Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “You’re not anybody’s inferior.”

  “Chain of command says so. But screw chain of command. Command isn’t going to help you on this one, is it? When we get back to headquarters, why don’t we grab our own cars? I can meet you at, oh, some barbecue joint or pizza parlor. We can talk and no one will overhear us.”

  Molina shook herself out of her atypical funk long enough to eye him suspiciously. “Is this a date you’re proposing, Alch?”

  “Naw, Lieutenant. It’s a friendly bull session between co-workers.”

  “Bullshit.” She rubbed her left temple with the heel of her hand. “All right. Tell me where.”

  He named a favorite of his, just a strip shopping center BBQ joint, and gave her the coordinates.

  His lieutenant nodded, as surly as his daughter when she had been a typical teenager. Thank God Vicky was safely married and someone else’s problem. Doing fine, really, past all that youthful single-girl angst and on to young-married stress.

  He’d been in the army. Germany. Well remembered how the non-coms had taken the green lieutenants in hand. They were underlings, but they looked out for those naive, smart, upwardly-bound doofuses with something bordering on paternal affection. Didn’t envy them the pressure one little bit. No way. So this was not his first duty call babysitting a suddenly rudderless superior officer. Usually the young lieutenants were blind drunk on the town, though. They weren’t blind-mad female furies, which was another critter entirely.

  It was probably career suicide to get too friendly with his female boss, but . . . God knew he knew how to raise a daughter into a woman. And in some unnamable way, the formidable C. R. Molina had always struck him as a motherless child.

  He wasn’t even sure she would show, but drove his Honda Civic to the place they’d agreed upon. At least he’d get good ribs and a light beer out of the deal, either way. Light beer tasted like a urine sample, but his metabolism didn’t burn off self-indulgence like it used to now that he was fifty.

  How old was Molina? Nowhere near her fifties, for sure. Maybe forty, though. She was notorious for having no personal life beyond her only daughter. Mariah. Must be eleven or twelve now. Alch winced. Bad age. Bitchy age. Going through all that social and hormonal upheaval. No picnic. Not for a single mother. Not for a single father.

  Because he’d done it. Raised a daughter pretty much by himself. Got through “training” bras and the unspeakable tampon transition, and all those sticky intra-sex issues that were embarrassing even when you were unrelated and middle-aged. Vicky never alluded to that old stuff, but she treated him with affection and an expected amount of tolerance. He was her “old man” now, and she could never imagine that he had ever been anything else to anybody else, especially her mother.

  Alch was musing on that when he went through the food line. Then the rich smell of hot smoke-flavored sauce returned him to the present. He found an isolated table and now sat nursing his beer. Fewer calories that way. He wondered if he should wager with himself whether Molina would show up.

  She did, entering the place like a SWAT team member forced to go through a school cafeteria line. She scoped out the people in line, checked out the tables, spotted him, all in one second flat.

  He nodded from across the room. She grabbed a tray and shuffled through the long line of options like any bewildered cafeteria customer. It was hard to pick a meal in a few split seconds.

  They’d each ordered and paid for themselves. Only way Molina would allow it, he knew.

  Man, that woman would be hard to date.

  Not that Alch did that much. Got out of the habit when he was raising Vicky. She was paramount. His kid. And now she was gone. Job over. Position phased out. Except for his day job.

  Alch made a minor effort to rise as Molina brought her brown tray to his table, but her hand waved him back down, like a faithful dog.

  She sat and removed her plates from the tray, then frowned at his place setting.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know they sold beer.”

  “Sure. You can go back for one.”

  “What do they have?”

  “A bunch of brands. I always get the Amstel Light. Unfortunately. It’s better than Coors Light, at least.”

  “I’ll be back,” she said, utterly unaware of parroting the Schwarzenegger catch phrase from The Terminator flicks.

  Alch pulled a face at her vanishing back. Beer with the lieutenant. Well, well.

  She returned not only with a beer but with two, neither light.

  “Dos Equis. You deserve full flavor after this afternoon’s debacle, Morrie. And so do I, God help me.”

  He wisely didn’t follow up on that opening. Better to let the food and drink take effect first. He’d learned that from Vicky, even if it had been Pizza Inn and Dr Pepper in her case.

  “This is great brisket,” the lieutenant . . . Molina . . . C.R Carmen said, after several minutes of silent mutual eating and sipping.

  All around them people came and went. The din of sliding trays and clanking silverware and plastic tumblers hitting Formica tabletops echoed, creating a benign, vaguely muffled background, like they were in a movie scene instead of real life.

  “So who was that masked man?” Morrie finally asked.

  She shook her head. “You sure know how to kick off an interrogation, Detective.”

  “Don’t think of me as a detective.”

  “What should I think of you as?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe what you need at the moment.”

  “Need. That’s the second time you’ve used that wimpy word.”

  “It’s not wimpy. It’s . . . reality. Look. I know you’re the boss. I know you’re tough. More than that, I know you really care about how you do the job, how we all do the job. I also know you’re a girl. Hey! Don’t bristle. It’s true. I raised a girl. By myself. I know the territory, even if I’m only a grudgingly tolerated visitor to it.”

  “Your daughter makes you feel like that?”

  “All kids make you feel like that. You’re a parent. Whoever wants to be ‘a parent’? You always thought you were more interesting than that.”

  She shook her head at him, but it wasn’t denial, it was recognition. “I was an accidental parent.”

  “Who would do such a thing deliberately?”

  “Lots of people set out to do it.”

  “They’re crazy. They have no idea what it involves, do they?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “So what’s the problem? You know you’ve got to name it or go crazy. I’ve been almost driven crazy by my daughter. Because of my daughter. Because I love her more than anything and I’m just a way station on her life journey. Because I’m bound to be left behind, but if I can do anything to make her life better, or brighter—”

  She interrupted with her hand, clamping hard on his forearm across the table. “Does she appreciate it?”

  “Hell, no. Not now. When I’m gone . . . maybe.”

  “Oh, Morrie—”

  “Drink your beer. It’s solid stuff. It’s solider than ninety-eight percent of what we do every day. Enjoy every calorie. You look back, and that’s all you got. So what’s the trouble?”

  “I don’t do this,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Tell. Tattle. Whine. Admit. Admit guilt, failure, lack of control.”

  “Me neither.”

  She laughed. “Why do I feel I’d like you for a father?”

  “Because you don’t know the hellion I used to be. True.”

  She didn’t laugh, though he’d meant her to. “This violates every professional rule I’ve set myself.”

  “Maybe you set yourself the wrong rules.”

  “Apparently. My daughter is spiraling out of control, asking unanswerable questions. And now, I meet an unanswerable . . . fragment from my past.”

  “That guy at Maylords.”

  “Guy. Don’t I wish. Just some ‘guy.’ Unfortunately, he’
s Mariah’s father.”

  “Whoa. Holy shit. She know it?” Silence held. “He know it?”

  “I know it. That’s all.”

  Morrie chugalugged real beer, trying to make Molina’s messy personal life jibe with her impeccable professional trajectory.

  None of the messiness really mattered, except to her.

  “You’re a single mother,” he said finally. “It’s rude of anyone to speculate. It certainly doesn’t enter into job history, like it used to. Those were the bad old days. I can’t tell you the speculations made then about me and Vicky. A father with one daughter. Wife dead? Wife divorced? Wife run off? Wife murdered? Whatever the scenario, I was considered weird. Father with daughter. Not the norm.”

  “That’s why I respect you so much.” It was murmured. Muttered.

  “Me?”

  “You. It shows in how you partner Su. She’s a handful. She has issues. She respects you. I wish I’d had a partner as good when I was in her position.”

  He literally sat back, absorbed this information. He wasn’t here to garner kudos. But he was touched. Maybe it wasn’t just Vicky. Maybe it was Su. And . . . my God, Molina?

  Uh-oh. Morrie Alch, professional father substitute. Not quite what he was willing to settle for. Yet.

  “Let’s call it a mutual admiration society,” he said.

  “That’s why it’s so hard. But . . . who else could understand?”

  Morrie nodded. He was doomed to “understand.” Not to be understood. All single parents were. Not a voluntary occupation.

  “So,” she asked, “who was your daughter’s—Vicky, isn’t it?—mother?”

  “You sure don’t dance around questions like this in interrogation. I guess I should be flattered you changed your style for me. What you really want to know is why we split and what happened to her.”

  Molina shrugged as she pushed away her empty plate and drew the beer mug closer. “You tell, I tell.”

  Alch heard himself chuckling again. “I feel like a snitch. Odd role reversal.” He put his plate with its ruddy smear of sauce onto the brown tray on top of Molina’s.

  “Okay. She was a nurse. Emergency room. We figured maybe our odd hours would work out better together than with some nine-to-fiver or other. And they did. At first.”

  “So it wasn’t the hours. Or the overtime. Or being on call?”

  “Nope. All the logistics were fine. Little Vicky worked out too. I did my share of diapers, feedings, drop-offs at preschool later, things most nine-to-five fathers miss out on.”

  “Diapers. I always knew you were an unsung hero, Morrie.”

  They smiled in mutual remembrance of smelly times past.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Time went by. Enough time to think about another kid maybe.”

  “What happened.”

  “Job burnout.”

  “Really?” Molina sounded surprised. “You’re the most unburned-out detective on my staff.”

  “Hers. I learned my laid-back lifestyle the hard way. Emergency room is crazy, the hours, the stress, the danger, the dying. She started using. I never spotted it until it was a habit as big as the Goliath Hotel. All those rushing, come-and-go hours had ended up in needing a rush.”

  “That’s how you got custody. Fathers didn’t often back then.”

  “Sure, make me feel good about my age.”

  “It’s a good age, Morrie. I just hope I get there with my sanity intact.”

  “You will. Maybe it doesn’t look like it now. Adolescence is hell at any age. So what’s your story?”

  “You breathe a word—”

  “Hey, I told you about my junkie ex-wife. Your history is worse?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Losing someone to drugs is . . . the worst. Staying sane, and sober yourself, through it, that’s a major medal, even if you’re the only one who knows you earned it.”

  Alch nodded, sipped beer. Was glad he didn’t have to speak.

  “Okay. My turn.” She bit her lower lip, which didn’t hurt her makeup. She wore so little, if any, that no lipstick stained the beer mug. “Show and tell. ‘That guy.’ I’ve known he was in town for some time. I hoped, prayed, he’d never know that I was living here. Now it’s public record.”

  “Who, what, when, where, and why?”

  “Rafi Nadir, ex-police uniform, fifteen years ago, Los Angeles. And why? God knows I ask myself that plenty. I was a half-Chicana woman on the force. You can imagine what that was like then and there. They put me patroling the streets of Watts.”

  “Oh, great, playing the race card. Blacks versus Hispanic cop.”

  “And the gender card: macho men versus woman in uniform.” She stared into the bottom of her empty beer mug.

  Alch got up. “I’m buying this round.”

  “Big spender.”

  Around them families came and ate and went and came again.

  Alch returned to the table, thinking he should have suggested a bar and grill. Except that this family chain restaurant was oddly apropos to their business.

  And it was business. This was all about being dedicated cops and alienated ordinary citizens.

  “You like Dos Equis?” she asked as he set the frosty mug in front of her.

  “Beer is beer, but some is better than others.”

  “Same could be said of people. Rafi’s Arab-American. An odd-man-out minority. At first, to me, he seemed sympathetic, supportive.”

  Alch nodded.

  “He had a future, Morrie. You know there are certain professions that demand your body and soul. Police work. Medical work. Newspaper work, maybe.”

  “Not banker, lawyer, accountant.”

  “Nothing greedy. Nothing where you make much money.”

  “Ask me about doctors nowadays!”

  “Back then. When we were young.”

  Alch nodded. He liked thinking about that, about then. When his back and his feet didn’t hurt, but things a lot more interesting did, in a good way.

  “Anyway, Rafi was on my side. It wasn’t fun being me on patrol. You know how they haze the new guys? Imagine how they can haze the new female. So, Rafi and I . . . we were partners in prejudice: his ethnic origins, my ethnic origins and my gender.

  “We lived together.” She checked him for disapproval level.

  “Bet your family loved that.”

  “My family didn’t know that. I was on my own then. God, I was in my mid-twenties, I should have been on my own, but girls raised in ethnic cultures are always a bit retarded when it comes to knowing about real life. They like us to be helpless and innocent.”

  “I’m betting that’s where Mariah comes in.”

  “No. That’s where I left. I got a promotion, and he didn’t. It wasn’t much of a promotion, but it was something. That’s when I found out I was pregnant.”

  “So? Things happen.”

  “Not with a pinprick in a diaphragm, Morrie. Right then. Right after I got promoted! He knew I was raised Roman Catholic. He knew. What was I going to do? Abort? How was I going to handle more responsibility and weirder hours with a kid? I’d have to quit. Get some part-time brain-numbing job. Maybe stay at home, off the streets, change those diapers until I croaked of ammonia fumes.”

  “He punctured your diaphragm to get you out of the picture on the job? He didn’t want to just dump you?”

  She shook her head, then took a deep swallow of beer. “He wanted to own me. He wanted me barefoot and pregnant and dependent on him. I saw it all through the pinprick of light in my little rubber artificial birth control device. That’s what the Church calls contraception. ‘Artificial.’ Like false fingernails or something. And getting pregnant is ‘natural.’ Maybe in my case it was God’s punishment for using birth control, I don’t know. It sometimes felt like that. Rafi had forced me into an impossible position, an impossible decision. I just knew I had to get out of there, right away, and never let him find me again.”

  “And he didn’t. Until today. So what did you tell Mariah?”


  “That her father was a cop. Who was killed. Helping a motorist on the freeway, ploughed into by a drunk driver.”

  “Dead hero. Guess there wasn’t a convenient foreign action going on at the time.”

  “No, there was just convenient lies.”

  “That’s bad, Carmen,” Alch said. “Very bad.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s why you’ve been so jittery lately. You knew this Nadir guy was in town.”

  “I’ve been jittery?”

  “Well, more like wired and jittery. Like—”

  “If you say ‘on the rag’ I’ll choke you, Morrie.”

  “Sounds like my Vicky talking. But I noticed something was wrong.

  Hell. We all did.”

  She suddenly put her head down on her folded arms. “So it didn’t work. My soldiering through. I demoralized my own troops.”

  “Not . . . demoralized.” Alch twisted his neck, trying to see her face. “Maybe you motivated them.”

  “Huh?” She looked up, her face red from the lowered position.

  “We’re all human, Carmen. Maybe we like to see a little of it in our bosses. Our ‘superior’ officers.”

  “You’re enjoying this?”

  “No, I’m enjoying getting to see that you’re human too. Just like the rest of us. You set yourself an impossible standard, you know. This Rafi Nadir can’t hurt you any more than you’re willing to hurt yourself.”

  She straightened up. Thought that over. “What would you do now?”

  “Figure out a way to tell my daughter the truth before somebody who didn’t like me had a chance to tell it to her first.”

  A long sigh, a longer swallow of beer.

  “You’re right. Mariah comes first and foremost. I thought I was protecting her, but I suppose I was fooling myself. She’ll like knowing her father’s a failure?”

  “She’ll want to know her father, and make up her own mind. You can’t stop that. You can only supervise that.”

  “Not good news, Morrie. Not what I had hoped for at all.”

  He nodded at her. “Believe it or not, that’s a step forward, Carmen, not a bad step forward. At all,” he echoed her. Deliberately.

  She glared at him—the Molina he knew and liked and who scared the hell out of him sometimes, in a good way he could rely upon—and then slapped a fin down on the table.