Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (34 page)

Sell any?
Temple was fleetingly tempted to take umbrage, but then she remembered the rainbow of glitzy fabrics on her lap.

“Yeah, several. I thought I’d watch some of the girls’ acts. Get more ideas for outfits.”

“You do whatever you like,” he said, “as long as you feed the kitty or you feed the bartender.”

Temple glanced stageward. A lone girl was striding across it to a drumbeat, squatting every now and then to wrap her fingers around some moonstruck guy’s neck and let his fingers jam paper money down the skimpy pocket of her Tess-sold thong. Temple presumed that was “feeding the kitty.”

She sipped the pallid margarita. It tasted more of lemon water than anything else.

The stripping profession is a lifestyle choice
, she reminded herself. Who was she to judge? According to Molina, Temple was in an intimate relationship with a suspected murderer, and Molina ought to know, having been in an exploitive relationship with another murder suspect.

Speak of the devil.

Temple gazed across the huge room with anxious recognition.
Wasn’t that him?
Rafi Nadir? Standing in the first row of tables, watching the woman onstage. He nodded as she passed. She winked back.

So he was indeed a genuine habitué of these places. A bouncer, Max had said. A man who liked to hang around naked ladies, who wallowed in the loud, sleazy atmosphere.

Her disguise was great, like wearing sunglasses on the street, Temple decided as she checked herself out in the mirror. Her actress aunt, Kit Carlson, would be proud of her. Amazing what one heavy-haired wig could do. She could watch everyone, just some idling costume pusher waiting for the next shift of dancers to come in and grab her wares.

Associated pros often came and went at strip clubs: photographers, costume hawkers, maybe even undercover cops.

O holy nightgown!
Nadir was heading her way.

Temple turned back to the bar to swig from the smudgy margarita glass. She did
not
want to be caught making eye contact with a murder suspect. Also, he had seen her before, sans the Dyan Cannon locks. What had Max said? An ex-cop? He’d be good at penetrating disguises.

“Hey, Jay,” his deep voice addressed the bartender behind her. “Anything shakin’ tonight besides booty?”

“The usual usual,” Jay answered, filling his order for scotch on the rocks.

Temple noticed that Nadir’s drink had more color and needed less color of money to pay for it than her watered-down drink had required. Apparently he was known here.

“No suspicious characters?” Nadir asked.

“Just you.” Jay snickered. “You’re not hired heat anymore, why worry?”

“This used to be my beat.” Nadir’s eyes, so dark the black pupils melted into the surrounding iris, scanned the entire club.

Temple wondered if his pupils were dilated from being high on something, or if he just came with creepy jet black eyes, like a larger-than-life cartoon villain.

She remembered Thomas Harris’s one chilling fantasy touch in his description of Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter. He had “maroon” eyes.

How could Molina suspect Max’s true-blue eyes (sometimes disguised by contact lenses as alley-cat green) when here stood a suspect with eyes as black as his presumed heart?

Supposedly Molina had at one time fallen for this man, this hired muscle, this jaded strip club junkie.

Just as her description of Nadir was yearning toward truly extreme heights of distaste the man himself turned to her. “You’re new.”

“Not according to my mother.”

He was speechless for a second, then laughed. “So you sell overpriced elastic bands. How’s business?”

“Good. And they’re not overpriced. It takes tremendous skill to make the ‘gather’ setting on a sewing machine pay off. These costumes have to survive a lot of…stress.”

This time he exploded with laughter, his dark eyes almost disappearing inside the fleshy eyelids.

“You got that right, kid. So, is your sister a stripper? How’d you get into this scene?”

“You got the sister part right. She does this.” Temple shook her hoop like a Salvation Army girl her tambourine. There was no noise, though, which wouldn’t have been heard over the sound system anyway. She and Nadir were shouting at each other, although only two feet apart.

Yikes. She was sitting
only two feet away
from Molina’s ex–sleaze-a-squeeze and the only man in Las Vegas, or anywhere, that Max Kinsella had shown any fear of. Wow.

“Say, you’re kind of cute,” he said, as if just noticing that. Having a strip club epiphany of sorts.

Anyone else called her cute, she’d raise a ruckus.

This was the fearsome Rafi Nadir, so she’d accept it. “Thanks. I won’t say you’re kind of cute yourself.”

Again he laughed. She got the impression he didn’t do a lot of that and he enjoyed the novelty. He was…gasp…enjoying her.

“What’s your name?”

“Tess.”

“That all there is?”

“That’s all there is around here.”

“Smart. You never know who you’re talking to.”

“Well?”

He shrugged, let a smile touch his lips, smugly. “My name’s Raf.”

“Smart.”

He aimed his forefinger like a pistol. “Bang. You’re faster on the uptake than most of the broads around here.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m not a broad.”

He digested that along with some sodium-rich snack sticks salted with about three peanuts from a bowl on the bar that Temple had rejected forever after one try. Salty snacks encouraged drink orders, and bloating in the female of the species. Better dead than bloated.

“You want to go someplace where we can talk?”

Temple couldn’t believe her luck: Rafi Nadir, feeling talkative, all to herself.

Too bad she didn’t dare risk going as far as the jukebox with him, not that there was one here.

He read her hesitation so fast she thought he was Max. Predators were like that. Funny, she’d never thought of Max as a predator before.

“How about a quiet table?” he suggested.

“There is one in this place?”

He jerked his head toward a far corner. “There is one in every place. You just gotta know the terrain.”

She shrugged her acquiescence and slid off the barstool.

“Leave that,” he said, stopping her hand from reaching for the drink. “Send over a real one for the lady,” he growled at Jay.

Temple was glad she had ditched the high heels, the better to disguise her daily habits, the better to run for her life.

His hands were always on her: between her shoulder blades to guide her toward the right table, at her elbow to thread between the tables, on her shoulder to follow her down onto the chair he pulled out for her.

With a man you were attracted to, it was a barrier-breaking, seductive exercise.

With a shady character, it was stomach-knotting. Temple wanted to use her fabric ring like a barrier to fend off his attentions, but undercover junior G-girls didn’t get any good leads that way.

“Amazing,” she said after Jay had come and gone, leaving a margarita with a high lime color behind. “It really is quieter here.”

Nadir pointed to the ceiling. “In Vegas you always gotta check the ceilings. They’re not only where the spy cameras lurk, but the loudspeakers. This is a loudspeaker-free zone.”

“How’d you know all that?” Temple asked, sipping her margarita through its short, obligatory straw like a teenager at a soda fountain. She figured the more naive and impressionable she acted, the more information she’d get.

“It’s my business.”

She waited, sucking on her straw. Whew. This margarita had a tequila kick.

“I’m in security. Right now I’m working for a major Strip celebrity, but before that some of the strip clubs asked me to check out their systems.”

“Wow. How do you get into that kind of work?”

He hesitated. The urge to impress won out over discretion. “I’ve got a history in law enforcement.”

She bet he did! What was the expression Max had used? Rogue cop.

“So you went from the LVPD to private eye work.”

“Private security,” he corrected her. “Private eyes are rip-offs. Their rep is all from books and the movies.”

Temple was still congratulating herself on leaving out the
M
in LVMPD. Unlike many cities, Las Vegas’s police force was called the Las Vegas
Metropolitan
Police Department, because there was also a North Las Vegas Police Department. If she had used the official set of alphabet soup to refer to the force, Nadir would realize she knew a bit more than she should. Which wasn’t much, but at least it was a fine point or two, thanks to her brushes with Molina.

Molina! Was married to this guy! Or shacked up with him!
Imagine that. No, don’t imagine that
, she told herself on redirect. She didn’t want to gag on the only real drink she had ever gotten in a strip club.

She had to admit that Rafi Nadir knew how to operate around here. That meant he would also know how to operate unseen and unsuspected around here. And certain murderers, especially sex murderers, loved to revisit the scenes of the crimes.

“Are you cold?”

“Huh? Oh, goose bumps. Just nervous.”

“This is all new to you, right?”

“Yeah. My sister does this stuff. Does all right with it too. But she’s —”

“She’s what?”

“Scared. There was a stripper killed not too long ago at one of the clubs. Outside one of the clubs. And another girl was just attacked. She had all these, ah, suits made up and decided she didn’t have the nerve to hang around and sell them, so I said I would.”

“What makes you such a brave little girl?”

Grrrrr.
Temple hated condescension, even coming from potential serial sex killers. “I lost my job, so I guess I was just desperate. Anyway, I’m glad to see that the clubs have security experts like you working to keep us all safe.”

She apparently had hit the litany of buttons that made Rafi Nadir resonate like a choir boy singing soprano, or ring like a slot machine that had just coughed up three cherries in a row.

“Don’t you worry. This creep’ll get caught.”

“You sound pretty certain. Any reason?”

He leaned close. Even with this “quiet” table, the grinding rock music was always pounding the edges of your attention, flattening them like tin.

“I was there.”

“There?”

“In the parking lot of this one club. Secrets. Some guy was with Cher Smith. I stopped them to make sure it was on the up-and-up.”

“And —?”

“He cold-cocked me. Moved faster than a whipsnake. I don’t often take a hit. Cher drove off. I think he followed her.”

Temple frowned. She’d heard this story the other way around. Oddly, Nadir’s version jibed with Max’s, except….

“That was the killer. She was dead in another strip joint parking lot the next night. I saw the killer. That’s why I come back and hang around, even though I’ve got a better job elsewhere. I saw the guy. I’ll see him again. Guys like that don’t stop.”

Temple was speechless, probably the best thing she could have done.

Nadir was setting up Max to be the killer. If Molina could ever overcome her extreme prejudice against crossing paths with Nadir, that’s the story she would get out of him and it would give her everything she’d ever wanted.

How ironic.

“Now don’t be afraid.” Nadir reached out to pat her hand. He didn’t. His own closed over it, trapping it against the slick tabletop. “That’s why I’m here. I saw the guy. He wears disguises, but I’ll know him again.”

“How do you know you will?”

“Because I did see him again. That girl who was attacked outside Kitty City? I was there too. He got away. Some dumb-ass undercover narc bitch was there and blew my one chance to nail the guy. I had him in my reach, but she held a gun on us both. She arrived just after I came on him with the girl down. She couldn’t tell which one of us was the real killer so the stupid…broad let him get away, and forced me to go after him.”

“Did you get him?”

“No. He had too big a start on me. He can disappear like Lance Burton, this guy. But don’t worry, unless you see some guy over six feet tall. That he can’t quite hide. Tall guy. You look out then.”

Temple nodded, sober despite the kick-lime margarita. She could swear that Nadir believed his own story. But then, pathological killers always had some self-justifying notion.

She pulled her hand from under his to pick up the big glass bubble of the margarita glass in both palms and drink from the rock salt-slathered rim.

Her lips curled at the caustic taste, even as her skin crawled.

She had either just heard the twisted spiel of a stone-cold killer, or there was more to these murders than Max, Lieutenant Molina, and even Rafi Nadir knew or was telling her.

“So where’ll I find you tomorrow night?” he was asking, as if she’d want to be found by him.

Maybe she did.

She leaned in to whisper one word to him.

Shadows

Matt couldn’t help thinking about computer hackers as he stepped out of the small WCOO office into the empty parking lot.