Temple went over to the table to inspect the papers that had put Mariah to sleep. The only sexy one was the tom scrap of threat. And something about that bothered Temple.
She sat down at Mariah’s abandoned chair and read the terse words. “Murderous bitch” was pretty damning. And “incompetent.” But the last words were strange … “on national TV.” Thing is, Kit hadn’t been selected for the show until a month ago. Reality TV shows moved fast. They had very little budget, just a quick casting call to the public at large, assembling a panel of experts, scouting a ready-made site.
From what Kit had said, why would Marjory Klein have known about the show over three months ago? Because the note-writer was taunting her about appearing on it, was maybe stirred up by it. Was trying to scare her. And who took the folder out that had contained that letter? Someone who knew Marjory and her anal-retentive ways.
Someone who was announcing that he or she was aware of Marjory’s every move scarily soon. A stalker. Maybe that’s why Marjory brought the lawsuit papers with her. She didn’t trust them left at home. Or she wanted to leave a clue in case anything had happened. Like the threatening note. Only the killer had taken the note. Or most of it. So the note had to be incriminating.
Temple read it again. Looked over the suit document. The case had been filed in Salt Lake City. In the wrongful death of the late Chastity Cummings. The name seemed familiar, but Temple had heard so many new names here at the Teen Queen Castle. Including her own pseudonym.
She pulled out the large white papers Mariah had been reading like a fractured fairytale. Newspaper clippings never presented the cleanest timeline. News reporting was staccato, it hit the highlights of action, not thought. Arrested. Makes bond. Autopsy results announced. Vanished. Anniversary of murder story. Wacky detective takes up case eight years later. Vanishes like the suspect, Arthur Dickson. House on the market. Doesn’t sell. Becomes private casino. Another anniversary story speculating on who actually did it Noting how long the dead have been that way.
Finally, it’s a twenty-year anniversary. MURDER STILL PUZZLES OFFICIALS. Arthur Dickson is still at large and missing. His bimbo ex-wife can’t be found. Her younger ex-boyfriend is a Hollywood stuntman who worked on Waterworld before his career sank. The wounded daughter? Died in an Oregon nursing home years before.
Temple paged through the copies of the twenty-year-old photos.
It was like a Greek tragedy: rich, older man; young wife with young daughter. Wedding. Spending. Publicity. That was the public part. The private? Drinking. Fighting. Divorcing. Money. Rage. Murder going ballistic one night. A mysterious masked intruder with a gun. Innocents wounded. The wife wounded but alive. The husband with an alibi just possible enough to ensure reasonable doubt. Still, he breaks bail and runs. Never to be found again. Everybody else left behind to start new lives or cope with what remained of the old.
Temple stared at the old photos under the weak overhead lights they put in every bedroom, except maybe in expensive whorehouses.
What if the house was not a reality show set because it was grand and vacant and notorious? What if the chicken came before the egg?
She studied the photos again. Hey, this ploy had worked for Xoe Chloe, the undercover Teen Queen candidate with an agenda. Why wouldn’t it have worked for someone else? A murderer?
Her forefinger speared one face in one photo, subtracting the negative, accentuating the positive past connection.
Yes. Clever and chilling.
She quickly grabbed a hot pink folder, either hers or Mariah’s, and doublechecked the morning schedule.
If she worked it right, she should be able to hand Marjory Klein’s killer over to Detective Alch along with the borrowed baggie Molina had openly discounted.
How sweet it is …
Chapter 49
Conscentual Adults
Miss Midnight Louise and I rendezvous in the kitchen at twelve o’clock high, a very appropriate time.
Miss Louise is rude enough to suggest that the kitchen has become our favored rendezvous point because I have an eating disorder.
I point out that it offers the advantages of being periodically deserted and that the black marble floor and black granite countertops afford us a degree of camouflage we can obtain nowhere else in this huge house.
She sniffs.
Which is exactly what we are here to discuss.
When she showed up on the scene so unexpectedly (probably just to complicate my life), I was forced to come up with a task for her that would occupy her overbusy brain and yet keep her out of my way. (You can imagine how she would interfere with my necessary interrogations of the Persian girls!) I do believe there is a reason for the great detectives having a right-hand gal in the office, not on the mean streets with them. Dames do like to ride herd on a dude!
So I had to share with her, by proxy, the one precious clue in this case that I have held close to the chest hairs from the beginning.
Had I not followed my protective instincts in following my Miss Temple to the shopping mall, where she made herself so obnoxious in her brilliant way, I would never have picked up the trace of a killer.
We are not dogs, but do we not have noses? Do we not lay our own scent of ownership hither and yon? Are we not better equipped than humans for following the trail of murder? Or, as in this case, murders?
So I had conveyed to Louise as best I could the strange, sickly sweet odor of the puddle outside the mall.
“You are sure it was not diluted blood?” she had demanded.
“I know blood in any state, my dear Louise. No, it was the sort of thing humans eat but should not.”
“That is legion. Can you be a tad more specific?”
“Something cloying, and it was pink.”
“Everything pink is cloying when it comes to humans.”
“I hope you except the cat world Swiss Army knife from that judgment, that marvelous instrument of myriad uses, the feline tongue.”
“Speak for yourself, Romeo. So what is the scent I should search for?”
“Strawberry.”
Louise makes a delicate gagging sound, a prehairball sortie.
“Or perhaps cherry or raspberry. I am no connoisseur of fruit flavors. Then again, it could be that dreadful pink bubblegum flavor. Whatever it was, it was tacky enough in both senses of the words to cling to someone’s shoes. I have been tracing it upstairs, downstairs, and everywhere but my lady’s chamber.”
“So why should I pollute my nose following disgusting Dumpster leavings?”
“Because I first sniffed it someplace else than here.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the parking lot of the mall, where I tailed my Miss Temple when she made her debut as Miss Xoe Chloe by auditioning for this very madness.”
“Parking lot?” Miss Louise is sounding properly intrigued now.
“Right. I found it next to a body that was the focus of a lot of police attention, including that of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina and her new squeeze.”
“No.”
Louise is sounding satisfactorily shocked at last.
“Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has a new squeeze? I thought she was beyond such things.”
“Apparently not, but the point, Louise, is that a poor young girl had been struck dead on the spot. And there was this melting puddle of sticky pink stuff beside her. I have smelled the same stuff on some shoe that has been moving around the place, from the pool area where the mats were sprayed with shaving cream to these supposedly secret passages.”
“Me-wow!” Louise has sat down in front of me in a dazed condition. I can finally see a bit in the dark and I do not like what I am seeing. “I never dreamed Miss Lieutenant Molina would be a traitor to the cause of female independence.”
“Maybe he is not her boyfriend. Maybe he is just a new associate. I merely remarked that something more seemed to be going on, but forget it! The point is, whoever killed that girl is here and has killed again. We must follow
the putrid pink trail.”
So I had argued with Miss Louise until she felt her feminine sensibilities were on the line, i.e., anything I can smell she can smell better.
Passing on a scent, no matter how strong, by proxy, is not easy. But Miss Louise spent several diligent moments vacuuming my whiskers for any remaining traces and pronounced that she had the idea but the methodology of getting it was most repugnant.
Forensic evidence is often like that, I told her.
So we have been sniffing our way through the Teen Queen Castle ever since in search of likely candidates. For I had observed at the crime scene that the killer, with the usual insufficient human olfactory equipment, had trod unknowing in the melted ice cream.
Sickly sweet strawberry scent does not go gently into that dark night. Observe the car freshening products so beloved of patrol car and cab drivers. And most of them strawberry scented.
Miss Louise is indelicate enough to point out that this could confuse the issue.
I point out that we are inside a house, and a huge house, not a moving vehicle. (Although I do wish that Miss Louise was inside a moving vehicle at this moment, headed for the Valley of Fire.)
However, the trained professional does not allow personal druthers to affect his effectiveness in the field.
“So,” she asks, “what is our total suspect list? Although I report the strange actions of your Miss Temple and Miss Lieutenant Molina’s Mariah in the dietitian’s office, I could detect no more cloying scent upon them than one usually encounters paging through certain fashion magazines. Strawberry is far too bourgeois for such venues.”
Huh? Normally I am in command of French, for it is one of those languages that you are in command of or it is in command of you, but I am a little lost here.
So, when in doubt, hold forth. I pace back and forth on a floor so clean there is not any odor other than Pine-Sol to distract me.
“I have detected suspiciously sweet odors on the footwear of a cameraman who tried to kick me in the pool area.”
“You have a pool area? I am impressed, Pops. Is it a front bay or a back bay pool area?”
“Most unamusing, Louise. You are right that I am ill-disposed to a kicker, but unfortunately the gorilla in question has no other counts against him than slinking through the technical corridors, and that is his job.”
“I have traced a sickly sweet odor to the tacky Payless loafers so appropriate to the person of Crawford Buchanan,” she says. “I would so like him to be a murderer. Say it is possibly so.”
“It is. He is what humans call a ‘lech,’ which means he likes to chase young girls. Molesters are in big disfavor nowadays. Perhaps the murdered woman was trying to interfere in his pursuit. They could have destroyed his reputation just as he was trying to make the leap to TV media.”
“Ah.” Louise digests that idea happily. Like my Miss Temple, she cannot stand Crawford Buchanan.
“Sickly sweet odor?” she offers. “Did you ever check his cologne? Me-eeeuw.”
“Agreed. A guy knows these things. He uses Old Lice, I believe, which I understand is good for repelling mosquitoes as well as females. It could be possible he spilled some, from the amount he slaps on each morning, and stepped in it.”
“Speaking of sickly sweet in the face of sickly sour, Dexter Manship’s suede Bass shoes have that odor about them. I fear it is that illegal weed people are so fond of smoking.”
“Close but no cigar. I must confess, with regret, that my most recent Elvis visitation—”
Here she snorts her disbelief with a vehemence that would get her arrested were she not an innocent-looking feline.
“You and Elvis! That is a delusional mutual admiration society. As I recall, he was a dog and horse man. And I would not expect his ghost to be any different.”
“That is just it, Louise. Not every Elvis apparition is the real thing.”
“Not every! Like any one of them could be!”
“Your Mr. Matt had his suspicions.”
“Elvis might look up Mr. Matt. I might look up Mr. Matt if I were returning for my tenth life. Neither of us would look you up.”
What is a guy to say to such a blanket dismissal? A few choice expletives cross my mind but I am ever the gentleman. Especially on Candid Camera.
“So,” I sum up. “We have three suspects, so far. I think tomorrow we shall have to arrange to trip them all up. Literally. And soon.”
Chapter 50
A Hasty Hand
Temple hadn’t really been able to sleep.
She’d set the bedside clock radio but it was like clock radios in hotels: so many hands had been on it that it was unlikely its current reading was correct.
Luckily, Mariah was out cold. Temple felt a twinge of guilt after she turned off the possibly unreliable alarm and unplugged the unit just to be safe.
Better Mariah should miss breakfast and her first consultation of the day than that she should be involved in a confrontation with a killer.
Actually, Temple only needed to confirm where the suspect was, then dash to the entry area and await the arrival of jolly old Detective Alch. He could do the take-down and Molina would be seething with … gratitude?
Well she should be, Temple thought. The clear and present danger would be over. Mariah would be safe, along with everybody else, and still an innocent contestant with a chance of winning.
Xoe Chloe, alas, the incorrigible roommate now revealed as an overage fraud, would be outed and kicked out of the Teen Queen Castle. Fair exchange: Temple cherished no delusions of ever becoming a teen queen, back then or here and now. She’d been lucky to go to her high school prom, even with a dorky date, much less be crowned queen of it. Or anything.
There is something strangely unreal about thinking you’ve discovered a murderer. It gives you a sense of invulnerability, oddly enough. After all, you know what’s what when nobody else does.
That’s how Temple felt when she tiptoed out of the bedroom, leaving it dim behind all the drawn miniblinds, with Mariah’s head still buried in the covers.
She checked Xoe Chloe’s watch, a jingling band with a cheery collection of skulls and Harley Davidson charms mixed in with such girly icons as tiny spike heels she’d found at the mall.
All Temple had to do now was ensure the perp was ensconced in the proper consulting room, then guide Alch there.
He thought he was here as a mere delivery boy. She hoped he still carried. Maybe she should have speed-dialed the Fontana Brothers as backup. Her Aunt Kit would adore meeting them.
She got down to the main floor, checked her watch, and hovered at the front entry hall. No Alch yet but it was only 8:25. Maybe she should pick up some muscle on the way.
Time to skitter down the endless halls—where were Xoe’s Rollerblades when she needed them?
Temple’s heart was pounding when she reached the right door, and not from the run. What if she was wrong? She knocked. After ten seconds’ silence, she pushed the door open.
The office seemed empty. Strange. The 8:30 slot was booked. Someone should be here.
Aware that her every move might be recorded, Temple played the curious arrivée, peering in, peeking around, moving around on silent little cat feet.
No bogeymen jumped out from behind furniture, so before she knew it, she had advanced to the empty desk.
Upon its admirably clear surface lay a note, scrawled in a hasty hand.
Temple cocked her head to read it sideways: “See me first thing tomorrow.”
Hmmm. Sounded like the tail wagged the dog, although this dog had always been in charge of the manger.
Either way, she needed to hit another office fast Her watch said Alch would be pushing open the Teen Queen Castle entry portcullis right about now … .
She dashed down another hall, around a corner, and into familiar territory.
Another door, another knock, another long silence. Brash, bleached-blonde Xoe Chloe walked right in. Peered.
The high-backed l
eather chair behind the desk was spun away from the door to face the windows overlooking the pool area.
Temple had a very bad feeling. She should cut and run, whatever that meant.
She’d been here before. Empty office, sinister chair back. Cameras, anyone?
Why had Dexter Manship left that imperious note just sitting on his desk? Had he figured out what she had? She’d trespassed on his empty office before, but then there had been nothing sinister to find after all.
That was there and then. This was here and now.
Had he too tumbled to the bizarre truth? Where was he now?
Was she too late? Would Alch find yet another victim instead of a perp?
She didn’t like Manship. Who did? Manship probably didn’t even like Manship. But … he was a human being, sharp and observant. Maybe too much of both.
She approached the desk. Walked around it. Outside the Nevada sunshine was bouncing off the blazing white stone and blue water and basting bronzed blondes to French toast.
Inside, the office was dim. Silent. Still as death.
She grabbed the chair’s high back and spun it around with all her might.
She needed all her might. The chair was heavy and only rotated forty-five degrees.
Enough to reveal a passenger.
An inert passenger.
The wrong one.
Xoe Chloe could have skated back down a quarter mile of hallway to the front door in about two minutes.
Temple was less athletic and way more practical.
She screamed. It was a wimpy thing to do but it would bring ’em all in about sixty seconds flat.
Chapter 51
Heartfelt and Red-Handed
“They have you on tape,” kindly Detective Alch said. Threatened. “We have you on tape, since their tapes are now our tapes. Slinking around Manship’s empty office a few days ago.”
“That wasn’t me,” Temple said. “That was Xoe Chloe. She’s much nervier.”
Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit Page 28