“My God, my life is already circumscribed. I have no face to most people I deal with, no true voice, no body. You’re saying I should be a prisoner within this costume, not relax my guard for a moment.”
Max straightened. “Not every moment. You can work and play with the big cats. But don’t share your troubles with them. Someone might be listening. Someone might have bugged their collars, the environment. Trust no one. No place. No time. Nothing.”
“A man can’t live like that.”
“Yes, he can. If he must.”
“You?”
“Sometimes. For a long time. Again.”
“You think this is a…conspiracy.”
Max nodded. “Conspiracies are big, clumsy, well-aged anachronisms, but don’t underestimate the elephant. It’s the largest surviving land animal, and it has a long reach and an even longer memory.
“And it can crush a Big Cat with its front toenail.”
…The Sting
“This music could drive a person crazy,” Molina shouted to Morris Alch.
She was hoping he had attained an age group where he’d agree with her right off.
Instead, he just smiled.
“Sorry, can’t hear you over this racket, Lieutenant.” His forefinger patted his earlobe. “Hard of hearing. What a blessing sometimes.”
He gazed around like a kid who’d run away to see a traveling carnival.
This was a side show, all right, with the hoochie-coochie girls front and center. Morrie gazed up at their undulating everythings with innocent amazement. He was working, after all, even though it was past midnight when he met her here.
Molina wasn’t sure she was ready to watch another man fall for the obvious.
“I should have brought Su,” she shouted. “She’d keep her eye on the prize.”
Alch screwed a finger in one ear as if to twirl out wax. “Can’t hear,” he shouted happily.
Maybe, Molina thought, the awful, knee-knockingly loud music was part of the attraction. Some men seemed to crave not having to talk, or think.
The music made her teeth grind. It was what she thought of as jackhammer rock: screeched lyrics you couldn’t understand, screaming guitar, a dominant, body-vibrating bass deep enough to stop pacemakers for three blocks around.
She glanced at the small, glassed-in booth where the teenage troll responsible for this hellish hullabaloo was nodding his scraggly head to the beat like a palsied muppet.
They were here on official business, waiting for a brief break in the festivities.
Morrie stared up at the stage, where the only view was of Frederick’s of Hollywood thongs being put to very skimpy use.
You’d think Alch had never been to a strip club before, she thought, and then Molina considered the likely fact that he probably hadn’t, not often. He didn’t strike her as the type to rowdy out with the boys. Maybe that was why she’d always liked him, as much as an impartial superior officer could like an underling. Not playing favorites was the key to effective management, but she realized that she trusted Morrie more than most.
Which meant that she was relying on him to trust her enough to be useful and not ask too many questions. In other words, enough to use.
She let a few dead strippers romp through her memory to remind herself why this case had her covering up for her enemies and keeping her colleagues in the dark.
If progress was made tonight, if they could get closer to a chargeable suspect on the Cher Smith murder, the pressure would ease. The charade could stop, and she could go after the quarry she really wanted with brass knuckles: Max Kinsella, signed, sealed, and delivered for assorted felonies. Or Murder One would do. Maybe solving this case would take care of that matter for her at one and the same time.
The idea was so satisfying that she smiled.
The music stopped. Silence was more shocking than sound.
“Quick,” Molina said under her breath to Alch.
He heard her. The barefoot boy with mouth agape was gone, replaced by a canny investigator. Their quarry was momentarily accessible.
Together they burst like gangbusters through the small wooden door with its upper half all window.
“Police,” Molina said before the kid in the hot seat could do more than squirm.
He half stood, gulping like a guppy, trapped in his fishbowl of a booth, a place so transparent that almost nobody ever noticed it. She had.
“Police,” she repeated, aware of their plainclothes.
“Take it easy, son. This is just a routine inquiry.”
This was why she’d brought Morrie along. There was hardly a savage soul to be found in Las Vegas that his easygoing manner couldn’t soothe: antsy, acne-ridden, teenage DJs among them.
“This is Lieutenant Molina,” Morrie was saying. “My name is Alch. I know, it sounds like I’m burping. Just think of mulch or gultch. But you don’t have to think of anything but what you might have seen. Answer a couple questions and you’ll never see me — us — again.”
“Questions? I only get a five-minute break.”
“That might be against labor laws,” Molina said.
“So what?” the boy demanded. “You think I’d give up this cool job just for a longer break?”
“What’s so cool about it?” Morrie asked. “Besides the scenery?” His suited shoulder shrugged toward the empty stages.
“The music, man. I get to do it all. Next step is my own radio show.”
Molina nodded, leaning against the closed door. “Who picks the music?”
“The girls mostly. They have their routines worked out. Sometimes I get to suggest numbers, though. Depends on the girl.”
“Okay, son…say, what’s your name?”
A silence held that matched the unnatural sound of silence in the larger room beyond.
“First name,” Alch settled for.
“Tyler.”
“So, Tyler, what’s the attraction with this here job, other than cutting a career path to the top ten radio stations. Hours sort of stink. Nobody notices you much.”
“Are you kidding, man? The girls notice me plenty. They’d be lost without me. I miss a cue, they look stupid. Like I say, I help a lot of them with their routines. All the guys in my class would kill to have this job.”
“Just what class are you in?” Molina’s tone implied “underage.”
“Senior,” he said. Sneered. Didn’t like teacher types asking him to account for himself, big man like him. “I’m okay to work here, nights or whenever.”
“I wish I’d had a job like this at your age,” Alch put in, pulling the kid’s attention away from Molina. Teenage boys didn’t like female authority figures. It takes a few decades to get used to it. Did for Morrie anyway. Maybe kids today were faster studies. He doubted it.
He glanced at Molina, broadcasting his thinking.
She subsided, amused.
He didn’t often get a chance to take the lead with her. He was surprised that she didn’t care, but she didn’t. He realized that this was why she’d ordered him along. Male bonding. Sort of.
“I gotta admit,” Morrie went on, doing his Columbo imitation, “it’s pretty hard to hear the music out there. It’s all boom box, you know?”
“Yeah. It’s a generation thing. The point is the beat, the bass. That’s all there is. You’re not supposed to notice the lyrics or anything. We’re selling beat, bump, oomph.”
“Well,” Molina said, “we’re not selling anything, but we’d sure buy an ID if you can make one. We figure from your booth here you get a good view of the whole place, including the regular customers.”
“Yeah.” The kid nodded, glancing at the stage where a purple spotlight glared on empty wood flooring. He twisted a dial up, then down, but the sound system remained mute.
“See, Tyler,” Morrie said, “we’re counting on you having sharp eyes, even if you’re half-deaf from this music.”
“I hear fine.”
“I don’t. My little middle-aged joke. Don’t get like me.”
“Deaf?”
“Middle-aged.”