Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (39 page)

“This is a weird place."

“You got that right."

“
I mean, it is supposed to be a contest but it seems
like someone is pulling the strings."

“
How so?" He leans down like a gentleman to hear
her answer.

I lean up.

“
I mean, it is supposed to be a fair contest but every
thing so far is rigged. All the Teen Queen candidates
are tall, thin, and blonde. They all look alike. Maybe it
was a mistake that I was made a finalist?”

This gives him pause.

“
Hey, kid, you got it the wrong way around. Looking
all alike is not the way to go. You look like yourself, then
you'll know you're not a fraud."

“Girls change their looks all the time."

“
Right. Because they have not found the way they re
ally want to be."

“Like a singer?"

“That what you want?"

“Yeah."

“
Okay." You can tell that Rafi Nadir knows a little
about advising girl singers. He leans against the wall.
"Sure you want to find a look to perform in but it should
be what you like, not what everybody else looks like.
You got lots of time—"

“
No, I do not! The finals are just days away. I gotta
polish my song and find out what they do to me and—"

“
No, you do not. You do not wait to find out what they
do to you, ever. You decide and you tell them, get it?"

“But, if I am not sure . ."

“
Then make sure before you let them at you. Me, if I
was you, I would nix the blonde. They always do blonde.
At least half the country is not-blonde. Look at that big
old alley cat there. He could be any one of thousands. I
bet there are more black cats than any other kind in the country."

“
Maybe not."

“Why not?"

“
I heard Tern ... someone say once that they put
black cats to sleep more than any other kind.”

While I shudder to hear the truth so baldly stated,
Mr. Rafi Nadir stops to reconsider.

“
There are still a lot of them around, so I guess that
does not work."

“So what are you?" Mariah asks.

“Not-popular."

“Why? What are you?"

“Me? This is not about me," Rafi says.

“You're not-blonde."

“I am worse than that. Arab American."

“
Oh. I see what you mean about popular. I am just Latina. But even all the girls on the Hispanic stations
are going blonde."

“
You kids. Always gotta do what everybody else
does. Grow up. Get past that.”

Mariah nods to the door behind which Miss Savan
nah Ashleigh awaits her.

“She is blonde.”

Mr. Rafi Nadir straightens and makes a funny face at
the door. "Right. Case closed.”

Mariah giggles, then knocks.

Point made.

Chapter 43

In
Old Cold Type

Newspapers sent
out copies of old articles on white paper so heavy it had a chalky feel.

Temple lay an Atlas's worth of such pages over the bathroom twin-sink counter. They'd been delivered to the house in a king-size pillow wearing a flannel case in a frolicking kitten design.

A wretched note accompanied this innocuous delivery:
"Please deliver to my little Xoe, who doesn't sleep well without her kitty pillow. She must have forgotten to take it. Her Mom.”

Apparently this maternal plea had moved the powers that be, for they had sent the sleekest professional blonde
in Temple's category to deliver it to her bedroom door
just before dinner, with the hulking cameraman shooting tape over her bony shoulder. Apparently, now that the crime scene work was done and the detectives were gone for now, the filming ban had been lifted.

“Here you are, Xoe," Ashlee announced. "Something special from home for our resident tough girl. Oooh, the coot 'iddle kitty-wittys. Maybe now you can go beddiebye.”

Temple/Xoe snatched the ungainly gift away.

She must have blushed because Ashlee tittered for the camera.

Temple was embarrassed all right. Not because of the kiddie pillow but because the note had probably been penned by mother Molina.

“Thanks lots," she told the door she had slammed in Ashlee's face.

Temple had turned to drop the pillow on the bed while Mariah snagged the note that dropped off it.

“Hey, this looks like—" She glimpsed Temple's hasty shushing pantomime and came near. "—like a really soft pillow." She leaned down (how humiliating!) to whisper in Temple's ear. "Looks like my mom's writing.”

Then they had adjourned to the bathroom. Although Temple was pretty sure bathrooms were a no-film zone, she was paranoid enough about their current task to hang
washcloths and hand towels from any possible fixture that
might hide a camera.

The copier hadn't captured every line. Many were
blurred.

Mariah hunched over the assemblage, scanning the blurry type.

“
Wow.
This is ancient stuff."

“The mid-eighties."

“Right. Ancient stuff. My mom sent this?”

Mariah looked up and Temple nodded. "At my request.”

“
You tell my mom what to do? Awesome."

“I asked her."

“Oh. That doesn't usually work for me. Just asking.”

“Mothers are like that. Luckily, your mom is not my mom."

“
You sound like you mean that way too much.”

“
Guilty.”

They settled down to read various pages, Temple
perching on the tub rim, Mariah sitting on the closed
throne. Then they exchanged sheets and read some more.

“
What do you think?" Temple asked finally, turning on
the bathtub faucet again. The Teen Queen Castle's water
bill for this period would be humongous from resident
spy work alone.

“This stuff is Tabloid City. The kind of thing you'd see on
CBS Investigates
today. With that Dan Rather-not guy with the so dingy buzz cut. Why do old guys do that?"

“Maybe so there's less gray showing."

“Oh. Anyway, this case is so clear."

“Yeah?"

“It's like a movie. Old-guy husband is major upset that
his young bimbo blowup doll wife"—Mariah looked up
to make sure that Temple had noticed she was drawing on
her brand-new info on blowup dolls—"is divorcing him
and getting half of his money, along with a new
boyfriend. She even gets the house while the judge is considering everything. This house. And she invites the new young boyfriend over. Think Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore."

“And Bruce Willis is the Die-Hard husband?"

“Right. So Bruce goes bonkers and puts on this ninja outfit with the Spider-Man hood—he was big on martial
arts, remember, and Elvis and also Zen stuff, which
you'd think wouldn't be, like, getting him into murder. So he shows up and shoots away at everybody and paralyzes
the wife's daughter from her first marriage, wings the
wife, kills the boyfriend, and disappears down the hidden passages and they never catch him."

“That left a lot of loose ends," Temple said.

“
Yeah, but they're all, like, so old now. What could
they do?"

“
As you get older, Mariah, and you will, even old
enough to drive a car, you'll be struck by how young all the old people who used to be around you actually were."

“Huh?"

“
Age is relative. And bad blood has no expiration
date.”

This Mariah considered, biting on a painted nail that Temple grabbed away from her mouth before it became a serrated edge and ruined her 'Tween Queen score.

Mariah was still mulling over the implications. "You're
saying what's happening now could go back to this stuff way back when?"

“Just add twenty years to everybody's ages."

“Well, the husband would be sixty-something. Too old to totter around here, I'd think."

“And the wife?"

“She was a lot younger. Forty?"

“Forty. Only ten years older than I am."

“
No!" Mariah regarded Temple with true horror.
"You're only ten years away from
that!
I'd be . . . twenty-three, and old enough to drink."

“And vote."

“That too.”

Temple felt oddly deflated by the notion that she was only ten years away from forty. She'd always thought of
herself as only ten years away from twenty. It was the
same thing but much more depressing looked at from the other end of the telescope.

Mariah speared a blurred photocopy image. "She'd be thirty-five, the girl who was shot."

“Too old to compete here."

“
Yeah. Not to mention crippled. None of it makes
sense. They're all too old.”

That was Mariah's callous teenybopper judgment.
Temple shuffled the copies around. No matter how she juggled the dates and the dramatis personae, these mur- derous sinners and sinned against were indeed "too old" to be part of the Teen Queen reality show.

Unless . . . she was looking at the wrong parts of the Teen Queen show. And the wrong reality.

Chapter 44
1
 

Old Tyme
Revival

If Molina prided herself on anything, it was on
being a
thorough supervisor. The minute Temple Barr asked for
copies of the Dickson mansion murders, she'd ordered
extra copies for Alch and Su.

“Savannah Ashleigh's bodyguard," Su said, looking up from the documents.

Unfortunately, Molina knew exactly who Savannah Ashleigh was: washed up cinemactress; neuterer of Temple Barr's cat, Midnight Louie; judge at the Teen Queen contest.

“Bodyguard?" Molina bit.

“This guy is forty. Too young to be the ex-Mrs. Dick-son's boyfriend and no way her ex-husband. Still. A bodyguard. That puts him on the premises with the wherewithal to commit murder.”

Molina was not pleased to see a contemporary photo of Rafi Nadir spun across the table right in front of her nose. Her blood ran cold. Cliché, yes. Fact, you bet!

She kept all her physical reactions dampened as she frowned at the photograph in her custody, knowing she was being watched carefully by her troops. Seeing Rafi Nadir again a couple weeks ago had been easy. No one would believe he'd been a former lover and was even Mariah's father. He was a loser. She was a winner. She'd frozen, ignored, brushed by, brushed off, rushed out of
there. Maylords Fine Furniture was just a crime scene
and Rafi Nadir was just an innocent bystander in that instance. Or not so innocent. He'd found her again and now knew about her, who she was, what she was. Homicide lieutenant. He had reveled in delivering the murderer to
her, bound over. And Temple Barr had reveled in helping
him to do it.

Maybe she thought turnabout was fair play. Molina had
pursued Temple's significant other; now Molina's ex-SO was in a position to embarrass, if not pursue, her.