Cat In A Midnight Choir

“Shades of Sean,” Temple said soberly.

“Every senseless death is a shade of Sean.” Max swiveled to scan the night sky. Nothing outshone the constellations of Las Vegas. The sky was black and blank. Not even Ophiuchus could be seen, could anybody but they recognize it.

Temple didn’t know what to say. Scratch the surface on any part of Max and you always opened the scab of his cousin’s death.

So instead she tried to picture Molina and Nadir as a couple and mentally choked on the image. Like the fabled O. J. Simpson glove, it did not fit.

“I did say,” she mused, “when you asked me what I thought of Nadir, that he would appeal to a certain kind of woman.”

“Molina’s kind?” Max had whirled back.

“No. Not at all. But Mariah is what…twelve years old? Add almost a year for gestation. We’re talking a much younger Molina. Maybe dumber.”

“Nadir’s a bad enough guy that she doesn’t want him to come anywhere near Mariah. I wonder what the kid will make of this if she finds out later. But you see Molina’s problem. If she used official police avenues to check out Nadir she’d have a lot of explaining to do. Whys and wherefores. At that point, no strippers had been killed, at least not in the current sequence.”

“Hence you. She must have been desperate!”

“Thanks.” Max’s wry smile faded quickly. “When Cher Smith was killed, it brought everything to a head. I had witnessed Nadir threatening her, but I was the last man known to have any substantial contact with her. It doesn’t help that a few days ago I was undercover at a strip club when another girl was accosted in the parking lot. I came on Nadir kneeling beside her, and then Molina came on both of us. I recognized her despite the undercover drag but Nadir didn’t.”

“What did you do?”

“What she told me. She had a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pointed at my head. Nadir ran and she let him. I wanted to go after him, stop him, but she wouldn’t let me. You tell me what she was thinking. She made it pretty clear that she could forget she saw Nadir and ‘remember’ just me. She had me dial for assistance on her cell phone and then told me to get out of there.”

“What about the girl?”

“She was basically all right, just knocked down. But somebody had her by the throat first, and it wasn’t me.”

“Then Nadir is the killer!”

Max hesitated. “He could have arrived on the scene just moments before I did. We all could have heard the girl scream. I can only say that he was there first, but Molina has a lot of reasons for not believing that. If she nailed me for these crimes, she could close the case-book and be pretty sure that Nadir would discreetly fade away.”

“She’d rather see an innocent man convicted than deal with an old boyfriend?”

Max grinned. “I’m not an ‘innocent man’ to her. Never have been.”

“If only you could reveal your counterterrorism past. Don’t you have someone who could testify that you’re a good guy?”

“No. We don’t operate like that. We can’t. You’re taking it on my word that I’m a good guy. As far as any official trail shows, I’m an iffy guy. It served me well when I wanted to infiltrate a rogue operation, but it’s left me without a safety net. About the only respectability I could claim is my magician career and that ended on a suspicious note, to say the least.”

“You’re trapped in this…circumstantial straitjacket, and every time you try to wiggle out of it, you just draw the buckles tighter.”

“Thanks for another vivid but depressing image, appropriate but discouraging.”

“What can you do?”

“Find the real killer. Make sure that Molina doesn’t overlook, or bury, that person in her zeal to cover her past with Nadir. I suppose you could regard her as an enraged rhino protecting her young.”

“Stop! You’re going to make me snort with laughter. That’s so undignified. So…rhinolike! Talk about a vivid image.”

“The trouble is, she’s out there herself, undercover, in the clubs, covering her tracks and Nadir’s. I run the risk of falling into a trap I can’t get out of. And then it’s her word against mine.”

“And mine.”

“You’re not a witness. Well, maybe a character witness. And even there you can hardly defend me. I’ve had to keep too many aspects of my life hidden, even from you. No, this charade is between me and her and whoever killed Cher Smith.”

“If it’s Nadir and he’s working somewhere for the Synth, which you’re being really canny about not telling me where, he’s out of the strip club scene, from what you said.”

Max shook his head. “He gets time off. Can’t stay away. I’ve seen him.”

“Yuck. How could Molina ever have shacked up with a man like that?”

“You still have some professional respect for her?”

“Well, I like to see women making it in a man’s world. I like to think they can bring more sense and integrity to the bull pen, less posturing and selfishness.”

Max blinked.

“All right. I know women can be as corrupted by power as the next guy, but I like to think that I would have integrity and compassion even if I got a lot of power.”

“There you go. You’re imagining what you would do in her place, but you didn’t have to go through what she did to get to her place. It changes you, Temple, grappling with a corrupt system, and all systems are corrupt. You have to compromise somewhere.”

“I have to admit that Molina always struck me as fairly uncompromising. That’s why she irritated me so much. A closed mind is a terrible waste. On the other hand, I never saw her taking the easy way out, or giving it to anyone.”

“I warned you that you’d inadvertently overestimated her. She may not sell out for money or power, but she’s a mother. She’ll do anything to protect her kid.”

Temple nodded. She could see that. Couple Mariah in danger with Molina’s inbred distrust of someone with a revolving-door past like Max, an elusive sort by profession, and you had ice and water in conflict. Enough ice could chill water to a lethal degree, but mobile, shape-shifting water could wear down ice and even stone all the way to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It just took a lot of time.

Temple decided she’d put her money on always-flexible water, but that ice had taken over a good part of North America in its day, and had trapped a lot of lost species in its path.

“Don’t be glum,” Max prodded her, the performer in him incapable of letting anyone wilt in his presence. “I’ve handled much worse than Molina before. With Nadir somewhat removed from the arena, his presence will be easier to track.”

“You almost had him at the last attack scene.”

Max nodded. “I need to catch him doing something dirty somewhere that Molina isn’t policing.”

“It blows my mind, Molina hooked up with a scumbag. Hey…maybe that’s why she’s never had any respect for my faith in you. She assumes all women hook up with scumbags.”

“Thanks for the spirited defense. I think. I assume you mean that I am not a scumbag.”

“Absolutely. Way too responsible to be a scumbag. ’Course, Molina doesn’t see you as responsible, but as irresponsible. You’d think a cop would be a better detective.”

“I think you’ve been up too late, eating and drinking too lavishly. Time to head home.”

“And where is that? Don’t say second star to the left and straight on to Ophiuchus.” Temple leaned her chin on the heel of her hand. She was feeling a little punchy.

“Circle Ritz for you, where Midnight Louie will no doubt be waiting with a perfectly logical explanation of his eighteen-carat deposit.”

“Not in his box!”

“Not in his box, but on your bed. Then back to my lair for me.”

“Or out joint-crawling?”

“Whatever it takes, Temple. I have to find the one who’s been attacking strippers, or Molina will build a case around me. A non-metaphorical straitjacket.”

“But going out there hunting makes you look more suspicious.”

“She’s doing the same.”

“She’s a cop. She’s not going to be suspected of anything except overwork.”

“All I can say is, the next time we go head-to-head over a crime in progress, Molina won’t be crooning ‘The Man That Got Away’.”

Matt checked his watch. Almost midnight. Almost time for him to take over from Ambrosia.

He liked to come in early and watch Letitia work. Her voice was melted milk chocolate, and the words caught in the tide were pure caramel.

“So you’re feeling bad, honey, that you didn’t trust the dude and let the relationship wither. Can’t go back. All you can do is admit what you lost and go on. We all do it. Every day. In every way.”

Her Valium voice trailed off in a tone of regret that felt personal as she cued the song she’d selected, “The Man That Got Away.”

Funny, Matt thought, that title could almost be a cops-and-robbers anthem.

The content, though, was all bluesy self-torment. Matt saluted Letitia’s therapeutic instincts in letting the caller wallow in her regrets in such gorgeous style. Showed the feeling was classic, constant, human. Showed you could make art from misery, and warned that you could make misery into an art.

The singer was one of the oldies, Jo Stafford or somebody, but Matt could hear Molina doing this song, if she’d ever subscribe to a song so hopeless, where the woman was so low-down and blue.

It was a great ending to the show, but the clock was a few minutes shy of quitting time. Ambrosia whispered into the mike over the song’s closing notes.

“Time for one more request. Once more with feeling. You out there, lonely and blue? Need a little soul music to go on? Come talk to Ambrosia tonight. The moon is full, and so is my song chart.”

“I need a special song, Ambrosia,” a female voice whispered back.

Matt stiffened to sense the barest lilt of a brogue in it.

“I can’t remember the name of it. Can’t remember who did it. But I hear it in my head night and day, day and night.”

“Maybe it’s Cole Porter, honey.” The smile in Ambrosia’s voice was its own kind of lilt, clean, honest.

“No, something a lot more modern.”

“Who’s it for, someone you lost?”

“Maybe. Maybe more for someone I haven’t completely found yet.”

“He’s special.”

“Oh, yes. Rare, even. But rather elusive.”

“The rare ones always are. So have you thought of the song yet?”

“I can’t quite remember. It says something like ‘I know everywhere you go, I know everything you do’.”

The soft, seductive voice on the phone had become a mean-business monotone. “What is the group that does that?”

“The Police.” Ambrosia’s liquid voice curdled into hard candy. “I don’t play that one. It’s a stalking song. I don’t like to see anyone stalked, even a guy.”

“I guess you don’t mind hanging onto someone else’s guy when you strut out into your own parking lot,” the voice taunted.

That’s all it said, and the ominous words never made the air.

In the control room, through the glass picture window, Letitia made a horizontal chopping motion, her model’s face a mask of fury.

Matt nodded at her through the window. He had recognized Kitty’s cold, even tones. The trace of an Irish accent had only enhanced the sinister message. She whispered as if in a confessional, and her voice echoed in his ears though it had never reached the public, his audience.

Letitia, no trace of gentle Ambrosia in her face or figure, stood and motioned him into her seat. They had only two minutes before he would take over.

“That b-woman,” Letitia said. “She is beginning to get on my nerves.”

He sat down, the leather chair was still toasty, and set up the earphones, the mike, his big glass of water. “My nerves have been gotten to for a long time.”

“Well, we’ve got her vocal tone down. She won’t be able to call in here again.”

“It’ll only make her meaner.”

“You ain’t seen mean until you’ve seen me in action. Now forget her and do the show. Don’t let her rattle you. She’s just a spoilsport.”

Letitia left the room but took up a post on the other side of the glass. Guard duty. Nobody was going to mess with the mind, heart and soul of her prize find, Mr. Midnight, late-night advice guru extraordinaire.

“I’m so worried, Mr. Midnight,” came the shaky vibrato of a new female voice, a normal if neurotic female voice, through his headphones.

Funny how uncertainty made a female voice supposedly seem “normal.” Kitty O’Connor had ditched the presumed normal female role. But she had messed with the wrong woman in Letitia.

Letitia sat like an island idol on the other side of the glass. She no longer left after her stint as Ambrosia, the feel-good soothing music shrink, had ended. Instead, she sat guard over Matt and his callers, a grim powerful presence, more household god than producer, determined that Kitty should not mess up her concept, The Midnight Hour, or her on-air personality, Mr. Midnight.

Matt was beginning to feel like an airwave Frankenstein, the misunderstood creation of both his inventor and his worst enemies. A puppet whose strings were tangled between opposing forces. Even those who meant him well somehow became caught in a sick power struggle.

The Lady of the House

A quick scan of Miss Temple’s bedroom and her bedroom closet, both left in shocking disarray, tells me that she has decamped in full battle gear: high heels and Opium perfume. So I need not expect her back until near my midnight hour.

I would love to knead my nails in the piles of delicate feminine fripperies, but my timetable does not permit a self-indulgent lingerie fest.

So I rush to run a nail under the French door with the wiggly-waggly latch. In a jiffy it is sprung and I spring through the slit, pausing to pull the door shut behind me.

I am balanced on the patio railing and about to leap onto my escalator to the ground below, the trunk of the canted palm tree, when I hear a hissing from above.

I look around for snakes. Then I look up to see a familiar pair of red eyes gleaming down at me.

Some see signs and portents in the heavens. Ophiuchus, say. I see Karma.

Not mine. Miss Electra Lark’s. Karma is the name of her excessively self-confident Birman roommate.

“Louie,” she cries from her distant perch. “Come up and see me.”

Sometime! I want to spit back at her, but I have found it bad luck to ignore Karma.

So I shinny up instead of down the rough palm trunk, and in a Las Vegas minute (which is about three, since people in Las Vegas lose track of time) I am hurling my fighting weight over her railing to land with an impressive thump.

“Oooh! You should join Flab Ferrets, Louie. Methinks that you have been spurning the Free-to-be-Feline of late.”

“It does not take a psychic or a Sacred Cat of Burma to figure that one out, Karma. I am not the health food type.”

“Obviously.”

She is a substantial lady herself, rather Victorian in her way, wearing a flounced ecru dressing gown and a set of snow white mittens and gaiters on her extremities. Her eyes are Prussian blue, but she is no Persian, despite her longish coat. The Birman is a very particular, I might almost say peculiar breed. A distant ancestor supposedly died to protect the life of a dalai lama, and they have never gotten over the honor. So the living ones like to lord it over inferior souls. Like me, for example. I am always handy as an example of an inferior soul.

“I am on my way somewhere,” I say. “What do you want?”

“I want to warn you.”

“Not that again! I do not need visions of lurking danger. I could use a good lookout at times, but you are a dedicated homebody, so that is out.”

I do not like to say it, but Karma, for all her superior spiritual gifts, is something of an agoraphobic, which does not mean that she is allergic to cats of the angora kind but that open spaces terrify her. That is why she never leaves the shadowed environs of Miss Electra Lark’s penthouse. I am sure Miss Electra likes light — why else would she be living and working in Las Vegas? — but assumes the shuttered existence in deference to her companion’s nervous tics.

“Louie, I must warn you. Forces assemble against you.”

“So what else is new?” I sit down and smooth an unruly eyebrow hair. “As long as you are interrupting my exit, I might as well ask if you have heard of a certain Ophiuchus dude.”

See, this is what the trained operator does. I do not just ask a simple question, I ask it in such a way that she could make all sorts of wrong assumptions, and from her answer I will learn what she is hiding, if anything. Or if she knows anything. Or if I should care.

“Ophiuchus,” she hisses, all the hairs on her housecoat standing straight up. “How do you know of such a sacred and secret sign? You are an unwashed unbeliever.”

An unbeliever I may be, but unwashed? Never!

“Listen, nobody runs the tongue concession as frequently and effectively as Midnight Louie. I do not get this black satin coat for nothing.”

“I mean that you have not been dipped in the font of eternal knowledge and wisdom.”

“I have been dipped in the koi pond at the Crystal Phoenix repeatedly, and can tell you that my wisdom quotient has gone up with each dip, also my nutrient level. Can this ‘font’ stuff and tell me what you know about Ophiuchus.”

“Ophiuchus is a Forgotten One.”

I nod. I have not heard of him before, so this must be tru.

Her blue eyes narrow. “He was beloved of the Ancients.”

“So are a lot of things that are kaput nowadays, like examining entrails.”

“As a matter of fact, several of our kind still seek signs in the entrails of birds. I speak of the hidden priestesses of the Raven Cult, for instance.”

Yuck! I say, eat ’em or leave ’em, but do not play with your food. These so-called “spiritual types” are the most bloodthirsty on the planet, if you ask me.

“So this Ophiuchus —?”

“Is the Sign of the Serpent Beaver.”

“Why is the constellation shaped like a house?”

“Louie, Louie. You have been corrupted by too much human contact. The constellation is not in the shape of a house but of a trap. The Serpent wraps around its victims, ensnares them in its coils. There is no escape.”

“This is just a bunch of hot gas jets in the sky, right? Not even the newspaper astrologists remember its name. That is fifteen minutes of fame minus fifteen in my book. Face it. Ophiuchus is the last millennium’s teen sensation. History. Forgotten history.”

“You are asking about it.”

“That is because I have weird friends.”

“The stars are eternal.”

“Not according to the latest wrinkle in the Big Bang theory. I watch the Discovery Channel.”

“I channel discovery.”

“My mama is bigger than your mama.”

“I do not think so. My mama is a snow leopard.”

“Mine is a…gangland leader.”

“A gangland leader? Surely you are not proud of that, Louie?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. This is the twenty-first century, Karma. Our kind need street smarts these days. Now, if you do not have any practical advice, I will be on my way.”

The news of my mama’s occupation appears to have tumbled Karma off her high horse. Or perhaps for her kind it is an elephant.

“I just wanted to warn you, Louie. The unseen planet of the hermaphrodite has entered the house of Ophiuchus, the Sign of the Serpent Beaver and thirteenth sign of the Invisible Zodiac. This is not a beneficent sign for you and yours.”

“Sure, sure,” I say, taking my leave.

In a minute I am down the palm tree trunk and into the foundation plantings.

I am in such haste to leave Karma and her dour rantings behind that I knock my noggin on the leg of an aluminum ladder some careless handy man has left standing.

A love tap on the brain-box does not slow Midnight Louie.

I dash through the parking lot, where my forefoot sends some round gold metal object spinning away like a Frisbee and crashing into a post.

Naturally, I cannot leave without investigating.

The object has split into two halves. My nose fills with a sickly sweet perfume as I accidentally inhale a cloud of fine dust.

Is this some druggie’s party kit? Have I taken a fatal dose of some disorienting, illegal, aphrodisiac hallucinogen?

Alas, no. It is merely a compact of ladies’ flea powder.

The rough journey, however, has shattered the mirror in the lid. I see my face reflected as in a microwave oven window, darkly, looking like a living jigsaw puzzle in the web of broken glass.

Who needs to linger in front of an unflattering reflection, other than a masochist?

I am quickly on my way again, leaving Karma’s silly predictions and bad omens behind like the insubstantial fairy dust they are.

Stripped for Action

“You!” Lindy Lukas snorted, inhaling cigarette smoke and coughing it out again with her foggy-throated words. “Nobody’d believe you as a stripper, honey. You’re too damn short.”

“If you only knew how much I hate to hear that,” Temple said.

“That nobody’d believe you as a stripper?”

“That I’m too short. That is blatant heightism. Aren’t four-inch heels part of the uniform? I’m an expert on spikes.”

“So are volleyball players, and they’re not stripper material. You can’t grab just any old girl and turn her into a stripper. It takes talent.”

Temple gazed at the ladies doing their thing onstage at Les Girls. It was the only stripper-run place in Las Vegas, but that didn’t mean the classic bump and grind was dead here.

“I suppose I could do you up as a twelve-year-old,” Lindy said through her smoke-slitted eyes. “That appeals to some customers.”

“I am not doing Alice in Wonderland in a G-string. That is really sick.”

“If you have to play a role,” Lindy went on, “I’ll get you a metal ring of thongs and you can be a costume hustler. You’ve seen how that’s done, I guess.”

Temple nodded. Her one backstage experience with strip shows had included a G-string of murders. Strippers were perennial targets for the demented. In a way, she was glad that Lindy had ruled out the role of victim for her. With what was happening to girls in strip clubs in the last few weeks, Temple might be mistaken for a real candidate. And that’s not what she wanted, to play decoy. She wanted to play detective.

“Do you have any idea,” Temple asked, “who might have killed that one stripper and attacked another one in the club parking lots?”

“Lots of ideas. Too many. It’s my job to watch these guys, but it’s a hard call. These places attract hustlers. Some of them are customers, but not usually, or self-appointed ‘freelance’ photographers or serious loose cannons. See that guy over there, who looks like he just left the orgy set of Gladiator?”

Temple nodded at the apt description. The man was a kind of Hugh Hefner clone, old and stringy but surrounded by busty Barbie dolls wearing attire stringier than he was. His white hair was combed forward into a Roman fringe designed to camouflage a hairline that had receded like the Tiber in a drought.

“The perfect suspect,” Lindy went on. “Wants those girls young enough to be his granddaughters hanging off of him by the dozen. Spends mucho dollars keeping that harem around him every time he comes in.

“After all the money he spends on the pleasure of their public company, you can picture him waiting in the parking lot and assuming one of them could be persuaded in giving him the pleasure of her private company.”

“And would she?”

“We’re strippers, not hookers. If an individual girl feels sorry for the old coot, that’s up to her. But most of ’em can’t wait to get out of here. They have lives like everybody else, kids, and boyfriends, husbands.”

“So Caesar in his would-be salad days over there really isn’t a good suspect?”

“Could be, but I doubt it. He’s here to bask in the public attention.”

“You ever run into a guy called Rafi Nadir?”

“Raf, yeah sure.”

“You know him?”

“Well, he never worked for me as a bouncer, if that’s what you mean. But he used to come in as a customer.”

“Why didn’t he work for you? He seems to have been associated with several clubs.”

“That’s the advantage of us running our own place. I’ve been retired from stripping probably almost as long as you’ve been alive, but I’ve seen it all. Raf was okay as a customer, but give him a smidge of authority and he’d get carried away. It just went to his head. He’d get overaggressive with customers who were basically pussycats, boss the girls around like he was the manager or something. I never gave him the chance to go into overdrive here, and he was fine.”

“You’re saying he was a petty tyrant, all bluster.”

“Unless things went really wrong. That’s the trouble with a guy like Raf, you can mostly count on him to be sound and fury, but then that one time…all bets are off.”

“If somebody he’d been pushing around, a woman, got away and then he ran into her alone again, would he be dangerous then?”

“Like in an empty parking lot? You’re asking could he have killed that Smith girl. If the right ‘wrong’ chain of events came up, yeah. But ordinarily, no. That’s my take. I could be wrong.” Lindy lit another cigarette off the glowing butt of the last one.

The smoke was making Temple’s eyes and throat clog, but she could hardly ask an expert witness to give up an addiction. So she blinked hard to clear her contact lenses and eyed the room again.

She wasn’t sure what she would turn up if she visited the strip clubs, but something would be better than nothing. She already had a new angle on Nadir: all bark and less bite. This from a woman who had made it her career to size up men in a New York minute.

Nadir was Molina’s bête noir, but there were always two sides to a story. Despite his trashy background, he might not be a killer.

Did Molina think so also? Is that why she let him escape the compromising circumstances, and therefore had to let Max go too? Or was she simply too desperate to risk bringing Nadir in? If he knew she was in town, he could find out about her. He probably would. A man of bluster would not want to leave the past alone. And then he would eventually hear about Mariah. Temple pictured Nadir demanding parental rights, and shuddered.

“You okay?” Lindy said after a hacking cough subsided. “I said I thought Rafi could be less dangerous than he looked, not more.”

“I was thinking about something else. Who do you think killed Cher Smith?”

“Oh, hard to tell. Someone who just ran across her, I think. Stinking luck. If she hadn’t been in that parking lot at that exact time, if he hadn’t happened to have been there. That’s the kind of crime it usually is. He probably propositioned her and didn’t think she ought to go turning him down. She probably panicked instead of kneeing him and running. Sniffled or tried to scream. That’s how these things happen. He panics and is afraid she’ll tell.”

“So if he’s afraid, the killer, there must be somebody he’s afraid of.”

“Besides the cops?”

“Yeah. If it’s all one thing leading to another, escalating. Maybe he’s a pillar of the church, or just married. But he’s got somebody to answer to.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Do you?”

“No. But I worked at getting this way a long time, honey. This is all we old broads have to show for the struggle. No one much bothers with us anymore.

“Now. When do you want to become the little G-string girl? I have to get one my suppliers to fork over some of her wares.”

“I could sell them for her. I mean, I’d need to look legitimate.”

“That’s already your problem, Temple. You look way too legitimate to be in here.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to attract undue attention in the clubs.”

“Coming in with quick-change stuff will help that. But you need to lose that red hair. Can you get a wig with a kind of hippie bandeau around the forehead, like retro flower child? If you look slightly street-person you can come and go as you please.”

The idea of a wig hunt perked Temple right up. Not only was it an instant disguise, she always liked to see herself as other than she was. It was her version of the human potential moment, or her long-buried theatrical urges coming out.

The right wig and not even Max would spot her! Maybe.

“When do I get the costumes?”

“I’ll get ’em if you can give me a hundred down. Then, whatever you sell you get to keep.”

“Down and done,” Temple said, slapping palms with Lindy before digging in her tote bag.

“You didn’t say why you want to do this.”

“Oh, research for an upcoming job.”

“PR work certainly gets into weird areas.”

“Certainly does.”

Temple spun off the bar stool and passed through the dim and mostly empty club into the dazzling daylight of the Strip. Strip was sort of the key word in Las Vegas: a town that would strip you of your money and your clothes as soon as look at you, and it often did if you were stripped.

Why did she want to do this?

Because she needed to do something to hold off the tightening noose Molina had thrown around Max. Now she could see how quickly his conscience had led him into a quagmire, how much it would suit Molina’s hidden and public agenda to arrest Max for Cher Smith’s death. They were engaged in a secret duel to the death. A referee was desperately needed.

Max had said the homicide lieutenant was driven by the desire to protect her daughter at all costs. Temple didn’t share that maternal fierceness, but she’d seen it before. It was considered a noble urge, but it also could be blinding and dangerous.

Temple had her own to protect, though not a kid, decidedly not a kid. Max had always done everything he could to protect her. It was time she returned the favor. Her conviction about that was very…fierce.

So, c’mon, mama. Let’s see who can nail whom first.

The House of Midnight Louise

It is a long hike over to the Crystal Phoenix and along the way I have plenty of time to brood about Karma’s usual mystic mutterings.

I must admit that I have had an itchy-twitchy feeling that has nothing to do with psychic channeling and everything to do with plain old instinct.

I am worried about my little doll.

You will observe the startling new use of the plural.

Miss Temple, in my opinion, has been lower than a polecat at a limbo contest of late.

I know that she is worried about Mr. Max. And Mr. Matt. And Miss Lieutenant Ma’am C. R. Molina. In some cases she is worried about the sanity and safety of the persons in question. In others — well, one — she is worried what the person in question might do to threaten the safety and sanity of the others.

And I know Miss Louise. She is not one to miss an opportunity to tweak my tail. Yet here I have proceeded, completely tweakless, for almost half a day. Is it possible for a hardnosed dude to miss abuse? I do not think so. But it is possible to deduce that Miss Louise may not be absent of her own free will, because she would never choose to loiter around a spooky old mansion when she could be persecuting me with her presence.

I must proceed logically. Miss Temple is relatively safe with Mr. Max for the night. That is to say, she is safe from anyone other than Mr. Max, and she apparently thinks that is an all right place to be.

So I must first make sure that Louise is missing in action, and then return to the scene of the crime and decide how to find and spring her from Los Muertos. If I did not cross her trail in the house during my previous visit, she might be held prisoner someplace secret and inaccessible, of which that joint has as many such places as a slab of Swiss cheese has mouse holes. What? You thought they were air bubbles?

The Crystal Phoenix’s showgirl Big Bird is fanning its neon tail feathers three stories high as I approach. I avoid the sweeping entrance drive and veer around to the side, where the lights are low and the tourists are utterly absent.

I do not expect to be seen, but still dart from palm trunk to palm trunk.

Imagine when I find one of my refuges already occupie.

He growls and I hiss. We face off. It is too dark here to tell exactly what our opponents are, other than natural enemies.

I swipe the air and snag a shiv on a hairy bit of coat.

The growl deepens.

“Listen,” I say. “I am just minding my business. I suggest that you mind your own business and we go our separate ways.”

I head forward and bump brows with something knee-high to a dump truck.

“I will go right, and you will go left,” I suggest.

“No dice. I go right.”

“Fine.”

We move again. Right into each other.

“Uh, do I go to my right, or your right?”

Oh, great. A Ph.D. candidate. A Doctor of Phoology. “You go to your right and I will go to my right.”

We move, dancing in the dark. We stub our toes on each other’s hangnalls.

Apparently the tree trunk is no longer between us.

“I demand satisfaction,” my invisible partner grumbles.

“Fine. There is a floodlight out behind the service entrance. There is also a pretty big Dumpster near it that should offer plenty of satisfaction.”

“I mean a duel. Face to face.”

“You have not sized me up yet.”

“It does not matter. You have stepped on my toes.”

I realize that the doofus means that literally. I have stepped on his toes — and he on mine — and he wants me to fight him over it.

I shrug in the dark. A gumshiv expects frequent challenges to defend his…masculinity.

I head forward again and this time do not run into anything, although I do hear the click of large nails alongside me all the way to the back of the building.

As the broad fan of light thrown by the security bulb grows nearer, I glance sideways to check out my companion. For all I know, I could be accompanied by a stork in tap shoes.

No such good luck. My sparring partner, I finally see, is a Great Dane. Must weigh about one-twenty.

“What is a purebred like you doing loose in Las Vegas?” I ask.

“I have run away from home.”

“There is not much in the way of single-family housing on the Las Vegas Strip.”

“I live at a hotel.”

“I did not know that the hostelries around here encouraged dogs on the premises, unless they were greyhounds and running at the track that day.”

“This is not a people hotel. That is why I ran away. It is a nasty segregationist institution. I am making a political statement.”

The way he says “segregationist institution” I know he has gotten that phrase from someone else. From their brain to his lips.

“What is the name of this joint?”

“They call it the Animal Crackers Inn. You can see that even the name is denigrating. It implies that all animals are crackers.”

“Never assume ill will when idiocy could be a cause. You know that people have a disgusting weakness for cute names when it comes to animal-related businesses. It is nothing we of the superior species should take personally, unless we wish to waste our time on human foibles.”

“Foibles?”

“Ah, quirks.”

“Quirks?”

Why do I think this guy’s brain cells have also run away from home, without him?

“It is their problem!” I say. “My problem is why a big bozo like you has a hair-trigger temper. My shivs need sharpening but I prefer a less lofty target. Not that I could not slice the nose hairs off King Kong if I had a mind to.”

“Oooh.” The Great Dane sits down and still manages to be as tall as Miss Temple barefoot. “I do not feel so well. I have an upset stomach.”

“That is what you get for accosting everybody who crosses your path in the dark.

“No. It is all the rich food that the chef leaves out for me.”

“You ran away from home — okay, a hotel — and you have a chef feeding you? Some political statement.”

“Chef Song means well, but his style of food is alien to my diet.”

For a moment my mind boggles at a Dane subsisting on bok choy and egg foo yung, although I do think that they would have sushi in common, or pickled herring at least.

“So you are another pet of Chef Song,” I say, my mind always on my investigation.

“I am no one’s pet,” he growls, leaping to his nine-inch-nailed feet, which scrape the concrete as chalk does a blackboard.

This gets my back up of course, and it looks like our little back-alley do-si-do is on again.

“Wow,” he says, his artificially perked ears backing off a little. “You look just like those Halloween dudes. Pretty spooky.”

“Now that is an out-and-out stereotype,” I say as I de-arch my back and let my electric hairdo settle down into the usual sleek pompadour. I have learned to speak his language. When that happens, fisticuffs can be avoided. “You should be ashamed of yourself, a denigrated species in your own right, passing on the prejudice.”

He lies right down, snugs his huge black nose between his fawn-colored paws and whimpers. “You are right. I am a bad dog.”

Great Bastet! These self-accusing sessions try my patience. It is too easy these days to chew your own mitts instead of looking around for the mitts that pull the strings.

“Look,” I say. “I do not care if you are a pit bull on speed or Charo on chew sticks, I just want some information. I am looking for a dame. A little doll. Looks a lot like me except she is smaller, fluffier, and, er, meaner. She is one of Chef Song’s favorites.”

“Oh, Louise! Why did you not say you were a friend of Louise’s? She is the cat’s, uh…” He thinks, visibly. “…peignoir. Such a sweet little gal. She is the one who hooked me up with Chef Song after I had fled my life of enforced luxury.”

“Happy to hear it,” I grit between my teeth.

My supposed partner has never lifted a whisker to negotiate a truce between my and my worst enemy on two legs, Chef Song, who is sentimentally attached to a food source, his koi and mine, our mutual gold mine, the fascinating fins in our lives. You would think a chef who serves sushi would understand my wee addiction to koi fresh from the pond. I cannot help it that he has made the odd decision to watch these fish instead of serving or eating them.

“When did you last see the little…dear?”

“Hmmm. Yesterday. It was egg drop soup and szechuan shrimp. Made me sneeze and rub my nose.”

When I look blank he adds, “Lunch.”

“Lunch yesterday.You say that Louise ate this disgusting slop?”

“She is quite the…connoisseur.”

“Why do you pause so long between words?”

“I must remember my mistress’s expressions. She speaks to me only in…French.”

No wonder the poor fellow is so confused and an easy target for extremist political activists. Why cannot his mistress speak his language, Danish? People are so self-centered.

“And what nationality is your mistress?”

“Ah…Californian. Or is it Vegan?”

No wonder! I did time at an upscale Palo Alto motel in my youth, and the sympathetic ladies used to leave out chocolate cake for my starving pals. Maybe to them chocolate is protein. At least it is not fatal to cats, as it is to dogs, though it is hardly the nutrition needed by the starving.

“Well, I will leave you by the Dumpster here. Perhaps you will find something succulent, besides me, inside. You need to get off that foreign food.”

I have what I needed to know, so I skedaddle. I leave the Great Dane torn between two cuisines: Chinese and Chinese, fresh or well-aged junk food.

It is obvious that a rescue mission is called for at Los Muertos.

I recall the trail left indoors by unseen hordes of cats. If Midnight Louise has run afoul of a gang, she could be minced mouse by now.

My pace quickens, though I am not much paying attention to where I am going. It disturbs me that I found no trace of her on my previous visit.

The idea is strangely upsetting. I am almost run over by a skateboarder.

Of course if I can recruit Osiris and Mr. Lucky to my side, I might stand a chance.

But how to get them into the house? It will not be through Miss Louise’s discovered dryer vent pipe, of that I am sure. Unless Mr. Max Kinsella can shrink two Big Cats to the size of Pomeranians.

And of course there is the matter of where he might be even if I were able to find a way to persuade him to come to Louise’s aid. We do not talk the same language, the Mystifying Max and I.

Irreconcilable Differences

“Tess,” Temple said, figuring that she’d react most naturally to the same first initial as her real name.

She glimpsed her shoulder-length ash blond hair in the facing walls of mirror, fascinated by how different she looked. Besides, it was less stressful than eyeing her conversation partner.

“So, Tess,” said the tall, virtually naked woman standing in the middle of the room. She did wear very high heels, however. “How long have you been selling this stuff?”

“This stuff” was the gaudy array of nylon spandex concoctions that hung from a giant version of a steel key ring hoop around Temple’s right wrist.

“Not long. This is my sister’s stock, but, well, she’s a little freaked by the parking-lot attacks.”

“So are we.” The woman’s long artificial fingernails paged through the bountiful patterns of skimpy stretch fabrics and cut a silver lamé number from the herd. “Let me try that one.”

Temple spun the hoop until that item was near the latching mechanism. She sprung the hoop open and lifted off what looked like tangled suspenders…or, to her mother’s generation of women, a sanitary napkin belt…or to eleven-year-old boys, maybe even a slingshot. Or maybe not, considering how sexually sophisticated eleven-year-old boys were getting nowadays.

“Cute.” The woman twisted to face one set of mirrors, crushing the fabric strips against her naked torso.

I have been here before, I have seen this before, I am not uncool about it.

Temple repeated this mantra once more, still searching for someplace neutral to look. She had never gotten into the girls-in-the-buff health club scene, but always ducked into shower stalls or toilet cubicles to change clothes in decorous privacy. Perhaps that was because she was small…and, ahem, small…and would seem even smaller in all departments by direct comparison.

“Great!” The happy customer delicately stabbed her four-inch spikes through certain openings in the fabric like someone doing a Highland fling. The stretchy fabric was pulled up into snug place, becoming a teeny tiny thong on the bottom half and a random arrangement of straps on the top that could take a passing swipe at covering her nipples. Sort of.

“How do you know where all that’s supposed to go?” Temple asked. “And doesn’t it…chafe?”

“Oh, it’s not on long enough to do much of anything. And it goes where I say it goes. How much did you want?”

Temple had been coached, but the ridiculous price stuck in her craw. “Forty-five dollars.”

“Fine.” The woman’s nails rifled a lime-green sequined bag big enough for a cell phone and some paper money to pull out a fifty-dollar bill. “Keep the change. I really just love this.”

She writhed into various poses in the mirror, working the straps off her shoulders, down her stomach. Every move was judged through narrow, dispassionate eyes.

“You’ve got some sexy fabrics there,” she told Temple.

“Thanks. You’ve got some sexy moves.”

“You ever stripped?”

“Ah…I’m too short for it. I’m told.” This was the only time in her life Temple had been pleased to be found wanting in height.

“Oh, don’t listen to anyone else. You could build a real exotic act around being so little. You know, china doll, or Catholic school girl. That’s always a popular one. The guys go wild over those little plaid uniform skirts.”

“Oh, really. Why do you think that is?”

“Grade school repression, silly! When you work up an act, you gotta think: what would a horny twelve-year-old find sexy?”

“That young?”

“Oh, they can be sixty or seventy and still think like that. Generally, they like the illusion of really, really innocent or really, really naughty. So what’s your sister’s name?”

“Ah…oh, my sister.” Desperate. “C-Carmen.”

“Carmen? That doesn’t exactly go with Tess.”

“Theresa,” Temple said.

“My real name’s Monica Mary, and now I get it. Theresa and Carmen. You girls could do a sister act, you know, a real nun thing. Go over big.”

“Not with the Vatican, I think.”

“I got news for you. They don’t come here.”

“Anyway, if you like our stuff, I’ll be around for a while.”

“How come you’re not afraid of the Stripper Killer?”

“Ick, is that what they’re calling him?”

“That’s what we’re calling him. So you’re not afraid.”

“I am, but I need the money more than…Carmen. What do you think? Are any of the clubs a bigger target? Am I safer here? What about when I should leave? I hear that poor Cher Smith was attacked at two A.M. Maybe if I made sure I was out of the clubs by one A.M. —”

“Hey, two A.M.’s a good time. It’s when we kind of shift off, although here in Vegas you can go all night.”

“You mean that a lot of you leave around two A.M. Wouldn’t the parking lot be crowded then?”

“It’s not like we run in packs. We’re all pretty much loners. It gets intense in the dressing room, but what we like about the life is we can come and go when we please. A lot of us get picked up, you know? We don’t have to worry about parking lot prowlers when a Hell’s Angel on a Harley shows up to carry us home.”

Swing low, sweet chariot. Temple nodded, thinking she’d rather take her chances in public with the Stripper Killer than have a Hell’s Angel in her private life.

The door to the dressing room banged against the wall. Two women came caroming in with the speed and impact of bowling balls, toting tiny purses and huge gym bags.

“Monique! That’s absolutely adorable, girl!” screeched the black woman with blond hair.

Monica Mary, aka Monique, stretched and preened in her silver lamé slingshot.

“Where did you get it?” demanded the white woman with the long, jet-black Afro.

Obviously, exotic was in. Guess they didn’t call it exotic dancing for nothing, since that was a sound-alike for erotic.

Monique’s daggerlike nail pointed at Temple’s hoop of overpriced Spandex.

By the time Temple departed, her hoop was lighter and her wallet was fatter.

She had glimpsed the girly backstage atmosphere at strip clubs before. It always made her feel sad, the sooo high school element of girls having a good time experimenting with makeup and clothes. Only these girls were here to take off the clothes. Once they’d been cheerleaders and prom queens, or maybe not either. That was another route to the black lights that cast an ultraviolet purple haze that made whites look lurid on cheesy stages in every major city and minor hamlet across this land.

This backstage interaction was the oddly innocent side of the industry, and it struck Temple as more real than all the calculated moves and pouty faces under the spotlight. It was a female support group, only most of their support seemed to come from ultra-narrow spandex. A band of spandex is comin’ after me…comin’ for to carry me home. Only it wasn’t a band of angels that had carried Cher Smith home.

Girls just want to have a good time, but some of them never learned a liberated way to have it.

Temple checked her watch before diving through the door that led to the major sound-system assault in the club area. Just past midnight. Matt Devine would be taking his first call of the night at WCOO’s Midnight Hour. To watch the two P.M. “shift change,” Temple would have to kill some time and she didn’t want to spend it backstage slinging spandex suspender sets. She sells spandex suspenders at the strip show. No thanks. Let sister Carmen handle that part. Carmen. Why had her subconscious been unable to dredge up any name but that one? Weird.

In the performance area, Temple managed to climb onto a bar stool and sat facing the club, her ring of costumes covering her lap like a folded coat.

“Drink?” the bartender hinted behind her.

Nothing was free in a strip club, especially not a barstool.

Temple dug out a ten-dollar bill and asked for a margarita. That ought to buy her about half an hour.

“Sell any?” he asked when he plunked the pale, snot-colored drink in front of her. She would bet that there was about as much tequila and lime in the glass as there was Carmen in her Northern European soul. Nada.

Sell any? Temple was fleetingly tempted to take umbrage, but then she remembered the rainbow of glitzy fabrics on her lap.

“Yeah, several. I thought I’d watch some of the girls’ acts. Get more ideas for outfits.”

“You do whatever you like,” he said, “as long as you feed the kitty or you feed the bartender.”

Temple glanced stageward. A lone girl was striding across it to a drumbeat, squatting every now and then to wrap her fingers around some moonstruck guy’s neck and let his fingers jam paper money down the skimpy pocket of her Tess-sold thong. Temple presumed that was “feeding the kitty.”

She sipped the pallid margarita. It tasted more of lemon water than anything else.

The stripping profession is a lifestyle choice, she reminded herself. Who was she to judge? According to Molina, Temple was in an intimate relationship with a suspected murderer, and Molina ought to know, having been in an exploitive relationship with another murder suspect.

Speak of the devil.

Temple gazed across the huge room with anxious recognition. Wasn’t that him? Rafi Nadir? Standing in the first row of tables, watching the woman onstage. He nodded as she passed. She winked back.

So he was indeed a genuine habitué of these places. A bouncer, Max had said. A man who liked to hang around naked ladies, who wallowed in the loud, sleazy atmosphere.

Her disguise was great, like wearing sunglasses on the street, Temple decided as she checked herself out in the mirror. Her actress aunt, Kit Carlson, would be proud of her. Amazing what one heavy-haired wig could do. She could watch everyone, just some idling costume pusher waiting for the next shift of dancers to come in and grab her wares.

Associated pros often came and went at strip clubs: photographers, costume hawkers, maybe even undercover cops.

O holy nightgown! Nadir was heading her way.

Temple turned back to the bar to swig from the smudgy margarita glass. She did not want to be caught making eye contact with a murder suspect. Also, he had seen her before, sans the Dyan Cannon locks. What had Max said? An ex-cop? He’d be good at penetrating disguises.

“Hey, Jay,” his deep voice addressed the bartender behind her. “Anything shakin’ tonight besides booty?”

“The usual usual,” Jay answered, filling his order for scotch on the rocks.

Temple noticed that Nadir’s drink had more color and needed less color of money to pay for it than her watered-down drink had required. Apparently he was known here.

“No suspicious characters?” Nadir asked.

“Just you.” Jay snickered. “You’re not hired heat anymore, why worry?”

“This used to be my beat.” Nadir’s eyes, so dark the black pupils melted into the surrounding iris, scanned the entire club.

Temple wondered if his pupils were dilated from being high on something, or if he just came with creepy jet black eyes, like a larger-than-life cartoon villain.

She remembered Thomas Harris’s one chilling fantasy touch in his description of Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter. He had “maroon” eyes.

How could Molina suspect Max’s true-blue eyes (sometimes disguised by contact lenses as alley-cat green) when here stood a suspect with eyes as black as his presumed heart?

Supposedly Molina had at one time fallen for this man, this hired muscle, this jaded strip club junkie.

Just as her description of Nadir was yearning toward truly extreme heights of distaste the man himself turned to her. “You’re new.”

“Not according to my mother.”

He was speechless for a second, then laughed. “So you sell overpriced elastic bands. How’s business?”

“Good. And they’re not overpriced. It takes tremendous skill to make the ‘gather’ setting on a sewing machine pay off. These costumes have to survive a lot of…stress.”

This time he exploded with laughter, his dark eyes almost disappearing inside the fleshy eyelids.

“You got that right, kid. So, is your sister a stripper? How’d you get into this scene?”

“You got the sister part right. She does this.” Temple shook her hoop like a Salvation Army girl her tambourine. There was no noise, though, which wouldn’t have been heard over the sound system anyway. She and Nadir were shouting at each other, although only two feet apart.

Yikes. She was sitting only two feet away from Molina’s ex–sleaze-a-squeeze and the only man in Las Vegas, or anywhere, that Max Kinsella had shown any fear of. Wow.

“Say, you’re kind of cute,” he said, as if just noticing that. Having a strip club epiphany of sorts.

Anyone else called her cute, she’d raise a ruckus.

This was the fearsome Rafi Nadir, so she’d accept it. “Thanks. I won’t say you’re kind of cute yourself.”

Again he laughed. She got the impression he didn’t do a lot of that and he enjoyed the novelty. He was…gasp…enjoying her.

“What’s your name?”

“Tess.”

“That all there is?”

“That’s all there is around here.”

“Smart. You never know who you’re talking to.”

“Well?”

He shrugged, let a smile touch his lips, smugly. “My name’s Raf.”

“Smart.”

He aimed his forefinger like a pistol. “Bang. You’re faster on the uptake than most of the broads around here.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m not a broad.”

He digested that along with some sodium-rich snack sticks salted with about three peanuts from a bowl on the bar that Temple had rejected forever after one try. Salty snacks encouraged drink orders, and bloating in the female of the species. Better dead than bloated.

“You want to go someplace where we can talk?”

Temple couldn’t believe her luck: Rafi Nadir, feeling talkative, all to herself.

Too bad she didn’t dare risk going as far as the jukebox with him, not that there was one here.

He read her hesitation so fast she thought he was Max. Predators were like that. Funny, she’d never thought of Max as a predator before.

“How about a quiet table?” he suggested.

“There is one in this place?”

He jerked his head toward a far corner. “There is one in every place. You just gotta know the terrain.”

She shrugged her acquiescence and slid off the barstool.

“Leave that,” he said, stopping her hand from reaching for the drink. “Send over a real one for the lady,” he growled at Jay.

Temple was glad she had ditched the high heels, the better to disguise her daily habits, the better to run for her life.

His hands were always on her: between her shoulder blades to guide her toward the right table, at her elbow to thread between the tables, on her shoulder to follow her down onto the chair he pulled out for her.

With a man you were attracted to, it was a barrier-breaking, seductive exercise.

With a shady character, it was stomach-knotting. Temple wanted to use her fabric ring like a barrier to fend off his attentions, but undercover junior G-girls didn’t get any good leads that way.

“Amazing,” she said after Jay had come and gone, leaving a margarita with a high lime color behind. “It really is quieter here.”

Nadir pointed to the ceiling. “In Vegas you always gotta check the ceilings. They’re not only where the spy cameras lurk, but the loudspeakers. This is a loudspeaker-free zone.”

“How’d you know all that?” Temple asked, sipping her margarita through its short, obligatory straw like a teenager at a soda fountain. She figured the more naive and impressionable she acted, the more information she’d get.

“It’s my business.”

She waited, sucking on her straw. Whew. This margarita had a tequila kick.

“I’m in security. Right now I’m working for a major Strip celebrity, but before that some of the strip clubs asked me to check out their systems.”

“Wow. How do you get into that kind of work?”

He hesitated. The urge to impress won out over discretion. “I’ve got a history in law enforcement.”

She bet he did! What was the expression Max had used? Rogue cop.

“So you went from the LVPD to private eye work.”

“Private security,” he corrected her. “Private eyes are rip-offs. Their rep is all from books and the movies.”

Temple was still congratulating herself on leaving out the M in LVMPD. Unlike many cities, Las Vegas’s police force was called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, because there was also a North Las Vegas Police Department. If she had used the official set of alphabet soup to refer to the force, Nadir would realize she knew a bit more than she should. Which wasn’t much, but at least it was a fine point or two, thanks to her brushes with Molina.

Molina! Was married to this guy! Or shacked up with him! Imagine that. No, don’t imagine that, she told herself on redirect. She didn’t want to gag on the only real drink she had ever gotten in a strip club.

She had to admit that Rafi Nadir knew how to operate around here. That meant he would also know how to operate unseen and unsuspected around here. And certain murderers, especially sex murderers, loved to revisit the scenes of the crimes.

“Are you cold?”

“Huh? Oh, goose bumps. Just nervous.”

“This is all new to you, right?”

“Yeah. My sister does this stuff. Does all right with it too. But she’s —”

“She’s what?”

“Scared. There was a stripper killed not too long ago at one of the clubs. Outside one of the clubs. And another girl was just attacked. She had all these, ah, suits made up and decided she didn’t have the nerve to hang around and sell them, so I said I would.”

“What makes you such a brave little girl?”

Grrrrr. Temple hated condescension, even coming from potential serial sex killers. “I lost my job, so I guess I was just desperate. Anyway, I’m glad to see that the clubs have security experts like you working to keep us all safe.”

She apparently had hit the litany of buttons that made Rafi Nadir resonate like a choir boy singing soprano, or ring like a slot machine that had just coughed up three cherries in a row.

“Don’t you worry. This creep’ll get caught.”

“You sound pretty certain. Any reason?”

He leaned close. Even with this “quiet” table, the grinding rock music was always pounding the edges of your attention, flattening them like tin.

“I was there.”

“There?”

“In the parking lot of this one club. Secrets. Some guy was with Cher Smith. I stopped them to make sure it was on the up-and-up.”

“And —?”

“He cold-cocked me. Moved faster than a whipsnake. I don’t often take a hit. Cher drove off. I think he followed her.”

Temple frowned. She’d heard this story the other way around. Oddly, Nadir’s version jibed with Max’s, except….

“That was the killer. She was dead in another strip joint parking lot the next night. I saw the killer. That’s why I come back and hang around, even though I’ve got a better job elsewhere. I saw the guy. I’ll see him again. Guys like that don’t stop.”

Temple was speechless, probably the best thing she could have done.

Nadir was setting up Max to be the killer. If Molina could ever overcome her extreme prejudice against crossing paths with Nadir, that’s the story she would get out of him and it would give her everything she’d ever wanted.

How ironic.

“Now don’t be afraid.” Nadir reached out to pat her hand. He didn’t. His own closed over it, trapping it against the slick tabletop. “That’s why I’m here. I saw the guy. He wears disguises, but I’ll know him again.”

“How do you know you will?”

“Because I did see him again. That girl who was attacked outside Kitty City? I was there too. He got away. Some dumb-ass undercover narc bitch was there and blew my one chance to nail the guy. I had him in my reach, but she held a gun on us both. She arrived just after I came on him with the girl down. She couldn’t tell which one of us was the real killer so the stupid…broad let him get away, and forced me to go after him.”

“Did you get him?”

“No. He had too big a start on me. He can disappear like Lance Burton, this guy. But don’t worry, unless you see some guy over six feet tall. That he can’t quite hide. Tall guy. You look out then.”

Temple nodded, sober despite the kick-lime margarita. She could swear that Nadir believed his own story. But then, pathological killers always had some self-justifying notion.

She pulled her hand from under his to pick up the big glass bubble of the margarita glass in both palms and drink from the rock salt-slathered rim.

Her lips curled at the caustic taste, even as her skin crawled.

She had either just heard the twisted spiel of a stone-cold killer, or there was more to these murders than Max, Lieutenant Molina, and even Rafi Nadir knew or was telling her.

“So where’ll I find you tomorrow night?” he was asking, as if she’d want to be found by him.

Maybe she did.

She leaned in to whisper one word to him.

Shadows

Matt couldn’t help thinking about computer hackers as he stepped out of the small WCOO office into the empty parking lot.

You never saw them, hackers, but they came knocking on your cyber-door, and huffed and puffed until they blew your house down. Their only motive was spite, pure and simple. They didn’t have to know you to hate you. They struck and ran, leaving your entire system slowly eating itself. They were thugs, vandals, cyber-stalkers.

Kitty was like that. Maybe, like hackers, she took pride in mindless destruction. It was more fun to ruin a stranger than an acquaintance. Some poor Job who stood there naked and bleeding, asking the universe, “Why me?” Evil without motive, logic, gain, was more unsettling than all the seven deadly sins combined.

Letitia had left a few moments before him, at his insistence. He said he had to be a “big boy.” Basically, he had to make sure she wasn’t with him in case Kitty showed up.

He’d ridden the Hesketh Vampire tonight and every night since she had accosted him and Letitia in this very lot.

The Vampire was one sleek, shining, silver gauntlet thrown down on the empty black asphalt. She wanted to play motorcycle nightmare on her Kawasaki, he was ready to play back.

He figured they were pretty well matched. He had the anger and she had the nerve. Anger could betray you, of course, but it also was a fearless motivator.

He unlocked the cycle, took the helmet off the handlebar, put it on, donned the leather gloves, mounted, kicked the stand up, balanced all the bike’s awesome weight on his boot-toes for a moment before throttling up and cruising down the smooth asphalt.

He was alone except for the shadow he cast in the pink-grapefruit-color parking lot lights high on their standards, like artificial moons stuck on fence posts. Pumpkin heads on scarecrow stalks.

His shadow was a lowrider, a sidecar running alongside the Vampire’s high-profile bulk. The motor throbbed like hard-rock music, guttural and insistent, announcing itself to the night.

There was no way to be subtle on a motorcycle. It was an instrument of the self-advertised, married to a machine. I am inhuman. Hear me roar.

Overweight people, outcast people, overcontrolled people all found freedom on a motorcycle.

Matt wondered if that was why he had hated the Hesketh Vampire at first: too flashy, too noisy, too look-at-me.

Now he thought that he had been the too-too one. Too modest, too quiet, too self-effacing. Was that what had drawn Kitty O’Connor to him? Bullies always needed a victim, and a bully was what she was. Motorpsycho nightmare.

He watched his side mirrors. The helmet muted sound; it was like cruising inside a noisy silent movie, the familiar cityscape sliding by, sometimes at a pinball-machine tilt.

And then it was there: the black ball of a gadfly in his right mirror, moving up fast.

He tilted, swept left down an unknown street. Then right, swerving. Skating the dry warm streets, bike and man moving to a Strauss waltz, like the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It was past 2001 now. It was past odyssey and into obsession.

He rode for the sake of it, for the oneness of it, only visiting the mirror now and then, finding the black spot clinging to him like a burr, but still a block or two behind.

What did she really want? What could she really do? Try to crowd him off the street into an accident? She didn’t want any accidents to happen to him. She wanted to happen to him. So…if he wouldn’t rattle, would she rock and roll? Quit? Give up? Just enjoy the chase and drop out?

He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to lead her. She knew where he worked and lived. She didn’t know a thing about his internal landscape, except what she guessed or hoped to produce.

There was a strange freedom in deciding she could do him no harm, that she was trapped by wanting to harm him in certain limited ways.

She was gaining on him. He didn’t particularly care. Maybe he’d spin around in a 180-degree stop. Wait for her. See what she’d do.

At least it was just him and her. No innocents in the way. Did she understand that trapping him alone with her was not the threat; it was trapping him with someone else?

Yes, or she’d never have brought that poor girl along to the Blue Dahlia.

He had to make her think that the game was more interesting when she came solo.

So he did it, swept the Vampire in a tight, tilted circle and dragged his toe along the ground to balance it to a swaggering stop.

And waited for her.

Like a fly you’re about to swat, she played coy. Throttled down to a dull grumble, hovered three hundred feet away, the Kawasaki snorting and smoking like a stalled dragon.

It reminded him of a bull, so he revved up and raced at her, a toreador on ice.

His aggression caught her off guard. She swept away left down a dark, unlit street.

He followed, on the attack for once, liking it far too much. The worst thing an enemy can do is to make you like him. Like Cliff Effinger, mean, violent, hair-trigger. Still…he had seen, learned from a master. Maybe he needed a little of Cliff Effinger to deal with Kitty O’Connor.

He was an amateur.

She had roared out of sight, then silenced.

When he moved past an intersection, she shot out across it like a cannonball.

He almost spun out sideways in order not to hit her.

And the point was made.

He still wanted to avoid conflict. Crashing. Charging.

He turned the Vampire in a large circle and roared away, the chased rather than the pursuer now.

And now she retaliated. Buzzed up close like a wasp, agitated his jet stream, wobbled close to his wheels. It was like the chariot race in Ben Hur, nerve and dirty tricks and only the power of one Christian God to pull his fat from the fire.

He recognized his earlier hubris, the misplaced faith in the machine, in his new devil-may-care attitude. All the devil cared about was pride going before a fall, and Matt was pushing, was being pushed into taking the Vampire into a hasty, bruising scrape along asphalt and concrete.

He felt a pain, as if the machine’s metal skin were flesh and blood and he would be responsible for its grazing.

He jumped a curb without thinking about it, the jolt bone-jarring. He was barreling along sidewalk on a thankfully deserted street, ducking unclipped shrubbery.

Innocent greenery snapped away from his helmet, his handlebars.

His side mirrors reflected slashes of the rare streetlight. He sensed his pursuer rather than saw or heard her.

All he heard was his own breakneck progress and the thought that this had to end with a mistake, badly, in a crash.

Ahead loomed the deserted industrial park he had used to dodge a pursuing motorcycle before, long before he knew that Kitty O’Connor was after him.

It was odd, the motif of the pursuing motorcycle, like a nightmare, like a cop, like the Hound of Hell or Heaven, like fate.

Matt twisted the hand throttle, poured on the power, turned a 45-degree angle around a building whose glass eyes had all been shot out.

The buzz was right behind him. He was going to cut the next corner too close or too far and he and the Vampire would go sliding horizontal into the dark night and hard ground for a long, long screech of yards.

Something came slicing behind him, crossways, like a buzz saw.

Another cycle. Big. Gaudy. Older than the Vampire. Bigger than the Vampire. All bristling chrome and wire wheels, a red vintage Harley-Davidson.

It swept a huge circle and came up behind him. The motor throbbed like Wagner’s Pilgrims’ Chorus, like the Valkyrie on the warpath.

The rider wore no helmet, just a pair of wraparound sunglasses as pitch-black as tar.

His hair was windswept tar. His knuckles on the handles were white in the night, ungloved.

He wove behind Matt, left and then right, and every swerve put itself between the Vampire and the Kawasaki that followed.

Then the huge machine moved up on Matt, slowly but certainly.

He rode in Matt’s left blind spot, like a cowboy herding a steer.

Matt couldn’t engage with the other motorcycle. This interloper had interposed itself between them. He found himself resenting the intrusion.

It had been him and Kitty O’Connor and now they were three.

He was being herded out of the empty shopping center back toward the freeway and civilization and speed limits and population.

It occurred to him that he ought to be grateful, but he wasn’t.

Maybe this would have ended it, once and for all.

He was being herded too damn fast.

His speedometer in the lurid dashboard lights read ninety miles per hour and he’d hardly noticed it.

His escort pulled abreast without revving up a decibel.

He glanced over, saw the lacquered hair, the thick sideburns.

Elvis saluted and pushed inward to force Matt onto the entrance lane of Highway 95.

In his right mirror Matt saw the overbuilt motorcycle turn like Leviathan to face the oncoming black blot of the Kawasaki.

Damn, but he wanted to see the outcome of that collision!

The night swallowed the images of the two motorcycles. He was awash in headlights and taillights and seventy-mile-an-hour lane changers and overhead lights as bright as the morning star.

This was Las Vegas, and his money was on Elvis. There was no percentage in messing with a living legend, especially after he was dead.

Matt felt a new swell of appreciation for the time-honored religious tradition of patron saints.

Elvis made a troubling spiritual figure, despite his clumsy aspirations to the role while living, but as a ghost he was pretty damn impressive.

Heads or Tails?

At least I am able to return at a decent hour.

I manage to beat Miss Temple back to the Circle Ritz and am lounging on the comforter with my rear leg hiked over my shoulder like an Enfield rifle on parade, grooming an intimate part of my anatomy, when she comes waltzing in.

“Still up, Louie?” she asks the obvious…unless it is a question of a personal nature and therefore not so obvious.

Either way, I do not deign to answer, as usual.

I am too miffed by her bizarre appearance to deign to notice her.

When she leans over the bed to give me a midnight smooch, I turn my head away. Has she not looked in a mirror lately? Not that I go for dames who would place looking in a mirror over looking at me, but an occasional peek could spare another individual much distress.

“What is the matter, Louie?” She backs off, puzzled, her adorable little muzzle all wrinkled like a shar pei’s, who are not so adorable.

Then she runs into herself in the dressing table mirror.

“I bet it is the wig! You did not want all this blond Dynel rubbing on your whiskers. Well, this is history. For now.”

She strips off the Lauren Bacall “do” to reveal her own sassy curls all crushed beneath. This girl could use a good grooming, but my tongue is not for hire. I have enough square footage of my own to tend to.

“These are wild,” she says vaguely in my direction.

I hear a click and then the large silver ring on her forearm snicks open.

All is forgiven! An armload of cat toys!

I bound from the bed and leap into action, batting, snagging, toothing.

“Louie! These are borrowed goods. Let go. No! Bad boy! Please!”

That is Miss Temple’s idea of domestic discipline, all right. She wields the Carrot of Cajolery and the Big Stick of Superior Force in such rapid turns that a guy could commit sixteen felonies or hara kiri while she was making up her mind whether to slap or tickle him.

She hangs my playthings on the top of the ajar closet door.

“I agree,” she tells me, “that those skimpy string monokinis would make ideal cat toys, but I need them for my undercover work.”

Perhaps she meant uncovered work.

I decide right then that despite my misgivings about Miss Midnight Louise I had better keep an eye on Miss Temple and her midnight ramblings.

So much for taking on a partner. Now I am stuck with a partner missing in action and the previous case of the stripper killer heating up and no one at hand to lend a mitt in either instance.

Perhaps I shall have to hone my delegating skills further, first thing tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Miss Temple has totally thrown off her undercover persona to slip under the covers with yours truly. It is while we are rubbing noses and murmuring sweet little nothings that I resolve to defy logic and physical science and pursue two cases at once.

Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?

Temple often thanked her checkered employment history for a brief detour into the thespian arts.

That explained how she was able to call Molina the next morning, as innocent and bright as sunshine.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about Max,” she began.

“Good.”

“Maybe not.”

“For you or for me?”

“Well, the thing is” — Temple hated people who used “the thing is,” and hoped Molina did too; would bet that Molina did too — “the thing is, I need to know the exact time that Cher Smith was killed.”

“Why?”

“Well, it could be that I know where Max was, and was not, at that time.”

“That night? You remember the timetable of that night?”

“He told me about it the next day.”

“The killing?” Molina sounded ready to leap through the phone.

“Noooo. Just about meeting Cher. But if I knew the exact time that Cher Smith was accosted and killed the next night, I might be able to…make more sense of what I do know. You know?”

The silence on the phone line said that Molina definitely did not know.

Good. Temple wanted the homicide lieutenant’s frustration level high enough to override her better instincts.

“Are you there?” Temple said. “Look, I’m not even sure I should be calling you.” Whined.

“Me too,” Molina finally answered. “That’s privileged information. Time of death. Besides, it’s not an exact science.”

“I know. I heard that on C.S.I. Isn’t that a cool show?”

“No. Their depiction of forensic work is wildly improbable. Forensics people don’t play amateur detective and interview witnesses and suspects. We do that.”

Temple relished being the object of that short, biting tone. The madder Molina got, the more disgusted, the more she’d play right into Temple’s hands. Or ears, in this case.

“Well, I’m not asking for court evidence here. Just a time. An hour. You know. When? Elevenish? Twelvish? One-ish?”

“How about two-ish,” Molina gritted through her teeth.

Temple smiled like the Cheshire Cat. “Two-ish, it is. We would need a hyphen in that, though.”

“Hyphen?”

“Between two and ish. To look right.”

“I don’t care how it looks, that’s the time Cher was attacked. So. Are you going to give Kinsella an alibi? Was he caressing your lily white body at the time?”

“Lieutenant! That is soooo personal a question to ask. And pure speculation. You have no idea what shade my body is. There are always self-tanning lotions. Two A.M. I’ll have to check my diary to be sure.”

“Is that just an expression, or do you really keep one?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Temple said. “With a warrant,” she added in a throaty growl. “G’bye!” Snippy Weakest Link tone of voice.

Whew! What a workout for an amateur actress.

She stared at the notebook she always kept by her phone and compulsively doodled on while talking. The number 2 and the capital P.M. were prominent on the pages, outlined by the tilted, houselike shape of the constellation Ophiuchus.

But the two things were not connected: the stripper killing and the Synth. Were they?

Whatever the case, Temple knew more than she had, and more than Molina meant for her to know. That was one thing Temple had learned from Lindy last night: the exact time when Cher was accosted was very important. Now all Temple had to find out was who might have been crossing that parking lot at the same exact time, besides Max Kinsella, who she did soooo not want to be guilty. If Molina was out to see that Rafi Nadir would walk, Temple was determined to see him walking across the right “wrong” parking lot at 2:00 A.M.

Even if the shoe, or glove, fits, you must not call it quits.

Ritz Cracker

“I can see,” says my dear Miss Temple, “why strippers are so eager to get out of these blasted outfits.”

I can see a lot more of my dear Miss Temple than I am accustomed to, but I shut my eyes and try not to think of that noxious Egyptian hairless breed of my kind known as a sphinx. I suppose the Sphinx itself is hairless, probably due to endless sandblasting.

I am sorry to say that even my Miss Temple, left alone with a ring of fifty strip-tease artists’ tools of the trade cannot resist slipping into a little nothing in front of her bedroom mirror.

I suppose the most admirable and sensible female harbors a bit of unwholesome curiosity about how well she would pass as a femme fatale. I blame the media.

Still, it is no pleasant task to recline upon our communal couch and watch her preen and pose with such ridiculous articles of nonclothing. Worst of all, she is wearing my shoes as an accessory to the crime!

She turns the radio up to a deafening level. It is a rock oldies station playing something with a chorus of “She works hard for the money.”

Miss Temple works hard to look like a stripper.

I flatten my ears against the sight and the sound.

At last she turns off the radio and sighs, which is more than I can manage.

“Not even the Midnight Louie shoes can add any class to this outfit,” she admits. “I guess I am stuck being Miss Modesto of 1958.”

With that she goes through what looks like a straitjacket escape act as she unwinds the assorted elastics before donning her usual underthings, which I find skimpy enough to begin with. What a relief. It is a good thing that I do not talk to humans on principle, as I could certainly shock Miss Temple Barr’s friends, coworkers, neighbors, lovers, and enemies with a breathless fashion report on her brief entry into exiting her clothes.

Soon she has donned the long, yellow wig as one would a hat, were one human and had ears oddly placed in the center of one’s skull instead of proudly rampant at the top, like the lordly lions on a coat of arms.

Outside our windows the sun is dyeing the day the luscious rosy-orange of a perfectly ripe peach, not that I would ever eat a fruit, but I can appreciate perfection in many forms. Perhaps it takes one to know one.

“Well,” says Miss Temple, bending to kiss my ruffled brow, “at least I know that one of us will be safe at home tonight.”

Uh-oh. This is a blatant confession that she will be out and up to no good.

I can tail her, of course, but I am counting on an assistant a bit more reliable than Miss Midnight Louise to do the job.

I will wait until apprised of Miss Temple’s destination before I hit the trail. So I allow myself to doze off on the zebra comforter that she has thoughtfully left crumpled into a wad in the middle of the bed so I am like Mohammed on top of his mountain, or perhaps the princess who finally got enough mattresses to forever kiss the pea good-bye.

Whilst I nap, gently nodding, suddenly there comes a prodding, prodding at my dreamland’s door. Open here I fling my lashes, when with a sound like cymbal clashes, I hear a footstep on the floor. A creak and pause, and nothing more.

Well, Midnight Louie is up and at ’em faster than a mongoose with snake pâté in store.

I leap to the floor and then to the door. I peer through the crack as I plan my attack.

Now I do not know whether to move in the model of “The Raven” or “The Night Before Christmas,” because what to my wandering eyes should appear…

But a figure all in black.

It could be a raven, a very large raven. It could be Santa, fresh from a shoot down the soot of a chimney.

However, this is Miss Temple Barr’s home, sweet home, so if a large black object appears unannounced, it is likely Mr. Max Kinsella.

This time he is not bearing gifts, like pizza, but is truly checking the place out, like a, ahem, cat burglar.

Before I can pounce, he rushes the bedroom door and pushes it open.

I can barely sidestep the inevitable black eye, which is never a noticeable condition in my case.

“You!” he says, acknowledging my presence. “She must have gone already. Where?”

At that he marches right in and begins searching the premises as if I was not there and to be reckoned with. He does not even pause to give me time to answer, although I admit that I would not.

From the tumble of comforter he lifts the solitary monokini that Miss Temple had tried on in an inexplicable moment of craven feminine weakness. I cringe to have her minor moment of experimentation exposed to other eyes than my own.

He finds the crushed K-Wigs bag on the closet floor.

He stares at me as if he would like to wring an answer from my helpless esophagus (not knowing that he probably could), then turns and ransacks the rest of the apartment.

I follow at a discreet distance.

I fear no man, but I do recognize one at the limits of his patience. And I have seen the strength in Mr. Max Kinsella’s clever fingers. I would prefer for them not to be playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on my epiglottis.

So I tippy-toe after the human cyclone that Mr. Max has become.

He has searched the kitchen and living room and is now in the second bedroom, aka the office.

I hear a woman’s voice.

Has Miss Temple returned for something she forgot, like me?

No such luck. As I near the open door, I notice that the voice has a distant recorded quality. It is as husky as a bull walrus, but it is still a woman.

“Temple, honey,” she is saying again, on rewind. “Lindy. Sorry to miss you. I was wrong about that guy you were asking about. He’s not going to be where I said he was. He’ll be at Secrets tonight. I hope this call isn’t too late. Give me a buzz when you have my message so I know you’re all right.”

“Thanks, lady! All wrong, but at least she’s safe,” Mr. Max snarls at the answering machine as he bangs the button to stop the machine. “Temple, Temple, Temple…” He sighs before leaving.

He does not even notice my presence in the room, although I have assumed a position under the desk that would be extremely difficult to notice.

Still, he is the Mystifying Max, and one would hope he would be a little better than this.

I cogitate a bit after he leaves. I am sure that this call came through while Miss Temple was making like Gypsy Rose LeVine to that awful hubbub on the radio. I distinctly heard her murmur “Baby Doll’s presents….” Mr. Max is heading in the wrong direction, yet I am sure the action at Secrets will be particularly vibrant tonight when he goes there to find out who Miss Temple had a hankering to follow. I am now a totally free agent, as now I know my roommate has gone off somewhere completely safe.

I hop up on the desk. I have never gotten much into cyber-crime, but I am not ignorant of the possibilities. Besides, what I have in mind is more techno-crime. Thoughtfully, I rewind the message that Mr. Max so heedlessly left unreeled.

My big mitts suffer somewhat from what retired boxers call cauliflower ear. They have been bruised and battered by many months of hitting the pavement when I was a homeless dude. Still, these answering machine buttons are not beyond my manipulations. After some preliminary misdials and abrupt hangups, I manage to find and hit the autodial button that directs my call to Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s office at the LVMPD.

When her voice answers — and I do not know if it is real or recorded — I hit replay and let the message Mr. Max heard transfer to the lieutenant’s end of the line.

It will certainly be interesting to see who shows up at Secrets tonight. And when. And what they all do about it.

Of course I am heading that way myself.

Every catastrophe in the making deserves an impartial witness.

I am so glad my Miss Temple was headed in a different, utterly safe direction before that — shall I say, fateful? — message came through.

Diamonds or Dust

In the dusk Matt walked to the Strip, then took a bus.

He got off downtown and wandered the enclosed area, drifting into the open entries to raucous casinos, veering back onto the canopied concourse to gawk up at the sky-size Las Vegas version of a CineMax screen with the tourists. Images danced like the aurora borealis on crystal meth over them all. No one noticed him.

He caught a cab near the Four Queens and took it to Bally’s. He ambled through the hotel to the monorail and took it to the MGM Grand.

He walked through the miles of lobby and gaming areas there, then ducked out a side exit.

Then he hiked to the Goliath.

This was the night.

Act or be acted upon forever.

Do or die.

He killed a half hour in the Goliath lobby before he even approached the front desk.

He had seen no one who knew him.

No one who looked like Kitty in disguise with diamonds, though he’d seen a lot of diamonds in the shopping area.

Diamonds were made under immense pressure, built up for eons in the hidden center of the earth.

He understood that feeling. He knew that pressure.

Tonight it would be diamonds or dust.

Cover Story

Here it had begun.

Molina’s dead eyes took in the ersatz elegance of Secrets.

It was an upscale strip club, although that term was a contradiction in terms. Scratch a strip club, no matter how high-class, and you sniffed corruption and exploitation.

She had been laboring late on paperwork when the forwarded call had come through.

“Temple, honey.”

No need to guess on whose answering machine that rye-whiskey voice — almost mannish, almost female impersonator — had left the news that Secrets was the place to be tonight.

The first question was who had sent that message to Temple Barr, and why.

The second was, what was Barr doing club-crawling when single white females were the Target of the Month at places like this?

Trying to save the scruffy, shopworn soul of Max Kinsella, no doubt.

Molina’s head ached from the wig that clung to it like a mothballed barnacle, and the incessant smoke and noise.

The glamour of undercover work was way overrated.

This could be a trap or a diversion. Barr could have gotten the message and come here, or not. She could have notified Molina in this cryptic way, or not. Molina assumed not. Barr had a history of independent action, ill-considered or not. So, she herself could have been alerted by…Matt Devine, Good Neighbor Matt. Or not. Or by Max Kinsella. Bad Scene Max. Or not.

The whole evening, the entire charade was possibly key to the case. Or not.

She had to assume that Barr at least had the smarts to disguise her appearance.

So now Molina was on the lookout not only for a possible killer, but for a civilian trespassing on police turf.

Still, she wondered what Barr had blundered into. Her informant had the kind of smoky, boozy voice of someone who knew the strip club world inside out from the time of Moses to Madonna.

Who did Barr think she was tracking? A he, of course. If the killer was a woman, it would be a shocker. From the message, it was someone who was a repeat offender at strip clubs, a regular. That included a lot of customers.

Molina eyed the men standing, sitting, drinking, ogling.

The usual batch of losers and loners. Men whose shoulders slumped, whose jaws dropped, whose eyes were dead with unspoken hopes. And the muscle crowd. Not loners. Guys in gangs, loud, profane, obscene. Pack runners not likely to go beyond the pale in public parking lots, but don’t let them run into you alone on a lonely road.

Molina had seen them all, the types. So who didn’t you see? Who was conveniently invisible?

“See anybody who ought to be in pictures?” the bartender asked.

This model was female, but she had the same easygoing attitude of her male counterparts, as if Sister Wendy doing the shimmy on the bar wouldn’t turn a hair.

“Not yet. I’m really looking for places, not people.”

What a lie! Molina was pleased with her latest cover story: location scout for C.S.I. It was the perfect justification for surveillance work: both jobs required lots of sitting and watching and soaking up the atmosphere.

Molina tried some oversalted bar nibblies despite her better judgment. Had to look semioccupied while waiting for Godot, or whoever.

Like most stakeout work, this could turn out to be another dull, wasted evening.

Terra Incognito

Matt eyed himself in the mirror. In the mirrors.

He turned away, displeased as always with his looks.

The place was plastered with mirrors, and it certainly wasn’t to visually enlarge the area. The rooms were already king-size.

He went to the window, which gave him a hawk’s-eye view of the elaborately tiled areas surrounding the many pools. The mosaic of gold, terra cotta, and white tiles, with rectangles and circles of chlorinated water thrown down among them like area rugs, was like overlooking some Roman ruin, though nothing down there or up here was ruined, except possibly his immortal soul.

The sinking sun sizzled on seminude figures ambling among the bronzed bodies arrayed on lounge chairs. Dozens more people stood in the pools, looking from up here like toothpicks impaled in blue icing. Very few people in the pools actually swam.

The entire scene reminded him of an orgy sequence from a Cecil B. DeMille film epic, The Last Days of Pompeii, say, just before the wrath of Mount Etna rained on the pagan parade and turned everybody into ashes, ashes, all fall down.

My, he was getting apocalyptic, wasn’t he? If the Devil was in the details, God, unfortunately, was not often in the Big Picture.

Las Vegas had been committing a lot of mortal and cardinal sins for decades without a peep from Anybody Upstairs, except possibly the real overseeing deity of the city, the Eye in the Sky cameras posted over all the casino tables.

Paranoid, he turned and examined the room’s ceiling for surveillance equipment, despite knowing that any devices would be too sophisticated for him to detect.

What a racket, though. The thousands of men who had done what he was about to do were ripe for blackmail. He supposed that the major hotels had a stake in keeping petty crime off their premises. Better to get their cut on the gambling concessions far below the thousand-dollar suites and million-dollar penthouses than some cheesy blackmail.

Matt eyed the room again. It was half the size of his whole unit at the Circle Ritz, maybe six hundred square feet. A mirrored wall doubled the apparent size of the bedroom. The bed seemed even larger than king-size, and was a mound of piled pillows and bedlinens covered in large, regal designs.

The carpeting was plush, deep, and the color of stale blood.

Beyond the mirrored wall was a hall lined with a long, mirror-doored closet. A door opposite them led into the marble-floored bathroom, as big as his living room at home. A huge matching marble tub reminded Matt of a Roman sarcophagus. It took about fifteen steps to get from the tub to the freestanding marble sink. The toilet and bidet were on the other side of the sink. Of course every wall of the bathroom was mirrored, so you could see yourself coming and going. Literally.

Matt would mostly like to see himself going. Out the door into the wide, well-lit hallway that overlooked a glittering open atrium to the casino attractions far below, down in the stainless-steel-lined elevator car, through the raucous casinos, past the gaudy restaurants, walking a half mile to the exit doors to breath the overheated Las Vegas air and inhale the slightest, distant tang of desert creosote. Wilderness enow.

Omar Khayyám was considered quite the romantic poet, but even he couldn’t find a plain loaf of bread in this place to go with the expected and dreaded “thou.”

“Thou” was right! It had already cost Matt eight hundred dollars to get this far, and the second stage of the evening was going to run at least another thousand.

Corruption cost, and in Las Vegas, corruption cost big-time.

Matt allowed himself a glance in the closet door mirrors.

He’d better up his estimate of costs incurred for this unconventional outing of his. His clothes were new too, bought in the brightly lit shops lining every hotel’s obligatory shopping arcade.

Big winners were expected to blow large wads in these places and they were crammed with designer labels and luxury goods Matt had never heard of.

He suspected some of the high-priced items might not be in the best of taste, but nowadays it was hard to tell highway robbery from high-class prices, especially in Las Vegas.

So he wore a two-hundred-dollar pair of slacks in his favorite khaki color, although the clerk had described it as “lukewarm café au lait.” His shirt was a cotton-and-silk blend in stone color. His blazer was a wool-silk blend a bit darker than camel, which the clerk had called “escargot.” Had Matt not known this was the French word for the humble and edible snail, or slug, he would have thought it was a synonym for calf-shit brown.

Still, even he, who hated mere appearances, had to admit these clothes had an easy feel and drape that evoked the hushed sound of eurodollars falling to new lows on the Aubusson carpets of the international exchange.

The least a man who was expecting a thousand-dollar whore could do was dress up to the lady’s level.

He immediately censored the word “whore.” That was the old puritan streak putting unpleasant labels on everything, and everybody.

She was a professional woman of the highest order. Like a well-paid motivational speaker, say. He could identify with that. He got an obscene amount of money for speaking engagements now, being a celibate ex-priest working as a semifamous radio shrink. What was the difference between selling a mind and a body?

Matt paced back to the window, suddenly worried if the “thou” in his unwelcome equation was going to show up. The hundred-dollar bill he’d passed as discreetly as he could to the bellman might be taken as a generous tip, instead of an order for some “classy entertainment.”

Matt winced at the phrase. He’d been coached, of course, by an expert. Well, Carmen Molina never would or could walk in his shoes, but she ought to know the routine.

So what happened if he was just being ripped off by the bellman? The six-hundred-dollar room, his seven-hundred dollar “casual” outfit, the crisp bulk of fresh hundreds in his new eelskin wallet (she would see that, of course, as well as his new underwear), his desperate gamble that one sleazy act paid for through the nose would liberate him from his demon stalker, what if nothing happened? And he was waiting. For nothing?

Then he’d be relieved. As much as he needed to do what he had set in motion, he most devoutly hoped that something would go wrong and it would never happen.

Baby Doll’s Brand-new Bag

I am only halfway across the Circle Ritz parking lot when I am accosted, if one can be accosted by an albino tumbleweed.

“Oh-oh-oh-oh,” my attacker says, hyperventilating.

“It is about time,” I say. “I cannot be about my business until I know what you have to say.”

“Uh-uh-uh-uh.”

“Um, words would be nice.”

“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.”

I sit down and prepare to wait, sweeping my posterior member back and forth like a cranky metronome.

“I-I-I-I-I…

“Ran…

“All…

“The…

“Way.”

“Admirable devotion to duty. But you should have saved a couple breaths for your report.”

Frankly, I am impressed. But it never does to let underlings know when they have done well. Management by creative tension has always been the watchword of my breed. Keep ’em guessing, keep ’em on their toes, and keep ’em worrying about what I really think.

“So where did she go?” I finally ask.

“Ba-ba-ba-ba —”

“Bally’s?”

“Ba-ba-ba-ba —”

“The Ali Baba Room at the Alhambra?” Not exactly a strip club, unless you consider it a Las Vegas Strip club, but they do have belly dancers.

“Eee —”

E. Now what in Las Vegas begins with E, except E lvis?

“Duh-duh-duh.”

Duh is right!

“Catch your breath and show it who is boss. There, that is the ticket. Give the old brain case a good shake to free all the fleas in your ears. Now, from the top.”

“Bah-bee.”

“Bobby?”

“Duh-alls.”

“Bobby…Dulls.” Light strikes. “Baby Doll’s!”

My informant’s head nods like one of those idiotic toys with a spring for a neck and sawdust for brains.

What else can you expect from a mere dog but extreme panting and stupid facial tricks?

“Baby Doll’s,” I repeat, to make sure I heard the little bowhead correctly. Those cranial barrettes will cramp your cerebellum. “It is a strip club. That makes sense. And you ran all the way to and fro?” This is quite a hike for a three-pound floor-duster like a Maltese.

Nose E. nods his fuzzy little face from which the tongue has protruded like the tag on a zipper the whole time. “I could not…keep up.”

Some dogs love to chase cars, but this one’s legs are so short he should chase Hot Wheels. To be fair, tailing little dolls is not his bailiwick. The Nose Pose is his game and it has made him tops in his field of drug-and bomb-sniffing.

“Did my clever marking technique work?” I ask.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Midnight. The scent you, er, drizzled on the right rear tire was impossible to lose. Unbelievably rank. I have to say you cats have it all over dogs when it comes to the odiferous art. Although I soon lost sight of it — your Miss Temple drives like an Indy Five Hundred speed demon, I might say — I was able to track the Miata all the way to Baby Doll’s parking lot. That is not a very nice place, you know.”

“I know.”

“That was not a very nice thing to do to a human’s new car, either.”

“I know, but it was for her own good and, beside, humans have the nasal sensitivity of a stainless steel beak. So you left the Miata, and Miss Temple, at Baby Doll’s?”

“Yeth.”

Funny. I had never noticed that Nose E. lisped before. Why am I not surprised?

“Good work, half ounce. I will take it from here.”

He trails me, everything jiggling like a chorus girl’s…uh, pompoms: hair, head bow, tiny white whiskers that would look about right on a lab rat.

“Oh, Mr. Midnight. I hate to leave a job half-done. Let me go with you! I like to be in on the search and seizure.”

“Trouble is, the action is not going down at Baby Doll’s. I just wanted to make sure that my Miss Temple was safely out of harm’s way. So trot back to the Old Groove, or whatever it is called, used record store your human, Mr. Earl. E. Byrd, operates. You can rest easy in a job well done. Now it is time for your biggers to take over.”

“Oh! You are just like the Federales!”

“Huh? The only thing Mexican about me is any jumping beans I choose to carry.”

“The FBI and the NSA and all those Big-time Initial Guys. They always want me and Earl E. to bow out after I have identified the perp.”

“No doubt it is for your own safety. You are civilians, after all.”

“And you are not?”

“I am an…exception. Your reward will be hearing how well everything went now that I am on the case. See you later, Tater Tot.”

I take off at a lope I know the exhausted Nose E. cannot imitate. I have heard Miss Temple bemoan her short-legged stride often enough to realize where his true weakness lies. Industrial strength sniffer, but wimpy ankles.

I try not to gloat as I streak through the dark Las Vegas night, sure and powerful as my own stride.

For once I have both Miss Temple Barr and Miss Midnight Louise safely diverted to the side while the real action is going down elsewhere. Not only am I a knight errant protecting the weaker females of the species, but I am establishing my supreme territory as Crime-Solver Extraordinaire.

My small deposit on the tire of Miss Temple’s new car is only a drop in the bucket of my forthcoming triumph in the art of territory marking.

Now I am up against the big boys: Mr. Max Kinsella and, uh, Ms. C. R. Molina.

I am in my proper element: on the prowl alone and pulling everyone else’s strings.

How sweet it is!

Secret Showdown

He came through the door like an Old West gunfighter.

In fast and hard, so even the heavy metal door swung open and came to a dead stop for a few seconds.

He paused to survey the scene.

In a Western movie, every eye in the place would have been on him.

At Secrets, he went unnoticed.

The door’s weight reversed the opening momentum and swung slowly shut. By then he had melted into the mob scene.

Or not quite melted.

One eye in the house had noticed his entrance and still followed his black-clad form through the smoky haze.

Molina couldn’t believe her luck.

Kinsella here. Undisguised. Wearing his signature black, looking almost naked in a sleazy turtleneck (which probably meant it was ) and tailored slacks, looking a lot like a ninja as he circled the crowd and the stage, looking for someone.

Who?

Likely Temple Barr, but Molina would have spotted her even if she had been got up like a Munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. The notion was so pleasing that she smiled into her sob-sister margarita…it was criminal how weak they mixed these drinks in the strip clubs…not her jurisdiction, thank God.

But Max Kinsella was. Baa baa, black sheep, have you any bull? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.

Midnight Choirboy

I cruise by the Secrets parking lot, but not much seems to be happening.

Much as I would like to settle down at the edge of the parking lot and watch two ace trackers from different hunting parties stake out the same watering hole, I find that when I have a chance to sit still, I get antsy instead.

It has been just too long since I last heard head or tail of Miss Midnight Louise.

I know for a fact that my Miss Temple is safely deployed at the one place the dude in question is not likely to show, Baby Doll’s.

I do not know anything about the disposition of Miss Midnight Louise other than that she is not at the Crystal Phoenix, or the Circle Ritz, or here or anywhere she should be breaking a nail to get to with a report, at least.

While I sit there chewing my nails I find my noggin cogitating. I am not sanguine about finding Miss Louise in that cavernous place, and I do not like contemplating the many unseen, if not unsniffed, signs of major muscle of a feline nature about the place.

It is quiet here, except for intermittent slices of unholy midnight howls that emanate from Secrets every time the single wide front door opens and shuts to let merrymakers in or out.

I am a bit perturbed that all is normal here. I am even more disturbed to see a stripper leave the premises for the night escorted by a dude with major workout issues. Apparently Secrets has installed a killer security system: see the ladies to and from their cars. With everyone but me carrying cell phones these days, it makes sense.

I had better swing by Baby Doll’s on the way to Los Muertos, just in case. It is only a mile or two out of my way.

Oh, my aching pads! When they slapped the tag “gumshoe” on Pls, they must have meant we pound so much pavement pursuing leads that our shuffling feet get so weary they end up sticking to the street.

I am not sorry to leave the dimly heard hell-raising chorus within behind as I plod through the black-and-neon checkerboard of a Las Vegas night, wishing I had at least one of my two little dolls in my sights.

No Dice

Max circled the room like a wolf marking his territory. Secrets was doing business as usual, crowded with pleasure-seekers lost in their own vice of choice: booze, babes, or maybe just mind-shattering sound.

The crowd was large and self-absorbed. Even the strippers seemed oddly isolated as they writhed onstage to the music they had chosen. Stripping had always struck Max as a solitary vice on both sides of the spotlights.

He hadn’t bothered to disguise himself, not even with attitude. Still, his striking appearance barely registered on Secrets’s many employees and clients. Everything was expected, including boredom. Damn it, if Temple had tracked a killer here, he wanted the bastard to be aware of him, his presence. His threat.

Even Temple didn’t seem to be here.

Max sighed. He’d have to check the stripper dressing rooms to make sure she wasn’t backstage. That would draw out whatever testosterone troops guarded this place. At Secrets they would be fairly discreet.

Rafi Nadir’s stint here must have been an aberration. This place’s pretensions to business class over coach wouldn’t support obvious muscle like him.

Besides, Nadir had never worked here after the night Max had taken Cher away from him in the parking lot. Max had checked. He could have decamped out of shame at being outsmarted and outmuscled by someone as apparently easy as Max.

Max wasn’t about to bet on shame being a big part of Rafi Nadir’s psychological makeup. Aggression, yes.

Max scanned the entire scene like a panoramic camera, identifying the cast of dozens: the familiar bare figures of girls onstage or lap dancing at the tables, the lapdog circle of guys transfixed like risen mummies before the footlights. Instead of craving revivifying tanna leaves these zombies were shedding leaves of green bills into the teeny-weeny bikini bottoms of various strippers. Down the snatch.

There was even the hard-boiled dame at the bar…a retired stripper, or maybe a club photographer. No camera, so she was some other hanger-on in the whole elegantly sleazy scene.

The illusion he required: the instant perception by one and all that he belonged here, that he could go where he wanted with no one objecting.

Max scanned the room again, 360 degrees, and found his course of action.

He walked through the tables, past the obscenely boogying couples, behind the dazed wannabe studs playing hang-dog at the stage lip.

Ducked into the glass-enclosed sound booth at the side of the stage.

“Hey, DJ!” he addressed the slack-jawed youth at the console. “Bitchin’ job, man.” He flashed a hundred-dollar bill, dropped it onto the feedback dial. “I could use a sharp sound-meister like you at my new club down the Strip, X-treme Dreams. Meanwhile, play ‘Misty’ for me, huh? Double speed.” Max winked. “I gotta see a babe about a takeover bid.”

Max was out of the noise-free zone and back on pulse-pounding time. He strode toward the door leading backstage as if he owned the place. His presence in the sound booth would have registered on the edge of everyone’s eyes. Once he visibly left a zone normally not intruded on, he could climb every mountain, plow through any door.

Through the door. He held it shut with his body, listened, felt the pounding bass vibrate the wood, his metabolism.

After an unchallenged minute, he moved down the dark hall and through a heavy velvet curtain that shivered to the heavy metal music.

Another door.

Here he knocked.

And waited. Like a gentleman.

This was where the women’s world began. Brass knuckles might get you through the hard-knock barriers of sheer muscle. Golden rings would get you through the silken curtains of sheer willpower.

“Yeah?” A distracted feminine voice. Well, mostly feminine.

“Sorry. I need to speak to someone. Can anyone step out?”

He had unconsciously lapsed into an English expression. It called to the women inside like a vodka martini to James Bond.

“Yeah?”

The woman opened the dressing room door a crack only as wide as the seam on a nylon stocking from a ’40s film noir. She was tall, rangy, tough. A trans?

“Name’s Maximilian. I’m opening a new high-end place, X-treme Dreams, in a couple of months. Looking for talent.”

“You’ve got nerve, coming here.” She eyed him up and down.

He nodded. “X-treme Dreams will be a nervy club. I’m looking for ladies who don’t hold back.”

Hoots and whistles erupted behind the gatekeeper.

“Because then I don’t have to hold back on the perks.”

More whistles.

“You got a little redhead in there? Visitor?”

“You looking for ET, Maximilian?”

“Only if it stands for ‘Extreme Tensions’. I am looking for that little redhead, though, even if she’s passing as a blond. I have an emergency message from her mother, Molina.”

He had to hope that if Temple was inside, she would hear and get his message.

“We don’t have any little women in here,” door-babe said. “If your needs are that specialized —”

“X-treme Dreams will encompass every fantasy, every female. But I want the full range. So if a little redhead happens to show, tell her to see Maximilian out front.”

Max passed another hundred through the crack in the door that was neither too large or too small, but just right for the bill to be snapped up by a long pair of fingernails.

He ambled out through the hallway, pausing in the door from the dressing room, in no hurry to join the crowd nodding and swaying to the music and the bumps and grinds.

The lone woman at the bar looked about ready to slide off her barstool. She was obviously straight. Straight women found strip clubs boring. So did mature men, not that there were any on the premises.

Max expertly resized up the crowd. No Temple out here, in any guise. No Rafi Nadir.

So think outside the box, as they used to say in the thriving dot-com industry. Maybe the guy Temple was trailing was not Rafi Nadir.

Epiphany.

Maybe Rafi Nadir was not the killer.

But the killer had to be here. Temple had been advised to be here by a source she apparently knew. Why wasn’t she?

Max checked his watch, which he wore face-out on the inside of his wrist so he could consult it surreptitiously.

Almost half past one.

Something was wrong.

A flash went off in the darkened club.

For a moment Max took it for gunfire, not a camera.

But the only sound was the rat-a-tat of the bass strafing the club through the sound system. Music that made the place sound like a war zone.

Maybe it was: ground zero in the eternal war between the sexes.

The darkness, the sound, the thronging customers, the late hour, it all reminded him of the thick, cloying fellowship of an Irish pub the moment before a terrorist bomb went off.

Max felt the room reel. No, he was reeling.

His fear for Temple, his unease that she wasn’t here, concluded that she had already left home before that warning phone call had come, that she might be on a collision course with his cousin Sean, who was only a ghost at this point and could hardly collide with anyone solid. In this weird retro-moment he realized that everything — his life, his love, his future — was out of his control…

He crashed through the sound and the milling vacuous faces, heading for the door. The whole place was going to blow. Somewhere. He had to be there. If not here, where? Lindy. The name rang a distant bell. Temple had used it, long ago. Weeks? No. Months? Yes. What he would do outside, he didn’t know.

Hear himself think, maybe.

See a path leading to Temple.

Realize who the killer was. Temple thought she knew, surely he could reason it out as well as she. Or could he? Did he care too much, as usual? He had to get out, away. Had to find Temple.

If she wasn’t at Secrets, and the killer wasn’t, they were both somewhere too awful to imagine.

Somewhere he didn’t know about, where Sean stood at the bar, waiting with a mixed drink of regret and excitement to hear about Max’s assignation with pretty Kathleen, the Irish revolutionary colleen.

No matter who won the girl or the game or the day, the loser would shrug and grin and say “Next time.” That’s how it was sometimes with boys, with men, with brothers.

Only, with Sean, there was no next time.

Max threw his shoulder into the heavy external door as if breaking into somewhere instead of out of his own head.

The night should have felt cool, crisp. Like in Londonderry, like in Minneapolis, like in Wisconsin…like where he grew up and could never go home to again.

This air was still, warm, heavy.

Still Las Vegas.

Max lunged for where he thought he might have left his car, almost drunk on panic and guilt and memories.

“Wait,” the voice ordered. “Hold it right there.”

It spoke with bullets for quotation marks.

Final Jeopardy

Matt had given up and thrown himself on the heavily brocaded comforter to watch CNN when someone knocked at the door. Lightly.

He jumped up, trying to punch the mute or power button and instead sending the huge television screen into paroxysms of alien images, ending with an apparent pay service for tripleX-rated movies.

Oh my God. This was not what he wanted to see.

He managed to fumble the buttons until the hotel service screen, innocuous, came up, and went to the door.

Maybe the bellman hoping for another sucker tip.

He unlocked the chain and the dead bolt and opened the door.

He’d been expecting the leather-strapped female who’d dominated the screen for a few frantic moments.

She was…well, she was not that.

“You rang?” she said.

“Actually, you knocked.”

“But you rang first.” Her smile was slow and perfect. “I’m Vassar.” She eased over the threshold and Matt was closing (closing!) the door behind her like a good host before he knew it.

“Better lock it again,” she said over her shoulder. Her mostly bare shoulder. “This is Las Vegas. Besides, we don’t want to be interrupted by anything but room service.”

She walked to the window like a big cat prowling its territory.

He took in her clothing: gauzy designer something, both expensive and vaguely provocative, though he couldn’t say why he knew it was either.

She was tall. Not quite tall enough to be a model. Instinctively, Matt realized that women as short as Temple (five foot aught) did not end up as high-class call girls. No doubt something she would bewail as another inequity of la vida squata.

And this woman was blond, a creamy, caramel blond that must have come from the fairy-godmother fingers at a very expensive salon because it was too shiny and silky and unnaturally natural a color with its fine highlights to be anything but solid gold in the bleaching department.

He applauded his foresight in dressing well for the job.

“Sunset on the Strip,” she murmured.

He came over, surprised. The sun was indeed sweltering in the west like melted butter. Everybody below threw long shadows and there were a lot fewer of them now.

“Where’d they all go?” He answered his own question. “Moving indoors to gamble with dice and cards instead of ultraviolet rays.”

“Speaking of which” — she cast him a sidelong glance — “do you want to troll the casinos? Eat dinner?”

“Uh, no. I mean, we can eat dinner, but…here.”

“Oh.” She eyed him disconcertingly.

He couldn’t imagine what she was thinking. All he had in mind was avoiding public places. That would eliminate the slim chance that Kitty O’Connor had somehow followed him here and would spot him, even though he’d spent three hours getting here to ensure no one followed him.

“I ordered champagne, if that’s all right.” He gestured to the footed wine cooler, designed like a temple brazier.

“Oh.” She ankled over to the bottle.

This was the first woman Matt had ever seen “ankle.” She moved as fluidly as a fashion model, all the action in her hips, shoulders and ankles. It was a strut, a stuck-up strut, but as much a strut as any stripper’s more obvious locomotion.

Vassar, huh?

The waiter had opened the champagne, thank God, although on second thought Matt decided to keep God out of this.

The flutes were etched in frosted designs, like lace embedded in ice. Matt poured carefully, anxious not to agitate the expensive wine, anxious not to regard his guest too closely.

Her fingernails were long, longer than Temple’s, and flashed a subtle metallic sheen.

“Some men,” she said after an appreciative sip that indicated his hotel bill would rise by two or three hundred dollars, “think a woman brings them luck at the gaming tables. You’d be amazed how much of my time I spend on my feet, bringing luck.”

Of course he looked at those bare, long-toed feet, and at the thin-soled, impossibly high-heeled thin-strapped shoes that decorated them. Temple would have wanted a thorough description the way Molina wanted a postmortem. Think about the shoes, not Molina and postmortems. They were pale, iridescent snakeskin constructed like a futuristic airport. He’d better leave Temple out of this as well as God. Both of them would be equally wroth with him on this one.

“Tough job,” Matt said.

She smiled at him. Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.

“You want dinner?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Another delaying tactic. It would be better to get to know her first. Wouldn’t it?

She ambled over to the burlwood desk to skim the heavily padded room service menu, like she knew just where it was. She knew just where it was. She’d been at the Goliath many times, maybe in this very room many times.

He was beginning to feel yucky about this as well as guilty, but remembered that Molina had assured him that she would be “clean.”

“What do you feel like having?”

“I don’t know. You pick. Surprise me.”

She raised a pale eyebrow. “A gambler, after all,” then lifted the phone receiver and ordered very specific dinners without glancing at the menu again.

What a pro. She’d been here, done that many times before. And that was exactly what he needed. Wasn’t it?

After Vassar hung up the phone, she swaggered over to the seating area near the window and arranged herself in one of the upholstered chairs. Her legs crossed higher on the thigh than he would have thought anatomically possible, revealing that her dress’s fluttering skirt was split up the side as far as the mind of man could go.

A shame to waste such a show on a fraud. For the first time, he wondered if he could do what he had to do. He didn’t see her as a person, a woman, but as an exotic variety of show horse, all artificial arched neck and instep, all exaggerated gait and overdressed mane and tail, all unreal.

She leaned back, lifted her elbows and supported her neck with her interlaced fingers.

Matt was able to observe from this new posture that her armpits were preternaturally bare of hair. No doubt permanently removed.

None of this was a turn-on, and he knew he had such a button, because it had been triggered a time or two.

“You’re very unusual,” she said.

“The feeling is mutual.”

She laughed, the first genuine reaction he’d seen. “I’m not unusual…. What name do you go by?”

He hesitated long enough for her to continue, “John would do, but it’s a bit predictable.”

“Thomas,” he said quickly, voicing his doubt.

“Thomas. That’s better. It may not be your real name, but it’s obviously significant to you.”

“How do you know that?”

“People are never good at making up totally unrelated things about themselves. There’s always a clue. A psychological tic. Thomas. Thomas Crowne Affair, maybe. Thomassss…Wolfe? Thomasss…Mann. Thomasss — what?”

“Merton,” he said without thinking.

“Ummm. I knew it would be an author. I didn’t know it would be such a good author.”

“You know about Thomas Merton?”

“Know? I’ve read him. Along with Proust and Genet and a lot of very depressed Frenchmen and women.”

“Your name — women in your field often take geographic names.”

“So. You have experience with women in my field.”

“No! No, I don’t. I’ve just observed.”

“I went to Vassar, yes. Graduated. Observed.” She slid onto her tailbone, revealing an impossibility: yet more leg.

My God, the woman was a stork! He sipped more champagne. Obviously, he needed to be tipsy. He noticed her glass was empty and got up to refill it.

Outside the sky was the color of a Maxfield Parrish print, that heavenly, morning-glory blue that is fading fast to green and will soon flash a fringe of yellow before dousing itself in the utter dark of night.

“I’m glad to see you enjoying something,” she said, heavy emphasis on the something.

“Nature’s hard to beat.”

“And you don’t think I’m very natural.”

“I never said —”

“‘Natural’ is not an advantage in my line of work. Or in this town. I love both of them. What’s the matter with being unreal? Is reality that great a trip?”

“Reality, usually no. People, though. Authenticity is —”

“Gawd, if I hear that pretentious word again! Au-then-ti-ci-ty. Only phonies flaunt au-then-ti-ci-ty.”

“Call it honesty, then.”

“Fine. How about you give me some.”

“What kind do you want?”

“There are varieties, like…dry honesty? Sec, or triple sec? What’s your pleasure? Or maybe it’s wet honesty, like a wet dream.”

Someone knocked at the door. Fortuitously.

Matt jumped up to answer it. A waitress wheeled in a large cart draped in white linen (a young cowboy draped in white linen) on which floated silver Merimacs and Monitors of covered dishes. A huge exotic flower blossomed from a vase like a tropical fungus. There were tiny sterling salt and pepper shakers, glittering glasses, another bottle of wine.

“By the window,” Matt said, unwilling to let the sunset go and leave him alone with the electric lights. He reached into the slick eelskin wallet to peel off another hundred.

“Thank you, sir!”

Something in the tone was ironic, forcing Matt to overcome his shame of witnesses to really look at her. She was a clone of Barbara Eden as the sit-com genie, all bare midriff and glittery lavender veils and long blonde ponytail. She was petite enough to remind him of Temple, although much curvier, an observation that felt disloyal, as if this whole situation wasn’t a betrayal enough.

She rolled the hundred tight into cigarette-size and deposited it in the valley of her push-up bodice. Above the veil that covered her lower face, her eyes glittered like the dappled water in the darkened pools below, blue-green.

She winked and left, a real “working woman” who’d hit the jackpot of a big tip in a high-dollar suite. And all she had to do was flash a little flesh, push a cart, and do her job.

Now her, she was interesting. A mystery. Who did she really work for? What kid was going to get a special outing out of that hundred? What significant other would she wave it at as proof of a job well done? What small luxury would sit on her crowded bathroom shelf in what ordinary house or apartment…

“Hey, Big Spender,” said the woman lounging in the chair.

Matt remembered the rest of that line: spend a little time on me.

Matt edged the food cart between them. Vassar was forced to sit up to examine her dinner.

“Oh, this side’s yours. Mine’s the sea bass.”

“Shall we spin the table or change seats?” he asked.

“Spin the table. Do we get a kiss when it’s done?”

“Dinner first. It looks superb.”

“The dinner he compliments,” she said to the window with a shrug.

She was slightly tipsy, and he was all too sober.

“You’re…superb, too.”

“Too.” She washed away her moue with a sip of champagne and a pointed look at the distant wine cooler.

He rose and filled her glass again.

Outside the night had turned midnight blue.

Was he guilty of rejecting a hooker? Another pretext for anguished self-examination.

“No, really.” He sat opposite her, examined her beautiful face, all bones and makeup. Her eyes…what color were her eyes? He couldn’t tell.

He lifted his champagne glass. “You are beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated. The race of men must bless your existence.”

“They reward it, that’s for sure.” But she seemed mollified.

Matt decided that the condemned man deserved a hearty last meal. He concentrated on the cutting of his tender pepper steak in brandy-whatever sauce. It melted in his mouth like Lady Godiva chocolates.

Everything was superb. The best garlic mashed potatoes he had ever eaten. Even the vegetables were tasty, crisp, worth gobbling down to the last sprig or floret. The champagne bottle was empty, so he had to open the wine and switch to the squatter glasses.

He drank, she drank. The food disappeared and so did the any visible trace of the world outside.

“Most men,” she said over dessert, a tiramisù, “would envy you.”

“From what I know of most women, and that’s not a lot, they’d be wild with jealousy to see how much you can eat and still look like you do.”

“That’s one of the reasons I decided on this profession. It occurred to me I had certain advantages for it. Some are metabolic. Wealthy men usually like to eat well. I can keep up with them in that respect as well. Men are bored by women who peck at food like chickadees, whining all the while.”

“You don’t whine.”

“Apparently I don’t impress you either.”

“You do! I can’t say how much you impress me.”

“But.”

“But…I’m a special case.”

“I’d figured that out. Most men — in other words, my usual clients — fall into two or three, categories.”

Matt drank a bit more of the red wine. It was amazing. He glanced at the label, resolved to memorize it so he could find it again, although he might not be able to afford it again, not after tonight.

His watch said a quarter to ten. He didn’t have to go to work. It was Monday. The most beautiful woman in the Goliath Hotel was sitting across from him, and if he could get it together, by tomorrow morning when he checked out he’d be a Real Man. A sinner. A human being. A ruined priest. Ex-priest, rather. And no longer Kitty-bait.

All he had to do was what came unnaturally.

“Your usual clients?” he prompted politely, as if he were counseling someone on the radio help line.

“They’re powerful men. Rich men. They have insecurities along with many securities of the financial sort. They crave the best of everything to prove their worth, in both senses of the word. I’m one of the bests they can afford. Then there are the other men. They have issues. They can’t afford me, but they will. Now I have to add the dot-com geeks who’ve never felt desired in their lives. I’m something they can’t afford not to have. I’ll make them feel like the billion dollars they made overnight.”

“So sometimes you’re a reward, sometimes you’re an extravagance. And sometimes you’re a therapist.”

“Oh, you are a quick study, Thomas. Doubting Thomas.”

He ought to have gone on red alert at that, but the meal and the wine had made him mellow.

“The problem is,” she continued, “you don’t fit into my client profile.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a combination of all three. You have some money, but not enough to keep this sort of thing up. You have issues, but you hide them like a pro, like me. You’re not a geek, but you need to be babied along like one. You don’t want a trophy, loathe trophies; you’re not desperate to lead the high life, la vida loca dinero; and you don’t want a therapist. So what do you want? Or should I say, need?”

“Hmm. Cards on the table.”

“This is Las Vegas.”

She leaned forward, elbows on the immaculate linen, like a saloon girl in a cheap Western.

“You’re pretty accurate,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t forced to be. You’re not my trophy, or my reward, or my Cracker Jack prize for accidentally being somebody. You’re my…savior.”

Her eyes narrowed. He still couldn’t see their color, but it didn’t matter anymore.

“Savior? I’ve never been called that before.”

“You’ve never had a client like me. I’m an ex-priest.”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“But you must know that priests make promises of chastity, to live as celibates.”

“Catholic priests.”

“You sound like you were raised Episcopal.”

“As a matter of fact…but that’s history.”

“Childhood religion is never history.”

“You are a priest!”

“Ex-priest.”

“But not ex-celibate.”

“Right.”

“So some friendly neighborhood Catholic spinster wouldn’t be ecstatic to help you out?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s an…impediment.”

“Oh. You’re impotent.”

“How the heck would I know?”

“Don’t be testy, we’re getting somewhere here.”

“If I am impotent it’s situational. I’m trapped.”

“How? You’re an ex. You can do whatever you want.”

“Leaving the priesthood isn’t like leaving a religion. You don’t throw over all the traces. You’re still obligated to be a moral person.”

“‘A moral person.’ Listen to yourself. Get real.”

“So I’m a geek. Apparently there are a lot of them out there nowadays, cyber and otherwise.”

“Okay. So you need someone to break you in to normal life. I’ve been hired for that before. You’re not my first virgin.”

“Maybe not, but I’m your first reluctant virgin.”

“Why? I’ll give you a night to remember. I am very good at what I do.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Thomas.”

“And I do believe you’re a product of Vassar. And I do understand you’re an attractive lady.”

“But. You’d prefer another lady.”

“Maybe I would, but I can’t.”

“Because you’re impotent.”

“Because I don’t know, and I don’t much care. I’ve got a psycho in my life, my work. A woman who likes to corrupt priests.”

“Even ex-priests?”

“Even ex-priests. There aren’t too many innocent men out there anymore.”

“Tell me about it. Women, either.”

“So…she’ll hurt any woman I have anything to do with. Anything, anyone! My landlady who’s sixty-something. A preteen daughter of a friend.”

“Unless —”

He nodded.

“So you need to sleep with me first.”

Silence.

“But you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to be coerced into sleeping with anyone.”

“I get you. I was there once. Yeah, I was a virgin. Everybody was. Almost everybody gets over it, one way or another.” She poured some more wine in her glass, her face softening under the makeup. “There was a guy I dated, my freshman year in college. Big, gorgeous guy, football player. Said I was a prick tease one night. Maybe I was, maybe I was just a virgin. I wasn’t after that night.”

Her eyes of no color were black holes.

“Date rape?”

“Didn’t have the phrase all over the newspapers then. I believed that I’d got what I deserved. It’s true. I wanted a boyfriend, but I didn’t want to sleep with him. Not yet. I didn’t know what it was about. I wasn’t ready.” She smiled over her glass rim. “That’s why I’m so good at my job. I can tell the guys who aren’t ready from the ones who’ve always been ready.

“I’m sorry, Thomas, but you’re not ready.”

“I’ve got to be. This woman is dangerous. I’ve got to disarm her. I’ve got to take away the thing in me that she covets.”

“You can sleep with me but you won’t lose your innocence.”

“You think so? She doesn’t really care about innocence, just the fact of it. Did I mention she was insane? Someone told me to try this. There’s no way she could suspect that you were in my life, no way she could hurt you. You’re the only safe woman in Las Vegas for me.”

“Now you’ve gone and made me feel my work is a duty. I’ve gotta save you from a date rape. I don’t know, Thomas. I work better when the goals are more crass. Orgasm, power, money. Sure, I can handle the insecure. But you’re not insecure, just…inexperienced. And you don’t want to do it. That’s kind of insulting. It doesn’t exactly turn me on, and I work better when I’m turned on.”

“You actually…enjoy your work?”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re in control?”

“How can I be in control? I’m bought and paid for.”

“Oh, come on. You’re leading the willing sheep by the fleece.”

“We call it short hairs in the business.”

Matt shook his head. Apparently sexual transactions allowed for no dignity. “You’ve got to admit I’m an interesting client.”

“Unique.”

“So, now that you know my problem, can you do anything about it?”

“It takes two. You’ve got to be willing and able to hold up your end of the bargain. I’m a very sexy lady, but if you really don’t want to get into it, I can’t make you. How have you managed to remain celibate anyway?”

“I’ve been looking for the right woman.”

“How right does she have to be?”

“Not involved with anyone else.”

“And you found one who was.”

He shrugged. He didn’t have to tell her about Temple.

“So there is one woman somewhere you’d have no trouble sleeping with.”

He nodded. “If we were married.”

“Married?”

“Married. But…I realize that’s a high qualification. I believe that I could slip off the straight and narrow if I weren’t careful.”

“Okay. You have a libido.”

He nodded, cautiously.

“Then I can help you.”

“I don’t seem to be cooperating tonight.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“No, and it’s because you sensed that my heart isn’t in this. You’re not used to dealing with reluctant clients. I don’t blame you for feeling insulted. I would be in your shoes.”

“If you were in my shoes, honey, you wouldn’t be here.”

She’d expertly slipped into a vaudeville drag-queen twang that he couldn’t help smiling at, even as she waggled a foot in the outlandish high heels.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, “to be such an atypical client. I was looking at you as a means, instead of a person.”

“That’s the way I’m generally looked at.”

“How do you stand it?”

“I’m a very desirable, high-paid means. Look at what you’ve spent on me already.”

“True.”

“Let me show you I’m worth it.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“I still get my money, right?”

“Right…”

At that instant Matt realized that he had invested too much, in every respect, in this evening to chicken out. Or maybe the wine he had drunk realized it.

Vassar had become a person for him in the last few minutes. She was funny, she had a history, she was willing to take him on. And she was a paid professional. At least one of them would know what she was doing.

Max: Gloves Off

“Police shootings of unarmed men these days,” Max said as he raised his empty hands, “even white guys, get more bad press these days than they’re worth. Suspension. Internal investigation.”

“Like you’re not armed.” Molina’s tone was scoffing.

“I’m not. Ever. Once in a blue moon maybe, but when have you last seen a blue moon over Las Vegas?”

“What about police woundings?”

He was silent.

“I’m saying you’re wanted for questioning and by God this time you’re going to come downtown and sit in an interrogation room and call a lawyer or sweat bullets or whatever you want to do, but you are coming in.”

Max finally turned, very slowly, to face her, just as a car’s departing headlights pinned him in a moving spotlight glare like a man caught fleeing across a prison yard. “It really messes up an investigation to have a police lieutenant playing undercover agent.”

“You’re a pro?”

“Maybe.”

“Wouldn’t doubt it. It messes up your plans, you mean.”

“Are you pursuing a case, or protecting your ass?”

“My integrity is none of your business.”

“And mine is yours?”

“You don’t have any.”

“What if…what if, Lieutenant, in this case I had more integrity than you?”

She laughed. “Is that how you snooker Temple Barr? Pretending to some mysterious higher moral ground? I am not Little Miss Mischief. This is a nine-millimeter Glock, buddy. It, and I, mean business. And if I have to punch a hole in your kneecap to keep you here, I will. Try doing your usual vanishing act with a knee brace, Mr. Moto.”

“Mr. Moto wasn’t a magician,” Max said, as if they were having an idle conversation that required minor corrections.

He had already examined the parking lot for unexpected quick exits and found himself caught disgustingly out in the open. Could it be that Molina had planned her approach that well?

Meanwhile, the sense that Temple was in danger was ticking like a maddened metronome in the back of his head, where migraine headaches start.

Of course, the more he worried, the less he dared show it, feel it. If he lost this game of cat-and-mouse here, he wouldn’t be free to rush to Temple’s rescue anywhere.

“This isn’t the end of the world, Kinsella.” Molina neared, the weapon still raised. “All I want to do is talk.”

“You want me to talk.”

“Well, talking usually is a two-way street.”

She was using the cajoling tone of interrogation-room cops the world over, a condescending parental teasing: you want to be a good boy, don’t you?

No.

He lowered his arms, a little.

“I think Temple’s in danger. I’m not going to hang around discussing whether you’re going to destroy your career by shooting me or not, in the knee or not. I’ll give you a rain check. Let me go to Temple, and I’ll come in to see you in twenty-four hours.”

“I do not make appointments with scum. I do not bargain with human vanishing cream. Now.”

“No.”

He moved closer to a row of parked cars.

Her feet scraped asphalt as she skittered faster than a whipsnake to block his movement.

The gun was leveled at his chest.

Was it going to be a game of shoot-me, shoot-me-not?

Yes, because Max was not going to be stopped. Even now Temple might be…Sean.

He moved again.

And stopped at an unexpected sound.

Molina had slammed the Glock down on the hood of the parked Ford-150 behind her.

Max couldn’t help wincing for the paint job.

“You can say no. I can say no.” She stepped toward him, in front of him, blocking his way, protecting her piece, daring him to go for it.

He lifted his arms from his sides. “You finally believe me about something, that I’m not armed.”

“Oh, you’re armed, and dangerous. I know that. I’m just saying you’ll have to go through me to get out of here.”

Max glanced to the pant-legs that covered her ankles. “And your side piece.”

She nodded. “I’m not going to drop my guard to bend down to take that off. Maybe you can grab it when I kick your head off.”

“That’s the most interesting proposition I’ve had all night, and that’s saying something after one too many hours in a strip club or two or three.”

“So you admit to patronizing the clubs.”

“I admit to doing what you’re doing here: investigating the clubs.”

“Who made you junior G-man?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I would love to be surprised about you, Kinsella. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. Now. Into my car and down to headquarters. Or not?”

She came closer, sideways stance.

It was to be, as the British say, fisticuffs.

That put him off balance. He had to play this out here, in its own time, or he could never get away to go to Temple.

For a nightmarish moment Molina morphed into Kathleen O’Connor, and he was back to the night when a stupid adolescent dalliance became his salvation and his cousin’s Sean’s death warrant.

But Molina was not the porcelain, poisonous Kitty. Her deadliness was direct: she wanted to wage war, not love, or at least not love as a variety of war.

There was no option. Max would have to fight her. And win.

Given Molina’s size, profession, training, and fierce personal stake, he couldn’t consider winning as the usual given.

Max, the semiretired, had once been expert in half a dozen martial arts, but he was two years rusty by now. Molina, he would bet, hadn’t worked out much recently either.

Still, she had the confidence, and the anger, to challenge him. It went against all the rules of police work. It was deeply personal.

Interesting. The only woman he’d had for a mortal enemy up to now would never confront him physically.

Max began calculating, not how to pass Molina to reach the gun but how to draw her into a weaker position. He didn’t feel an ounce of chivalry about the coming struggle. Her slamming the Glock down had released him from all that. If she wouldn’t hide behind the gun she certainly wouldn’t hide behind her gender. She wouldn’t hold back either.

Neither would he.

It was tentative at first, like a knife fight. They danced around, determining each other’s reach, reflexes, speed, strategy.

Eerily, the first inward rush to engagement was simultaneous.

The moves came fast and frantic then.

They grappled silently, all their limbs twisting to find a hold that would last, but each move resulted in an effective countermove.

Breaths became pants and then grunts, but neither resorted to martial arts cries, though both had done the drill. At nearly six feet, Molina was solid and surprisingly strong. Max was a steel eel, tensile and limber. Their fighting styles were as violently different as their personalities and made them serious opponents. Molina’s determination to subdue a suspect she had hunted for months, come hell or high water, met the skilled desperation of Max’s need to end this contest and rush to Temple’s aid.

It ended in Max’s pinning Molina against the van wall, enforcing a temporary truce as they caught their breath, boxers clenched in each other’s arms like dizzy waltzers before breaking away to pound each other to oatmeal.

“We’re well matched, Lieutenant,” Max admitted between discreet pants.

Not good news. He couldn’t count on getting this over quickly and moving on to Temple.

“It’s not over,” she gritted between her teeth.

“No.”

He wasn’t really holding her. His hands had flattened against the metal beside her shoulders, one knee was braced between her legs. Technically, she was pinned, but he could see her mind reviewing a half dozen things she might try for the one right move, when he surprised her by speaking again.

“Don’t spoil the moment. This has been incredibly erotic.”

She broke their eye contact by whipping her head to the side, cheek to the smooth metal. “You’ll try anything,” she said, contemptuous.

“Yes.” He knew he sounded amused, but he meant to startle and irritate her at one and the same time.

She whipped her head to the opposite side. “Get out of my face.”

“That’s not what you really want.”

That brought her eyes forward, blazing. “Right. Next you’ll say that what I really need is a good screw.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated! No. This is simple. Me cop, you crook.”

They both knew the truce was temporary, that either one could lash back into attack, and that both would be ready for it.

“Sure it’s simple. A simple matter of control, Lieutenant. Or overcontrol. It goes with your job. You’re on the job, all the time. You’re in charge, all the time. After a while, there’s no way not to be in control, in charge, on the job. Except this.”

“I can be out of this any second I want to.”

“But do you really want to?”

The Third Man

Temple nursed her decidedly flat club soda and the sample-perfume-vial-size drop of scotch that went with it.

Your midlevel strip club barware was so tacky: narrow glasses clogged with ice like a backed-up sink. No lowball glasses, no delicate-footed cocktail glasses. Just thick cheap giveaway glass, cloudy ice, squinky drink.

Not that she wanted anything alcoholic. The noise, i.e., music to strip by, had already given her a headache.

So she sat on her barstool, her feet hooked around the top rung, the gaudy selection of monokinis covering her lap, and kept an eye out for her most likely suspect.

It wasn’t a brilliant piece of deduction, but talking to Lindy had spurred some ideas.

For one thing, both Cher Smith and the girl whose attack had been interrupted, Gayla, were both new to the Las Vegas strip scene. It could be a coincidence, but Temple thought the killer might be oneof those asocial guys who are only bold when they’re over-the-top aggressive: no nerve, or all nerve. Someone who explodes. She’d seen so many wimpy guys here, mooning at the strippers like besotted computer nerds in front of a porno-site screen…. What if the worm turned? Maybe he picked new girls because they were fresh enough to still be stupid. Maybe they hesitated and talked to him, just to be nice to someone who seemed to need it. Maybe they needed to feel glamorous and desired. Two people meeting with so much to overcome, their separate expectations igniting instant disappointment of the other’s fantasy, and then…violence.

Temple sucked her ice cubes again. There was so little drink in the glass it stayed puddled on the bottom.

That was her theory that saved the neck of everybody she knew. And wrote a satisfying “The End” to the episode that had begun with Cher Smith’s dead body being found in this very club’s parking lot.

Or, if she wanted to depress herself, there was the Terrible Troika to consider: Max, Rafi Nadir, and Lieutenant C. R. Molina converging seconds apart over the fallen form of Gayla in another strip club parking lot more recently.

Had one of the two men attacked Gayla? The victim couldn’t say who had barreled into her in the dark. Temple thought she could eliminate Molina as the perpetrator. That left Max and Rafi. She knew she could eliminate Max, so that left Rafi.

Unless…a third man had been there just before these two natural enemies.

So who was the third man?

Temple had an idea, and she was looking for him tonight.

The migraine music stopped.

Temple glanced at the stage.

Temporarily vacant.

In the glassed-in sound booth, she saw a man standing and talking to the kid who ran the sound board. Not the man she was looking for.

Who do you overlook at a strip club?

The man who is looking at you, but from behind a mask.

She was looking for the man in the mask.

The music started up again, so suddenly it nearly snapped her head back. The strips of tissue she had stuffed into her ears barely muted it.

She figured if the guy was a regular, and he probably was, he’d come back to Baby Doll’s. To allay suspicion if nothing else. Or just to relive his big moment.

Temple had read the true crime books, some of them anyway. She knew the profiles, yucky as they were.

She knew something else as she scanned the constantly moving crowd of customers: that head of dark, slightly wavy thick hair.

Darn! Rafi Nadir was here too. Of all the gin joints…

She spun back to the face the bar, hunkered down. When she’d told him this was her next thong gig, he was a suspect worth watching. Who’da thought that Lindy would later tip her off that a new hot suspect would be here tonight?

Unlike Nadir, this was somone too nondescript to describe, although she’d glimpsed him once, more than once when she reviewed all her forays into the clubs.

He was like a mailman, someone made invisible by his function.

Tonight she wanted to spot him, and then really see him.

And she didn’t need Raf Nadir playing Big Man to her Little Girl to get in the way.

An off-duty stripper (were they ever off duty?) who was cruising the house paused to twine her arms around his neck.

He must like that, being greeted like a Big Spender. The male ego could be a slippery slope to being taken, and then expected to take it back in spades.

Oh, the music! It was worse than forty alley cats caterwauling. Temple liked high-octane rock, the best stuff, but this was jacked up so that the bass became a punishment.

She glanced in annoyance at the gangly kid in the glass booth, his head bobbing on his scrawny neck (which she’d like to wring), staring sightlessly at the stage where a girl slithered out of her second skin (courtesy of Tess the Thong Girl, as they’d started calling her already). Temple was struck by how fast and easy it was to establish yourself in a subculture like this. Well, easy for her as long as she wasn’t masquerading as Suzy Stripper.

It would be that easy for the killer too.

And then she spotted him. Suspect Numero Uno.

That nervous little middle-aged man in the yellow polyester shirt and the polyester-linen sport coat. Hair receding about as much as his belly advanced. A bit officious as he lined the offstage girls up, telling them what to do and clearly liking it.

And that mask he carried everywhere, his ticket to entry into this scene, the reason nobody ever really saw him clearly, because every time they looked right at him, really looked at him, they were thinking of themselves and never saw him, couldn’t see him, not through the monocle of glass that made them small in his eyes and him eternally nonexistent in theirs.

Temple nodded to the bartender.

“Another S and S?” he asked.

If she had either scotch or soda in her glass, she couldn’t testify to it in court. “Yeah. And…that guy.”

“Lady, there are sixty guys in here.”

“Him. The photographer. Do you know who he is? I mean, who is he shooting the photos for?”

“His bedroom wall.” The guy left to run some tapwater and sheltie pee over the ice cubes in Temple’s glass.

He plunked the glass beside the ten-dollar bill she’d glued to the water spots on the bar.

“Guys can just come in here and do that?”

“They make copies, give ’em to all the girls. What a racket.”

“Well…” Temple said, jiggling her thong ring.

“Yeah, but you’re selling a product. You don’t get off on it unless you’re a dyke. These losers, they just gotta be around the girls but they don’t want to pay for it. They gotta think they’re special.”

And a guy who thought he was special might ask for special treatment, and if he was refused…

“How long has he been doing this?”

“Since I been here?”

“And —?”

“Longer than you’ve been coming around. Why you want to know?”

“I’m new. Just curious.”

“Just curious don’t pay in this game. Forget it. He’s nobody.”

Nobody just might get tired of that condition.

Temple checked out Nadir through a concealing strand of blond Dynel wig.

The same stripper was still with him. His arm circled her waist. They were talking, smiling, flirting.

Revolting! She’d be glad to wash this scene right out of her hair, her fake hair. She glanced at the officious photographer again.

Well, it was an intriguing idea, but there wasn’t much she could dowith it except pass it along to Molina, who would sneer at her amateur theories.

Still, she had come up with an alternative to Max, at least, and they could check on this guy’s movements, his history. Who knows what would show up?

She kissed the ice cubes a less-than-fond farewell and slid off the stool. Her rear was numb.

“Sold out?” the bartender asked.

She nodded, feeling guilty about the two-hundred-something of stripper-earned money in the tiny wallet-purse she’d learned to carry in the clubs on a shoulder strap she wore across her chest like a bandolier.

They worked hard for the money. Temple hated to take any of it under false pretenses, for vulgar accessories to a lifestyle that still made her cringe.

She could hardly wait to walk out of here — if only Rafi Nadir wouldn’t notice her! No, he and that stripper were still hanging on each other.

She had to push with all her might to open the big front door.

The night air wasn’t really cooler, but it felt cleaner, rinsed of all that smoke that made her ears and nose and throat clog up like ice in a pipestem glass.

She walked across the lot to where she had hidden the Miata between two huge custom vans. That was the problem with a new high-profile car. It was a liability for sleazy undercover work.

She missed the snappy click of her high heels on the asphalt, a percussion that had always lifted her spirits since she’d been allowed her first pair at fourteen, and that made her feel taller. But sneakers were smarter to wear and her ears still rang from the relentless music inside, like an infection she couldn’t shake.

The parking lot had a wooden fence stretched between brick posts to present a more seemly view to the street. Facade was all in Las Vegas.

Temple realized she had mixed emotions: she hoped she’d found a suspect who would take the heat off Max. She was so sick of the strip club scene.

She glanced at the fence, lit by the security light.

A cat sat on it. A silhouette in the night. Big cat.

Its mouth opened wide to showcase white shark’s teeth in a mouth raw and red against its backlit form.

Maybe it was a black cat.

Temple spotted the Miata’s sassy and sleek rear end, looking black, not red, in the vans’ shadow, and moved toward it, her door key between her first and second knuckle.

And then she realized what was wrong.

The cat had howled.

And she hadn’t heard it.

She was temporarily deaf from the music inside and…she hadn’t taken out the wads of tissue in her ears.

She was temporarily deaf.

A body slammed into her from behind.

Slammed her up against the van.

“You don’t want to leave.” The voice was right at her deaf ear, penetrated the soundlessness like a scraping file.

“I’m not a stripper,” she said. Not me. I don’t fit the profile.

If only she could reach up and rip out the tissues, but his body had crushed her against the lukewarm metal, arms pinned at her sides, the ring of costumes cutting into her ribs and hip.

“You’re pretty,” it said. A hand snagged in the rough fibers of her wig. She could feel the bobby pins that held it on slipping. “Come home with me.”

He was pushing her along the van. She felt the side door give behind her, slide open, even heard the sharp crack as it began to move.

His van. She had become a crime of opportunity.

Once inside…

Temple squirmed, resisted, tried to scrabble along the moving door so something solid remained behind her, so she wasn’t pushed, sucked into that bottomless imprisoning dark within.

The struggle must have knocked some tissue out of her ears. She heard like one cured: an unholy yowling, a whining like the horrible shrieking sound played behind the shower murder scene in Psycho.

Oh, Lord, she was in the shower murder scene in Psycho!

The guy’s elbows and hands and knees were jamming into her, hurting her, but she kept scrambling. She didn’t know anything about him: how tall, how old, how heavy. He was just an impinging part of the dark.

If she went down, she would never know….

She felt herself slipping, sinking into the off-key shrieking sound, her wrist desperately twisting to turn the big metal ring on her wrist.

He had gotten tangled in the jungle of elastic straps, an arm, Temple thought.

In that instant, her fingers found the small cannister danging from a keychain amid the garish fabrics. Max’s so unromantic gift.

She twisted it, twisted her hand half off its joint, and pushed on plastic.

A mist hissed up between them like an invisible serpent’s head, as searing and blinding as a sandstorm in her eyes, her nose, her throat.

Force fell away, but Temple tumbled writhing and gagging to the asphalt. After the hard struggle along the metal van side, it felt as cushioning as a warm gingerbread cookie.

Tears blinded her. Her ears, though, were finally clear of tissue. The horrible shrieking, screaming, howling sound never stopped.

Molina: Face-off

Before Molina could answer, he swung her away from the wall.

She was surprised by his strength, quite amazing, almost equal to an angel-dust addict’s. The move lifted her off her feet for a second.

She had never experienced in adult life that pit-of-the-stomach carnival-ride thrill she felt now, not in martial arts class and not even in sex, not since she had grown into a tall woman and made herself strong and independent, and ultimately celibate. He only had thirty pounds on her, but he was all muscle and bone, as flexible as a rattlesnake tail.

Now he was pressing her so tightly between the van and himself that she could hardly breathe. She had never allowed herself to speculate about any man’s sexuality, not for years, not since she’d become a career woman in a man’s world. He was right about one thing: she was all business, all working mother, all bureaucrat and civic servant. And hunter.

He released her, drawing his left hand down her arm to her hand. His right hand tilted her face to the side. Then his mouth touched her neck over the carotid artery. Every move was music, slow and controlled and perfectly pitched. Not a kiss, a slow-burning brand.

She was back in a crowded high school hallway, a gangly, thick teenager watching the petite bowhead girls as they ransacked their lockers between classes. Giggling and brushing back the careful curls from their necks to show off small lurid bruises. Hickeys. The tattoos of a quarter century ago. Badges of sexual initiation. She knew now that these marks demonstrated the boys’ passion and possession more than the girls’. Good Hispanic girls were too repressed to feel passion, but they were good at pretending to it. And they welcomed visible signs of possession, of their own dangerous desirability. Hickeys were the one pimple an adolescent girl could be proud of.

She had never had one.

A departing headlight raked across their figures like a spotlight. She used the distraction to push him away. “Vampire,” she accused.

“Vlad the Impaler,” he answered.

How could he find sex so amusing, she wondered, especially this explosive kind that defied all previous behavior, all roles, all reason? Maybe he found her amusing.

“You just want to screw me.” The accusation, the situation demanded an ugly word for it.

“Right. I just want to screw you.” He said the words emphatically, separately, with an undertone of surprise.

Somehow the surprise made the vulgarism sexy, not dirty, as he looked at her mouth, then her eyes. “But I won’t. Not until you just want to screw me as much.” He had perfectly imitated her tone but his words were an invitation, and hers hadn’t been.

She caught her breath. Words were just another weapon to her, but they didn’t work for her like this, not in emotional clinches. Only on the street, where they were ugly and effective.

“Don’t try your bedroom games on me,” she said contemptuously again, softly. She meant the contempt for the games, not the bedroom, but she had to wonder if one hadn’t rubbed off on the other for her long ago.

“Bedroom games,” he agreed. “We’re well matched, Lieutenant,” he repeated. “Shall we call it a draw for now?”

The “shall” reminded her of his Continental adventures. Her law enforcement instincts had always told her he could have been, could be, involved in something serious. Something big-time. International. Now she knew it.

She scuttled away along the metal wall, more repelled by herself than by him. He would try anything; she didn’t have to.

“You’re a criminal.”

“Sometimes. To some.”

She shook her head, didn’t look at him. “Get out of here.” Said as shortly as she would dismiss a snitch.

He left, as she said, as he had always wanted to.

And in that momentary turning away, she leaped, kicked a foot out from under him, followed up with a hard knee to the small of the back as he went down, had his right thumb in a painful lock as she forced his arm into an ugly angle behind his back, used her free left hand to slam his head into the asphalt and stun him long enough to grab the handcuffs out of her Excaliber fanny pack, snap the left wrist in, jerk it hard over to…finally…meet the pinned right wrist and…presto.

One magician, hogtied on the rocks.

Molina sat back, both winded and revved. Practice makes perfect, and God knew she had done her share of takedowns in L.A., but that had been years ago.

This one felt better than all of them put together.

For a moment she gloried in being a successful street cop: quarry run down, pinned down, about to go downtown.

She caught her breath and rose, bending to grab his elbow and force him to his feet. She kept his arm in custody while she retrieved the Glock from the truck hood.

“Not leaving your license number?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, just hustled him along to her car, trying not to grin in triumph.

Moments later she realized that not once during the whole confrontation — not once — did she ever consider going for her ankle gun.

Not bedroom games, she said to herself, breathless but satisfied. Just old-fashioned, street-smart police work.

Hallelujah Chorus

As I gaze upon my Miss Temple sprawled on the asphalt, coughing and spitting like a half-drowned red tabby, I feel a strong surge of pardonable pride.

Thank Bastet that I decided to pause at Baby Doll’s en route to my rescue mission for Midnight Louise!

It looked dicey for a minute or two, when I feared Miss Temple would not heed my clarion call for some reason. Luckily, I had arranged for backup.

Although I have not worked with this gang long enough to unleash them on a perpetrator in an orderly disorderly fashion, they certainly were in fine voice and alerted Miss Temple just in time to upset her attacker.

Our continued caterwauling attracted more help of a human nature, but rather than stick around to answer for such a scruffy band of companions, I decide to press on to the next crisis.

“So that is your live-in,” a hoarse voice growls in my ear. “Not much for size or looks. And I think she’s deaf. Have you had her tested by the vet? I presume a privileged fellow like you has a vet.”

“You are not seeing my Miss Temple at her best angle, Ma. Upright. And she has heard me perfectly well on previous occasions. Must be that awful howling music pouring out of Baby Doll’s. We better split before someone mistakes us for street musicians and starts hurling projectiles at us.”

At that I jump down from the fence and back into the mean streets, all in the hopes of ending the discussion. My dear mama, I discover, has enough wind to trot alongside me and still belabor my plans, my significant other, and sundry other details about my person and life.

I begin to wonder if this raid on Los Muertos will be worth it.

I Once Was Deaf but Now I See

Temple pushed down on the heels of her hands.

She couldn’t see, but at least she didn’t hear that horrible shrieking anymore. She had a queasy suspicion that she had contributed to it at the end there.

No one was touching her either.

She pulled herself up against the van and tried to open her eyes.

Blinking, burning. She forced her eyes ajar an eyelash-width again, catching her breath.

Then two hands grabbed her arms above the elbows.

She inhaled to screech, solo, when someone shook her slightly.

“Hey. Tess. It’s okay.”

The voice sounded familiar.

She forced her eyes wider despite the searing saltwater they drowned in.

Rafi Nadir. She was wrong! He was here and he had always been the one.

She pulled away, screamed, kicked, punched, spun her ring, grasping for the pepper spray canister again.

“Hey! Simmer down, Tess. It’s okay! I decked him pretty good. He’s out until someone wants him talkative.”

Him?

Temple gasped, stopped flapping like a fish out of water. (She would never eat fish again.)

She tried to focus on the dark asphalt at her feet, between the two vans.

A long figure lay stretched out facedown.

While she stared, Rafi Nadir whipped out a cell phone and dialed 911. “Mugging suspect down at Baby Doll’s strip club parking lot, Paradise and Flamingo. We need a squad car fast.”

He kept the phone to his ear and frowned at Temple’s gaping expression. “If it hadn’t of been for those nutsy alley cats serenading the strip club from the fence, I never would have noticed you fighting this creep in the shadows here. Don’t you know better than to park your car between two behemoths like this? Put yourself in the dark, a perfect target for a mugger, or worse.”

“I — I think it’s ‘worse’. I think that’s the stripper killer.”

Temple did not explain that she’d parked in the dark on purpose to hide her car. An undercover operative does not give away trade stupidities…er, secrets. Especially not at Secrets. Was she still a little punchy?

“Good thing you had that pepper spray.” Nadir paused to answer a question on the open line. “North side of the lot. Yeah.” He shook his head at Temple. “I don’t know what to do with you, Tess. If this guy is the stripper killer, and I kinda think it might not be that bad, you just walked right into his hands. Haven’t you got anybody to look out for you?”

“Alley cats?” Temple suggested, shrugging. The tears were stopping and so were the shakes. “Who is it?”

“We’ll let the police handle that, little lady.”

“No. I really, really want to know. Now.”

Rafi Nadir stared at her. She knew she looked worse than a drowned, red-eyed rat. She knew he thought she was stupid and reckless, which she had been, but only because she was smart and tough, in secret. And she knew he thought women needed to be bossed around for their own good. But. She really needed to see who this guy was.

And he saw that she had earned that right.

So he bent down to roll the guy over. Tall, lanky, all in black. Not as tall as Max, but close enough to stop a heart, hers, for a minute. Black Levis, black work shirt. Not Max. Not the photographer.

“Oh, my God!” She pointed as if Nadir couldn’t see for himself. “It’s that sound machine kid. The club DJ. He gets around from place to place too, like a stripper, doesn’t he? Don’t the DJs do that?”

“Yeah —” Nadir was looking down at his victim with more respect. “But he’s just a kid.”

“A kid in a candy store. I bet these guys get the idea they own these women they work around.”

Nadir started to say something, looked at Temple, then shut his mouth.

“Listen,” he said. “I’d better not hang around.” Sirens were wailing like alley cats in the distance. He looked over his shoulder. People who had been peering out the club’s open door now were starting to trickle onto the asphalt. “They’ll help you keep him down if he gets antsy. Just use your spray. And try not to let it blow back in your face.”

Temple regarded the shadowy figure on the ground. Her fingers found the spray can among the spandex.

“Smart idea.” Nadir’s hand rested on her shoulder for a sexless, bracing second. “You take full credit for this one, kid. You didn’t see me.”

And then he left.

Temple slumped against the van.

Wow.

She aimed her pepper spray at the ground near the young man’s head.

She was wrong. Her hand still shook.

She was thinking about what would happen to Max if she had been left dead like Cher Smith in a strip club parking lot.

Siren Song

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“You’ll have all the time in the world to prove it.”

Her voice was level, strong, intense. But Molina was worried.

He had been the hardest takedown in her career, and she was half-afraid that he had let her win in the end, not because he was a gentleman but because it suited him.

So now she had Max Kinsella, handcuffed, to put in her personal car, which was equipped with nothing but a police radio.

She sure didn’t want him behind her, so the passenger seat was the only option and it wasn’t a good one.

“Get in,” she said, as if she just loved the idea of putting him there.

She shoved him into the seat, pushing down on his head to force him inside.

His height was still too much for the Toyota’s roof line, and he banged his skull.

Good, maybe it’d daze him a little. It was a twenty-minute ride to headquarters and she didn’t want to distract herself calling in or doing anything but keeping him in custody until he was safely locked up somewhere even an magician couldn’t abracadabra his sleazy way out of.

Kinsella sat hunched forward in the seat, partly because of his height, partly because with his hands manacled behind his back he couldn’t lean back. Tough.

“Temple’s life could be on your head,” he said. Sounded strangled, like he really cared. And getting…cozy with her if it would help get him free. What a creep!

“Can it.”

She snapped on her seatbelt, started the car, put it into gear, checked that he was still bound and pulled out of the Secrets parking lot.

“You don’t know that Temple isn’t in danger,” he said, “and you really don’t have anything solid on me.”

“I’m sure I can work up a probable cause that would curl a judge’s hair. You have been caught on too many dirty scenes too many times.”

“Not caught. Not until now.”

“Why do I think that you think you’re not really caught?”

He shrugged, stared ahead, intently watching the street as if he were behind the wheel, not she.

Just fifteen more minutes and she’d be rid of him.

The radio squawked. She wanted to turn up the squelch dial, but couldn’t risk leaning down into the well of the car. Perfect opportunity to sandbag her.

After a buzz of competing calls, she heard the words, “Baby Doll’s.”

Kinsella thrashed a little against his bonds. Solid-steel suspicion, that’s what she had on him. It would have to be enough.

She had to lean forward to pick up the mike. Had to. Kept her eyes on him as if she was a staple gun and he was wallpaper.

More voices chimed in, sputtering through the static. Action.

She waited for a break and got on. “Molina. What’s going on at Baby Doll’s?”

“Perp down. Victim’s okay. She’s saying it’s the stripper killer.”

Molina hit the brakes so hard her passenger’s forehead tapped the windshield.

She made sure he wasn’t using the distraction to attack her, but he was listening as hard as she was.

“Victim is okay?”

“Yeah. She pepper-sprayed the guy” — Kinsella jerked, and she glared him to stillness — “to kingdom come. He’s out cold yet.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“Some DJ kid for the clubs. Tyler something.”

Molina gave up and pulled the car over to the curb, putting on the emergency blinkers. Tyler. Who’da thunk it? She had a horrifying suspicion who might have.

“And the intended victim? You got a name yet?”

“Tess, from what some people around here said.”

Tess?

“But it turns out it’s really Temple.”

Of course. The awful inevitability of it was almost blinding.

“Yeah,” the radio squawked. “That’s a first name. Temple Barr. Tiny little thing, but she put this guy down flat.”

The radio went silent.

“I think I’ll be going now,” Kinsella said quietly.

She looked over. The handcuffs dangled from one wrist, then the empty one was snapped on her right wrist, the left one jumped from his wrist to snap shut on the steering wheel.

It all happened faster than the blink of an eye, especially an eye controlled by a mind that was busy absorbing vast new vistas on a series of old problems.

“You bastard.” Her tonelessness made the word even uglier. “I ultimately would have had to let you go anyway. This time.”

He opened the door, jumped out, leaned his head back in a sliver of open door.

“I know you would have had to.” Kinsella rubbed his forehead, grinned. “But ultimately it’s more fun this way. You do still have the key somewhere on you, don’t you, Lieutenant?”

He slammed the door shut and vanished…only because she couldn’t move much to see where he had gone.

While she struggled to dig the key one-handed out of her rear paddle holster, fighting the damned seatbelt all the way, the radio buzzed with the happy crosstalk of high adventure and the taunting muted shriek of sirens speeding to the crime scene.

Kinsella had been honest about one thing: a woman in danger.

At least Temple Barr was just dandy, and neither she nor Kinsella would have her damage or death on their conscience.

That would be something in common with Max Kinsella that Carmen Molina absolutely could not bear.

Serial Chills

“I did not raise you,” my mother says, “to leave a lady lying in the street, even if she is human.”

“Look, Ma, you did not raise me, period. It was six weeks and ‘You are on your own, kit.’ Besides, I know my Miss Temple and she is fine, especially after we sang to high heaven to attract attention to her plight. I do not know that Miss Midnight Louise is fine.”

“Usually something ‘stinks’ to high heaven,” Ma says.

“Well, we were not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but it got the job done.”

We are trotting along at the head of a feline brigade, if a brigade can be as motley a crew as this is.

Only my mother’s stern matriarchal influence on the cat colony has permitted this rare outing en masse, so I am best off if I do not irritate the old dear too much.

“So this Midnight Louise is your kit, Grasshopper,” she says.

“We have not had a DNA test,” I grumble, “so I am not about to claim relationship. She was known as Caviar until some humans got the funny idea she looked like me and renamed her Midnight Louise. You know how it is, humans think all us black cats look alike.”

“Hmph. Caviar is a pretty fancy name for a nobody. I do not have any grandkits, that I know of.”

“Thank your lucky whiskers! Young kits today have no respect.”

“They did not in your day either,” says she with a sidelong glance. “This will be good for the colony,” she adds. “To leave the safety of their turf, to venture into the Dead Place. They were getting too complacent with the Fixers leaving them food.”

I can see that my mama is a leader of cats.

“The days of free-range cats are ending,” I say. “It is too dangerous out here and there are plenty of humans to be educated into giving us posh retirement homes off the street.”

“And you would be content to sit inside twenty-four/seven and watch the world through a window?”

“Sure.” Again I get the green sideways stare. “If I were retired. But I am a professional. There are not many PIs of my persuasion — although sometimes I think there is one too many trying to muscle into my territory — but for the average cat, which is everybody else but me, the domestic life is the best bet. Even dear old Dad has left the seafaring life for a sweet berth with some old guys who run a restaurant on Lake Mead. Heck, they even named it after him. What more could you want?”

“So Three O’Clock is nothing but a house cat. I am glad he left me for that calico floozy from the pawn shop.”

I am not about to touch parental history, particularly when it is mine, so I keep trotting and keep it shut.

The pale stucco walls of Los Muertos gleam in the moonlit distance like the white cliffs of Dover. I expect bluebirds any moment, though I have never seen such a mythical beast.

I could use a few helpful Disneyesque birds. They could scout the upper stories and peek in windows and then coming peeping back about what is going on to me.

When we get to the gate I turn to address the mob.

“Okay. Listen up. There are Rottweilers in there and they have a hair-trigger temper…mostly triggered by our kind of hair. We want to get in, and then up on whatever we can climb.

“Also, you will find that a couple of major players also occupy the grounds. They are our kind of folks, but they are not used to seeing us types close up and personal. They might mistake us for an appetizer in the heat of the moment. I know these dudes, but they do not know you. So keep your distance if you want to retain your whiskers and any other vital bodily parts.”

“These are the Big Cats?” asks poor Gimpy, who has managed to keep up with our march despite his desperately disabled leg. “We will see Big Cats?”

“Yes, but do not let them see you first. I need to explain our mission to them. I am hoping that they will keep the Rottweilers…entertained while we approach the house.”

“We will see Rottweilers?” Gimpy asks like a kit who thinks dragons are cool.

“The important thing is that they do not see us, kit,” I tell him. I cast a significant glance at Snow Off-white, who ankles to my side with a minor hiss.

None of this gang is eager to bow to my leadership, but since I know the way, and the Big Cats, they have to.

“Keep an eye on Gimpy when we get in,” I growl sotto voce to her.

“I am not a kit-sitter! You keep an eye on him.”

“You ferals need to look out for each other. Cooperate, or kiss your whiskers good-bye. When we get Midnight Louise out of that house of horrors, I will have the Big Cats tell you a little story about what intraspecies cooperation can do.”

“They are not so big.”

“You have not seen them yet.” I cuff her lightly to get her on the right track and turn back to Ma Barker.

“You want to take on the Rottweilers, Ma?”

“You bet.”

“Remember. Lead them to the arrangement of rocks and fountains in the middle of the grounds.”

“They should have park privileges? I would like to lead them off a cliff.”

“There is not much here in the way of cliffs, but if you get them to that place, they will wish they had a cliff to jump off of.”

“And the colony?”

“I would like to deploy them at high points around the house and grounds.”

“And you?”

“I will go in, solo. I am counting on backup when Louise and I escape that place.”

“You expect pursuit.”

“Yup.”

“Worse than Rottweilers?”

“Worse than dogs.”

“Hmmm. You are sure that you do not want me to lead the Rottweilers out into major traffic?”

“I do not want them hurt. They are only ignorant indentured servants of a corrupt administration. I just want them out of the way.”

“Mercy to dogs? You have been off the streets too long, Grasshopper.”

But I think that the old dame will do as I say, instead of as she wishes.

In ten minutes I am past the snoozing snakes, up Sleeping Beauty’s hedge of thorns, and doing the Twist to make Chubby Checker plaid with envy as I slither my way down the aluminum vent pipe.

I hit bottom…and a unexpected impediment.

The way is blocked!

I do not like the feel of this. It is something solid like…wood.

Yuck! It is the head of the dead dummy guy.

Well, I am not Woody Woodpecker so I am momentarily stymied.

Then I tumble. (I am after all, on the ghostly site of a once-proud dryer.)

Aluminum is no different from what they make some food containers out of, and I was busting into garbage cans and aluminum foil and food containers since I was a punk kit.

I manage to get my business end — my powerful hind legs — into position and began rabbiting away at the edges of aluminum surrounding the wooden noggin in my path.

I cannot say that it does not require time, energy, and rhythmic persistence, but in a bit I have managed to kick out a flange of aluminum, a most malleable metal, all around the blockhead.

Then it is merely a matter of drop-kicking the old oaken noggin to Kingdome come. Let us play a little ghostly touch football, Elvis!

The head pops out of my way like a ripe melon meeting a sledgehammer.

I am back in the closet.

But not for long.

The fact that the entry hole has been plugged leads me to believe that Miss Midnight Louise has been forced to admit her route of entry.

This gives me a chill. I do not like to think what it would take to force Miss Midnight Louise to do anything.

On the other hand, her presence here, if discovered, could have led to a search party.

I sniff the closet perimeter, detecting again the odd, musky, decidedly alien feline odor I sensed elsewhere in the house.

Just what does Miss Hyacinth use for henchmen these days?

The thought gives me another chill.

There is a lot about this place that gives me serial chills.

Then again, it could be the air conditioning.

Well, there is nothing like brisk activity to get the blood moving.

I try the door.

It is now locked, of course.

They are beginning to get me mad.

I sniff the perimeter again, hoping this joint is old enough to have an established mouse and rat population. Great chewers, they are.

However, I turn out to be depressingly alone in my incarceration. And I do so like it when the rodent population has done the preliminary excavating for a job.

I do discover, behind some musty satin and velvet capes, a heating register.

This is as good as a twenty-four-karat golden gate.

In no time flat, I have managed to dislodge two loose screws and have the grate askew in its frame. One last loose screw and it is hanging by one corner.

I gyrate through and find myself once again in the upper hallway, deserted by all except the ghosts from Omen movies.

This time I do not waste any (time, that is) exploring the ambiance.

I move, fleet and sure, through the cavernous rooms, past the guardian suits of armor, unabashedly sniffing like the lowest dog.

This time I do not turn and head toward the upper regions when I reach the crossroads to the kitchen but continue on the trail of roast beef, the occasional enterprising rodent, the strange feline scents, and a vague whiff of canna lily that can only betoken my darling…cohort.

As I suspected before, the kitchen is a large, old-fashioned affair with a door leading to a…butler’s pantry. And a door leading to…the outside garden. And a door leading to…a dining room the size and solemnity of a private medieval chapel. And a door leading to the…cellar.

Oh, joy.

Last time I went up and found magicians, Big Cats, and Hyacinth.

I will now descend and hopefully find…Midnight Louise.

Of course I must first open the door.

Breaking into a mansion has its drawbacks. Give me a one-room apartment any day.

There is a mitt-wide space under the door.

I stick my mitt into the dark.

When it is not cut off, I use it to nudge and wiggle the door. Sometimes these old doors are as loose as change.

In a couple minutes I hear a welcome click. A loose metal tongue has just given up the ghost.

Or, in this place, a ghost may have just given me entry.

You never know.

I edge through, pull the door shut behind me, thrilled to hear no click of true closure, and descend a flight of stone stairs in the pitch dark.

I am not sure why dark is considered pitch. It does not sing. It does not normally tilt, like stair risers. Anyway, pitch dark is considered blacker than my best formal coat, and so this pathway is.

I move down for so long that I feel the cool dank air rising to meet me.

So does the scent of the alien weasels I scented in the closet, and the faintest sniff of calla lily.

I recall that the lily is the chosen human symbol of death.

Poor Louise. Snatched in her prime, preprime, really, and interred here in this forgotten cellar, with only weasels for pall-bearers. If they bothered to bury her.

I am smitten by remorse. Or is that smited? Smoted?

Anyway, I realize with a pang that had I not been distracted by human concerns and my Miss Temple’s safety, I would have been here sooner and perhaps could have prevented this tragedy.

While the feral folk wait without, I tunnel deeper within, afraid that our quest will have only one certain and sad ending. Ma Barker will not meet her only maybe grandkit. I will be partnerless again. Hmmm. The Crystal Phoenix will once again need a new house detective. Chef Song will lose a toadie!

I am nearly choking with loss (and dust) when I touch the cold stone of bottom.

I tiptoe around the rough-hewn stones. The scents have boiled down into an unappetizing stew.

Death leers from unseen corners.

I stumble over a sudden depression in the floor, wrestle with a metal tray until it is dislodged, fall a rib-bruising distance, and find the stingers of a dozen scorpions puncturing my poor hide.

I am done for! Dropped like Indiana Jones into a pit of vipers and vermin, with no way out.

“Get off me, you big oxymoron!”

Only one person — pardon me, individual — would berate me so subtly.

“Louise! You are alive!”

“Not by much, after you landed on me. How did you manage to remove the grating?”

“What grating?”

“As I thought. Dumb luck. Quick, I can climb to the top on you and then…well, I do not know if I can pull you out, so I will go to deal with the muscle upstairs and come back for you later.”

“Wait a minute. I can climb out on you, and then pull you out.”

“You would crush me, Popsicle. It is better I crush you.”

“Maybe we can both make it out,” I suggest, hurling upward until my front shivs catch on a stone rim.

Oooh! That stings.

So do Midnight Louise’s shivs as she ratchets up my spine to the cellar floor in a twinkle, just like old St. Nick up the chimney. Nick is right! Ow.

“You are not going to leave your old man just hanging here by his nails?”

Something comes hurtling down.

“There is a board. I will scout the stair to make sure your lumbering down here did not awaken all the dogs of war in the house.”

Dogs? I thought they were outside.

I manage to scramble up the board, failing to avoid every rusty nail in the dark. If I do not die of tetanus it will be a miracle.

I run and limp my way back up the stairs, running into a furry wall at the top.

“You were a prisoner?” I whisper.

“It suited me to let them think so.”

Un-huh. Likely story. “Who are ‘they’?”

“Your lady friend Hyacinth and her cronies.”

“She is not…a lady. Or a friend. Besides, our main goal is to leave here safely.”

“My main goal is to eat Siamese tonight.”

“Louise, there is more going on than your petty attempts at revenge. I have a whole cat colony waiting outside to back us up, not to mention the Big Cats.”

Louise is unmoved. I can feel that by the punishing twitch of her unconvinced tail.

“And your grandmother is waiting to meet you.”

“My granddam?”

The family tree will get them every time.

“That is right. I, uh, ran across her again tonight during my investigation.”

“You mean you ran and she found you. So where did you dig up the ferals?”

“Your grandmama is their head honcho.”

“No kitting!”

“I swear.”

“Well, I guess I could wait to make mincemeat of Hyacinth until another day. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and there is nothing colder than dead.”

“I will hear about your adventures later. Meanwhile, I have restored our old route into the place, which someone had carefully closed.”

“Then let us blow this Bastille.”

Bastille? For a moment I think Midnight Louise is referring to the dread Bastet, but the moment passes. One does not wish to invoke Bastet, even inadvertently, unless one wishes to deal with the goddess of cats since the days of ancient Egypt. My tip is: one does not want to deal with Bastet. Ever.