Cat In A Hot Pink Pursuit

“Ghastly! I had no idea you dealt with such things.” Kit the former actress and current novelist, a creature of empathy, was devastated.

Temple shook off the past and its eternal losses. “Marjory Klein was the most unlikely murder victim in the place. Do you know anything about her?”

“We had meetings together, ate together, compared notes on candidates. Yeah, I knew her, Horatio.”

“Wait!” Temple waved the hand the glass happened to be in. “Is that Horatio as in Hamlet and the skull of Yorick, or Horatio as in CSI: Miami? Given your theatrical background, it’s hard to tell.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I tell you the woman was harmless. Good-natured. A widow. Urn, two, I think, grown children. Utterly committed to her field of work. Been in eating disorder consultation for years. Thought this stupid show was an opportunity to set an example for teenagers with bad, even dangerous, eating habits across the country. She was a much better person than I was, and now she’s dead.”

“That’s a very good point. If one of the coaches or judges was going to be killed, why not Dexter Manship, say?”

“He’s insufferable, yes. And it just isn’t an act. It’s all the time. So tiresome. Egotistic. Elitist. Everything well-balanced people love to hate. But … it’s also his shtick. He’s an entertainer. Killing him for being irritating would be like … offing Jerry Lewis. He’s a whipping boy for the rest of us, which is very healthy. And the French would be devastated.”

“The feelings of the French are not a national priority right now.”

“Oh, pooh. They’re supposed to be that way, as Dexter Manship is supposed to be the way he is. I just don’t understand why poor Marjory was killed. Strangled, I heard.”

Temple considered and decided to keep the suspected manner of death to herself. Not that Kit would tell but she might not be able to down another legume in her life, and that would be a sad betrayal of Marjory’s mission. Temple knew she was taking a very dim view of lima beans right now, as if she wasn’t already skittish about them. Who knew?

“What should I do?” Kit asked.

“Keep an eye open. Does anybody here strike you as suspicious?”

Kit sipped and considered, considered and sipped. “That dark dangerous-looking guy that Savannah Ashleigh calls a bodyguard.”

Temple frowned. “I know him. He’s not Mr. Good Citizen but—”

But. Rafi was taking questionable jobs around Vegas, and she’d met him doing muscle at strip clubs. He’d been a strong suspect for the Stripper Killer. Just because he was Molina’s loathed ex was no reason to become his champion. What if this time he really was up to something … ugly?

Molina would have her scalp. And neck. And rear end if she underestimated Nadir’s reasons for being here when Mariah was on the premises and involved. Molina would have her skin for not mentioning that Nadir was here, period. Maybe she’d better tell her … and have Molina on-site, in everybody’s face? Not productive.

“What are you scheming, niece? I see whole Elizabethan tragedies running through your mind.”

“You have a theatrical imagination, Aunt Kit. It’s fun but off base. Some of the dramatis personae in this thing are a little dicey, is all. It’s the strangers I wonder about. We don’t know enough about anybody to figure out who might want to kill them. Are any of the judges and coaches previously acquainted?”

“Sorry. Not a one. To hear them tell it. From my point of view, they act like strangers.”

“Then … what about the people who put us all together?”

“Who? Oh. You mean the producers.”

“Yeah, why are they so shadowy?”

Kit shrugged. “They always are, whether it’s a Broadway play or a TV show. Only a very few producers develop a high public profile. I’m thinking of Don Hewitt of Sixty Minutes, and, my God, that show’s been on since God made Eden. So sheer longevity gets his name out. Stephen Cannell, a lot of people know him, fans of The Rockford Files and a few dozen other TV hits.”

“I’ve been calling our absent producers Goodson Toddman.”

“Oh, yeah! A play on the names of the old game-show kings, Goodman-Todson. But you’re in publicity. You know the people behind the people. The public doesn’t.”

“Wouldn’t that be a great way to set up a sting, a revenge plot, a murder, then? Produce a show as an excuse and pop off your enemy. Or enemies.”

“Oh, great. Now I have to worry what producers I might have ticked off during my distant acting career. I’m just a paperback writer now. Please, sir, no more. Don’t kill me.”

But Kit’s touching theatrics didn’t touch Temple. She was standing up, then pacing in the bathroom’s limited space. She liked that idea very much. Don’t look at the Teen Queen show as what it purported to be but as someone’s elaborate revenge plot. And it had to be revenge. You don’t kill someone the way Marjory Klein was killed for any other reason.

So. Reality TV as a setup for murder. Maybe … for multiple murders.

“Kit! You’re a genius. I’ve got a whole new take on this thing. Pick up thy bottle and toddle on home.”

“But, Temple, if it is indeed a setup and some of us, maybe all of us, aren’t here by accident, I was invited. Out of the blue. For no discernible reason.”

“Some people were invited as cover, like maybe all the contestants.”

“Cover. I’m cover. That’s good. I can live with that. I wouldn’t know anybody in common with a dietitian, would I?”

“Of course not. Where was Marjory from?”

“Ah, Los Angeles, I think she said.”

“See. Wrong coast, Manhattan baby. You’re safe. They say not, but I think the police must have someone undercover here.““Besides you?”

“I’m told I’m only good for babysitting.”

“Not your forte. I know. I’m your aunt.”

“Keep that under your hat, if you have one with you. And we both better keep an eye out to see that none of the little girls get hurt.”

“Sure. But, Temple, all of the girls had appointments with Marjory. Maybe she really ticked one off with her healthy eating crusade. Maybe she found one who was seriously anorexic and was determined to have her put into treatment.”

“And therefore removed from the competition. I didn’t want to reveal the total grossness of the death scene, but I suppose a girl who purged herself would consider stuffing food down someone’s throat a suitable punishment.”

“Stuffed down her throat?” Kit put a hand to her own neck. “God, what a way to go. I hope nobody ever hates me that much.”

She pushed the cork back into her illegal bottle, as if she couldn’t swallow anything more. The gesture reminded them both that no liquor was served in the Teen Queen Castle.

Imagine, Temple could turn in her own aunt for violating the dorm rules! Teenage angst, revisited, made for many motives for murder.

Kit saluted at the door, then scurried back down the hall to her own wing.

Temple turned back to the room. Mariah was still doing the turtle under the bedcovers. Temple wished she could be as dead to the world and the schemes that must be swirling around here as Mariah was at this moment.

Chapter 37

American Tragedy

“You want what’?”

Molina looked up from the phone receiver pinched between her cheek and shoulder. She held up a hand to signal Alch and Su to hold on a minute.

“I have more to do right now than act as a glorified file clerk,” she went on.

Under the desk her toe tapped an impatient drumbeat on the vinyl tile floor.

Alch and Su exchanged glances.

“All right. I’ll find someone to do it, although God knows we’re understaffed. Yes. ASAP. My messenger boy may have to be a bit unconventional. Fine. Good.”

She hung up with an undisguised sigh.

“More paperwork, Lieutenant?” Alch asked sympathetically. Paperwork was the bane of accountants, schoolteachers, and law enforcement types.

“Nothing germane.” Molina sat. “What’s happening at that damn house?”

“Nothing more. We have some uniforms on the set, so to speak,” Alch said.

“Meanwhile,” Su added, “I’ve found a lot out about Marjory Klein.”

“And—?”

“She was somebody, Lieutenant. She has several books about nutrition and eating disorders on Amazon.com and eBay.”

“Second coming, obviously,” Alch mocked. “Amazon and eBay. The new carnival hucksters.”

“The point is,” Su said, pointedly, eyeing Alch askance, “that she was something of an expert in the field.”

“Credentials accepted. What about her personally?”

Su flipped pages, quoting. “Associate Professor at Great Western University in Michigan. Blue-collar school but well regarded. Assisted various nationally known psychiatrists in treating eating disorder cases. She had some professional chops.”

“In other words,” Alch summed up, “she was an expert of a sort.”

“Amazing.” Molina was truly surprised. “The show producers actually assembled some credible advisors, unlike our own CSI.”

“It’s a national hit, Lieutenant,” Alch said, “no point in being a nit-picker.”

“There’s always a point in being a nit-picker, Morrie, or at least some pleasure.” But Molina smiled.

“Okay,” she went on. “This woman wasn’t a quack. Could she have professional rivals jealous of her new public profile with the Teen Queen gig?”

“We’re talking academia,” Alch said. “Always rivals.”

“I have the autopsy report.”

“What’d Grizzly say?” Su asked.

Molina smiled again. Her nickname for the burly brusque coroner, last name Bahr, had stuck. It gave her a certain cachet with him. Coroners were always a trifle vain, like Sherlock Holmes’s older brother. They loved the tribute of a nom de guerre.

“Peanut oil. Peanut allergy. Deadly. Victims of this condition usually advertise it widely to avoid any contact with such a common food element.”

“So the lima beans . .” Su began.

“Were both a medium and a message, I think.”

“Wow.” Su was speechless for two seconds. “Any one of those girls could have had enough of Klein’s ‘beans and legumes’ philosophy. And peanut oil … it’s everywhere.”

“What about the kitchen?” she asked Alch.

He nodded, consulting his notebook. “Bottles of the stuff, raw peanuts. ‘Natural’ peanut butter floating in oil. Anyone could have accessed it.”

“Wasn’t the kitchen normally off-limits?”

“Yes, but the show reveled in rebels.” Alch looked up at Molina. Pause. “One Mariah Molina made an unauthorized midnight raid on the kitchen Tuesday night. And Xoe Chloe caught her with a hand in the Chips Ahoy.”

A silence held in the small, narrow office.

“I suppose no one is exempt from suspicion,” Molina said finally. “I am at a loss for a motive.”

“According to witnesses, Klein was particularly hard on your daughter,” Su said. “She was on the most stringent diet.”

“Nobody else got bad news from the nutritionist?”

“Everybody had to consume more soy protein, low-fat dairy, and milk.”

“None of that is a motive for murder,” Molina objected.

“Agreed.” Alch sat forward on the damned uncomfortable plastic shell chair. “We need to dig deeper into the victim’s personal life.”

“Hah!” Su crossed her arms over her size zero Donna Karan jacket. “Nutritionists don’t have personal lives. Klein was a divorcée for twenty years, an academic drudge, a nobody outside a very narrow arena of expertise.”

“She was somebody enough to get drafted for the Teen Queen Castle show.” Molina sat back. “Find out more. Find out more relevant facts. Find me a motive.” Alch and Su stood. “Right,” he said.

“Wrong,” Su murmured as they shouldered out the narrow door together.

Molina leaned back in her chair’s cheesy tilt setting. She couldn’t agree with Su more. This murder was all wrong. The vic was all wrong. They were all wrong, or they would see the connections that were now invisible. But, like a magician’s hidden mechanisms, those threads had to be there.

Magicians. At least Max Kinsella had nothing to do with this case, thank God and Harry Houdini.

Chapter 38

North into Nowhere

The Circle Ritz was a kitschy piece of fifties architecture clinging to the fringe of the exploding ultramodern Fantasia that the Las Vegas Strip had become.

It was round, faced with black marble, and sported triangular balconies at the “corner” units.

Max drove his latest dispensable vehicle, a black Toyota Rav4, into the familiar lot. He knew every dimple in the asphalt and every pothole the heat had burned into the surface.

Temple’s new red Miata, caramel-colored canvas top up, sat under the shade of the venerable palm tree that overarched the lot.

He usually entered the unit he and Temple had shared—until his enforced disappearance eighteen months ago—like a second-story man: by the French doors on the balcony.

Part of that was self-preservation; there were those thatwanted him dead. Another part of it was the magician’s need to surprise. Temple had always been a ready audience for the paper rose bouquet, the sudden flash of fire to light a candle, and especially the unannounced midnight assignation.

This time, though, Temple was gone and he’d have to enter by a more conventional route, the side door from the parking lot.

The Lovers Knot Wedding Chapel that landlady Electra Lark operated was in the building’s street-facing front. Back here was only a long hallway, then the buzzer security system for the units.

Max had his own key but he buzzed his destination anyway. This mid-afternoon visit would be a surprise, and he wanted to ensure his quarry was in.

The answer was yes, so he pushed the button for the single elevator and waited for its slow descent. He felt like a visitor here at last, not just an errant resident who’d been AWOL too long. Not a good feeling. No wonder Temple was getting restive about their relationship. Ouch. That was the first time he’d thought of it that way.

The old elevator took him up at its usual charming cranky rate. When the door finally opened, his destination was just three strides away.

The forbidden penthouse.

Another button to push. Rewarded by the nostalgic chime of an old-fashioned doorbell.

“Max!” Electra Lark cast the door wide, her tropical-colored muumuu filling it like a flower-shop display. Beyond her came the chill and hum of airconditioning. “Don’t be a stranger. Come in.”

“Are you sure? I’ve never been inside before. Most residents haven’t.”

“Tut-tut. You mean you never managed a clandestine exploration, like Temple’s cat, Louie, that bad boy?”

“Magician’s honor.”

“Well, you’re not really a resident anymore. Are you?”

“Not officially.”

“Neither is Louie, but he’s coming and going around here all the time.”

Electra turned and Max followed her through an octagonal entry hall lined in vertical mirrored blinds that reflected his image in disconcerting slivered bits. He felt exactly that fragmented these days.

The rooms beyond were cool, almost cold, and dimly lit. The whole place smacked of an inner sanctum, quite different from Electra’s bright, beachy appearance and personality.

“Have a seat,” she suggested.

He wasn’t sure which hunkering forties sofa or chair would accommodate his six-foot-four frame; they were all bulky, but the seating areas were oddly cramped. He settled gingerly on the maroon mohair sofa.

“May I offer you some sun tea?”

“No”

Electra sat on a rattan chair by the blond television set that must be fifty years old. “Well, you’re an easy guest.” She herself was eternally sixty-something. Her white hair, normally a canvas for a variety of spray-on colors, like indigo or purple or magenta, was a tumble of golden blonde, giving her the look of an aging Shirley Temple doll on Hawaiian holiday.

“I just stopped by to ask after Temple.”

“What about her?”

“She mentioned she was leaving town.”

“Oh, yes. She asked me to watch her place, and Louie, for a week or so. I have seen about as much of Louie since then as I’ve seen of you in the past several months.”

“That bad?”

“Oh, you bachelor boys have your rounds to make, no doubt, deserting us faithful girls at home.”

Max let that go. “I wondered if you’d heard how Temple’s father was.”

“Father?”

“That’s why she went home. Isn’t it?”

“Goodness, Max! I don’t know. She didn’t mention why she was leaving and I’m not one to pry, not right out anyway. She was in a tearing hurry to leave. I hope it isn’t anything too serious, although at his age … and mine, it could be.”

“She said it was a minor heart problem. A stent.”

“Listen, at our age, heart problems are not minor. Poor little thing. She must have been worried to distraction to forget to mention it to me. Or she didn’t want me to worry. Oh … Max! Wait! Don’t move.”

Of course he froze at Electra’s sudden command. Her eyes had widened like windows and she was staring directly behind him.

Max’s muscles tensed to jump any which way necessary.

“What is it?”

“This is unheard of. She’s … come out and is perching on the sofa back. Just behind your left shoulder.”

“She. You’re not referring to a poisonous serpent or a scorpion, I assume.”

“Lord, no. Shhh! If you move very slowly you might see her.”

Max could move as slowly as a living statue in the Venice hotel’s central courtyard, in other words, almost beyond camera detection. In a minute, he had turned enough to stare into the most celestial sky blue eyes he’d ever seen.

He was facing a cat whose longish silky cream hair was accented with brown and white.

“Karma,” Electra pronounced.

“You mean it was karma that she’s shown herself to me.”

“Maybe so, but that’s also her name. Karma. She’s a supersensitive cat, a Birman. They were sacred to the dalai lamas.”

“Much was.” Max rose, very slowly.

The cat remained in place, staring at him.

“This is so unusual. Karma doesn’t take to strangers.”

“I’m not a complete stranger.”

“Not until the last few months. If Temple calls, is there someplace I can reach you?”

He jotted his cell phone number on a blank card from his pocket.

Electra rose to see him to the door. “It’s good to see you Max. I’ll walk out with you.”

“Not necessary.”

“No, but I want to see what you’re driving these days. I’ve never seen anyone with such a habit of changing cars.”

“Leases allow me to change cars as often as you change hair colors.”

“Touché.” She took his arm once they were back in the foyer and waiting for the elevator. “I’m upset that Temple didn’t tell me about her father. You’ll keep me informed if you find out anything, won’t you?”

“I don’t have her mother’s phone number. I wasn’t exactly a Barr family favorite.”

“Why ever not, Max? I’d want you in my family album any day.”

He shrugged as they rode down in the elevator. “Temple was the youngest child and the only girl. They didn’t want her running off to Las Vegas with an itinerant magician.”

“But you were headlining at the Goliath!”

“I’m not anymore. Maybe they were right. And families are funny.” He couldn’t help thinking of his own very unfunny family situation.

By then they were in the lobby. Electra took a firm maternal grip on his arm. “You’re part of the Circle Ritz family, dear Max, whether you’re in residence or not. So feel free to come visit me and Karma anytime.”

Max smiled at her innate warmth. He’d been pretty insulated from family feeling most of his life. Surprising how good her encouragement felt.

On the back step, Electra halted them. “Wait. Let me guess which one is yours.”

“Not much of a challenge. There are only seven vehicles out here.”

“You are always a challenge, Max. Hmmm. The black Toyota SUV.”

“Not the silver Crossfire?”

“Maybe, except I know who drives that.”

Something guarded in her tone made Max ask, “And who is that?”

“Matt. Just got it.”

“Devine? What happened to churchly frugality?” Electra shrugged, her arm still linked through his. “Maybe it was time he broke out a little.”

“You were letting him ride the Hesketh Vampire.” Max referred to his vintage Brit classic motorcycle, also silver, which he’d given Electra way back when as a down payment on the Circle Ritz condo. For Temple and him.

“Right. Then he bought my old Probe.”

“Now that he has the Crossfire, I don’t suppose he gives the Vampire much exercise these days then?”

“Not much. I could ride it. Still have my Speed Queen helmet, but I haven’t for some reason.”

Matt stared at the low sleek silver car and the small red convertible and his own high-riding SUV, which looked ultra-conservative and dull alongside those two.

“I feel like taking a nostalgic spin on the Vampire. Did you know that there are only three left, outside museums? Come on; I’ll give you a ride that will curl your blonde hair even more.”

“I don’t know, Max. You sound pretty reckless right now.”

“Speed Queen isn’t up for that?”

“Darn wrong!” She reached into her muumuu pocket. “Just let me unlock the shed and we’ll be ready to rock and roll.”

In minutes, Max had grabbed the no-name black helmet Matt had used. Electra had mounted behind him, her chubby hands locked around his waist. They cruised out of the parking lot through a few city blocks before hitting Highway 15 paralleling the Strip, then veering onto 93, heading north into nowhere.

He let the Vampire have its head, like a horse. After all, it was named for the unearthly scream its engine produced as it reached higher speeds.

Far past the city, he let the motorcycle run as straight as a banshee scream, due north. Electra whooped behind him and held on tighter. Wind lashed them both into a mute, moving altered state of speed and nerve and nirvana.

And finally, miles down Highway 93 en route to Ash Springs, the Vampire’s triumphant screech drowned out the ugly, unwelcome questions in Max Kinsella’s head.

Chapter 39

Awful Unlawful

The atmosphere around the Teen Queen Castle was rapidly turning into English country house boredom.

All the frenetic activity ground to a halt. Each faction clung to their “wings,” lolling about the common rooms watching CNN (the coaches and judges), MTV and E.T. (the ‘Tween Queen candidates), Ambush Makeovers and Home Shopping Network and QVC (the Teen Queen lions’ mane den), and ESPN (the technical crew).

Xoe Chloe, the nonconformist, found reason to ricochet between all of them, as if on invisible Rollerblades.

And, of course, she kept bouncing off Alch and Su as they made their rounds interviewing the entire cast and crew.

There were two other people on board as unattached as Xoe Chloe, both unanchored and both unsavory. Temple wondered what that meant.

“Hey there!” The words were banal; the deep baritone that intoned them sent hacksaw blades up Temple’s back.

She turned to find Crawford Buchanan attired in a banana-yellow jogging suit (which made him look like a tropical fruit with a shaggy, rotting end, i.e., his always too-trendy coiffure), trying to catch up with her in the artsy breezeway between the coaches’ and candidates’ areas.

“Yeah?” She turned and stopped only because it occurred to her he might be worth pumping.

“You sure do get around.”

“Beach Boys. 1964. ‘I Get Around.’”

“An MTV girl. If I were a judge you’d make my cut.”

“You’re a real Nowhere Man. Beatles. 1966.”

“Okay. Cute. I’d still like to interview you.”

“With no mike, Spike?”

He tapped his forehead. “I still have this. And maybe some paper somewhere.”

While he patted his jogging suit pockets for the absent notebook, Temple snatched an InStyle magazine abandoned by a passing blonde on a nearby table.

“Write on this.”

“Well, I guess I can. In the white spaces.”

“You always been a radio guy?” she asked.

“Off and on. Used to have my own show. They called me the Provo, Utah, Kid.”

“Real catchy.”

He bought it. “What do you think about this murder thing?”

“I think it’s ruining the reality TV show world. I mean, jawing with maggots, eating live lizards, winning a million for snagging some dork on live TV … or not, singing so bad you’re an un-American Idol, that’s all righteous stuff. Cool. But murder. Way too intense. Bad form. You know what I mean?““Uh, yeah. So … why’d you do this?”

“Thought it’d be a kick. Why’d you do this?”

“I have a chance to get syndicated and you could be part of it, Xoe. It’s the pits that we’re off camera. I need a telegenic personality like you. When we’re recording again, I’d get you Rollerblading all through the house. You’d be our guide to the whole show, see? Great exposure. A shower scene maybe. Then jogging around the pool. Show ‘em all sweating and primping. The public will love it.”

“Whoa! Crawford, you devil, you. That’s all visual material.”

“Right. Radio sucks. I’m being recorded here too. I wanna go TV.”

“Sure. You’ve got the chops for it. Say, if you solved this murder thing—”

He blinked, flashing his long, ladylike lashes. A supermodel would kill for those things.

“I’ve been thinking this police stuff is a hitch,” he said.

“No, dude. It’s an opportunity. CSI Central. Who d’you think done it? You’ve been all over this place. Unless … it’s you-uuu.”

He spat out a yeesh sound. “Right. I want to ruin a chance to change media. No way. But you’re right, if I could find a way to capitalize on this murder.. .”

“So, what’d yah think of this Klein babe?”

“Nothing. I mean, she wasn’t good-looking or even interesting.”

“Interesting enough for someone to murder.”

“That’s true.” The Crawf frowned, lost in the implications. “I interviewed her on tape. Had to. She was a coach. All she did was spout stuff about how girls eat bad just to look good but end up looking worse. I mean, I don’t care how they get there, as long as they get there, and you got there, if you know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Temple restrained herself from rolling up her InStyle magazine and stuffing it down his throat.

Then she took her own mental temperature. She felt, right now, just like the murderer must have felt confronting Marjory Klein. Only Crawford was a disgusting toad who deserved to eat his own words.

What could, would Marjory Klein have deserved? Mariah saw her as a diet Nazi, a nag, but Klein had just wanted young women to be healthy, hadn’t she? Since when was that a sin?

Temple owed the Crawf big time for stirring an emotion in her that gave her a few seconds’ insight into the murderer.

Crassford Buchanan ought to be a de rigueur fixture on every crime scene to inspire the detective to think like someone in a murderous rage.

The killing may have been sheer rage at the end but at the beginning, during the setup, it had to have been pure cold calculation. That gave her an interesting insight into the killer.

Temple wandered out to the pool area, still trying to put the pieces together. Whoever did it had to know something about Marjory. Her philosophy and habits. What she was allergic to. That meant the roots of the murder lay far away from this Teen Queen Castle on the Mojave. And therefore the motives were harder to find.

How could Temple contribute anything? She didn’t have the access the police did to the victim’s past. Or maybe she did. Molina.

The pool was deserted right now except for one lounge chair on which lay a bronzed body in a lime green bikini.

A big black cat lay under the lounger, basking in the shade of that B-movie body.

Louie blinked at Temple, his eyes the same lime green shade as Savannah Ashleigh’s latest thong.

Savannah wore a silver foil collar around her neck like a high-tech Elizabethan collar. It focused the sun’s lethal tanning rays at her neck and under her chin. No ugly untanned white streaks allowed just where they might make her look a trifle old and crepe-skinned.

Temple stopped to stare at this flagrant example of self-abuse. Even Hollywood George Hamilton had used self-tanning lotions for years.

“Reminds me of bacon,” a voice behind Temple noted. She turned to find Rafi Nadir standing at attention in the shade of the portico, sunglasses as dark as those on any South American dictator hiding his eyes. Nothing disguised the contempt in his voice as he regarded the object of his protection.

Savannah was courting melanoma while paying to avoid an unlikely personal physical attack.

“Yo,” Xoe Chloe said.

“Yo, yourself, whoever you think you are. I know you,” he added.

“Me?”

“You … now that the KISS wig is history. First, you’re a thong-girl at a strip club, then you’re a PR flack at a furniture store, and now you’re a juvenile delinquent Valley Goth Girl.”

“You made me! How?”

“Once that lame wig was gone.”

“I didn’t have much time to get an act together.”

“So, now you’re gonna tell me what you really are, a PI.” It was as good a secondary cover as anything. “Maybe,” Temple said, “and now the murder to go with me has happened at last.”

“So. You want something.”

“Not much.”

“They always say that.” He nodded at Savannah.

“I really don’t want much.”

“I must admit that you get around.”

“You too.”

“Yeah, well, I gotta take these freelance gigs.”

“I’d think guarding a dedicated babe like Savannah would be a cushy job.”

“She hasn’t even got the integrity of a stripper,” he said. “Look at that old alley cat sitting under her shadow. He knows what she’s good for. Occupying space in this world, and not much else.”

“She may have struggles we don’t know anything about.”

“Most people do. It still doesn’t entitle them. So. What is a PR girl doing here playing a Bad Barbie PI?”

“I’m someone’s bodyguard too. One of the ‘Tween Queen candidates. Her mother hired me.”

He nodded. “Her mother had the right idea, it turns out, now that murder’s been done. Hey! You’re rooming with the poor kid who found the body. What’s her name? Mamie?”

“Mariah.” Temple felt weirder than she could say introducing Rafi Nadir to the name of his unsuspected daughter.

“Mariah. Odd name. Mama musta been a big fan of Mariah Carey. The pop diva, you know.”

“I do know. Actually, the name reminds me of the song.”

“Song?”

“From Paint Your Wagon.”

Rafi’s body language remained as blank as his sunglasses. “Paint your what?”

“A musical comedy about the California Gold Rush. The name of the western wind is Mariah. In the song.”

“Well, this is the West.” Rafi shrugged. “As if Las Vegas was anywhere real.““What keeps you here?”

“I don’t know. L.A. was a bust. I drifted. There are lots of temporary jobs here for a guy like me. If I don’t get competition from know-it-all PR gals. You’re quite a chameleon, you know that?”

“I don’t want to be. I just keep getting drawn into these situations.”

“So how’s the kid?”

“Mariah?”

“Yeah. I’ve worked the death scene and interviewed citizens who found the corpse, but a kid? And this one was rough. You handle it okay?”

“Yeah. Except the victim was so harmless.”

“Those are the worst. She seemed like a nice lady.”

Temple eyed Savannah, who wiggled on the lounge chair, forcing Louie to move to keep his shady spot. Rafi was oddly unaffected by Savannah’s vampish moves. Maybe he wasn’t as knee-jerk a jerk as she—and Molina—thought. Was that possible?

“What a spotlight hog,” Rafi said. “A little talent would help a lot.”

“Maybe not. Look at this competition.”

“Looks like a murder competition.”

“You expect more?”

“There are so many more deserving victims.” His blocked gaze clearly focused on Savannah.

“Don’t worry. Louie is on the case.”

“Louie?”

“The cat. My cat.”

This kept him silent for a few seconds. “You and the cat are a team? I spotted him around Maylords.”

“A girl can always count on a cat.”

“Does this Mariah girl have a cat?”

“Two. Striped. And Louie by proxy.”

Rafi’s continually scanning sunglasses lowered to re-gard Louie, then lifted to Savannah with her foil collar, ear-plugging radio and the bikini a lime dressing on an oiled, silicone-stuffed breast of turkey prime.

“These cops on the scene,” he said. “They haven’t a clue. But I think you do. Keep me in the loop.”

“Mr. Nadir, if it’s loopy you want, it’s loopy you’ll get.”

“Right. I liked the expression on that homicide lieutenant’s face when you had me snag the Maylords killer. That do-able again?”

“Maybe. But I don’t get your issues.” Of course she knew more than he could guess.

“Nobody could.”

Then Savannah called for a misting with distilled water and a green apple martini, and Rafi moved to oblige her. Was that a motive for murder? Oh, yeah.

Chapter 40

American Idle

There is not much to be learned underneath the dripping shower of tanning creams.

Granted, my Miss Temple has made excellent use of the shower option in the bathroom for consultations and speculations. However, Miss Savannah Ashleigh proves to be a disappointment in this area, and I am sorry I am too far away to eavesdrop on my esteemed associate’s parley with Mr. Rafi Nadir.

He keeps turning up in this town like the proverbial bad penny, but any human dude who can remain unimpressed by the too obvious attributes of Miss Savannah Ashleigh gets a free grade C in my book.

So, once Miss Temple, aka Xoe Chloe, leaves the scene to Mr. Nadir and his charge, I ankle across the hot concrete at a sprightly pace and head for the far door to the kitchens, which is often an open and shut case of folks coming and going.

And who do I end up nose-to-nose with but my own not-so-darling daughter. So-called.

“Louise! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“No doubt from all those hours lolling with bimbos on the back forty,” she retorts.

(Louise does not converse so much as retort. And riposte. And countercharge. And other annoying communication habits.)

“Information gathering,” I report. (If she can retort, I can report.) “As you can see, my Miss Temple is on an important undercover assignment.”

“She is a PR flack! How important can this assignment be? If you ask me, she is in her second teenhood. That is what happens to humans who have odd ideas about relationships with the opposite sex. She is bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the choices available to the modern female. She should chill out and sample the buffet before she commits herself to ‘until death do them part,’ whoever ‘them’ may be. Or just get fixed and forget it.”

“Easy enough for you to say.”

“I am proudly neuter. Look at all the angst and time it saves. I would save even more time if my decidedly not-neuter Dad deigned to tell me what case he was working on.”

“It is not a case. It is a personal matter. My roommate took on this nutso assignment and I have been dragged along like a Hello Kitty purse,” I say, referring to line of feline-themed frivolities for the grade-school set.

“‘Hello Kitty!’ This is exactly what I say when I am visiting the executive suite at the Crystal Phoenix and happen to spy your puss on the nightly news. If Miss Temple is undercover here, you are way overcover: ‘a passing alley cat who took one look at the lovelies in residence and stayed on to become an unofficial mascot.’ One week it is masquerading as a domestic accessory in Fine Furnishings, and the next week it is scarfing up ‘a lean fish and veggie’ diet on a reality TV show set. You are getting downright decadent in your old age, Pop.”

“Shhhh,” I hiss, checking for any Persian girls who might be within hearing range. Overhearing such nonsense might give them the wrong idea about my age and carefree lack of encumbrances. “I am not your pop. Murder has been done here. I need discretion more than ever.”

“Why do you think I am here? That nasty killing is all over local TV.”

“What? The producers of this shoddy but hot show do not have the juice to squelch bad publicity?”

“Get with it. Nowadays bad publicity is good publicity. This the era of really cheesy reality, on TV or off of TV. Look at Paris Hilton and Victoria Gotti. Bad is good.”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think certain standards prevail. Why are the police not shutting this show down?”

“Why shut it down? The place is already wired from one end to the other, all kosher and everybody signed up to agree to it. They could not legally get a wire tap on a murder scene, but all they have to do here is review the daily footage and stalk the suspects. We should have it so good in our business. At least Midnight Inc. Investigations should have a full complement of staff on the premises. Especially since our prime client is here and in danger.”

“And that would be?”

“‘Your Miss Temple,’ as you are always putting it. You know that she relies upon us for footwork.”

“Urn, me maybe. I do not believe she is aware of your occasional participation.”

“All the better.” Miss Louise makes my heart sink by nudging me under a shaded bench against the house and sitting down for a long consultation.

From this vantage point, we watch the humans come and go while I give a running commentary on who is who and who hates whom.

I learn that Miss Louise is one hundred percent in agreement with my Miss Temple on the vapidity of blondes of either gender. I then twit her on her fondness for Mr. Matt. She swishes her long fluffy train in my face and says that the rare exception always proves the rule, and I had better watch out because her Fancy Feast coupons are on him in the Miss Temple sweepstakes.

I then defend the suave man of the world, black of hair but pure of heart, and she concedes that she would not kick Mr. Max out of bed if she happened to be in residence there.

She predicts that my “honeymoon” with Miss Temple cannot last forever, and I should stick to working in the family business because soon that may be all that I have to keep me warm.

Before I can get my whiskers in a wad at this scenario, a glimpse of Mr. Rafi Nadir’s motorcycle boots passing through on some demeaning errand for Miss Savannah Ashleigh interrupts us.

Louise recognizes him with just one whiff of leather sole. “Ah. The freelance muscle-about-town. I know you have a soft spot for him because he helped Miss Temple out during a dangerous moment once, but I find him turning up at criminous scenes all too often.”

-Criminous?’ What have you been reading at the Crystal Phoenix while waiting for Chef Song to wave some effete delicacy of Chinese cuisine under your nose? Agatha Christie? Talk about decadent! `Criminous’ That is not PI talk. Are you a house detective or a housecat?”

“Back off! The lone dude with the lone gun went out with the forty-five. Face it, Pops, it is the age of CS/. You want long words like `criminous,’ you should hear what the forensics folks toss around. This dead lady here was killed by something chemical, not a gun or a knife.”

“Still plenty of that out there,” I grumble, for the chit is right. It is science not horse sense (though I have never known an equine with much of it) that rules modern crime-solving circles.

While I am hunkering down, contemplating the demise of the lobo detective (as witness my own cravenly alliance with Midnight Louise herself), I cast an eye to see what Mr. Rafi has brought to the side of Miss Savannah.

I stiffen with surprise, all over.

He has brought two canvas bags, one pink and one purple, both with mesh sides, each containing an Ashleigh sister.

I cannot contain myself, although I try to not let Miss Louise see that.

“Must go interrogate a couple of witnesses,” I mutter under my breath.

“Witnesses! Daddy-O! What would these two floozies ever witness except their mistress’s indiscretions?”

“Exactly, Louise. A starlet of Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s stature—”

She snorts but I step aside before my coat is sprayed.

“—of her stature is sure to hear all the latest gossip. Of course, the Persian girls overhear it all. Stay here. Two of us might look suspicious.”

At this, I make an end-around approach to the Ashleigh lounge chair, for the woman is highly prejudiced against me, even though she knows I am a totally sexually responsible dude since my enforced operation at her hands. Well, at the hands of her plastic surgeon.

Now the V-word is my byword. Not Viagra, Bast forbid, but for V as in … vasectomy. I am a thoroughly modern male, even if by mistake.

Soon I am huddled under the lounge chair again, picking up tidbits of information from the girls.

“Our mistress is so unheeding,” Yvette complains. “She likes to swelter in the UVs, so she assumes we would like it. With our luxuriant fur coats, of course, we prefer cool dark places.”

“Me too,” I say.

The paired purrs from the carriers nearly drive me crazy. “So what is happening with your mistress? She must surely be uneasy that a contest advisor has been offed.”

“Mais oui.“Only it sounds like “meow” to the uninitiated, i.e., humans. Solange presses her piquant face to the mesh so that several of her long curled vibrissae protrude and tickle my own whiskers. “She has been uneasy for some time. Someone has been lurking around, and it has gotten worse now that we are here at the Teen Queen Castle.”

“Hmmm,” I purr. I would normally think Miss Savannah was imagining this stalker or making it up for publicity purposes. Yet I glimpsed a dark figure in her room with my own night-vigilant eyes. ‘What will the death of one of the advisors mean to the show, once the police free the murder scene and shooting can begin again?”

“Shooting?” The Divine Yvette bats her black mascaraed lashes as a prelude to a swoon. “You think there will be shooting?”

“I meant cameras.” But of course shooting is not impossible with a murderer among us.

And I recall Miss Temple telling her Aunt Kit about a notorious shooting death in this very house many years ago. I have not led Miss Louise astray. Eavesdropping is the low-key operative’s biggest asset, and you cannot get a lower operative than me.

I glance back to where I left the young sourpuss, my partner. The spot is vacant. I cannot understand why she did not wait around like a good girl for me to return and make my report, but frankly, I am glad not to have her cramping my style with the sisters Ashleigh, now that I have them to myself.

She might blow my cover and refer to me by some demeaning nickname like “Snooze” or “Geezer” or, heaven forbid, “Daddy-O.”

Chapter 41

Wolfram and Heart

Matt wore a Carl Sandburg T-shirt, baggy khakis, loafers without socks, and a Chicago Cubs cap on backwards.

He’d arrived at eight A.M. and spent the day lurking in the halls and emergency stairwells of the building that housed Brandon, Oakes, and McCall. Just an ordinary guy, staking out who came and went through the doors of the prestigious law office.

He’d wanted to look like a guy who’d gotten lost in the lobby and was still trying to find his way out. Nobody questioned him.

Around two P.M., after he’d watched the noontime exodus return to the law firm, he bought lunch at the lobby coffee shop and pumped the waitress.

Even in his instant scruffies, his looks won smiles and chitchat and information. The coffee shop provided latte, yeah, they had a machine for every variety of espresso.

Lots of very big people went up there. So what was he doing here?

Waiting to connect with a contact. He was in the record business.

Realllly! Her cousin Stevie had a fab basement band. Radical but not too, you know? Ready for a big-time commercial break. He didn’t look like a DJ. They were usually such losers in the looks department. He should be on MTV.

Yeah.

Matt finished the dregs of his caramel–whipped cream latte, just a dozen calorie counts shy of a hot fudge sundae, and went back up to the forty-fifth floor.

To lurk.

Krys, who had okayed his outfit this morning, would be amazed to know how dull subterfuge was. He was amazed to know how dull it was. He thought about Carmen Molina, back in Vegas. Had she ever done this detail? Maybe. Maybe not.

What were the chances? The law office staff seemed to recognize him. So how likely was it that some relative of his lost father would breeze up in the elevator and into Brandon, Oakes, and McCall? Today or any other day.

Infinitesimal. Matt bet that DJs didn’t often use that word.

Ex-priests did, though, having been conditioned to think in terms of infinity.

In terms of infinity, what were the chances that he would find any trace or trail that led to the man who’d fathered him?

Almost zero. He didn’t care. He’d learned long ago not to care. He’d tried to tell his mother that. Trouble was, she did.

What had been the high point in her life had been the nadir in his.

Nadir. Speak of the Devil. Rafi Nadir. Another unwanted father. Carmen Molina had made it clear that Nadir hadn’t deserved to know he was the father of a child she would bear and rear without him.

The usual rap was men were unreliable. Men skated out from under fatherhood and its obligations. They were louts. Rats. Immature. They seduced and abandoned. They made Matt sorry he was one.

Except …

He didn’t believe it. He’d seen it during the Sacrament of Reconciliation, formerly known as Confession. Men were scared. They thought they had to be the whole enchilada, 24/7: strong, sole supporting, macho men. It was too much.

He considered his mother at nineteen—her critical condition. Pregnant, with him. Catholic. Young. Damned. Despised. No support of any kind. Hard not to hate the guy who put her there. Except that she hadn’t. And he’d gone off to a foreign war and died. No chance to prove his mettle on the domestic front.

The elevator made all the grunts and groans of being about to open again. Matt peeked through the stairway door like a kid playing hide and seek.

Another “briefcase” walking into Brandon, Oakes, and McCall.

Except … this guy didn’t carry a briefcase. He wore an expensively pale suit. His ash-blond hair was silver at the temples. Same height, same build, thickened a little around the middle.

Matt gaped, as if he’d seen a ghost walking through a wall, as the form vanished into the dark wood door of Brandon, Oaks, and McCall.

The proof of the pudding was what this man would look like from the front, when he walked out.

Matt stuck the toe of his new sports tennies against theheavy metal door. This he had to see, no matter how long it took.

It took forty-eight minutes by his stainless-steel watch.

Several people came and went. Matt began to worry about a discreet exit door farther down the hall … but, still, the elevator had to be taken, unless someone wanted to walk down forty-some flights. And then that someone would come face-to-face with Matt lurking in the hidden echoing concrete spine that ran up the length of every skyscraper.

The lawyers’ office door didn’t so much squeak as rumble a little when it opened and shut.

It was opening now, spitting out the front view of the man Matt had glimpsed from behind. He managed to eel out of the stairway to meet the man at the bank of elevators.

To meet himself.

Related, no doubt.

How to mention it?

The guy did the usual big-city elevator shuffle: push the DOWN button, stare at the computerized numbers of floors and cars above. Pace. Glance at his watch. Glance askance at the guy who’d joined him in waiting, trying not to stare at strangers, of course.

Matt’s throat was so dry he couldn’t have received Communion to save his soul.

Alex Haley’d had Kunta Kinte. Now Matt had his own Roots. Someone who looked like him. Someone he looked like besides his mother. It didn’t matter, he’d always said. It mattered.

The man slipped a look at him again. He seemed nervous.

Matt took off the stupid baseball cap, stuffing it in the pocket of his baggy Dockers. He regretted the carefully casual clothes, regretted not looking like himself. Not looking like this impeccably dressed man three elevator doors down the hall.

The man, maybe—forty-five. A cousin? Not a brother, his real father had been too young. Matt had to be an only child. The mystery man cleared his throat. Looked away.

The elevator indicator tinged.

They both froze.

Watched the door open between them, neither wanting to meet the other as they rushed to claim it.

The man glanced at the EXIT sign over the stairwell where Matt had lived most of today.

He knew. Or suspected. He wanted to run.

The elevator doors opened. Closed. A couple inside watched them with puzzled, and finally contemptuous, stares. Why call for an elevator if you weren’t going to take it. Why indeed?

And then they were gone.

Alone again.

“I think,” Matt said, “that your last name might be the same as mine should be.”

The guy stared at him. His eyes were gray. So was his skin color. Matt saw he was older than he’d looked at first glance, and began to fear he might be having a heart attack.

He began to have one too. This guy was actually old enough … to be his father.

Chapter 42

Feline Shepherd

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you!

With my own concealed ears, I hear my Miss Temple consign young Miss Molina to the questionable oversight of Mr. Rafi Nadir, who may be her unacknowledged sire.

Being an unacknowledged sire myself, I feel a deep sense of obligation to keep an eye on this extremely unlikely pairing.

If my Miss Temple has set the wolf to watch the lamb, I will be the mountain lion set to watch the wolf.

And when it comes to major matches, felinus versus caninus always wins.

So, when Miss Savannah Ashleigh betakes herself inside, I pad after Rafi who pads after her.

Once she is fully attired, if you can ever call the belly button–exposing, cleavage-baring clothing of MSA that, we follow her to her office quarters for the day and stand guard in the hall.

He is in the standard feet apart, hands crossed in front posture of security guys since my forebears stood guard duty in the palaces and temples of ancient Egypt.

I assume the deceptive stance of a sleeping feline. It works every time.

Sure enough, along comes Miss Temple, escorting Miss Mariah to her first appointment of the day.

“Mariah, this is Mr. Nadir. He will help you if anything goes wrong.”

Mariah is having none of it. “You mean if Savannah Ashleigh is strangled in her own monokini by the time I go in for my appointment?”

“Hey,” Mr. Rafi Nadir says in a cajoling tone. “Nobody buys it on my watch. What say I accompany you on your rounds and make sure?”

“What about your client?” Mariah asks, savvy kid that she is.

“Oh, I suppose your friend Xoe Chloe will be responsible for her.”

Miss Mariah consults Miss Temple, who shrugs in typical, deplorable Xoe Chloe fashion.

And so the deal is struck. My Miss Temple will watch Miss Savannah Ashleigh, a personage we both wish would be boiled in canola oil and put on the South Beach Diet until death did them part. And Mr. Rafi Nadir, the bane of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s life, past and present, will be watching over his own daughter, unawares. If Miss Savannah gets restive and calls for male reinforcements, instead of Mr. Rafi, I myself will rush to the scene to distract her and the Persian babes. It is the least I can do, and I have been known to drive Miss Savannah to distraction in the past.

It is amazing the things an observant feline can know, and not say.

I decide where to invest my time and energy, and decide it is the unlikely partnership of Nadir and Molina.

Miss Temple watches me ankle off down the hall after them, looking worried.

So we all three end up waiting outside various offices for Miss Mariah’s daily consultations.

“You pull bodyguard duty often?” Mariah asks.

I am about to answer but Rafi Nadir beats me to it. “Nah. Most people who hire bodyguards need the publicity more than the muscle.”

“This is a weird place.”

“You got that right.”

“I mean, it is supposed to be a contest but it seems like someone is pulling the strings.”

“How so?” He leans down like a gentleman to hear her answer.

I lean up.

“I mean, it is supposed to be a fair contest but everything so far is rigged. All the Teen Queen candidates are tall, thin, and blonde. They all look alike. Maybe it was a mistake that I was made a finalist?”

This gives him pause.

“Hey, kid, you got it the wrong way around. Looking all alike is not the way to go. You look like yourself, then you’ll know you’re not a fraud.”

“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 got lots 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 Tern … 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 beddiebye.”

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 was 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 1

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 theworld 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.”

“Then why’d you come?”

“My mother. She’s never forgotten. She’s had a rotten life, as you can imagine. It was the one thing she asked of me that I couldn’t refuse. She would have made a great Godfather.”

“And Mira. Now I see it. You look like Mira.” Matt kept silent.

“Not the Mira I knew.”

“Once,” Matt bit out. One night. One-night stand. “From what I understand,” he added, watching carefully, “I was the product of a virgin birth, so to speak.”

The man shook his head. “What’s your name?”

“Matt, short for Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas the betrayer.” He let that sink in. “My last name is Devine.”

“She married?”

“Yes, but to a loser. Who else would have her after that? She named me something different. After her favorite Christmas hymn. Can you guess?”

“Divine? Oh.” He grew even paler, if that was possible. “`O Holy Night’?”

—0 Holy Night, 0 Night Divine.’ Bingo. I’m named for a mortal sin.”

The man pushed off the wall. “It’s not your fault. Listen.” He glanced down the hall again, then shook his head. “We need to talk. Privately.”

“Agreed.”

“I have a club . .

“You would.”

“Then you suggest—?”

“I have a hotel. The Drake.”

The man’s pale eyebrows—almost dead white, though his hair was still steel blond—rose.

“The Amanda Show puts up its regular guests in style,” Matt explained.

“We’ll go there then.”

“Yes, a hotel’s so impersonal. Like a church.” Matt was pleased to see him wince.

“You must be famous.” The man came as close as he’d avoided doing before.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, awaiting the elevator Matt’s finger had summoned. Father and son. God’s finger to Adam.

Damn! They were almost the same height. No denying. The man seemed to notice this. “How is … Mira?”

“She’s pretty good. No longer a single parent with a kid at home. Has a job. Is widowed.”

“My name is Winslow. Jonathan Winslow. And . “he reported this dutifully—“I’m married. I have a family. Three almost-adult kids.”

Matt noticed that he hadn’t said “happily.”

“I wish I’d had a son who’d do for me what you did for your mother.”

“You have kids. No son?”

“Yeah. I have a son.”

No more comment. Matt read bitter estrangement.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s the family mantra here, I guess. Keep in touch. Let me know when you’re in Chicago. We should … learn to know each other.”

Matt, surprised, hesitated. Then nodded. Maybe. Maybe not.

“Meanwhile, let’s hit your hotel. I could use a drink or three.”

How many bars in how many hotels the world over hosted lost relatives who sat and stared at each other over drinks they were reluctant to touch?

Matt supposed there must be at least eight.

He ran his fingers through his hair that the unaccustomed baseball cap had tamped down, like the wire ring of a kindergarten-play halo.

“You’re blonder than I remember your mother being.”

It was Matt’s turn to feel put on the spot. “You remember right. The … my radio station had some stylist do my hair for the latest publicity photos. I’m told it’ll wash out. Can’t be too soon for me.”

“Media.” Winslow laughed a little, for the first time. “Image. Reality is never enough, is it?”

“No. Not in this day and age.”

“So, you’ve been a priest.”

“Until eighteen months ago.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Better question would be ‘Why’d you enter?’ I was looking to become the perfect father I’d never had.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I did not know. I looked for your mother after I got back from my tour of duty and couldn’t find her. We only knew first names. I didn’t dare probe further. My family would have had my head if they’d known about … what happened. I had no ideathey already knew and had resorted to lawyers. I suppose they thought they were protecting me.”

“They were. From unwanted consequences. Me.”

“I’m sorry. I could say it a thousand times and it’d never change the past. You look … like you turned out fine.”

“It could have been worse,” Matt conceded, “although I could have done without the abusive stepfather.”

Winslow’s contrite expression was startled into shock. “My God! How did that happen?”

“She had no options. She was a pariah, an unwed mother in a deeply Catholic community. Oh, they ‘supported’ her but not without instilling this bone-deep sense of shame. She helped hurt herself, her upbringing helped. So strict. She took such a chance on you.”

“It didn’t feel like that. If felt like a miracle, like the inside of a snow globe when you shake it up and all the magical snow comes floating down on everything, making it … beautiful. What does she want now?”

“Not money. The two-flat kept us afloat. It was worth that much. But she’s figured out someone had a stake in buying us off. She’s gotten to be a lot tougher lady.” Matt smiled. “It’s been good for her, actually. She just wants to know who and why.”

“That’s a lot.”

“She has no idea you didn’t die. Neither did I, until today.”

“Big day for us both,” he noted, sipping from his scotch on the rocks, then setting the drink aside as if he was rejecting far more than an easy glow at a moment of truth. “I wouldn’t have abandoned either of you if they’d have let me know. I’m not a naive kid anymore. I promise you, there will be hell to pay.”

“I … we don’t want to hurt anyone else. Just tell me what to tell her now that I know the truth. The kind lie? I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t need to know you. I wanted to find some crooked lawyers protecting an insulated, snobby family. Maybe I wanted to see someone sweat if I’m deep-down honest about it. But I didn’t want to find you. I don’t need you now. She doesn’t need you now. You’re irrelevant. Maybe you can make whoever in your family did this pay a little. Maybe that’ll make me feel better for seeing my mother lied to and let down a second time.”

Winslow folded his cocktail napkin into accordion pleats. “The Winslows do go back to the Mayflower,” he noted wryly. “Not the Washington hotel, the ship.” His face sobered again. “It would have been my father. He’s dead now. No one can make him suffer. My mother’s in a nursing home. She probably was an accessory. She has Alzheimer’s.”

“Your father. Your mother.”

“Your grandparents.”

“They’re gone, then, both of them. What were they thinking?”

“What all parents do: don’t let my kids make any foolish life-altering choices.”

“I guess you didn’t, really, then.”

“I did. Because I’ve never forgotten her.”

“Is that what I tell her?”

He pulled the drink back over and took a long hard swallow.

“No. That’s what I tell her.”

Chapter 46

Closet Encounter

of the Third Kind

Since this place is crawling with camera operators and just plain operators, I sic Midnight Louise on tailing Crawford Buchanan. (They deserve each other, in my opinion.) I leave my Miss Temple poring over old newspaper clippings and preparing to take her rest on a pussycat pillowcase.

I decide to do what I do best: prowl by night. I have resolved to find and explore all the secret passages in the house.

One would assume that after my namesake hour, the house would quiet down. One can assume nothing when it comes to crime or hordes of teenage girls.

My midnight ramble will need some unwitting accessory work from someone human, and I am betting that enough humans are sneaking around unauthorized here to populate a small city.

Naturally, I am forced to head first to Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s chamber. Some crass folk, including Miss Midnight Louise, were she here to know my plans, might imply that I am more interested in brushing whiskers with the Ashleigh sisters than in exploring secret passages. Quite the contrary. The one entrance to a secret passage I know of at this point is in the Ashleigh suite.

A dude must start somewhere.

So I amble down the deserted hall, rehearsing my speech to induce the Ashleigh sisters to let me in, when my first unlawfully wandering human comes shuffling down the same corridor.

I flatten myself against a baseboard and hope the shadows will hide me.

Not to worry. The sleepwalker is a blonde in pink pajamas, closely followed by a … a blonde in pink pajamas.

The first blonde, Miss Silver by name, carries a sinister canister. It resembles a harmless can of shaving cream but those have been suspect since the foamygraffition-the-exercise-mats incident.

“Shhh!” Second Blonde urges First Blonde.

“Shhh, yourself. All we have to do is leave this in her bathroom and her hair will be history.”

“Are you sure that phony label will stick on?”

“I printed it out on my laptop on glossy adhesive paper. Looks like the real thing.”

Sure enough. I crane my neck up and can read the name of a popular brand of hairspray. Makes one wonder what is really in it. Of course I have to follow them, and that involves backtracking to … Miss Temple and Miss Mariah’s room!

The pair of evil blondes turn the knob about as slowly as they can think, which is very slowly indeed and quite impressive for sneak thieves. Only they are leaving something rather than taking it.

I tail them past the sleeping innocents. The kitty pillow is cast away on the floor, I am happy to say, both for my Miss Temple’s taste’s sake and because I will come in and squash it with my own body after my nightly rounds are made.

They sneak into the bathroom and leave the can on the sink ledge, among a skyline of similar products. It is called “Hair Today.”

Right. As soon as they sneak out again I drag in the massive pillow from the bedroom (no easy task, even for a muscular chap like myself), then position it under the sink.

Then I leap atop the sink rim, balancing precariously, and bat the suspect can off its perch.

What a stunt director dude I would have made! It lands, soft and soundless, on a particularly cloying image of a striped kitten dead center on the pillow.

I roll the can to the floor under the sink, where I can direct Miss Temple’s attention to it in the morning.

Then I take the pillowcase in my mouth again (wet flannel, ugh!) and wrestle it back to its original position beside the bed.

Now I can begin my true task of the night. I retrace my steps to the Ashleigh bedroom but draw back when I hear voices inside.

It must be one A.m. Who would be yammering at this hour?

I press an ear to the door.

“Can you believe it?” Miss Savannah Ashleigh is wailing into her cell phone. “We are cooped up in here all the time with nothing but Teen Queens and a bunch of middle-aged judges and consultants and camera people. I am dying for a Rodeo Drive South Beach latte. Also a decent lay.”

And the Persian sisters have to hear this sort of talk!

“Indecent would do,” she agrees with the friend on the receiving end of her conversation.

Luckily, Miss Savannah is as careless with her door locking as her conversation, so I am able to ankle through the slightly ajar door.

The Persian sisters are languidly polishing their nails with their tongues when I arrive, and both perk up immediately.

“Want to go exploring down those dark and mean streets?” I inquire with a couple struts past their empty canvas carriers.

“Oh, no, Louie,” Yvette replies. “We are ready for our beauty sleep. But we will distract our mistress for you, if you wish.”

This was not quite the scenario I had in mind. Since their mistress is not in Dreamland but lusting after latte, I shrug and go to the mirrored wall panel.

The girls loft themselves onto the bed like the plumes de ma tante, which must have been pretty soft stuff, and start rubbing back and forth on Miss Savannah’s phone-holding hand, waving their full-furred tails in her face and generally blinding her to anything that is going on in the room. Long fur can be useful as well as beautiful.

I leap up, hitting the secret panel right where it bows to pressure. I am through the slight opening before I can say, “Hey, there is no light in here!”

There is no light back there, either, as an obliging Persian girl, perhaps the over-thoughtful Solange, has run over to cast her weight at the door and shut it. Tight. It does not give to my exploratory nudge.

Not that I wish to return to light and softness and Persian girls when dark and hardness and danger call.

So I look from left to right, which is equally and utterly dark, and plunge ahead until my whiskers hit wall and I can follow the tunnel.

I soon also follow the hard narrow curl of electrical cable along the seam of floor and wall. A high pinpoint of red light freezes me for a moment. I think of the reflective eyes of a cougar on a rock, ready to leap down on me.

But further reflection convinces me the light only indicates the electric eye of a recording camera.

And then one wonders, why set up a camera to record the action in a secret passageway? Someone on the crew must have made a unilateral decision to film the crew itself, who are the only persons who would have a reason to lurk back here.

Hmmm.

Like all nocturnal sorts, from vampires to skunks, I find the dark only enhances my other senses. I sniff the mixed scents of the grounds … bark chips, leaves, sandy soil. Not unexpected. The technicians who wired this place for 24/7 snooping would be the same crew ranging from grounds to house, back and forth.

There is one odd scent: a sweet, fruity one. Could it be a trace of the Razor’s Edge shaving spray that clung unnoticed to a shoe sole? They put some awful fragrances in human toiletries, possibly because most people do not take daily sponge baths as we hipper cats do.

I seem to be alone in these passages now but I sniff the presence of plenty of people coming and going. In fact, as I turn a corner I spot a faint light.

I am not pleased to see it because that means that someone might see me in this oversize airconditioning vent.

When a faint sound comes from around the next bend I freeze like an ostrich. There is no hiding place in this purely functional conduit, not even the huge veiling spider webs beloved of horror films. I unlatch my shivs and practice snapping them in and out, in case I need to resort to a kamikaze attack.

As I hunch there, ready for epic battle, the sound that I hear begins to take on an air of familiarity. In fact, it is a song half-sung under the breath. “Suspicious Minds.”

Well, that fits this place to a T.

The mutterer in motion rounds the half-lit bend and I view a human figure all in white, glowing like a ghost.

I am not a superstitious fellow, despite my breed and color. It takes but three seconds for me to recognize the Elvis impersonator judge who has been drilling the singing candidates for their big debut. (Miss Kit Carlson is handling the acting coaching and I am all atwitter over what my Miss Temple will come up with in the persona of Xoe Chloe.) Anyway, the faux Elvis spots me and stops cold. “Well, hello there, little fellow. Anything I can do for you? Need a new Cadillac?”

Only for sharpening my shivs on genuine leather.

This is not the first time I have encountered the likeness of Elvis Presley in this town. On some occasions, I was even convinced I was seeing the real thing.

So I amble over and rub my nose on the brass studs decorating the bell-bottoms on his jumpsuit. This is better than a sisal rope scratching post, let me tell you.

The costume, and the leg beneath it, are completely solid, by the way.

“You better git while the gittin’ is good,” the ersatz Elvis advises. “This joint will be jumpin’ with bad mojo pretty soon.”

I manage to meow plaintively. I hate to meow plaintively! It is the resort of cowards and kept cats! However, at times I must play dumb.

Elvis bends down and scratches me behind theears, as if I were a hound dog. Red-neck dudes are always more dog people than cat people. Their loss.

“I am tellin’ you, cat. You better whiplash your ass outa here. Things are gonna get ugly.”

Now what does Elvis know about it?

I pause to stretch low and long, doing a floor-dusting belly touch. Then yawn wide enough to swallow a Chihuahua.

Then I amble along past the dude and around the corner he rode in on.

It is suddenly darker there. I have to wonder why the light was following Elvis. Was that the real unreal thing? The ghost of rock ‘n’ roll? Or was it a pale imitation?

Either way, I do not like my recent dance in the dark with an ambulatory Elvis one little bit. The moment my vibrissae sense a stir of fresh air, I take a sharp running right in that direction … and fall three feet down onto a hard surface.

That does not give even a ninja a lot of time to do a double axel and land on his feet, spraying wood shavings like Tara Lipinski sprays ice splinters. Float like a butterfly, land like a lummox.

I barely manage to turn myself upright before I must dig my shivs into a wooden roof.

Which then plummets below at a speed fast enough to give my ears a Bing Crosby pin-back.

Landing is the bone-crunching shock I had anticipated.

I cripple my way over the edge and flip upside down again, hanging by a half-torn nail sheath.

Even upside down I can see Miss Midnight Louise in the night-lit glow of the kitchen where she is one with the black marble floor except for the cynical gleam of her old-gold eyes.

“Could not resist a midnight raid on the icebox, eh, Dad? Do not bother apologizing. There is some very nice kipper a passing guest was kind enough to dig out of the Sub-Zero for me. And did I manage to dig up some dirt on the murder vic. Lose the death grip on the silent butler, come on down, and we will chew the fat. Yours, I hope.”

What can I say? Nothing. So I do not.

And thus I learn what my Miss Temple and her roommate Mariah were up to in the Teen Queen Castle while I was communing with Elvis in the attic.

Chapter 47

Filing Their Nails

Temple and Mariah had played possum until the blondes’ lightning raid on their bathroom was well over. Temple quickly found the added can of purported hairspray and tried it on a hand towel, which immediately turned as shiny and shellacked as a decoupage project.

“Liquid plastic spray,” Temple diagnosed. “Those witches wanted my new blonde hair turned into an impossible mess. Too bad we have serious work to do tonight, or X. C. would sneak in and adhere a few sleepy blonde heads to their pillowcases. They’re all feather-heads anyway. But I have something else in mind tonight.”

They darted like dragonflies down the stairs to the first-floor hall, knowing where the cameras were positioned and trying to dodge them like bullets.

Mariah had insisted on coming along on this clue-fishing expedition and Temple, frankly, needed a lookout.

Now they stood outside the door to Marjory Klein’s former office and Mariah was facing the first challenge of her crime-solving life: crossing yellow crime scene tape.

You’d have thought she was Matt Devine being asked to commit a little mortal sin.

“I don’t know, Xoe. We’re not supposed to.”

“‘We’re not supposed to.’ Where would that have gotten Lewis and Clark? Lois and Clark for that matter. TV characters you’re probably too young to remember.”

“Am not. Reruns. They were almost hot.”

“Okay. ‘We’re not supposed to.’ Where would that have gotten—?”

“Ah … um … Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde?”

“Right. Well, I’m legally blonde now, and I say we crash this party.”

“Huh?”

Temple ducked under the tape and donned the thin latex gloves that came with her hair-dye product. The pros had ignored them to use their own professional-quality pairs, so Temple had appropriated them against a future need. She pushed against and opened an unlocked door.

Surprise! The cops were really lax. Or someone else had been here.

Mariah followed her inside, acting like Dorothy in the haunted wood: scared. As if she thought Mama Molina had some crystal-gazing globe that could follow her every move. Probably did.

Temple flicked on the mascara wand–size flashlight she always traveled with. A bright needle of light played over surfaces familiar to both her and Mariah.

“Too much to revisit?” Temple asked.

Mariah had insisted on accompanying her. Now the dark empty room made the reality of sudden death a more obvious deterrent than a thirteen-year-old might realize.

“No. And yeah. I guess. That poor lady! She just wanted me to do well.”

“We will do well. By her. She was the only consultant who imported her own file cabinets. I wondered why when I had my sessions with her. Let’s take a look.”

First Temple scanned the room for hidden cameras and mikes. She was getting good at spotting them. They’d stockpiled cloth napkins at meals and now distributed them around the room like demented waitresses. Over the lamps, the power outlets, lighting fixtures.

Besides, they kept the room’s lights off. Even if any cameras picked up intruders, they would be shadow puppets on a highly manipulated stage.

The file cabinets had always struck Temple because they were the Steel Case sort: heavy metal, with locks. This office’s decor was more wicker basket style. They were the two-drawer variety on wheels that’s easily overlooked as mobile work surfaces. There were three of them, all lockable.

That was the problem. Temple tried each one. Surprise. These drawers were locked.

“We need the keys,” she whispered to Mariah. “And they’ll probably be hidden.”

Twenty minutes later, Temple had explored every drawer and Mariah had finished her more imaginative search, usually up above or under something.

No keys.

“Why didn’t the police try the files?” Mariah wondered.

“Probably thought they came with the office and had nothing to do with Marjory. But we’ve seen all the other offices and no one else has these industrial-strength things.”

“Still, missing them is shabby police work.”

“Maybe the police checked them out and relocked them, then.”

“If my mom had been on the scene, they’d have been shaken upside down. Why hasn’t she shown up?”

“Probably to keep from ruining your big chance, remember? You made it pretty plain she wasn’t to interfere.”

“Yeah.”

This kept Mariah silent for a whole minute. “Mrs. Klein was a food freak,” she said suddenly. “Maybe it was for good and all but she was still freaked about it. She used to play with that fake fruit on her desk until I was ready to scream, or grab one and eat it. I bet—”

Mariah ambled to the basket of fruit on the desk and pulled out a plum (wax). From beneath it she pulled out a snake. “Hey, look!” A slim leather cord that ended with a trio of thin tiny keys.

“Brilliant thinking,” Temple said. “Where would a food freak hide something but under fake fruit.”

Temple grabbed the flimsy keys and tried them in sequence until all three file cabinets were unlocked. The open drawers revealed colored hanging file folders stuffed with a variety of colored file folders, each bearing a clear crystal tab indicating its contents.

“Reading rainbow,” Mariah commented.

“Seriously neat freak.”

Every food group, vitamin, study, and food additive had a file folder. So did every Teen Queen candidate.

Temple collapsed on the floor to read about her alter ego, Xoe Chloe, line by flashlit line. This wasn’t just a food plan (more fruit and fiber, less empty calories like soda pop), it was a psych sketch.

“Am I glad I’m not really me!” she told Mariah. “I show ‘clear antisocial tendencies magnified to chronic instability.’ Hey. I’m better at being bad than I thought.”

Mariah snatched the flashlight to study her file. “I’m the ‘typical only child’ who’s ‘hidden behind baby fat.’ I’m ‘desperately seeking a father figure!’ Coulda fooled me.”

“Listen, if Marjory Klein was so off about a fake personality like Xoe, she’s certainly off about a real personlike you. Makes you wonder how off she was about everybody.”

“She did have a beans and legumes fixation.”

“To the point of mania. No wonder someone crammed some down her throat.”

“Look! Golly. Here under ‘Miscellaneous’ are some court orders.”

“About what?”

“Kids ordered into therapy with her.”

“Sad but true. Take a lesson from this, Mariah. You act like Xoe Chloe once too often and you’re sentenced to psychobabble.”

“I like Xoe. She’s way more fun than you are.”

“So are a lot of things that are bad for you.” Temple sighed. “Working with the dysfunctional stirs up ugly emotions, especially if you’re inept. I can see someone having a motive for murdering this woman now, I just don’t see who or exactly why.”

Temple ran her flashlight over another merry rainbow of folders. The light paused on a subject tab labeled “Indigestible.”

It was a weird category, so naturally she pulled it. “Mariah! Look at this.”

“Do I have to? It’s on that long legal-size paper that’s so boring.”

“Right. Boring but important. This is a lawsuit.” Temple flipped back the pale blue pasteboard cover to skim the legalese inside. “Wrongful death. Someone sued her for malpractice! For … failing to prevent a fatal eating disorder, for creating it, actually. This is serious stuff.”

“You mean, someone hated her enough to bring a suit against her?”

“Exactly. Someone’s child died under her care.”

“We hear about anorexia and bulimia and stuff at school. It’s gross, and also nuts.”

“And a heartbreaking, relentless condition. If someone thought Marjory Klein had contributed to his or her child’s death by starvation, they might just stuff a bunch of food down her throat until she choked on it.”

“I thought an allergy killed her.”

“Her own food peculiarities must have been known. Or the killer mixed some poison in. We won’t know the cause of death unless your mother shares it with us, and I can’t see why she would. You’d think this suit was still ongoing, or she wouldn’t have brought it along. But look at the date.”

“Nineteen ninety-one. I wasn’t born yet.”

“This doesn’t make sense.” Temple ran her thin line of light over endless legal phrases, then paged back to the beginning. “The dead girl’s name has got to be in here somewhere. Maybe it’ll mean something.”

Mariah hung over her shoulder, reading along with her. “There!”

“Where?”

“Two lines below where you’re reading. ‘Chastity Cummings.’ Man, I’d like to die if my first name was Chastity! That’s worse than Mariah. I mean, think what the other kids would say the minute you got out of kindergarten.”

“Kids are teasing kids over words like ‘chastity’ in the early grades?”

“In Catholic schools they are. The thing about going to a religious school is you get all those nasty words like `lust’ and ‘adultery’ and `O-Nanism’ and stuff early. It’s all in the Bible.”

“Right. Being reared a Unitarian, I was .cheated of all that early lurid class content. Rats.”

“What’s a Unitarian?”

“Unitarian Universalist. We see God and the world as inclusive and tolerant.““You mean you wouldn’t stone or smite anybody?”

“Right. Ours not to judge.”

“Somebody has to, or my mom wouldn’t have a job.”

“That’s civil law. That’s different. Anyway, I don’t get why this old suit is still in her active files.”

Mariah had pushed herself up to her knees to root in the file drawer again.

“Look! Here’s a sheet of paper that caught in the fold-over part of the hanging file.”

Piece was right. Just a torn-off triangle from one corner of a plain sheet of white paper. Not typed, written on. Just a date and a few scrawled words, the ends of three lines.

Maybe somebody had removed a folder in a hurry and a page had caught in the cardboard seam and pulled off. Recently, or ages ago.

Oops. Very recently.

“Ah.” Temple sat back on her heels while her moving flashlight told a fascinating if somewhat staccato story. The date read February 14, 2005.

This scrap was as timely as today. Only months old. Valentine’s Day. A favorite one for expression of sentiments sweet, and perhaps bittersweet, maybe even sour. Maybe even poisonous.

“Is it a valentine?” Mariah sounded hopeful. “Lots of people keep them. We do valentines at school but everybody’s chicken and girls send friendship ones to girls and that’s all. Boys would rather die than send a valentine.”

“Just wait.” Temple advised her. She frowned at the penmanship. Maybe her fake green contacts were coloring the ink, making it harder to read. She deciphered the few words ending each line:

I’ll never forget … murderous bitch like you … incompetent on national TV.

“That’s it,” Temple said after murmuring the words to Mariah. “That’s the motive. We better get this to your mother.”

Temple held up the scrap by her plastic gloves. “Thank God neither of our fingerprints are on it. Can you find the equivalent of a plastic baggie in this office … without leaving fingerprints?”

“Easy.” Mariah hopped up. “Mrs. Klein handed out `healthful snacks’ in plastic baggies from the little fridge behind her desk. Sliced rutabaga, can you imagine? It is to gag.”

Mariah was soon back with a baggie of sliced … Temple peered at the browning contents. Looked like shredded turnip greens and sliced medulla oblongata, or possibly liver. She dumped the mess into Mariah’s palms as she dried the inside of the baggie on her T-shirt hem and placed the paper remnant inside.

“My mom’s going to wonder if you’re passing on evidence of a threatening note or a salad.”

“B oth.”

Mariah dumped her sticky handful into a second plastic bag of unknown nibblies. “We’d better throw this mess out upstairs.”

“Right. Now let’s hope we can make it back to headquarters without attracting any unwelcome attention.”

Mariah giggled. “You’re so funny. The way you talk. I don’t get why my mom considers you such an awful pest.”

“I haven’t a clue, Mariah. Sometimes moms are like that. Behind the times. Let’s blow this joint.”

First, they collected all their napkins. Then Temple used the flashlight beam to lead their way out. She shut it off before she edged the door open. Silence greeted the motion. She pushed the door open farther and heard nothing. Prodding Mariah out, she followed and slowly,slowly shut the door, turning to duck under the crime scene tape …

… and spied a black cat sitting right there in the hall, like a welcoming committee of one, feet primly paired, ears perked, eyes inscrutable.

For once it was not Louie. This cat was smaller, longer of coat, and gold of eye, not green.

But its face wore the same superior smirk! I see you. “Oh.” Mariah reached out to pet the lovely thing but it darted away like a feral.

“Forget the cat,” Temple whispered. “We need to get home without anyone noticing us.”

In a house full of cameras this was always a problem. Which was why they headed first for the kitchen, then up to the room.

If any camera did capture some part of their wanderings, they could always claim a raid on the refrigerator.

Chapter 48

Recipe for Murder

Temple called Mama Bear as soon as they returned to their room.

The cell phone didn’t produce the strongest signal in the world in the bathroom with the water running, but secret agents had to get used to adverse conditions.

Mariah was in the outer room, reading the paper fragment through the plastic baggie and munching on a stash of julienned raw carrots she was allowed as snacks. Yum.

The hour was late and Temple felt some unkindly satisfaction at getting Mariah’s mother up.

“Yes.” The voice was so sudden and stern that Temple momentarily couldn’t decide how to begin. She wasn’t used to being barked at.

While she hesitated, Molina’s voice came back on the line even more demanding. “Who is this?”

“Ah, Xoe.”

“Xoe?” Apparently, her alter ego hadn’t made an impression on Molina. So much for a chance with the judges.

“Right. I’ve found some fascinating papers in the dead dietitian’s office. You should have them right away.”

“You.” Molina actually sounded glad about that. “What papers?”

“A lawsuit involving Mrs. Klein several years ago.”

“We know about that. My detectives did a background check and it came up. So you woke me up for that?”

“And a scrap of paper dated last February fourteenth. It sounds threatening. It apparently was torn off the contents of a folder as it was being taken out. Someone didn’t notice.”

“Valentine’s Day hate note, eh? That sounds more promising. No nice and neat signature, like ‘Your Killer,’ I suppose?”

Temple didn’t bother answering that bit of sarcasm. “What were you doing in the woman’s office anyway? That’s still a crime scene.”

“I am, therefore, I snoop. I thought that’s what I was here for.”

“You’re here to keep an eye on Mariah. Where was she while you were on this law-breaking expedition?”

“Urn, in our room, studying some papers and snacking on carrot sticks.”

“Carrot sticks! Commendable if out of character. I suppose your prints are all over that office now.”

“No. I used a pair of latex gloves, just like the pros.”

“Where’d you get—” _

“They dyed my hair as part of the makeover but had their own gloves. And I never throw anything away, so …”

“They dyed your hair? All of it?”

“This is a makeover show.”

“What have they done to Mariah?”

“Nothing. Yet. Except make her work out and eat veggies.”

“Don’t let them dye her hair.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“So you wore hair-dye gloves to search the office. Unbelievable.”

“And the paper scrap is in a plastic baggie fresh from Mrs. Klein’s office refrigerator. I had to throw out some guck to get an empty baggie.”

“That’s all right. Our crime scene people have already taken samples of everything in there for analysis.”

“So how do we exchange the evidence.”

“‘We’ do not. I’ll send Alch over in the morning. You know him, Mariah knows him, and one of you two should be able to pass him a baggie without undue attention.”

“We’ve got a window of opportunity between 8:15 and 8:30.”

“That early? I’ll have to call Morrie tonight yet.”

“This is beauty boot camp, you know. No laggards here.”

“Except the dead.”

Speaking of which, the line went dead.

Temple was slow in folding away her cell phone. Molina had sounded really growly when she’d first answered the phone, before she even knew it was Temple. Suspicious and growly. And something else. Temple called upon her theatrical background to conjure just the right word to describe the other note in the lieutenant’s usual gruff and businesslike tone. Anxious, maybe? No. Scared.

Temple shut off the water and pulled down the washcloths. She was hanging so many napkins and towels around suspected camera sites she felt like a laundress.

In the bedroom, all the lights were blazing but Mariah had tunneled completely under the covers and was lost in sudden, absolute adolescent sleep, her rear end humped up to make an island in the pink silk sea of coverlet.

Temple went over to the table to inspect the papers that had put Mariah to sleep. The only sexy one was the torn scrap of threat. And something about that bothered Temple.

She sat down at Mariah’s abandoned chair and read theterse words. “Murderous bitch” was pretty damning. And “incompetent.” But the last words were strange … “on national TV.” Thing is, Kit hadn’t been selected for the show until a month ago. Reality TV shows moved fast. They had very little budget, just a quick casting call to the public at large, assembling a panel of experts, scouting a ready-made site.

From what Kit had said, why would Marjory Klein have known about the show over three months ago? Because the note-writer was taunting her about appearing on it, was maybe stirred up by it. Was trying to scare her. And who took the folder out that had contained that letter? Someone who knew Marjory and her anal-retentive ways.

Someone who was announcing that he or she was aware of Marjory’s every move scarily soon. A stalker. Maybe that’s why Marjory brought the lawsuit papers with her. She didn’t trust them left at home. Or she wanted to leave a clue in case anything had happened. Like the threatening note. Only the killer had taken the note. Or most of it. So the note had to be incriminating.

Temple read it again. Looked over the suit document. The case had been filed in Salt Lake City. In the wrongful death of the late Chastity Cummings. The name seemed familiar, but Temple had heard so many new names here at the Teen Queen Castle. Including her own pseudonym.

She pulled out the large white papers Mariah had been reading like a fractured fairytale. Newspaper clippings never presented the cleanest timeline. News reporting was staccato, it hit the highlights of action, not thought. Arrested. Makes bond. Autopsy results announced. Vanished. Anniversary of murder story. Wacky detective takes up case eight years later. Vanishes like the suspect, Arthur Dickson. House on the market. Doesn’t sell. Becomes private casino. Another anniversary story speculating on who actually did it. Noting how long the dead have been that way.

Finally, it’s a twenty-year anniversary. MURDER STILL PUZZLES OFFICIALS. Arthur Dickson is still at large and missing. His bimbo ex-wife can’t be found. Her younger ex-boyfriend is a Hollywood stuntman who worked on Waterworld before his career sank. The wounded daughter? Died in an Oregon nursing home years before.

Temple paged through the copies of the twenty-year-old photos.

It was like a Greek tragedy: rich, older man; young wife with young daughter. Wedding. Spending. Publicity. That was the public part. The private? Drinking. Fighting. Divorcing. Money. Rage. Murder going ballistic one night. A mysterious masked intruder with a gun. Innocents wounded. The wife wounded but alive. The husband with an alibi just possible enough to ensure reasonable doubt. Still, he breaks bail and runs. Never to be found again. Everybody else left behind to start new lives or cope with what remained of the old.

Temple stared at the old photos under the weak overhead lights they put in every bedroom, except maybe in expensive whorehouses.

What if the house was not a reality show set because it was grand and vacant and notorious? What if the chicken came before the egg?

She studied the photos again. Hey, this ploy had worked for Xoe Chloe, the undercover Teen Queen candidate with an agenda. Why wouldn’t it have worked for someone else? A murderer?

Her forefinger speared one face in one photo, subtracting the negative, accentuating the positive past connection. Yes. Clever and chilling.

She quickly grabbed a hot pink folder, either hers or Mariah’s, and doublechecked the morning schedule.

If she worked it right, she should be able to hand Marjory Klein’s killer over to Detective Alch along with the borrowed baggie Molina had openly discounted.

How sweet it is …

Chapter 49

Conscentual Adults

Miss Midnight Louise and I rendezvous in the kitchen at twelve o’clock high, a very appropriate time.

Miss Louise is rude enough to suggest that the kitchen has become our favored rendezvous point because I have an eating disorder.

I point out that it offers the advantages of being periodically deserted and that the black marble floor and black granite countertops afford us a degree of camouflage we can obtain nowhere else in this huge house.

She sniffs.

Which is exactly what we are here to discuss.

When she showed up on the scene so unexpectedly (probably just to complicate my life), I was forced to come up with a task for her that would occupy her over-busy brain and yet keep her out of my way. (You can imagine how she would interfere with my necessary interrogations of the Persian girls!) I do believe there is a reason for the great detectives having a right-hand gal in the office, not on the mean streets with them. Dames do like to ride herd on a dude!

So I had to share with her, by proxy, the one precious clue in this case that I have held close to the chest hairs from the beginning.

Had I not followed my protective instincts in following my Miss Temple to the shopping mall, where she made herself so obnoxious in her brilliant way, I would never have picked up the trace of a killer.

We are not dogs, but do we not have noses? Do we not lay our own scent of ownership hither and yon? Are we not better equipped than humans for following the trail of murder? Or, as in this case, murders?

So I had conveyed to Louise as best I could the strange, sickly sweet odor of the puddle outside the mall.

“You are sure it was not diluted blood?” she had demanded.

“I know blood in any state, my dear Louise. No, it was the sort of thing humans eat but should not.”

“That is legion. Can you be a tad more specific?”

“Something cloying, and it was pink.”

“Everything pink is cloying when it comes to humans.”

“I hope you except the cat world Swiss Army knife from that judgment, that marvelous instrument of myriad uses, the feline tongue.”

“Speak for yourself, Romeo. So what is the scent I should search for?”

“Strawberry.”

Louise makes a delicate gagging sound, a prehairball sortie.

“Or perhaps cherry or raspberry. I am no connoisseur of fruit flavors. Then again, it could be that dreadful pink bubblegum flavor. Whatever it was, it was tacky enough in both senses of the words to cling to someone’s shoes. I have been tracing it upstairs, downstairs, and everywhere but my lady’s chamber.”

“So why should I pollute my nose following disgusting Dumpster leavings?”

“Because I first sniffed it someplace else than here.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the parking lot of the mall, where I tailed my Miss Temple when she made her debut as Miss Xoe Chloe by auditioning for this very madness.”

“Parking lot?” Miss Louise is sounding properly intrigued now.

“Right. I found it next to a body that was the focus of a lot of police attention, including that of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina and her new squeeze.”

“No.”

Louise is sounding satisfactorily shocked at last. “Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has a new squeeze? I thought she was beyond such things.”

“Apparently not, but the point, Louise, is that a poor young girl had been struck dead on the spot. And there was this melting puddle of sticky pink stuff beside her. I have smelled the same stuff on some shoe that has been moving around the place, from the pool area where the mats were sprayed with shaving cream to these supposedly secret passages.”

“Me-wow!” Louise has sat down in front of me in a dazed condition. I can finally see a bit in the dark and I do not like what I am seeing. “I never dreamed Miss Lieutenant Molina would be a traitor to the cause of female independence.”

“Maybe he is not her boyfriend. Maybe he is just a new associate. I merely remarked that something more seemed to be going on, but forget it! The point is, whoever killed that girl is here and has killed again. We must follow the putrid pink trail.”

So I had argued with Miss Louise until she felt her feminine sensibilities were on the line, i.e., anything I can smell she can smell better.

Passing on a scent, no matter how strong, by proxy, is not easy. But Miss Louise spent several diligent moments vacuuming my whiskers for any remaining traces and pronounced that she had the idea but the methodology of getting it was most repugnant.

Forensic evidence is often like that, I told her.

So we have been sniffing our way through the Teen Queen Castle ever since in search of likely candidates. For I had observed at the crime scene that the killer, with the usual insufficient human olfactory equipment, had trod unknowing in the melted ice cream.

Sickly sweet strawberry scent does not go gently into that dark night. Observe the car freshening products so beloved of patrol car and cab drivers. And most of them strawberry scented.

Miss Louise is indelicate enough to point out that this could confuse the issue.

I point out that we are inside a house, and a huge house, not a moving vehicle. (Although I do wish that Miss Louise was inside a moving vehicle at this moment, headed for the Valley of Fire.) However, the trained professional does not allow personal druthers to affect his effectiveness in the field.

“So,” she asks, “what is our total suspect list? Although I report the strange actions of your Miss Temple and Miss Lieutenant Molina’s Mariah in the dietitian’s office, I could detect no more cloying scent upon them than one usually encounters paging through certain fashion magazines. Strawberry is far too bourgeois for such venues.”

Huh? Normally I am in command of French, for it is one of those languages that you are in command of or it is in command of you, but I am a little lost here.

So, when in doubt, hold forth. I pace back and forth on a floor so clean there is not any odor other than Pine-Sol to distract me.

“I have detected suspiciously sweet odors on the footwear of a cameraman who tried to kick me in the pool area.”

“You have a pool area? I am impressed, Pops. Is it a front bay or a back bay pool area?”

“Most unamusing, Louise. You are right that I am ill-disposed to a kicker, but unfortunately the gorilla in question has no other counts against him than slinking through the technical corridors, and that is his job.”

“I have traced a sickly sweet odor to the tacky Payless loafers so appropriate to the person of Crawford Buchanan,” she says. “I would so like him to be a murderer. Say it is possibly so.”

“It is. He is what humans call a ‘tech,’ which means he likes to chase young girls. Molesters are in big disfavor nowadays. Perhaps the murdered woman was trying to interfere in his pursuit. They could have destroyed his reputation just as he was trying to make the leap to TV media.”

“Ah.” Louise digests that idea happily. Like my Miss Temple, she cannot stand Crawford Buchanan.

“Sickly sweet odor?” she offers. “Did you ever check his cologne? Me-eeeuw.”

“Agreed. A guy knows these things. He uses Old Lice, I believe, which I understand is good for repelling mosquitoes as well as females. It could be possible he spilled some, from the amount he slaps on each morning, and stepped in it.”

“Speaking of sickly sweet in the face of sickly sour, Dexter Manship’s suede Bass shoes have that odor about them. I fear it is that illegal weed people are so fond of smoking.”

“Close but no cigar. I must confess, with regret, that my most recent Elvis visitation—”

Here she snorts her disbelief with a vehemence that would get her arrested were she not an innocent-looking feline.

“You and Elvis! That is a delusional mutual admiration society. As I recall, he was a dog and horse man. And I would not expect his ghost to be any different.”

`That is just it, Louise. Not every Elvis apparition is the real thing.”

“Not every! Like any one of them could be!”

“Your Mr. Matt had his suspicions?’

“Elvis might look up Mr. Matt. I might look up Mr. Matt if I were returning for my tenth life. Neither of us would look you up.”

What is a guy to say to such a blanket dismissal? A few choice expletives cross my mind but I am ever the gentleman. Especially on Candid Camera.

“So,” I sum up. “We have three suspects, so far. I think tomorrow we shall have to arrange to trip them all up. Literally. And soon.”

Chapter 50 A Hasty Hand Temple hadn’t really been able to sleep.

She’d set the bedside clock radio but it was like clock radios in hotels: so many hands had been on it that it was unlikely its current reading was correct.

Luckily, Mariah was out cold. Temple felt a twinge of guilt after she turned off the possibly unreliable alarm and unplugged the unit just to be safe.

Better Mariah should miss breakfast and her first consultation of the day than that she should be involved in a confrontation with a killer.

Actually, Temple only needed to confirm where the suspect was, then dash to the entry area and await the arrival of jolly old Detective Alch. He could do the takedown and Molina would be seething with … gratitude?

Well she should be, Temple thought. The clear and present danger would be over. Mariah would be safe, along with everybody else, and still an innocent contestant with a chance of winning.

Xoe Chloe, alas, the incorrigible roommate now revealed as an overage fraud, would be outed and kicked out of the Teen Queen Castle. Fair exchange: Temple cherished no delusions of ever becoming a teen queen, back then or here and now. She’d been lucky to go to her high school prom, even with a dorky date, much less be crowned queen of it. Or anything.

There is something strangely unreal about thinking you’ve discovered a murderer. It gives you a sense of invulnerability, oddly enough. After all, you know what’s what when nobody else does.

That’s how Temple felt when she tiptoed out of the bedroom, leaving it dim behind all the drawn miniblinds, with Mariah’s head still buried in the covers.

She checked Xoe Chloe’s watch, a jingling band with a cheery collection of skulls and Harley Davidson charms mixed in with such girly icons as tiny spike heels she’d found at the mall.

All Temple had to do now was ensure the perp was ensconced in the proper consulting room, then guide Alch there.

He thought he was here as a mere delivery boy. She hoped he still carried. Maybe she should have speed-dialed the Fontana Brothers as backup. Her Aunt Kit would adore meeting them.

She got down to the main floor, checked her watch, and hovered at the front entry hall. No Alch yet but it was only 8:25. Maybe she should pick up some muscle on the way.

Time to skitter down the endless halls—where were Xoe’s Rollerblades when she needed them?

Temple’s heart was pounding when she reached theright door, and not from the run. What if she was wrong? She knocked. After ten seconds’ silence, she pushed the door open.

The office seemed empty. Strange. The 8:30 slot was booked. Someone should be here.

Aware that her every move might be recorded, Temple played the curious arrivée, peering in, peeking around, moving around on silent little cat feet.

No bogeymen jumped out from behind furniture, so before she knew it, she had advanced to the empty desk.

Upon its admirably clear surface lay a note, scrawled in a hasty hand.

Temple cocked her head to read it sideways: “See me first thing tomorrow.”

Hmmm. Sounded like the tail wagged the dog, although this dog had always been in charge of the manger.

Either way, she needed to hit another office fast. Her watch said Alch would be pushing open the Teen Queen Castle entry portcullis right about now… .

She dashed down another hall, around a corner, and into familiar territory.

Another door, another knock, another long silence. Brash, bleached-blonde Xoe Chloe walked right in. Peered.

The high-backed leather chair behind the desk was spun away from the door to face the windows overlooking the pool area.

Temple had a very bad feeling. She should cut and run, whatever that meant.

She’d been here before. Empty office, sinister chair back. Cameras, anyone?

Why had Dexter Manship left that imperious note just sitting on his desk? Had he figured out what she had? She’d trespassed on his empty office before, but then there had been nothing sinister to find after all.

That was there and then. This was here and now.

Had he too tumbled to the bizarre truth? Where was he now?

Was she too late? Would Alch find yet another victim instead of a perp?

She didn’t like Manship. Who did? Manship probably didn’t even like Manship. But … he was a human being, sharp and observant. Maybe too much of both.

She approached the desk. Walked around it. Outside the Nevada sunshine was bouncing off the blazing white stone and blue water and basting bronzed blondes to French toast.

Inside, the office was dim. Silent. Still as death.

She grabbed the chair’s high back and spun it around with all her might.

She needed all her might. The chair was heavy and only rotated forty-five degrees.

Enough to reveal a passenger.

An inert passenger.

The wrong one.

Xoe Chloe could have skated back down a quarter mile of hallway to the front door in about two minutes. Temple was less athletic and way more practical. She screamed. It was a wimpy thing to do but it would bring ‘em all in about sixty seconds flat.

Chapter 51

Heartfelt

and Red-Handed

“They have you on tape,” kindly Detective Alch said. Threatened. “We have you on tape, since their tapes are now our tapes. Slinking around Manship’s empty office a few days ago.”

“That wasn’t me,” Temple said. “That was Xoe Chloe. She’s much nervier.”

Temple wasn’t nervy at all now, except in the wimpy meaning of the word. Her back was to the desk and Beth Marble’s very dead body, but the grotesque image was branded on the movie screen behind her eyes: Beth’s head tilted back, eyes open, the curled black hair slid back several inches … a wig like Xoe Chloe’s ex-accessory, but the head beneath it … bald. It was bad enough the woman was dead; worse that the killer had scalped her in a sense. Temple wondered if gravity, or the murderer, had unmasked Beth after death.

“You say you were going to spring the murderer’s name on me when I got here. Then why the detour to Manship’s office?”

“He’d left a note from my suspect on his desk, asking him to see her.”

“‘Your suspect?’ Miss Barr, I personally think you’re an okay person, and I get that my boss wanted you on this scene for reasons relating to her daughter. But you’ve been caught red-handed over a dead body. You see my position.”

“Yup. You’re probably sitting on the exact place the body was laid before it was propped up in the chair.”

Alch eyed the large ottoman, then sprang up. “You think she was killed elsewhere and brought here? But how? This place is crawling with cameras and antsy contestants. You couldn’t import a bedbug here without getting major notice.”

“I don’t know.”

“So. Are we to suspect you, or Manship?”

“Good question. Since I’m a wild card here—” Alch snorted.

“Probably Manship. He’s the Big Meanie on board. The note signed by her was left in his office, so he probably was there.”

“So how did he waltz a dead body three hundred feet through corridors that might be highly populated any second?”

“I don’t know. He’s Australian. They’re used to wrestling crocodiles.”

“Okay. Tell me about the vic.”

“Well, I think the vic was actually the perp.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Amazing, Temple thought, how talking the talk cut through the fog. Vic. Perp. That made the so-intenselypersonal act of murder strangely impersonal.

“Or one of them.”

“Say you’re kidding me.”

“I can’t. I do have a rationale for why I thought the perp who is now a vic became a perp.”

“Rationale. Look, Miss Barr, the lieutenant told us about your pseudo-participation in this circus. We are inclined to overlook a great deal. But being found first on a murder scene is not one of the overlookable offenses.”

“How many ‘offenses’ did Molina consider expected?” His expression tightened. “A few. Like breaking and entering on the first death scene. And bringing her daughter along.”

“You guys have taken over the show’s secret recording duties.”

“Darn right. Now. I’ll take you downtown so the lieutenant can debrief you.”

“Mariah—”

“Not to worry. Su’s with her.”

For some reason, Temple felt usurped.

“Why didn’t Molina use Su in the first place? Why drag me into it and then punish me for getting ahead of the curve?”

“You’re a head of something, all right,” he said, gazing at her blindingly blond hair. Then he chuckled. “Don’t sweat it. Somehow I don’t see you as a candidate for stabbing someone through the heart.”

“Was that the murder method?”

Alch put a finger to his lips and mustache. “Not for publication.”

So she was escorted out of the death scene, a defiant Xoe Chloe to the last. Everyone gathered around: herd of tittering blondes, glad to have Xoe off the show; Crawford Buchanan, hissing a blow-by-blow commentary into his live mike; her own aunt, looking aghast but keeping her lips zipped like a good actress; a subdued Dexter Manship; and Rafi Nadir, bringing up the rear to give her a thumbs up, her only supporter.

Unless you counted Midnight Louie at the crowd’s very edge, backed up by a trio of hip kits, one silver, one golden, and one as black as Xoe Chloe’s hair used to be.

Louie did not give her a thumbs up.

But he did wink. Or blink. Whichever. He had a whisker’s chance in hell of helping her.

“What did you think you were doing?”

Molina didn’t waste words. Temple was in her office, which was a good sign. She doubted it was bugged but couldn’t be sure. After living in the Teen Queen Castle, she was fairly paranoid. Police had a license to be tricky.

“I thought I’d lead Detective Alch to the person who’d killed Marjory Klein.”

“Oh, you led Alch to something, all right. Another murder. And what the hell is going on with my daughter? You were supposed to protect her. Instead, your pet sleazebag is running loose on the premises and a pretty prime suspect for any and all of this.”

“I didn’t know Rafi would be there. Savannah Ashleigh hired him as a bodyguard. And Mariah’s fine. Neither of them has a clue as to who is who. You really pulled the wool over Rafi’s eyes. If he found out he had a kid, he’d probably stroke out and your problems would be over. In fact, that might be a nice sneaky way to get rid of him forever.”

“I wouldn’t count on convenient acts of God to get you out of this mess. Some amateur sleuth you are. You just led Alch to Beth Marble. This woman turned out to be a victim, not a criminal.”

“Why does her killer have to be Mrs. Klein’s killer?”

“We have a serial situation here. There was a young girl killed in the parking lot outside the shopping mall where you and your … peers auditioned two weeks ago. We’ve found defaced posters of the show flyer all overthe place. Someone is targeting the competition and its entrants.”

Temple absorbed this, even the additional details, with no surprise. “Those were the arguments you used to blackmail me into becoming Mariah’s chaperon. You’ve always suspected an outside stalker.”

Molina, her face sober to the point of grimness, nodded.

“Look. I don’t for a minute believe that you’d stab anyone in the heart … unless they were going after your sainted Max Kinsella. You can bet I’d never turn my back on you in that regard. But you’ve put me in an impossible position. You were found where you were found. I had to abstract you.”

“‘Abstract?’ Like I’m a hologram you erase?”

“Abstract like ‘take out’ before you’re taken out. First, I’d like to know why you thought Beth Marble killed Marjory Klein. It’s quite a leap of logic.”

“Who do you think killed Beth Marble?”

“Haven’t a clue yet. She apparently was not only the mastermind behind this piece of reality TV tripe but her personality was all grins and roses. A cloying personality type, I grant you, but why target her as a killer?”

“Why should I tell someone who ridicules my deductions and jerks me around like a puppet?”

Molina leaned back in her skimpy executive chair, not even big enough to hide a dead body. She tapped a pen on her desktop.

“You build a good case, I’ll buy it.”

“And that’s worth something?”

“It’s worth our deal about Kinsella continuing.”

“Okay. My reasons aren’t entirely logical—”

“So I’ve been telling you about Kinsella. But go on.”

“I just … felt from the first that the house’s history had something to do with the sinister goings-on now.”

“‘Sinister goings-on.’ Very good. Very Agatha. Go on.” Molina was always a hard house to play. “I think, from the old photos in your fairly lousy news-clipping copies, that Beth Marble was really that blonde trophy wife of yore, Crystal Cummings.”

Molina neither moved nor spoke.

“After all, she didn’t die in the attack years ago. She just went off the radar after all the court trials and hoopla and her estranged husband’s disappearance. So did her seriously wounded teenage daughter. They became the forgotten victims.”

“Have you any idea how many cold case files there are? How many suspects and almost victims drift off into the great anonymity of modern life? It’s easier to lose people than to find them.”

“Exactly. But I figure that this poor kid, Crystal’s daughter, she would have had enormous emotional trauma. Maybe enough to create an eating disorder, which is a cry for control. Enter Marjory Klein, an inflexible, doctrinaire therapist. Believe me, I had to sit in her office swallowing her legume regimen, and poor Mariah—”

“What about ‘poor’ Mariah?”

“You know Mrs. Klein was hard on her weight issue.”

“Hispanic girls often have baby fat but they get it off later.”

“Right. A Weight Watcher would know, wouldn’t she?”

Molina’s face darkened but she didn’t say anything. Kids will blab. Temple felt her ground hardening under her.

“And you’re only her mother and Mariah was only in Mrs. Klein’s hands for a few days and I did tell her to ignore the woman … and already the veins are standing out on your forehead.”

“They are not.”

“They would be if you allowed them to. So figure it’s not just a few pounds and your daughter but Crystal Cummings’s teenage daughter with a serious case of traumaticanorexia or bulimia brought on by the attack in the Dickson house.

“So she eventually dies, the daughter. Cummings would be her last name. Or maybe she’d have the last name of her actual, forgotten father. But maybe Crystal just used her mother’s own last name. I hear that sort of thing happens all the time. Much cleaner, especially if the father has abandoned the child.” Molina’s face was getting grimmer by the second. “The point is, this young girl was only a stepdaughter to Dickson. That was the tragedy of her getting hit by one of the bullets. She was a truly innocent bystander.”

Molina started shuffling papers on her desk like a madwoman.

Finally, she pulled one out and leaned back in her chair. “Tiffany Cummings.”

“No, that wasn’t the daughter’s name. The articles said she was called Chastity.”

“Tiffany Cummings was the name of the seventeenyear-old who was accosted in the mall parking lot during the Teen Queen tryouts and stabbed to death with a screwdriver.”

“Ouch.” Temple was stunned into silence. She kept quiet to think. For once, she and Molina were in perfect sync.

The notion of two young girls with their lives ruined and cut short so violently was appalling. Had Chastity survived just long enough to bear a daughter? Maybe postpartum depression had pushed her into anorexia. And maybe Tiffany was Crystal Cummings’s granddaughter. A far fresher motive for a killing.

“We haven’t traced any relatives to the parking lot vic. If she wasn’t a runaway, she lived a gypsy life.”

Finally Temple spoke. “If Tiffany Cummings was the first victim, Marjory Klein was the second victim, and Crystal Cummings masquerading as Beth Marble was the third—?” She fell silent. “I’ve got a headache.”

“It’s probably an allergic reaction to bleach. That dye job of yours is unreal.”

“That was the idea, wasn’t it? Just like the reality show was supposed to be unreal. Only it had ended up being a shadow of the Dickson house murders twenty years ago. If Crystal, aka ‘Beth,’ killed Marjory, who killed her? And why?”

“That’s a very far-out theory of yours. We’ll have to do a lot of checking to prove the entwined threads in this tangled web. Meanwhile—” Molina stood, towering like the Palms hotel. “You can go back.”

“I’m disgraced. I was taken away by the police.”

“That should only burnish Xoe Chloe’s sorry reputation. Look. I don’t want Mariah alone in that mess, and you do seem to have some sort of whacked-out handle on things. Finish out the assignment and Max Kinsella is all yours, off my usual suspects list forever.”

“He already is all mine.”

“Maybe.” Molina’s electric blue glance met and held Temple’s a trifle too long.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that nothing’s certain in this world but death and taxes. Taxes I leave to accountants. Death is my beat. Magicians are one step behind the Grim Reaper when it comes to surprise appearances. I wouldn’t count on them. Not a one of ‘em. Especially that one. Deceiving the public can become an addiction that leaks over into a private life. That’s all.”

“Cops can’t always be counted on either,” Temple said.

Whether Molina got the reference to her ex, Rafi Nadir, or not, Temple left the office feeling she’d gotten a little of her own back.

But not nearly enough.

Chapter 52

Dress for Success

Temple finally understood Fonzie’s appeal when she returned to the Teen Queen Castle.

The Fonz was the black-leather-jacketed “hood” on the Happy Days sitcom hit set in the fifties. The Bad Boy.

Xoe Chloe Ozone returned free and triumphant to the Castle.

Being taken away by the police, and released to return, made her a model of Teflon charisma.

Eyebrows may have raised but they’d been lifted by botox or Dr. Perricone formulations anyway. Xoe Chloe was cool. Nobody could tie her down.

Except maybe makeover madness.

“Where have you been?” Vanetta, who’d obviously had her head in her makeup case all day, asked frantically when Xoe appeared. “We’re pulling wardrobe for the makeover debut and talent review. All the good stuff could be gone by now.”

“That’s all right. I’ll take the bad stuff that’s left over.”

Temple could not believe that with two rooms taped off as crime scenes, the show would go on. But apparently it was good to go, for reasons best known to Molina and Co.

Somebody shrieked at seeing her. A fireball rushed down the corridor and embraced her like an upright lobster.

“Mariah?” Temple had to detangle from the hyper teen to see her.

Whoa! The makeover team had been busy during Temple’s unhappy interview with the maternal unit.

Mariah’s shiny brunette bob with bangs (so reminiscent of her mother’s unfussy do) had been … well, further bobbed. And cut. And streaked. With—what else?—blonde.

It was still mostly brunette, though styled into one of those raggedly cheerful upflips so popular now. Oddly enough, the waifish cut emphasized Mariah’s blackberry-dark eyes and even some surfacing cheekbones, thanks to a diet of beans and veggies.

“You look very cool,” Temple told her.

Then she was yanked away into the adjoining library, which was filled with racks of clothing.

Kit Carlson came rushing to greet her, looking relieved. “I’ve saved some outfits for you.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Temple began. But when she glimpsed the goulash of lime green ostrich feathers, sixties Op Art prints, and leopard skin draping Kit’s arm, Temple knew Xoe Chloe had found her fashion muse.

Kit leaned close to whisper, “I wasn’t wardrobe mistress for my high school production of Hair for nothing.”

While Temple tried on various combinations of hip-huggers and chunky jewelry that would have made rock-star chicks look as staid as Laura Bush, Kit brought her up to date on the mood inside the Teen Queen Castle.

“The police are on us all like a cheap suit—that Detective Alch is sure kind of Columbo-cute—and the camera crew is eating it up. Our show has morphed into a combo of Cops and Survivor

“Everyone said you were a murderer when the police took you away, so the producers have been madly assembling clips of every inch of footage on you for a special Xoe Chloe memorial montage. You are a star, kiddo! Clay Aiken has nothing on you.

“The Clairol horde were thrilled at your exit and are so terminally pissed at your triumphal return that I notice they’re shedding brittle hairs like a miffed alpaca. Negative emotions are so bad for one’s looks.

“Mariah is feeling supergirly about her transformation but she missed showing off for you, Big Sis.

“Savannah Ashleigh’s glowery bodyguard, that Heathcliffy Rafi-guy, has been patrolling the halls and snooping around like a cop on the beat, way beyond his blonde bimbo duties.

“So has that black alley cat mascot that showed up. He looks a lot like your Louie, but surely he’s safe at home and I suppose all black cats look alike. Does that old gigolo have a harem, or what? There are these white and yellow Persians with him.”

Temple finally got a word in edgewise. “That is indeed Louie. He’s doing some investigative legwork for me. And we say ‘silver’ and ‘golden’ in the Persian game.”

“Well, la-di-dah. The fluffy black one must be an `ebony,’ then.”

“She’s not a Persian, just a long-haired American domestic. They call her Louise now, but I don’t think she’s Louie’s girlfriend; she’s way too independent.”

“Well, call me a short-haired American domestic.

Does madame find favor with her wardrobe selections?”

“They rock, Kit! And so do you. Thanks a gadzillion!”

“Only if I make it on The Apprentice with Donald ‘Mr.

Comb-over’ Trump next. With my luck, I’d have ended up on The Benefactor with that cheapo Mark Cuban sports nut.”

“May the Force be with you.” They slapped palms, then Temple gathered up her garish armful and fled.

Mariah ambushed her again in the hall. “I need you to check out my performance outfit.”

“In the bathroom, no doubt.”

“Where else?”

They returned to the room, and Temple found she’d been oddly homesick for it.

Steam heat was less welcome. Bleached blonde hair had a tendency to frizz, but Ken Adair had handed her an arsenal of moisturizers, softeners, and conditioners for its upkeep. Being a blonde was hard work, but Xoe Chloe remade (and still reasonably disguised) was worth it.

Mariah sat Temple down on the closed bathroom throne (Temple thought of Elvis’s last hour) and grabbed her hands. “I was so worried.”

“About me?” Foolish Temple. Teens were teens.

“No, about me! What do you think? Do I look hot? Will my mom kill me? Does this new haircut make my face look even more fat? What about these loser clothes they picked for me? What about my talent song? Is ‘Defying Gravity’ too obscure, too dweeby? Whaddayah think? Whaddayah think?”

“Chill, Baby-O. Xoe Chloe is on your case. Wicked is the hottest musical on Broadway, and ‘Defying Gravity’ is the current overcoming-teenage-angst anthem. Every girl feels like a misunderstood witch at your age. Plus the song’s a showstopper for a darker voice, which you have in spades! As the song says, until you try, you’ll never know. We’ll run the wardrobe and the routine and we’ll both come out smelling like, oh … Rose’s green apple juice in a killer martini.”

“Yeah. That’s cool. Apple green. I saw those feathers. You’ll knock ‘em dead.”

“Speaking of which—”

“The show’s over, right? That’s what my mom hauled you outa here to say. She always ruins it for me.”

Temple grabbed Mariah’s plump little shoulders and refrained from shaking.

“Mariah. She does not. She’s putting her shield on the line to keep the lid on the murders here, just so you can get up there and be shallow like all the other little ‘Tween Queen wannabes.”

Mariah stared at Temple’s sudden stern turn. Then her eyes teared over. “I don’t know what happens. Sometimes it seems like everything’s so endlessly awful.”

“Sometimes it is. Not now. You’re just feeling Wicked Witch of the Westly. The police aren’t going to close the show down. They want everybody bottled up here while they do some very complicated background checks. And they’ve imported some undercover pros to prevent any more violence, so expect to see a couple new crew members. Your mom is following some very interesting leads, thanks to … us. We have to keep it together and let the show go on until the police have enough evidence to name and charge the person behind all this. We are … undercover distractions. We gotta be good at it, right? That’s our real job. This stupid contest isn’t the point. I’m not Xoe Chloe, and you’re not Madonna, Jr. We’re us, underneath it all, and we have more important jobs than winning this thing, right?”

“I guess.”

“You guess right.”

“But the talent show is tomorrow and then they judge and then it’s all over.”

“Right. Then we judge and then it’s all over. Capische?”

“That is so Sopranos.”

“And we are the contraltos, right? We are different.”

“You sure are.” Mariah grinned.

“Dare to be … you and me,” Temple finished. “Defying gravity.”

Chapter 53

Tailings

The hour is once again my namesake one and I am stationed outside the Ashleigh suite trying to figure out how to get in.

This is when Miss Midnight Louise happens along. Yeah. Like she is following me.

“What ho, Romeo?” she inquires in the acid tones granted only to the female of the species, any species, and guaranteed to shrivel the cottontail off a bunny rabbit, not to mention other attachments of which I am unduly fond.

“Stalking the Ashleigh girls again, I suppose,” she adds. “When are you going to get that those snooty purebreds are too good for you?”

“When I lose my self-esteem, which will be never. So. You are emulating the Crawfish and descending to domestic snooping.”

“Just wondering why you were slacking off on the job.”

“I am not slacking anything, Louise. I need to gel through the looking glass again.”

“You and little girls named Alice.”

“You recall that one of ours started her on that famous adventure. Holy Havana Browns! How am I going to get in there without Miss Savannah Ashleigh seeing me?”

“I do not see why you cannot rely on your dubious inside connections. Of course, neither one of them would come if you came calling.”

This gets my goat, and my llama too. I stick a mitt under the bottom of the door, shoot out my shivs, and make what pathetic scratching noises I can.

Sure enough. In thirty seconds flat, I am playing pattycake with a set of soft, moist pads from the other side.

Throwing Louise a superior gaze over my shoulder, I hunker down for a game of whisker teasing and whispering via the quarter-inch crack.

In a minute, I have convinced the Ashleigh girls to make a heck of a commotion in the service of getting me into the secret passage. They are quite aware of this area, especially Yvette, as she is wont to play with her own image in the mirror for hours, Solange informs me. But she thinks she can tear Yvette away from herself long enough to do what is needed.

Miss Louise and I retreat against the opposite wall and wait.

Not for long.

The shrieks, human and not-so, emanating from beyond the door result in an adjoining door slamming open against the hall wall, and Mr. Rafi Nadir, clad only in unzipped jeans and sneakers, charging down the hall and through the door like a cannonball.

Louise and I exchange a look, then shoot through on his sneaker heels. Well, sneakers do not have heels,as such. Suffice it to say that we are in like dingleberries dangling from a shih tzu’s tail.

There is a lot of fluffy pale hair flying in the room, part of it Persian and the other part of it Horst of Beverly Hills, and most of it eiderdown from some terminally clawed pillows.

Quick thinkers, these Persians. They have staged the Mother of All Pillow Fights to upset their mistress and bring the troops running.

While Mr. Rafi Nadir inserts himself into the pile of flying fur, shrieks, and flailing claws both human and feline-I admit that even I would quail at such a task-I hurl myself at the pressure point that turns the mirror into a revolving door, and Louise and I whisk into the dark beyond, pausing to pull it shut behind us with paw power times two.

“So this is what you wanted?” she asks in the absolute dark.

I wait for my eyes to acclimate. That probably takes a little longer than for her, but I do not wish to make this obvious.

“Shhhh. I am thinking.”

“I can see you would need absolute quiet for that. Why did you want to be here?”

“Is it not interesting that this house has been honeycombed with hidden passages since the time it was built?”

“I have heard that creepy Crawford dude prattling about the big shootout here into his microphone. No doubt these passages made the escape of the masked killer easier twenty years ago. Everyone thought it was Arthur Dickson himself, and no one could prove it. But what does a long-dead scandal have to do with teen queens today?”

I am about to tell her, which would be interesting as I do not know yet myself, when there is a cracking sound and a vertical bar of light appears behind us.

That is how I first saw Elvis, as a narrow bar of light in the Action Jackson attraction tunnel under the Crystal Phoenix a few months ago.

I am eagerly awaiting a return engagement of the King when the light vanishes with a click and another click brings a swash of light into the tunnel.

Louise and I plaster ourselves to the dark walls, avoiding detection but not avoiding the fact that it is Rafi Nadir bearing a flashlight into our midst.

I also glimpse shadowy forms by the now-closed mirror-door.

In sum, we are not alone, times three.

Louise has dashed across the aisle in the darkness and now brushes against my shoulder. “Great. We are here but so is the hired bodyguard. What do you suppose he wants?”

“Whatever he wants, it is worth tailing him. And keep your nose alert for that noxious sweet scent I mentioned the other day.”

“Shhh!”

Rafi turns and sweeps the flashlight over the unadorned wooden floor, missing us by that much.

We open our eyes once the searchlight has passed. I hear slight scrabbling sounds behind us.

“Mice,” Miss Louise dismisses them. “That is what we are dealing with, not a murderer.”

“A murderer is still in this house. We could, in fact, be tailing him now.”

This snaps her to literal attention.

“Rafi Nadir has the scent on his shoes?”

“Yes, but he could have picked it up out by the pool. The hot sun had melted what traces of it I found that day, so anyone could have accidentally stepped in it.

Except myself, of course. I have been certain to keep my toes well out of it.”

Louise’s tail is hitting the wood planking like a woodpecker’s beak, hard and fast. That betrays her thinking. “So. This substance is a sure link to another murder scene … and to the mischief here, but like rabies it has spread to innocent carriers. Still, we might learn something by tracing every one who has spread it.”

“Exactly.”

“I admit that this Rafi Nadir has been showing up at every recent murder or crime scene for some weeks now.”

“Agreed, yet I hate to suspect him. He treats my Miss Temple right, in his way.”

“So he could not possibly be a killer,” she concludes sarcastically. “Perhaps he is stalking your precious Miss Temple.”

“I do not think so but I have detected the sticky substance on some others who might be.”

“Such as—?”

“Do not forget the cameraman who tried to kick me when I first arrived.”

“Right. I was not here then. I missed that. Pity.”

“And Ken Adair, the Hair Guy.”

“That could merely be some stinky hair gel that got on his shoe.”

“True. Most of these girls would put recycled bubblegum on their locks if a beauty consultant told them to.”

“Any other suspects?”

I hesitate.

“Spit it out, just not literally?’

“Miss Sulah Savage, aka Miss Temple’s aunt from Manhattan, whom I bunked with at Christmastime, Miss Kit Carlson.”

“Whew! I did not guess the relationship. This place is a snarl of hidden relationships as well as secret tunnels. Miss Sulah Savage has been most generous to me with tidbits at mealtime. She could have innocently walked through a bit of it herself.”

We hear a crack of something opening or shutting far down the corridor of darkness.

“Quick!” Miss Midnight Louise is all tracker now. “I do not want to lose Mr. Rafi.”

We take off and there is a double echo of pad thumping wood behind us that only I hear, because I am listening for it.

We hit a hidden flight of stairs and go streaking down it too fast to stop. More dark hallway. Our whiskers ease us through, warning us before we slam our pusses into solid wall.

A far sliver of light tells us where Mr. Rafi Nadir has gone.

We race to that point, pause, and then Louise sticks her nose into the light. (She is very good at sticking her nose where it does not belong.) It widens to whisker width. The light comes from a lit lamp. In its intense circle, we spot Mr. Rafi bending over a desk and chair. I notice some fresh four-tracks on his upper arms, but he is too busy to pay much attention to a few wounds.

I realize where we are: on the wrong side of the crime scene tape, and so is he.

This does not seem to bother him as he moves around the room, examining this and that.

“This is Miss Marjory Klein’s office,” Louise hisses in my ear.

I flatten my offended appendage. Her hisses are sharper than a biker’s switchblade.

We push against the wall as Mr. Rafi comes back into the passage, shuts the door disguised as a wall on the other side, and moves farther along it.

Last I had heard of the pursuing Persian girls was some muffled thumps on the surprise staircase and some choice curses in Farsi.

Amazing how one reverts to one’s roots in times of stress, even natural blondes like the Divine Yvette.

Yet I dare not rush to her assistance and give away that we are not alone.

Rafi is sure giving the place the once-over. We follow him left and follow him right, and then follow him right into another office.

This is Ms. Beth Marble’s office, and once again we are all on the wrong side of the crime scene tape.

Miss Louise is the first nose through the hidden door, of course, and she reports to me in short little pants.

“He is examining her drawers.”

In other situations, this would not be rated family fare, but since Miss Beth Marble’s mortal remains are long gone, I am sure that everything is above board.

Besides, it is clear to me that Mr. Rafi is tracing the passage’s access to the crime scenes. Certainly it is clear how a body might be transported from Mr. Dexter Manship’s office to this one without being observed.

In fact, I turn us around and, using my instinctive feline radar, lead Louise to a site that Mr. Rafi has not discovered yet.

There I instruct her to jump up at a certain spot until the apparent wall turns into a door.

I sit back on my haunches and enjoy the exercise, since it is not mine. Eventually she hits the sweet spot that opens the concealed entrance.

No light this time, as no one bearing a flashlight is in our party, but I bound inside, whisker my way to the desk, and leap up to punch the lamp’s switch.

Light blinds me for a few seconds, but, sure enough, I am inside Mr. Dexter Manship’s office. No doubt cameras are recording my presence. I recall too late the strange snipping noise that preceded Mr. Rafi into the offices he visited. He had cut the camera cords, which were no doubt placed too high for me to reach anyway.

Ah, well. I am very telegenic and will be dismissed as harmless vermin, as usual.

Miss Louise has skittered in at floor level and is sniffing deeply under the desk.

“Mr. Manship is indeed another bubblegum shoe suspect,” she confirms my previous conclusion with satisfaction. “A pity everybody tiptoed through the exercise mats during the shaving cream graffiti episode. We need the film of that time to check who got close enough to infect their shoes.”

“Yes, yes. Proof is fine, but right now I need suspects. Ours is not to make the case, ours is to point out the possibilities.”

“How? We are hardly legitimate consultants.”

“About your own suspected origins you may speak for yourself, Louise. I know my sire and dam.”

“Braggart!”

I inhale deeply the atrocious tutti-frutti scent deposited under Mr. Dexter Manship’s desk. It is particularly strong and there are even a few stringy remnants of the source. Let us hope his shoes are so endowed tomorrow, during the Teen Queen finals.

I have an urge to unmask a murderer, and cannot think of a more deserving candidate.

Miss Louise carps about our worthless expedition on our way back to the mirrored door.

I make no defense, and not only let her precede me back into Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s domain, but show her the hall door with all due courtesy.

“I am going to inspect Miss Savannah’s shoes,” I tellher. “No sense being sexist and omitting a female suspect. You may want to do the same with Miss Sulah Savage’s closet. After all, she does use a pseudonym.”

Off the little chit goes, dreaming of Manolos, as in Blahniks.

Personally, I do not think Miss Kit indulges in status symbols as blatant as Blahniks. So I wait by the mirror, checking the state of my best bib and tucker and licking it into submission.

On the room’s king-size bed, Miss Savannah Ashleigh snores softly, no doubt the result of a Beverly Hills nose bob.

In a few moments, the unlatched door pushes open and girls silver and golden slide through. They are looking a bit mussed about the muzzle and decidedly annoyed.

“Louie!” Miss Yvette is in fine fettle, good mettle, and superb Ma Kettle mode. “You led us on zee wild goose chase. And affair we had done zee hokey-pokey on the intruder’s epidermis.”

(When stressed, the Divine Yvette resorts to B-movie French.)

“Poor fellow,” I say. “But I gathered lots of good intelligence.”

“Somezing new pour vous, I tink.”

Yvette is really, really mad. She is starting to sound like a voyageur. Wrong continent, wrong period.

“Those stairs were very sudden,” her sister Solange rebukes.

And I am duly chastised. “But you both have the impeccable French nose for strong cheeses and rank fruit. Did you trace the raspberry/strawberry scent through the tunnels?”

“And banana,” Solange adds.

“Banana?” I think she is making a value judgment. But non. I mean, no.

“There was a distinct undertone of banana. I ought to know. Our mistress uses a banana-scented sun screen.”

Banana! Of course!

The scent that leads from the mall to here is not that of a mere ice cream treat; it is that of a healthful fruit smoothie!

Now I have nailed the full spectrum of ingredients that will lead to a murderer. Brought down by a high-protein health-food shake.

Somehow it is poetic justice.

I would boast of my breakthrough, but the Divine Yvette has lofted onto Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s bed and wrapped herself around her percussive head.

Not only dogs are devoted.

Solange sees me to the door. “Was it something I said, Louie?”

I allow her to polish my sides with her softest, foxiest furs.

“Exactly. What a rare and subtle nose.” (The French love these kind of compliments.) “Brilliant! Now I must prepare for the takedown tomorrow.”

She wafts her fulsome plume under my own nose. “I am sorry Yvette is being such a pill. Perhaps you will come to tell me the outcome.”

Perhaps I will. I chuck her under the chin with my most flexible member.

“Wish me luck, sweetheart.”

“Bonne chance, Louie!”

Having restored international relations with our allies of old, I push out into the ordinary hall, walking on air and the inescapable scent of a spilled fruit smoothie that will trip up a murderer.

Chapter 54

No Glimpse

of Stocking

Max’s watch read five past midnight when he climbed the Circle Ritz’s conveniently stepped black marble facing up to the second-floor balcony of his and Temple’s unit.

He was still officially half-owner. That’s how he could make this clandestine expedition, knowing she was gone, with a semiclear conscience. No, nothing was clear about this intrusion except the night sky, spangled with stars.

He’d told enough necessary lies in his undercover work to recognize a story that was stapled together. Temple was gone, all right. Not to Minnesota though, and not to tend an ill father she hadn’t even mentioned to Electra Lark. No, she’d just asked the landlady to look after the cat.

Speaking of Midnight Louie, Max had better be on the lookout for him. He wouldn’t put it past the territorial old boy to trip him in the dark, since they both always wore black and were fairly invisible at night.

The French door lock gave to a few passes of Max’s tiny metal wand. He’d told Temple to secure these doors again and again, but she probably didn’t want to interfere with Louie’s comings and goings.

The main room was unlit. Faint night-light glows came from the office and kitchen, another concession to Louie probably.

He pulled out his slim high-intensity flashlight. The coffee table looked normal, including its clutter of scattered newspaper sections. Temple, an ex-newsie, was lost without newsprint nearby. None of the stories laid face up seemed relevant to anything: long security lines at McCarran Airport; one hotel mega-conglomerate offering billions for another; a reality TV show setting up shop in a deserted Vegas mansion. The usual nonsense that had made Las Vegas famous.

Max ran the light around the floorboards but no Louie lurked. Either crashing on the king-size bed or out to play while his mistress was away.

The bedroom would tell the tale of the trip. Max paused in the doorway, then shut the door and turned on the light.

Temple had definitely left in a hurry. Louie was not lounging on the bedspread because it was carpeted with clutter. Clothes, underclothes, and shoes were scattered everywhere. Everything but pantyhose. Temple hated hot, sticky hose. Never wore them. An admirable habit.

Empty thin plastic shopping bags also dotted the landscape, bearing names Max had never seen here before, like the Icing and Marvella’s Marvelous Wigs.

Temple needed a wig to visit her sick father? Max started a serious search of the closet. Was she on some crazy undercover crusade again? All of her seriously dressy heels were still here. Her summer slides were scattered over the parquet floor, obviously tried on and stepped out of, but never put away.

She’d been in a hurry. She’d put a wardrobe together ina flurry. At the dresser by the wall, a drawer had been plundered and left open, shutting askew and sticking, and then abandoned.

Max smiled to imagine Temple’s hasty explosion of creative swearing. She never cursed with common expressions when a wacky euphemism was at hand.

The offending drawer was Temple’s Sacrosanct Scarf Drawer, holder of every maternal Christmas present that had been found wanting, along with rosy purchases that soon proved completely wrong. All the things she didn’t use but couldn’t bear to throw out for one reason or another.

Max realized he missed the intriguing and amusing clutter of a female housemate. He missed Temple’s clothes and sound and smell. He went over to set the drawer on its proper track, to stuff the colorful, gauzy scarves that refused to knot and tie properly for her back into their place of exile. As a magician, he had a far better way with scarves than she did. Maybe he’d make a bouquet of all her rejects and surprise her with it when she got back. From … wherever.

A tiny round box caught his eye, the cover off and something winking at him from inside it.

What winked was a ring, an inexpensive sterling gilt and cubic zirconia ring. The bottom of the box still had its adhesive price tag, thirty-eight dollars. One step above a Cracker Jack box trinket. Yet uncannily like the Tiffany opal and diamond ring he’d given Temple last Christmas when he’d come out of hiding and entered her life again. The ring that had been taken from her by a renegade magician named Shangri-La and had ended up in an evidence baggie in Lieutenant Molina’s gloating custody.

Temple had spotted this cheap substitute somewhere and had bought it. Not worn it. Bought it. To remind her of the real one, and then tuck it away like something shameful.

Max could have strangled Molina if she’d been there. Could have kicked himself. He’d only learned what had happened to the ring recently. He should have gotten Temple another one ASAP, not left it to her to comfort herself with a substitute.

Not left it to her to comfort herself with a substitute. The echo of that phrase sounded suddenly sinister.

He sat on the bed and stared at the ring, then glanced at one of the abandoned shoes and picked it up. It lay on his large, strong hand like a curio. A curve of red silk-covered sole, a slender heel, a bejeweled band across the instep. Size five. Cinderella accessory, hands, and shoes, down. Made for a foot fit for a prince. One who actually showed up for balls.

Max put the shoe back down. He put the cover back on the box because he couldn’t bear to look at the ring. Temple didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, or her disappointments on her finger. Obviously, his ring and its loss meant more to her than she’d allow to show. As had the promise he’d given with the ring that someday he’d be free to be a real boy, with a real girl for a wife and a public career again and a house somewhere full of the magic of her laughter, with a dragon of a scarf drawer he could tame into submission with the flick of one finger.

Another opened ring box caught his eye from across the room, this one plainer. He got up, put his hand out, then pulled it back as if contemplating touching white-hot metal. What the holy hell was this doing here? Gold metal. Real gold. A size big enough for a man’s hand.

The ring was shaped like a huge snake coiled into a circle, its jaws closing on its own tail. The Worm Ouroboros. An ancient symbol of eternity. Given to Matt Devine by Max’s own personal demon, Kathleen O’Connor, as a symbol of her undying hatred of them both.

Kathleen was gone. The ring had disappeared even before she had, to hear Devine tell it.

How the devil had it ended up here, in Temple’s scarf drawer? Had Devine given it to her? Why? And when? And how could Max ask Temple without revealing that he’d come slinking around while she was gone, worried about her but even more worried about them, suspecting she’d lied to him? Now he was certain she had. About this trip, and about how much else?

How much had she had to comfort herself with a sub-

Chapter 55

Shoe Biz

To avoid an overstaged look, the madeover ‘Tween and Teen Queen candidates would strut their stuff on a small stage near the pool at twilight time in Las Vegas.

Temple had thought the arrangement rather tacky until she saw the area that afternoon. Fresh lavender and yellow lotuses and lit candles floated in the pool. A semicircular array of clear Plexiglas folding chairs filled the large concrete expanse between pool and house. Banks of flowers turned the planting areas into mini gardens of Eden, with more candles burning on tall lily-shaped holders staked into the ground.

The raised stage was draped with pastel organza and seemed like a huge orchid cloud when viewed from the house.

Temple stared at the area’s transformation into a kinder, gentler place, realizing that what would happen here tonight meant a lot to girls like Mariah. This was akind of coming-out party, with the addition of killer media pressure.

“She may have seemed flakey,” a voice behind her said, “but this event was really important to Beth Marble.”

Temple turned to her Aunt Kit, who knew nothing of the woman’s real identity, or her very dark history and issues.

“It reminds me of a garden wedding scene,” Temple said. “I wonder—?”

“What?”

Temple only shook her head. She had wondered whether Crystal Cummings had married Arthur Dickson in this very spot. She’d have to look it up when this was over. If it ever would be over.

“Beth planned every detail of this setting,” Kit went on. “It seemed to mean something special to her.”

Temple nodded, glad that the police hadn’t made the connection that the dead girl in the parking lot was Beth’s granddaughter until after Beth herself was dead. Glad that she herself hadn’t made that connection any sooner than now.

Even if Beth’s hyper-happy exterior hid a vengeful heart, there must have been some healing energy there somewhere. The bald head under the wig screamed “cancer.” Knowing you were likely to die might make the most stable person a bit crazy, maybe even for, or especially for, a long-delayed vengeance.

“You ready to wow them?”

Temple grinned at her aunt. “I’m ready to do the most unwinning act you ever saw. Get out your pencil and prepare to draw goose eggs.”

“You should give it a real shot. I think Xoe Chloe could hit as one of those alter-ego personalities. Like Martin Short in the fat suit as Jimmy Glick on TV.”

“Oh, Lord, no! There are enough closet performers in my circle.”

“You mean Max?”

“Ah . yeah.” She’d meant Carmen Molina but why confuse her aunt.

“Anyway,” Kit said, squeezing her arm. “I think you underestimate Xoe’s Midas touch. Break a leg.”

On that contrary show biz good wish, Kit disappeared back inside like a fairy godmother off to minister to other Cinderellas.

Temple regarded the beautiful scene, not fussing about her little upcoming roller-rap routine, but about how to trick a killer into the open.

Beth Marble had dreamed up this entire event just to lure and kill a woman who had failed her daughter.

Who had penetrated Beth’s carefully applied fake identity and used the hunter’s trap to kill the hunter?

“Is she there?” Mariah tugged on Temple’s ostrich-feather fringed sleeves, long enough for a medieval minstrel.

Temple pulled back from the crack in the side curtains. “Yes. Your mother is about two-thirds of the way back, wearing ‘our’ outfit, with some guy.”

“She’s with some guy? That must just be Detective Alch.”

“Alch is sitting elsewhere in the audience.”

“Then it’s some other girl’s father or something.”

“They were whispering with their heads together.”

“Must be a cop.” Mariah stuck her head through the curtain. “Must be … oh, gross. They’re, like, laughing.”

“Mariah. Audiences have a lot of time to kill. They do things like that.”

“Where’s Matt?”

“Out of town, I think. The guy does look like a cop, though. I wouldn’t want to mess with him.”

“That’s not Xoe Chloe speak.”

Temple pulled Mariah back to check out the open bar and the three bartenders. One of them was Su.

The videographers prowled the perimeter like hungry wolves, filming the audience, the scene, even the cat who dogged their footsteps, Midnight Louie.

In fact, he was doing more than dogging their footsteps, he was sniffing them, like a dog.

She spied Crawford Buchanan on the sidelines interviewing a Teen Queen candidate so tall he could look up her skirt by pretending to drop his notebook, which he was bending to pick up at the moment.

Creep.

Louie, perhaps drawn by the rolling pencil, had rushed over and was now sniffing his shoes.

Must be the muck that stuck.

“What’s my mother doing now?” Mariah asked. “She’s, ah … pulling out one of those little mirrored lipstick holders and putting on lipstick.”

“What? She never wears lipstick. It must be a secret signal.” Mariah pushed past Temple to peek again.

“She is! And that guy is watching her. Ick! That is way too … too.”

“I’m sure it’s a signal,” Temple said confidently. That was the truth. Public lipstick applying could be. But she looked again. Yup. The guy was watching Molina’s every move. That kind of signal didn’t usually bring on the tactical squad.

“Listen,” she told Mariah, feathering her fingers through the new haircut for maximum “perk.”

“Just think about getting up on that stage without tripping and doing your talent routine. That’s our job tonight. Let the police and your mom do their jobs.”

“I wish Matt was here.”

“I don’t.” Temple put a hand to her straight blonde hair, the lime green ostrich feathers on her long sleeves fluttering like wings in the corner of her eye. He’d have a bird!

“You look really … different.”

“Higher praise I could not get. Now we better get into our lines and get ready to suffer through twenty-eight three-minute presentations. You know how long that is, counting applause, if we get any?”

That forced Mariah to think and get her mind off her mother’s performance in the audience.

That’s what it had to be, Temple decided. No way Molina was flirting. No way.

“Sixty,” Mariah was saying, “an hour. And … twenty-four minutes.”

“Add another forty minutes for the judges to score each act and for people to waste time getting on-and offstage.”

“We’ll be here forever!”

“Certainly will feel like it.” Temple pinched the curtain shut and prepared to be trapped backstage while all the action was going on out front.

Theater was like that. She just hoped the police found some likely suspect for the string of murders that had wiped out three generations of one family so far, a family already decimated by a miscarriage of justice that never ended.

Every blonde seemed to be ahead of Temple on the play list and every blonde seemed to do a Britney Spears song with every Britney Spears move ever patented.

The program alternated ‘Tween and Teen Queen candidates, and Xoe Chloe was programmed dead last … wonder how that had happened, Temple thought, eyeing Dexter Manship at the judge’s table. The peeping place she’d found was far stage left, behind a gargantuan array of gladioli spears. Nobody backstage or in the audience had spied her, so she was able to watch her competitors swivel and shake their way to true mediocrity.

When Mariah came through the curtain, it was like watching a tennis match. Snap her head to check her roomie’s poise. Great. The judges. Positive. Mama. Stunned. The guy with her had to put a hand on her arm to keep her in her seat, or maybe to keep her from going for her semiautomatic.

Mariah looked, what? Girly grown up without seeming trashy. She looked all of nifty fifteen. She let the music precede her, as opposed to walking up to the mike and waiting like the other girls had, amateurs all. Make ‘em wait. Then she began the strong yearning song of the lonely young Wicked Witch of the West from the Broadway hit, Wicked. Lyrics and melody showcased Mariah’s girlish contralto. Even Molina was relaxing, tilting back in her chair. Shocked, awed, and smiling. “Defying Gravity” along with her daughter.

Way to go, roomie!

Temple joined the applause and watched the judges’ pencils scratching high on their rating forms.

Somebody poked her in the back.

“Who is that?”

She turned. Rafi Nadir loomed over her and did not look happy.

“My roommate.”

“Not the kid. She did okay. Who’s that with—?”

He wasn’t going to say but he was glowering at the unidentified man with Molina. Or maybe he was glowering at Molina.

Rafi did not know that Temple knew their personal history, so she just played dumb.

“Who?”

“Never mind. I’ll go check the crowd.”

He eyed Savannah Ashleigh, who had both cat carriers at her side. She’d take one or the other cat out from time to time and pretend the kitty was writing in the scores. Of course, she got lots of closeup camera attention every time she produced one of her gorgeous Persians.

Rafi vanished without another word, leaving Temple time to look around for Louie. Louie loved Persians, from her observation.

Yup. He was under the judges’ table, the old dog! And snuffling at Dexter Manship’s shoes. Maybe the old boy’s sniffer was getting a little dull, to be diverted from nearby unfixed Persian pheromones to a neighboring guy’s shoes!

Now he was nudging the Elvis impersonator’s boots.

Louie must be losing it.

Oh, well, it happened to the best of them. Who knew how old he really was? Right now she herself felt about forty.

And nothing was happening.

The judges were watching. The audience was watching. And the police personnel were watching. Just watching.

Not only that, the evening event was almost over. Temple suddenly discovered a whole herd of butterflies in the pit of her stomach.

Xoe Chloe was up in two shakes of a blonde mane.

Time to stop fretting over hidden killers and start thinking about something serious, like sudden debilitating stage fright.

Why had she ever agreed to this debacle? Sure, it’s fine for Xoe Chloe to make a fool of herself, but Temple had inherited some legitimate theater genes that demanded a decent performance.

Oh, well. Temple closed the curtain on her peephole and withdrew backstage to wrestle her contrary muse, Xoe Chloe, to the mat. Hopefully shaving foam free… .

The preprogrammed karaoke trio segued into the theme from James Bond.

Xoe Chloe burst through the side curtain, not the center one, on Rollerblades.

She spiked concrete on the space before center stage. Threw off her bicycle helmet, kicked off the blades. Tap danced up the three stairs to the mike.

She grabbed that sucker by the throat, tilted it almost horizontal like a rock star and strutted around it while rapping in rhythm, kick boxing, clapping, ostrich feathers flapping, on a beat in a counterpoint to the snare drum scratching and her high-heeled boots stamping and her blonde hair shaking and she said and she said, who knows, but the rhyme was the rhythm and rhythm was the reason and this was the Xoe Chloe season and … one … more … time, and then another … we speak to the sisters and we speak to the brothers and we walk around the world and watch it spin, and then we take it out for a walk and let the bows begin.

The applause was the climax to the routine. The judges were scratching furiously. Temple was blinking like the idiot she felt she was: standing center stage, the mike slowly swinging back to its proper upright position.

Louie was streaking out from under the judges’ table—all their heads bent to the score sheets—and … apparently panicked by Temple’s raucous routine, climbing up the judges with his claws.

Climbing up one judge’s sturdy sleeve in particular, which resulted in a dark hairy object flying up, up, and away, toward the pool.

“Louie!” Temple wailed into the mike.

The audience started singing “Louie, Louie” as if cued. But the dark flying object, or DFO, was not Midnight Louie. It was someone … something else.

A thing Temple knew well from personal experience. A black wig.

Elvis’s sideburned headpiece.

Everyone eyed the bald man in the glittering jumpsuit, now flailing his arms at phantoms.

For Louie was gone.

Only the naked head was left.

The center of all regard.

The bull’s eye that Alch and Su and a waiter and a man in the audience converged on.

Dexter Manship leaped up, snatched the score sheet from under the captive as he was rushed away, and leaped onstage to push Xoe Chloe away from the mike.

“Forget the fuss, dear hearts. We have our winners.”

All the candidates rushed onstage to hear the verdict, pushing Temple to the back.

A hand was in hers, squeezing hard. Mariah’s. Manship’s voice carried over everything, including the scuffle as Elvis was led away.

By the fringe of the pool, a rapt Crawford Buchanan was blabbing into his ever-present mike, unaware of a black stalking form closing in on him at foot level.

The black cat pounced, leaping, claws out.

Backpeddling, Crawford and his mike took a plunge into chlorinated water. No one even heard the splash. The night had an unhappy ending. He didn’t drown.

Chapter 56

As Blind as Bast

Naturally, having masterminded the revelation of the criminal, I am thereafter ignored.

As soon as the police personnel present swarm the faux Elvis, they compare notes and conclude he bears a decided resemblance to a computer-aged image of … ta-dah! … Arthur Dickson.

The whole tawdry scheme is immediately clear to all and sundry, as it has been to me. (Naturally, I eavesdrop shamelessly, and unnoticed, as they gather to exchange notes.) When ailing Crystal Cumming, aka Beth Marble, brought her scheme for the reality show to the producers, one of the silent partners was Arthur Dickson, forced underground by his narrow escape from prosecution for the first atrocity at his signature mansion.

Beth Marble, who no doubt took her false last name from the sad monument to the life and death of her shattered daughter and her own imminent fate, knew the mansion had passed through many hands. She envisioned it as a court of justice for the woman who had, perhaps inadvertently yet concretely, contributed to the final downward spiral of her unfortunate daughter.

In using the scene of the worst moment of her life for her revenge, poor Beth was unaware that her ex-husband had also been drawn back to the bloody battlefield. He had always known who she really was.

So he put himself into the TV show as a bizarre judge, and finally found Beth in his power again. Once she had stepped outside of the bounds of civility by killing her daughter’s misguided therapist, he killed her, hoping to end forever the quest for vengeance that had forced him underground.

However—and this I heard direct from the lipsticked lips of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina as she explained it to a Mr. Paddock of her recent acquaintance, unaware of my collaboration at their foot level. Anyway, she told him (and thus me) that the body of the young girl in the mall parking lot was the suspect’s step-granddaughter.

The police surmised that the poor girl had recognized “Beth Marble” on the TV previews as her grandmother, and had come to the mall to confront her and perhaps urge her to give up the quest for revenge.

Fate stepped, in to demand a dance, as it so often does. A car nearly hit her in the parking lot. When the driver stepped out to see to her, young Tiffany recognized him from the old newspaper clippings she had been weaned on. Her surprise revealed her knowledge. Arthur Dickson, so long anonymous, grabbed a screwdriver from the back seat of his vehicle and ensured his continuing anonymity by killing his step-granddaughter, just as his violent actions twenty years before had wounded and ultimately destroyed his stepdaughter.

Whew. I am beginning to seriously re-examine myrelationships with my, er, esteemed long-lost maybe-daughter Midnight Louise. Like who wants a fang through the heart?

Before I can digest my ill-gotten information, I am surrounded by a congratulatory frill of Persians. Much thrumming and purring and swishing.

Miss Louise also shows up, returning from a successful expedition to scare Crawfish back into the pool a second time. It is certain he will never cross paths with a black cat again.

“Louie,” cries Yvette in her sweet soft voice. “You have singlemittedly revealed a villain and also dunked the lowlife who was always after zee dirt on my mistress.”

“Well, yes,” I admit. Then I glance at Miss Midnight Louise, who is a trifle damp but no less triumphant. “However, my associate was on the Crawfish Pukecannon case.”

“Your associate?” The Divine Yvette lifts a perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“Actually,” I say, “she is my partner. In business, that is. And my … possible offspring.”

“Louie! You have admitted offspring?”

“Well, just one. One small insignificant one. Maybe.”

“You are an admitted single father?”

“Maybe. These things happen to a guy. Like they have been known to happen to a girl. It could be worse. It could be a whole litter. Or a few dozen.”

The Divine One shows me the underside of her tail, which is not too tacky, as she leaves. “I do not date secondhand goods.”

I am left alone with Miss Midnight Louise, who is not looking any too happy at my recent description of her.

But she holds her tongue for once, and sniffs, as I have been doing much of lately.

“Good capture,” she notes. “Small loss.”

That is for her to say and me to gnash my fangs over.

Chapter 57

The Past Is Prologue

Supposedly Matt had people skills.

Sixteen years as a parish priest and one as a hotline and radio counselor should qualify him for anything.

He sat at a table in the Drake Hotel bar, all wood paneling and leather. His hotel would be the neutral ground. He felt like an anxious diplomat arranging for a secret meeting between Bush and Osama bin Ladin. The situation was explosive. So much could go wrong.

His mother arrived first, as arranged. She was wearing the Virgin Mary blue blouse and blue topaz earrings he’d bought her for Christmas with a gauzy black and silver skirt that had the Krys influence all over it.

She was a knockout.

She scanned the room expertly. Confidently. Serving as hostess at a popular tourist restaurant had given her a new social poise. Dating again must have helped. Matt remembered the distinguished man in the camel-hair coatshe’d seated so graciously when he’d dined alone in “her” restaurant last Christmas.

Finding him, her dark eyes sparkled with greeting. She rushed over on her low-heeled pumps. Another symptom of the hostess job. Easy Spirit shoes for tired feet: neat, attractive, but not showy. The phrase could describe his mother’s overall impact.

He stood to seat her. Bars always had such heavy chairs that women found hard to sling around. Maybe to promote male chivalry. Maybe to anchor tipsy customers for another round or two.

“Matt.” Her lips brushed his cheek before she sat.

No one would call this woman beaten down but that would have described her just months ago, before she moved out of the old two-flat filled with bad memories in the Polish section of Chicago and into a new apartment, job, and the strange cross-generational alliance with her punkish art student niece Krystyna.

Somehow, they were good for each other, so good they sometimes scared the heck out of him, between Krys’s obvious interest in him and his mother’s simultaneous emotional unthawing after years of repression and guilt.

She knew that she was to meet someone important to her quest to find out about the man who’d fathered him, the boy who’d gone off to combat after meeting her in the St. Stan’s church the night before Christmas.

“I can’t believe you’ve found something out,” she told him, ignoring the waitress who hovered behind her. Matt had been out of the priesthood long enough to know that cocktail waitresses at your table side were a boon in most bars, a boon that might not be repeated for too long.

“Have something, Mom.”

She glanced at the lowball glass in front of him. “A .. . scotch on the rocks.”

“House brand okay?”

She expertly eyed the bottles behind the bar, another new talent. “No. Johnny Walker Black.”

Go, Mom, go! You’ll need it.

“Who is this? One of the lawyers who offered me the deal back then?”

“I met him at the lawyers’ offices.” Temporizing. “Thank you for doing this. I know they just would have blown me off.”

Blown me off? Krys again.

She sat back as the drink was wafted onto a napkin before her.

“I can’t believe you got somewhere. Cheers.” She lifted the glass. Their rims clicked. She seemed excited and happy.

“It wasn’t easy. They blew me off too on the first visit. So I came back and hung around the floor, watched who came and went.”

“Just like a detective. Like that young lady friend of yours you say isn’t a serious girlfriend. Tamara, was it?”

“Temple.”

“Odd name for a girl.” She sipped again, and sighed. “But they’re doing that these days.”

“It suits her.”

“That’s just because you’re used to it. Because you like her. A lot. Don’t try to duck that. A mother knows. Maybe you can bring her up here for next Christmas.”

“Maybe. Mother—”

“I thought we’d gotten past that formal stuff. Krys doesn’t even call me ‘aunt’ anymore. In fact, we were out shopping and someone mistook us for sisters. Can you imagine?”

“Yeah. You look … really great, Mom. Someone would probably mistake us for siblings too.”

“I’d be honored to have such a handsome brother. Your uncles have all let beer bellies have their way with them. Don’t you do that.”

“No chance. Uh, Mom, this person we’re going to meet, he didn’t know anything about what the lawyers arranged.”

“You mean he was taken in the way I was?”

“Well, he was pretty young back then too. That’s how I connected to him; he had no idea that they’d offered you the two-flat as a bribe to keep me and you out of the family. He was pretty shocked. And angry.”