“Sounds like murder in the human kingdom too. You obviously think that Molina and company won’t investigate the leopard angle, or won’t investigate it well enough. Why not?”
Max grinned and drained the dregs of his long, potent drink. Rum and everything.
“Because my friends in camouflage, the animal-rights protesters, are going to tell all about the man in black they saw lurking in the desert before Van Burkleo died.”
“You! That’s right. You were out there. And you were on the scene. You’re a likely suspect.”
“And wait until the widow and the snooty secretary tell the police that you were there.”
“Oh, no!”
“Worried?”
“Only that Molina will have a nervous breakdown trying to decide which of us she’d most like to nail with murder.”
Chapter 23
Déjà Vu
Reno, as she called herself, was too short to be a stripper. Maybe five four on a good day and the right high heels.
She was in superb shape, though, especially for a relatively recent mother. And she made the most of it. Even at two in the morning.
He watched her from the smattering of audience: bored guys trying to decide how many dollar bills it was worth stuffing down her G-string to give them some reflexive kick, some nervous system surge that could be identified as erotic through the smoke and the sound and the booze and the damn emptiness of life itself.
Strip clubs were the most depressing places in the world when you stripped away the jacked-up sound, the rote sexy motions, the scent of money and sweat.
Max had donned Vince with the same professional dispassion and distaste that cops pull on latex gloves these days: it was a habit, it was useful, it was a protective device from the unnameable stains of life in the sleaze lane. One hoped.
Onstage, Reno grabbed her ankles in their four-inch-high heels, bent over, back arched, and showed where life began. And sometimes ended.
Max stared at Reno’s splayed high heels, so different from the high-fashion form Temple wore.
High heels were supposed to be sexy, and he supposed they were. The culture had seen to that. Yet there was a world of difference between Reno’s spikes and Temple’s high heels, and he’d have to be somewhere else to explain it to himself.
He glanced at the bar. Rick was there, waiting for Godot, or Ilsa, or Claude Rains. Rick was looking at Max…Vince…when he looked Rick’s way.
A bad sign.
Max slid off the armless chair, built for lap dancing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the rolling gait of an overmuscled man heading his way.
He didn’t even look to see if it was Rafi Nadir.
He was out the door, in the still of the night. Around a corner. Another corner. Back in Dumpster Row, where the neon didn’t shine.
He had seen Reno arrive in a banged-up Toyota. His luminous watch dial, pure ‘50s, told him it was only 1:40 A.M. How much longer could Reno shake it for the dollar-bill fools?
He’d wait.
He heard the front door wheeze open, then hold the position. The bouncer looking for him.
After a while the muffled sound of music softened, then cut off.
Door closed.
Max edged around the building to the end of the parking lot that hosted Reno’s Toyota.
He moved into the scraggly brush edging the asphalt. Looming over it was a two-headed streetlight as sleek and sinister looking as the Martian ship probes in The War of the Worlds. But both lamps were dead, blind, only faint moonlight reflecting from their burned-out reflectors. They made an odd but apropos metaphor for the stripper club called Secrets and everybody in it. He settled into the shadows to wait.
* * *
She came clicking across the parking lot on her four-inch hooker heels. Swaggering.
Apparently a good night.
Halfway to the car, a pursuing shadow bolted from the dark hulk of Secrets and caught up with her, hard.
It spun her around.
“Reno.”
Max heard the name, heard everything, as the words hissed across the dry asphalt like a sidewinder snake.
“You want?”
“Had a good night.”
“Okay.”
“Not over yet.”
“It is for me.”
“You haven’t shared.”
She shook off the man’s arm. “You work here, like I do. You don’t get a cut.”
“I can take it any way you like.”
“Nothing!”
He reached for something: her, or where he thought the money was.
Reno’s arm struck out.
He backed up. “You—”
“You work here, just like I do. You don’t own anything about me.”
Max was easing over on silent shoes, but they were facing off and didn’t notice anything but their own anger.
“Your roommate thought the same thing, and look what happened to her.”
“Mandy? That mouse? She was dumb and sweet, but I ain’t. Let me be!”
By then Max was there.
“Trouble?” he asked.
They both rounded on him.
Maybe he had sounded too much like a cop.
“Get outa here!” the man warned.
The woman said nothing, especially not thank you.
Something hissed besides footsteps on dry asphalt. Something high and shrill.
A pop like a gun made everyone jerk, but nothing more happened.
Except that one of the dead streetlamps strobed into life again.
Thin blue light painted their faces a sickly color.
“You!” Rafi Nadir’s hand dropped its viselike grip on Reno’s elbow. “The cops sent someone in to get your mug down on paper. They must want you bad for something.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Max said, claiming Reno’s released elbow. “Now I’ll give you one. Call it a night before someone calls the vice squad. Do you want your face on the mug books?”
Nadir’s mouth worked. He was the kind who was always spoiling for a fight. Max was ready, though he didn’t look like it.
Nadir ignored him and addressed Reno. “This guy probably killed your roomie. Some white knight.”
She was staring at Max as if Rafi Nadir didn’t exist.
Before Nadir could get excited about being irrelevant, Max steered Reno to her car, took the fistful of keys from her hand, opened it and watched Nadir as she got in.
“I’ll see you at home,” he said affably.
In the slanted streetlight rays, her face looked hard, but curious. “You’re Vince.”
He shut the door on her, heard the oncoming scrape of shoes and turned to face Nadir, not so affably.
Reno started her car and drove away, leaving the two men plenty of room for…whatever.
“You’re not leaving,” Nadir said. “Not until that girl is long gone. I should call the police.”
“But you won’t.”
“I don’t need backup to deal with you.”
“What’s to deal with. I’m leaving, aren’t I?”
Nadir stared down the street. Reno’s beater was out of sight, out of hearing. He stepped back with an elaborate gesture of permission.
“Go ahead. But you gave me trouble with another stripper, and she ended up dead the next day. If anything happens to this one, it would look bad for you.”
“That works both ways, doesn’t it?”
Nadir stared sharply into Max’s face, puzzled by his calm, unsettled by the implication.
“I don’t ever want to see you at Secrets again,” he said.
“You won’t.”
Max turned and crossed the parking lot to the street beyond, where he had parked the Maxima two blocks away.
At first he listened for Nadir following him. When he was in the dark between streetlights he finally looked for him.