Nothing was sicker than his feelings about Vassar’s death.
Matt sat up, his bare feet on the wood floor, which felt slick and cool.
Somebody must miss Vassar. She hadn’t lived, or worked, in a vacuum. Maybe he could find out who. Tell them, him or her, about her last hours, which hadn’t been too bad really … or was that hubris?
Matt shook his head, trying to make sense of the crowded hours: Vassar, and then Molina breaking in on him at home with such awful news, and next Temple, asking questions he didn’t want to answer. Then Leticia baby-sitting him through the lonely hours live on radio, and Kathleen calling to say he was free, and finally Jerome, Jerry Johnson from seminary, showing up in the parking lot with fifteen years of baggage invisibly dragging behind him, expecting Matt to help lift the load.
Punishment, he supposed, for trying to turn against years of conditioning.
He got up and trudged to the shower, sloughing his gipajamas. Martial arts-wear as sleepwear. Was there some underlying statement in his habits? Did he need to be on guard even as he slept? Especially as he slept? Yes.
Hot water, then cold may have cleared his head, but not his heart.
Dressed, Matt went into the main room, not surprised that the hour was too early for anything except extra z’s.
Maybe he would drive somewhere, to an all-night fast-food place. Eat breakfast as the sun rose over the mountains at the valley’s eastern edge.
His wallet and keys lay on one of the small cube tables that formed an impromptu coffee table in front of the sofa.
He swept the items up, designated for opposite pants pockets, then stopped to study the key ring.
Something was different. Wrong. Missing.
His heart leaped to the top of the Mount Charleston, seeking the first rays of sun.
It was Monday morning, and Kathleen O’Connor’s worm Ouroboros ring was gone. The bad news was that sometime in the recent past she had been in his rooms, had moved among .his things, perhaps even while he slept, to accomplish the sleight of hand of the missing ring. The good news was that, for the first time, he truly believed that she had given up on him.
Liberation felt uplifting, like a good confession. Like saying the Apostle’s Creed and starting a whole new day, a whole new life.
But one man’s liberation was often another’s loss. The snake had left Eden.
Where was it slithering next?
Chapter 25
… Jailhouse Hard Rock
“Okay,” Molina said, shaking the multivitamin energy drink-to-go on her desk.
Breakfast.
Everyone in the room was eating on the run, or on the meeting break: Alfonso, Barrett, Su, and Alch.
Alfonso had a McDonald’s cholesterol special on his lap, sausage and cheese predominating. Barrett munched a sports nutrition bar. Su had coffee from the Office Urn of All Sediment and an Almond Joy candy bar. Alch, he went for a Weight Watchers bar, munching in time with Barrett.
Molina eyed her troops, aware how their very differences, physical and psychological, made them good partners. Too good for this case that cut so close to her own bones. Yet she had to do her job. Or seem to.
“I saw Rothenberg,” Molina announced. “Vassar was her girl, and Rothenberg believes that her girls are too mentally, physically, and socially healthy to off themselves, or to get offed. She won’t be yelling police incompetence if we just bury this investigation. Case closed?”
“No way,” Su mumbled through three hundred luscious calories that would not put an ounce on her tensile little frame, Molina reflected. “A call girl dies. Chances are ninety-to-one it’s murder.”
“No evidence,” Alfonso countered.
Molina took a deep breath. It was now or never. Do her job or save her rear.
“I don’t like that bellman with Alzheimer’s,” she said. “The kind of tips they get for playing matchmaker, I don’t believe he never noticed a thing.”
“Lots of that sort of traffic at a big place like the Goliath,” Su said. “I doubt those women even remember the faces they saw the night before, and they get paid plenty.”
“What do you suggest?” Alch asked Molina. Morrie always recognized when she was leading a horse to water.
“Bring the bellman in. Sweat him. Let me know when you’re ready.”
Alch nodded.
Barrett spoke up. “Whatever the bellman says, there’s not a mark on her that wasn’t caused by hitting neon at eighty miles an hour. Some bruises, a lot of internal damage. She could have dived. But Rothenberg has a political stake in representing hooking as safe and sane.”
Molina nodded, waiting for their respective partners to bow in.
“It’s not good PR,” Alch offered, trying not to look lustily at Su’s half-eaten candy bar. “A dead call girl when you’re a national spokeswoman for hookers’ rights to choose? Rothenberg might know more. Maybe somebody was moving in on her operation. It’s pretty passkey. The girls are gung-ho about wanting to do what they do. An old-school pimp would be a wolf among sheep.”
“Interesting,” Molina agreed. “Rothenberg’s bled the local media for all the feature stories she can get. She might be ripe for plucking, and her girls too. Vassar might have been approached first to change handlers.”
“What if she went for the idea?” Su asked, sitting forward on a chair she already perched on like a sparrow.“What if she’d been recruited by someone else, and Rothenberg saw her libertarian utopia looking shaky? Would she kill to defend it?”
“Even more interesting,” Molina granted. “And then there’s the string of deaths of near-apparent women of the night. You know which ones I mean?”
“Yeah.” Alch burped. That Weight Watchers bar must have been heavy consumption for him. He shrugged apology, but was too jived on his idea to blush for his social sins. “First there was that woman’s body dumped at the Blue Dahlia parking lot. ‘She left,’ was painted on the neighboring car. Yours, as I recall, Lieutenant.”
“You don’t have to remind me, Morrie.”
“Right. Anyway, Su and I solved that one. Some weirdo had killed her for not being a shady lady, can you believe it?” he asked Alfonso and Barrett.
“And there was that young stripper, Cher Smith,” Su put in. She was competitive with her elder, Alch, even though, or especially because, they were partners. “We lucked out when her killer tried to attack a strip-club costume-seller who was armed with pepper spray.”
“Right,” Molina said too quickly.
The less anyone dwelled on that recent episode the better she’d feel personally. The fact was that a mere civilian had lured and trapped the killer, pathetic as the murderer had turned out to be.
“We’ve still got one outstanding,” Su noted unhappily, folding her candy bar wrapper into very tight, neat origami.
Buddha bless overachieving third-generation Asian-Americans, Molina thought.
“That’s the broad,” Alfonso said, Egg McMuffin sticking to his teeth, “they found in the church parking lot about the same time as the Blue Dahlia dame.”
God bless old-time cops of whatever ethnic heritage who never let go.
“Gloria Fuentes,” Barrett added with narrowed eyes, “was no shady lady. She was a retired magician’s assistant. Sure, they’re all legs and cleavage, but this lady was over the hill, pardon me. She’d been out of the performance game for years. Hell, her main magician, Gandolph the Great, had quit performing to sniff out fake mediums years ago. She was no spring chicken, and she died in a church parking lot, for Gawd’s sake, not in the parking lot of a trendy restaurant-nightclub like the Blue Dahlia, pardon me, Lieutenant, for your patronage.”
“The Blue Dahlia hasn’t had any crime calls except that one,” Molina noted.
“But that was a doozy. Murder One,” Barrett chortled. Yes, chortled. Molina turned to Alch, whose insight she could always depend upon.