Its clients took the mental barrage like a Fifth Avenue mob would take ticker tape during a parade, with festive disregard. The place had a Mardi Gras look and feel. The girls (strippers were always “girls” no matter their age) and the men mixed it up like old, bawdy friends. The clients were as loud and disorderly as the taped raunchy rock music, and seemed to enjoy competing with it. Even the deejay guy in the glassed-in soundproof booth seemed to be having a good time.
And…so did Rafi Nadir.
Max bellied up to another sopping-wet bar and ordered another watered-down drink as costly as a pound-can of R-12 Freon. He was glad this place was crammed with customers, and probably always was. People tended not to bother remembering faces in joints like this until they’d seen you for the ninth or tenth time.
Rafi Nadir was the center of a bouquet of centerfold girls, obviously a visiting ex-worker, not on the job.
He wore a loose white shirt with sleeves rolled up and buttoned at the elbow over khaki pants. Something about his demeanor, the pale shirt, his dark, overblown good looks, the way he accepted the strippers’ attention as his due reminded Max of Libya’s Khadafy, one of the more sinister international figures, and that was going some these days.
Face it: to brush shoulders with Rafi Nadir was to loathe Rafi Nadir. He gave the word “lowlife” a new definition. No wonder Molina was having nightmares about this creep showing up in her life. No wonder she wanted him as far away from their daughter as a serial killer.
If Max managed to get enough on him for a murder rap, he’d be bailing Molina out of a pretty rough corner. She’d hate it, and he’d love it.
And Max was close. Nadir was out of control, not drunk, but high on some apparent good fortune. The twenties were diving into the surrounding G-strings like South Sea Islanders seeking pearls.
Men drunk on their own importance are only a half-step away from walking off a cliff. Max just had to watch Nadir, follow him, and he’d catch him deciding to force another stripper in a parking lot into early retirement…He might even be the one who had killed Gloria, Gandolph’s old assistant. No telling how many stripper murders they could wrap him up in.
While Max was weaving happy endings, just as he was ready for a fadeout on Cher’s smiling transparent face on high in the best black-and-white Hollywood tradition, he saw something unpleasant in the mirror.
She was tall, she was dressed like an aging flower child, she was talking to a guy at the other end of the bar who looked as much like a regular as anyone here tonight. And she glanced in the mirror at herself as if noticing a stranger, then her eyes ran down its length as fast and smooth as fingers whisking a run off a piano keyboard.
Max hunched over his drink, turned to the guy on his left, put his right hand with the clumsy college ring on it in front of his face, almost knocking his phony glasses off.
They made a perfect triangle: He and Molina at opposite ends of the bar and Rafi Nadir at the apex in the middle of the room, holding forth amid his harem, perfectly placed to spot either one of them, should the fates permit. Rafi Nadir on top of the world, which in this instance was a pyramid. A pyramid scheme, so to speak.
Molina’s ears, feet, and—now that she had sat down at the bar—butt were killing her. But the eyes felt fine, except for the burning irritant of secondhand smoke.
But that was Las Vegas. No way would smoking be banned.
“You related to any of the girls?” Don, the regular, was asking.
She was relieved that she wasn’t being mistaken for one of the girls, but miffed that he thought she might be somebody’s mother. Or big sister maybe.
“No. I’m a PI, just following up some leads.”
“Oh.” He was a stocky blond in JT10: jeans/T-shirt/tennies. Roofer, but harmless enough. Roofing was your number-one occupation for transients with crime in mind.
“You’re not kidding?” he asked. “About the PI part?”
“Who’d kid about that?” She glanced in the mirror again. This guy was dry; time to sink another well, but no good candidates presented themselves.
Then she noticed that Rafi was gone.
She stood up, scanning the mob. “Look, Don, I’m slowing down your action by sitting here. Thanks for the info.”
“I didn’t tell you much—”
“More than you think.” Bystanders always did.
She knew from five minutes with Don that Kitty City girls tended to stay put here, that it was always this busy, that Rafi was a familiar figure around the place, and now—that he was gone.
She rose and headed for the strippers’ dressing room.
Nobody noticed her as she beat her way through the heavy black velvet curtains at the side of the stage, then went down the hall, through the women’s john, and into the long, ugly, bare room behind it.
The usual three or four girls waiting to go on were busy peeling off their street clothes and pulling on what amounted more to accessories than clothes: boots, spike heels, thigh-high hose, garter belts, G-strings, body stockings the size and shape of intertwined rubber bands.
“Say, I missed talking to Rafi,” Molina said. “He leave with anyone?”
They looked blank and shrugged and questioned her in turn.
“Can you help me with this hook?”
“This new thong look all right?”
It was girls’ dorm, only the dorm backed onto a strip joint.
Molina hooked, nodded, and beat her way out of there.
“Rafi never plays favorites with the girls,” one voice singsonged after her as she left.
Never plays favorites. So what was his angle?
Reentering the club area was like walking into a sonic boom. Her ears, eyes, nose, and throat burned from acrid smoke and one foul, gasoline-slick vodka tonic she had nursed for far too long.
Her watch said it was long past coach-turning-into-pumpkin time, but the kid in the sound booth was still nodding and shaking to the music only he could hear at normal volume.
Molina eyed the entire scene one last time, and gave up.
If just seeing Rafi (and him not seeing her) was an achievement, then the night was not a waste. But she needed much more than that. It might be time to delegate, let her own people follow up her suspicions, which had not one shred of evidence behind them but instinct.
She moved under the irritating mirrored ball that raked her face with spinning spitballs of light. Looking away, she glimpsed herself streaking past the end of the mirror behind the bar. Brown eyes. So different. Such a good disguise. At least she’d learned that tonight.
Pushing the superheavy door open—why did they always make it so hard to get in and out of these places? Never mind. Pushing the door open with all her weight, she moved out into the untainted air, still slightly chilly before spring abruptly became summer and the air was always as warm as bathwater, and more often hot-tub water.
No smoke to breathe in, just air. She took a deep, singer’s breath, expanding her lung capacity to its fullest, drawing in from her diaphragm. As she exhaled, slowly, with control, a woman’s scream hit a high note and sustained it until abruptly ending.
The sound came from…behind the building, which gave her three sides to choose from.
She raced around to the left, digging the gun from the paddle holster in her purse. The scene of the scream: parking lot on three sides, jammed with cars but deserted of people, who were all inside deaf as posts to any ugly noises outside.
That’s why he struck in strip-joint parking lots, alone in a crowd. She had to be here to see it, hear it. A perfect setup if the timing was just right for everybody to be inside yet, whooping it up.
He had to know the pulse and timing that made strip clubs predictable in their own erratic way, Molina thought as she moved cautiously through the lot, scanning parked cars, hunting for a wrong motion, a glint of reflected streetlight on something, someone in the wrong place….