Cat In A Leopard Spot

Molina glanced up at the familiar frieze of mug shots and most-wanted posters.

“Trophies?” Janice asked, “or just generic crooks?”

“Some we nailed. So. What did you get at…what’s-its-name?”

“Secrets. Sounds more upscale than it is. I owe you thanks. I never would have visited a strip club otherwise. Neither would have Matt.”

“You took a date?”

“I took muscle.” Janice smiled. “Or thought I did. The star attraction ended up hitting on him.”

Molina shook her head. “From rectory to raunchy. You and I have a lot to answer for in the education of Matt Devine.”

“He did better with her than I did with the house muscle.” Janice leaned forward, the pencil in her left hand tapping the glass atop Molina’s desk. “I’ve made a find, I think. Remember the guy you had me sketch recently?” Janice glanced over the walls and frowned. “I don’t see his handsome face on your Wall of Infamy.”

“It’s a pending case.” She leaned down and reluctantly pulled the folder holding Janice’s all-too-lifelike portrait of Rafi Nadir. “This guy?”

Seeing her sketch again, Janice grabbed her upper arms as if cold. “I could redo that for you, better now. This is what blew me away. I met him. Last night. At Secrets. I guess he’s a bouncer there. Isn’t that the guy you’re looking into for something?”

“For something. So?”

“A stripper from the club was murdered. Not there, but she had worked at Secrets. And, listen, the hard time that guy gave me—”

“He came on to you?”

“Hardly! He implied I was a lesbian just for being in the club. I think he was going to call Matt gay, except that Reddy Foxx was all over him and usually her kind are pretty on target about gender preferences.”

Molina was ready for a good primal scream: what hath subterfuge wrought? She could picture it all too clearly: Janice and Matt bellying up to the bar in a strip club to interrogate a gin-slinger named Rick on her request, while Rafi Nadir, the guy she most wanted to separate from any part of her life or anybody she knew or who knew her…and Raf hassling them both. With only a ridiculously named stripper putting the make on Matt to stand between them and his territorial temper.

If it didn’t have the making of a first-class tragedy, it would be a surefire comedy.

“You had your hands full,” Molina commented in the neutral tone of voice she was so expert at falling back on: the noncommittal neutrality that masqueraded for police politeness. It was really just a darker shade of doubt, but most civilians and good citizens didn’t know that, though the bad actors knew it and didn’t care.

“Lieutenant? You seem a little distracted.”

Molina gazed into Janice’s on-the-level eyes, now showing a shred of concern. “Just too many unclosed cases on my mind. So. You want another crack at the illustrated man.” She pushed Janice’s sketch toward her.

“Right. Now that I’ve seen and heard him, I just hope somebody gets him for something. I’ll redo it gratis. Just for the lesbian crack.”

“You can’t believe anything you hear in a strip club. So that was it. A close encounter with the sketch subject. It must have been unnerving. Like seeing a ghost.”

“Like seeing a nightmare. I’m not used to these hard customers. Matt didn’t seem particularly worried, though.”

“He’s seen hard customers before.”

“As a priest?”

Molina permitted herself a smile. “No. Here. In Vegas.”

“That man I first sketched for him?”

Molina shrugged. “Unappetizing, but not particularly dangerous. Just mean.”

“His stepfather. Matt says he…stalked him.”

“Matt’s being hard on himself, as usual. He found him. For me, frankly. For himself too. Looking for a criminal isn’t stalking.”

Janice nodded. Molina could tell she was unconvinced, that she was thinking of a subject that had not come up, and probably wouldn’t. “That second sketch I did for him…”

“Second one?” Molina felt her nerve endings sit up and salute. Effinger was old news, an unsolved case that nobody really cared about. A minuscule serving of small potatoes at the biggest buffet in Las Vegas.

“The woman. The gorgeous woman.”

“Hmmm.” Molina made it sound like she knew all about it and wasn’t particularly interested. That’s how you got troubled witnesses to talk: you overreacted to the trivial and tiptoed around the crucial.

Janice fell into easy compliance. “She didn’t look like a criminal, but I suppose they don’t all come from Central Casting, like that Raf character at Secrets.”

Molina ached to shock Janice a little by revealing that Raf had been a cop. You couldn’t take anything for granted in the law enforcement game. Nothing. Including gorgeous women that Matt Devine wanted pretty pictures of. A self-indulgence? Someone he had a crush on?

“She wasn’t a redhead?” Molina had never thought of Temple Barr as gorgeous, but Janice was one of those stolidly average-looking women, like Molina herself, who might confuse pretty cute with pretty.

“No. A cross between Snow White and the Wicked Queen. Skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood.”