Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (37 page)

He caught a cab near the Four Queens and took it to Bally’s. He ambled through the hotel to the monorail and took it to the MGM Grand.

He walked through the miles of lobby and gaming areas there, then ducked out a side exit.

Then he hiked to the Goliath.

This was the night.

Act or be acted upon forever.

Do or die.

He killed a half hour in the Goliath lobby before he even approached the front desk.

He had seen no one who knew him.

No one who looked like Kitty in disguise with diamonds, though he’d seen a lot of diamonds in the shopping area.

Diamonds were made under immense pressure, built up for eons in the hidden center of the earth.

He understood that feeling. He knew that pressure.

Tonight it would be diamonds or dust.

Cover Story

Here it had begun.

Molina’s dead eyes took in the ersatz elegance of Secrets.

It was an upscale strip club, although that term was a contradiction in terms. Scratch a strip club, no matter how high-class, and you sniffed corruption and exploitation.

She had been laboring late on paperwork when the forwarded call had come through.

“Temple, honey.”

No need to guess on whose answering machine that rye-whiskey voice — almost mannish, almost female impersonator — had left the news that Secrets was the place to be tonight.

The first question was who had sent that message to Temple Barr, and why.

The second was, what was Barr doing club-crawling when single white females were the Target of the Month at places like this?

Trying to save the scruffy, shopworn soul of Max Kinsella, no doubt.

Molina’s head ached from the wig that clung to it like a mothballed barnacle, and the incessant smoke and noise.

The glamour of undercover work was way overrated.

This could be a trap or a diversion. Barr could have gotten the message and come here, or not. She could have notified Molina in this cryptic way, or not. Molina assumed not. Barr had a history of independent action, ill-considered or not. So, she herself could have been alerted by…Matt Devine, Good Neighbor Matt. Or not. Or by Max Kinsella. Bad Scene Max. Or not.

The whole evening, the entire charade was possibly key to the case. Or not.

She had to assume that Barr at least had the smarts to disguise her appearance.

So now Molina was on the lookout not only for a possible killer, but for a civilian trespassing on police turf.

Still, she wondered what Barr had blundered into. Her informant had the kind of smoky, boozy voice of someone who knew the strip club world inside out from the time of Moses to Madonna.

Who did Barr think she was tracking? A he, of course. If the killer was a woman, it would be a shocker. From the message, it was someone who was a repeat offender at strip clubs, a regular. That included a lot of customers.

Molina eyed the men standing, sitting, drinking, ogling.

The usual batch of losers and loners. Men whose shoulders slumped, whose jaws dropped, whose eyes were dead with unspoken hopes. And the muscle crowd. Not loners. Guys in gangs, loud, profane, obscene. Pack runners not likely to go beyond the pale in public parking lots, but don’t let them run into you alone on a lonely road.

Molina had seen them all, the types. So who didn’t you see? Who was conveniently invisible?

“See anybody who ought to be in pictures?” the bartender asked.

This model was female, but she had the same easygoing attitude of her male counterparts, as if Sister Wendy doing the shimmy on the bar wouldn’t turn a hair.

“Not yet. I’m really looking for places, not people.”

What a lie! Molina was pleased with her latest cover story: location scout for
C.S.I
. It was the perfect justification for surveillance work: both jobs required lots of sitting and watching and soaking up the atmosphere.

Molina tried some oversalted bar nibblies despite her better judgment. Had to look semioccupied while waiting for Godot, or whoever.

Like most stakeout work, this could turn out to be another dull, wasted evening.

Terra Incognito

Matt eyed himself in the mirror. In the mirrors.

He turned away, displeased as always with his looks.

The place was plastered with mirrors, and it certainly wasn’t to visually enlarge the area. The rooms were already king-size.

He went to the window, which gave him a hawk’s-eye view of the elaborately tiled areas surrounding the many pools. The mosaic of gold, terra cotta, and white tiles, with rectangles and circles of chlorinated water thrown down among them like area rugs, was like overlooking some Roman ruin, though nothing down there or up here was ruined, except possibly his immortal soul.

The sinking sun sizzled on seminude figures ambling among the bronzed bodies arrayed on lounge chairs. Dozens more people stood in the pools, looking from up here like toothpicks impaled in blue icing. Very few people in the pools actually swam.

The entire scene reminded him of an orgy sequence from a Cecil B. DeMille film epic,
The Last Days of Pompeii
, say, just before the wrath of Mount Etna rained on the pagan parade and turned everybody into ashes, ashes, all fall down.

My, he was getting apocalyptic, wasn’t he? If the Devil was in the details, God, unfortunately, was not often in the Big Picture.

Las Vegas had been committing a lot of mortal and cardinal sins for decades without a peep from Anybody Upstairs, except possibly the real overseeing deity of the city, the Eye in the Sky cameras posted over all the casino tables.

Paranoid, he turned and examined the room’s ceiling for surveillance equipment, despite knowing that any devices would be too sophisticated for him to detect.

What a racket, though. The thousands of men who had done what he was about to do were ripe for blackmail. He supposed that the major hotels had a stake in keeping petty crime off their premises. Better to get their cut on the gambling concessions far below the thousand-dollar suites and million-dollar penthouses than some cheesy blackmail.

Matt eyed the room again. It was half the size of his whole unit at the Circle Ritz, maybe six hundred square feet. A mirrored wall doubled the apparent size of the bedroom. The bed seemed even larger than king-size, and was a mound of piled pillows and bedlinens covered in large, regal designs.

The carpeting was plush, deep, and the color of stale blood.

Beyond the mirrored wall was a hall lined with a long, mirror-doored closet. A door opposite them led into the marble-floored bathroom, as big as his living room at home. A huge matching marble tub reminded Matt of a Roman sarcophagus. It took about fifteen steps to get from the tub to the freestanding marble sink. The toilet and bidet were on the other side of the sink. Of course every wall of the bathroom was mirrored, so you could see yourself coming and going. Literally.

Matt would mostly like to see himself going. Out the door into the wide, well-lit hallway that overlooked a glittering open atrium to the casino attractions far below, down in the stainless-steel-lined elevator car, through the raucous casinos, past the gaudy restaurants, walking a half mile to the exit doors to breath the overheated Las Vegas air and inhale the slightest, distant tang of desert creosote. Wilderness enow.

Omar Khayyám was considered quite the romantic poet, but even he couldn’t find a plain loaf of bread in this place to go with the expected and dreaded “thou.”

“Thou” was right! It had already cost Matt eight hundred dollars to get this far, and the second stage of the evening was going to run at least another thousand.

Corruption cost, and in Las Vegas, corruption cost big-time.

Matt allowed himself a glance in the closet door mirrors.

He’d better up his estimate of costs incurred for this unconventional outing of his. His clothes were new too, bought in the brightly lit shops lining every hotel’s obligatory shopping arcade.

Big winners were expected to blow large wads in these places and they were crammed with designer labels and luxury goods Matt had never heard of.

He suspected some of the high-priced items might not be in the best of taste, but nowadays it was hard to tell highway robbery from high-class prices, especially in Las Vegas.

So he wore a two-hundred-dollar pair of slacks in his favorite khaki color, although the clerk had described it as “lukewarm café au lait.” His shirt was a cotton-and-silk blend in stone color. His blazer was a wool-silk blend a bit darker than camel, which the clerk had called “escargot.” Had Matt not known this was the French word for the humble and edible snail, or slug, he would have thought it was a synonym for calf-shit brown.

Still, even he, who hated mere appearances, had to admit these clothes had an easy feel and drape that evoked the hushed sound of eurodollars falling to new lows on the Aubusson carpets of the international exchange.

The least a man who was expecting a thousand-dollar whore could do was dress up to the lady’s level.

He immediately censored the word “whore.” That was the old puritan streak putting unpleasant labels on everything, and everybody.

She was a professional woman of the highest order. Like a well-paid motivational speaker, say. He could identify with that. He got an obscene amount of money for speaking engagements now, being a celibate ex-priest working as a semifamous radio shrink. What was the difference between selling a mind and a body?

Matt paced back to the window, suddenly worried if the “thou” in his unwelcome equation was going to show up. The hundred-dollar bill he’d passed as discreetly as he could to the bellman might be taken as a generous tip, instead of an order for some “classy entertainment.”

Matt winced at the phrase. He’d been coached, of course, by an expert. Well, Carmen Molina never would or could walk in his shoes, but she ought to know the routine.

So what happened if he was just being ripped off by the bellman? The six-hundred-dollar room, his seven-hundred dollar “casual” outfit, the crisp bulk of fresh hundreds in his new eelskin wallet (she would see that, of course, as well as his new underwear), his desperate gamble that one sleazy act paid for through the nose would liberate him from his demon stalker, what if nothing happened? And he was waiting. For nothing?

Then he’d be relieved. As much as he needed to do what he had set in motion, he most devoutly hoped that something would go wrong and it would never happen.

Baby Doll’s Brand-new Bag

I am only halfway across the Circle Ritz parking lot when I am accosted, if one can be accosted by an albino tumbleweed.

“
Oh-oh-oh-oh
,” my attacker says, hyperventilating.

“It is about time,” I say. “I cannot be about my business until I know what you have to say.”

“
Uh-uh-uh-uh
.”

“Um, words would be nice.”

“
Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh
.”

I sit down and prepare to wait, sweeping my posterior member back and forth like a cranky metronome.