Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (44 page)

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. Ar
rested. 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, subtract
ing 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 be
cause I have an eating disorder.

I point out that it offers the advantages of being peri
odically deserted and that the black marble floor and
black granite countertops afford us a degree of camou
flage 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 over-
busy 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 pre
cious 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 de
manded.

“
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 myr
iad 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 connois
seur of fruit flavors. Then again, it could be that dread
ful pink bubblegum flavor. Whatever it was, it was tacky
enough in both senses of the words to cling to some
one's shoes. I have been tracing it upstairs, downstairs, and everywhere but my lady's chamber."

“
So why should I pollute my nose following disgust
ing 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 in
trigued now.

“
Right. I found it next to a body that was the focus of
a lot of police attention, including that of Miss Lieu
tenant 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 fe
male 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, who-
ever 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 mo
ments 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 prod
ucts 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 mo
ment, 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? Al
though 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 Pay
less loafers so appropriate to the person of Crawford
Buchanan," she says. "I would so like him to be a mur
derer. Say it is possibly so."

“
It is. He is what humans call a 'tech,' which means he likes to chase young girls. Molesters are in big dis
favor nowadays. Perhaps the murdered woman was
trying to interfere in his pursuit. They could have de
stroyed 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 morn
ing, 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."