Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

He clicks the cell phone dark. “That was my head of operations, Hank Buck. He reports that Mariah has been registered as EK’s roommate, but all four competing girls and their mothers—or mini-manager in EK’s case—are sharing a suite with multiple bedrooms, like this one.”

“Why did you hang up?” Miss Carmina Carmen demands. “I want a full report on Mariah’s setup in the contest. Where she will be when.”

“I will get you a schedule, but she is completely safe with the teen contenders, Carmen,” Rafi, aka Raphael, says. “The hotel has provided high security for all of the girls. Trust me.”

Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina, now back in action, does not think so, and says exactly what she does think, which resembles the third degree.

“Just who is chaperoning the contenders? What is the security level? Mariah should be up here with us for complete safety.”

Mr. Rafi is staring at Miss Carmen with blank disbelief. “Did you not hear me? She is folded in with the junior competitors. You would jerk her away from her new friends and the excitement and responsibility of helping EK through the competition?”

“Mariah ran away. She took a terrible risk. She deceived her custodial parent and took advantage of—”

“Took advantage of what?” Rafi asked, as quick as I to notice that Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has suddenly gone quiet and pale, as if remembering something she should not say.

“Took, um, ad-advantage of my being distracted by a very de-demanding job,” she finished.

By now my Miss Temple is also staring at the stuttering lieutenant, and frowning.

“You really want to do that?” Rafi asks. “Take away what she has helped someone else earn, another kid’s dream? Right on the brink of it maybe coming true?”

“The odds against EK winning are huge.”

“But they are the odds Mariah helped her earn.”

“She took a horrible risk and needs to pay a major price.”

“Yes, but I am sure you can think up a big-time one after the competition is over. Today is Saturday and the competition only runs through the end of the week, Carmen. We are assigned this duty, and Temple and her cat are on their own time.”

“But this charade we have set up—”

“Will allow us to see our daughter in action without inhibiting her.”

“She has been a willful, foolish child. She should not be rewarded.”

“You can ground her for six months.”

Miss Temple piped up, “And keep her from going to the fall father-daughter dance she was so hot on attending.”

My Miss Temple does not often “innocently” lob verbal hand grenades into a situation, but she did just then. I sit back with her to watch the fireworks coming up.

Rafi caught it on the first toss. “Father-daughter dance? That’s right. Let us discuss this. Mariah is eager to go?”

“Sure. It would be her first dress-up formal event. She is all hot to have Matt Devine do the honors.”

“He is hardly a friend of the family, is he?”

“He is friendly to us.”

“And,” Temple put in helpfully, “Mariah thinks that he is hot.”

Rafi tossed the figurative hand grenade to the ceiling. “An ex-priest? A childless, never-married ex-priest? Escorting my daughter to a father-daughter dance? What is wrong with someone really paternal, like Detective Alch?”

“I suggested that from the first,” Miss Carmen says nervously.

Between them, Miss Temple and Mr. Rafi have her squirming, and both are enjoying it for what I assume are vastly different reasons.

Miss Carmina Carmen goes on. “Mariah rejected Alch. She does not have a truly grounded idea of what a father figure is. She can be amazingly mature one moment and hopelessly shallow the next. As for the father-daughter dance, it is not some major emotional crisis for her. She just wants to wow the other girls with an older more glamorous escort.”

Rafi shrugs and folds his arms across his chest. “You are not canceling this event on her. She will just have to wow them with me.”

“I had said I might be ready to broach Mariah with the subject of you in good time. Not now!”

“This dance is not for a few months. Time enough to ‘broach’ a lot of things. I may not be Golden Boy, but I am her real father and I could ‘wow’ the other girls better than Uncle Morrie.”

I eye Mr. Rafi Nadir. This guy has nerve. Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina is all bristling officer again, her own arms folded tight across her stomach, but also under her breasts, which is a somewhat inflammatory posture to take with exes.

Thing is, for whatever reason, Mr. Rafi Nadir has tightened and tautened and taken the upper hand since slinking into Vegas a loser a few months ago, and his dark looks might indeed cause a feminine heart to flutter, not that Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has either of those two attributes in high supply, femininity or heart.

But something is making her face flush a deep, carmine-red, fury or fever.

My Miss Temple has dropped her Zoe Chloe posture to stand there gracelessly gaping, which is so unlike her.

“This is not, ” the policewoman declares, “the place or the time to discuss Mariah’s parental custody arrangements.”

“This is the exact right time,” Rafi pushes. “You can discipline Mariah however you think is necessary, but it should not affect what she does next fall, or my right to continue building rapport with her. I get what she wants, even if you have forgotten what it ever was to want anything.”

The silence in the room is long and deep enough to keep a tiger litter sleeping peacefully. I eye my Miss Temple, who is biting her lip and holding her breath and crossing her fingers, all at once.

Our not-so-favorite favorite homicide lieutenant takes a deep, shocked breath, which suddenly doubles her over. Rafi reaches a hand out to her upper arm to steady her, but she twists violently away, her next breath ending like a bellows with a little puff of shock. Her face is clown-white pale.

Rafi Nadir is pretty shocked too. “You are not just being the usual hard-ass,” he says as if he is just working this out while we eavesdrop. “You are . . . in physical pain. You are hurt.”

“Nonsense,” she says so emphatically that we all know it is not nonsense.

“You have been wounded,” Rafi diagnoses with narrowed eyes. “A triplicate form desk jockey. How? Why?”

“None of your business,” she tells him, letting her fierce gaze pass over him to freeze Miss Temple in a burgeoning comment she swallows like a double wad of bubble gum.

“I am not the focus of this insane rescue effort,” Molina spits out. “Mariah is. As you say, she is safe now. And we are stuck in these loony undercover personas babysitting a two-bit dance competition getting flaky death threats to see that she stays that way. I’m not crazy about her rooming elsewhere, but you proved that cutting a kid from the herd in a situation like this would be considered cruel and unusual punishment by said kid. Your people had better keep a damn serious eye on them all.”

She turns and vanishes behind the double doors to her bedroom suite, leaving us three twitching whiskers and blinking eyes. At least I am the only one able to whisker-twitch.

“Wow,” Miss Temple says to Mr. Rafi. “You pushed more buttons than I knew she had.”

“Right now,” he answers, “if I had any stake in anything, I would be more worried about her than her daughter.”

His cell phone rings and he claps it to an ear as hard as a sparring partner might hit it. Ouch!

I cannot tell you how sick, ticked, and piqued I am about cell phones. These miserable little devices are like a medieval infestation of rats. They breed everywhere. People are entirely at their beck and call, and run shrieking to cuddle them every time they squeal. And they have a thousand annoying voices, some famous. This fad to have unique “ring tones” is a plague on humanity. Anyone with sensitive hearing is assaulted daily, and also left out of the loop watching folks speak loudly as they wander down the street. Time was, people behaved that way, they were put in custody “for observation.”