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Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit
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For my oldest friend, Camille Greicar,
inheritor of my Nancy Drew collection
(I thought I’d outgrown them but apparently not),
with fond memories of our childhood summers
in Pisek, North Dakota
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Chapter 1 - Hello Kitty
Chapter 2 - Spooks
Chapter 3 - Swinging for It
Chapter 4 - Male Call
Chapter 5 - Mail Call
Chapter 6 - Undercover Chick
Chapter 7 - Bait Boy
Chapter 8 - Separate Lies: The Sequel
Chapter 9 - Bling-Bling Babies
Chapter 10 - Louie Goes Ape
Chapter 11 - Good Golly, Miss Goth Girl
Chapter 12 - Turnabout Foul Play
Chapter 13 - Macho Nachos
Chapter 14 - Bad Daddy
Chapter 15 - Sweet Tooth
Chapter 16 - Monday Morning Coming Down
Chapter 17 - Mr. Chaperon
Chapter 18 - Pretty Putrid in Pink
Chapter 19 - Chicklets
Chapter 20 - Whipped Scream
Chapter 21 - Hanky Panky
Chapter 22 - A Meeting of Minds
Chapter 23 - Exercised to Death
Chapter 24 - Great Big Beautiful Doll
Chapter 25 - Close Encounters of the Weird Kind
Chapter 26 - Midnight Attack
Chapter 27 - Midnight Assignation
Chapter 28 - Contingency Plan
Chapter 29 - Home Sweet Harassment
Chapter 30 - The Extent of the Law
Chapter 31 - Kissing Cousins
Chapter 32 - The Wig Is Up
Chapter 33 - Upping the Auntie
Chapter 34 - Two-Faced
Chapter 35 - Diet of Worms
Chapter 36 - Diet Drinks
Chapter 37 - American Tragedy
Chapter 38 - North into Nowhere
Chapter 39 - Awful Unlawful
Chapter 40 - American Idle
Chapter 41 - Wolfram and Heart
Chapter 42 - Feline Shepherd
Chapter 43 - In Old Cold Type
Chapter 44 - Old Tyme Revival
Chapter 45 - Past Tense
Chapter 46 - Closet Encounter of the Third Kind
Chapter 47 - Filing Their Nails
Chapter 48 - Recipe for Murder
Chapter 49 - Conscentual Adults
Chapter 50 - A Hasty Hand
Chapter 51 - Heartfelt and Red-Handed
Chapter 52 - Dress for Success
Chapter 53 - Tailings
Chapter 54 - No Glimpse of Stocking
Chapter 55 - Shoe Biz
Chapter 56 - As Blind as Bast
Chapter 57 - The Past Is Prologue
Chapter 58 - Showdown
Chapter 59 - An Invitation She Can’t Refuse
Chapter 60 - Caught in the Crossfire
Chapter 61 - The World His Oyster
Previously in - Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …
By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates - MYSTERY
PRAISE FOR CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS
Tailpiece - Midnight Louie, Paterfamilias
Tailpiece - Carole Nelson Douglas Makes Room for Daddy
Cat in a Quicksilver Caper
Notes
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Hello Kitty
Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s desk hosted two very different images.
One was a glossy 11-by-17-inch poster of a Barbie-doll-cute teen girl tricked out in industrial-strength amounts of hot pink.
The other was the same image, cut into jagged pieces that had been grafted onto photographed body parts of an actual Barbie doll.
The phrase “Teen Idol” on the first poster had morphed into “Twisted Sister,” with a welter of blood-red spatters, on the second one.
“Sick,” Molina said, unnecessarily.
They all stood gazing down on the twisted twin posters, neither of which was exactly wholesome. One was merely Extreme Fashion. The other had been refashioned into something freakishly violent.
“Being the mother of a newly teenaged daughter, finding this stuff strewn around a shopping mall parking lot makes me shudder,” Molina said. “The slashed poster reminds me that some things are scarier than adolescent hormones.”
“Mariah’s thirteen already?” Detective Morrie Alch asked, surprised. He was comfortably into his mid-fifties and his lone daughter was grown, gone, and a mother herself.
How Molina envied him.
“Just turned,” she said. “A month ago. I’m already considering a barbed-wire perimeter around the house. This is so sick.”
“The Teen Idol concept,” Detective Merry Su asked, “or the threatening poster?”
“Both.” Molina shook her head. “So tell me about this Teen Idol thing.”
“Reality TV hits Las Vegas,” Su said. A petite, twenty-something, second-generation Asian American, Su looked ready to compete for a teen title herself.
“Can’t prove it by me,” Molina answered. “We’ve been hosting reality TV since the New Millennium Hotel went up five years ago.”
“It’s a quest to name a ‘Tween and Teen Queen,” Alch said.
“Two age groups, thirteen to fifteen and sixteen to nineteen,” Su said.
“Got it. Teens-in-training and the full-media deal. Is this a singing competition?”
Being a closet vocalist herself, Molina had actually caught a few episodes of American Idol. She found the concept exploitive of the pathetic wannabes every art form attracts and a mockery of true talent by letting the public select winners for emotional reasons. Look who they felt most sorry for.
“More than that: talent of any kind, made-over looks and improved attitude.” Su was always eager to overexplain. “This is the triathlon of reality shows.”
Alch nodded at the unadulterated poster. “Yup. This girl here looks real athletic, all right. I bet it challenges her biceps to load on that amount of mascara and lip-liner every day.”
“‘Lip-liner?’” Molina called him on it. “Still keeping up with the girly stuff, Morrie, even with the daughter long gone?”
“You haven’t hit the bustier stage in your house, I bet. Hold on to your Kevlar vest.”
Molina chuckled, imagining some busty contestant wearing a bulletproof vest in a glamour roll call on TV. Whoa. Maybe that would have a perverse attraction.
She tapped her forefinger on the oversize plastic bag encasing the altered poster, protecting it for forensic examination.
“We’ve got … what? Dozens of teenage girl competitors from around the country pouring into a Las Vegas shopping mall in their Hello Kitty finery for auditions—and one sick puppy already announcing that he’s out there waiting?”
“That’s about it,” Alch said. “No fingerprints. No way to trace the color copier to a local Kinko’s.”
“Kinko’s are us,” Su said.
“No kidding.” Molina frowned. “You know the routine. Keep it quiet, keep
an eye on the audition event. If we’re lucky, the uniforms will find him before this ridiculous show launches. When?”
“This week’s local auditions finish the selection process,” Su said. “Then they narrow the field down to twenty-eight finalists in the two age groups and seclude them all in a foreclosed mansion on the West Side. For two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” Molina didn’t like the wide window of opportunity that much time afforded a pervert with a publicity addiction. “This could be the work of a kook as harmless as Aunt Agatha’s elderberry wine. Or not. Keep on it.”
Molina was still at her desk, with a different wallpaper of paperwork covering it, at seven thirty that evening when someone knocked on her ajar door.
No one knocked in a crimes-against-persons unit. She looked up—glared—from her paperwork. As the only woman supervisor, she never let down her guard.
A man entered as if he owned the joint.
Brown/brown. Five ten or eleven. A stranger who acted way too at home on this turf. On her turf. In her hard-won private office.
“Yes?”
“Working late?”
“Always.” She waited. His clothes were casual but hip: blue jeans, black silk-blend tee, khaki linen jacket, big diver’s watch face full of specialty minidials, and a sleek gold bracelet with a subtle air of South American drug lord. Couldn’t see his shoes. Too bad. A man’s shoes told as much about him as a woman’s.
“You don’t recognize me.” He sat in the single hard-shelled chair in front of her desk, meant to discourage loiterers.
Recognize? No. He was way too hip for what usually showed up in police facilities, except for a five o’clock shadow too faint to be anything but a trendy shaving technique.
“You’ll have to excuse me—” she began sardonically, still searching her memory banks.
“I consider that high praise.”
“That you’ll have to excuse me?”
“That you don’t recognize me in civvies.”
Okay. She ran a mental roster of uniforms, and came up blank. This was beginning to get annoying.
“I’m heading out,” she informed him, slamming her desk drawers shut, picking up the black leather hobo bag she toted to and from work and nowhere out on the job.
“How about a drink en route?”
“How about an ID? And … no.”
He laughed then. “You’re usually onto this stuff. Tough case on your desk?”
“They’re all tough. What’s your name?”
“You really don’t recognize me?”
He cocked his head, and then she had him.
“Dirty Larry?”
“All cleaned up.”
“Gone Chamber of Commerce! To what do I owe—?”
“How about a drink on the way home? Some noncop bar.”
“Why?”
“Personal police business.”
She didn’t like the way he drawled that out but checked her watch. Mariah had stayed after school tonight. Sock-hop committee at another student’s house. Her baby daughter! Thinking about dancing with wolves. All harmless teenybopper stuff, hopefully. Staying at the Ruizes’ for dinner until eight or so.
Dirty Larry, the Mr. Clean edition, waited. He watched her with an amusement that hinted he knew the pushes and pulls of her private life.
Bastard! Her vehemence, unjust, pulled her back from the brink. This was a colleague, after all. An undercover narc. Maybe he had something for her. He’d be used to private rendezvous in public places.
“Okay. Five minutes?”
He nodded, got up, and ebbed into the hall. She speed-dialed the Ruizes and got a commitment that they’d keep Mariah until ten, just in case.
Chapter 2
Spooks
In a city built on urban fantasy hotels with sprawls that rivaled the King Ranch, the Palms bucked the hotel-casino trend and lived up to its name. It was an off-Strip cylinder of gilded construction, like a tower of giant golden coins.
“I am not dressed for this,” Molina said, meeting Dirty Larry at the Palms’s side entrance, as agreed, their separate vehicles parked in whatever spot could be found.
“What are you dressed for?” He had an annoying knack for taking her simplest remark as a springboard for some deeper meaning. Dirty Larry the Existentialist?
“A crime scene,” she said. “You going to deliver?”
“Not here. Not now. I’m off undercover.” He looked around. “It’s kinda nice to be escorted by an obvious cop. Like having a bodyguard.”
“I’m that obvious?”
“Like you say, you’re not dressed for the Palms.”
“A psychologist could speculate that you want to get me off my own turf, at a disadvantage.”
“Off your turf, right. Is that really a disadvantage?”
She shrugged and turned for the door, moving into a stream of tourists in tropical print shorts and shirts.
She knew what she was and she knew what she wore: low-heeled oxfords. Espresso-brown pantsuit. Oxford shirt, faintest baby blue, open at the collar. Semiautomatic in a paddle holster at the small of her back, steel blue. Talk about fashion coordination. Supermodels had nothing on a modern female cop.
They entered the usual jam-packed, ultra-air-conditioned smokehouse of a Vegas casino, an atmosphere lit by blinking slot machines that broadcast bling-bling bluster and the clatter of coins spilling into metal troughs.
In the craps area, Larry stopped to schmooze a pit boss who passed him some VIP comps. Comps papered the town, if you knew who to ask. The passes sent them to the head of a line that had formed even though the Ghost Bar had just opened, then onto an express elevator. Eerily, once aboard, all sound suddenly stopped, the casino’s endless clatter replaced by the customary silence of half-pickled strangers packed together like kippered herrings in a tin.
The Ghost Bar perched fifty-five stories above all the hustle, a tourist attraction of the first water. Three of the four walls were glass and the view was jaw-dropping. Inside, the place was a 2001: A Space Odyssey sixties wet dream of blue neon, streamlined silver seating pieces, and lime green accents. Icy in color and exclusive in attitude.
Molina took it all in with the same cool distance she used at crime scenes. She checked out the VIP clientele already seated as well as the ambiance and spotted several vaguely familiar faces. It took a moment to realize that they were stars, actors and singers, not escapees from Most Wanted lists. Odd, the jolt of false familiarity you could get from a household face.
“What do you think of the place?” he asked.
“Playboy, Penthouse, circa nineteen sixty-five.”
“You talking the magazines or improper pronouns?”
“Both.”
Posh or Mosh the Spice Girl wannabe did the waitress dip to lay two cocktail napkins on their sleek tabletop. Bowing to the power of the chichi, Molina surprised Dirty Larry, and herself, by ordering a pepper vodka martini. Larry ordered something called a Burning Bush.
Molina let her lifted eyebrows do the talking.
“Black Bush whiskey with peach, lime, crème de cassis, and a dash of cranberry juice for health.”
“Gack,” she said.
“It lives up to its name on the tastebuds. You can try a sip.”
He nodded at the twelve-foot-high glass walls.
“On the balcony, you can stand on a Plexiglas rectangle and look down fifty-five stories, if heights don’t make you nervous.”
Molina stood, uncoiling her own impressive height, almost six feet. “Shall we dance?”
Seconds later they balanced on the ghostly plastic platform over nothing. A rectangle of aquamarine sparkled four thousand feet below, almost a mile, overrun by what looked like small brown bugs.
“The Skin Pool Lounge,” he said.
“Not a glamorous name but a literal one?”
“Skinny dipping is only on Tuesday nights.”
Tuesday was the weakest night for customers, hence flashing the flesh. “Only i
n Las Vegas.”
They savored the glittering swath of the Strip’s massive hotels, laid out like jewels on black velvet or, more apropos to their profession, a glitter-dusted body on an autopsy table.
Take that, T. S. Eliot, Molina thought. You and your “night anaesthetized like a patient on a table.”
“Shamelessly hokey but a must-see,” Larry said.
“Hokey should be shameless. I like it. That surprise you?”
“Yes and no. I’ve been to the Blue Dahlia. That’s shamelessly hokey too.”
She drew a breath, ready to retort, defend, deny. Instead she shrugged. “So?”
“So let’s sit down and talk shop.”
“Strange place for that.”
Their cocktails were waiting in glassware as kooky as the retro-modern furniture. The classic triangular bowl of Molina’s martini glass was supported by an off-center curve of crystal. His drink was served in a rectilinear tower of modernist glass.
He lifted it, not for a toast, but to offer a taste.
This was a way-too-early intimacy but Molina took him up on it. Dirty Larry had a challenging edge but she could match it. The bizarre ingredients produced a sizzling effect that explained the cheeky name that referenced both the religious and the obscene.
“So what was the Blue Dahlia crack for?” Molina asked after rinsing her palette with a swallow of clean, sharp vodka martini.
“Odd you should use that expression. Dirty Larry did a cocaine deal there once.”
Molina frowned. He tended to refer to his undercover persona in the third person. Weird.
“A one-off,” he went on.”Nothing habitual. The client had a thing for you.”
“Oh, great.”
“People get their kicks where they can.”
“And here I think I’m singing for dedicated vintage music lovers. Listen—”
“It’s okay. My lips are sealed. Your pseudonymous singing habit is safe. Everything I do undercover is off the record unless it involves criminal charges.”
“You’re not undercover now.”
“I take … vacations. R and R. It messes your mind to play an undercover role too long. I’m doing accident investigations for a while.”
“From drug traffic to traffic? Isn’t that a bit tame?”
He nodded. “That’s the idea. Nice quiet beat. After the fact. Fascinating, really. The evidence of a crash and burn but nobody there to threaten you or haunt you. Only evidence. Nice inert, cool evidence.”