Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina, now back in action, does not think so, and says exactly what she does think, which resembles the third degree.

  “Just who is chaperoning the contenders? What is the security level? Mariah should be up here with us for complete safety.”

  Mr. Rafi is staring at Miss Carmen with blank disbelief. “Did you not hear me? She is folded in with the junior competitors. You would jerk her away from her new friends and the excitement and responsibility of helping EK through the competition?”

  “Mariah ran away. She took a terrible risk. She deceived her custodial parent and took advantage of—”

  “Took advantage of what?” Rafi asked, as quick as I to notice that Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has suddenly gone quiet and pale, as if remembering something she should not say.

  “Took, um, ad-advantage of my being distracted by a very de-demanding job,” she finished.

  By now my Miss Temple is also staring at the stuttering lieutenant, and frowning.

  “You really want to do that?” Rafi asks. “Take away what she has helped someone else earn, another kid’s dream? Right on the brink of it maybe coming true?”

  “The odds against EK winning are huge.”

  “But they are the odds Mariah helped her earn.”

  “She took a horrible risk and needs to pay a major price.”

  “Yes, but I am sure you can think up a big-time one after the competition is over. Today is Saturday and the competition only runs through the end of the week, Carmen. We are assigned this duty, and Temple and her cat are on their own time.”

  “But this charade we have set up—”

  “Will allow us to see our daughter in action without inhibiting her.”

  “She has been a willful, foolish child. She should not be rewarded.”

  “You can ground her for six months.”

  Miss Temple piped up, “And keep her from going to the fall father-daughter dance she was so hot on attending.”

  My Miss Temple does not often “innocently” lob verbal hand grenades into a situation, but she did just then. I sit back with her to watch the fireworks coming up.

  Rafi caught it on the first toss. “Father-daughter dance? That’s right. Let us discuss this. Mariah is eager to go?”

  “Sure. It would be her first dress-up formal event. She is all hot to have Matt Devine do the honors.”

  “He is hardly a friend of the family, is he?”

  “He is friendly to us.”

  “And,” Temple put in helpfully, “Mariah thinks that he is hot.”

  Rafi tossed the figurative hand grenade to the ceiling. “An ex-priest? A childless, never-married ex-priest? Escorting my daughter to a father-daughter dance? What is wrong with someone really paternal, like Detective Alch?”

  “I suggested that from the first,” Miss Carmen says nervously.

  Between them, Miss Temple and Mr. Rafi have her squirming, and both are enjoying it for what I assume are vastly different reasons.

  Miss Carmina Carmen goes on. “Mariah rejected Alch. She does not have a truly grounded idea of what a father figure is. She can be amazingly mature one moment and hopelessly shallow the next. As for the father-daughter dance, it is not some major emotional crisis for her. She just wants to wow the other girls with an older more glamorous escort.”

  Rafi shrugs and folds his arms across his chest. “You are not canceling this event on her. She will just have to wow them with me.”

  “I had said I might be ready to broach Mariah with the subject of you in good time. Not now!”

  “This dance is not for a few months. Time enough to ‘broach’ a lot of things. I may not be Golden Boy, but I am her real father and I could ‘wow’ the other girls better than Uncle Morrie.”

  I eye Mr. Rafi Nadir. This guy has nerve. Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina is all bristling officer again, her own arms folded tight across her stomach, but also under her breasts, which is a somewhat inflammatory posture to take with exes.

  Thing is, for whatever reason, Mr. Rafi Nadir has tightened and tautened and taken the upper hand since slinking into Vegas a loser a few months ago, and his dark looks might indeed cause a feminine heart to flutter, not that Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has either of those two attributes in high supply, femininity or heart.

  But something is making her face flush a deep, carmine-red, fury or fever.

  My Miss Temple has dropped her Zoe Chloe posture to stand there gracelessly gaping, which is so unlike her.

  “This is not,” the policewoman declares, “the place or the time to discuss Mariah’s parental custody arrangements.”

  “This is the exact right time,” Rafi pushes. “You can discipline Mariah however you think is necessary, but it should not affect what she does next fall, or my right to continue building rapport with her. I get what she wants, even if you have forgotten what it ever was to want anything.”

  The silence in the room is long and deep enough to keep a tiger litter sleeping peacefully. I eye my Miss Temple, who is biting her lip and holding her breath and crossing her fingers, all at once.

  Our not-so-favorite favorite homicide lieutenant takes a deep, shocked breath, which suddenly doubles her over. Rafi reaches a hand out to her upper arm to steady her, but she twists violently away, her next breath ending like a bellows with a little puff of shock. Her face is clown-white pale.

  Rafi Nadir is pretty shocked too. “You are not just being the usual hard-ass,” he says as if he is just working this out while we eavesdrop. “You are . . . in physical pain. You are hurt.”

  “Nonsense,” she says so emphatically that we all know it is not nonsense.

  “You have been wounded,” Rafi diagnoses with narrowed eyes. “A triplicate form desk jockey. How? Why?”

  “None of your business,” she tells him, letting her fierce gaze pass over him to freeze Miss Temple in a burgeoning comment she swallows like a double wad of bubble gum.

  “I am not the focus of this insane rescue effort,” Molina spits out. “Mariah is. As you say, she is safe now. And we are stuck in these loony undercover personas babysitting a two-bit dance competition getting flaky death threats to see that she stays that way. I’m not crazy about her rooming elsewhere, but you proved that cutting a kid from the herd in a situation like this would be considered cruel and unusual punishment by said kid. Your people had better keep a damn serious eye on them all.”

  She turns and vanishes behind the double doors to her bedroom suite, leaving us three twitching whiskers and blinking eyes. At least I am the only one able to whisker-twitch.

  “Wow,” Miss Temple says to Mr. Rafi. “You pushed more buttons than I knew she had.”

  “Right now,” he answers, “if I had any stake in anything, I would be more worried about her than her daughter.”

  His cell phone rings and he claps it to an ear as hard as a sparring partner might hit it. Ouch!

  I cannot tell you how sick, ticked, and piqued I am about cell phones. These miserable little devices are like a medieval infestation of rats. They breed everywhere. People are entirely at their beck and call, and run shrieking to cuddle them every time they squeal. And they have a thousand annoying voices, some famous. This fad to have unique “ring tones” is a plague on humanity. Anyone with sensitive hearing is assaulted daily, and also left out of the loop watching folks speak loudly as they wander down the street. Time was, people behaved that way, they were put in custody “for observation.”

  Now, if you are not mumbling or screaming meaningless phrases when you front down the street, you are not hip. You are the new “boom boxes.”

  I must say that my kind has admirably resisted the trend to constant and showy communication. We still say more with the blink of an eye or the twitch of a back or the flick of a shiv.

  Still, such are these times that my Miss Temple and I are forced to tear our attention from Miss Carmen’s most satisfying meltdown to regard Mr. Rafi’s one-sided monologue.

  “The
Barbie memo? Sure, anything on that would be good.” He paces, nodding and listening. “No kidding. Just today. Missing? Search the mall, and do not forget to comb between every row of the parking lot. Especially the parking lot. There is precedent. Get back to me as soon as. The lieutenant? On the other phone. I will make sure she gets the message.”

  Miss Temple and I have edged nearer on one very provocative sentence.

  “Another Barbie doll has shown up at the Albuquerque audition site,” he reports grimly, “and a female competitor is missing. I had better tell ‘Carmina.’ Unless you—”

  “No,” my Miss Temple says wisely. “She is all yours. I will check the Internet for fresh Barbie doll atrocities.”

  So there we are again, torn between a cell phone and the Internet. I tell you, the art of investigation is not the same old gray mare it used to be.

  Everybody Undercover,

  Quick!

  Temple figured she was playing a pretty good Mariah substitute at the moment.

  She even had the typical teenager’s quarreling parents. There was no doubt that Lieutenant Molina and Rafi Nadir made volatile partners. After they’d made it to the high-roller suite, Raphael and Carmina made sure to get as far as possible from each other in their bedroom assignments. Lions, and tigers, and angry ex-lovers, oh my!

  As soon as Temple could relax in the presumed privacy of her star bedroom, she phoned Matt on her cell.

  “Where are you and what are you wearing?” she said when he answered.

  “Who are you?”

  “Your light of love in a kickier, bolder persona. Enjoy.”

  “Temple, where are you?”

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m wearing?”

  “If it’s the usual Zoe Chloe Ozone Goth issue, no. Ish, for sure. Can I make it any plainer, because I certainly can’t make her any plainer.”

  Temple was not about to relinquish making a provocative call from a high-roller suite.

  “You are about to lose a date,” she told him.

  “Our wedding date?”

  “No, sweetums. We haven’t even set that yet. I’m referring to your dinner-dance date with a star, Mariah Molina.”

  “Huh?”

  “Surely you haven’t forgotten the glamour event of the fall, the father-daughter dance at Our Lady of Guadalupe High School?”

  “Shoot. I had. Your crazy new assignment has my mind going to mush. I’m supposed to squire Molina Jr.”

  “Yes, you are, and we’ve found the little footloose and fancy-free rascal. She’s managing a hot newcomer in the junior division of this very hot Dancing With the Celebs gig you’ll be dazzling with your fancy footwork.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Not good for Mama Bear’s composure and now Papa Bear has IDed her as a walking wounded policewoman, which makes her twice as dangerous a bear. Did you know anything about that? Molina getting hurt?”

  “Uh, maybe.”

  “Oh, no! Matt, you haven’t been playing Wailing Wall for the enemy? What’s this all about?”

  “It’s hardly relevant to what’s going on now.”

  “The heck it isn’t. You’ve got a rival for Perfect Dream Dad. Rafi wants to escort Mariah to that dance.”

  “His world and welcome to it. Her mother sort of railroaded me for the job anyway.”

  “Her mother railroads us all, but right now she looks like she’s been working on the railroad, rode hard, and put up wet. What is going on with her?”

  “She’s been . . . wounded. That’s all I can say without violating—”

  “The sanctity of the confessional.”

  “In a way. I swore.”

  “Humph. The only way you would swear. Fiancés shouldn’t keep secrets from fiancées.”

  “I know. I’m between a frying pan and the steel wool here.”

  “What a labored metaphor,” Temple hooted. “Who’s the steel wool, me or Molina?”

  “Okay, that was a bad figure of speech. Say, if Mariah has been found and is back in Vegas, your charade is over and you can go home, right?”

  “Wrong.” Temple lowered her voice. “There was another mutilated Barbie doll outside a mall audition in Albuquerque. One of the teen wanna-be competitions. Molina’s boss has decided they have a decent team undercover here and wants our show to go on.”

  “Mariah will see through you all in a millisecond.”

  “She did, but she likes it. Drama queen. We’re all going to share the multibedroom Zoe Chloe Ozone comped high-roller suite, except Mariah, who’ll bunk with the junior division competitors. So far Mama Bear has given her holy hell for taking off and Papa Bear has been introduced as an investigator from hotel security, which he is. We’ll all keep an eye on her, and she’ll keep her mouth shut because she badly wants her little friend to compete. Ekaterina is a Chechen refugee and a world-class dancer, apparently. What I’ve gotten out of the kids is that, caught between Russian troops and Chechen security forces, a new wave of Chechens have been immigrating since 2003, mostly to European Union countries and a few to the United States. EK could qualify as a cultural refugee with the right creds. Like winning this contest.”

  “If this Barbie Doll Killer is branching out to auditions in New Mexico, the finals here would be a free-for-all for him and you are masquerading as a teenager, Temple. Now that I’m a fiancé, I’m saying you should forget it and go home for your own safety.”

  “I’ve got two police types living with me, practically, and you’re booked into a room here, too, for contest week. And I’m key to the undercover operation. Or Zoe Chloe is.”

  “You make this zany character sound almost real.”

  “It’s scary how real she is to these teen fans. I needed a phalanx of hotel security getting to the private elevators. They were screaming and shooting photos. I felt like Marilyn Monroe come back from the dead. And Zoe Chloe doesn’t do anything, except broadcast attitude.”

  “All this is supposed to reassure me?”

  “My job is to stick with Mariah, and we’ll have Mama and Papa Bear all over us, believe it. It’s like they’re in a competition to safeguard Mariah.”

  “Guilt.” Matt’s tone was grim. “They each need to prove they’re the perfect parent. I really hate you being caught in the middle there, Temple, whether it’s between dueling parents or a serial killer and his prey.”

  “Is it because we’re engaged now?”

  “It’s because you’re a target two ways: as part of an undercover police team with a known stalker on the loose, and as the crazy pop persona, Zoe Chloe, who attracts maniac fans. Max isn’t here anymore to play guardian angel. He did, you know, and he was darn good at it.”

  Temple was stunned into silence. Matt was right. She’d always had her secret “shadow,” had unconsciously taken it for granted. Even now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s the truth.”

  “I know. But I committed to this. Mariah’s a neat kid. Maybe her yen to perform is really an unconscious hope of pleasing an absent father. She did this not for herself, but to help another kid who could really use a boost. I don’t know what Molina told her daughter about her parentage, but I’m seeing something happening with Molina and Rafi. A coming to terms. Mariah, too. This enforced mission might even settle things with all three of them. I can’t bail.”

  “And you don’t want to. You’ve always been hooked on investigating things, and now you’re hooked on being a teenybopper star.”

  “I am not!” But the suite was cool and the masquerade got her old drama queen juices going. Besides . . .

  “Don’t worry, Matt,” she said confidently. “I’m not only the apple of the LVMPD’s many eyes but Midnight Louie hitched a ride with us. The Hooded Claw is my bodyguard.”

  “Ever since that debacle at the chicken ranch, I must admit Louie has a lot more street cred with me.”

  “He saved me from a mob hit man.”

  “I don’t give him that much cred. He was just ac
ting out in the manner of his breed. He went a little crazy in a speeding vehicle, is all. Cats hate riding in cars.”

  Sure. Temple eyed Louie, sprawled dead center of her huge, round, gold-satin-covered bed like a big, black, hairy, giant tarantula. His absinthe-green eyes squinted with mobster relish. He’d loved lolling in the big black SUV on the ride to Laughlin and back.

  Yeah, baby, yeah.

  Midnight Louie must have been exhausted by the roundabout trip to the hotel.

  He didn’t budge for an instant from lying dead center of the mattress.

  Since it was a round bed, Temple had to curl around him like a worm. So much for Internet stardom.

  She had trouble sleeping, which might have been the position, or her, um, position.

  She was now officially a fiancée acting against her intended’s better judgment. She hadn’t had to answer for her own safety to anyone since leaving her Minneapolis home almost three years before. True, she’d been living on her own since she was twenty-three, and she was pushing thirty-one now.

  Temple tossed and turned, trying to track down the gnawing feeling of guilt taking nibbles out of her innards. She’d left Minneapolis with Max, which was hardly a huge independent step, although leaving her smother-loving family was a hard break to make.

  Max had been concerned about her safety—he’d left her without a word for almost a year to lead some nasty hoodlums away from their love nest. Love nest. Temple smiled. Max was hardly the nest type. They’d lived together, but Max had always had a secret life she finally found out about. So he’d never moved back into their Circle Ritz condominium once he was back in Vegas and her life. They were both free to come and go.

  Matt was a lot more conservative than Max. He worried about her unleashing Zoe Chloe Ozone again, even though the police were unofficially encouraging her to do it. Temple supposed a suspect nicknamed the Barbie Doll Killer might be a tad unsettling to a fiancé who wasn’t a secret agent on the side, like Max.

  But she’d gotten attached to Mariah when she and Zoe had been roommates for the Teen Queen competition. Temple had only had older brothers in her family, always bigger, stronger, surer, “righter.” Mariah was like a little sister who needed advice on being girly, being a performer, being a snoop.