Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 12

Clothes Call

Molina met Alch in the morgue's smallish lobby, looking sheepish.

"I was checking out the victim's clothing."

"I'll get the report in a couple of days." She turned to leave.

The smell of the autopsy room. however well masked, lingered like a hidden corpse.

"I think you should look at them." Alch still sounded apologetic, but that would be for dissection her at the dissection table.

Molina raised her eyebrows.

He shrugged before he spoke again. "Maybe l should say . . .smell them."

*******************

"I'm not really in the best condition for smelling the evidence, Morey," Molina told him in the elevator on the way up.

He was standing in the elevator's opposite comer, leaning against the wall, as if getting a load off his feet rather than a reek out of his nostrils was the real reason for the distance.

His mustache twitched. "I know. But this smell you can't miss. Only . . . I can't explain it."

The lab was only a few doors away from the elevator, and a technician, who had put away the brown paper bags while Alch was gone, cheerfully produced them again.

Molina, hands enclosed in latex gloves, unfolded them gingerly. With the damage to the body occurring on the neck and throat, the clothing was likely to bear little damage from the crime.

She was glad that Alch had dragged her up here, after all. There was something odd about the clothes--a Clark skirt, a blouse, a matching jacket. Navy blue, except for the blouse, which was a strange, not-silk slippery fabric. Polyester. This lady was definitely not upscale.

"She had no purse. No ID" Molina was repeating what they already knew. "Nothing in that line's turned up?"

Alch shook his head. "We checked the trash containers in a mile radius; got the trash pickup schedule. Nothing."

"Someone didn't want us to find out who she was, but he sure didn't mind us finding her."

"Do you see what l mean about the smell?"

"Yeah. Oh, yeah." Molina's head reared back as the unfolded skirt gave off an odor as strong as a slap in the face. "God, I hate that stuff."

Alch nodded glumly. "Get it often enough in the squad cars. That's why l was so happy I'd made detective. Never have to smell that strawberry shit again."

"Are you sure it's just strawberry? This is too noxious to be just a little strawberry."

"You got it, Lieutenant. It's super-amplified strawberry, that's what it is. Strawberry to die from. They always use it in those car refresher thingies that hang from the dashboard. It's enough to make a guy puke."

She nodded. "Strong stuff, I always thought it was worse than whatever it was supposed to cover up."

"So why's it so strong on the victim's clothes?"

Molina considered this very good question. "They also use it in gas stations' ladies' rooms."

"No kidding! Honest, I didn't know that."

"What do they use in gas stations' men's rooms, then?"

Alch thought. "Uh, nothing. Lieutenant."

Molina restrained herself from comment. "So she was in a gas station ladies' room recently?

Makes no sense, but--"

"Check the gas stations in the neighborhood for strawberry air freshener. And their trash bins too."

"Got it." Molina took a deep breath. "Now let's get out of here."

Back in the lobby, they paused by some mutual unspoken consent.

"Maybe that strawberry stuff," Alch suggested, "would help . . .in there."

"No way. If the orange stuff doesn't do it; nothing will. Besides, that strawberry stuff is worse than death warmed over."

"Maybe," Alch said, but he didn't sound convinced.

********************

Molina got home a little before seven to an empty house.

Mariah was attending an after-school basketball game followed by a pizza-dinner out and would be dropped off by the organizing parent.

Sometimes she envied parents their minivans full of screaming kids and the smell of pizza and spilled soft drinks.

She took a shower, using almond-scented gel and shampoo. Better to smell like poison than putrefaction. Despite it, an odor of orange blossoms lingered, bringing thoughts not of weddings, but of very ripe and hidden death.

She ran her fingernails into a bar of wet Ivory soap, digging out half-moons of scrapings that reminded her of the skin cells so often left behind under the victims nails.

The house was old, and the shower was a coffin, dark as the deep maroon ceramic rile that lined it.

Anybody could he in the house, sneaking up on her like in Psycho, and she wouldn't know it, see it, hear it.

She pulled the big bath towel down from the dimpled, frosted glass door, and stepped out into the bathroom, which felt cold.

"Boo!" said Mariah from the adjacent bedroom.

"Back already?"

"You been at the morgue, haven't you?"

"What makes you think so?"

"You never shower this early, unless you've been at the morgue."

"You're a good detective," Molina said in a tone not too different from what she'd use with an employee.

The big navy towel swathed her torso to the ankles. She wrapped a hand towel around her wet head.

"You look like a swami," Mariah teased.

"Then l will go into the kitchen and foretell what you will not have for dinner, mem sahib."

Navy, Molina thought as she shooed her daughter out the bedroom door and shed the damp towel to don her usual jogging suit.

Dream; color for a dreary set of clothes. Nothing about the victim was suitable for a TV

movie-of-the-week. Just some poor woman who had attracted the violent hand of some formerly abused child who had grown up into a Controlling, homicidal man.

Still the same old story.

She toweled her Chin-length hair dry, rubbed hard, as if to shake off any lingering taint of Grizzly's dead body emporium.

In the other room, the TV blared. The night for Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and her annoying black cat.

"Soon enough," Molina breathed to herself, bracing herself-for stages yet to come in her growing daughter. "Soon enough. But not yet."

She went out to round up the kittens and find out how Mariah's day had been and who had won the basketball game, which was important, because Our Lady of Guadalupe had all the cutest boys on its team.

Molina frowned. Didn't girls play basketball too these days?