Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 11

Portrait of a Shady Lady

Janice lifted an eyebrow when she saw the Probe in her driveway, but didn’t comment on Matt’s “new” old car.

She looked like a schoolgirl with a sketch pad and a street-map guide to Las Vegas balanced on the crook of her right arm. She wore jeans for the first time since he had met her, and the arty earrings were gone. She noticed him noticing her outfit.

“What does the respectable self-employed woman wear to a strip club?” she mused, arranging herself and her gear in the Probe’s front seat. “Something casual but nonconsensual? That’s what I concluded. What do you think?”

“You don’t look like a stripper, in civvies or out.”

“That was the idea, but how would you know?”

“I’ve been backstage at some of the big hotel shows. I figure strippers don’t dress, or undress, much differently from showgirls.”

“Were these topless showgirls?”

“Ah, no.”

“Well, the ones we see tonight will be. Maybe I should leave you in the car.”

“I don’t think so, Janice.” Matt checked the rearview mirror for headlights. Nothing. Maybe Kitty the Cutter wasn’t infallible, after all.

“What’s with the car?” Janice asked at last.

“I’m trading my landlady for the Elvismobile.”

“For this? Why?”

“I like a low profile.”

In the strobelike flash of a passing streetlight, he could see her eyebrows lift skeptically.

“Okay,” she said. “Who am I to cavil with low profile? I’m racing out to sketch felons in a strip bar.” She squinted at the map under the rapid strafe of the next streetlight. “We need to turn left on Paradise.”

He followed her directions religiously, trying to pretend he wasn’t nervous about going ever nearer to a long-forbidden zone. Once Matt had parked the Probe in the brightest section of the flat, featureless parking lot that surrounded Secrets like an asphalt moat, a material black hole of night, they regarded the building through the windshield.

“Grim, isn’t it?” Janice said.

“No windows, just that big winking neon sign and that little windowless door. It reminds me of an ugly mausoleum.”

“Shabby. No advertising gimmicks outside. Like someplace you disappear into and never come out of.”

“Apparently some woman did just that, or Molina wouldn’t want a sketch of a killer.”

“You always call her that?”

“Some woman?”

“The lieutenant. No title, no first name?”

“Almost always.” Matt wasn’t about to admit how deviously he used the lieutenant’s despised first name. Knowing someone’s secrets was definitely like holding a weapon. A weapon you didn’t give away to anyone else.

“But not always.” Janice waited for more.

“I guess always,” Matt said firmly.

He recalled another secret he kept, and winced internally. Molina had custody of the opal-and-diamond ring Kinsella had given Temple in New York City. The elegant ring, instead of enhancing Temple’s finger, reposed in a plastic evidence baggie: found at the scene of another death, of a woman killed in a church parking lot. Matt wondered where the woman whose killer they were tracking tonight had been killed. Here? Or somewhere else? She hadn’t ever had an opal-and-diamond ring, Matt was willing to bet.

Was the victim even a woman? Molina hadn’t said, and Matt had assumed stripper club meant dead stripper. He asked Janice, who shrugged her mystification. “I’m supposed to ask for a bartender named Rick to get a description of a guy named Vince. That’s all we mere translators need to know.”

“Translator. An interesting description of the art of suspect portraiture.”

“All portraiture is suspect. It’s filtered through the eyes of an artist. We make very unreliable witnesses.”

“But you’re good at drawing out witnesses.”

She nodded. “Ready? To be honest, I’ve never been to a strip joint before either.”

Although a few cars were scattered around the parking lot, no one was coming out or going in when Matt and Janice approached the graffiti-etched door.

“I don’t suppose many women go to these things. As viewers, I mean,” Janice said.

“I don’t suppose many ex-priests do either.” He pulled the heavy metal door open and waited for her to enter.

“On the other hand,” Janice said hopefully, “maybe we’re both wrong.”

Sound blasted out at them like construction noise: raw and blind, teeth-rattlingly vicious. An aural attack. It was also a fortunate distraction for the terminally self-conscious.

Janice rummaged in her purse until she plucked out a couple of tissues, quickly tearing them to pieces and handing him shreds to jam in his ears.

Even buffered, the music was painful. After that sensual assault, any visual shocks were minor.

Both of them fastened on the long oblong of the bar as an island of safety. Except…

“There are two!” Janice shrieked.

“What?” Matt pointed at his stopped-up ears.

Janice’s left hand raised, her first two fingers forked in a vee. Not V as in victory, but—

“Two bars,” she mouthed now, more than shouted.

Matt turned to assess who passed for bartenders on each side of the room. En route, his eyes slid off mostly naked women writhing to the deafening beat they could feel through their feet and teeth.

A medieval vision of hell, that’s all Matt could think of. Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel wall, where the artist pictured his enemies damned and writhing under torture. Matt, on the other hand, hoped not to see one familiar face in this nightmare vision. Or to have one familiar face see him here.

He pointed toward the farther bar. There the man behind the shiny expanse was a mustached thirty-something, instead of the beefy twenty-one-year-old who manned the nearest strip of shining bottles and background mirror reflecting long bare legs executing extreme variations on the splits.

Janice and Matt climbed onto the plastic-upholstered barstools like flood survivors finding purchase.

She laid her sketch pad atop the droplet-dappled counter.

The man noticed them, ostentatiously finished swiping down the far end of the bar, then ambled over.

It was early enough that the place wasn’t crowded, Matt noted. Or maybe it never was crowded. There was something desultory about the atmosphere, despite the pumped-up music and sound system, the women bobbing and posing on the opposing bars, the one in the purple-white spotlight on the stage strutting to the beat. She was a hefty girl in a cheap version of the famous Marilyn Monroe white dress blown up by the subway grate.

Matt had to admit that he found photos of Marilyn Monroe engagingly earthy. She seemed to be mocking herself and the viewer even as she pouted and posed. From her to Jon-Benet Ramsey was one turn of the page backward. Sometimes all sexiness seemed an act the innocent put on to survive an anti-innocence world. That’s what you thought, even as they died of being pinup girls. All girls under the skin.

“Rick?” Janice inquired. Shouted really.

“Who’s asking?” Matt read the man’s lips.

“Janice.” She held out a hand.

He regarded it as a curiosity. “Yeah?”

“Lieutenant Molina sent me,” she mouthed, putting her hands to better use at her mouth like a megaphone.

Rick reared back, as if bitten. “Molina?”

“I’m here to get your description of Vince.”

Janice shouted every key word, punctuating the din, but the method seemed to work.

Rick nodded.

“Can we go somewhere quiet?”

Rick shook his shaggy head. “Can’t leave my post.”

Like he was a soldier, Matt thought. Like his was an honorable profession.

“Okay. Tell me about Vince—” Janice shouted.

The music, if it could be called that, ended as abruptly as an earth tremor, on a dissonant guitar twang drawn out to tortuous length.

Quiet hurt as much as cacophony. Maybe more.

Janice flipped back the cover of her sketch pad and held her pencil poised over the blank page. “I’m all ears, Rick.”

“Okay, but you gotta buy drinks.”

Matt was about to protest until he saw Janice’s anxious look. “Two scotch on the rocks.” He didn’t expect to get much in the way of fancy mixes, and that was the fastest highball he could think of. Matt shrugged his disavowal of his order at Janice while Rick turned away to clatter ice cubes into thick, ugly glassware and to pour a thin drizzle of whiskey over them.

The silence reverberated in their abused ears, in waves and pulses, sounding like the ocean in a seashell.

Even as Matt’s twenty-dollar bill was being scraped away, Janice was at work. “So. Coloring?

“Dark,” Rick grunted.

“Foreign?”

“Just dark.”

“Skin color?”

Rick shrugged. “Nothing unusual. I said not foreign.”

“Face shape. Long? Broad? Prominent cheekbones?”

“Just…regular.” Rick smirked at her busy pencil.

Matt slapped another twenty to the soggy bar top. “Molina said you’d cooperate. I bet if you don’t she’ll see no one wearing a badge cooperates with you or this place for a long time. Plus, there’s a tip in it.”

Rick tilted his head, droned rapidly. “Weird dude. Slouched over his drink. Looked like one of those guys who hands out private-dancer flyers on the sly on the Strip, except he was bigger. Narrow. Big but narrow. Not thick-necked muscle, if you know what I mean. Face was…angular, I guess you’d say. All sharp and asking things, you know? Eyebrows like question marks. Greasy hair. Moussed to death. Trendy clothes, if you’re from 1975. Velour jogging suit, open at the chest. Cheesy gold necklace. Lots of chest hair. If he’d been broader you’d call him an ape, but he was…sleeker. Slippery. Yeah, that’s it.”

“Nose?”

“Long, like he was. Eyes slanted like a cat’s. Eyebrows too, maybe. He looked like he was in a high wind all the time. That moussed-back hair just made him look more like he was running.”

“Good-looking?”

“Mandy seemed to think so, the way she hung off him. ’Course, she was drunk six ways from Sunday, as usual.”

“What on earth would make a girl get drunk in a place like this?” Janice muttered, her pencil flying, racing the deejay in the corner and his tape machine. She turned her pad to face Rick. “This close?”

He blinked. “Damn. You’re good. But the face was broader, beneath the eyes.”

“Broader cheekbones,” she said as her pencil made it so. “And?”

“Younger. Guy couldn’t have been much over thirty. I mean, he acted like the years of the world were on his back, but he wasn’t that blown.”

Janice’s forefinger softened the bags under the eyes, strengthened the nose.

“Yeah.” Rick nodded, getting interested despite himself. “And the mouth was more…mobile, not so tight. You take your fifties hood, and maybe put some, I don’t know, early Sean Connery behind him—”

While Rick talked, Janice’s pencil walked over the nubbly paper, changing, changing, changing. She presented the latest version silently.

Rick jabbed a stubby forefinger on the paper. “Eyes were funny. Out of it but in it, if you know what I mean.”

Janice nodded, her mouth tightening as she worked and reworked the sketch.

Matt had never seen her sketch so fast. She had taken her time with him, teased every little detail out of him. Now she was sketching in lightning time, and the results were just as good. Matt wondered if she had needed to spend so much time with him, or had just wanted to.

She smudged, corrected, erased, kept flashing the sketch at Rick like a challenge. Each time he met the dare by mentioning another specific, another modification.

It was like watching a duel, thrust and retreat, revise and represent. Back and forth. So fast he couldn’t keep track.

“That’s it,” Rick suddenly conceded. “It’s him.”

“Vince.” Janice nodded satisfaction as she squinted her eyes at the sketch pad. “Wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark pizza parlor.”

Matt, who’d hardly glimpsed the results of the last ten minutes of rapid-fire exchanges, leaned close to see as Rick’s hand swept the twenty under Matt’s fingertips into his custody.

A blast of resumed music made Matt’s heartbeat stop, then start again with great, galloping thuds. But it wasn’t the music that unnerved him. Even done up as Marlon Brando on Prozac, Max Kinsella was recognizable to anyone who had reason to know and fear, or maybe even love him.

Thank God he was here with Janice, and not Temple.

“Think I’ve got it?” Janice said, shouted over the music, smiling. She leaned back to rub her neck.

Someone else leaned in to see the finished sketch.

“Wow. You’re good,” she oozed at Janice. “I don’t see this guy here, though.”

“Have you ever?” Matt felt obliged to ask, though he was trying to ignore the woman’s presence.

From what he could tell, all the while trying not to see any better, she was attired in iridescent strings. A quartet of strips, and where they went, or didn’t, he did not want to go, or know.

“Seen him?” Her face was bare naked too, but easier to take. Her full lower lip—collagen-enhanced?—swelled with doubt. “Don’t think so. You ever seen me?” she asked provocatively.

Matt shook his head, glad Janice was supporting him with the same gesture.

“I’m the star attraction.” She pointed toward the stage where the sleepwalking Marilyn wannabe was easing her halter-style straps off one shoulder, then the other. Even Matt knew this wasn’t very seductive. “Aren’t I the star, Rick?”

“Sure are, Redd.”

Matt was glad of an excuse to look at her hair, a dramatic magenta-mahogany color found only in a chemist’s lab. The color was nothing like Temple’s natural coppery crimson mop. If the color was surreal, the way it was looped and piled on top of her head was even more artificial. At least, Matt thought, she had a greater mass of hair on her head than clothes on her entire body.

A long-nailed hand curled over his shoulder. “You’re new here.”

Janice was watching from what had become the sidelines with a distinctly chilly Mr. Spock distance. This was his show, and his problem.

“I intend to stay that way,” Matt said. “New here.”

“Aw, too bad. I was going to let you buy me a drink. I don’t have to go on for a half hour. Onstage, that is.”

She twined herself and her strings around him, in the process almost pushing Janice off the neighboring barstool.

Matt had never felt more embarrassed and less in the presence of a near occasion of sin. This B-movie seduction scene was so hokey it should be shown to the troops to turn them off, except he had a feeling not much would turn off troops.

He tried to pry off her invasive hands.

“What’s your lady friend doing,” she demanded, clinging more, “taking notes?” She looked over her shoulder at Janice.

Matt found a wave of relief turning into a churn of guilt.

“You need some ideas, honey?” the lady known as Redd said.

“I’m a staff artist for the National Enquirer,” Janice answered coolly. “We’re doing a piece on The Wacky Strippers of Las Vegas. Mind if I sketch you?”

“Yes. I do.” Redd straightened. Her face was already painted as perfectly as Janice could ever do it: pencil-arched dark brows, bowed scarlet mouth, eyes so deeply shadowed their own color was neutralized by the shimmering smoky claret aura around them.

Redd’s taloned hand struck out to capture the sketch pad, so swiftly that both Matt and Janice jumped, but did nothing. “This is no stripper.” She eyed the portrait of Vince with an odd expression, part repulsion, part a hunger Matt couldn’t name.

Janice reclaimed the pad just as swiftly. “I said The Wacky Strippers of Las Vegas, not just women strippers.”

Redd’s darkened eyes smoldered.

Matt smelled something really tacky brewing, like a catfight. He stood up, grabbed Redd’s arm. “I thought you wanted me to buy you a drink?”

She whipped around to face him, eyes as feral as her mouth frozen in a half snarl.

“You ready to pony up?”

He shrugged. Anything to save the day, or night.

Rick spoke for the first time, like a member of an audience who suddenly finds his voice. “What’ll it be, Reddy?”

“My usual.” She undulated onto the empty stool next to Matt. He was glad to serve as a barrier between the two women.

Redd, or Reddy, threw a sultry smile at Rick. “A Bloody Mary.”

Matt watched Rick mix the tomato juice and vodka over copious ice cubes, then stake the glass with a limp stalk of celery. He assumed the liquor content was about as limp, and as limp as the ten-dollar bill Rick extracted from his fingers. No change was forthcoming.

“So,” said Redd, growing on him like kudzu, “you new in town?”

“Sure.”

“You want to be sure to catch my act. In about twenty minutes. I’m the headliner.”

He nodded noncommittally. He hoped he and Janice would be gone in ten.

Her arm twined his, her leg had stretched and then flexed over his thigh. He could feel her muscles, taut and as stringy as her costume. Stripping, he assumed, required both dexterity and strength.

It was like being embraced by a boa constrictor.

Matt had just about decided to be ungentlemanly and dump her, when Janice attracted her own variety of snake.

The guy who slithered up was as muscular as the voluptuous Redd. He and Janice must be wearing targets on their backs, Matt thought: newbies to the fleshpots.

Jaded must be the middle name around Secrets.

The man beside Janice was thick-set, obviously overbuilt and obviously flaunting it in a tight T-shirt advertising some heavy-metal band that looked like torturers on leave from Torquemada and the Inquisition. Torquemada and the Inquisition. Sounded like a rock band name. The guy’s fleshy face sagged in all the wrong faces, just slightly enough to blur his strong features.

“You folks buying?” he asked. It sounded like a threat.

“So far,” Matt said, just to divert the guy’s slimy eyes from Janice. That merited a scowl and a glance at the entwined Reddy Foxx.

“Well, I know you must be a big spender, at least, if our star attraction is wasting her between-set time with you.” He glanced back at Janice, who was trying to look cool but was doodling hard jagged lines on the corner of the overturned sketch.

Matt was so glad Vince was facedown for the moment that he barely noticed Miss Foxx’s barely legal custody.

The bouncer smirked, glancing from one to another, all three.

Apparently everyone was too controlled for his taste.

He flicked Janice a glance. “We don’t encourage dykes in here.”

For an instant even Rick stopped nervously wiping down the bar. These were his private customers, and he didn’t want the bouncer to find that out.

Matt was stunned, not knowing what was required in the way of defining his lady friend’s honor.

After a few seconds’ silence, Janice laughed easily. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m here on police business. You want to call someone a dyke, I suggest you call up the lieutenant who sent me here. I’m sure she’d be interested in the customer policies here at Secrets. Me, if I took your comment personally, I’d just call the ACLU.”

His expression tightened, and he glanced suspiciously at Matt.

“What is this? Some gay door-busting setup?”

“Rafi.” The voice of reason came most surprisingly from the entwining Miss Foxx. “Don’t be a big bad bigot. It’s bad for business.”

His shoulders shifted uneasily, as if he knew he was in the wrong, but didn’t know how to back down from it.

“We’re leaving anyway,” Matt said, standing up and automatically dislodging Miss Reddy Foxx.

Janice grabbed her sketch pad, uable to keep Raf from gawking at the image, and brushed past both the stripper and the bouncer.

“When I said I felt like a gunslinger here to ‘draw,’” she muttered to Matt as they headed for the blackness that harbored the door out of there, “I didn’t think I was speaking literally. Does everybody get harassed like that at these places?”

Matt glanced back at the unlikely couple—or maybe the perfect couple—their exit had marooned at the bar.

“Only if you’re obviously out of place, I bet.”

“And we are.”

“Were,” Matt said as they pushed through the big metal door and he took a deep breath of welcome smoke-free, sound-free night air.

He wished he could as easily leave behind the strange image of Max Kinsella that Janet had sketched tonight.

“Want to come in?” Janice asked on her threshold.

Matt hesitated, and watched her instantly regrouping for some face-saving comment.

He looked back to the pink Probe at the curb. Once. What serious whacko would tail a pink Probe, really?

“Since we’re both gay, I’m sure it wouldn’t do any harm.”

Janice laughed in relief. “What a creep. Okay. Come on in.” Now she was scrambling to appear unsurprised.

This dating dance was a version of the twist crossed with doing the hokeypokey.

She rattled the keys, while Matt savored his power at doing the unexpected. Janice was the soul of serenity, but now she wasn’t sure of anything.

Matt was. Now was the time to face facts.

She walked in ahead of him, turning on lamps. Lamps, not overhead lighting. It gave her airy, ingratiating rooms by day a mysterious, shrouded look by night, suitable for seduction.

Except he didn’t think either she or he was up to that.

“Coffee? Or wine?”

“Something in between?”

“Beer?”

He nodded, relieved when she left the living room. The clocks ticked down the hall and around the corner. Ticking clocks seemed old-fashioned for a woman with a modern style like Janice, but he liked their companionable predictability. If a grandfather clock could be heard around the corner, maybe a grandfather was lurking somewhere.

A stab of curiosity about his paternal grandfather crossed his mind. Forget it. Lost in space and time.

He sighed, relaxed. Janice’s figure coming from the kitchen bearing two tall glasses could have been Betty Crocker’s. Not Martha Stewart’s. That was domesticity as de rigueur empire.

“It’s odd,” Janice commented as she sat beside him on the long, cushy sofa after setting the pilsner glass on the tile-inlaid coffee table. “But I got the impression both of our pickups recognized my sketch, but weren’t saying anything.”

Matt nodded, sipping the smoky, stinging beer.

“I got the impression that you did too. And you weren’t talking either.”

Matt swallowed more beer faster than he would have liked. “Me? Know this Vince guy?”

“Yeah. It’s incredible that someone like you would know an obvious sleaze like him. Do they always do that?”

“Do what? And who?”

“Women. That stripper babe was wallpapering you. She could have come off one of those TV nighttime soaps. Bloody Mary! For gawd’s sake. Reddy Foxx.”

“It’s the Mr. Midnight persona, not me.”

“Did that broad know you were Mr. Midnight?”

“Broad?”

“Broad.”

Matt realized that on some primal level, Janice—levelheaded, single-mom-to-the-core, earthy Janice—resented the heck out of some semi-naked woman messing with her escort.

“That was an excursion into a Mike Hammer novel,” he said. “Too unreal. Vince. Rick. Reddy Foxx. And what was the muscle guy’s name?”

“Raf. Gave me the creeps. The kind where you wish you were packing an Uzi.”

“Janice!”

“Well, I did. Going there was a big mistake. No amount of money is worth getting slimed.”

“I have to agree.”

“So? Does it happen often?”

This was a perfect lead-in. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

She waited, never having sipped her beer. He felt like he was on trial.

“The reason I canceled coming over tonight for dinner in the first place is that I have a stalker.”

“Stalker?”

“A stalker. Must have picked her up from the radio show. The downside of fame, such as it is. It became clear this weekend that she was obsessively jealous of any women I associated with. Which means it’s dangerous for women to associate with me.”

Janice sat forward. “So that’s why you were so…distracted all night. Looking over your shoulder all the time. Made me think you were sorry you agreed to go along.”

“No. I’m glad you weren’t there alone. I was just…looking for a stalker.”

“In the car too. Always checking your rearview and side mirrors?”

He nodded.

“You’re not kidding. You’re being stalked.”

“What’s worse is that people who have anything to do with me are being stalked by default.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do? The police?”

“First, it’s considered funny when a woman stalks a man. The weaker sex, remember? Second, how many of those innumerable women who are stalked have to end up shot dead in a parking lot before the law can lift a finger against the stalker? Think it works any better for male victims?”

“Matt. That’s terrible.”

“I’m just beginning to guess how terrible it is.”

“That’s why you’re driving the funky old car tonight?”

“Borrowed it from my landlady. Figured no self-respecting stalker would suspect a pink Probe.”

“Matt. Is it that she-devil I sketched way back when?”

“Yeah. How—?”

“I just realized that was a face capable of extremes. How do you know her?”

“I don’t. She used to know someone I hardly know years and years ago. I don’t know what makes her tick. She just has it in for me, personally and generically.”

“Generically?”

“She hates priests. Ex-priests. But I think she’s mainly trying to get to someone else who’s unreachable. So I’m the prime substitute. Plus, she knows I don’t know how to handle this sort of thing.”

“You seem to be doing all right. Going undercover in a pink Probe.”

“That only works for a while. Believe me, I’ve seen anyone female around me, even a child, attacked by this woman.”

“And that happened last weekend?”

“Last weekend. Lost weekend. The last weekend of my freedom, that’s for sure. So I didn’t cancel dinner because I’m afraid to be alone with you. That’s what you thought, I know. I canceled because I’m afraid of what danger being seen alone with me will bring to you. Okay?”

“And tonight?”

“Tonight I’m taking a chance because I owe you an explanation. I did watch as best I could, and I don’t think anyone followed us.”

Janice sank her chin into her hand and contemplated the sour scenario. Suddenly she sat upright. “Well, that slut Reddy Foxx is in real trouble if your stalker somehow slipped into Secrets.”

Matt laughed, enjoying the feeling. “Thanks. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll associate only with fallen women from now on and let my stalker eliminate the femme fatales of the world.”

“Well, I guess they shouldn’t have to die for being cheap hustlers. I can’t believe it. Matt, do you realize how constricting life could be?”

He nodded. “But maybe my stalker has underestimated me. I came from a constricted lifestyle, remember? Maybe I can outlast her.”

“And in the meantime, your life is not your own.”

“That’s true. But isn’t free will often an illusion?”

“I don’t know. I’m just an artist, not a theologian. I’m going to miss you,” she said, lifting her beer glass for a toast.

He touched glass rims with her. “Me too. I guess I’ll find out a lot about free will in the next few weeks.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“I’m glad too.”

She smiled. He smiled. Maybe this evening could have ended differently, but not now.