Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (21 page)

The whirr of a car window opening. The driver showing himself? Pointing a gun?

He kept walking.

Heard a muffled cry.

Turned.

Kitty stood beside the rear car door, now gaping open, the young woman tumbled to the asphalt in a fetal position, still bound, still gagged. Eyes still wide open.

“There. She’s out. On her own. I’ll leave her here. Now, come back.”

Kitty strode around to the car’s long front hood gleaming like a black steel coffin and lifted the heavy champagne bottle, a hostess as impervious as patent leather.

“It’s rude to walk away when you’re the guest of honor.”

At least now the car couldn’t take off with the girl captive.

Matt obeyed, or, rather, did what he thought was best at the moment, which was to seem to obey.

She poured another shaft of champagne trembling with manic bubbles as he approached and handed him the glass, her hand rock steady.

She sipped. He followed suit, wondering what playing her game would get him or cost him.

Her payoff was instantly obvious. Satisfaction. She fairly purred with it, arched her dark eyebrows, licked the smoothly rolled glass rim of the flute as if it were jagged and she had a taste for blood, even, perhaps, her own. Or perhaps mostly her own.

Matt rolled that idea around on his tongue as he swallowed the madly fizzing wine. He’d never thought of champagne as a hyperactive beverage before, manic, bipolar, as ready to go flat as erupt.

Like Miss Kitty?

Could he drag her down to the dark side of her nature? Depress her? Paralyze her?

“This is a joke,” he said. “A scene out of a B movie.”

“My movie, not yours.”

So control was everything. She unholstered the remote again and aimed it at The Blue Dahlia, at the roofline along the building’s side.

Instantly, a few blue notes of sound came rolling over the parking lot.

“‘
Someone to watch over me
’,” crooned a homicide lieutenant, spreading her vocal wings after too long in a cramped cage.

Matt couldn’t help turning his head to puzzle out the illusion; the band sounded as if it had moved outdoors.

“How’d you do that? Never mind. Not telling me is half the fun. But why the sound effects?”

“You come here to hear the music, right? Can’t be the food?”

“It’s not too bad.”

Her shiny dark head shook. “Must be the music. Tell me the truth.”

“The music,” he agreed. “The name of the place. Getting away from anyone who knows me. I don’t know.”

“Liar!”

He kept quiet, wondering if she’d already figured out the connection between him and Molina.

“You’re trying to get away from someone you
know
,” she accused instead. “
Someone who watches over you
.”

Her smile emphasized a mouth painted rambling rose red, a pretty mouth, small and pointed, not particularly sensual, almost pleasant peeling back over those small pearly teeth.

Oh, the shark, dear…

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Protecting me?”

“Protecting my investment.” She came nearer, set her champagne flute down on the hood. “Let’s dance.”

“I don’t.”

“You will.”

“When someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away?”

“Of course. The whole world dances when someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away. Haven’t you watched the evening news? But don’t ruin our outing with politics. Aren’t you glad I didn’t come in and upset the help? We can have our evening out here, under the stars.”

She took the glass from his fingers and set it on the hood. The surface curved, so everything on it tilted, faced imminent falling, destruction. The whole world tilted, facing the same fate, particularly his tiny corner of it.

Had Kitty somehow learned of his long-ago “prom” expedition into the desert with Temple? But how? Impossible. Yet she was duplicating it in some devilish way. Maybe that was how; she was the demon Molina would never believe in.

Molina.

She might be closing down her set and coming out soon, but to a different parking lot.

Did he want Molina to come to the rescue? Could she end up a captive?

While he worried, Kitty had insinuated herself against him, broadcasting an elusive, probably expensive perfume. Her curled hand rested on his shoulder like a fallen blossom. Her other hand was slipping into his palm where the champagne flute had been.

…a face on a passing train

This was so bizarre, and to hear Molina’s voice wafting over the empty parking lot…

Kitty started swaying against him, seductive no doubt. Besides his deep disinclination to respond to anything she offered, despite the haunting image of that innocent girl as a mute witness to this insane scene, the real turn-off was her choice of music to seduce by, her Mantovani and Iglesias and Rod Stewart all rolled into one was a moonlighting homicide lieutenant’s dusky contralto.

“You
don’t
dance,” she was saying. “I’d shuffle a few steps, if I were you. Your faithful fan is out of the car but not out of reach.” She prodded a long fingernail into his chin.

Matt shuffled, resenting the infringement of her body, relieved that he felt absolutely no interest in mere proximity.

“Let’s do talk politics,” he said.

“As long as you dance.”

“You must sincerely believe in the Irish cause.”

“Must I? I mustn’t do anything, haven’t you figured that out by now? I could have a folded razor in the hand that’s on your shoulder. It would take a millisecond to cut your face to shreds.”

Her sensed her hand, a loose fist at the corner of his eye. It could indeed hold a weapon.

He suddenly took control of her other hand, so lightly laid in his, and spun her out, away from him. “Maybe we should swing dance.”

The sudden move surprised her, maybe even pleased her. She caught her breath like a teenager, laughing a little.

He suppose it had felt like being on a thrill ride, and Kitty the Cutter liked thrills. Maybe needed them.

She tried to close in again, but he took her other hand off his shoulder and kept moving away, remembering patterns he’d seen on PBS shows about jazz and swing music. That kind of dancing was a constant tension: pull close, push away. Not so different from the choreographed discipline of the martial arts. With Kitty the Cutter, dancing was a martial art and Matt had just figured out the steps.

Luckily, Molina had swung into an up-tempo song.

Jeepers, creepers.

She wasn’t kidding, and that
kid’ll eat ivy, too.

“Apparently,” Kitty said, not unhappily, “you like fast dancing.” “I like anything that keeps you at arm’s length.”

“You can’t keep me there forever.”

“No, but this’ll do for now, while we talk.”

“What’s to talk about?”

“That girl. You’ll leave her here, unharmed?”

“This time.”

“So what do you want tonight?”

“Where’s your ring? I should say
my
ring? The deal is you have to wear it.”

“It’s here. In my pocket.” “That’s not ‘wearing’.” “I’m wearing it on my key ring. You didn’t say where I had to wear it. I suppose I could wear it around my neck.”

“Splitting meanings, just like a damn politician. Or a priest. How many angels dance on the head of a red-haired girl?”

Matt’s heart stopped, hoping that Kitty meant only the unknown girl she’d kidnapped from the radio station. Had she held her captive since then? Or only taken her tonight? How many angels danced on the head of Temple Barr? An entire chorus.

“Just one,” Matt answered Kitty, more blithely than he felt. “One guardian angel.”

“Who?” The jeer twisted her beautiful features — Snow White, the fairest of them all, suddenly the Wicked Stepmother. “You? You can’t even protect yourself from me.”

“Guardian angels are invisible, Kathleen. Don’t you remember that from catechism? No one can see them, not even the soul they guard. You have one, you know.”

“Fairy tales! Like Santa Claus.”

She was getting breathless from spinning in close and out far. Matt kept it up, relentlessly. She wanted contact, she would get it. He was in control, her hands in his, unable to wound. She had only her voice.

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” he said as they seesawed in and out, moving in small, furious circles on the asphalt. What would make her let him go, so he could help the young woman?

“The music’s stopped, so can we,” she said.

“Has it? I hear music.”

He moved to an unheard rhythm, like telling the beads on an endless rosary, rote motion. The car sat as if abandoned with the battery dead. He doubted there was a driver. Only Kathleen O’Connor, a one-woman terrorism squad. And now she was breathless putty in his hands.

She craved control. To use it and perhaps to feel the object of it, as well.

“They’ll be coming out. The band,” she said. “Now that they’ve stopped.”

“What do you care?”

“You…you’re crazy.”

“That’s projection.”

She tried to wrench her hands out of his. “Psychoshit! You’re all full of it.”

“All who? I’m only one guy.”

“No, you’re not. Your name is legion.”

He laughed. “Now
I’m
the demon.” He spun her quickly 360 degrees, lifting his arm so she twirled, a human top. Her long, snaky earrings flashed like comets.

She reeled a little as he resumed the relentless step in, step out, pull her close, push her away motions.

“You mean my ex-profession,” he said, a little breathless himself. “We priests are all alike.”

“Yes! Liars and hypocrites.”

“Some, I suppose. There are some of those everywhere. Are you so perfect then?”

“No, but I admit I’m bad. I know I’m bad. I don’t pretend to try to be good.”

“Sometimes pretending to be something is the only way to become it.”

“A liar’s way. Is that what you are, someone who pretended to be a priest?”

She glared as he pulled her in, her eyes pure hatred now, the seductive veneer rubbed away like a cloud of silver polish on a mirrored tray.

“And are you pretending to be a temptress, an assassin? I don’t think so. I think you’ve done all that. I think you’re exactly what you want the world to think of you as: a very bad girl.”

She finally was able to pull one hand free, although it must have hurt.

He let the other go. She was dizzy now, not only from the dance but from something inside of her he had released. It wasn’t pretty, but at least her actions were hurting her for a change, instead of somebody else.

“Then don’t mess with me. Don’t make me do something you’ll regret.”

“Either way, I’ll regret it.”

She smiled, tilted her small, dainty head. “Now you understand. It’s a lose-lose situation. You might as well get it over with.”

“Maybe you’re right. Where? When?”

She backed up, went around to the passenger side of the car. She downed the rest of her champagne in a long-throated gesture. Then finished his mostly full glass. She started stashing the equipment in the car’s rear seat.

“No. You don’t get to plan. To prepare. The next time you see me. I choose. If you want to enjoy it, you’re allowed, you know. But I think you’ll hate it. All I can say is just think of England. Or your landlady or that island mama you work for, or this little carrot-top wetting her Gap capris.” She gestured at the other side of the car, where Matt didn’t dare look because he didn’t want to remind her she was leaving him with another woman.

“What if I surprised you?”

“You can’t. That’s what’s so delicious about it. You couldn’t surprise me in a hundred years. So keep that ring warm for me.”

She darted into the front passenger seat and slammed the car door shut.

The engine started with a quick, quiet hum. The car pulled away, the tires peeling like black Band-Aids from the loose gravel on the surface.

Matt rushed to pull the girl away from the departing tires. Her ankles and wrists were circled in duct tape.

She mewed behind the silver gag.

“It’s all right. It’ll take a while to get this tape off without hurting you.” He looked around the deserted lot, then pushed his arms under her knees and back, picked her up, and headed toward the Blue Dahlia.

Main Course

“It’s a good thing they trust me to lock up,” Molina said, pouring lighter fluid onto a cleaning rag she had found behind the hall door, the one that didn’t lead to her dressing room but to a maintenance closet.

“If they couldn’t trust you to lock up, who could they trust?”

She gave Matt a look — a long, hard Molina look — then soaked the tape over the girl’s chin. “There you go. I know you want to sing out right now like Britney Spears, but ripping this tape off would give you a rug burn for a week. In the movies, they just tear away duct tape, but that’s make-believe. There. It’s coming. Just a bit more, and don’t lick your lips unless you like the taste of kerosene.”

While Molina calmed the captive and eased the gag off, Matt dowsed the girl’s wrists with fluid.