“Actually, though I was on lunch break at the Dumpster out back at the probable time of the murder, I did happen upon it soon after. And I saw a lot of suspicious characters slinking in and out of the model rooms beforehand. There was the late Miss Beth Blanchard herself, who had a fetish for rearranging pictures. There was a squat, chubby man in a linen suit who seemed to be spying on everybody. There was Mr. Rafi Nadir, who also seemed to be watching everybody. I noticed a nondescript man with a beard who was keeping a close eye on the murder victim as well. That list does not include a rather scruffy, tall fel-low wearing a great quantity of cow leather, who apparently had come in the back way. I saw him watching La Blanchard hang pictures, but then he just vanished. He was wearing boots and sunglasses.”
“Hmmm.” Miss Louise does not allow her comment to es calate into anything so pleasant as a purr. “It could have been the hit man … or I wonder if that could have been your roomie’s previous live-in, Mr. Max Kinsella? He has been strangely absent lately.”
“That is fine with me. It is a lot less crowded on the king-size without him. Do you think he could be working undercover at Maylords?”
“No more so than you,” she says acidly.
I immediately get the implication. “I have made a lot of progress, Louise, it is just not obvious yet.”
“And when will it be obvious? At the rate people are dying in Maylords, customers will have to schedule s�ances to consult
the staff.”
“Clients,” I correct her. “Only low-brow establishments have ‘customers.’”
“I see.” She looks me over as if I were human belly-button lint. “So you are well rested, but you have learned nothing
useful.”
“What I have learned will be very hard to convey to these insensitive humans. I will need to develop a long-range plan.
Do not rush me, Louise. I must have time to lay my plans.”
“You sound like a hen.”
Before I can respond to this rank accusation, Miss Louise stares in the direction of the parking lot.
“I see your roomie is going off with the sinister-looking Nadir guy that gave Lieutenant Molina the heebie-jebbies. Maybe you should follow her.”
“No,” I say, surprising the vibrissae off of her. “Miss Temple can take care of herself, but there is something else only I, and you, can do, and it is not around here.”
She presses me for details, but I only have a hunch, and am not about to blow it. Besides, I am eager to get outside and eavesdrop on what is going on inside Molina’s car.
Chapter 44
I t ‘ s M y P a r t y …
In the Maylords parking lot, Molina had hurled herself into the passenger seat of the Crown Vic and sat there, arms crossed on her chest, staring through the windshield into the glare of the Las Vegas lateafternoon sun.
Morrie Alch got in, and started the engine. The fan, set on high, washed them with lukewarm air.
“Su do any prosecutable damage?” she asked.
Alch chuckled. “You got eyes in the back of your head, don’t you? No. Just cooled him down some. I get a charge out of how she can ice those macho guys. She looks so dainty and acts so alpha.”
“Yeah.” Molina sighed. “The psychology of surprise. I could never use that. I’m too big. For a woman.” “Not in my book.”
She shot him a glance, half surprise, half warning. She didn’t encourage fraternizing.
Alch figured this was no time to accommodate what Carmen Molina didn’t encourage.
“This is bad,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“Very bad. Want to tell me why?”
“No.”
“Need to tell me why?”
She nailed him with a don’t-mess-with-me glance, then, seeing it wasn’t working, sighed again.
“Off the record,” he said. “Out of the ball park. Like we, weren’t cops, weren’t superior and inferior. Like we were . veterans of the same war, reminiscing years after.”
“You’re not anybody’s inferior.”
“Chain of command says so. But screw chain of command. Command isn’t going to help you on this one, is it? When we
get back to headquarters, why don’t we grab our own cars? I can meet you at, oh, some barbecue joint or pizza parlor. We can talk and no one will overhear us.”
Molina shook herself out of her atypical funk long enough to eye him suspiciously. “Is this a date you’re proposing, Alch?” “Naw, Lieutenant. It’s a friendly bull session between coworkers.”
“Bullshit.” She rubbed her left temple with the heel of her hand. “All right. Tell me where.”
He named a favorite of his, just a strip shopping center BBQ joint, and gave her the coordinates.
His lieutenant nodded, as surly as his daughter when she had been a typical teenager. Thank God Vicky was safely married and someone else’s problem. Doing fine, really, past all that youthful single-girl angst and on to young-married stress.
He’d been in the army. Germany. Well remembered how the noncoms had taken the green lieutenants in hand. They were underlings, but they looked out for those naive, smart, upwardly-bound doofuses with something bordering on paternal affection. Didn’t envy them the pressure one little bit. No way. So this was not his first duty call baby-sitting a suddenly rudderless superior officer. Usually the young lieutenants were blind drunk on the town, though. They weren’t blind-mad female furies, which was another critter entirely.
It was probably career suicide to get too friendly with hisfemale boss, but … God knew he knew how to raise a daughter into a woman. And in some unnamable way, the formidable C. R. Molina had always struck him as a motherless child.
He wasn’t even sure she would show, but drove his Honda Civic to the place they’d agreed upon. At least he’d get good ribs and a light beer out of the deal, either way. Light beer tasted like a urine sample, but his metabolism didn’t burn off selfindulgence like it used to now that he was fifty.
How old was Molina? Nowhere near her fifties, for sure. Maybe forty, though. She was notorious for having no personal life beyond her only daughter. Mariah. Must be eleven or twelve now. Alch winced. Bad age. Bitchy age. Going through all that social and hormonal upheaval. No picnic. Not for a single mother. Not for a single father.
Because he’d done it. Raised a daughter pretty much by himself. Got through “training” bras and the unspeakable tampon transition, and all those sticky intrasex issues that were embarrassing even when you were unrelated and middle-aged. Vicky never alluded to that old stuff, but she treated him with affection and an expected amount of tolerance. He was her “old man” now, and she could never imagine that he had ever been anything else to anybody else, especially her mother.
Alch was musing on that when he went through the food line. Then the rich smell of hot smoke-flavored sauce returned him to the present. He found an isolated table and now sat nursing his beer. Fewer calories that way. He wondered if he should wager with himself whether Molina would show up.
She did, entering the place like a SWAT team member forced to go through a school cafeteria line. She scoped out the
people in line, checked out the tables, spotted him, all in one second flat.
He nodded from across the room. She grabbed a tray and shuffled through the long line of options like any bewildered cafeteria customer. It was hard to pick a meal in a few split seconds.
They’d each ordered and paid for themselves. Only way Molina would allow it, he knew.
Man, that woman would be hard to date.
Not that Alch did that much. Got out of the habit when he was raising Vicky. She was paramount. His kid. And now she was gone. Job over. Position phased out. Except for his day job.
Alch made a minor effort to rise as Molina brought her brown tray to his table, but her hand waved him back down, like a
faithful dog.
She sat and removed her plates from the tray, then frowned at his place setting.