Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  He reached in his pants pockets for the cycle keys, eyed the waiting helmet, almost craving its anonymity, its implied safety.

  A small click in the night.

  Maybe the touch of a high heel on the asphalt.

  Maybe the snick of a switchblade.

  Maybe the mechanism of an opening car door.

  Maybe all three.

  Matt whirled to face the dark car with its windows black-tinted like a limousine’s. It was a boxy, anonymous vehicle. He couldn’t even name the model and maker.

  It looked like a cut-rate hearse to him.

  Someone was stepping out of it.

  Stepping out with my baby…

  A woman.

  …a face in the misty light…

  No, not Laura from forties film noir…just Kathleen. Kitty. Any haunting songs written for such a common name or nickname? Only raucous Irish ditties and a soulful Celtic ballad or two.

  I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…

  She wore something long, dark, and glittering. It hung from rhinestone straps on her shoulders. She was done up like a disco prom queen. Her high heels clicked on the pavement as she approached. Scarlet rhinestones dripped like blood from her earlobes. Not rhinestones maybe, rubies…

  She clutched not a gun but a small, bejeweled purse shaped like a kumquat. The innocuous bag was more suggestive, more chilling. What was in it? A folded razor? A tiny automatic pistol? A lipstick case? A vial of poison? Or of holy water?

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” she said. “The Midnight Hour is still a lifetime away.”

  He was alone this time. He didn’t have to worry about her hurting anybody else. He moved toward the motorcycle again. It could outrun any car.

  “You’ve come here before,” she called after him, softly as a song. Her voice still held the faintest musical lilt of Ireland, a siren’s lure. “I was wondering why.”

  He didn’t pause.

  “Actually, I was wondering who.”

  He turned, stopped, spoke. “What a small world you occupy, Kathleen O’Connor. There is not always a why, or a who. Sometimes there’s a what. Not for you, though. You’re hooked on whys and whos. That’s what makes you so ignorant.”

  “Me! Ignorant? I’ve lived all over the world, visited casinos that make Las Vegas look like Disneyland for the double-wide set. I’ve drunk the finest wines, worn designer jeans that cost more than that whole damn motorcycle —”

  “Impressive,” Matt said without stopping or turning.

  “If you really want to be impressed, maybe you should peek in the backseat of my car.”

  Her voice wasn’t musical anymore, but raw, as metallic as a zipper slowly opening, grating. Kitty was sure that what she was about to reveal was raunchy but irresistible.

  Matt knew it was a mistake not to resist, but her voice had become so smugly threatening…

  He turned. Kitty O’Connor cut a sophisticated figure in the blue-green parking lot glow. The car behind her was a shiny black box. He remembered sensing it as a hearse. Whose hearse?

  He started toward it, she spinning and clicking on those high heels to reach it first, as if now they were in a race. Her staccato steps reminded him of Temple, but he didn’t want even her name crossing his mind in the presence of Kitty O’Connor.

  The woman had paused by the back door on the driver’s side of the four-door sedan to unlatch the hard little jeweled bag. She brought out something black and oblong. A remote control. The car’s rear window opened with a can-opener whirr.

  It sliced open on a band of red hair. Matt’s heart stopped, but the window kept descending until a third of the way down. He saw frightened eyes and a duct-taped mouth, like a robot’s featureless silver orifice pasted onto a human face.

  Matt’s heart throbbed like a jungle drum as he recognized not the fractured face but the mane of red hair: the teenaged fan from last night at the radio station parking lot.

  The window was rising again like a dry dark tide, obscuring the terrified eyes and obscenely cheerful red hair. Had Kitty chosen the girl because she had been there, or because her hair was red?

  “She’s just an —” he began.

  “Innocent bystander?” Kitty tucked the remote control back into her purse as casually as if it was a cigarette case. “My favorite kind. Besides, I don’t buy your assumption that anyone is innocent. Even you.”

  “I never claimed I was.”

  “You claimed you were a good priest.”

  “A good priest isn’t innocent. A priest needs knowledge of evil.”

  “You must be an even better priest now,” she said, slithering forward like vamp on a nighttime soap opera.

  “A priest needs knowledge of evil,” he repeated, “like a seductress needs a touch of innocence to be believable. Seducing me won’t work.”

  “Just remember the girl in the backseat. Next time she might be somebody you really know.”

  He choked back his anger at her constant threats, her theatricality. Did she need to be the star of her own show this much? Apparently. And what did that tell him about her?

  “Relax,” she was saying. “I’ve planned a quiet evening for just the two of us. And” — her dark head jerked over her shoulder toward the closed window — “she can’t see us. No one inside the car can see out except the driver. Aren’t you wondering who the driver is?”

  He hadn’t considered that. If Kitty was not alone tonight, if she had a hostage, she might also have an accomplice. An accomplice was needed for what? Chauffeuring? Ferrying captives…carrying bodies?

  “A quiet evening —?” he repeated to gain time.

  “Sure.” She walked around to the car’s front passenger side.

  He heard the heavy metal door open, then Kitty began unloading objects onto the car’s long black hood. Two champagne flutes. A silver ice bucket. A green bulbous bottle of Perrier-Jouët twined by painted art nouveau flowers.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He didn’t, of course.

  “Come here or I’ll have to get my petite straight razor from my purse and attempt to cut that poor child’s duct tape off.”

  She poured one tall flute too full of champagne, and waited.

  He moved in her direction, around the front of the car, wondering if her anonymous driver had orders to run him down.

  But the engine stayed dormant and only the bubbles in the long tall glass moved.

  They spun frantically for the lip of the glass, pearly strings and ropes twirling up like deep sea divers trying to outrun the bends. Bubbles, tiny bubbles of frantic, tiny final breaths.

  A tearful bound girl trapped in a stranger’s car with her mouth taped, breathing anxiously through her nose, fighting for each breath as congestion clogged her sinuses and nostrils.

  “Let her go.”

  “No.”

  “Let her go, or I go.”

  “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”

  He shrugged, walked away, turned his back on the bubbles.

  “You don’t dare risk it,” her hoarse whisper called after him.

  He heard furious heel clicks, rapid, angry.

  The whirr of a car window opening. The driver showing himself? Pointing a gun?

  He kept walking.

  Heard a muffled cry.

  Turned.

  Kitty stood beside the rear car door, now gaping open, the young woman tumbled to the asphalt in a fetal position, still bound, still gagged. Eyes still wide open.

  “There. She’s out. On her own. I’ll leave her here. Now, come back.”

  Kitty strode around to the car’s long front hood gleaming like a black steel coffin and lifted the heavy champagne bottle, a hostess as impervious as patent leather.

  “It’s rude to walk away when you’re the guest of honor.”

  At least now the car couldn’t take off with the girl captive.

  Matt obeyed, or, rather, did what he thought was best at the moment, which was to seem to obey.

 
She poured another shaft of champagne trembling with manic bubbles as he approached and handed him the glass, her hand rock steady.

  She sipped. He followed suit, wondering what playing her game would get him or cost him.

  Her payoff was instantly obvious. Satisfaction. She fairly purred with it, arched her dark eyebrows, licked the smoothly rolled glass rim of the flute as if it were jagged and she had a taste for blood, even, perhaps, her own. Or perhaps mostly her own.

  Matt rolled that idea around on his tongue as he swallowed the madly fizzing wine. He’d never thought of champagne as a hyperactive beverage before, manic, bipolar, as ready to go flat as erupt.

  Like Miss Kitty?

  Could he drag her down to the dark side of her nature? Depress her? Paralyze her?

  “This is a joke,” he said. “A scene out of a B movie.”

  “My movie, not yours.”

  So control was everything. She unholstered the remote again and aimed it at The Blue Dahlia, at the roofline along the building’s side.

  Instantly, a few blue notes of sound came rolling over the parking lot.

  “‘Someone to watch over me’,” crooned a homicide lieutenant, spreading her vocal wings after too long in a cramped cage.

  Matt couldn’t help turning his head to puzzle out the illusion; the band sounded as if it had moved outdoors.

  “How’d you do that? Never mind. Not telling me is half the fun. But why the sound effects?”

  “You come here to hear the music, right? Can’t be the food?”

  “It’s not too bad.”

  Her shiny dark head shook. “Must be the music. Tell me the truth.”

  “The music,” he agreed. “The name of the place. Getting away from anyone who knows me. I don’t know.”

  “Liar!”

  He kept quiet, wondering if she’d already figured out the connection between him and Molina.

  “You’re trying to get away from someone you know,” she accused instead. “Someone who watches over you.”

  Her smile emphasized a mouth painted rambling rose red, a pretty mouth, small and pointed, not particularly sensual, almost pleasant peeling back over those small pearly teeth.

  Oh, the shark, dear…

  “Is that what you think you’re doing? Protecting me?”

  “Protecting my investment.” She came nearer, set her champagne flute down on the hood. “Let’s dance.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You will.”

  “When someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away?”

  “Of course. The whole world dances when someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away. Haven’t you watched the evening news? But don’t ruin our outing with politics. Aren’t you glad I didn’t come in and upset the help? We can have our evening out here, under the stars.”

  She took the glass from his fingers and set it on the hood. The surface curved, so everything on it tilted, faced imminent falling, destruction. The whole world tilted, facing the same fate, particularly his tiny corner of it.

  Had Kitty somehow learned of his long-ago “prom” expedition into the desert with Temple? But how? Impossible. Yet she was duplicating it in some devilish way. Maybe that was how; she was the demon Molina would never believe in.

  Molina.

  She might be closing down her set and coming out soon, but to a different parking lot.

  Did he want Molina to come to the rescue? Could she end up a captive?

  While he worried, Kitty had insinuated herself against him, broadcasting an elusive, probably expensive perfume. Her curled hand rested on his shoulder like a fallen blossom. Her other hand was slipping into his palm where the champagne flute had been.

  …a face on a passing train

  This was so bizarre, and to hear Molina’s voice wafting over the empty parking lot…

  Kitty started swaying against him, seductive no doubt. Besides his deep disinclination to respond to anything she offered, despite the haunting image of that innocent girl as a mute witness to this insane scene, the real turn-off was her choice of music to seduce by, her Mantovani and Iglesias and Rod Stewart all rolled into one was a moonlighting homicide lieutenant’s dusky contralto.

  “You don’t dance,” she was saying. “I’d shuffle a few steps, if I were you. Your faithful fan is out of the car but not out of reach.” She prodded a long fingernail into his chin.

  Matt shuffled, resenting the infringement of her body, relieved that he felt absolutely no interest in mere proximity.

  “Let’s do talk politics,” he said.

  “As long as you dance.”

  “You must sincerely believe in the Irish cause.”

  “Must I? I mustn’t do anything, haven’t you figured that out by now? I could have a folded razor in the hand that’s on your shoulder. It would take a millisecond to cut your face to shreds.”

  Her sensed her hand, a loose fist at the corner of his eye. It could indeed hold a weapon.

  He suddenly took control of her other hand, so lightly laid in his, and spun her out, away from him. “Maybe we should swing dance.”

  The sudden move surprised her, maybe even pleased her. She caught her breath like a teenager, laughing a little.

  He suppose it had felt like being on a thrill ride, and Kitty the Cutter liked thrills. Maybe needed them.

  She tried to close in again, but he took her other hand off his shoulder and kept moving away, remembering patterns he’d seen on PBS shows about jazz and swing music. That kind of dancing was a constant tension: pull close, push away. Not so different from the choreographed discipline of the martial arts. With Kitty the Cutter, dancing was a martial art and Matt had just figured out the steps.

  Luckily, Molina had swung into an up-tempo song.

  Jeepers, creepers.

  She wasn’t kidding, and that kid’ll eat ivy, too.

  “Apparently,” Kitty said, not unhappily, “you like fast dancing.” “I like anything that keeps you at arm’s length.”

  “You can’t keep me there forever.”

  “No, but this’ll do for now, while we talk.”

  “What’s to talk about?”

  “That girl. You’ll leave her here, unharmed?”

  “This time.”

  “So what do you want tonight?”

  “Where’s your ring? I should say my ring? The deal is you have to wear it.”

  “It’s here. In my pocket.” “That’s not ‘wearing’.” “I’m wearing it on my key ring. You didn’t say where I had to wear it. I suppose I could wear it around my neck.”

  “Splitting meanings, just like a damn politician. Or a priest. How many angels dance on the head of a red-haired girl?”

  Matt’s heart stopped, hoping that Kitty meant only the unknown girl she’d kidnapped from the radio station. Had she held her captive since then? Or only taken her tonight? How many angels danced on the head of Temple Barr? An entire chorus.

  “Just one,” Matt answered Kitty, more blithely than he felt. “One guardian angel.”

  “Who?” The jeer twisted her beautiful features — Snow White, the fairest of them all, suddenly the Wicked Stepmother. “You? You can’t even protect yourself from me.”

  “Guardian angels are invisible, Kathleen. Don’t you remember that from catechism? No one can see them, not even the soul they guard. You have one, you know.”

  “Fairy tales! Like Santa Claus.”

  She was getting breathless from spinning in close and out far. Matt kept it up, relentlessly. She wanted contact, she would get it. He was in control, her hands in his, unable to wound. She had only her voice.

  “I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” he said as they seesawed in and out, moving in small, furious circles on the asphalt. What would make her let him go, so he could help the young woman?

  “The music’s stopped, so can we,” she said.

  “Has it? I hear music.”

  He moved to an unheard rhythm, like telling the beads on an end
less rosary, rote motion. The car sat as if abandoned with the battery dead. He doubted there was a driver. Only Kathleen O’Connor, a one-woman terrorism squad. And now she was breathless putty in his hands.

  She craved control. To use it and perhaps to feel the object of it, as well.

  “They’ll be coming out. The band,” she said. “Now that they’ve stopped.”

  “What do you care?”

  “You…you’re crazy.”

  “That’s projection.”

  She tried to wrench her hands out of his. “Psychoshit! You’re all full of it.”

  “All who? I’m only one guy.”

  “No, you’re not. Your name is legion.”

  He laughed. “Now I’m the demon.” He spun her quickly 360 degrees, lifting his arm so she twirled, a human top. Her long, snaky earrings flashed like comets.

  She reeled a little as he resumed the relentless step in, step out, pull her close, push her away motions.

  “You mean my ex-profession,” he said, a little breathless himself. “We priests are all alike.”

  “Yes! Liars and hypocrites.”

  “Some, I suppose. There are some of those everywhere. Are you so perfect then?”

  “No, but I admit I’m bad. I know I’m bad. I don’t pretend to try to be good.”

  “Sometimes pretending to be something is the only way to become it.”

  “A liar’s way. Is that what you are, someone who pretended to be a priest?”

  She glared as he pulled her in, her eyes pure hatred now, the seductive veneer rubbed away like a cloud of silver polish on a mirrored tray.

  “And are you pretending to be a temptress, an assassin? I don’t think so. I think you’ve done all that. I think you’re exactly what you want the world to think of you as: a very bad girl.”

  She finally was able to pull one hand free, although it must have hurt.

  He let the other go. She was dizzy now, not only from the dance but from something inside of her he had released. It wasn’t pretty, but at least her actions were hurting her for a change, instead of somebody else.

  “Then don’t mess with me. Don’t make me do something you’ll regret.”

  “Either way, I’ll regret it.”

  She smiled, tilted her small, dainty head. “Now you understand. It’s a lose-lose situation. You might as well get it over with.”