Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “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 aro
und 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 pre
sence.

  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.