The woman had paused by the back door on the driver’s side of the four-door sedan to unlatch the hard little jeweled bag. She brought out something black and oblong. A remote control. The car’s rear window opened with a can-opener whirr.
It sliced open on a band of red hair. Matt’s heart stopped, but the window kept descending until a third of the way down. He saw frightened eyes and a duct-taped mouth, like a robot’s featureless silver orifice pasted onto a human face.
Matt’s heart throbbed like a jungle drum as he recognized not the fractured face but the mane of red hair: the teenaged fan from last night at the radio station parking lot.
The window was rising again like a dry dark tide, obscuring the terrified eyes and obscenely cheerful red hair. Had Kitty chosen the girl because she had been there, or because her hair was red?
“She’s just an —” he began.
“Innocent bystander?” Kitty tucked the remote control back into her purse as casually as if it was a cigarette case. “My favorite kind. Besides, I don’t buy your assumption that anyone is innocent. Even you.”
“I never claimed I was.”
“You claimed you were a good priest.”
“A good priest isn’t innocent. A priest needs knowledge of evil.”
“You must be an even better priest now,” she said, slithering forward like vamp on a nighttime soap opera.
“A priest needs knowledge of evil,” he repeated, “like a seductress needs a touch of innocence to be believable. Seducing me won’t work.”
“Just remember the girl in the backseat. Next time she might be somebody you really know.”
He choked back his anger at her constant threats, her theatricality. Did she need to be the star of her own show this much? Apparently. And what did that tell him about her?
“Relax,” she was saying. “I’ve planned a quiet evening for just the two of us. And” — her dark head jerked over her shoulder toward the closed window — “she can’t see us. No one inside the car can see out except the driver. Aren’t you wondering who the driver is?”
He hadn’t considered that. If Kitty was not alone tonight, if she had a hostage, she might also have an accomplice. An accomplice was needed for what? Chauffeuring? Ferrying captives…carrying bodies?
“A quiet evening —?” he repeated to gain time.
“Sure.” She walked around to the car’s front passenger side.
He heard the heavy metal door open, then Kitty began unloading objects onto the car’s long black hood. Two champagne flutes. A silver ice bucket. A green bulbous bottle of Perrier-Jouët twined by painted art nouveau flowers.
“Come here,” she said.
He didn’t, of course.
“Come here or I’ll have to get my petite straight razor from my purse and attempt to cut that poor child’s duct tape off.”
She poured one tall flute too full of champagne, and waited.
He moved in her direction, around the front of the car, wondering if her anonymous driver had orders to run him down.
But the engine stayed dormant and only the bubbles in the long tall glass moved.
They spun frantically for the lip of the glass, pearly strings and ropes twirling up like deep sea divers trying to outrun the bends. Bubbles, tiny bubbles of frantic, tiny final breaths.
A tearful bound girl trapped in a stranger’s car with her mouth taped, breathing anxiously through her nose, fighting for each breath as congestion clogged her sinuses and nostrils.
“Let her go.”
“No.”
“Let her go, or I go.”
“You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”
He shrugged, walked away, turned his back on the bubbles.
“You don’t dare risk it,” her hoarse whisper called after him.
He heard furious heel clicks, rapid, angry.
The whirr of a car window opening. The driver showing himself? Pointing a gun?
He kept walking.
Heard a muffled cry.
Turned.
Kitty stood beside the rear car door, now gaping open, the young woman tumbled to the asphalt in a fetal position, still bound, still gagged. Eyes still wide open.
“There. She’s out. On her own. I’ll leave her here. Now, come back.”
Kitty strode around to the car’s long front hood gleaming like a black steel coffin and lifted the heavy champagne bottle, a hostess as impervious as patent leather.
“It’s rude to walk away when you’re the guest of honor.”
At least now the car couldn’t take off with the girl captive.
Matt obeyed, or, rather, did what he thought was best at the moment, which was to seem to obey.
She poured another shaft of champagne trembling with manic bubbles as he approached and handed him the glass, her hand rock steady.
She sipped. He followed suit, wondering what playing her game would get him or cost him.
Her payoff was instantly obvious. Satisfaction. She fairly purred with it, arched her dark eyebrows, licked the smoothly rolled glass rim of the flute as if it were jagged and she had a taste for blood, even, perhaps, her own. Or perhaps mostly her own.
Matt rolled that idea around on his tongue as he swallowed the madly fizzing wine. He’d never thought of champagne as a hyperactive beverage before, manic, bipolar, as ready to go flat as erupt.
Like Miss Kitty?
Could he drag her down to the dark side of her nature? Depress her? Paralyze her?
“This is a joke,” he said. “A scene out of a B movie.”
“My movie, not yours.”
So control was everything. She unholstered the remote again and aimed it at The Blue Dahlia, at the roofline along the building’s side.
Instantly, a few blue notes of sound came rolling over the parking lot.
“‘Someone to watch over me’,” crooned a homicide lieutenant, spreading her vocal wings after too long in a cramped cage.
Matt couldn’t help turning his head to puzzle out the illusion; the band sounded as if it had moved outdoors.
“How’d you do that? Never mind. Not telling me is half the fun. But why the sound effects?”
“You come here to hear the music, right? Can’t be the food?”
“It’s not too bad.”
Her shiny dark head shook. “Must be the music. Tell me the truth.”
“The music,” he agreed. “The name of the place. Getting away from anyone who knows me. I don’t know.”
“Liar!”
He kept quiet, wondering if she’d already figured out the connection between him and Molina.
“You’re trying to get away from someone you know,” she accused instead. “Someone who watches over you.”
Her smile emphasized a mouth painted rambling rose red, a pretty mouth, small and pointed, not particularly sensual, almost pleasant peeling back over those small pearly teeth.
Oh, the shark, dear…
“Is that what you think you’re doing? Protecting me?”
“Protecting my investment.” She came nearer, set her champagne flute down on the hood. “Let’s dance.”
“I don’t.”
“You will.”
“When someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away?”
“Of course. The whole world dances when someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away. Haven’t you watched the evening news? But don’t ruin our outing with politics. Aren’t you glad I didn’t come in and upset the help? We can have our evening out here, under the stars.”
She took the glass from his fingers and set it on the hood. The surface curved, so everything on it tilted, faced imminent falling, destruction. The whole world tilted, facing the same fate, particularly his tiny corner of it.
Had Kitty somehow learned of his long-ago “prom” expedition into the desert with Temple? But how? Impossible. Yet she was duplicating it in some devilish way. Maybe that was how; she was the demon Molina would never believe in.