Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“Rafi Nadir…what kind of name is that?”

“Lebanese, maybe Lebanese-American. I don’t know.”

“For Cher Smith’s murder? Who is this Rafi guy?”

“You’ve met him.”

“No way!”

“I wish you hadn’t, but you did.”

“How do you know —? Max, you were there when I met him!”

“Elementary, my dear Temple.”

“Don’t tell me,” she ordered. She was already irritated that he knew something he hadn’t told her. Now she would have to figure out on her own who this Rafi Nadir was and when she had “met” him.

Max wished she hadn’t met him. It must have been recently, because they’d been hanging out together more. That creepy guy in the desert, the knife and chain-mail bikini maker. Mace was his name, though maybe it was a nickname.

She glanced at Max. He was smiling, watching her mental wheels turn, spin, and dig themselves deeper into a rut.

Somebody at the science fiction convention? But everybody there wore some stupid costume, and they certainly didn’t use names unless they were Spock or Data.

Max wished she hadn’t met him . A moment flashed into her mind. Looking over her shoulder at Max and seeing a deep flicker of fear beneath the surface anger. And looking forward from that moment, she was staring into the face of the Rancho Exotica guard who had made a point of lifting her down from the Jeep, an act she could have managed all by herself.

“The macho guy at the ranch. The guy you later told me had to get out of there at the end before the police came. I could tell you hated to see him leave the scene of the crime as much as you hated to leave it yourself. But Molina was coming…so who is Rafi Nadir, Max?”

He nodded in tribute to her impeccable deductions. “Ex-L.A. cop. Went rogue. Does shady muscle jobs, like at the ranch. Which was why I was furious when he laid hands on you.”

Furious, Temple remembered. And frightened. She had never seen Max frightened before.

“He also does bouncer work at the strip clubs,” Max added grimly.

“ That ’s how you decided he was a suspect?”

Max stared at her hand-drawn table as if an invisible rattlesnake lay coiled upon it. “Yeah. I saw him in the clubs. He liked to throw his weight around, particularly at a-hundred-and-ten-pound strippers. Someone…drew my attention to him.”

Temple remained silent, studying her table, studying Max. He seemed to be talking and thinking on autopilot. Too little on his mind, or, more likely, too much.

Whichever it was, he was not about to share his deepest inner concerns with her.

Max mysterious was one thing: this was a given with a man who had made his living as a magician for so long. Max unable, or unwilling, to be forthcoming with her was something else. Someone else.

“Anything more I should know?” she asked suddenly.

He started slightly. That was also so unlike Max, showing surprise. “Know?” He was confused, playing for time while the cobwebs cleared.

“Any more suspects I haven’t listed here, like this Nadir guy?”

“Oh. No. Except for the amorphous Synth.”

“Rafi doesn’t sound too sinister,” she said, lettering it in.

“He goes by Raf.”

“As in raffish?”

“As in you wouldn’t want to win this bozo in a raffle. If you cross his path, stay away from him, Temple. He’s major breaking news in the local disaster department, especially for women.”

“Yet you let him get away from the scene of the last crime before the police got there.”

Max’s face froze as if she had said something astounding.

“Scene of the crime? How did you —?”

“I was there, remember? At Rancho Exotica.”

“Oh, right, at Rancho Exotica.”

That’s when Temple realized that there had to have been another scene of the crime where both Max and Rafi were present, but she hadn’t been.

“Apparently he’s as eager to dodge Molina as you are,” she said, probing now.

Again Max tensed, right on the name, which Temple had dropped the same way some people would toss a grenade into a garden party: casually, but with oh-so-lethal intent. The bombshell was the name Molina. Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina, lady cop, lady blood-hound when it came to Max and his vague past and all-too-often suspect present.

“Let’s face it,” Max said, deciding to hide behind humor, “what red-blooded man wouldn’t want to dodge Molina? Except maybe Matt Devine.”

Now Max was dropping his own grenades. Temple tried not to feel the spray of psychic shrapnel. When had their consultation become a chess game?

When the name Rafi Nadir had come up.

The one man Temple had ever seen who frightened Max. Excepting Matt, and that was a very different kind of fear.

Why? Who was Rafi Nadir, really?

And why wouldn’t Max tell her a damn thing about him?

Feral Foul

As everybody knows, the world-weary private eye must sometimes tread on the dark side of danger.

Mean Streets R Us.

By us I mean the old-time guys: Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee. We are a breed apart. We are not afraid to get our digits dirty, our eyes blackened, our whiskers wet, or our ears wiped.

You can knock us down, but not out.

Okay, sometimes you can knock us out.

But not off.

Anyway, having observed my Miss Temple struggling to make sense of the string of murderous events that have dogged her teeny-tiny high-heeled footsteps since we met, I decide to take action.

It was nice of her to share her deductive reasoning with me. I truly enjoyed our consultation over Sunday morning coffee. We make a good team. She is the cream in my coffee, and I am the caffeine in her cream. She is sugar. I am spice. But she can be feisty, and I can be nice when it suits me.

However, when it comes to ferreting out information from the lower elements, there is no way that I will allow my Miss Temple to dirty her tootsies with a walk on the wild side. I will go this part of the case alone.

I am not even taking my usual “muscle,” the spitting-mad Miss Midnight Louise, who is my would-be daughter. I say that there are a lot of black cats in this hip old world (despite wholesale attempts to eliminate our kind since the Dark Ages, no doubt why they call it that), and we cannot all be related. Though even a macho dude like myself must admit that there are times when you cannot beat a seriously enraged dame for effective backup.

The successful operative will stick at nothing to get results.

Still, sometimes it is best not to show up in the company of a girl. She might be mistaken for your mother.

So it nears my namesake hour when I slink solo into a neighborhood where even the pit bulls and housing developers do not go.

This is the north side of town where the abandoned houses and cars are all older than the Nixon administration. “Run-down” would be a high compliment in this area, and run down is what careless intruders usually get.

I pass a few rats the size of Midnight Louise scurrying in the opposite direction.

One stops to hiss in amazement at my presence, and at the fact that I am heading in the direction that he and his cohorts are fleeing like the, er, plague.

I hiss back. His claws scrape the cracked asphalt like dry leaves as he skitters out of sight.

I shrug my coat collar up around my neck to keep the wind from picking all my pockets. It also looks as if I am making a fashion statement instead of just having the hair on the back of my neck at permanent attention.

The effective operative does not wish to look scared into a new hairdo.