Rafi shook his head. “I never thought I’d see her again.”
“Good … or bad … that you finally did?”
“I don’t know.” He siphoned Sprite down to the ice cubes. “All I know is everything turned crappy after we split.” She’s gone.
Temple recalled the two words scrawled on Molina’s car outside the Blue Dahlia nightclub and restaurant.
Later those same words had magically showed up on the midriff of Gandolph the Great’s dead ex-assistant in the Las Vegas medical examiner’s facility.
How many romantic hearts had that primitive jungle beat been pounded into: She’s gone. He’s gone. It was in her own blood.
It had echoed eternally when Max had disappeared with no word.
She could understand Rafi Nadir’s confusion and uncertainty. What did that make her? Make him?
Only human.
“You’re a strange little duck,” he said.
“Me?”
“I’ve been brushed off by bimbos with diseases that’d make your DNA curl. You … you’re different.”
“I’m not-”
“No. I get that part. You’re not up for grabs. I don’t get why you bother with me when nothin’s in it for you, or me. Or why you’re so nosy about murdered strippers and homicide lieutenants when you’re a PR woman, for God’s sake. I shouldn’t be giving you the time of day. I don’t know why I am.”
“Maybe,” Temple suggested, “you’re really a nice guy. Somewhere in there.”
“No,” he said. “Not really. It’s you that’s way off-base.”
That’s when she began to regret being here. With him. Not much redeemable social value there. Still, if she could figure out how he and a straight arrow like Molina had ever gotten together, had conceived a child together, she might know why Molina was such a bulldog about incriminating Max in something.
Temple had to concede to herself that she was becoming exhausted by Molina’s eternal hints and allegations about Max, by how the woman used her position to harass Temple … and Max by proxy.
A twang of honesty made Temple also admit to herself that it hadn’t done their relationship any good. Temple could be as loyal as a Boy Scout oath, but the stress and suspicion had worn her down. Even pit bulls had to let go finally, out of sheer exhaustion.
“Say.”
Temple looked up. Rafi Nadir was regarding her almost sympathetically.
“I just meant:’ he said, “that you’re a whole different ball game than Carmen.”
“Was she always so buttoned down?” When he frowned at the expression, which didn’t mean much in an inborn burqa worldview, she went on. “Why is it she judges everybody by some inflexible standard, and doesn’t cut the rest of us any slack?”
He was nodding now, either a smile or a smirk (depending on your point of view) tilting the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah. She was always hard to read. That sorta was what fascinated me.”
Temple was fascinated by the fact of any man being fascinated by Molina. She knew her eyes probably widened.
Rafi would like that, saucer-eyed female audience. It would soothe his male ego.“I wasn’t used to women like that,” he
said.
“Like what?”
“Women trying to be like men. You’re right. I liked parts of it. Other parts-” He shook his head, his mouth twisting into
distaste as if the Sprite in his glass had turned to vinegar.
“Was that what you had in common? Excuse me, but you were both from cultures with a strong tradition of stomping on women.”
He stared at her, his dissolute hawk’s face focused totally on her.
Temple swallowed without having even sipped her white wine spritzer. (She knew the management; the management owed her. So she could order an effete white wine spritzer in a strip club. Or at least this strip club. And get it darn cheap too.) Temple picked up her spritzer. Sipped. Tried to look buttoned up and cool and calm. Like Molina.
Rafi burst out laughing. “You nailed it. I was a sexist pig, trying to get with a little looser male-female culture. She was an uptight servile broad, trying to get ahead in a very wired male sexist-pig environment. We were made for each other.”
Bitter as the last words were, a thrum of truth underlay them.
“So what happened?” Temple asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Fact is, Molina’s on my boyfriend’s case. The more I know about where she comes from, the more I know about where
he’s going.”
“He that Anglo dreamboat I saw you with at the opening?”
“No! Matt’s just a friend.”
Rafi shrugged. “You knew who I meant right off. Just a friend? Couldn’t tell it by me. Kinda strange, isn’t it, how the dead guy in the Murano looked so much like him?”
“Creepy, but Matt has nothing to do with that crowd. He was there with Janice Flanders.”
“He `just a friend’ of hers too?”
“Uh . I don’t know. She’s divorced.”
“And you got a boyfriend.” Rafi’s desert-dark eyes drilled into hers.
“Right. My boyfriend wasn’t anywhere near Maylords, thank God, otherwise Molina would have made him on the murder.
Trust me. She’s had it in for him ever since a killing at the Goliath Hotel where he was working, over a year ago.”
Rafi nodded all through her little speech. He looked about as convinced as Molina had when Temple had tried to explain
her personal situation in the past.
What was it about her? Didn’t she look as truthful as an A-plus lie-detector graph on sight? She certainly felt that way.
“About Carmen and me.” Rafi’s fingers played with his Sprite glass as idly as if it had contained straight vodka.
Appearances were deceiving, Temple reminded herself. She had seen Rafi with a glass of clear iced liquid half a dozen times at strip joints when she had been trying to be a one-woman amateur undercover operative to save Max’s skin. And never once had it dawned on her that he was drinking soda pop.
“About Carmen and you,” she prompted.
He smiled. “You can’t wait to get the goods on her, can you? I almost feel sorry for her.”
“That would be a first! Anyone feeling sorry for the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD!”
“Is that what they call her?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“She was a maiden once, but she wasn’t always iron.”
Temple pasted on her stock deeply inquisitive look and kept silent. That had always gotten her a revealing monologue or two when she had been a TV news reporter.
She was innately inquisitive, and had always been looked on as harmless as a head-cocked West Highland white terrier. As an independent woman she had come to loathe her nonlethal appearance. Except that people routinely forgot that terriers were bred to root out vermin. Mercilessly. Which worked to her advantage, didn’t it? Sometimes “cute” was camouflage.
Rafi Nadir obviously found her harmless enough to bare his soul to … or past parts of it.
“We were both token minorities on a force notorious for ethnic prejudice.” His eyes grew distant. People’s did, when they were zeroing in on their pasts. “Maybe we each envied something about the other. She was so wary and controlled, had tobe, like a panther. I was-it was a macho place and time, and I had that down-but I wasn’t quite the right kind. So. She toned me down. I pumped her up. It worked for a while.”
“Was she always so unfeminine?”
“Some women came into police work early. They were all female. Not cute like you. Pointed. Nails. Heels. Tits. Caused a lot of the wrong kind of trouble. Most cops have wives who find the job competition enough, much less the temptation of women cops. Carmen, she went the other way. All business, no gloss. That sorta intrigued me. I tried to help her live up to her name.”
“The opera, you mean?”
“Yeah. I know something about opera, at least what they were named.”
“Did she … sing when you knew her?”
“No.” He folded his arms on the slick Formica tabletop, leaned closer.