“What a bitch!” he said.
What a bummer of a beginning, Temple thought with a sigh.
She and Rafi Nadir shared a table near the front of Les Girls, the better to avoid the performers attempting intimate relationships with a stainless-steel pole onstage.
“Why couldn’t she have been a real girl? Like you?” he asked.
“How am I different?” Temple asked. Let me count the ways.
“You’re—” Rafi’s eyes grew unfocused. “You’re nice. A guy feels good taking care of you. And you’re spice. You think you can take care of yourself. I like that. I like . . . knowing you can’t, always.”
Temple figured this was as real as it got with Rafi.
“You’re conflicted,” she returned in fine Dr. Phil form. “You like girlie girls, but you also need women who don’t kowtow to anybody. You only think you like me, because you don’t know me. Do you?”
He blinked, sipped his Sprite on the rocks. Big, bad Rafi Nadir.
“You’re just trying to keep me away from her,” he said.
“Of course. You’re a bum combo, brother.”
“Brother? That’s how you think of me?”
“I have five.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. They hassled me and overprotected me and probably saved me some grief more often than I admit, and at times I could have strangled every one of them.”
“That’s it! Why don’t you broads appreciate what we guys can do for you?”
“Because we need what we can do for ourselves.”
“Without us.”
“Maybe. But it’s better with you guys.”
Rafi shook his head. “I never thought I’d see her again.”
“Good . . . or bad . . . that you finally did?”
“I don’t know.” He siphoned Sprite down to the ice cubes. “All I know is everything turned crappy after we split.”
She’s gone.
Temple recalled the two words scrawled on Molina’s car outside the Blue Dahlia nightclub and restaurant.
Later those same words had magically showed up on the midriff of Gandolph the Great’s dead ex-assistant in the Las Vegas medical examiner’s facility.
How many romantic hearts had that primitive jungle beat been pounded into: She’s gone. He’s gone. It was in her own blood. It had echoed eternally when Max had disappeared with no word.
She could understand Rafi Nadir’s confusion and uncertainty.
What did that make her? Make him?
Only human.
“You’re a strange little duck,” he said.
“Me?”
“I’ve been brushed off by bimbos with diseases that’d make your DNA curl. You . . . you’re different.”
“I’m not—”
“No. I get that part. You’re not up for grabs. I don’t get why you bother with me when nothin’s in it for you, or me. Or why you’re so nosy about murdered strippers and homicide lieutenants when you’re a PR woman, for God’s sake. I shouldn’t be giving you the time of day. I don’t know why I am.”
“Maybe,” Temple suggested, “you’re really a nice guy. Somewhere in there.”
“No,” he said. “Not really. It’s you that’s way off-base.”
That’s when she began to regret being here. With him. Not much redeemable social value there. Still, if she could figure out how he and a straight arrow like Molina had ever gotten together, had conceived a child together, she might know why Molina was such a bulldog about incriminating Max in something.
Temple had to concede to herself that she was becoming exhausted by Molina’s eternal hints and allegations about Max, by how the woman used her position to harass Temple . . . and Max by proxy.
A twang of honesty made Temple also admit to herself that it hadn’t done their relationship any good. Temple could be as loyal as a Boy Scout oath, but the stress and suspicion had worn her down. Even pit bulls had to let go finally, out of sheer exhaustion.
“Say.”
Temple looked up. Rafi Nadir was regarding her almost sympathetically.
“I just meant,” he said, “that you’re a whole different ball game than Carmen.”
“Was she always so buttoned down?” When he frowned at the expression, which didn’t mean much in an inborn burqa worldview, she went on. “Why is it she judges everybody by some inflexible standard, and doesn’t cut the rest of us any slack?”
He was nodding now, either a smile or a smirk (depending on your point of view) tilting the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah. She was always hard to read. That sorta was what fascinated me.”
Temple was fascinated by the fact of any man being fascinated by Molina. She knew her eyes probably widened.
Rafi would like that, saucer-eyed female audience. It would soothe his male ego.
“I wasn’t used to women like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Women trying to be like men. You’re right. I liked parts of it. Other parts—” He shook his head, his mouth twisting into distaste as if the Sprite in his glass had turned to vinegar.
“Was that what you had in common? Excuse me, but you were both from cultures with a strong tradition of stomping on women.”
He stared at her, his dissolute hawk’s face focused totally on her.
Temple swallowed without having even sipped her white wine spritzer. (She knew the management; the management owed her. So she could order an effete white wine spritzer in a strip club. Or at least this strip club. And get it darn cheap too.)
Temple picked up her spritzer. Sipped. Tried to look buttoned up and cool and calm. Like Molina.
Rafi burst out laughing. “You nailed it. I was a sexist pig, trying to get with a little looser male-female culture. She was an uptight servile broad, trying to get ahead in a very wired male sexist-pig environment. We were made for each other.”
Bitter as the last words were, a thrum of truth underlay them.
“So what happened?” Temple asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Fact is, Molina’s on my boyfriend’s case. The more I know about where she comes from, the more I know about where he’s going.”
“He that Anglo dreamboat I saw you with at the opening?”
“No! Matt’s just a friend.”
Rafi shrugged. “You knew who I meant right off. Just a friend? Couldn’t tell it by me. Kinda strange, isn’t it, how the dead guy in the Murano looked so much like him?”
“Creepy, but Matt has nothing to do with that crowd. He was there with Janice Flanders.”
“He ‘just a friend’ of hers too?”
“Uh . . . I don’t know. She’s divorced.”
“And you got a boyfriend.” Rafi’s desert-dark eyes drilled into hers.
“Right. My boyfriend wasn’t anywhere near Maylords, thank God, otherwise Molina would have made him on the murder. Trust me. She’s had it in for him ever since a killing at the Goliath Hotel where he was working, over a year ago.”
Rafi nodded all through her little speech. He looked about as convinced as Molina had when Temple had tried to explain her personal situation in the past.
What was it about her? Didn’t she look as truthful as an A-plus lie-detector graph on sight? She certainly felt that way.
“About Carmen and me.” Rafi’s fingers played with his Sprite glass as idly as if it had contained straight vodka.
Appearances were deceiving, Temple reminded herself. She had seen Rafi with a glass of clear iced liquid half a dozen times at strip joints when she had been trying to be a one-woman amateur undercover operative to save Max’s skin. And never once had it dawned on her that he was drinking soda pop.
“About Carmen and you,” she prompted.
He smiled. “You can’t wait to get the goods on her, can you? I almost feel sorry for her.”
“That would be a first! Anyone feeling sorry for the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD!”
“Is that what they call her?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“She was a maiden once, but she wasn’t always iron.”
Temple pasted on her stock deeply inquisitive look and kept silent. That had always gotten her a revealing monologue or two when she had been a TV news reporter.
She was innately inquisitive, and had always been looked on as harmless as a head-cocked West Highland white terrier. As an independent woman she had come to loathe her nonlethal appearance. Except that people routinely forgot that terriers were bred to root out vermin. Mercilessly. Which worked to her advantage, didn’t it? Sometimes “cute” was camouflage.
Rafi Nadir obviously found her harmless enough to bare his soul to . . . or past parts of it.
“We were both token minorities on a force notorious for ethnic prejudice.” His eyes grew distant. People’s did, when they were zeroing in on their pasts. “Maybe we each envied something about the other. She was so wary and controlled, had to be, like a panther. I was—it was a macho place and time, and I had that down—but I wasn’t quite the right kind. So. She toned me down. I pumped her up. It worked for a while.”
“Was she always so unfeminine?”
“Some women came into police work early. They were all female. Not cute like you. Pointed. Nails. Heels. Tits. Caused a lot of the wrong kind of trouble. Most cops have wives who find the job competition enough, much less the temptation of women cops. Carmen, she went the other way. All business, no gloss. That sorta intrigued me. I tried to help her live up to her name.”
“The opera, you mean?”
“Yeah. I know something about opera, at least what they were named.”
“Did she . . . sing when you knew her?”
“No.” He folded his arms on the slick Formica tabletop, leaned closer.
Temple heard the deep bass boom-badda boom-badda boom boom throbbing in the background, vibrating the table surface under their folded arms. That primitive beat would never back the soulful wail of classic torch songs that Carmen belted out at the Blue Dahlia. Even that self-indulgence happened only on the odd nights when she felt like dumping Lt. C. R. Molina. Then Carmen came out of the dressing room in a black velvet ’40s evening gown and scatted like a contralto archangel.
Rafi stabbed a droplet of tabletop condensation with a pristine fingernail (Temple always found it creepy that, for such a jerk, his nails were clean as a whistle). One of those fingerails drew the drop into a comet trail.
“I found out that she sang. On key. Had sung in school choir. Had soloed. I talked her into finding a no-name club and working it off—the despair and downers. I created Carmen.”
Well! Temple was well and truly blitzed. Rafi Nadir as impresiario? As Brian Eno, manager to the Beatles? Colonel Parker to Elvis Presley? Get outta here!
“It’s a fact.” He’d read and answered her skepticism in half a heartbeat. “I got her patronizing the vintage stores, buying into the ’30s and ’40s looks. She always thought she was too big to be attractive. She always thought being attractive was a sin. Christianity is one woman-hating, repressive religion.”
Temple blinked.
“Yeah. I know. But I’m not Muslim. My family is Christian. It’s okay to dis your own race or religion.” Rafi laughed. He sipped his Sprite as slowly as if it were 100-proof vodka. “We dudes are all the same, under the foreskin.”
Gack! He had made a rather sophisticated, if crude, play on words, and cultures. Not to mention a self-enlightened one.
“Are you sure you’re the Great Satan Molina thinks you are?” she asked.
He laughed, not nicely. “Hell, yes. I am now. Then, I was as stupid as Carmen was. Only I got nailed by it, and she just sailed free of all that. Teflon Woman.”
He drained the harmless dregs of melted ice cubes. “I lost my career. Okay, it was partly my fault. When the cards are stacked against you, sometimes you make the deck turn faster, just to get it over with.
“What I don’t get, or forgive, is the way she dumped me. Maybe she saw that my career was sinking like a stainless-steel stone. Whatever, she just left. That was it. Not a word, not a note. Gone. She was gone. No explanations, no reasons, no apologies, no hysterics. Nothing left behind that I could blame. Except me. That was cold. And that’s why I’ll never forgive that—”
Temple cut him off. “Is that when you decided that underachievement was your business, your only business?”
“You’re one of those annoying reformers, aren’t you? Always looking on the bright side. Let me tell you, there’s no bright side in the real world. You work law enforcement, you see the dark side. You don’t need no black helmet, no light saber. You see the dark side every day. There is no Good Ship Lollipop. No wonderful world of Oz. Trust me.”
“Maybe I should. Maybe you’re not really the rotten guy everyone thinks you are.”
“Maybe.” He leaned over the table. Very close. “Maybe you’re wrong. The world is full of wrong dead women. Born optimists. Maybe Carmen got it right. Cut and run. Maybe you should do that too. Now.”
Temple did not believe in turning tail.
On the other hand, maybe Rafi Nadir had a point. If he really was a redeemable guy, this was a warning. If he was not, this was a Warning.
Temple turned tail, and left.