Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Restoring balance? Plus, I’ve never done anything like this. I thought it’d be interesting. And it’ll help my career.”

  “You’re just in it for the fame and fortune.”

  “Anything wrong with that?”

  “Just don’t go pretending you actually care about any of us.”

  “But I do.”

  When Temple snorted and looked away, Kit went on.

  “If we women leave it up to men to judge women, we’ll end up with the Taliban.”

  Temple was speechless at the conviction in her aunt’s tone but Xoe squirmed in her chair. “This is way heavy stuff, lady.”

  “She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister.”

  Temple blinked. Maybe she had to banish tears. “That’s brother, lady, that quote. ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.’”

  “It can’t work both ways?”

  “Not in my world.”

  “Get a different world, then. Make one.”

  “I’m trying.” For an awful, role-playing moment, Temple was Xoe Chloe Ozone, teen girl rebel. Her Aunt Kit was good. Very good.

  Kit smiled crookedly, at her. “Try a little less hard, and try being a little more soft, huh? Being interesting isn’t the kiss of death in the real world. It just looks like it sometimes.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Temple stood and slouched away.

  She was such a fraud.

  Who else around here wasn’t?

  Including a stalker/killer.

  Before she reached the door, Kit leaped up to intercept her.

  “Oh, fashion faux pas! You’ve got mascara smudges under both eyes. You surely don’t think raccoon eyes are punk?”

  Before Temple could defend her waterproof brand of mascara, Kit leaned close and whispered, “We need to talk somewhere. Privately.” Kit nodded to a small door at the left and whispered again. “Adjoining privy. They had it right in the old days, didn’t they?”

  Temple recognized the word for “private” as applied to old-time bathrooms. But Xoe Chloe just looked puzzled, then nodded and followed Kit past the coffered wooden door into a bathroom equipped for a Victorian household, wood-paneled, with matching enclosed tub and toilet.

  Once there Kit turned the faucets on full, retrieved a pair of thong panties that were drying over the edge of the tub, thought better of it, grabbed a tea-rose-embroidered hand towel instead, and tossed it over some sort of sprinkler spigot in the ceiling.

  Thong panties? Temple thought. “I don’t think they can have cameras in the bathroom,” Xoe Chloe whispered.

  “Just to be safe, sweetie.” Kit sat on the broad tub surround and kicked off her shoes, a pair of svelte but sensible pumps. Pink. She was an ex-actress after all, and tended to dress for real life as if it were a play.

  “Not in the bathrooms,” Temple said. “Invasion of privacy. Even for reality TV. Cross my heart. But it never hurts to be safe.”

  “Exactly,” Kit said. “What’s up, niece?”

  “Oh, darn! I was afraid you’d make me.”

  “The big, black hair and big bad attitude did the job until I spent a bit more time with you. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, and it’s even worse to play your old Aunt Kit. What happened to your dear curly red head, which I first glimpsed when you lay in your mother’s arms spitting up on my fifty-dollar infant jumpsuit christening gift, which was a lot of money when you were born, dear, although now it wouldn’t make a decent tip at Lutèce.”

  “Wigs are us here in Las Vegas. So I was an ingrate from the first, huh?”

  “An expressive child, I would say. Not one afraid to make her opinions known, of the infant menu or the world at large.”

  “How did you end up here—?” they began in unison.

  Kit took the next line. “Money, dear heart. My feeble celebrity as a romance author doesn’t get me many freebies but this was one of them. I bet the producers thought my theatrical background would make me more exciting on camera. Poor things. The stage was my métier.”

  “You’re plenty lively. And just who are the producers? We keep hearing about them but never see them.”

  “Money men. It’s the same everywhere. They keep out of sight so no one can dun them for funds or tell them what to do. I call this particular set Toddman and Goodson, an old-fashioned pair of late-middle-aged men living vicariously through the stuff that dreams and network profits are made on. All the hip young producers are making CSI imitations. I imagine you haven’t seen them, my dear, because they look like accountants and you’d never recognize them as the powers that be. So, why the wild child persona?”

  Temple took a deep breath and explained, and then she swore her aunt to silence.

  Temple was scheduled to see sweet-faced Beth but couldn’t stomach that after her confession to Kit. Beth was a super-sweet lady who seemed to live in a dream world, and Temple didn’t feel like deceiving another nice middle-aged lady who deserved a better menopause than an appointment with Xoe Chloe. She decided Xoe didn’t abide by schedules.

  She headed for Consultant Room Three, Dexter Manship’s. It would be fun to play off someone she despised, a Crawford Buchanan substitute, so to speak.

  Xoe didn’t knock, natch. Just swaggered in, swinging her hips and her belly button ring.

  The high-backed leather chair behind the desk was turned away from her. (Wouldn’t you know sweet and savvy Aunt Kit had been assigned a room that looked like a porch but Dexter Manship had a Lord of the Manor study to commandeer?)

  “Hey, man. I’m here.” Temple waited for an answer but got none. “A little early, like a couple hours, but what’s the point of being a go-getter if you can’t wake up the troops.”

  No answer, not even a creak of leather.

  Xoe leaned over the desk (all the better to create some cleavage) and shoved one wing forward with all her might.

  The chair whirled around faster than Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho.

  No wonder. It was empty.

  Xoe put a hand on her bare hip and pouted for the cameras. She looked around. “Dude! Dude?” A glint of mirrored glass caught her eye. She swaggered over and helped herself to a swig of scotch on the rocks.

  “What a setup,” she told the room, and the cameras. It was wonderful not wanting, needing, to win this thing. She could be her not-self. Very liberating. “Bet that’s a casting couch in the corner. The whole thing’s a setup. Right?” She toasted her glass to the room’s four corners. “It’s been fixed.”

  She walked to the windows behind the desk, which overlooked the pool area. Two groups of seven girls were working out on the new hot pink mats or swimming in the heart-shaped pool while the other two groups were making the rounds of the diet/beauty/wardrobe consultants or “counseling” with the judges-cum-advisors and gadflies.

  And she was indoors, in this shadowed room, with no one to shadow box. She set her glass down dead center on the desk, and ambled to the door. No coaster to buffer the expensive wood.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected to find in here. Maybe a scorpion to tease, a statement to make. For a moment, she’d thought she might find a body waiting to be discovered.

  But the room was empty, and the cameras had recorded a solo performance.

  There was only one thing to do: go to her actual appointment with, sigh, Savannah Ashleigh. Late.

  Chapter 22

  A Meeting of Minds

  Temple sidled into Consulting Room Four twenty minutes late, prepared to make surly obeisance.

  Not to worry.

  Savannah Ashleigh was striding away on the elliptical walker in the office, the TV tuned to the soap operas and a Cosmopolitan magazine splayed open on the machine’s control panel. Apparently, each judge had been allowed to import whatever they wanted to their offices.

  Well! Temple was dying to see at what level, speed, and calorie-burning rate the woman was operating. However, the Cosmo issue effectively hid everything but its own provocative contents.

  Savannah Ashlei
gh’s shiny spandex workout attire hid nothing. She had a Hollywood body, that was for sure, narrow but rounded. Her Dolly Parton hair bounced in one platinum blonde wave as she glided along at a rapid pace, her face delicately sheened with sweat.

  Xoe leaned against the door and applauded, slowly.

  That threw Savannah out of her rat race. She shook her head, batted her eyelashes, and observed her observer.

  “Are you my ten fifteen?”

  It was now 10:35, but Temple nodded. (Xoe was a shrugger, not a nodder, so Temple had to step in for her from time to time.)

  Reluctantly flipping the magazine shut, Savannah pressed her forefinger to the control panel and the green level control vanished … not before Temple noticed it was solid all the way to the top. Savannah was a serious strutter.

  She eyed Xoe for the first time. “My, you’re a grim little thing. Pastels and brights, hon, are what you need. And, of course, someone will talk to you about that hair.”

  Temple was willing to bet Savannah’s hair was about as natural as her own.

  “Now sit down in that cute little chair, and I’ll sit at the desk and we’ll go over your program.”

  “I have a program?” Xoe slouched into the seat indicated. “That makes me sound like a computer.”

  “Don’t we wish. Program out the calories and carbs, program in the veggie shakes and distilled water.”

  “That’d give me the shakes, all right.”

  “Now.” Savannah was paging through the contents of the standard hot pink folder. “Hmmm. Could lose ten pounds. Definitely a hair and face makeover. I’ve been through your wardrobe—”

  “When?”

  “When you were out of your room, dear. Such trash. If it doesn’t chime, clatter, cling, or clash with every other color in your wardrobe, except for black, it isn’t there. We’ll be looking for something light, floral, and airy for you.”

  “Are you recommending a scent or a wardrobe? ’Cuz your recommendations stink.”

  “A very good point, uh, Ex-oh-ee. A signature fragrance would be a fine addition to your wardrobe. I don’t think any other girl has mentioned a stinking problem, so you would be ahead of the competition. On that matter.”

  “It’s Xoe-ee.”

  “Oh. As in ‘Zoo.’ Well, you might consider a name change while you’re at it. Perhaps … Daisy.” She looked up to register Temple’s expression. “Or perhaps … not. Anyway, I’ve ordered some darling things for you, which should fit whether you work off those biggy, piggy ten pounds. Or not.”

  Savannah rose, dabbed at her forehead with a floral hand towel, and escorted Temple to the door.

  That was when some poor ‘Tween or Teen Queen candidate who had actually been left alone for a moment began to scream to wake the dead.

  Savannah stood paralyzed in her tracks, hands over her waves of hair-sprayed curls.

  Temple sprinted out into the hall, not only beginning work on the biggy, piggy extra ten pounds but to find out whether a contestant had killed or been killed, or had just broken a fingernail.

  Chapter 23

  Exercised to Death

  The screams continued, leaving no doubt that most of the contestants possessed well-developed pairs of lungs, not to mention any superstructure above them.

  Mariah was three steps behind Temple, and Temple never thought for a moment of telling her to stay back for her own good.

  They were both committed to serving time in what was quickly becoming a House of Horrors and deserved to know what was going on firsthand.

  Temple and Mariah were apparently closest, for they burst through the double doors to the indoor workout room and found Silver standing hunched just inside the doors, screaming her heart out.

  What riveted her gaze was instantly obvious.

  A blood-spattered figure in a hot pink leotard lay slumped over an elliptical walker machine … the very kind of machine that Savannah had been putting through its paces, or vice versa, just moments before in her private office.

  Mariah gasped, and Silver screamed until her hair should have turned white had she not bleached it that shade long ago.

  Temple gradually realized that the figure on the walker had pointed hands and feet. And then she saw that its bubble-gum-pink flesh, spattered with a measles of blood drops, was rather … rubbery.

  Footsteps were pounding into the room behind them and stopping.

  “She looks like a Barbie doll,” Mariah’s clear young voice said.

  Temple nodded. She’d heard of defaced and mutilated Barbie doll images showing up around town from Mariah’s mother.

  But this was worse. This figure was life-size.

  “It’s not a real person, it’s a blow-up doll,” Temple murmured.

  “What’s that?” Mariah’s dark eyes demanded an honest answer.

  “Later,” Temple hissed under her breath. “Cameras.”

  By now the kitschy security forces were pushing their way into the room … and coming up mortified at the scene they confronted.

  No way bronzed Greek god he-men were going to deal with butchered sex toys.

  Beth Marble had finally arrived. Her voice could be heard urging the girls to leave immediately.

  Temple went over to take Silver’s arm. “Easy. It’s just a doll. You can’t kill Barbie. She’s forever. Come on.”

  Silver moved in tiny baby steps like an old, old woman. Amazing how shocking unreality could be.

  Yet Temple couldn’t underestimate the sick mentality at work, or how bold it was. Someone knew the setup and was exploiting it.

  Someone? Anyone. The crew was an assemblage of workers from here and anywhere. The contestants were selected from anyone who chose to enter. Temple knew for a fact that being a finalist could be manipulated. This could be about more than a single demented prankster-cum-killer. It could be a conspiracy.

  The producers could have arranged it. Maybe this had always been more horror show than beauty/makeover pageant. American Idol-cum-Fear Factor.

  “I’m calling the police,” Beth announced from the hall when the room had been cleared and the double doors firmly shut on the bloodied doll.

  The bloodied life-size actual doll. The faux victims were getting bigger, and the “attacks” closer together and bolder. More personal.

  Temple was interested to see three nervous men she’d never spotted before, overdressed for members of the camera crew. Must be the “suits” from the producers’ office. They had to be lurking around here somewhere, clean-shaven bland-looking men whose ages were in the indeterminate twilight zone of forty to sixty. Two of them immediately nixed calling the police.

  Beth shook off their opposing voices. “Everyone go to your rooms and stay there until further notice.”

  Everyone but the suits was forced to drift away, whispering to one another despite the ever-eavesdropping cameras and mikes.

  “Scream Queen,” someone whispered before they all dispersed to their separate cells … rooms. “Silver should get a lot of screen time for this.”

  “So what got everyone unglued about that doll, besides the blood?” Mariah asked in the shower-steamed bathroom, while water pattered into the tub and down the drain. Xoe and Mariah watched from the center of the room. They would shortly be regarded as the cleanest candidates in the competition. “Sure it was gross, Xoe Chloe, but it was just a dead balloon. I mean, talk about airheads—”

  And what, Temple wondered, would Mama Molina think of Xoe Chloe (Mariah obviously loved the comic book name) enlightening her sheltered daughter about sleazy ads in the back of men’s magazines?

  But she explained, as delicately as she could. She’d always heard that parents should be honest about sex education. Even dragooned in loco parentis types like herself.

  Mariah reared back. “Gross! Guys are so pathetic. And now gruesome too. Whoever is doing this is major sick.”

  “Some guys. And the red may not have been real blood. And the perp may be sick, or just pretending to be.”
>
  “What do you mean?”

  Temple mopped at her sweat-dewed brow. The wig was looking very natural thanks to all these steam baths. It was relaxing, growing just like real hair. Maybe someday soon she would become a real Xoe Chloe, like Pinocchio became a real boy.

  “These are flashy incidents,” Temple said, “designed to upset people and just begging to bring in the authorities. Maybe someone has it in for the show’s producers. There’s a point when too much freaky publicity hurts rather than helps a project. I’m Miss Public Relations. Trust me on this.”

  “So someone’s trying to ruin the show.” Mariah nodded. “Could be.”

  “Or it’s an elaborate setup.”

  “Or it’s a real sicko.”

  “Those are the options.”

  “Do you think my mom will get involved in this?”

  “Like a Kevlar vest on a SWAT team.”

  “Oh … shoot. She’ll ruin everything. Can’t she ever just let me do anything by myself?”

  “Hey! She okayed this whole deal, despite your never telling her in advance, but it’s going way beyond any of us being Teen or ‘Tween Queens. It’s starting to look like Junior Miss Fear Factor.”

  “If we solve this thing, we can get this show back on the road.”

  “To me, that is not a good thing, Mariah.”

  “Oh, no. You’re cool. You’ve got a real shot at this.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. Nobody here needs a do-over more than you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean, it’s brilliant. You are just awesomely wrong. I wish I coulda had that much to start with.”

  Chapter 24

  Great Big Beautiful Doll

  It seems the Divine Yvette has taken it into her pretty little head that since the little doll named Silver found the big doll named Balloon, a shaded silver Persian is likely to be the next victim of random spattering.

  “She is very superstitious,” sister Solange explains to me in the hall when I am denied access to the suite accorded to Miss Savannah Ashleigh and dependents. “She will not leave her carrier or take food. Other than caviar and sirloin tips, of course, which our mistress must hand-feed to her.”