Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Who Do You Trust?

Lieutenant Molina was good to go: she wore her spring khaki pantsuit and her Glock 9 millimeter in a paddle holster at her right rear hip. Her feet were pushed into tan suede loafers that didn’t make any insecure male officers or detectives suspect she might be taller than them by more than a smidge.

She carried several pair of latex gloves and one colorless lip gloss in one side jacket pocket, her shield and sunglasses in the other.

And she was sitting on the arm of the living room couch, tapping her loafer sole on the carpet because America’s almost ’Tween Idol, Miss Mariah Molina—just thirteen and out to prove that age was justifiably unlucky for parents everywhere—was still lost in the jungle of electric cords and tubes, jars and bottles the bathroom countertop had become.

“Hurry it up, chica!” Carmen called, checking her leather-banded wristwatch. “We’ll both be late.”

“Just a minute! I only have to do one more thing.”

Carmen shook her head. From tomboy to teen in one crazy dangerous stint of reality TV. Mariah appeared in the living room archway, flushed and still chasing her sequined flipflops down the hall to push her feet fully into them.

The Teen Idol hairdresser had chopped Mariah’s dark basic bob into a ragged, flipped-up look that was surprisingly appealing except for chunks of highlighted blond here and there.

Try to keep a Latina from going blond nowadays! Even African-American women had jumped on the blond bandwagon. Asians too. Soon the only natural brunet left on the planet would be Midnight Louie, Temple Barr’s pesky black tomcat.

“Look okay?” Mariah ran to the small oval living room mirror for further verification. She eyed only her lightly made-up face (that battle was a goner), not the blue-and-green plaid of her Our Lady of Guadalupe uniform.

Manly men could be a pain, but girly girls were catching up to them fast.

“Terrific,” Carmen said, standing. “Now, let’s roll.”

Mariah grabbed her fully loaded backpack. At least her grades were pretty good. But Carmen missed the long, glossy brunet braid down her back, so ready to be tweaked on their way out to school and work in the mornings.

Tweaks were as out of date in maturing modern mother-daughter relationships as braids. Shoot.

Molina hit her office in the Crimes Against Persons unit feeling more naked that morning than packing a Glock should permit.

She’d come out of the closet a couple weeks back at the Blue Dahlia restaurant and cabaret. Mariah, Temple Barr, and one of Carmen’s colleagues from work had met her occasional alter ego for the first time: torch singer Carmen, a continuing attraction in her vintage velvet gowns that matched her vintage velvet contralto voice.

“Morning, Lieutenant,” a colleague greeted her.

No worry. It was just Detective Morrie Alch. He didn’t know she had a closet to come out of. His genially furrowed face under its black and silver spray of thick hair reminded her of a faithful old Scottish terrier.

“Morning. What we got?”

“Trouble at the New Millennium.”

“Who died?”

“We don’t know yet, but he was found twisting in the air-conditioning above the fancy installation stuff they were putting in for that upcoming Russian exhibit. Kinda like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Hanging from a couple of bungee cords. Cirque du Soleil gone homicidal.”

“Murder, then? Or accident?”

“Hard to tell. Was wearing this black spandex cat suit, but his face, get this, was painted white.”

“Classic clown stuff. Accident, murder, or suicide?”

“Triple play. You got it, Lieutenant. Place is a mess. Workmen and hotel execs all over it. Not to mention T. B. and shady security. Su and I are up for it. Are we a go?”

“Sure. If it’s odd, you’re the perfect odd couple to handle it.”

Morrie made a face not unlike Mariah’s when reacting to a really stupid, horribly embarrassing suggestion from her moth-er.

Detective Merry Su was a pit bull-shih tzu cross. Tiny and ultra competent. Relentlessly cute and just plain relentless. A smaller, Asian edition of Temple Barr, PR woman to clients with a bent for providing the scene of the crime for murder.

Speaking of which . . . T. B. “Temple Barr—?”

“She sure looked different, but real cute, at that Teen Idol gig.” Alch’s chuckle was both paternal and, to Molina, annoying. “She’s just like my daughter used to be . . . before she grew up and found out she’d become a wife and mother: you’d never know what they’d be up to.”

“I’m not looking for domestic reminiscences, Morrie.”

He shrugged. “Dispatcher gave me her name. Seems she’s handling PR for this Russian thing at the New Millennium.”

He actually sounded happy about that.

Molina hit the paperwork on her desk, her khaki blazer hung on her chair back, her short-sleeved khaki-and-white cotton blouse sticking to her shoulder blades despite the air-conditioning.

The paddle holster was in a drawer and her pen was tapping paper. What the heck was Temple Barr up to her hooker-high heels in now?

A set of knuckles brushed her door ajar. Dirty Larry was peering puckishly around it. He could afford to be puckish around the office. His street role as an undercover narc had him playing down and dirty. 24/7. Hence the nickname.

Molina regarded Larry with a twinge of regret. She’d let him bulldoze his way into her private life. She wasn’t sure she knew his motive, although he’d certainly taken his opportunity. Why? A woman doesn’t work her way up in a police department as an officer on a career track without questioning everything, especially herself.

Larry led with a question. “Kid come down off of Teen Idoldom?”

“Somewhat. They never get their feet fully on the ground at this age.”

“Me neither.” Larry sidled in. “So. You still having second thoughts?”

“About what?”

“Your big ‘reveal’ at the Blue Dahlia.”

“Reveal. I loathe that reality TV word! It’s so bogus.”

“Like you aren’t? Well, aren’t you?”

Larry had taken the single plastic chair in front of her desk. He didn’t sit so much as lounge. Molina suspected he had a spine like a Slinky.

She didn’t really trust him, but something about him was oddly winning. No doubt that served him well when he was risking his neck among the Dangerous and the Depraved.

His close-cut hair still blared “dirty blond.” He seemed the eternal hard-bitten kid you’d glimpse from railroad yards as the train pulled away from the worst neighborhoods in town. Any town. His face would haunt you like a Depression-era photograph until you saw a blurred green ribbon of bushes and trees beyond the moving window, not hovels and kids with nothing better to do than stare at themselves in passing train windows.

“I sense regret.” Larry picked a square notepad block off her desk to play with.

“You’re a narc. Regret is the sludge in which drugs grow.”

“Stay a narc long enough, you can’t come in out of the dark.”

“So, how’s accident reconstruction treating you?”

Larry came down from his dangerous game by taking on innocuous assignments for a while.

“Great. Instead of blood-spatter patterns like the crime techs fixate on, I’ve got shattered-glass patterns. Instead of crack houses, I get to go to toney nightclubs like the Blue Dahlia in my off hours.”

“Toney? Please.”

“I get to see and hear ‘Blue Velvet.’ ” His smile was suddenly boyish, radiant. The passing train was a glittering, rattling string of diamond-mirror glass shattering the night.

Molina frowned. The song was one of her best. But the matching vintage gown, à la Topsy, had “just growed” in her closet, a single unsuspected moonflower in a midnight meadow. Or something sinister, like mold. Midnight blue mold. She didn’t remember buying it.

Everything was coming at her so fast, the Cannonball Express. Her daughter blossoming into dangerously empowering girlyhood. Herself revealed. Part professional huntress. Part . . . moonlighting torch singer.

“Any luck on that off-time assignment I mentioned?”

Larry pulled a narrow notebook from his linen blazer pocket.

“You sure are one paranoid lady, but I suppose it goes with the job. First a rogue L.A. cop, then this. You’ve sure got me guessing.” He quirked her his crooked grin, but his eyes were suddenly hotter than she liked to see on the job. Who was using whom here was still not settled, but it was unsettling.

“Get on with it,” she said.

Larry settled even lower on his Slinky spine in the unfriendly plastic visitors chair, blue-jeaned legs crossed over his lean thighs. Undercover narcs tended to be super-casual, but he was taking a holiday from the drug wars in the Traffic Department for a while. So he was handy for her “black projects,” like keeping her private life, such as it wasn’t, private.

“This is hit and miss, you understand,” Larry said. “When I have a moment. Gotta say this is not a shit assignment: nice neighborhoods, low crime, and the best tail I’ve tailed in my career.”

“Save the sexist chitchat for your brother apes on the force.”

“You are way too easy to rile, you know that?” He grinned again. “I just meant it was nice to do a wholesome bit of tailing for a change. Not very interesting . . . subject goes from home base to major Strip hotels; the New Millennium lately. Um, detour to a couple of real funky little joints on semi-shady blocks across from the worst section of Charleston Avenue.”

“Really.” Molina sat up to take notice.

“Yeah. By the Blue Mermaid Motel. Names of . . . Leopard Alley, the Bee’s Knees, and, uh, a real kinky one, the Indigo Albino.”

“Sounds like a list of sleazy clubs.”

Larry leaned forward, forearms braced on knees. “Vintage shops,” he whispered. “I even spotted a bong in one and an opium ring in another.”

“An opium ring? What’s that?”

He reached into his baggy jacket pocket again. Linen was like that, shapeless and prone to wrinkle. Molina hated it. For her own wardrobe. On guys it looked good: fashionable but not like they cared that much.

He pulled out a slender silver object, a tiny curved, sterling pipe, with a ring band just under the etched bowl.

“I got you it. Can’t say I never gave you a ring.”

“How exquisite.” Molina turned the lightweight object in her fingers. It might make a good pendant.

“Ladies used ’em back when a little naughty drug use was a fashion accessory, kind of like cocaine spoons today. The twenties, I’d guess.”

“I’ll actually keep this,” she told him. He raised his almost invisible flaxen eyebrows. “History of crime artifact.”

But she was . . . what? Taken aback. Pleased? Larry had not only done her off-shift tailing bidding gratis, but had thought to bring her a pretty neat souvenir.

“I’ll have to visit those vintage dives someday.” She frowned. Her supply of vintage velvet gowns wasn’t shrinking, but expanding. Maybe she had a magic closet. Yeah.

“You ever want a guide to the dark side of trendiness,” he said, “I’m your man.” His eyes glittered at the unsaid implications of his phrase.

Molina tried the ring on her right third finger. It would glitter if she wore it at the mike at the Blue Dahlia. She seldom wore jewelry, but this was exotic and just slightly sinister. She discovered she liked the exotic and just slightly sinister.

“Thanks,” she told Larry. “Anything else?”

He shuffled through the notebook. “A couple of Strip shopping expeditions with the middle-aged chick who’s staying with her.”

“Oh, really? You know who?”

Larry gave her a rebuking look. “Talked to the landlady. “Aunt from New York City. Same type, just more miles on her. This is interesting. Aldo Fontana seems to have come and go privileges at the Circle Ritz these days. That black Viper of his is a regular in the parking lot.”

“Oh, the Fontanas are fans of our subject from way back.”

“This is Aldo, solo. And he seems like a real fan of the aunt, who must be fifteen years older than him, at least. Though she hasn’t got a bad tail either.”

Molina was thinking too hard to object to his terminology.

“So, she has an aunt in town who’s hooked up with the Fontana Brothers? Odd. Where do they go, Auntie and Aldo?”

“Everywhere hot, loud, and expensive. We could do a double tail some night.”

“I don’t like heat, noise, and throwing money around.”

“Anything for a collar,” he said.

“Anything more on the real object of this investigation?”

“Temple Barr? Naw. Cruises by the Stuart Weitzman store in the Caesar’s shopping arcade at every opportunity. Um, visited one of those older gated communities not quite near Henderson. Stopped by a veterinarian’s on the way home for some suspicious-sized bags of something called Free-to-Be-Feline. Do you think it could be fertilizer?”

“If cat leavings are volatile, yes. Never mind. Just leave me the list.”

“What’re you looking for?”

“Something suspicious, but she’s obviously just been a diversion for you during your off hours.”

“Not much. Now tailing you—”

Molina felt her right hand clench under the bizarre accessory of the opium ring. She’d been some places lately she wouldn’t want anyone to know she’d gone.

“Forget it. You’re off this detail. Temple Barr is the same simple, shallow girl I always suspected her to be.”

“What did you expect to get on her?” he asked, handing the notebook over her desk.

Max Kinsella, she answered herself. She had expected to find his fingerprints all over her and her life. Why wasn’t he there anymore? Maybe he had other interests now.

Bastard! But weren’t they all, given half a chance?

Molina thought about the men in her life: past, present, and future tense. Very tense. Rafi Nadir. Haunting. Unsuspecting parent and patriarch. Failed policeman. Successful ghost and potential blackmailer. Dirty Larry. New kid on the block. Brassy, pushy, sexy, suspect. Max Kinsella. Mortal enemy. Mysterious. Taunting. Murderous?

She didn’t trust one of them. Except Morrie, who was too decent to count on for the ethical pinch she was in.

Carmen began to get an idea of what her blooming adolescent daughter was up against.

Larry left, both pleased with his report and puzzled by her behavior, her goals.

She regarded the opium ring. She really liked this little toy, and his thoughtfulness in buying it for her. Nobody had bought anything for her for a long time. Nobody had ever bought her anything interesting and beautiful. Maybe there was more depth to Larry than street smarts. Maybe this . . . bribe, was supposed to make her think so. Turn her into a silly woman believing a man, believing in a man like Max Kinsella, as Temple Barr did.

Not her. Not Carmen Molina.

Not ever.