“Thanks, Steve.” Molina watched him set the tray on the opposite drawer pillar like an offering. “I love to impress company with my lavish backstage perks.”
Steve, a toothy guy with receding gray hair, grinned. “Courtesy of the management. We’re glad to have you back.”
He winked at them both in the mirror as he left.
“They pay you for this?” Matt asked suddenly.
“Yeah, they pay me for this.” Molina sounded indignant. “I wouldn’t do an amateur gig. Lots of cops moonlight. This is less conflict of interest than most.”
“I didn’t mean…what I meant is they’re happy to pay to have you back.”
She leaned forward to hand him a lowball glass richly amber with about three ounces of scotch. He sipped. Johnnie Walker Black. Very happy to have her back.
He sipped again, feeling tension drain down his arms like a blood-letting. “This is the first time I’ve felt out of that woman’s reach for two weeks.”
Molina lifted her own glass in a distant toast. “Happy to hear that. What’s the reason?”
“A bodyguard?” he said, laughing.
“You aren’t kidding.” She crossed her legs.
The motion would have been coy in another woman clothed in floor-length vintage black velvet, but now it simply revealed the small, lethal-looking gun attached to her ankle by some industrial-strength black holster of nylon webbing.
Matt almost choked on a quarter ounce of scotch too good to spray on the concrete floor. “Do you always do that?”
“Always,” she said. “Nobody’s going to die because I was in a Luby’s Cafeteria with my gun in the car.”
He nodded, remembering the case, another massacre in a public place by a single psycho gone ballistic. And that brought them back to Miss Kitty. “I can’t carry a gun. I can’t shoot her. So that makes me a perpetual victim?”
Molina nodded while she savored her drink. “This ought to oil the old pipes for the next set. You are keeping me up late tonight, Mr. Midnight.” She twisted to check a small clock on the dressing table.
“No problem. I’m not due at work for a couple of hours.”
She glanced at his glass. “Can you drive —?”
“I had a heavy meal.”
“Then enjoy. I imagine you haven’t enjoyed much lately. Back to your…bête noir? Is that better than ‘nemesis’? Here’s the deal. Here’s what every woman with an abusive ex on her tail finds out. Nothing and nobody can help you. If you were a woman, I’d advise you to get a gun and shoot the guy the next time he showed up. No, I wouldn’t. I can’t. But that’s the only defense they’ve honestly got, a lot of them. I am so damn sick of picking up the phone and hearing some woman was blown away in the parking lot of her office, or a grocery store, or a fast-food joint, or a day-care facility, or a school by some maniac man who can’t let go because he can’t live without a victim.
“And it’s always just when the woman finally gets a little starch and tries to get away, when she’s defending her kids where she couldn’t defend herself, when she’s being a heroine instead of a whipping girl, and then they kill her.
“Enough about my job frustrations. Now, about yours. Your job is to foil this woman. You can’t give her what she wants.”
“That’s what Letitia said.”
“Letitia.”
“My producer.”
“Oh, right. The Lane Bryant black Venus. You know, this Kitty woman is nuts. She really wants you.”
“Thanks.”
“No.” Molina leaned forward, elbows on her knees, a hoydenish posture for the elegant gown. She sipped premium scotch. “She’s dead serious about that. She wants you untouched by any woman. Weird. It’s not an uncommon attitude among abusive men, but women aren’t usually so…macho.”
“That biker outfit was plenty macho.”
“Why you?”
Matt wanted to shout, Because she can’t torment Max Kinsella. She can’t even find Max Kinsella.
But he couldn’t. He did have a few clues as to why he was the designated Kinsella standin, though.
“She likes to corrupt priests.”
“You know the answer then.”
He nodded. “Letitia laid it out for me, too.”
Molina sipped. Her electric blue eyes were softening to the color of natural blue topaz, Virgin Mary Blue, mild and misty. “You need an understanding woman who will remove that which Miss Kitty covets.”
“Who won’t get killed for the honor,” Matt added drily. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“I don’t think so. She’s nervous. That’s why she’s darting around, threatening these women. Once the deed is done, you’re worth nothing to her. The whole house of cards falls down. Anticipate her, disarm her. Hell, sleep with her then, if you want to. It would kill her.”
“Carmen. I’m not like that. I don’t do these things lightly.”
“That’s where she’s got you! You want to be got, cling to your odor of sanctity. You want to live, do what you must.”
“‘And do it well.’”
“Huh?”
“A quote from a songwriter you’d never sing. Well, maybe you would.” Matt took a deep, burning swallow of scotch.
“Any candidates to predate Miss Kitty?” Molina probed, perhaps a bit too curious.
“Nobody I’m willing to endanger,” he said shortly, swallowing without the benefit of scotch, the afternoon’s interlude in the Circle Ritz hallway returning on aching waves of might-have-been.
“No volunteers?” she pressed. Matt noticed that her lipstick had left a red half-moon on the edge of her glass, decided through a veil of pleasant haze that they were both relaxing too much, discussing things too dangerous to act on. Guns and sex and psychosis. “A good-looking guy like you?
“Janice? Letitia?” She left one name hanging until he thought he’d strangle on it. Why had he ever thought Molina might become an ally? She was a policewoman. She always needed to know the full story.
“No woman strong enough to risk.”
“Ah.” She leaned back, elbows braced on the twin pillars of the dressing table, the drink glowing topaz against the black of her gown.
Molina?
God, he must be drunk.
But the idea started caroming through his brain. She was armed and dangerous. She just said she thought he was good-looking. Lots of people did, but Molina saying it…thinking it.
If he was caught in some sexless limbo because of his religious past, she was a single mother in a man’s world. What kind of personal life did she have? Did she dream, as Janice did, of an Invisible Man who would come through her window, a puppet with no strings attached, like Errol Flynn on a rope, and go away leaving no traces, no obligations, no guilt, like a dream?
But there were always hordes of swordsmen after Errol Flynn as Don Juan or as Robin Hood, and a dalliance with a wanted man always backfired on the woman, even if her ankle was armed. Molina was not invulnerable, just professional.
She was not strong enough to risk, but he didn’t dare tell her that.
“I can’t. I can’t involve any woman in this who might be the object of Kitty’s murderous attention.”
“Hmm,” said Molina. Carmen. Looking lazy and contemplative, looking pretty luscious, as a matter of fact, maybe because of what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. Where had his friendly neighborhood earth mother gone? Luscious? He must be deranged.
Matt set the half-full glass of scotch on the small table near the wall. He had to be on live radio in under two hours.
“I just came here for some professional advice.”
Her eyes suddenly focused in points like acetylene torch flames.
“Professional. From the mouths of babes. That’s it, Matt!”
“What?”
“You need a professional. Someone Kitty wouldn’t even notice. A pro.”
“With a gun?”
“No! Listen. This is Las Vegas. Las Vegas. You get yourself a six-hundred-dollar-a-night room at the Oasis. The Goliath. Whatever. You tip everyone in sight, and you ask the bellman to send up some private entertainment. Tip him a hundred.”