“You suppose. That’s your job. Me, I don’t know. Could be someone from Secrets.”
“Who?”
“What guy, you mean?”
“Strangling isn’t the average woman’s choice of attack. It helps to be taller than your victim. Was Cher a tall girl?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Here. I’ve got a photo.” Reno rooted in the drawer of the end table that seemed more useful for holding the stuffing in the couch side than putting things on. “One of the club photographers took this.”
Molina took it in turn, a five-by-seven horizontal group shot of whatever girls at Secrets happened to be around. They stood in a ragged line, arms around each other like cheerleaders, most of them wearing only G-strings and the grinning expressions of the happily smashed.
“It was Senegal’s birthday. We all hung around after and broke balloons and sang ‘Happy You-Know.’ That’s Cher there.”
Molina stared at a face slightly blurred by booze and movement. “She looks pretty tall. Five eight, nine maybe.”
“You got a great eye.” Reno nodded, both impressed and suddenly sad. “Cher was about that. I know because she was always bitching about having to wear high-heeled boots. Said men like women who weren’t as tall as they were. What do you think?”
“From the photo, five nine.”
“No.” Reno was grinning like a girlfriend at Molina. “I mean, do men like tall women? You oughta know.”
Molina, surprised, said, “I doubt it. Too many guys are nervous about women anyway. I’d say short girls have it all over us tall ones.”
“Kinda what I thought. That was Cher’s problem. She felt like a horse and acted that way. Turned guys off. And, she was drunk as a skunk most of the time. She wasn’t stripper material. Had to drink to do it. Probably had to drink to do sex too. I think there was, you know, in her family.”
Molina nodded, making aimless marks in her notebook. Scratch a stripper and find a depressing life story. “What other guys hung out at the club?”
Reno curled up in the couch’s slightly soiled corner. “Too bad you can’t interview the police. They went over all this with me.”
“Did they?”
“Oh, yeah. Two of’em. Over and over, everything.”
Molina felt a rare, secret satisfaction. “You remember their names?”
“No, just detectives. Like you. Notebook, the whole deal. Only with IDs.”
“So what’d you tell them?”
“Just about the usual suspects. They were interested in the photo guy. I noticed you wrote his name and address down from the stamp on the back of the picture. And there’s the deejay, Tyler. Just a kid, underage, but I didn’t tell the cops that. Loves music, likes to watch naked girls dancing. All pimple-faces do. And he doesn’t have to pay for it.”
“He ever bother any of the girls?”
“All he knows how to bother people yet is by playing his tapes too loud, although you can’t possibly do that at a strip club. Naw, he’s a good kid, and the bartenders and bouncers, they’re just regular guys. You’d be amazed how boring it is to be around women shedding their clothes after the shock wears off. That’s why we move so much from club to club. I just don’t see any of these guys going berserk and offing a girl. Why?”
“You like the idea of an outside stalker better?”
“Yeah. Maybe it was her old man. Stepdad. Those are the kind who can diddle their own kids and then get mad when the kid grows up and goes off and lets someone outside the family do it. Maybe it’s that Hannibal freak, huh? Most of the guys who come to strip clubs are pussycats. That’s why we love doing it, putting a smile on their pussycat faces while they stuff our G-strings with cash money.”
Trifari started banging a plastic assembly toy on the floor, and Reno jumped down to take it away. “Come on, honey. Save that toy for next time.”
Molina had noted down the names of Secrets’ male workers. The detectives’ reports would cover all of them.
“Only one guy from Secrets came anywhere near Cher away from the club,” Reno said as she straightened up. “That guy she met her last night there.”
“The day before she was murdered.”
“Right.” Reno shivered as she sat again to sip strong, cooling coffee. “I think I know how to take care of myself. I’ve been at this a long time. Too long. But the money’s good and I come and go when I want, and I’ll be free days to go to my little girl’s school stuff when she’s older. When she’s in the school play, right, little star? If I hold up.” She laughed. “I look pretty good for my age, don’t I?”
Molina smiled. “I don’t know. What’s your age?”
“Guess.”
“Twenty-eight or nine?”
Reno preened. You could almost see a spotlight on her. “Add ten, honey.”
“Really?” Molina was honestly surprised. Reno was in great condition.
“I get in another ten years, I’ll have this kid in junior high and a nest egg for college. Then I can do nails at the Goliath or something.”
If, Molina thought, shutting her notebook, nobody ever caught her in a parking lot alone.
Chapter 5
Magic Act
The widening vee of seats unfurled like a fan. The audience filled the seats, a hydra-headed monster in miniature. Tiny pale faces glimmered beyond the spotlights like pearlescent fingernails.
From the front-row red-velvet chairs that curved into a smile to match the stage’s dark, grinning lip, the seating section lifted and expanded, making the faces dim into distant painted figures on a Chinese vase.
Most of the audience could never know that, to the performer, the seating section of a theater resembled a chasm, in time as well as in space. The spectators themselves became ignored attractions, mere curiosities, creatures trapped beyond the invisible “fourth wall” that every stage possessed: a cellophane curtain, a psychic force field.
The audience, by virtue of its assembly and its conspiracy of silence, its expectation of witnessing something, was not a mass of individuals anymore, but that ancient Greek-chorus embodiment of society at large. It was also the same thumbs-up, thumbs-down monster that had circled the gladiators in a Roman coliseum.
That ancient Roman audience had expected blood.
This contemporary Las Vegas one merely thirsted after amazement.
But even modern times were quickly reaching the point where blood was the only amazement left. At least in live performance.
And this performance was designed to amaze. The man who moved in the laser shafts of spotlights that raked the dark stage like dueling light sabers was tall, dark, and masked in sinister spots that resembled arcane tattoos in the theatrical lighting.
Unlike an actor, he could shatter the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience. That didn’t mean they were any more intimate to him, that ocean of whitecap faces bobbing gently now and then to cough or address a seat partner.
Such signs of inattention were not encouraged.
The man stepped into the upright coffin behind him, a carved and polished box fit for a vampire. A red velvet curtain lowered over it.
The masked man stepped through a breakaway back panel just as the curtain whisked up again to reveal an empty box.
He stepped through to confront an eerily similar figure to himself, a man in black everything, except for the mask. This man’s face was painted black. The smell of greasepaint hovered like a halo over the almost mirror images.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the intruder murmured.
“My God, what are you doing here?” The magician’s mechanical voice sounded even hoarser than normal. “My bodyguards—”