Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 3

Wail Woman

The parking lot felt like a giant black square on an inactive chessboard: empty, yet possessed of an odd aura of expectancy.

Carmen Molina advanced into it like a bold pawn making the first move: big steps, strides even, her velvet work clothes hanging slack in the Blue Dahlia's tiny dressing room while she left in her jeans and tennies, key ring jingling on her finger.

Still, she moved to the echoes of Gershwin and Porter, big songs that drew power from intimate, tautly controlled renderings: "Someone to Watch over Me". .. "The Man I Love" . . .

"Body and Soul" . . . "Night and Day" . . . "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and her current favorite,

"Begin the Beguine."

The trio had run through the whole repertoire that evening, for an audience that had hunkered down and listened like well-paid extras in a big-band movie. No drunks, no druggies, just good little groupies. The Blue Dahlia's clientele liked the setup, anyway; liked not knowing if the singer might show tonight, or if they were going to get instruments unaccompanied by voice. The performance schedule had to bow to her job responsibilities, but it also gave her a certain vintage persona: mystery chanteuse from some unfilmed sequel to Casablanca, where the saxophone, the girl singer's voice, and the room were always smoky.

Carmen chuckled, hearing an echo from the hard asphalt. If the audience knew about her daytime gig as homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina, she'd lose all her mystique. She wondered sometimes which was the role, and which the reality: blues singer Carmen or detective C. R.

Her well-aged Toyota sat alone near the lot's border, a familiar silhouette usually hemmed in by other vehicles when she left at midnight in her civvies, like Cinderella seeking and finding her homely pumpkin long after the ball was over and Prince Charming had been eluded.

But it was after three now. She and the band had celebrated a stellar night by noodling around with new wrinkles to the repertoire and a truly knock-'em-dead version of "Begin the Beguine."

Like a thirties cartoon character, she could hardly keep a rhythmic bounce out of her steps. I got rhythm. Who could ask for anything more? Night and day. Smoke gets in your eyes. Great songs.

She veered toward the driver's side, then her steps skipped a syncopated beat.

Someone had strewn a broken trash bag right beside her car. A leaky trash bag. The distant streetlight ran its rays over a slick rivulet of liquid.

Yuck.

She'd have to haul it away; it was too close to the car door for her to get in without stepping on it...

And then she got closer.

Her hand was digging in the shoulder bag at her side. She wasn't sure whether it hunted a firearm or a cell phone or both.

Both were there, but a glance around the parking lot had her pulling out the cell phone first.

Might be watching, but discreet enough to keep distant.

She stayed put for a few seconds after making the call. A homicide cop didn't often discover her very own dead body. But a cop's gotta do what a cop's gotta do.

From the torque of the torso, the victim had fallen--or been dumped--here while the music was being made inside.

She went close enough to check the body for heat and heartbeat. Neither. of course.

She glanced at the driver's door of her car.

It wasn't often that a homicide cop's vehicle was part of the crime scene, either.

She read the lethal graffiti, two words spray-painted on the sun-faded paint: she left.

Maybe "she," whoever she had been, had. But Carmen Molina couldn't leave.

********************

"Long night," Detective Morris Alch said about four AM.

Molina nodded.

"You eat here with anyone?"

"No."

"It's part jazz club, and the group was jamming. I was the last to leave. From the customer lot, at least."

"The pits about your car."

"Yeah. I'll get it back soon enough, after it's been through the 'body shop' at the morgue." He laughed at her pun. Horror and humor were the Abbott and Costello of police work.

Molina glanced at Alch's partner, Merry Su.

That was it; the whole name.

The woman was almost shorter than her name: ninety pounds of ace girl detective; a China doll so adorably diminutive it was a shame not to keep her on a shelf.

But Su was resilient, and the firmly middle-aged Alch made a pragmatic partner more inclined to playing Father-figure than Romeo or Lancelot. They were turning into the department's most effective team. Molina counted herself lucky they had been "up" for assignment when she had called the murder in.

They were also the pair she could most trust with her silly little secret: The homicide lieutenant was a crooner on the side. But no need to confess prematurely. The boys in the band knew better than to mention her intermittent role as torch singer unless they had to. They could all tell the truth and not quite tell it, just like an LA. Lawyer.

Unless things got ugly.

She glanced down where the dead woman had lain, body as if she'd been turning over in her sleep and had been flash-frozen.

Strangled and stabbed. Classic signs of a perpetrator known to the victim.

"She left."

Classic motive for domestic violence.

But why here? Why now? And why beside my car?

Nothing classic about those facts of the case but the question marks.