Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit Read online

  “Mercy,” Elvis repeated, frowning down at his sheet. He probably needed reading glasses. (The real Elvis would be—my gosh!—seventyish by now.) Maybe this guy’s vision would lose focus going from the sheet to her.

  “So why are you here, my dear?” a woman with a wireless mike popped out of nowhere to ask. She was almost as astounding as Xoe Chloe. A woman past early middle age was a rarity on TV and this one was fighting age all the way: phony black-dyed hair, all Shirley Temple ringlets where Temple’s was all long, razor-cut bob. Her papery complexion emphasized baby bright blue eyes and an attitude of relentless good cheer.

  Temple shrugged. It directed attention to her shoulder with the temporary tattoo: a tail-lashing crocodile.

  “If you don’t know, lady, I don’t know. Somebody said I should. I’m blowing this gig. It’s been unreal.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Savannah was squinting at Temple, sans the glasses she obviously needed. “You look—”

  Temple cringed, expecting the dreaded word, “familiar.”

  The Ann Landers with the mike seized her arm. “This girl is not all brash insouciance. She’s got goose bumps.”

  So would anyone with those vanilla-ice-painted talons running crosswise on her forearm!

  “You can see she’s trying to make a statement,” Savannah said. “Girls these days think they have to be so hard. You can be a lady and succeed.”

  “Why?” Temple answered. “You obviously didn’t.”

  “What d-d-do you mean?” Savannah was stuttering. “Succeed or be a lady?”

  “Both. I’m outa here. I got a grunge band to run.”

  “Really?” Elvis had finally exchanged his shades for a pair of half-glasses to read her entry blank. He regarded her over their rainbow titanium rims. “I think you’re all bluster and sass, young lady. I think you’re a fake.”

  Coming from him … now Temple was considering stuttering.

  “But a sublime fake, mate,” the Australian Simon was saying. “This girl has cheek. Love that bicep croc. And the underlying sentiment: ‘Green Machine.”’

  “You would,” Aunt Kit noted. “You’re nearly breaking your neck to see what those hip-huggers are embracing from behind.”

  Temple, recognizing her advantage, shook her Cher locks and her booty at one and the same time. “Dream on, old dude.”

  At that moment, the middle-aged angel with the mike—she really did remind Temple of the good witch Glinda from The Wizard of Oz movie, all that chirpy upbeat optimism—thrust herself into Temple’s field of vision. Cameras were rolling from the sidelines.

  “I’m Beth Marble, creator of this show. And I sense, dear girl, that despite your bold front, you’re really desperate to make the cast. Isn’t that true?”

  Temple eyed the Simon-clone. “I think he’s the one into bold fronts.” Then she stared into the emcee’s impossibly sincere eyes, heard that impossibly syrupy voice, and managed to nod, gruffly. If one can nod gruffly, Xoe Chloe was the girl for the job.

  The four judges’ vastly incompatible heads were nodding together as annotated pages passed back and forth.

  Scratch “annotated.” Not a Xoe Chloe word. How about … pages scribbled with cool graffiti.

  “Do you do anything entertaining?” Elvis looked up over his granny rims to ask.

  “The lambada,” she said, “while clipping my toenails.”

  “At least she confesses to clipping them,” Savannah ventured. “That’s a start. We could really fix her look, but—”

  They all frowned at Xoe Chloe. Temple sensed she was losing her audience, particularly Simon Pieman, whose real name was Dexter Manship, and who was sitting back with his arms crossed over his designer T-shirted chest, one bicep bearing a Crocodile Hunter tattoo. No sell, the body language screamed.

  Temple thought she knew the type and what pulled his Hell’s Angel’s chain. She boogied around in a tight little circle, all the better to show off the back of her waist-high thong panties almost fully revealed by the plunging low-rise capris. Rise? Heck, they’d never heard the word.

  Temple’d seen this classless getup on a teen mall salesgirl at Frederick’s of Hollywood last week, her attention drawn to the outfit by a pair of clucking old ladies. She had proudly and promptly appropriated it for bad girl Xoe.

  Dexter was moved to chuckle. “I said she was cheeky. Let her in. We could use a juvenile delinquent.”

  Aunt Kit was frowning at Xoe’s sheet, looking like someone about to cast a dissenting vote. Temple nailed her with a quick, pleading look the instant Kit looked up, her mouth already open and the no verdict on the tip of her tongue.

  Temple watched long enough to see the surprised expression forming, then looked away, defiantly sullen. Actresses ran on empathy and prided themselves on seeing beneath the surface. Aunt Kit should be a shoo-in now, and Simon Pieman was all Xoe’s—muscles, tattoo, and libido. But the Elvis impersonator … what was he doing here, except maybe as a tribute to the Elvis-loving man who’d built the house and was now long gone. And maybe because Elvis, dead or alive, real or false, always drew a crowd.

  Temple did a series of three quick-on-her-feet cramp rolls and assumed a West Side Story stance. “Hey, Officer Elvis, you ever do any break dancing during your film career?”

  “Break dancing? I invented it in my ‘Jailhouse Rock’ routine.” He seemed surprised she had appealed to him as a dancer. No, shocked. His persona was mired in the seventies. His Vegas audiences were determinedly middle-middle-middle. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road.

  “I do the mosh pit thing,” she said. “You’d go over big today if you had one.”

  He laughed at the idea of a bunch of moshing middle-middle-middles, then glanced at the others. “I might be able to teach this one something, if she’ll listen.”

  “Why, Mr. Presley, I would always listen to you … sing.”

  “You talk tough, Xoe Chloe,” he answered sternly, “but you haven’t worked until you’ve worn your tail and toes off on a rockabilly dance floor. Are you game?”

  “Sure. I got rhythm.”

  “Thank you. Thank you verra much.”

  On that surreal closing note, the judges conferred again, checked their watches, eyed the long line behind Temple, and the anxious face of the woman named Beth Marble who held the portable mike. And was possibly the real power here.

  “In,” Dexter Manship declared for them all.

  Temple got in a mock curtsy before she allowed herself to be hustled off to the sidelines by another gofer with clipboard. She was in. In! She’d made it, purely on her hidden punk power. Her Inner Bad Girl.

  The gofer, one of the twenty-something girls in hot pink who ran errands, sat Xoe Chloe down with another sheaf of papers to sign.

  Xoe could have cared less, but Temple read every last word, appalled at giving blanket permission to be recorded in every media known to man and woman but mostly audio-video, in all forms, now and in the future. In the universe.

  She’d be ceding all rights to her own self … except that own self was purely fictitious at the moment. Luckily, the phony driver’s license Molina somehow got for her attested that “Sharon Carlson”—please! No wonder “Zoe Chloe” had been born—was nineteen and therefore free to sign away her own rights to privacy.

  She finally signed the thing with an X for Xoe and dated it.

  Miss Pretty in Pink came back and asked for a real name.

  “It is a real name. Mine.”

  “We need a normal name.”

  “I’m as normal as you are,” Temple said. Being a teenager again was more fun than the first time! You could act out and act up and everyone thought it was the norm.

  “I need a real last name,” the hot pink chick repeated.

  Temple rolled her eyes, sighed, grabbed the clipboard and wrote “Ozone” after the X.

  “X Ozone? I don’t think so.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Artist Formerly Known As Prince?”

&nbs
p; “Maybe.”

  “He used an alien scribble for years. In purple ink yet. I think it was algebra. Surely you’ve heard of algebra? Why can’t I be X Ozone? It’s better than X Chromosome.”

  Miss Pink frowned. “Chromosome. I’ve heard of that name. Somewhere. Maybe it’s Greek.”

  “See! I’m famous.”

  “Is there an apostrophe between the O and the Z?”

  That gave Temple pause. “Yes, two,” she said. “Just chill.”

  The woman put the equivalent of quote marks after the O and darted away on her pert pink patent-leather slides. She was back in about two minutes after conferring with the angel lady with the mike.

  “I’m sorry. We need a real last name. Like legal.”

  She hadn’t asked for Temple’s real last name.

  “Carlson,” Temple said, appropriating her mother’s maiden name, and her aunt’s, which Molina had somehow come up with. She added the name to the X with a flourish.

  “Carlson. Isn’t that a cavern somewhere?”

  “In the brain,” Temple said soberly. “You’re right. A cavern in the brain. We all have a Carlson cavern in the brain.”

  “I knew I learned something in science class.” Beaming, the young woman bore away all the rights to Temple’s brand-new persona.

  Shoot.

  Chapter 12

  Turnabout Foul Play

  “Stabbed through the neck,” Officer Dunhill said. He was young and looked a trifle green. “The entry point is ragged. Really vicious.”

  Molina stood there in the lukewarm early morning dark of another 24/7 Las Vegas eternity. She’d asked to be called on any teen deaths.

  The girl lay in the middle of one row, halfway between the fat painted line that delineated parking places on either side. Probably attacked just as she was leaving, or about to return to a car.

  All the cars were gone now, and the girl remained. Sprawled within an invisible chalk outline. (Police departments seldom outlined body positions nowadays; recording methods, especially video, were far too sophisticated to require the romance of old-time techniques.) The blood from the neck wound was a discreet rivulet mostly hidden by shadow. A lurid pool of pink puddled near one hand that still touched a crushed ice cream cone. Walking to the mall with a strawberry cone in her hand.

  “Where’d that come from?”

  Dunhill eyed the sickly pink splotch vaguely shaped like Australia. “Parking lot mobile vendor. My partner did the interview. She bought the cone at seven fifty.”

  “So she could have been headed for the Teen Queen auditions at eight o’clock.”

  “With a fistful of calories?” He sounded doubtful.

  “Hot night. Slim girl. I’ll have the reality show people check if any candidates didn’t show up. I assume there was ID.”

  He nodded, flipped back a couple of pages. “Tiffany Cummings.” He shook his head. “Sixteen. Wasn’t sexually molested, from the state of her clothes. That’s a blessing.”

  Molina eyed the clothes in question—the teenage uniform that drove a mother like Molina nuts for a couple of reasons: tight low-rise jeans, skimpy thin top. Too revealing, too predictable.

  Dunhill shook his head again. Obviously he hadn’t been called out on many homicides. “First response couldn’t do anything for her. Except get the names and addresses of all the owners who’d parked in the vicinity.”

  “Any hot prospects?”

  “Mostly women or women with children. All shocked to death themselves.”

  “That many women? Alone? Shopping this late, in the dark?” Molina asked.

  Dunhill shrugged. “Multitasking. The wife complains all the time that there aren’t enough hours in the day. All we’ve got here as onsite evidence is a short rubber burn and an air-conditioning puddle over there. Looks like a car stopped fast and stayed long enough to leave traces.”

  “Or to startle and then kill our vic.” Molina glanced up at the brilliant lighting. This poor girl had been “shined” like a deer in the headlights by the very technology meant to protect her.

  “They held the Teen Queen auditions here today,” she observed. “This could be another message.”

  “That’s right! I heard about the mutilated Barbie doll images. You think this is related?”

  “I think this is going to be pretty hard to explain to the press, much less the parents. I’ll ask the captain in the morning for more personnel to put on the so-called Teen Queen Castle that reality TV show is using for the next two weeks. Can you imagine a more captive population for a killer like this?”

  “For this nut? Likes offbeat weapons. Nervy enough to attack in a major public place. No, Lieutenant, I can’t. Hey!” Dunhill was looking beyond her. “Get outa here! Scat!”

  By the time she whipped around, all she spotted was a lean dark shape vanishing under a Nissan Sentra.

  “Damn cat.” Dunhill was not happy. “Sniffing at the evidence. That pinkish gunk.”

  “Probably licking at it. Lots of scavenger cats and birds around a shopping mall. Forensics will have already bagged a sample; don’t worry, officer.”

  “This is my first murder call. Then to have it be a kid like this—”

  “Kids ‘like this’ you never get used to, thank God. What did you say her name was?”

  “Tiffany—” He again checked his notebook. “Cummings.”

  “That contest inside. Find out if she was a contender.”

  “She sure isn’t now.” He slapped his notebook shut.

  Mariah was still safe at home in her messy bedroom, thank goodness, Molina thought, but tomorrow night she wouldn’t be. Her kid had made the final cut. Tomorrow she’d be in the Teen Queen Castle, hopefully safe behind a moat of cameras and the foolishness that passed for network TV these days.

  Molina returned to her Toyota, parked far enough from the crime scene to preserve evidence. Something about the crime scene bothered her but she couldn’t say just what.

  Someone caught up with her.

  “What’s going on?” A voice behind her.

  She turned. “Larry. What’re you doing here?”

  “Heard the buzz. Now that I’m off undercover, I can’t sleep nights. Did too much action then. So I listen to what’s going down on the police channels. Looks like a tragedy.” He nodded back toward the fallen girl.

  “Sixteen? Yeah, a tragedy.”

  He scanned the mall’s hulking profile, haloed by the city’s constant aurora of artificial light. “The most innocent public places are where the dirtiest deals go down. Malls. Hotel parking lots. No safe place anymore.”

  “Not news.”

  “You’ve got a kid. Is she too young for malls by herself?”

  “Young,” she conceded, recalling the recent madcap shopping expedition with the trace of a smile. “And not ‘young’ enough for my taste.”

  “That’s why you care. That’s why you came out personally.”

  Molina shook her head, leaned against her car’s front fender. “No. That wouldn’t keep me up nights. It’s a case, that’s all.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t personal?”

  “Anyone killed on my watch is personal.”

  “That’s a lot of responsibility, Lieutenant.”

  “Goes with the job title.”

  He leaned against the car beside her. He’d be sorry. She recalled that it was dusty. Who had time to visit a car wash? Multitasking.

  “I, ah, lost that sense of being personally responsible,” he said. “I miss it. I was responsible for living up to my false identity. Period. It took all my energy and all my cunning.”

  “Cunning. I think of that as a criminal attribute.”

  “Right. I needed criminal attributes.”

  “Must be hard to drop.”

  “The hours are. Let me follow you home, make sure you get there.”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t drive this town at night alone, why have a firearm or a shield?”

  “I’m trying to be a regular gu
y here.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because I think you might have a regular girl in there somewhere.”

  “Regular equals helpless?”

  “Regular equals liking company.”

  “Not now. I’m not a babysitter for insomniac narcs. I’ve got my own baby to sit.”

  He backed off, literally. “Sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have come out. I’m just not used to being out of the loop, that’s all. Guess I just wanted to bullshit about the crime scene, whatever. Talk the talk. See a … friendly face.”

  She could’ve sworn he was about to have said “pretty.”

  Unbelievable! But maybe she was doing him an injustice.

  Sensing her irritation, he shifted topics. “That guy you tried to con me out of. You know, the address the other night. I’m betting that he’s personal.”

  “If he is, then it’s really none of your business.”

  He ignored her warning. “Ex-cop. L.A. I see that’s where you came here from.”

  “I see that you’ve been digging deeper into personnel records.”

  “You did it first. Karlinski in Records mentioned it to me.”

  Molina felt her face heat up, whether from annoyance or being caught, she couldn’t tell.

  “Listen.” He came closer and lowered his voice. “Undercover cops know better than most that the lines between professional and personal can get blurred in police work. You wanted to take something from me without my knowing it. Think what a lot more you could get if you were up front about it. That Nadir guy is trouble, I can smell it, and he worries you. Accidents isn’t putting me to work 24/7, the way I used to work. I got a lotta free hours. I could help.”

  “You’re volunteering? For what?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m bored.”

  “Not what I need.”

  “And I think you could use more of a social life.”

  She pushed off her car. “What would give you that idea? That’s the last thing I want, need, have time for.”

  “Case closed.”

  “I don’t even like you.”