Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“Janice? Letitia?” She left one name hanging until he thought he’d strangle on it. Why had he ever thought Molina might become an ally? She was a policewoman. She always needed to know the full story.

“No woman strong enough to risk.”

“Ah.” She leaned back, elbows braced on the twin pillars of the dressing table, the drink glowing topaz against the black of her gown.

Molina?

God, he must be drunk.

But the idea started caroming through his brain. She was armed and dangerous. She just said she thought he was good-looking. Lots of people did, but Molina saying it…thinking it.

If he was caught in some sexless limbo because of his religious past, she was a single mother in a man’s world. What kind of personal life did she have? Did she dream, as Janice did, of an Invisible Man who would come through her window, a puppet with no strings attached, like Errol Flynn on a rope, and go away leaving no traces, no obligations, no guilt, like a dream?

But there were always hordes of swordsmen after Errol Flynn as Don Juan or as Robin Hood, and a dalliance with a wanted man always backfired on the woman, even if her ankle was armed. Molina was not invulnerable, just professional.

She was not strong enough to risk, but he didn’t dare tell her that.

“I can’t. I can’t involve any woman in this who might be the object of Kitty’s murderous attention.”

“Hmm,” said Molina. Carmen. Looking lazy and contemplative, looking pretty luscious, as a matter of fact, maybe because of what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. Where had his friendly neighborhood earth mother gone? Luscious? He must be deranged.

Matt set the half-full glass of scotch on the small table near the wall. He had to be on live radio in under two hours.

“I just came here for some professional advice.”

Her eyes suddenly focused in points like acetylene torch flames.

“Professional. From the mouths of babes. That’s it, Matt!”

“What?”

“You need a professional. Someone Kitty wouldn’t even notice. A pro.”

“With a gun?”

“No! Listen. This is Las Vegas. Las Vegas . You get yourself a six-hundred-dollar-a-night room at the Oasis. The Goliath. Whatever. You tip everyone in sight, and you ask the bellman to send up some private entertainment. Tip him a hundred.”

“Carmen!”

“Listen. I know this town. A hundred. You can afford it to save your virtue for the right wrong girl, right? Okay. For that you’ll get a thousand-dollar call girl. She’ll be beautiful, intelligent, gorgeously dressed, consider herself a sex industry professional, not some cheap, downtrodden hooker. She’ll argue her right to sell her services with such sophistication that you won’t have an answer. You’ll tell her your problem, not about Kitty the Cutter but your personal history. She will love helping you out. She considers herself a mental-health field worker and, besides, you’re not hard to help out. You will walk out of there much poorer, but not what Kathleen O’Connor wants: an innocent man. You will have endangered no one. The call girl will vanish from the hotel as she always does, with a great story to entertain another john. You will be absolutely…adequate, right? You will have taken advantage of no one, as talking to one of these awesome sexual entrepreneurs will convince you. They are nobody’s victims, believe me, and consider themselves worth every c-note. It’ll be Pretty Woman all over again, only with this strange role reversal all the way through. Make sense?”

“Carmen. No.”

“Why not? It’s brilliant. It’s a scam. You out-sting the stinger. Why not?”

“Because…it’s a sin.”

“So is caving in to a sexual blackmailer. So…confess it afterward. You believe in absolution, don’t you? Don’t you have to?”

“Yes. But —”

“‘Yes, but’ are the two most dangerous words in the language. Do it or pay for not doing it. Wait to see which innocent woman will pay. Maybe Temple Barr. This Kitty doesn’t sound blind, just demented.”

Matt fingered the key ring in his pocket, feeling the hard cold, gold circle of the snake ring spinning against his skin. He remembered how it had appeared in his apartment, with the equivalent of an Alice in Wonderland note: Wear me. The controlling Miss Kitty clandestinely invading his space again, claiming his attention.

It reminded him of Molina’s cold-blooded investigative strategy in keeping the whereabouts of Temple’s ring secret. In then sharing its whereabouts with him so he became complicit in her cruelty. He wanted to protest their conspiracy of silence he had only broken when Temple had figured it out. To accuse her, excuse himself.

But the damage had been done. To Temple, not to Kinsella, whom Molina really ached to hurt, nor to him, who had been the stooge, the patsy.

Temple’s ring was recorded history now. The ring Kitty O’Connor had forced him to install on his keyring was still a secret, still an issue, still lethal.

Still the eternal threat, the Worm Ouroboros, wanting to slip onto a finger like greased lightning and burn him, and never, ever come off.

…and Revamp

“I’ll think about it,” Matt said. He already had, far too long. “I suppose it’d be easy to lose Kathleen if I dodged into a megahotel.”

“Use a phony name. Pay cash at the front desk like a big winner. Take one room there and then call down and change it. Find something wrong. Somebody smoked in a nonsmoking suite, that kind of thing.”

“You’ve got some tricky ideas.”

“Not me. Everybody I’ve ever arrested. So.” Molina’s wild-blue-yonder gaze softened with scotch and satisfaction. “You gonna take my professional advice?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

He stood, took one last sip of the very fine scotch and left.

In the hall he could hear the trio killing time until Carmen’s next set with jazzy crescendoes. He kind of liked this place, right here. Alone in the hall, between the dressing room and the stage, the public. Ignored, invisible.

He moved along, wove through the clotted round tables, arranged to be intimate and now in the way.

It was a weeknight. He had dragged Carmen in for a half-empty house, but she probably appreciated warming up with only chairs to hear her rusty voice. Most of the chairs were empty now.

So was the parking lot when he pushed open the big door with the round porthole window. Round windows seemed so decadent, as if blocking out a sinister subaquatic world.

He homed on the familiar tilted shape of the Hesketh Vampire, appreciating its sleek lines from a distance, savoring a fondness you’d feel more for a horse than a vehicle.

A nondescript black car sat between the faded white lines a few spots away. That was all. Matt knew the staff parking lot was on the other side of the building. This lot was for customers and, a few weeks ago, the dumped body of a dead woman.

He winced a bit to recall her. Killed for not being quite Catholic enough in someone else’s warped view, when he might be killed for being too Catholic.

Why dumped here? Because the killer had associated The Blue Dahlia with nightlife and corruption.

He reached in his pants pockets for the cycle keys, eyed the waiting helmet, almost craving its anonymity, its implied safety.

A small click in the night.

Maybe the touch of a high heel on the asphalt.

Maybe the snick of a switchblade.

Maybe the mechanism of an opening car door.

Maybe all three.