Part 45 (1/2)

Maybe I was wrong about Nance. Maybe the killer was closer to home. Could it have been Salvatore? or Charlie One Ear? Callahan?

Almost any one of the hooligans could have done the jobs, except Dutch, who was with me when Draganata was slain, and Mufalatta and Zapata, who were at Uncle Jolly's when Stizano got his.

Of the group, Salvatore might have a reason, perhaps something related to his mafioso father and Philadelphia. I was thinking about the why, not the motive. The itching foot.

I let it pa.s.s. I didn't like the idea.

Casablanca was on the downtown waterfront, a scant fifteen minutes from the scene of the crime. I parked on the promenade overlooking the river and we walked down a circular iron staircase to the river level. The Stick and I were quite a pair, me in my narc Windbreaker and boots, Stick in a suit that looked at least a decade old, a tie that defied time, and his felt hat balanced on the back of his head.

The nightclub was perched on the edge of a pier. The windows had been taken out for the summer and replaced by shutters, all of which were open. A rush of music and heat hit us as we entered it.

”Welcome to Mondo Bizarro,” said the Stick.

The place looked like it had been designed by an interior decorator on LSD.

None of the tables and chairs matched.

Gigantic stills from the Bogart film covered most of the walls. Towering up one was a gigantic blowup of Bogart, with cigarette and snarling lip, standing in front of Rick's nightclub in his white tux. Nearby, Peter Lorre leered frog-eyed at a fezzed and arrogant Sydney Greenstreet, while on another wall Claude Rains, dapper in his uniform and peaked cap, peered arrogantly at Conrad Veidt, who looked like he had just swallowed some bad caviar.

And, of course, Bergman. The eternal virgin stared mystically from under the sweeping brim of her hat on the wall opposite Bogie.

It wasn't the movie posters that gave the place its macabre charm, it was the animal heads, mounted like hunters' trophies between the blowups; psychedelic papier-mche animal heads painted in nightmare colors. There was an enormous purple elephant with pink polka dots and a giant red hippo with mauve eyes. An orange snake speckled with blue dots curled around one of the posts that held up the ceiling, and a lapis lazuli parrot swung idly on a bra.s.s ring under a ceiling fan.

The waitresses were poured into tan leather pants tucked into lizard-skin cowboy boots and wore matching leather halters, which just barely earned the name, and safari hats.

Mondo Bizarro was a conservative appraisal.

The crowd was as eclectic as the decor: tourists, college kids, pimps, gigolos, gays, straights, local drugstore cowboys, and what looked like every woman in town, eligible or otherwise.

We took a table opposite the entrance and settled down to watch the Circus Maximus. I wondered if I could even see DeeDee Lukatis in the mob, or whether I would recognize her if I did see her.

It didn't take five minutes for the action to start.

I felt the eyes staring at me first. It started at the nape of my neck and crept up around my ears. I let it simmer for a while and finally I had to grab a peek.

I saw her in quick takes, a tawny lioness, glimpsed between sweaty dancers weaving to a thunderous beat that was decibels beyond human endurance, and through smoke thick enough to be cancerous.

Her sun-honeyed hair looked like it had been combed for hours by someone else's fingers; long hair, tumbling haphazardly around sleek, broad shoulders. Her gauzy white cotton blouse was open to the waist and held that way by that kind of dazzling superstructure that makes some women angry and others dash for the cosmetic surgeon. There wasn't a bikini streak anywhere on her bronze skin, at least anywhere that I could see. Her long thin fingers were stroking the rounded lines of the purple elephant's trunk. Her other hand held a margarita in its palm, the stem of the gla.s.s tucked neatly between her fingers.

I watched her glide through the frenetic dancers without touching a soul. Did she practice her moves in front of a mirror, or did they come naturally? Not that it mattered.

Could this be DeeDee Lukatis? I wondered. The way things were going, my ego needed a boost.

It took her a long time to get to our table.

She slid into the chair opposite me and became part of it, stroking the stem of her margarita gla.s.s with a forefinger as though she could feel every molecule of it.

”Hi,” I said, dragging out my smoothest line.

That's when I found out she wasn't interested in me.

She had eyes for the Stick, who was leaning back in his chair with his hands in his pockets, a cigarette dangling from a lopsided smile.

”Well, what d'ya know,” he said. ”The place has a touch of cla.s.s after all.”

Her voice, which started somewhere near her navel, was part velvet and part vodka. ”Wow, it can talk, too,” she purred.

Cla.s.s dismissed. Suddenly I was an eavesdropper.

The Stick had an audacious approach.

”The joint's full of younger, better-looking, richer guys. Why me?” he asked, certainly one of the great horse's mouth lines of all time.

Her smile never strayed.

”I love your tie,” she said. ”I like old, rotten ties with the lining falling out. The suit, too. I didn't think they made seersucker suits like that anymore.”

”They don't. It's older than the tie,” the Stick said.

”Are you going to be difficult?” she asked. ”G.o.d, I love a challenge. ”

I leaned over to the Stick and said, ”This is some kind of routine, isn't it? I mean, you two have been practicing, right?” My wounded ego was looking for an out.

”Never saw her before,” he mumbled, without taking his eyes off her. ”Who are you?” he asked her.

”Lark,” she said.

”That your name or your att.i.tude?”

That earned him a big laugh. Her gray-green eyes seemed to blink in slow motion. Her look would have melted the icecap.

”Wonderful,” she said. ”Let's go.”

Just like that. Disgusting.

He jabbed a thumb at me.

”He's got the car.”

She looked at me. Flap, flap with the slow-motion eyelids, then back at him.

”How about a cab?” she suggested.

”Do we call it or can we grab one outside?” he asked.

”No, I meant him with the cab.” And she pointed at me.