He hadn’t bothered to disguise himself, not even with attitude. Still, his striking appearance barely registered on Secrets’s many employees and clients. Everything was expected, including boredom. Damn it, if Temple had tracked a killer here, he wanted the bastard to be aware of him, his presence. His threat.
Even Temple didn’t seem to be here.
Max sighed. He’d have to check the stripper dressing rooms to make sure she wasn’t backstage. That would draw out whatever testosterone troops guarded this place. At Secrets they would be fairly discreet.
Rafi Nadir’s stint here must have been an aberration. This place’s pretensions to business class over coach wouldn’t support obvious muscle like him.
Besides, Nadir had never worked here after the night Max had taken Cher away from him in the parking lot. Max had checked. He could have decamped out of shame at being outsmarted and outmuscled by someone as apparently easy as Max.
Max wasn’t about to bet on shame being a big part of Rafi Nadir’s psychological makeup. Aggression, yes.
Max scanned the entire scene like a panoramic camera, identifying the cast of dozens: the familiar bare figures of girls onstage or lap dancing at the tables, the lapdog circle of guys transfixed like risen mummies before the footlights. Instead of craving revivifying tanna leaves these zombies were shedding leaves of green bills into the teeny-weeny bikini bottoms of various strippers. Down the snatch.
There was even the hard-boiled dame at the bar…a retired stripper, or maybe a club photographer. No camera, so she was some other hanger-on in the whole elegantly sleazy scene.
The illusion he required: the instant perception by one and all that he belonged here, that he could go where he wanted with no one objecting.
Max scanned the room again, 360 degrees, and found his course of action.
He walked through the tables, past the obscenely boogying couples, behind the dazed wannabe studs playing hang-dog at the stage lip.
Ducked into the glass-enclosed sound booth at the side of the stage.
“Hey, DJ!” he addressed the slack-jawed youth at the console. “Bitchin’ job, man.” He flashed a hundred-dollar bill, dropped it onto the feedback dial. “I could use a sharp sound-meister like you at my new club down the Strip, X-treme Dreams. Meanwhile, play ‘Misty’ for me, huh? Double speed.” Max winked. “I gotta see a babe about a takeover bid.”
Max was out of the noise-free zone and back on pulse-pounding time. He strode toward the door leading backstage as if he owned the place. His presence in the sound booth would have registered on the edge of everyone’s eyes. Once he visibly left a zone normally not intruded on, he could climb every mountain, plow through any door.
Through the door. He held it shut with his body, listened, felt the pounding bass vibrate the wood, his metabolism.
After an unchallenged minute, he moved down the dark hall and through a heavy velvet curtain that shivered to the heavy metal music.
Another door.
Here he knocked.
And waited. Like a gentleman.
This was where the women’s world began. Brass knuckles might get you through the hard-knock barriers of sheer muscle. Golden rings would get you through the silken curtains of sheer willpower.
“Yeah?” A distracted feminine voice. Well, mostly feminine.
“Sorry. I need to speak to someone. Can anyone step out?”
He had unconsciously lapsed into an English expression. It called to the women inside like a vodka martini to James Bond.
“Yeah?”
The woman opened the dressing room door a crack only as wide as the seam on a nylon stocking from a ’40s film noir. She was tall, rangy, tough. A trans?
“Name’s Maximilian. I’m opening a new high-end place, X-treme Dreams, in a couple of months. Looking for talent.”
“You’ve got nerve, coming here.” She eyed him up and down.
He nodded. “X-treme Dreams will be a nervy club. I’m looking for ladies who don’t hold back.”
Hoots and whistles erupted behind the gatekeeper.
“Because then I don’t have to hold back on the perks.”
More whistles.
“You got a little redhead in there? Visitor?”
“You looking for ET, Maximilian?”
“Only if it stands for ‘Extreme Tensions’. I am looking for that little redhead, though, even if she’s passing as a blond. I have an emergency message from her mother, Molina.”
He had to hope that if Temple was inside, she would hear and get his message.
“We don’t have any little women in here,” door-babe said. “If your needs are that specialized —”
“X-treme Dreams will encompass every fantasy, every female. But I want the full range. So if a little redhead happens to show, tell her to see Maximilian out front.”
Max passed another hundred through the crack in the door that was neither too large or too small, but just right for the bill to be snapped up by a long pair of fingernails.
He ambled out through the hallway, pausing in the door from the dressing room, in no hurry to join the crowd nodding and swaying to the music and the bumps and grinds.
The lone woman at the bar looked about ready to slide off her barstool. She was obviously straight. Straight women found strip clubs boring. So did mature men, not that there were any on the premises.
Max expertly resized up the crowd. No Temple out here, in any guise. No Rafi Nadir.
So think outside the box, as they used to say in the thriving dot-com industry. Maybe the guy Temple was trailing was not Rafi Nadir.
Epiphany.
Maybe Rafi Nadir was not the killer.
But the killer had to be here. Temple had been advised to be here by a source she apparently knew. Why wasn’t she?
Max checked his watch, which he wore face-out on the inside of his wrist so he could consult it surreptitiously.
Almost half past one.
Something was wrong.
A flash went off in the darkened club.
For a moment Max took it for gunfire, not a camera.
But the only sound was the rat-a-tat of the bass strafing the club through the sound system. Music that made the place sound like a war zone.
Maybe it was: ground zero in the eternal war between the sexes.
The darkness, the sound, the thronging customers, the late hour, it all reminded him of the thick, cloying fellowship of an Irish pub the moment before a terrorist bomb went off.
Max felt the room reel. No, he was reeling.
His fear for Temple, his unease that she wasn’t here, concluded that she had already left home before that warning phone call had come, that she might be on a collision course with his cousin Sean, who was only a ghost at this point and could hardly collide with anyone solid. In this weird retro-moment he realized that everything — his life, his love, his future — was out of his control…
He crashed through the sound and the milling vacuous faces, heading for the door. The whole place was going to blow. Somewhere. He had to be there. If not here, where? Lindy. The name rang a distant bell. Temple had used it, long ago. Weeks? No. Months? Yes. What he would do outside, he didn’t know.
Hear himself think, maybe.
See a path leading to Temple.
Realize who the killer was. Temple thought she knew, surely he could reason it out as well as she. Or could he? Did he care too much, as usual? He had to get out, away. Had to find Temple.
If she wasn’t at Secrets, and the killer wasn’t, they were both somewhere too awful to imagine.
Somewhere he didn’t know about, where Sean stood at the bar, waiting with a mixed drink of regret and excitement to hear about Max’s assignation with pretty Kathleen, the Irish revolutionary colleen.
No matter who won the girl or the game or the day, the loser would shrug and grin and say “Next time.” That’s how it was sometimes with boys, with men, with brothers.
Only, with Sean, there was no next time.