Most torch singers caught the reflected sensual glow of the flames their lyrics celebrated. Molina was a cerebral singer. Her voice was something apart from Carmen the Performer. You couldn’t get a crush on her even while she crooned Gershwin’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” That made her an even more fascinating performer. The audience sensed something held back from them. Matt had heard that the secret of great acting was to always hold something back, leave the audience craving more. Something more to come, if only you can wait long enough, hold the applause, and … wait for the fireworks.
But even Molina’s vintage performing wardrobe was somehow didactic. This forties gown, that silk blue Dahlia above one ear perched on an out-of-period Dutch cut that was vaguely twenties decadent at the same time it was schoolgirl fifties. Her only makeup was dark lipstick, Bette Davis style. And Davis had been many things on the screen, all of them magnificent; sometimes the neurotic, but never the Vamp.
Matt ordered a deep-fried appetizer and a drink and gave himself the luxury that Molina never had given herself: thinking about her as a person, rather than a profession.
The trio behind her had suddenly become instrumental only.
Matt realized his dining-out Scotch was a drizzle of memory over ice cubes and Carmen was offstage. Time for him to “strike up the music and dance.” To her tune, of course.
Even at the Blue Dahlia, Molina was somehow in uniform.
Matt left a nice tip on the table and got up. He headed for the hallway and the second door on the right, straight on till morning, where her tiny dressing room was.
He knocked, and was invited in.
It was here she … they … had hatched the scheme of sending him to a professional call girl to lose the virtue that Kathleen O’Connor had wanted to capture for herself. As if one could acquire another’s virtue. As if virginity was a condition rather than a state of grace.
“Here we are again.” Molina acknowledged their mutual complicity in the call-girl scheme, gesturing to the round-seated wooden chair he had used before.
He watched her expression in the round mirror of the vintage dressing table. She hadn’t turned to welcome him, and he understood that. Guilt between even casual coconspirators was as much a barrier as the one between performer and audience. Every stage comes equipped with an invisible “fourth wall,” a division that is only in the mind of both performer and audience. A barrier.
“What do you have for me?” Molina had finally turned around, her workaday tone neutralizing the persona of Carmen.
“A way out. For both of us. Vassar accidentally fell to her death.”
“Says who?”
“Says the woman who was on the cell phone with her at the time, the woman she called after I left the Goliath suite.”
“Woman?”
“A volunteer counselor. I have her name, address, rank, cell phone number. She’s real, Carmen. She has a convincing explanation for Vassar’s death, and it wasn’t either of our faults.”
“Some woman? How did you find her?”
“She found me.”
“The radio station. Your show. That attracts nuts, don’t you know that by now?”
“So does your profession.”
“So be mad. I was only trying to help you.”
“Your advice was impeccably hard-headed. It was just wrong for me. And for Vassar, as it turned out.”
“What do you know about a call girl? There was semen in the body. If not yours, whose? Hookers, and especially high-end call girls, won’t lick a stamp without a condom these days. It does make one wonder about her previous stand. If things had gotten tight and you’d hadn’t been contacted by your convenient phone witness, I’d have had to ask you for a sample. Where does that fall on the spectrum of sin? Probably venial, compared to actual copulation. You didn’t even screw her, which was the whole point. Did you?”
“No. I didn’t even screw her. And that was the whole point. I was the first person who didn’t even screw her. Can you understand what that might mean to someone like her?”
“Maybe.” Said sourly. Molina was clinging tight to her professional distance. Compassion was an enemy to a cop.
“So what’s the latest story on Vassar’s last gasp?”
“You and that coroner. Always cynical. Always laughing at Death in fear of Death laughing at you. I’ve got good news. At least to me and my conscience. Vassar was happy, okay? She didn’t regard me as a flop. We made talk, not love, and sometimes talk is better than sex. I felt better for talking to her. Apparently she felt better for talking to me. She called this counselor she’d been avoiding right away. Deborah Ann Walker. She came to WCOO to find me and tell me that. Nice lady. Like Vassar. They were both classy ladies. The hooker and the reformer. Not so different, after all. Maybe the lady lieutenant figures in there somehow. Carmen, I know you tried to help me. I tried to do what you said. I failed. I chickened out. And that seems to have made all the difference. To Vassar anyway. And to me. I didn’t need to ‘lose’ anything about myself. I needed to give something more to someone else.”
A knock on the door. The barman with a tray. Two Scotches on the rocks.
Molina waved him in and him out again. She drank from her glass before resuming the conversation.
“This Walker woman was on the phone with Vassar after you left her at the Goliath?”
“She was on the phone with her just before Vassar fell.”
“Then where’s the frigging phone?”
Matt outstared her sudden fury. “That’s your job, to find it. My job is to tell you the truth you don’t want to hear. You didn’t do me any favors with your advice. But it worked out in a strange way, after all. I’d give right now what I was so desperately trying to keep Kathleen O’Connor from getting to get Vassar back, but I can’t be sorry I met her. I can’t be sorry I … failed to be a good customer. I’m glad I was a better friend.”
Molina pushed a hand through her unmussable hair. “You and Vassar, making fools of us all. Kathleen O’Connor and me. You’re right. I was fighting O’Connor through you and Vassar. I had convinced myself that this would heal everybody’s ills, you and the call girl. I wasacting like a goddamn social worker instead of a cop. Here’s the hardened call girl. I send her an ethical man. Here’s the beset ex-priest who actually cares. I send him to a woman who regards sex as richly rewarded therapy. A marriage made in Heaven, right? Except I no longer believe any marriage is made in Heaven.”
“That’s where you went wrong.”
Carmen/Molina glared at him, saying and singing nothing.
“You were right. Vassar and I were very good for each other. That’s what Deborah’s testimony tells me. We were both better off for meeting each other.”
“Deborah.” Molina pulled the fake blue Dahlia from her hair, tossed it onto the dressing table. “That’s the name of a judge in the Old Testament, isn’t it?”
Matt nodded.
“And she’s your witness to Vassar’s last words?” Matt nodded again.
Molina sighed, rested her head on her hand, which was braced on the dressing table pillar. “Don’t you see why I interfered? Kathleen O’Connor was every sexual predator I never caught. You were my … Mariah. My innocent daughter who’s growing into the real world that hides scum like that, whatever the gender. I wanted to see you safely through adolescence, Matt. Maybe the means were cynical, but the intent was … honest.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Sure. You and me, we’re dinosaurs. True. Our work, our vocations, require us to live up to public images, rigorously honest, severe, sexless, perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. Recognize the dogma? Except we’re human. We want to preserve what’s innocent in us, but we can’t afford to live by it in the real, ugly world.