Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

“It’s a legitimate question,” Temple insisted. “This guy is a local. The only thing vaguely aggressive Matt did since coming to town was to track down his stepfather. So this Hank Buck was a friend of that scumball? Really? I can’t believe that. Cliff Effinger didn’t have any friends. Whoever tied him to the bow of the pirate ship at the Treasure Island so he drowned could not have been Matt. If that was anything, it was a hit.

“And another thing,” Temple added. “What about the Barbie Doll Killer? Could Hank Buck be it?”

“I doubt it,” Molina said. “I can’t deal with that issue here and now, but I have a nasty suspicion that I’m gonna get on ASAP. Right now why Buck wanted to kill Matt is a priority.

“My detectives are even now breaking down Buck’s bio like he was Lee Harvey Oswald,” Molina said. “They’re going to his neighbors, his car mechanic, anyone. If there’s a connection to Matt, they’ll find it. Two attempts at murder must have a powerful motive behind them.” She looked over her shoulder to Mariah’s father. “He was one of yours.”

Rafi shook his head. “He was one of yours first. That was on his application that my people pulled. He was hired here before I was, but before that he was on the force. We found no record of dishonorable discharge. Your detectives are trying to find out why he quit the force. He was seeing the department psychologist, but those records are protected.”

“Not for long. Either way,” Molina said, “he was one bad cop, public or private. Why’d he target this event and these people?”

“That’s sure what I wonder,” a new voice said.

They all turned, shocked to see that Matt had joined them, and doubly shocked by the sight of his current tough-guy tango image.

“I finally escaped my fans,” he said. “I want to know why this guy almost killed me and Temple. I don’t see a reason.”

“I don’t see it, either,” Rafi admitted. “It’d make more sense if one of the celebrity dancers who was a victim of dirty tricks was the murder target. I can see it being Motha Jonz. Buck could have been hired to off her by the gangsta rappers, say, whoever Motha Jonz was involved with at the time of the Vegas shoot-out. I could see using the dance show to do that.”

“Hey,” Temple said. “Buck didn’t have to be hired. Wasn’t a teenager shot and killed during the gunplay on the Strip? I need my laptop. I could look that and all the other celebrity ‘sins’ right up. There are hundreds of sites on stuff like that.”

Rafi had a cell phone to his ear. “Nadir here. Collect a hot pink laptop from the—?”

He handed Temple the phone and she described it and told the guard where in the central bedroom it was. Then Rafi took back the phone and said he wanted the laptop in the dancing show greenroom “yesterday.”

“‘Hot pink’?” Molina mocked. “Can you never stop being girly?”

Matt pulled Temple close to his leather-clad side. “I don’t ever want her to.”

“You see the benefits,” Temple purred, watching Molina look away and shake her head. Temple straightened up and got back to business.

“Maybe that messenger boy shot in the rap star shoot-out was a relative of Buck’s,” she said.

“But Buck didn’t try to kill Motha Jonz,” Matt said. “Rafi, your gangsta rap slaying idea is interesting. Exchanging live ammo for blanks was the most dangerous dirty trick, but Motha Jonz was the shooter. The Cloaked Conjuror and José were more in danger from her.”

Temple had sat on an empty guard’s chair and now looked up and nodded.

“She might have gotten a police charge out of the incident,” Temple said. “That would have hurt her career even more than it has been. And she might have been found guilty and convicted.”

“What about all those other dirty tricks?” Matt wondered. “What was the point?”

“Obvious.” Molina was brusque. “Diversions to mask that you were a target, the target. I don’t know if he intended the Cloaked Conjuror to be injured by Motha Jonz’s loaded gun, but the fact that he did get hurt got us police thinking the whole thing might be a follow-through on the continual death threats he gets.”

“There must have been more to it,” Matt insisted. “We’re missing something.”

“What about the shoe incidents?” Temple asked.

“You would get on the shoes,” Molina said, rolling her eyes. “They were the most minor ‘accidents.’ At worst, Olivia could have twisted her ankle. As it was, her dancing through the problem and CC upholding her only enhanced her ratings with the audience. And you told me your nosy cat pretty much targeted very early on that the stage mother dosed her own daughter’s shoes with the pepper spray for the same reason—audience sympathy and votes.”

Molina eyed Rafi. “Now do you understand why I’m so set against Mariah getting into the kid performer stuff?”

“Wait a minute.” Temple sat up straighter. “I’m getting something. I’m seeing something.”

“So now you’re psychic?” Molina said.

“No, I’m . . . I don’t see how it relates to Hank Buck, that’s all. But, what you said: the onstage ‘accidents’ raised the victim’s scores. They got a sympathy vote. Olivia’s heel was first and the rating went up. That inspired Yvonne Smith to make Sou-Sou an underdog with another, far more dramatic shoe problem. And it worked. Her daughter’s score went up.”

Rafi was leaning forward, elbows on knees. “That’s right. It snowballed. Salter was poisoned, Wandawoman drugged, CC shot, and Matt was personally attacked by someone in Juarez’s guise. That had to be Hank, but could Sou-Sou’s mother have set up the other incidents to disguise the fact that her daughter’s problem was staged? And then there’s Temple’s idea. Maybe somebody in the competition or around the competition is a relative of the people these celebrities hurt. I mean, look at them. They’re quite a crew. In a way what happened to them fit their crimes.”

Matt caught his drift and kept the ball rolling. “Glory B. was the first one to have an almost accident even before the first show. She fell on the jungle gym and Danny Dove thought it had been tampered with. She got a DUI citation for an accident a few months ago, and a little girl has serious leg injuries.”

“I just Googled Glory B. online to get the facts straight,” Temple said. “There’ll probably be a huge settlement for the family of the girl. I don’t find anything obviously bad about Olivia,” Temple said, “but Keith Salter was all over the entertainment gossip shows for some cases of food poisoning at his restaurant in Aspen. E. coli. It was especially bad. A toddler died. No one was found derelict, but the media loved broadcasting the problem because Salter had raked so many other chefs over the coals on his Butcher’s Holler show.”

Molina spoke. “The hospital said there was no way to ever tell if his poisoning had been accidental, or intentional.”

“Wandawoman being drugged in the pasodoble?” Matt asked.

“Oh, my gosh,” Temple said, “that could have been done to make you look bad too. I’ll look her up.”

Molina shook her head. “Who needs detectives anymore? Everything is online.”

“And it stays there forever,” Temple said. “Sometimes good, sometimes bad.”

“The ‘bad’ refers to Zoe Chloe, right?”

Temple, tapping away on her laptop keyboard, shrugged at Molina. “Zoe Chloe has her uses. I just wish I could figure a way to earn money off of her popularity.”

“Everybody wants to earn money these days, especially these annoying celebrities behaving badly,” Molina noted.