"Watch? What are you talking about?"
"Cher."
"Cher? Her ex-husband, 'he dead.' Cher? What? Are you crazy?"
"A little."
The steady, absolute sanity of his tone worried her. The absolutely sane were the craziest of all.
"Look. I don't know what you think you're doing, but you are not to come here. Get it?"
"Too late," he pointed out, quite logically, still with that eerie over-controlled tone that she mistrusted with every instinct in her suspicious history.
"What's your problem?"
"You."
"Besides the obvious. I've never hidden the fact that I'd love to nail you."
He nodded. "You have this time."
"Enlighten me."
"That man you had me looking into."
"So?"
"You didn't tell me he was a murderer."
"I didn't know he was a murderer." Molina's throat squeezed shut with sudden dread. "Is he?"
"First, who is he?"
"I gave you the name and the facts. You ought to remember."
"Oh, I remember just perfectly swell. What I need to know is who he really is. To you. To whatever case you think you're working on."
" 'Think' I'm working on?" She tried to brush by, but he stepped in front of her. She pulled back, unhappy about retreating, but not ready to try anything else. Talk was always good while you were thinking of something else.
He seemed to think so too. "I don't know whether you're so stupid you don't know what you're doing--what you've done--or you're so dangerous you sent me out there to get that girl killed."
"What girl?"
"Cher Smith."
"The stripper. So what?"
"So everything! I pointed him right at her, thanks to my investigative work for you. She wouldn't be dead if you hadn't used me as your Judas goat."
"Wait a minute. Are you saying this--the stripper killing--had something to do with Nadir?"
"Are you saying you didn't suspect in advance that he might be involved in the earlier killings?"
"Look. I've had a long day--"
"So have I. And I had a long night before that."
"I just asked You to check out this guy. He was a very remote suspect."
"Now that's where we differ. I don't think he was that remote a suspect. I think he was a too-close-for-comfort suspect. I've had a little talk with your other 'helpers.' "
She remained silent; no one knew better when to ignore leading questions, or statements, than a cop.
"You've really been relying on the Circle Ritz gang on these cases. That's not according to your past M.O. There's some reason you're desperate enough to rely on amateurs."
"Look. I'm sorry she's dead, but I don't see any way this can tie into the two earlier murders."
"Except through you."
"Me? What about the second woman? The magician's assistant? Ring a bell, mighty Mystifying Max? She used to work for a magician around town years ago. Gandolph the Great.
Ever hear of him?"
He was silent for a long moment. Then he pulled her into the dark of the entry courtyard with him. She could feel his fevered breath on her cheek.
"I don't care about your deaths one and two. I don't care that you think Cher wasn't the third. I only care that she wouldn't have died if I hadn't come hunting your prey. This Nadir guy.
You've been notably off-the-record on these murders, Lieutenant. You've asked me to bird-dog for you, you've invited Matt Devine and even Temple into your inner sanctum of evidence.
Why? Why were you so suspicious of this guy? Why were you driven to use me, when you knew what a two-edged sword I could be? I don't like having dead girls on my conscience."
"And why do you?" She pulled away, though it took all her strength. "How did it come to dead stripers?"
"He's a bouncer at a strip joint."
"At Baby Doll's?"
"No, at the place Cher worked two nights ago. The place I got her out of."
"How, 'got her out of?' "
"I went there to get information on Nadir. She was working the club, an obvious rookie.
drunk as a duck on champagne. She knew a little about his whereabouts on the nights of the parking lot killings, so I suggested she sneak out and I'd meet her. He caught us. Cher said that she'd find work at another club, that it'd be all right. But she died the next night leaving that Club. Guess who probably did it?"
"I don't know who murdered her, but you've just given me plenty of reason to look into your story, because you're probably the last man she had anything to do with the day before her death."
She cut him off before he could finish drawing breath to speak again. "But what l find most unbelievable in all this is your stupidity. I'd expect it of a new uniform. They're always going soft on some pathetic hooker or stripper, and trying to get her off the streets. I thought you were a bit beyond that. That is such a rank, amateur thing to do--
"Don't talk to me like I'm one of your rookie detectives. You have no idea what I do, or did, or who l trashed or saved. I'm saying you sent me in there blind, without enough information, and l want the right stuff now."
"I see."
"No, you don't see." He came closer, grabbed her arm, hard.
"I got her to leave because it suited my purpose . . . your purpose. But it made this guy of yours mad; he acted like he owned that club, and everybody in it. He didn't like eating gravel and watching her leave with me. He wasn't the type to let it be. You didn't tell me he was capable of murder. You said he was just a pathetic tough, not a killer."
"I didn't think he was!" She wrenched her arm free. The skin burned even through her gabardine sleeve. when Max Kinsella got hold of a thing, he didn't let go easily. But his words still dug in when his fingers no longer did. She couldn't fault his fury. In his position, she'd feel it too. Was Nadir a killer? Had she had any suspicion that he was when she had asked Kinsella to find out about him?
"I basically' expected you to clear him," she said, rubbing her arm. "That's all. I needed to know he wasn't responsible. And you still can't prove that he was."
"I'm the one who saw him in that parking lot. He had me from behind, an elbow across the throat. A stranglehold. He could have killed me if I hadn't been ready for him. He could have killed Cher in a heartbeat."
"She doesn't show the pattern! Her killing is unconnected. It's gotta be."
"Because that's the evidence and your professional opinion? Or is that what you need to believe to clear your conscience?"
"Evidence." She bit out the word. "So far," she added reluctantly.
But her hedging seemed to shear off some of his edge. Even stone-strong evidence could develop splits and chips.
Kinsella leaned against the stucco garage wall, mollified enough to ease off a little. "All right.
I agree that the ID left on her implies another type of killer. But Nadir might just be that other type. You wouldn't have had me look into him if it weren't a possibility. What I want to know, need to know, deserve to know, is why you suspected this guy from LA. in the first place."
She thought. She thought for a long time, maybe a minute-something, and he waited like a cigar-store Indian: wooden, relentless, wearing the weight of the wrong she'd done him like a cloak.
And she had used him precisely because she wouldn't have to explain her motivation, as she would to one of her detectives. Now, here she was, having to explain in spades, and hating every second of it. This was her own worst scenario in living color. The only person it was worse for was Cher Smith, and she was dead.
She spoke at last, trying to keep her voice flat and expressionless.
"It's simple. Read my lips. 'She left.' On my car door; beside the first body. You noticed that something had happened to my car. Murderous graffiti. The only clear-cut case of the words
'she left' being left at the scene of the crime was at the Blue Dahlia. The body, which evidence now indicates was killed elsewhere and brought to that setting, was placed near my car. I had to assume a possibility that the placement was personal. If the dead woman had 'left,' had l also