Cat In A Leopard Spot

He followed her directions religiously, trying to pretend he wasn’t nervous about going ever nearer to a long-forbidden zone. Once Matt had parked the Probe in the brightest section of the flat, featureless parking lot that surrounded Secrets like an asphalt moat, a material black hole of night, they regarded the building through the windshield.

“Grim, isn’t it?” Janice said.

“No windows, just that big winking neon sign and that little windowless door. It reminds me of an ugly mausoleum.”

“Shabby. No advertising gimmicks outside. Like someplace you disappear into and never come out of.”

“Apparently some woman did just that, or Molina wouldn’t want a sketch of a killer.”

“You always call her that?”

“Some woman?”

“The lieutenant. No title, no first name?”

“Almost always.” Matt wasn’t about to admit how deviously he used the lieutenant’s despised first name. Knowing someone’s secrets was definitely like holding a weapon. A weapon you didn’t give away to anyone else.

“But not always.” Janice waited for more.

“I guess always,” Matt said firmly.

He recalled another secret he kept, and winced internally. Molina had custody of the opal-and-diamond ring Kinsella had given Temple in New York City. The elegant ring, instead of enhancing Temple’s finger, reposed in a plastic evidence baggie: found at the scene of another death, of a woman killed in a church parking lot. Matt wondered where the woman whose killer they were tracking tonight had been killed. Here? Or somewhere else? She hadn’t ever had an opal-and-diamond ring, Matt was willing to bet.

Was the victim even a woman? Molina hadn’t said, and Matt had assumed stripper club meant dead stripper. He asked Janice, who shrugged her mystification. “I’m supposed to ask for a bartender named Rick to get a description of a guy named Vince. That’s all we mere translators need to know.”

“Translator. An interesting description of the art of suspect portraiture.”

“All portraiture is suspect. It’s filtered through the eyes of an artist. We make very unreliable witnesses.”

“But you’re good at drawing out witnesses.”

She nodded. “Ready? To be honest, I’ve never been to a strip joint before either.”

Although a few cars were scattered around the parking lot, no one was coming out or going in when Matt and Janice approached the graffiti-etched door.

“I don’t suppose many women go to these things. As viewers, I mean,” Janice said.

“I don’t suppose many ex-priests do either.” He pulled the heavy metal door open and waited for her to enter.

“On the other hand,” Janice said hopefully, “maybe we’re both wrong.”

Sound blasted out at them like construction noise: raw and blind, teeth-rattlingly vicious. An aural attack. It was also a fortunate distraction for the terminally self-conscious.

Janice rummaged in her purse until she plucked out a couple of tissues, quickly tearing them to pieces and handing him shreds to jam in his ears.

Even buffered, the music was painful. After that sensual assault, any visual shocks were minor.

Both of them fastened on the long oblong of the bar as an island of safety. Except…

“There are two!” Janice shrieked.

“What?” Matt pointed at his stopped-up ears.

Janice’s left hand raised, her first two fingers forked in a vee. Not V as in victory, but—

“Two bars,” she mouthed now, more than shouted.

Matt turned to assess who passed for bartenders on each side of the room. En route, his eyes slid off mostly naked women writhing to the deafening beat they could feel through their feet and teeth.

A medieval vision of hell, that’s all Matt could think of. Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel wall, where the artist pictured his enemies damned and writhing under torture. Matt, on the other hand, hoped not to see one familiar face in this nightmare vision. Or to have one familiar face see him here.

He pointed toward the farther bar. There the man behind the shiny expanse was a mustached thirty-something, instead of the beefy twenty-one-year-old who manned the nearest strip of shining bottles and background mirror reflecting long bare legs executing extreme variations on the splits.

Janice and Matt climbed onto the plastic-upholstered barstools like flood survivors finding purchase.

She laid her sketch pad atop the droplet-dappled counter.

The man noticed them, ostentatiously finished swiping down the far end of the bar, then ambled over.

It was early enough that the place wasn’t crowded, Matt noted. Or maybe it never was crowded. There was something desultory about the atmosphere, despite the pumped-up music and sound system, the women bobbing and posing on the opposing bars, the one in the purple-white spotlight on the stage strutting to the beat. She was a hefty girl in a cheap version of the famous Marilyn Monroe white dress blown up by the subway grate.