Cat in an Indigo Mood

Chapter 31

Dancing in the Dark

Carmen crossed the nearly empty parking lot to her car, the long dry-cleaning bag whispering at her side.

The time was only midnight, but the Blue Dahlia parking lot looked as desolate as it had the last time she had been here. Just a few nights ago.

This time her car was parked under a twin-headed streetlight that resembled the alien ships'

creepy periscope heads from War of the Worlds. The vehicle's passenger side faced her blankly.

She was almost there when a figure rose from the driver's side, stretching suddenly and endlessly upward like Dracula assuming human form after moonlighting as a bat.

"Don't drop your dry-cleaning while going for the artillery, Lieutenant. It's only me," said Max Kinsella.

"I would never make the mistake of underestimating you. What brings you lurking around ?"

"You seem to want your snitches to report in parking lots. This one was handy."

She hesitated before going around to the driver's side. "You could have called-"

"I don't let myself be recorded without getting paid for it."

"Don't be so paranoid. You know as well as l do that I don't have anything concrete on you."

"But there's always hope, isn't there?"

She ignored him, shaking the key ring in her right hand until the correct one jingled into the light. The steel door-key glittered bluish. He stepped hack as she bent to unlock the car door, and plucked the hanger from her other hand.

She straightened as if he'd jammed a gun in her back, offended.

"Can't let your work clothes sweep the ground," he explained.

She eyed his raised arm and the vintage velvet gown's train shivering in its transparent polyurethane slip an inch off the dark asphalt. "Now l see why Temple Barr puts up with you; You make an excellent coat-tree."

"I have my uses." he admitted.

"Exactly my hope." She unlocked the door, collected the hanger, and swooped the gown inside to hang from the hook behind the driver's seat. Then she shut the door, folded her arms and leaned against it. "So. 'What have you got?"

"He wasn't hard to track. Downward spirals never are."

"Left a smoking trail, huh?"

Kinsella nodded. The streetlight's indigo shadows made his face into an eerie mask, skeletal and gaunt. She supposed her own features looked like the walking dead in the deep-blue glare.

Perhaps co-conspirators required dramatic lighting. But Kinsella looked more worried than he ought to.

His folded arms aped her own protective, slightly hostile posture. "The first six months after his dismissal, he wrote aggrieved letters to the police union, the newspapers, the ACLU, and a variety of fringe rightist rags, which seemed the most inclined to listen to him."

"He honestly Felt he had been railroaded?"

"Apparently."

"And you?"

He sighed. "They wanted him out, no doubt about it. He was minor trouble. Abrasive might describe it best."

"Cops need to be tough."

"This one had a chip on his shoulder that he always ached to knock off onto somebody else's shoulder."

"What about his personal life?"

"After his dismissal, he hung out with strippers."

She nodded. "They're pushovers for users. Speaking of which, any sign of drug or alcohol abuse?"

"Drinking. He was too controlled to fool with drugs. With alcohol, he knew what he was putting into himself; with drugs, it's what the cartel lets you have."

"So he was still. . . cautious. Self-protective."

"I didn't find any trace of a wife. He was an angry loner before the incident that got him dismissed. He was an angry haunter of topless bats afterwards, but that doesn't mean anything.

Loners always patronize the topless joints; these weren't businessmen's upscale fantasy clubs."

"I'm sure not," she mused.

"Okay. Your turn."

"What do you mean?"

"Your turn to tell me a few things."

"About what?"

"This case."

"This case? Why?"

"Because what I found out about Nadir would mean more if I knew what he was suspected of doing." He straightened to scan the deserted parking lot. "Where was your car parked that night?"

"What night?"

"I know you discovered a body here. I know when. I don't know where on the lot."

Her turn to sigh. She unfolded an arm to point to the oleander bushes fringing the lot's far boundary.

"You were parked there?"

"Yes." Her eyes asked a question he could read under the glaring light.

"Your driver's door panel has been repainted. There's overspray on the front wheel well.

Obviously, your car was part of the crime scene. What got on it. Blood?"

"Nothing so gory." To that, he said . . . nothing.

"Spray paint. Graffiti," she answered the continuing silence.

"The body was--"

"Lying beside the driver's door, maybe two feet away."

"What kind of graffiti?"

"Words. 'She left.' "

He digested the message for a moment, eves cast down to the asphalt. "Any overspray on the body?"

She squirmed against the car door; easing the pressure. It was a subtle point, well taken"No."

He nodded. "You think this ex-cop might have done it. Why?"

"You found no trace of a woman in his past?"

"Rumor. People had retired, transferred, quit. They said he used to live with someone years ago. Another cop."

"Pretty vague. You're sure he wasn't gay?"

His eyes narrowed at the humor in her voice. "Sure." Kinsella glanced past her to the car door. "Your estimate was right; he's the kind of egotistical bully who wouldn't take a woman leaving him kindly. What's his connection to this killing?"

"Don't know yet." Molina pushed herself away from the car door, walked into the borderland between streetlight and shadow.

"We don't even know the victim's identity. It would help to know if Nadir was in the vicinity."

"Someone is."

"What do you mean?"

"When I was coming back into town from LA. someone took a shot at me on the Strip."

She couldn't keep her eyes from widening. She thought for a minute, then laughed. "I suppose you had the top down like a tourist."

"Yes, ma'am."

"It could have been anyone."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your guard was down. Amazing. Apparently, the shooter missed."

"Mostly."

"Anything l should know about I"

He shook his head. "The bullet creased my skull and then got lost in traffic. I think the shooter was on a motorcycle."

"Ooh. Curiouser and curiouser. Could our Mr. Devine be a tad upset at your rocket-like reentry into Miss Temple-'s life and living quarters?"

"He could be, but he wasn't using the Hesketh Vampire if he was. Besides, he's got his own fish to fry." When she didn't say anything he cocked his head. "Too busy to read your morning paper'?"

"I checked it."

"For the sketch of the other dead woman?"

'Yup."

"Check it again. I'm not the only one who's attracted unwanted attention lately."

"Care to elaborate?"

"Nope." He grinned. " 'She left.' All I have to do is find out who 'she' is."

"All I have to do is find out who the dead woman is. You're out of it."

"Shouldn't be too difficult."

"Not with the cadaver dog I've got"

"Why are you smiling like that!"

"Like what?"

"Mona Lisa on Prozac."

"I enjoy irony."

"What a coincidence. So do I."

"Then," she said, spreading her hands like a good hostess inviting a guest to a sumptuous buffet. "Enjoy."

She got in her car, started it, and left him standing alone ("Blue Moon," crooned like a wailing saxophone) in the parking lot, a fading figure in her rearview mirror, diminishing to a dark question mark in the night.

He thought he knew all the answers, but in this case, no one did. Now, where the hell had she put the morning paper?