“No. It’s just how the movies show the old-time PIs. You know, the borderline guys with the junker cars living alone and suddenly they get this one case that all the bigwigs care about and they save the day. It’s like that, except for the big case and saving the day.”
“I probably make more dough than you do.”
Molina nodded. It was likely even true in terms of her real job. “Probably. Did Cher?”
“Cher?” Reno laughed, a bit pensively. “Not Cher. She was new, but she was worse off than that. She was…raw, you know? Didn’t have a clue how to take care of herself. She hated stripping, but pretended she didn’t. Drank like a fish. Drank like a whale. Just a mess.”
“An easy victim, then?”
“Listen. We’re all easy victims. That’s why we’re there, pretending we’re somebody, that we’re pulling the strings. But we’re not. We get paid good, though.” She glanced at the child, content with her dreadful breakfast and her upscale toys. “I’ll be able to send her to college. If I manage to hang on to my money. Sometimes it’s hard.”
“Boyfriends? Drugs?”
“I stay off the stuff.” Her face deadened. “My boyfriend, though…” She sighed. Looked at the child. Sighed again.
Reno laughed uneasily and jumped up, as fluid as a teenager. Stripping kept a girl in tip top condition, oh, yes. Molina was surprised no enterprising media queen had put out an exercise video based on stripping moves.
“Coffee’s ready,” Reno called from the kitchen. “Man, I could use a hit of caffeine.”
She brought two steaming, if water-spotted, mugs into the living room. Molina eyed the magazine-covered end table wondering where she would balance the hot mug.
“Just put it on the magazines. We don’t worry about coffee rings around here.” Reno settled cross-legged on the floor, while Molina felt a twinge of envy. She felt a lot older than Reno. Why had a woman this street savvy been caught with a pregnancy? Maybe she’d just wanted a kid.
“So. Any suspicious characters around that strip club? Secrets.”
“‘Suspicious characters.’ That is so NYPD. You crack me up.”
“Sorry. Why’d Cher leave the last club she appeared at?”
Reno shrugged, her face buried in the child’s hair, then looked up. “She didn’t say. I only saw her for a few minutes the day she died. She was all high on some guy she met named Vince. Said he might look out for her. I guess he played white knight when the bouncer got overeager.”
“The bouncer?”
“Guy named Raf. Likes to throw his weight around. Most of us don’t take guys like that seriously. All show and no go, but Cher was a scaredy-cat.”
“Maybe she was right.” Molina made a point of writing down the names of the men. Vince was new; Raf, of course, was not.
“This Raf been at the club long? What does he look like?”
“We called him our man from the Iranian secret police. Iranian Secrets police in our case, I guess.”
“What do you mean ‘Iranian secret police’?”
“Oh, Raf, our bouncer, just has that dark and dangerous look. Kinda foreign, but I don’t think he is. Kinda dominating. Then there was this Vince guy that came in. He was dark and dangerous looking too, but Cher was jazzed on him, oh, boy. He gave her money for nothing, after all. No dancing, no sex. Got her thinking about hair-dressing school, my gawd, can you believe it? Standing all day and no money in it? At least hookers get paid for standing around. And their blow jobs are over a lot faster. And then this guy tried to talk her into calling some counselor. For someone who looked like sleaze on a skateboard he sure acted like Mr. Goody Two-shoes.”
Molina nodded. Straight arrows, even cops, could fixate on reforming hookers and strippers. Probably unconscious libido.
“She say what this Vince looked like, anything identifying?”
“Tall, dark…you fill in the blanks. She offered to sleep with him for nothing, but he wasn’t interested. Gay, you think?”
“Maybe. Maybe just a do-gooder, like you say. Or a do-badder setting her up. No address, no way to get in touch with him again?”
“She didn’t say. She did say he tangled with Rafi. Raf. That’s short for Rafi. I ask you, what kind of name is that?”
Molina held back a smile in answering a woman who’d named her daughter Trifari. Trif? “Foreign maybe, like you say. Middle-Eastern, I’d bet.”
“Oh! Don’t tell me about those guys! Control freaks, and it’s all okayed by their religion or whatever. Anyway, that’s why Cher was switching clubs that next night. That she…died. Didn’t want to run into Rafi again at Secrets.”
“You’re free to do that?”
“Yeah. Not at the hoity-toity clubs, but at places like Secrets, it’s just who shows up. We move around. Get a wider clientele that way. More bucks. Poor Mandy. She coulda used more bucks. I hate to say it, but she was born to be somebody’s victim. Was it a nut case, do you think? Or that guy Vince?”
“Murder like this? Night. A woman alone in a strip club parking lot. It could be anybody.”
Molina read between the ancient lines. Despite Reno’s hard-nosed survival attitude and her genuine desire for a better life for her daughter, she would be putty in the hands of any controlling guy who threw a little money, time, and attention her way before taking over her life. Like the late, mostly unlamented Cher, little Trifari was in a race for her future with her mother’s abusive background. Would conditioning or maternal instinct win?
Molina hoped Reno was one of those women who, even if she couldn’t stop being a victim in her own life, at least could draw the line at that happening to her kids.
Some did it, and they deserved a medal. Most didn’t, and they deserved what they got: another generation reared for heartbreak.
Molina nodded at the little girl. “Why did you name her Trifari?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I do. Much better than Tiffany.”
“Yeah. That sucks. Like anyone from where I came from would ever have anything from Tiffany’s. But they might have some Trifari, huh?” She leaned back against the sofa, grabbed her knees, grinned like a teenager.
“I had this aunt, too, only she didn’t care about grammar. But she let me try on her jewelry when I was a kid. And some of it, the glittery stuff, had this little tag that read ‘Trifari.’ I always swore I would get me some of that someday.”
“And you did.” Molina nodded at the child.
“Yes, I did.” Reno slid into a kiddish singsong. “Mommy sure did, precious baby.” She hugged and rocked the little girl, stealing raspberry kisses while the child giggled.
Molina could have felt a lot of things at witnessing this mother-with-child scene: skepticism, anger, sorrow. Instead she just felt helpless. It was a feeling she hadn’t indulged for years. Not until Rafi Nadir had recently turned up in Las Vegas.
Belated rage literally straightened her spine. Reno wasn’t just a struggling single mother from a rotten background, she was a link in safeguarding Molina’s own daughter from the past, and the future.
“So Cher was a basket case. Why would anyone strangle her?”
“She was there? She was easy? Maybe that’s what it comes down to.” Reno’s grip on Trifari tightened until the child fussed in protest. “That’s why I don’t let any man live with us. Too many of them try things with little girls.”
Molina nodded. No argument. Every woman these days knew a woman whose child had been molested, and most molestations happen within the charmed circle of family and acquaintances. Those just were the odds, plain and simple. The only certain odds in Las Vegas related to domestic abuse.
“About this new guy, Vince. New at the club?”
“I’ve never seen him, but Rick had. He’s one of the bartenders.”
“How about this theory? Say someone Cher knew or met at Secrets got big ideas, or was mad at her. Suppose that person followed her to the new place and killed her there to keep everyone from thinking about any suspects from Secrets?”