Cat In A Leopard Spot

Max leaned against the filthy exterior of Baby Doll’s and actually smoked one of his prop cigarettes.

This was getting way too complicated. How could he get Molina off the night beat and back into her office where she belonged?

Nail Cher’s killer, that’s how. And nail Van Burkleo’s killer while he was at it. This was getting to be too big a job even for Superman.

A flare of smoke and music spat into the clean night air, the burst as shocking as the spray of a machine gun.

When the single front door to Baby Doll’s slammed shut, Rafi Nadir was out in the darkness with Max.

He stalked over.

“You the PI who was bothering the customers and girls in there?”

“Me? Man, I’m PE. Presley, Elvis, suh! Yes, suh, Colonel.” Max ran up a mock salute.

“You sure are a moth-eaten Elvis, man, now that I look at you. Sorry. I’m the house police, and I heard some private dick was hassling the customers. You got another coffin nail?”

“Shore.” Max tapped out a cigarette and provided a match for it, watching Nadir’s bloated features swell into focus while the match flame and the cigarette’s terminal ember flared. “Naw, I’m jest a country boy tryin’ to make a buck in the Big City. Quite some place.”

Nadir leaned against the building, took a deep drag. “Yeah. Cheesy town. Nothing like L.A. In L.A. you got your black and your yellow and your Mexican side of town. Big-time. Not the so-called ’hoods they have around here. It’s an industry there, man. This place is like a studio back lot. All show and no go. All front and no real action behind it. Like, even the Mob’s gone corporate. Trading stocks instead of bullets. There’s no real action anywhere here anymore.”

Max nodded. “I get yah.”

“Well, I’ll be outa this penny-ante bouncer stuff soon. There’s still something goin’ on I can latch onto. Maybe make a big buck or two while I still know how to spend it. Aw, whata I care whether some PI is nosing around, asking about some hopeless stripper who got herself throttled?”

“Throttled, huh? How’d you know that?”

“Word’s all over the strip clubs. The stupid whores are wearing dog collars to deter the Strip-joint Strangler, can you believe it? Nobody’s more superstitious than strippers and whores. They all think luck is what’s gonna save ’em. You see that rotten PI around here, son”—Rafi Nadir thumped Max several times on the chest with a stiff forefinger—“you send ’im to Rafi Nadir for a talking-to. But only tonight. I’m gone after tonight. I got a brand-new gig. With a classy outfit. I’m on my way back up. That’ll show…whoever. When next you see me, I’ll be a customer with bucks to burn. I’ll be able to buy this place and use the profits to light my cigar.

“Here.”

Nadir stuffed a twenty-dollar bill in Max’s cigarette-cupping hand. “Here’s some money to burn, Elvis. You remember Rafi. You’re gonna hear about him again.”

Chapter 32

Animal Wrongs

“You look tired, Lieutenant.”

Morey Alch’s voice floated over Molina’s head like a dampened volcano of rumbling concern.

“What are you, my mother?” she growled back. He didn’t retreat.

He stood at her office door, knowing enough to keep his distance. He usually knew better than to get her back up by suggesting she was doing too much. Today he was right: she was too pooped to overreact.

“We’ve got a lot of cold cases to solve,” she went on mildly. “And then this nutso leopard killing—”

“Definitely nutso. You eyeball that woman?”

“I think it’s a woman.”

Alch had poured two mugs of coffee—overbrewed sludge—at the big urn near the door. Now he nodded and transversed the long, narrow office walking like a man on a tightrope. He set one mug down at her place before settling at the other side of her desk. His own white mug was artfully decorated with dried-coffee drips of various lengths and intensity. He tossed her packets of creamer and sugar and ripped into his own duo.

Molina sighed. “You and Su getting anywhere on the likely suspects in that case?”

“Besides the leopard, you mean.” He looked up quizzically from his coffee ritual.

She laughed, as he had intended. “Right. The Leopard Man did it. You ever see those old black-and-white movies when you were a kid? You know, the African cult that dressed up in leopardskins and clawed their victims? Am I hallucinating, or does this Van Burkleo case smack of jungle drums, my friend?”

“The White Zombie,” Morey declaimed. “Movies like that. Great stuff. The leopardmen in those movies wore these, uh, you know, gloves, with claws in the fingertips. Reminds me of my trip to England. Me and the wife, before…well, before. Anyway, I got into the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. Only me. Only pros. Don’t let spouses in, which was just as well. Anyway, they got Jack’s letters there. The Ripper. And they had all these confiscated weapons, and I’ll never forget, a Freddy Krueger glove.”

“Freddy Krueger Goes to Blighty?”