Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Larry had taken the single plastic chair in front of her desk. He didn’t sit so much as lounge. Molina suspected he had a spine like a Slinky.

She didn’t really trust him, but something about him was oddly winning. No doubt that served him well when he was risking his neck among the Dangerous and the Depraved.

His close-cut hair still blared “dirty blond.” He seemed the eternal hard-bitten kid you’d glimpse from railroad yards as the train pulled away from the worst neighborhoods in town. Any town. His face would haunt you like a Depression-era photograph until you saw a blurred green ribbon of bushes and trees beyond the moving window, not hovels and kids with nothing better to do than stare at themselves in passing train windows.

“I sense regret.” Larry picked a square notepad block off her desk to play with.

“You’re a narc. Regret is the sludge in which drugs grow.”

“Stay a narc long enough, you can’t come in out of the dark.”

“So, how’s accident reconstruction treating you?”

Larry came down from his dangerous game by taking on innocuous assignments for a while.

“Great. Instead of blood-spatter patterns like the crime techs fixate on, I’ve got shattered-glass patterns. Instead of crack houses, I get to go to toney nightclubs like the Blue Dahlia in my off hours.”

“Toney? Please.”

“I get to see and hear ‘Blue Velvet.’ ” His smile was suddenly boyish, radiant. The passing train was a glittering, rattling string of diamond-mirror glass shattering the night.

Molina frowned. The song was one of her best. But the matching vintage gown, à la Topsy, had “just growed” in her closet, a single unsuspected moonflower in a midnight meadow. Or something sinister, like mold. Midnight blue mold. She didn’t remember buying it.

Everything was coming at her so fast, the Cannonball Express. Her daughter blossoming into dangerously empowering girlyhood. Herself revealed. Part professional huntress. Part . . . moonlighting torch singer.

“Any luck on that off-time assignment I mentioned?”

Larry pulled a narrow notebook from his linen blazer pocket.

“You sure are one paranoid lady, but I suppose it goes with the job. First a rogue L.A. cop, then this. You’ve sure got me guessing.” He quirked her his crooked grin, but his eyes were suddenly hotter than she liked to see on the job. Who was using whom here was still not settled, but it was unsettling.

“Get on with it,” she said.

Larry settled even lower on his Slinky spine in the unfriendly plastic visitors chair, blue-jeaned legs crossed over his lean thighs. Undercover narcs tended to be super-casual, but he was taking a holiday from the drug wars in the Traffic Department for a while. So he was handy for her “black projects,” like keeping her private life, such as it wasn’t, private.

“This is hit and miss, you understand,” Larry said. “When I have a moment. Gotta say this is not a shit assignment: nice neighborhoods, low crime, and the best tail I’ve tailed in my career.”

“Save the sexist chitchat for your brother apes on the force.”

“You are way too easy to rile, you know that?” He grinned again. “I just meant it was nice to do a wholesome bit of tailing for a change. Not very interesting . . . subject goes from home base to major Strip hotels; the New Millennium lately. Um, detour to a couple of real funky little joints on semi-shady blocks across from the worst section of Charleston Avenue.”

“Really.” Molina sat up to take notice.

“Yeah. By the Blue Mermaid Motel. Names of . . . Leopard Alley, the Bee’s Knees, and, uh, a real kinky one, the Indigo Albino.”

“Sounds like a list of sleazy clubs.”

Larry leaned forward, forearms braced on knees. “Vintage shops,” he whispered. “I even spotted a bong in one and an opium ring in another.”

“An opium ring? What’s that?”

He reached into his baggy jacket pocket again. Linen was like that, shapeless and prone to wrinkle. Molina hated it. For her own wardrobe. On guys it looked good: fashionable but not like they cared that much.

He pulled out a slender silver object, a tiny curved, sterling pipe, with a ring band just under the etched bowl.

“I got you it. Can’t say I never gave you a ring.”

“How exquisite.” Molina turned the lightweight object in her fingers. It might make a good pendant.

“Ladies used ’em back when a little naughty drug use was a fashion accessory, kind of like cocaine spoons today. The twenties, I’d guess.”

“I’ll actually keep this,” she told him. He raised his almost invisible flaxen eyebrows. “History of crime artifact.”

But she was . . . what? Taken aback. Pleased? Larry had not only done her off-shift tailing bidding gratis, but had thought to bring her a pretty neat souvenir.

“I’ll have to visit those vintage dives someday.” She frowned. Her supply of vintage velvet gowns wasn’t shrinking, but expanding. Maybe she had a magic closet. Yeah.

“You ever want a guide to the dark side of trendiness,” he said, “I’m your man.” His eyes glittered at the unsaid implications of his phrase.