"Go on! Get outta here! You? Huh. Makes sense, then. Brother John. We'll give you a try. An audition, okay? Trial run. At least you're used to working nights, right?"
"When would you want this 'show' to run?"
"Ambrosia rules from seven to midnight. I guess we could stand an hour of genuine counseling then."
"The midnight hour--"
"The Midnight Hour! That's it. Baby, you got marketing vibes.
Yeah. Okay. Brother John I can stick for now. 'The Midnight Hour with Brother John.' Got it.
And then we do the billboards. Yeah."
"Uh, about the audition--"
"Oh, yeah. Take an hour or two. Me and Dwight--you'll like him; skinny white dude like you--will play we're typical call-ins; you counsel. That's all. You'll ace it. Got a nice voice, not too professional, you know? Real sincere, that's the key to my show.
And then we do those billboards. Oh, baby . . . l feel like a Hollywood producer. Any questions?"
"A lot. Like--"
"Oh, yeah, pay. What do shrinks get these days? I haven't seen one since I tried hypnosis for my weight. Say, what? Um. A hundred bucks a night. Naw, two. And we wanta go over the weekend, say five nights a week. Monday and Tuesday are dead anyway. That okay to start?"
Matt tried to do mental math and an examination of conscience at the same time; each canceled the other out. Like Scarlett, he would think about it tomorrow. Rearranging his seven P.M.--to three--A.M. shift at ConTact would he easy compared to adjusting to the idea of counseling as entertainment. Still . . .
"I'll audition, and if you like--"
"What's not to like?"--she glanced down at a notepad on her desk--"Matt? Or should I say, Brother John, you devil, you?"
Chapter 9
The Dead Don't Talk
Molina sat at her desk, staring at the crime scene photos from the Blue Dahlia. She had seen thousands of these: cut-and-dried, seriously unaesthetic photos that gave the word "graphic" a chilling new definition.
Lieutenant C. R. Molina was used to them. She saw details, clues, a puzzle, a crime scene, a case, a body. She didn't see a person. No one in crime work could see a person in every dead body and survive it. Oh, sure, the victim was a person when Molina interviewed survivors, or mentally pictured arresting the killer.
But that person appeared in the other photographs, the ones supplied to newspapers and run in obituary columns. These crime scene memorabilia were evidence: photos of abused and forsaken and unfeeling "remains" hastening toward earthly dissolution. To think of them as anything else was to court insanity.
Carmen though, Carman who sang old standards and watched black-and-white movies and wore silk-velvet dresses that had not required underwear originally, had never discovered a dead body before. A victim, a case, a puzzle? No. Carmen took it personally. Her car, part of the crime site. Her car, defaced. Her place of work and recreation and escape . . . tainted. Touched.
Discovered.
Molina should tell Alch and Su about her involvement, of course. But to tell was to kill Carmen. And Carmen was her only escape from the years and desktops of photographed remains.
The knock on her open office door was differential.
Alch Stood looking in, head lowered, expression quizzical. He resembled a graying Hardy boy.
Molina waved him in, toward a chair.
"Must be weird," he commented, eyeing the array of photos. "To find a body."
"I've seen a lot of bodies in a lot of conditions."
"But not unexpected like that. As at witness."
She nodded, volunteering that much. "It was a shock. Don't know why. I've seen a lot more gruesome crime scenes."
"But you were called in there. You knew what to expect."
Molina leaned forward, braced an elbow on her desk, fanned her supporting hand over her mouth. She nodded. "Makes you wonder if l was expected to discover the body."
Alch relaxed in the chair. "Made me wonder. I didn't know about you." He looked up, carefully. "Just how much of a regular at the Blue Dahlia are you?"
"There are a couple of restaurants l hang at. Mexican place. The B.D. But . . . my patterns aren't predictable. You know the hours."
He nodded. "It's a long shot. Still, if there's something in it--"
"If there is, he waited until l was in the right place to do the job."
Alch shook his head. "Nuts. But they all are. 'She left.' That mean anything to you?"
"Just the obvious. We all know abused women are most vulnerable just after they finally leave their abuser for good. Why do we say 'their abuser?' Isn't he the abuser of us all? Creeps who need to control other people to death, in order to feel alive themselves, are everybody's problem."
"You assume that's the motive here?"
"The message, anyway."
"You really want to go to the autopsy?"
"Yeah. It's been a while."
"Well, l advised the M.E. you'd be coming."
"Oh, good." Molina stood, swept the photos back into their folder. "He'll have the place lined with all the burn victims he can dig up."
"Me." Alch said on the way out, for he disliked autopsies much more than she did, being much more of a romantic, "it's the drowning victims I don't like. Luckily, there aren't a lot of those in Las Vegas."
****************
It had been more than a year since Molina had donned plastic goggles and latex gloves to stand over a stainless-steel autopsy table, trying not to smell the odors that decaying flesh is heir to.
All medical examiners were sadists in one thing: harassing civilians when they ventured into their grisly arena. Even a veteran cop like Molina was grist for their private horror show, though they especially relished novices, like reporters or would-be crime writers, in real life, as in the TV
show M*A*S*H, black humor was the only sane way to deal with constant carnage.
Rusty Bahr was one of those men who had outlived his youthful nickname. His hair had waned to the ear line while his yellowing eyebrows had waxed long and bushy enough to imprison a princess.
Privately, Molina called him "Grizzly," which did suit his line of work as well as his burly appearance.
He looked at her now over the trifocal lines in his goggles, a tall empire-builder of a man she could easily imagine taming darkest Africa in the nineteenth century. Medical examiners, like trial lawyers, had a knack for self-dramatization.
"This particular corpse stick in your craw, Lieutenant?"
The food metaphor was part of the morgue comedy revue.
"The body was found in a staged scene."
"Killed there too?"
"That's for forensics to say. But the marking was on a nearby vehicle, not on the body, so far as we know."
"Pretty straightforward body." Bahr glanced at the waxy flesh from which the first mannequin-grip of rigor mortis had long since fallen.
Fresh kills like this were a mockery of the human condition.
Naked, immutable; a preview of the fate to which all flesh comes.
After visiting the morgue a few times, and the decaying body vault, Molina had decided how her particular world should end, as Robert Frost had asked in his short, macabre poem. Nor in icy flesh imbedded in earth, but in fire- In Mart Devine's choice for Clifford Effinger: cremation.
"Her clothes," Molina said.
"Bagged and tagged upstairs. We deal with the story' scribed into the derma, Lieutenant, into bone and body tissue."
"The ligature was fatal? The stab in the throat an after-thought?"
"Looks like it."
"Strange pattern."
He nodded, bending nearer the mottled flesh of the woman's throat.
She was not a young woman. Nor the glamorous, model-thin young thing so picturesquely slain on camera in a zillion TV shows and films.
The medical examiner would exhume the facts dormant in this body: time of death; actual means; age; weaknesses; trauma.