Cat In A Topaz Tango

Duty Call

Thanks to modern conveniences, a ringing cell phone had interrupted opera audiences, churchgoers, classrooms, and bedroom intimacies.

“Damn, I should have turned that thing off,” Temple complained. At least she had never programmed some dopey ringtone, like the “William Tell Overture,” theme song of the Lone Ranger.

“It’s the turnoff,” Matt pointed out as he watched his half-dressed fiancée scramble barefoot across her wooden parquet bedroom floor to the dresser. Coming home to Temple after being in the noisy restaurant with Molina was a nice contrast. He’d promised to keep Molina’s problem quiet, even though the restored condition of Max’s house was troubling.

Still, Matt could lie back virtuously, knowing he’d thought to turn off his cell phone. Of course, almost nobody called him. Temple’s PR job required her being eternally reachable, like a doctor, in case things went wrong. Matt checked his watch: 10:30 P.M. He had to leave for work in an hour, tops.

“Yes?” Temple was saying, looking puzzled. “Gone? Surely you can’t think Crawford—Doing? Uh—” She rolled her eyes at Matt. “Nothing. Now. Yeah. Right away. I hope it turns out to be a false alarm.”

She snapped the tiny slave driver shut. “Molina’s kid is missing.”

Matt sat up, collecting clothes. “Mariah? No! How long?”

“This evening sometime. Wasn’t at the other kid’s house where she was supposed to be.”

“What have you got to do with this? You and Molina get along like cobra and mongoose.”

“Molina wants to talk to Crawford Buchanan ASAP and needs someone who can find the vermin.”

“Awful Crawford, the DJ-publicist guy?”

“Yeah, your so-not-serious competition for Las Vegas listeners.” Temple was pulling on her knit jogging outfit. “I need to check his show times, and maybe check in with his much-abused insignificant other. Molina said something about the Internet and Mariah and the Crawf’s juvenile delinquent stepdaughter, Quincey, being online together. She didn’t make a lot of sense for Molina, so I’m guessing the kid is in trouble. I sorta bonded with Mariah at the Teen Queen reality TV house. I’d hop to it for Mariah before I’d toss her mother a stale fortune cookie.”

“I know that, next to Molina, he’s one of your least favorite people, so what does Crawford Buchanan have to do with Mariah?”

“He was pretending to cover that Teen Queen reality TV show she was competing on.”

“Molina roped you into going undercover on that to protect Mariah and you did a great job. Why does she need you so urgently now? That show is old news.”

“Maybe not,” Temple said. “She said Zoe Chloe Ozone had damn well get her ass in gear and over to her place. You know where it is, Oh Swami of the Desert Nighttime Airwaves? I’ve never seen her house and she didn’t give me a clue.”

“Yeah. It’s near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. You’ve been at the church, at least. To mass. With me.” He flashed her a remembering grin. “Whoever thought then we’d be thinking of getting married someday?” Actually, he had. “May I add OLG to the possible site list?”

Temple paused in jamming her bare feet into a pair of low platform slides. He could tell she really wanted to stay and finish what they’d started.

“Yeah. Good idea. I guess we should thank Molina for that one.” She took a breath. “I know how I’d feel if Louie was missing, so I imagine a kid must be triple that. “

“At least. There are so many predators nowadays.”

“Why the Crawf?” she fussed. “Oh, well, mine not to question why. Mine to round up the miserable skunk and bring him to—” She snatched the address Matt had just written on a note pad on one bedside table. “Chez Molina, of all places.”

“Molina’s opening her home to creeps like Buchanan now? I hope it’s not serious,” he said, sounding exactly that.

“Molina’s not usually the panicky type.”

“Molina hasn’t been too usual lately,” Matt noted.

“Aha! You get that feeling too? I can see I’ll have to interrogate you further after we do our respective jobs tonight. Wanna bet I’ll be ringing your doorbell upstairs around 3:00 A.M. demanding answers?”

“I’ll be breathlessly awaiting any and all of your demands,” Matt promised with a warm glance.

“Darn right,” she said. “Lock my door when you leave.”

Temple tuned in the Crawf’s local twenty-four-hour talk radio station as soon as she whipped her red Miata out of the Circle Ritz parking lot. Las Vegas was just getting cooking at 10:30 at night, rather like her and Matt.

Somewhere far down on her cell phone call list she had the number of Buchanan’s long-suffering girlfriend, Merle. First she’d try the station. Luckily, this was Las Vegas and someone would cover the switchboard 24/7.

“Hi,” she said as the phone was answered. “This is Temple Barr. I need to reach Crawford Buchanan—”

“This is not the public call-in line.”

Temple could hear the blur of the radio show broadcasting in the background.

“I know that. First off, I’m not the public,” she said. “I’m Temple Barr, local PR rep for the Crystal Phoenix, now acting for Lieutenant Molina of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, aka the LVMPD. She urgently needs to contact Crawford Buchanan. Since I know the media in this city—”

There was a pause. Then the receptionist’s voice blathered excitedly.

“Oh,” Temple finally got in. “You read about my aunt’s wedding at the Crystal Phoenix. Yes, it was ‘some posh do’ . . . yes, the Fontana brothers are the most eligible bachelors in town . . . ah, yes, the remaining eight are still ‘available.’ I’m sure something could be arranged if I can get Buchanan’s contact number ASAP. Okay. I’ll hang tight.”

Temple set the shut phone on the car’s central console, shrugging.

It appeared the Fontana brothers were a far more potent force in Las Vegas than a homicide lieutenant. Luckily, Temple was related to them by marriage now. Surely she could con one to help out a good cause by escorting a local lady for an evening. Maybe Ralph, who was girlfriendless at the moment, for rather sad reasons involving the chicken ranch murder case they’d all been roped into recently. If a child’s ingratitude was sharper than a serpent’s tooth a girlfriend gone bad ranked right up there too.

Temple’s cell phone rang seven minutes later. She whipped the steering wheel abruptly right into an empty strip center parking lot. She didn’t dare talk to Crawford Buchanan while driving. He made her resort to wild hand gestures at the drop of a consonant.

“You rang, T. B.?” The smarmy radio baritone oozed into her left ear like cold cod liver oil.

Temple again thanked her fates that he’d never learned her middle name was her aunt Kit’s given name, and even she never used it: Ursula. That would make Temple’s initials T. U. B. and Awful Crawford Buchanan would never let her hear the end of that!

“Right here, CB,” she shot back.

“And where is that this time of night, hmm?”

The next thing he’d be asking was what she was wearing. Kevlar!

“In front of a Dunkin’ Donuts store, en route to where you’ll be heading.”

“We’re having a rendezvous?”

“Not my idea. Lieutenant C. R. Molina wants to see you pronto, at her house.” She gave the address.

“Euw. Not my party hearty part of town.”

“Yeah, you’re so uptown. I wouldn’t dis the neighborhood or irritate Molina in any way. Her teen daughter is missing and she thinks you know something about it.”

“Me?” The oily baritone had risen to a squeak. Inside every self-aggrandizing social barracuda is a field mouse.

“You.”

“Is this about that reality TV Teen Queen show?”

“I don’t know. Mariah did compete in that.”

“I remember her. The Ugly Betty chub who belted out that song from Wicked.”

“You’ll get a belt from Molina if you refer to her kid like that. And you’re just jealous that your stepdaughter, Quincey, didn’t even get on that show. What’s Quincey doing now, anyway?”

“She’s got a waitress job and is a ring girl at the local fights.”

“What about college?”

“Her mother goes on about that, but she might as well use her looks while she’s got ’em.”

“She’s what, seventeen, and you think her ‘looks’ are fading?”

“Face it. The race today is to the super young. There are great opportunities out there for smart kids with ambition. Even Molina, Jr. The younger the better.”

“You sound like a pedophile.”

“Me? I’m just a promoter.”

“Same difference, sometimes, given the public crashes of all the pop tarts recently. See you at the lieutenant’s house.”

Temple had to end the conversation to consult the directions to Molina’s house and get on the road again. Too freaking bad.

She also had to weave through dark residential streets, vaguely recognizing the modest bungalows that surrounded Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.

Squinting at curbside numbers in the dark, she finally slid the Miata to a stop in front of a house with three cars already parked there, two in the driveway and one in the street, none of them marked police cruisers.

A boxy orange Hummer H3 pulled up behind her. Temple expected the Beach Boys or Leo DiCaprio and posse to pour out of it, but Crawford Buchanan did instead.

“Our cars really clash,” he noted, smoothing back his gelled black-and-silver hair as he eyed her red Miata.

“Thank goodness.”

“Come on, be a pal.” He took her arm, which she jerked away, as they went up the front walk. “You don’t want to make me look bad in front of the fuzz, do you?”

Temple was more concerned about her first visit to the Molina home than Crawford’s state of comfort.

Matt had been here more than once, she knew. She’d wondered if Molina was as utterly uninterested in men—in Matt—as it appeared. A police lieutenant could afford something more suburban, Temple was sure. Maybe the location was all for Mariah’s nearby Catholic school.

Catholics were consistent in their faith and Temple admired that, not that a fallen-away Unitarian would or could convert to a high-maintenance church, whatever the denomination. She mentally slapped herself for relating everything these days to her relationship with Matt.

Better look and think sharp. This was a serious situation, even if she had arrived with the terminally unserious Crawford Buchanan. At least she had stood and delivered him as requested. Molina had to respect that.

Well, no, she didn’t.

Morrie Alch opened the door when she knocked. Ringing the bell might have startled the already stressed-out residents. His thick, steel-gray hair looked grayer and so did his face.

“Come in,” he said. “This Buchanan?”

The rat in question answered for itself. “Crawford Buchanan, bro, main man about town. You may have heard my On-the-Go radio spots. Everything hip that’s happenin’.”

Morrie looked at Temple. “Molina wants to see you down the hall, kid’s room, right away. “You come talk to me, Mr. Hipster.”

“Everybody calls me ‘Crawford.’ ”

Alch made a face, then nodded Temple down the hall.

“Now, Crawford, let’s say we have a little talk,” Alch said as he gestured the Crawf to a furniture barn sofa occupied by the bony, dirty blond-haired guy Temple had seen with Molina at the teen house. He looked sexy-tough in a military or reform-school way, she couldn’t decide which. Is this what Molina was seeing these days? Huh. He was no Matt or Max.

Meanwhile, Alch was whispering sour nothings into her ear. “It’s too early to tell if Mariah just stayed late at the mall, but this is serious stuff we’ve found on her computer.”

“Didn’t Molina monitor—?”

“You bet, but she’s been real sick lately, and, uh, distracted.”

Temple let her face show shock. They didn’t call Molina the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD because she took sick days.

“No kidding.’ Alch stopped in the hall to address the gravity of the situation. “Real sick. This is coming at a rotten time. Bear that in mind and pretend you’re the little drummer girl, ready to march where needed.”

“So that’s why she didn’t show up at the Crystal Phoenix dinner a few weeks ago, other than my crime-solving skills getting public applause.”

“I think you won that one. Now, she needs you.”

“Me. Again? Aw, shoot, Morrie, my life’s a lot more complicated now.”

“You have a significant other missing in action?” He sounded vaguely parentally accusing.

He meant, Mariah, of course. A child.

Still, his words slid a hot knife of regret into her gut. Did she have a former significant other missing in action? Only recently an ex. Funny that the recent past could feel so raw. Max, even missing, could take care of himself, if he wasn’t dead. Not knowing why or where he had vanished would always haunt her but she would never regret having opened herself to Matt’s love.

Temple nodded at Alch. Now was no time to ramp up the rancor between her and Molina. Mariah was a naïve kid, and her mother must be kicking herself for being sick just when it was most damaging.

Or had Mariah taken advantage of her mother being sick? Kids today could be scary in their media-encouraged ambitions.