Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

“Girls change their looks all the time.”

  “Right. Because they have not found the way they really want to be.”

  “Like a singer?”

  “That what you want?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” You can tell that Rafi Nadir knows a little about advising girl singers. He leans against the wall. “Sure you want to find a look to perform in but it should be what you like, not what everybody else looks like. You gotlots of time—”

  “No, I do not! The finals are just days away. I gotta polish my song and find out what they do to me and—”

  “No, you do not. You do not wait to find out what they do to you, ever. You decide and you tell them, get it?”

  “But, if I am not sure …”

  “Then make sure before you let them at you. Me, if I was you, I would nix the blonde. They always do blonde. At least half the country is not-blonde. Look at that big old alley cat there. He could be any one of thousands. I bet there are more black cats than any other kind in the country.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I heard Tem … someone say once that they put black cats to sleep more than any other kind.”

  While I shudder to hear the truth so baldly stated, Mr. Rafi Nadir stops to reconsider.

  “There are still a lot of them around, so I guess that does not work.”

  “So what are you?” Mariah asks.

  “Not-popular.”

  “Why? What are you?”

  “Me? This is not about me,” Rafi says.

  “You’re not-blonde.”

  “I am worse than that. Arab American.”

  “Oh. I see what you mean about popular. I am just Latina. But even all the girls on the Hispanic stations are going blonde.”

  “You kids. Always gotta do what everybody else does. Grow up. Get past that.”

  Mariah nods to the door behind which Miss Savannah Ashleigh awaits her.

  “She is blonde.”

  Mr. Rafi Nadir straightens and makes a funny face at the door. “Right. Case closed.”

  Mariah giggles, then knocks.

  Point made.

  Chapter 43

  In Old Cold Type

  Newspapers sent out copies of old articles on white paper so heavy it had a chalky feel.

  Temple lay an Atlas’s worth of such pages over the bathroom twin-sink counter. They’d been delivered to the house in a king-size pillow wearing a flannel case in a frolicking kitten design.

  A wretched note accompanied this innocuous delivery: “Please deliver to my little Xoe, who doesn’t sleep well without her kitty pillow. She must have forgotten to take it. Her Mom.”

  Apparently this maternal plea had moved the powers that be, for they had sent the sleekest professional blonde in Temple’s category to deliver it to her bedroom door just before dinner, with the hulking cameraman shooting tape over her bony shoulder. Apparently, now that the crime scene work was done and the detectives were gone for now, the filming ban had been lifted.

  “Here you are, Xoe,” Ashlee announced. “Something special from home for our resident tough girl. Oooh, the coot ’iddle kitty-wittys. Maybe now you can go beddie-bye.”

  Temple/Xoe snatched the ungainly gift away.

  She must have blushed because Ashlee tittered for the camera.

  Temple was embarrassed all right Not because of the kiddie pillow but because the note had probably been penned by mother Molina.

  “Thanks lots,” she told the door she had slammed in Ashlee’s face.

  Temple had turned to drop the pillow on the bed while Mariah snagged the note that dropped off it.

  “Hey, this looks like—” She glimpsed Temple’s hasty shushing pantomime and came near. “—like a really soft pillow.” She leaned down (how humiliating!) to whisper in Temple’s ear. “Looks like my mom’s writing.”

  Then they had adjourned to the bathroom. Although Temple was pretty sure bathrooms were a no-film zone, she was paranoid enough about their current task to hang washcloths and hand towels from any possible fixture that might hide a camera.

  The copier hadn’t captured every line. Many were blurred.

  Mariah hunched over the assemblage, scanning the blurry type.

  “Wow. This is ancient stuff.”

  “The mid-eighties.”

  “Right. Ancient stuff. My mom sent this?”

  Mariah looked up and Temple nodded. “At my request.” “You tell my mom what to do? Awesome.”

  “I asked her.”

  “Oh. That doesn’t usually work for me. Just asking.”

  “Mothers are like that. Luckily, your mom is not my mom.”

  “You sound like you mean that way too much.”

  “Guilty.”

  They settled down to read various pages, Temple perching on the tub rim, Mariah sitting on the closed throne. Then they exchanged sheets and read some more.

  “What do you think?” Temple asked finally, turning on the bathtub faucet again. The Teen Queen Castle’s water bill for this period would be humongous from resident spy work alone.

  “This stuff is Tabloid City. The kind of thing you’d see on CBS Investigates today. With that Dan Rather-not guy with the so dingy buzz cut. Why do old guys do that?”

  “Maybe so there’s less gray showing.”

  “Oh. Anyway, this case is so clear.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s like a movie. Old-guy husband is major upset that his young bimbo blowup doll wife”—Mariah looked up to make sure that Temple had noticed she was drawing on her brand-new info on blowup dolls—“is divorcing him and getting half of his money, along with a new boyfriend. She even gets the house while the judge is considering everything. This house. And she invites the new young boyfriend over. Think Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.”

  “And Bruce Willis is the Die-Hard husband?”

  “Right. So Bruce goes bonkers and puts on this ninja outfit with the Spider-Man hood—he was big on martial arts, remember, and Elvis and also Zen stuff, which you’d think wouldn’t be, like, getting him into murder. So he shows up and shoots away at everybody and paralyzes the wife’s daughter from her first marriage, wings the wife, kills the boyfriend, and disappears down the hidden passages and they never catch him.”

  “That left a lot of loose ends,” Temple said.

  “Yeah, but they’re all, like, so old now. What could they do?”

  “As you get older, Mariah, and you will, even old enough to drive a car, you’ll be struck by how young all the old people who used to be around you actually were.”

  “Huh?”

  “Age is relative. And bad blood has no expiration date.”

  This Mariah considered, biting on a painted nail that Temple grabbed away from her mouth before it became a serrated edge and ruined her ‘Tween Queen score.

  Mariah was still mulling over the implications. “You’re saying what’s happening now could go back to this stuff way back when?”

  “Just add twenty years to everybody’s ages.”

  “Well, the husband would be sixty-something. Too old to totter around here, I’d think.”

  “And the wife?”

  “She was a lot younger. Forty?”

  “Forty. Only ten years older than I am.”

  “No!” Mariah regarded Temple with true horror. “You’re only ten years away from that! I’d be … twenty-three, and old enough to drink.”

  “And vote.”

  “That too.”

  Temple felt oddly deflated by the notion that she was only ten years away from forty. She’d always thought of herself as only ten years away from twenty. It was the same thing but much more depressing looked at from the other end of the telescope.

  Mariah speared a blurred photocopy image. “She’d be thirty-five, the girl who was shot.”

  “Too old to compete here.”

  “Yeah. Not to mention crippled. None of it makes sense. They’re all too old.”

  That w
as Mariah’s callous teenybopper judgment. Temple shuffled the copies around. No matter how she juggled the dates and the dramatis personae, these murderous sinners and sinned against were indeed “too old” to be part of the Teen Queen reality show.

  Unless … she was looking at the wrong parts of the Teen Queen show. And the wrong reality.

  Chapter 44

  Old Tyme Revival

  If Molina prided herself on anything, it was on being a thorough supervisor. The minute Temple Barr asked for copies of the Dickson mansion murders, she’d ordered extra copies for Alch and Su.

  “Savannah Ashleigh’s bodyguard,” Su said, looking up from the documents.

  Unfortunately, Molina knew exactly who Savannah Ashleigh was: washed up cinemactress; neuterer of Temple Barr’s cat, Midnight Louie; judge at the Teen Queen contest.

  “Bodyguard?” Molina bit.

  “This guy is forty. Too young to be the ex-Mrs. Dickson’s boyfriend and no way her ex-husband. Still. A bodyguard. That puts him on the premises with the wherewithal to commit murder.”

  Molina was not pleased to see a contemporary photo of Rafi Nadir spun across the table right in front of her nose. Her blood ran cold. Cliché, yes. Fact, you bet!

  She kept all her physical reactions dampened as she frowned at the photograph in her custody, knowing she was being watched carefully by her troops. Seeing Rafi Nadir again a couple weeks ago had been easy. No one would believe he’d been a former lover and was even Mariah’s father. He was a loser. She was a winner. She’d frozen, ignored, brushed by, brushed off, rushed out of there. Maylords Fine Furniture was just a crime scene and Rafi Nadir was just an innocent bystander in that instance. Or not so innocent. He’d found her again and now knew about her, who she was, what she was. Homicide lieutenant. He had reveled in delivering the murderer to her, bound over. And Temple Barr had reveled in helping him to do it.

  Maybe she thought turnabout was fair play. Molina had pursued Temple’s significant other; now Molina’s ex-SO was in a position to embarrass, if not pursue, her.

  But what about Mariah? Temple was supposed to be protecting her. Instead the poor kid had already had the rare life experience of finding a dead body. Now she was in danger of finding out her father wasn’t a dead-hero cop but the disgraced private cop currently on the reality show premises. Molina’s hands started trembling with fury. Alch was watching her curiously. He knew. Too many people knew. Just not Mariah yet, thank God. She spun the photo back to Su as if returning a tennis serve.

  “We’ll put him on the possibles list.”

  Molina put her mind as well as her emotions in cold storage. Nadir had been interred in the box of her past, which was locked up, like a gun in a cabinet. Safe behind steel doors.

  Now … his orbit and her daughter Mariah’s had intersected in this insanely trivial place, a reality TV show. His daughter Mariah, who he’d ensured had entered the world by foul means, not fair, but who’s existence he had never suspected.

  Not even the sleaziest producer could have scripted such an ironic, maddening moment. And Molina had to keep the peace, keep the secret, no matter what. What was Temple Barr trying to do? Destroy her before she destroyed Max Kinsella? They had a deal.

  Everyone but Alch was watching her under the mistaken assumption that she was brilliantly analyzing the case at hand. She needed to distract them from watching her chewing on the conundrum of her personal and professional life and onto something else … .

  “What about the cat?” she asked.

  “Louie?” Alch smiled at a closeup shot of the feline in question. “The usual suspect. Big, black, and known to the police.”

  “Cut the humor, Alch.”

  “You’re the one who sent the kitty pillow.”

  “My daughter shares the room.”

  “Oh, I see. The pillow was a two-fer: Trojan horse for the roommate and motherly gesture for the kid.”

  “Trojan kitty,” Su said, snickering.

  “The reality show may be a joke. What’s going on there isn’t. Who else on the grounds is suspect, just because?”

  Su frowned, which drew her creatively plucked eyebrows into the kind of fretwork you’d find on an Asian table. Molina had never dared inquire into the inspiration for those brush-stroke eyebrows plucked into lines beginning thick and ending as fine as a mouse-hair brush. She didn’t know if the motive was cultural or simply creative. But they made Su memorable. She’d never seen the like, and nobody else had dared to inquire either, not even sticklers for uniformity at high rank. It would be one mystery this homicide lieutenant would never solve.

  “Everybody who’s on the premises was ‘picked,’ in one way or another, except the producers.”

  “But they’re all supposedly strangers,” Alch added. “Back at the time of the murder, everybody was related, one way or another.”

  “Could the fallout from that violent episode be haunting this show? The suspected perp is at large.”

  “Disappeared,” Alch objected. “There’s a difference. Everybody’s given up looking for him.”

  “Not me,” Molina said grimly. She tapped the crackling white oversize sheets of paper with their blurred fine lines of newsprint. “Check out what happened to all these people.”

  “You think one of them might have come back somehow?” Su sounded unconvinced.

  “I think something’s going on that has nothing to do with Teen Queens or TV.”

  Chapter 45

  Past Tense

  The man who looked too much like Matt, or vice versa, shifted his weight from foot to foot. He glanced back over his shoulder, down the corridor leading to the law offices.

  But Brandon, Oakes, and McCall were too far away to call on for help.

  He cleared his throat. “They said … someone had attempted to find out information on me. It was some sort of a scam.”

  Matt just stared into the man’s face. “Someone. Some sort of con man maybe?”

  The man’s expression hardened. “Exactly. ‘Extortion’ was the word. I guess you know I have lawyers.”

  “I guess you don’t know you have a son.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Why? The virgin birth isn’t, to a good Catholic.”

  “How’d you know I was Catholic?”

  “Guessed.”

  “Listen, this building has security cameras, and guards. Whatever you want—”

  “Isn’t what you’d think, or what they’d have you think.”

  The gray eyes flicked over Matt’s casual clothes, avoiding his face. Matt had dressed like the nobody Brandon, Oakes, and McCall said he was.

  “They stiffed me yesterday,” Matt said. Explained. “So I came back undercover.”

  “You—what are you? You can’t be a policeman.”

  “Actually, I could be. As it happens, I’m not. I’m a professional advisor.”

  “Oh, I see. And you want me to pay for your advice. I take the ‘advice’ of my attorneys first and foremost, and I don’t need any outside opinion.”

  Matt took a deep breath. “Thirty-four years ago. You were, what—? All of twenty maybe?”

  “None of your business.”

  “It is my business. I’m about my father’s business.”

  The first frown of doubt. “Why do you keep quoting religious stuff to me?” He backed away.

  Matt could read the man’s mind: religious nut. He almost laughed, except that this was not a proper occasion for mirth.

  “I’m surprised. Back then, you’d light a candle to a saint, down in the Polish district, where they still had statues of saints on the side aisles of those old churches, where belief smelled like incense and hot beeswax candles.”

  “You are some kind of religious nut.” He was backing away, toward the corridor and the safety of his lawyers’ offices.

  Matt laughed gently. “I guess you could call priests that.”

  “You’re a priest?” That stopped him. Still a practicing Catholic then.


  “Ex.”

  That had him ready to bolt again: demented ex-priest, out for … what? Blood? Yes, blood, Matt thought.

  “I have a regular advice stint on The Amanda Show, that’s why I’m in town.”

  “You’re a TV personality?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “I don’t get this. Stop being mysterious and cut to the chase.”

  “I wanted to spare you the shock.”

  “Shock? What shock?”

  “You’re not supposed to be alive. You’re supposed to have died ‘over there,’ thirty-four years ago. At least that’s what my mother was told.”

  “Your mother?”

  “You might remember her. Pretty young Polish girl. Must have looked great in the candlelight from a bank of vigil lights before the white plaster statue of St. Stanislaus. It’s still there and so is she, sort of. Mira.”

  “Mira.”

  The man actually staggered. Away from Matt. He glanced wildly down the hall, suddenly realizing that whatever was down there was too far and too late for retreating to.

  Matt put out a hand. “I tried to warn you.”

  The man settled for leaning against the wall opposite the bank of elevators and staring up at the ceiling fixtures.

  Finally he spoke. “You look like me.”

  “I thought you looked like me first.” Matt allowed some weary humor to touch his voice.

  “They said she’d disappeared. Girls her age did then. All the time. I knew nothing about her. Nothing about you. There was nothing left to pursue.”

  “Yes, there was.” Matt heard his own voice like a stranger’s, hard and unforgiving. “Only the lawyers handled it. They signed a two-flat over to her to keep us, silence being the price.”

  “She took it?”

  “Her family had disowned her. Your family was willing to give her something to stay away. And … they told her you were dead.”

  He slumped against the wall that supported him. “I can’t believe my family would do that.”

  “They’re still telling you nothing. The moment I walked in the lawyers’ offices yesterday, I got weird vibes from people, like I was a ghost. That’s when I realized there must be … relatives around. I thought a cousin, an uncle. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to drop it.”