Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Yes, ma’am. It was a Sunday, couple weeks ago. And then a couple days later, they said she’d been killed, so I remembered. But I’ll never forget that girl.” Something in his tone, maybe the truth, riveted her for the first time. “She didn’t want to be here, but it was all she knew to do. I was new, too, so we talked a little. She said some guy had hassled her at Secrets, that’s why she was over here at Baby Doll’s. It wasn’t as classy a joint, but someone told her it would be safer here.”

“But it was just the same. What’d she expect? Never mind. Okay, who hassled her at Secrets?”

“I dunno. Some guy. Another guy named…Vince? Yeah, Vince scared him off. I never saw any Vince here, though.” Might as well give yourself an alibi while you’re at it.

“You’re sure? Seventies sleaze disco kind of guy? Gold chains, greasy hair?”

“Ma’am, we don’t have anybody like that in Tennessee, ’ceptin’ Elvis, of course, and he was seventies.”

“I guess you’d know.” She gave him a disgusted once-over so speedy that she failed to recognize even Vince beneath the Elvis getup.

He’d told Temple the truth: naked was the best disguise, especially if you were a naked embarrassment.

“Like I said, I bought her a drink, she seemed to like to drink more’n dance, and we talked and she told me she didn’t feel safe here. Then she left sometime after her number. Never saw her go. Wish I had. I woulda seen her home.”

“And held her hand, no doubt.” Molina snorted. She pulled out her notebook. “What’s your name and where can I reach you?”

“Bobby Rae. Bobby Rae Dixon. You can reach me at the Alhambra Inn most nights. I do two shows, seven and eleven, but the eleven o’clock’s the one that really rocks.”

“Oh, joy.” Molina finished jotting down the lies he had told her, then looked back at Baby’s Doll’s vacant, graffiti-smudged exterior.

The parking-lot lights were bright and it was almost one in the morning. She probably had a full twelve-hour day of real work to put in ahead of her.

Would she give up with the shreds he had given her, and leave Nadir to him?

“Kin I see you to your car, ma’am?”

She looked at him as if he was crazy. “Take my advice. You need to run for the boonies. I’ll find my car myself.”

She stalked off, deflected by relentless southern redneck courtesy.

He waited politely by the building, on watch until she got in her car and drove off. Not her real car, of course, without her license plates.

He wondered where she had dug up the beater. She didn’t have a convenient network to tap into, as he did, because the last thing she’d want would be for anyone in her department to know she was out freelancing.

“Razor’s edge, Lieutenant, ma’am,” he murmured in farewell. “Listen to Elvis. He knows that stuff.”

Straightening, Max turned back to Baby Doll’s. Time to find out what Rafi Nadir was doing at the scene of the crime. Again.

Chapter 30

Ringed In

Matt’s ringing phone dredged him up from the first deep sleep he had fallen into for a week.

His bedside clock read 2:00 A.M.

At first he heard only the blare of music and a vague party sort of clatter and chatter. It sounded like a TV movie frat-house scene.

“Did you get my present?” a husky voice asked on a tone of unwelcome intimacy.

“The worm.” He tried to make it sound like what he’d call her face to face if he had a chance.

“For I am a worm,” she said, laughing, repeating the Good Friday antiphon.

“No, just a very sick woman.”

“Oh? Then you’ll do as I say. Let me ask you, what are you wearing?”

He also recognized the obscene phone-call ploy so often used by men against women that it had become a cliché.

“I guess I’ll hang up, or just whistle into the phone.”

“Oh, don’t hang up. Whistle, just whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad.”

It was the second time tonight someone he had reason to loathe had called Matt their lad, and he was getting sick of it.

“Listen, there’s a point where you push someone too far.”

A pause. “Shall I tell you what Miss Temple Barr is wearing tonight?”

A chill climbed his spine like ghostly fingers with long nails. Another thing to tell Kinsella: don’t drop in on Temple without expecting to be seen by your worst enemy. Kinsella wouldn’t like that, Matt warning him away from Temple. Matt didn’t mind.

“Not necessary,” Matt said as coolly as he could manage. “I’ll wear your hellish ring, but not the way you think.”

“Oh, really? Now you’re making this interesting. I will check up on you. Somewhere, sometime, some way. Thanks for making it interesting. But, then, you always do.”

She hung up.

He wiped a thin dew of sweat from his upper lip and remembered—tasted—a fresh burst of the corroding hatred he had once felt for his former stepfather.

Matt had thought himself over such negative emotions.

He had been wrong. Dead wrong. He should ask God for forgiveness, but he didn’t want to drag God into this. It might cramp his style.

Chapter 31

Elvis Leaves the Building