Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

The Wrath of Carmen

The house was empty.

Molina slapped her car keys onto the high counter that divided kitchen from living room.

When had Mariah’s schedule gotten tighter, busier, more demanding than hers?

Band practice. Soccer practice. Cheerleader practice. (Boys still dominated basketball, but there was a fledgling girls’ team. Not for Mariah. Too short. Hence, a cheerleader.)

The striped cats, Tabitha and Catarina, came twining around her ankles, mewing, plaintive. They were suffering from Home Alone syndrome too.

Carmen unloaded a couple of cans of cat shish kebob or whatever onto some saucers and put them on the floor. The cats settled down to eat, feet neatly tucked.

That reminded Carmen to kick off her leather loafers, murder in this hot weather, and lift her legs one by one to peel off the knee-highs she wore with them. Sure, Temple Barr could clatter around bare legged on her perky mules or whimsical high-heeled sandals. She was a PR woman in the entertainment industry. Dignity was not a job requirement. Carmen padded barefoot on the cool laminate floor to the fridge to extract a Dos Equis. Kid not home; mom could chill out. As much as mom could ever chill out.

Female homicide lieutenants did not ever want to look bright and breezy. Carmen shook her head. This was a tourist town where the street cops wore summer uniforms of beige Bermuda shorts, but casual was not an option for her.

And that was okay. She wasn’t a casual kind of person. Casual doesn’t cut it working your way up on the force, being a single mother. Aaaiiy!

She sat heavily on the off-beige sofa covered in a wide-woven jute fabric. Fairly cool. The shoes and socks had left welts on her arches and ankles. So had the ankle holster she’d taken off first.

She’d left her guns on top of the eating bar. Mariah wasn’t here. Cats don’t have opposable thumbs to handle firearms. She’d stow them in the bedroom gun safe after she’d cooled off with half a beer.

Condensation dimpled the brown bottle. Dew for the drinking woman. The beer tasted effervescent and stinging.

So. Mariah was off social butterflying. Maybe Larry was off. Carmen felt like some adult company. Tabitha ratcheted up the side of the couch to one arm, then blinked solemn yellow eyes at her. Me? Snag upholstery?

Cats were born hostile witnesses. Mum to the max.

Max.

Carmen made a face. Her deal with Temple Barr was going south before the ink was barely dry. That swing-style death at the New Millennium had Max Kinsella’s imprint all over it. The only oddity was that it wasn’t Kinsella himself throttled and hung out to dry.

Maybe someone else felt the same way as she did, and had missed his or her mark. Carmen stretched her bare toes into the only sand available to her . . . the sandy beige nubbles of cheap wall-to-wall carpeting.

Maybe the place could use some updating, but with Mariah’s college tuition looming . . .

Carmen sipped beer, then stowed the bottle on a terra cotta coaster on her coffee table. Now that she’d wound down a little, she was aware of a tiny distant sound.

Outside? Some neighborhood low-rider twenty blocks over?

And there was a smell.

She eyed the cats, the usual source of unlikely smells. They had moved away from their half-demolished dishes to tongue-scrape their whiskers, faces, and feet clean.

Good children with bright shining faces.

The distant insectlike buzz of semi-music was putting her to sleep. Like she didn’t lose a lot of it in the night. And the scent. Heavy, come to think of it. Sweet. The way death was sometimes, in the earliest stages, before the sour . . .

Molina shot to her feet, bare toes digging in so she could charge in any direction. She eyed the black, dead bug–like silhouettes of her guns on the pale kitchen countertop.

She ran to grab them, secured one in each pocket of the hot polyester-blend blazer she’d still kept on. In this climate, linen and cotton wrinkled like your grandfather’s forehead from sitting at desks and in cars.

The cats leaped onto the abandoned sofa, claiming her vacant spot. They always wanted to be where you were, where you had been.

Maybe somebody else did too.

Her cell phone was on the coffee table. It wasn’t like her to strew her belongings around, but the day had been hot and Mariah was gone again, and maybe she’d felt a false sense of solitude and security in her own home.

A homicide lieutenant should know better.

She snatched up the phone, pressed it on, hit . . . Larry’s number. Didn’t hit TALK.

She was carrying a 9-millimeter Glock and the Colt Pocket Lite. If she couldn’t handle vague buzz and sniff without backup, she might as well use her shield for a beer coaster.

The house was older than she was. Laid out like a thick-waisted hourglass. Kitchen, dining, and living areas off the attached garage; long narrow hall with bedrooms and bath leading off that.

Modest house. Modest neighborhood. Fairly safe unless the Hispanic gangs were at it on your front doorstep, which they usually knew better to avoid in her case.

And so she walked into her own hall with the 9 millimeter cupped in a two-handed grip, elbows braced, body sideways.

Mariah could have left her bedroom stereo on. The sound was still soft, but louder here. A Latino station celebrating la vida loca in ways Ricky Martin had never thought of.

The odor hit her as sharply as vomit the minute she crossed into the hall’s eternal shadow. Houses in Las Vegas demanded interior darkness. Cool. Shelter from the sun.

She looked down, took a moment to focus.

She stepped in the smell, and made it sharper. Sweet.

Carmen bent to touch the dark red ovals that dotted the bland hall carpet.

Velvety. Thick. Saturated with scent.

Rose petals. Crushed to release scent. Each a separate blot on the carpet, like gouts of blood.

Sweet. Sick.

She followed the trail, knowing this was intended, her stomach twisted with anxiety. Mariah’s room on the right. Was that where the muffled music was coming from?

Call in? Call backup? Call Morrie? Call Larry?

Someone had been playing games with her for weeks. Leaving things in the house, announcing a bold come-and-go presence. At first, she’d doubted her own senses.

Not anymore.

Oh, God! And if Mariah wasn’t out as announced? Wasn’t doing teenage overtime on the social circuit? If she was still here, in that room where the rose petals led and the music was just a shadow of itself . . .

She came almost abreast of the door. Ajar. And the radio sound. Louder. And the rose petals, crossing the threshold.

The door banged against the wall, askew on its hinges. Her semiautomatic’s sleek, sweeping muzzle had the whole room covered.

A life-size poster of Johnny Depp as a pirate had nearly bought it until she recognized another familiar media face in the male photograph on the opposite wall. Had looked like a long-haired druggie at first flash. That beard sure begged for a 9-millimeter shave.

She had to wade through teenage effluvia, kicking away several stuffed animals, to reach the closet and rip that door open.

Just more girly clutter on the floor and unmoving ranks of clothes old and new. She used the gun muzzle to sweep the hangers back, her bare foot to feel and kick the clutter off the floor.

Nothing there. No one.

Back to the wall, backed up by Johnny “Pirates of the Caribbean” Depp. Big help. She needed to re-enter the hall, but someone might have followed her down, or preceded her down. Be waiting for her now. Or have been waiting for her all along.

The bathroom. Shower curtain. Oh, great, Janet Leigh at the Bates Motel time. But too small to conceal much. Then, her own bedroom.

In the hall, she pointed the Glock left, then right. Someone might have been lurking in her bedroom and returned to the living room while she investigated Mariah’s room. The rose petal trail smelled like a trap. There were still rose petals at her feet and they led into her bedroom.

If she goes on toward it, she bottles herself up in an architectural cul-de-sac. Just how well does Whoever know her house? Very well indeed. The music must be coming from the radio alarm clock in her bedroom.

No wonder it sounds so tinny. They never put decent sound systems into those cheap dual-function things.

At least Mariah is out, and safe at . . . someone’s house. Try to keep track of a kid nowadays. Try to remember the kind of September— this is May! Concentrate.

Carmen eyes the hall back where she came from. The perp could be out there, escaping. Or poised to bottle her in. Or . . . not.

She edges along, back to the wall, ready to move, or fire, in either direction.

What if this is just the misguided prank of some besmitten teenage boy, trying to get Mariah’s attention? Carmen overreacts, and disaster.

But she’s the one who’s had strange vintage velvet gowns showing up in her closet. Alien gift boxes left on her bed. She’s the one being stalked.

Carmen nears the door to her own bedroom. That door is ajar.

It always is. This is a two-female, two-cat household. The cats bounce between her bedroom and Mariah’s every night. Several times every night. And their litter box is in the bathroom under the sink with its four chrome legs circa the fifties.

Normal is open doors.

Abnormal is someone lurking behind them. Someone more solid than a poster. No posters in her bedroom. She spots a male figure . . . it’s surrender or shoot.

Her own house has come to this. Ticks her off. She adjusts her hands on the metal grip, the trigger guard. She’s got her forefinger resting on the guard, not the trigger. She moves it slowly and carefully to the trigger itself. Her palms are damp. They just stick to the warming metal better.

Her grip is sure.

She kicks her own bedroom door open and backs into it fast, so the door can’t rebound, hiding half the room.

Everything is so damn familiar. So damn static. But this room has a closet. And a gun safe in that closet.

There are a couple more guns in there. The standard issue .38 she got on her first patrol job in L.A. Another .38 she accidentally took during her flight from L.A. when she was pregnant with Mariah. Rafi Nadir’s, with his fingerprints all over it, like they were all over her past. How do you return an accidentally abstracted police department issue gun to an ex-lover you never want to see again? You don’t.

He’d never see the daughter he’d tricked her into bearing, he’d never see his gun again. Bastard.

She’s mad now. A match for anything.

She takes down the room foot by foot, piece by piece. Her own sanctuary, a crime scene.

After twenty sweaty minutes, she has nothing.

The gun safe is secure. Locked. The alien blue velvet dress still hangs among the other vintage velvet gowns for her secret off-duty role as Carmen, just Carmen, the blues singer.

She sits on the bed, her bed, holding the gun, her gun.

No one is here. She’d barged back out into the main rooms, shocked the cats, looked behind and under and over and into every nook and cranny. Nothing.

The bedside alarm clock radio drones on.

She can’t be sure she forgot to turn it off this morning.

There’ve been a lot of mornings like that lately, tainted by serial worry. About her job, her daughter, her stalker.

Then the alarm goes off—buzzing, buzzing—on her bedside table.

She slams the button down. And listens.

The radio, the damn radio is still playing.

From under her pillow.

She tosses the pillow aside like a lightweight Hollywood rock.

Something remains.

A vintage transistor radio.

A flat box, like nylon stockings used to come in. With a note.

After she dons latex gloves, she teases the box open with the muzzle of the gun at arm’s length. As if that would do any good against an explosive device. Just red tissue paper. She doesn’t really expect a literal explosive device. Her stalker is too subtle for that.

She expects an explosive message.

She gets it when she eases the enclosed gift card out of its Barbie-size white envelope. The note reads, “This is what you should have been wearing for a midnight rendezvous in the Secrets’ parking lot.”

The box holds one of those sleazy sub-Frederick’s of Hollywood outfits: black garters and red satin and white lace and underwire bra and filmy chiffon.

Only one person knows about Secrets’ parking lot. She puts the safety on the Glock but not her emotion, which is sheer fury. Max Kinsella with his sick cat-and-mouse games has invaded her home, her privacy, and threatened her child.

This is war.