was wearing a navy-blue sailor shorts suit, probably a thrift-store find, and red pumps that had her towering over six feet. She toasted Kit’s arrival with her Schlitz, flashing red fingertips and a long-lashed wink. Kit settled in with a sigh, and signaled to the waitress for her own drink, wondering why she’d ever considered staying home.
“Where’s Joe Friday?” Fleur asked, propping her arm on the table so the mermaid inked there flashed its emerald tail.
Grif had called to say he’d gone to a strip club to question Ray DiMartino, the owner, about Mary Margaret and his old case. But Kit didn’t say that. She was just starting to feel good and didn’t even want to think about it. Placing a cigarette in a vintage holder, she said, “Out gumshoeing the streets alone. He told me to stay home with my hens.”
“Sexist pig,” Fleur scoffed, giggling as she used the tip of her parasol to poke at a passerby in a zoot suit.
“Lovable sexist pig,” Lil added, because they all knew, and approved, of the way he doted on Kit. She just hoped that letting him question DiMartino alone in the bowels of Masquerade would give him the answers he sought. She knew why he’d gone alone. Grif hated taking Kit into that environment, yet as the music swelled throughout the Bunkhouse, and the curtains rose to reveal a platinum blonde covered in little more than glitter and feather fans, she couldn’t help wondering what he’d make of this one.
Doesn’t matter, she decided, as her Old Fashioned arrived and the woman onstage began to flutter her plumes. Let Grif have his haunted past and pedestrian strip club for the evening. This was hers.
Besides, Kit thought, sipping as the fans fell away and the audience began to whistle and hoot. It wasn’t where Grif was that bothered her, or what he was doing. It was what he was thinking. About another woman. About that Evie.
Something of her thoughts must have been revealed on her face, because Fleur turned to her as soon as the act was over. “Spill” was all she said.
Kit looked away. The stage kitten, dressed in fishnets and a bustier, sporting victory rolls, was sweeping glitter from the stage so the next performer wouldn’t fall. Lil was flirting with the whole table of swing boys next to them. She could confide in Fleur without interruption. Yet Kit didn’t feel like voicing her worries just yet. Voicing them, she thought superstitiously, might make them real.
“I’m just all junked up with this story I’m working on,” she said instead, tapping her cigarette holder against a crystal ashtray. “It’s the most disturbing, disgusting, vile thing I’ve ever seen.”
Lil caught the end of the statement, and leaned close, propped her elbows on the table. So Kit told them both about young Jeap Yang, his addiction to a drug that stripped the flesh from his body, untethering health from the inside out, and about Tim and Jeannie as well. She ended with the new information Marin had shared about him after Kit had submitted her story. “His real name is Juan Pedro Perez. You guys got feelers out in the Hispanic community?”
“Where’s he stay?” Lil asked, all of her playfulness gone.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Because we’re not like you Anglos, mamita,” Lil replied, falling into the accent that made her trill. “We stick together.”
“Whether we want to or not,” Fleur agreed, equally serious. “We pile our immediate family atop each other, and pile extended family atop that. And extended includes pretty much anyone we’ve known since childhood—neighbors, children of neighbors . . . their dogs.”
“I still remember my first pet fish, may he rest flushed in peace.” And Lil lowered her head, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross.
Kit smiled at her dramatics, thinking the whole cultural dynamic sounded claustrophobic . . . and nice. “He’s from Naked City. That’s where the two tweekers died today.”
“Shit, girl, he probably ain’t Mexicano.” Screwing up her beautifully painted mouth, Lil drew back to regard Kit with disdain. “You think us Latinas all look alike.”
“No, I don’t,” Kit said defensively, but the two women gave her matching stares, arms folded across their chests, perfectly plucked eyebrows raised in identical doubt. “You two, for example, look better than anyone I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
“Good recovery,” Lil said immediately, turning back to her drink, cultural slight forgotten as a woman in red took the stage, twirling long ombre sashes as