Cat In A Leopard Spot

Max felt touched. Nobody had patted his arm since Miss Rosenblatt in fourth grade. The return to innocence was refreshing, especially in a strip club.

Miss Rosenblatt would have fainted dead away if she had seen Max walk into Kitty City. Luckily, a dead faint was probably all that she was up to nowadays, as she would be confined to coffin and only rolling over in her grave in protest.

Kitty City enjoyed being a strip club: dim, loud, crowded and filled with milling almost-naked girls. Several mirrored balls turned overhead, strafing the clientele with bullets of bright, glancing light.

Its clients took the mental barrage like a Fifth Avenue mob would take ticker tape during a parade, with festive disregard. The place had a Mardi Gras look and feel. The girls (strippers were always “girls” no matter their age) and the men mixed it up like old, bawdy friends. The clients were as loud and disorderly as the taped raunchy rock music, and seemed to enjoy competing with it. Even the deejay guy in the glassed-in soundproof booth seemed to be having a good time.

And…so did Rafi Nadir.

Max bellied up to another sopping-wet bar and ordered another watered-down drink as costly as a pound-can of R-12 Freon. He was glad this place was crammed with customers, and probably always was. People tended not to bother remembering faces in joints like this until they’d seen you for the ninth or tenth time.

Rafi Nadir was the center of a bouquet of centerfold girls, obviously a visiting ex-worker, not on the job.

He wore a loose white shirt with sleeves rolled up and buttoned at the elbow over khaki pants. Something about his demeanor, the pale shirt, his dark, overblown good looks, the way he accepted the strippers’ attention as his due reminded Max of Libya’s Khadafy, one of the more sinister international figures, and that was going some these days.

Face it: to brush shoulders with Rafi Nadir was to loathe Rafi Nadir. He gave the word “lowlife” a new definition. No wonder Molina was having nightmares about this creep showing up in her life. No wonder she wanted him as far away from their daughter as a serial killer.

If Max managed to get enough on him for a murder rap, he’d be bailing Molina out of a pretty rough corner. She’d hate it, and he’d love it.

And Max was close. Nadir was out of control, not drunk, but high on some apparent good fortune. The twenties were diving into the surrounding G-strings like South Sea Islanders seeking pearls.

Men drunk on their own importance are only a half-step away from walking off a cliff. Max just had to watch Nadir, follow him, and he’d catch him deciding to force another stripper in a parking lot into early retirement…He might even be the one who had killed Gloria, Gandolph’s old assistant. No telling how many stripper murders they could wrap him up in.

While Max was weaving happy endings, just as he was ready for a fadeout on Cher’s smiling transparent face on high in the best black-and-white Hollywood tradition, he saw something unpleasant in the mirror.

She was tall, she was dressed like an aging flower child, she was talking to a guy at the other end of the bar who looked as much like a regular as anyone here tonight. And she glanced in the mirror at herself as if noticing a stranger, then her eyes ran down its length as fast and smooth as fingers whisking a run off a piano keyboard.

Max hunched over his drink, turned to the guy on his left, put his right hand with the clumsy college ring on it in front of his face, almost knocking his phony glasses off.

They made a perfect triangle: He and Molina at opposite ends of the bar and Rafi Nadir at the apex in the middle of the room, holding forth amid his harem, perfectly placed to spot either one of them, should the fates permit. Rafi Nadir on top of the world, which in this instance was a pyramid. A pyramid scheme, so to speak.

Molina’s ears, feet, and—now that she had sat down at the bar—butt were killing her. But the eyes felt fine, except for the burning irritant of secondhand smoke.

But that was Las Vegas. No way would smoking be banned.

“You related to any of the girls?” Don, the regular, was asking.

She was relieved that she wasn’t being mistaken for one of the girls, but miffed that he thought she might be somebody’s mother. Or big sister maybe.

“No. I’m a PI, just following up some leads.”

“Oh.” He was a stocky blond in JT10: jeans/T-shirt/tennies. Roofer, but harmless enough. Roofing was your number-one occupation for transients with crime in mind.

“You’re not kidding?” he asked. “About the PI part?”

“Who’d kid about that?” She glanced in the mirror again. This guy was dry; time to sink another well, but no good candidates presented themselves.

Then she noticed that Rafi was gone.

She stood up, scanning the mob. “Look, Don, I’m slowing down your action by sitting here. Thanks for the info.”

“I didn’t tell you much—”

“More than you think.” Bystanders always did.