Matt got into his new car in the Circle Ritz parking lot, settled his body into the multiple adjustable settings of his choice, and said an Our Father.
His “daily bread” was getting way out of hand. Still, he enjoyed sitting back in the cushy leather, almost asphyxiated by “new car” smell. If this was a pot-sweetener, the producers were beyond serious. So was the current situation in Las Vegas. Dare he even consider leaving now? Keep the car and Chicago, and lose Temple. Or lose the car? No contest.
Matt put the luxury car in gear, glad he was slinking away unseen in the dark of pre-midnight. He could put a few miles on the odometer and still return it as a loaner.
The Jaguar prowled into smooth street speed like its animal of origin, and Matt made WCOO’s parking lot in record time. Also unnoticed, since the lot was pretty empty as local programming switched from Ambrosia’s show of classic comfort songs and her down-home style of advice to the lost and the lovelorn.
The Midnight Hour, his advice show, which was all talk, ran two hours now due to the continuous call-ins, but the producers clung to the magic of the original name.
Both he, aka Mr. Midnight, and Ambrosia, whose real name was Leticia, were profitably syndicated. He grinned as he whooped the gift car locked, thinking of her reaction when she came out into the parking lot after ceding him the mic tonight. He’d given her the “Blue Suede” Elvis VW Beetle he’d won, and she loved the headroom, but this glittering Baked Alaska of a car would really rev her engines.
Inside the small building with the big radio tower he passed the lit but empty reception room and went to the studio, watching Ambrosia coo into the mic as she dished out solace and songs.
She sounded like an exotic siren escaped from some noir movie. Maybe she played the sultry big-band singer, her voice soothing as melted caramel.
“Now, baby, don’t you get down. Tonight is the turn of a new day, and I’m going to play a little traveling music just for you while you’re waiting for Mister Midnight to warm up my hot seat for a while and for your chilly little hearts to lift with more sage advice than should be slung by a young, hot guy like him. So hang on this dial, girls and boys, and prepare to be inspired.”
Leticia nodded as the commercials began and doffed her headphone muffs.
“Here’s my man,” she greeted Matt as he came through the door. “Great to have you back. Your superlarge sparkling water awaits, along with all those adoring ears out there. You already had a fan asking me for a song in your honor.”
“A fan?”
“Called herself your ‘biggest fan,’ but she was forgettin’ about me, baby.”
Leticia shimmied her red zebra-striped three hundred pounds out of the broadcast chair to give him a hug. “Welcome back from Chi-Town. The phone lines are already lighting up.”
“No rest for the wicked.” Matt slipped into the upholstered swivel chair. Yup, it was still warm. Leticia was his literal mother hen.
“Wicked?” She made a skeptical face. “You? About time.”
“Eyeball my new car when you leave.”
“You just got new wheels a short while back.”
“Not gratis like this.”
“What could be foxier than that silver Crossfire? It’s even a limited edition now.”
Matt shook his head and smiled, settling into the “cockpit” of headphones and mic and lighting call-in lines. He felt as alone as a soloing pilot once the show was running on, night voices in the unseen distance.
Leticia poked her head back in, bead-decorated black plaits rattling just before airtime. “I’m waiting around for a ride after, believe it,” she warned. “And to see if Miss ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ from my program shows up on yours.”
Matt felt the frown lines forming. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” He hoped Ambrosia’s guest wasn’t anyone with delusions of being Elvis. That would-be King caller last year was eerily accurate. Not even the FBI voice techs could say it wasn’t the Memphis Cat himself.
He also felt a figurative shiver. Max Kinsella as good as back from the dead, and now intimations of Elvis were resurrecting at WCOO-FM radio?
Naw. Matt just wanted to marry the woman he loved, do the right thing in the job market, and get along with her ever-present alley cat and his own sort-of namesake, Midnight Louie.
* * *
“Where were you the past week?” asked the caller.
Matt stirred uneasily in his adjustable chair. Lots of callers had already said in the show’s first hour that they’d missed him for the last week. None had asked him to account for his whereabouts. Not that anybody couldn’t tune in to The Amanda Show on their Internet connections. Usually radio listeners liked the call-in intimacy but didn’t cross the line.
“I ask the questions,” Matt said. “Don’t I get a vacation?”
“From me, Mister Midnight? No. Never. I’m your biggest fan.”
“I appreciate loyal listeners,” he said, “but I don’t think of you as ‘fans.’ More like fellow travelers in life.”
“Night fliers,” she said.
“Like night owls?” He tried to reference the cliché, because her tone had gone deep and seductive and dangerous.
“Yes. Hunters of the night.”
Oh, great. One of those vampire groupies. He’d done this gig long enough to recognize the occasional crazy.
“We’re all birds of a feather,” he said, switching to another lit line. “‘The Midnight Hour,’” he intoned into the mic. He’d learned to speak softly and be wary of kooks.
“Oh, Mister Midnight, I’ve been waiting a week to ask this. What can we adults do about school bullying? If a parent intervenes, it can make it worse for the kid. What’s the matter with kids today?”
And that launched an evergreen topic, with the call-board lighting up. For a moment Matt flashed back to his bad moments at the Dancing with the Celebs local reality-TV program, when he’d been bowed over a light board bleeding, alone in the dark in the wee hours, at the mercy of a masked attacker.
“Mister Midnight, did you hang up on me?”
The vampire groupie, back again. Was that so surprising? No.
She rolled on without pause. “That’s not polite. I just wanted to know if the rumors were true.”
He thought of his major TV offer and wondered how this creepy call-in knew about it.
“Are you really going to be doing a razor commercial on television, Mister Midnight?”
“I’m not getting or taking any commercial offers.”
“But you’re so good at bleeding.”
The air silence was Matt catching his breath, wondering how she knew he’d been stabbed by a sword recently.
“Bleeding heart,” her mocking voice continued.
And not so recently as well. Months earlier. More memorably. By a razor.
For the first time he’d detected the whisper of an Irish brogue in the voice, on the word heart.
And his blood ran cold. That cliché was true.
A diet-scam commercial blared in his headphones, so loud his pulse spiked with shock.
Leticia’s face appeared in the studio window, her expression furious.
Matt felt like he was in a movie like The Matrix, everything happening in fast, dislocating film cuts.
Then Leticia burst through the door and his senses snapped back into real-time and real-place mode.
“I am babysitting the technician until this show is over, Matt honey.” Her anger seemed to add ozone to the stuffy studio air. “I will make sure that crazy bitch doesn’t get through again. Don’t say a word. Save everything for the real call-ins. You the man. We talk after.”
Matt checked his watch. Forty minutes to go. For once, he was looking forward to the usual problems—dumped lovers, backstabbing co-workers, adoptive children seeking birth parents, unwed mothers seeking and sought by lost children, drug-addict brothers—all-American dysfunction with a capital D.
Leticia was right. He couldn’t let a crazy stalker make him blow the show. Especially not now. He gave her a faint smile and took the next call, welcoming a dose of ordinary, home-grown angst.
* * *
“Love, love, love the Jag,” Leticia said as she led him out of the station like a defensive lineman obscuring a quarterback. “It’s so you. Of course, you’re going to take me out for a drink in it.”
They neared the sculpted hunk of high-end metal, and Matt murmured “Maybe not.”
The front driver’s side tire was flat, obviously … slashed. An ice pick lay beside it.
“N … ice. What a way to treat an artwork.” Leticia shook her beaded braids until they tsked. “How’d you ever afford this baby?”
“Didn’t. It was a … gift,” Matt said, sickened by the vandalism. He wasn’t a Material Guy but he appreciated beauty. “‘Cashew leather interior with truffle trim.’ So said the owner’s manual. Very fattening to the wallet. Obviously out of my class.”
“At least she didn’t key it.” Leticia was on her cell phone, reporting the vandalism to the station security service and requesting a night guard for what was left of it while Matt looked up the dealer service number. Apparently, Jaguars weren’t allowed to languish.
“They’ll fix it and have it back to your place pronto.”
“You’re sure?” Matt asked.
“Hon, you get a twenty-four-hour nanny with cars this classy. It looks like you’ll have to ride in my Elvis Beetle, then I’ll drop you off at home. Better this way. You can drink, and you need one right now more than I do. Good thing Vegas is a twenty-four-hour town.”
The guard’s car was already entering the parking lot, and the uniformed guard who exited it was the usual middle-aged and thirty pounds overweight.
“Whew,” she whistled when she saw the XJ and the flat. “Pure jealousy. I go off duty in four hours.”
“That’s okay.” Leticia fished her set of station keys from her humongous designer bag. “Personnel comes in at five A.M.”
“A shame,” the guard told Matt. “Looks brand new.”
“One day. Be careful,” he told her. “The person who did this may still be lurking and must have had a lot of anger, and strength.”
She patted the holster on her hip. “So do I, if necessary.”
* * *
Las Vegas thronged with corny bars and lounges all trying to live up to the Strip’s glamour.
Leticia didn’t take him to one of those but to a freestanding building with a vintage blue-and-magenta neon sign outside.
“The Blue Dahlia,” Matt said, sounding as surprised as he felt.
“You know it?” Leticia went on without pause. “Great little club. I like the jazz trio, and sometimes a kick-ass torch singer sits in with them. Really rocks good for a white girl.”
Matt beat back a smile. Molina would get a kick out of that “review.” But the sometimes singing cop known at the Blue Dahlia as Carmen hadn’t come out to add vocal riffs to the music lately, as far as he knew, and she’d never perform this late. She had someone to watch over—not her; she was unattached and always had been since he’d known her—but her teen daughter at home needed protection.
“We close at three,” the waiter warned.
“We only need one drink—his,” Leticia said, pointing.
Matt wanted this fast and simple, so he ordered Scotch on the rocks.
Leticia was even faster on the draw when it came to getting down to business.
“Okay, Matt. Who was that woman caller who abused our shows?”
“A psychopath.”
“Ya-uh. How’d she get to be your psychopath?”
“By proxy.” Matt leaned back as his drink arrived. “She was someone else’s psychopath first, only he was harder to find than I was.”
“This is really creepy. I’ll have a Doctor Pepper,” she told the departing waiter. “And what’s the supercreamy, polyester shiny, Eurotrash, über-cool car about?”
“I’d rather discuss the phone stalker.”
Leticia’s big brown eyes grew bigger. “Am I smelling bad news here? You said that car was a gift. I can’t imagine your redheaded girlfriend letting you take anything compromising from … Madonna, say.”
Matt had to smile. “You’re right, but I’m not sure I’m keeping it.”
“I saw the temporary license plate. Is it insured?”
“By the dealership right now.”
“’Cuz those tires are mondo pricey, Jag-boy. It’s not the free original investment, it’s the upkeep. So who’s giving you my salary in cars?”
“You know your syndication deal pulls down a lot more than mine. The car is … a bribe, maybe.”
“You, take a bribe?”
“There’s a possibility of a daytime talk show.”
“Oh, my sainted seat at Oprah’s last network show and all my loot! It’s amazing she gave out VW Beetles when I already have a cooler one. You were in Chicago to visit family and do your occasional Amanda Show gig. They want you to do a solo?”
“Try a solo. Yeah. With Oprah heading her OWN cable network, the legacy network talk-show feeding frenzy is on rolling boil. OWN, Oprah Winfrey Network. That takes chutzpah. I don’t know, Leticia. Do I have the hunger for it? It would turn my life upside down just as Temple and I are planning to get married.”
“Good timing. Marriage means changing cribs, maybe even baby cribs. Producers on the level you’re dealing with would move the world for you.”
“I could bomb.”
“Yup. But my money would be on you. You got the chops and the voice all honed on radio, the most demanding form of talk show. And you got the looks. Is that why this spoiler babe showed up, just to rain on your parade?”
“Of course not,” Matt said. He didn’t say the thought that zapped his mind: Of course! Max Kinsella is back and so is Kathleen O’Connor. Both back, back from the dead.
Leticia downed half of her freshly arrived Dr Pepper, dressed up in a tall, footed glass with a spring of mint.
“My advice?” she said. “Finish your Scotch and prepare to blast home to the Circle Ritz in my ‘Blue Suede’ Beetle-rocket. What a combo! The King and the Brit bug-boys who usurped him … for a while. Betcha that fiancée is waiting up to greet you on your first night back on The Midnight Hour. You two have a lot to talk about, much more than me and thee.”
“That’s the truth,” Matt said, toasting her before draining his lowball glass.
On the small stage behind a similarly small dance floor, two couples were slow-dancing. The trio was riffing on a melody that got more familiar with every note, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” Set ’em up, Joe.
“It’s quarter to three,” Matt told Leticia. “I’ve got to be getting home.”
She nodded and produced cash from her bottomless bag, nodding at their empty glasses.
“I guess we had the ‘one’ for your psycho ‘baby’ and one more for the road. I just hope you’re not the one being set up.”