Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“That leopard is mine ,” she says.

I am staggered. I have never seen Miss Midnight Louise so incensed, and, believe me, I have seen her incensed. With my deep understanding of psychology, human or feline, I suddenly realize that by feeding the starving leopard, Miss Louise has developed a maternal attachment to it. There is nothing so fierce in the females of my species as the maternal instinct. Unfortunately. True, Miss Louise was made politically correct at an early age. So call her a single mom, an adoptive mom. Obviously, her assignment with the leopard has tapped deep inner needs.

“Osiris is fine, and being fed plenty at the Animal Oasis. We just saw for ourselves.”

Beside me, the thankfully mum Yorkie duo nod until the tiny bows on their heads seem to be seen through a strobe light. They remind me of those old-time kewpie dolls with springs for necks. Only these things also stick their tongues out from time to time. Dogs! Yuck.

However, Miss Midnight Louise is not being repulsed by Golda and Groucho at the moment. She is being repulsed by me.

“I am sorry,” I say humbly. “The very next time it is necessary to take a long, uncertain arduous trek out to the desert, I will make sure that you and no one else accompanies me.”

“I bet,” she jeers. She shifts her weight from one slim black foreleg to the other, and deigns to curl her train around her toes. “So what did you learn?”

I sit down and fold my mitts into each other.

“The Yorkshire constabulary were actually useful. When we arrived at the ranch, we discovered Osiris had been moved.”

“Moved?”

“But luckily, I had a pair of noses along that can cling to the desert floor like twin Hoovers. And where they led me was most interesting.”

Chapter 38

Murder Wears a New Face

The outer office tabletops were buried by Paris Vogue, Elle , and Vanity Fair . Also with discreetly faceless bound folders filled with disgusting before and glorious after photos.

Temple spent ten minutes filling out a clipboard with her medical history. Then she was invited into an inner office for an interview with a nurse.

The walls were filled with photos of women who had been transformed by surgery into plastic perfection. Although all were admirably slender, smooth, and gorgeous, none were as extreme as Leonora.

The nurse was a brusquely blowsy woman, so unlike an advertisement for Dr. Mendel’s procedures that you instinctively trusted her. She must be good to look like this and work here without undergoing continual reconstruction. Forty unneeded pounds pushed the buttons on her bodice to the breaking point. Her hair was a strawberry blond frizzle too undisciplined to be anything but natural, and good humor radiated from her unperfected features.

“How did you hear about us?” she asked.

This was better than a Broadway opening. Temple walked right through and to center stage.

“Leonora. Leonora Van Burkleo recommended you. Well, she recommended Dr. Mendel. Very, very highly.”

The nurse’s warm expression did not so much chill as grow sober.

“Her cheekbones,” Temple explained, pointing at her undistinguished pair. “I would die to have cheekbones like that.”

“She almost did,” the nurse muttered as she jotted something down on Temple’s information sheet.

“I beg your pardon? Oh. You mean she was in an accident and had to be reconstructed?”

“Yeah. Household accident.” Her mouth twisted.

“How terrible! Well, she didn’t mention anything to me. Is that why her new look is so exotic? She needed a lot of reconstructive work?”

“Dr. Mendel reconstructed her whole face.”

“And she didn’t specifically ask for the, ah, feline look?”

The nurse laughed bitterly. “Old Van Burkleo might say she asked for it.” Her at-first friendly eyes were blinking nervously. Her entire plump figure radiated throttled fury.

Temple, bewildered, stumbled on conversationally. “It must have been a very serious fall.”

“Several.” The woman’s haystack of hair hid her face as she bent over the papers.

What was she implying? Leonora had fallen down, repeatedly. Drugs? A drinking problem? One or the other so severe that she required full-face plastic surgery? Had asked for it?

“Look, honey.” The nurse looked up, her eyes glaring. “I don’t want you breathing a word of this to Mrs. Van Burkleo or Dr. Mendel. It’s none of our business. But I can’t have you…Listen. Your cheekbones are fine. You don’t need implants. You don’t need anything. Get out of here. And just be glad you’re not that poor, poor woman.”

“Leonora? But she’s rich and, and—”

“You don’t want to look like her, hon, even just in the cheekbones. Everything that’s there today is the only thing modern surgery could do to repair years of battering. If she wants to make a fashion statement out of mutilation, I guess it reasserts some sense of pride, but I can’t let innocents come in here wanting to copycat a tragedy. Young people today. Be happy with who and how you are!”

The woman handed Temple’s info sheet back to her and walked out of the consultation room.

Temple sat there stunned.

Staggered.

Domestic abuse. She remembered suddenly another face, one that had been on the TV news when she was a kid: Heidi…no, Hedda. Nussbaum. That terrible case where that demented abusive lawyer had killed an adopted little girl. Hedda Nussbaum was the woman who had lived with him. Temple’s mind still carried the before-and-after news photos of Hedda, how over the years her features had been pounded like veal scallopini until they were blunter and more swollen than any old-time prizefighter’s mug. Just like Leonora’s ersatz big-cat look.

This put a whole new complexion on the case.

Leonora Van Burkleo had motive one for murder, even if you were tempted to call it justifiable homicide.

Chapter 39

Collusion Course

For the first time in her life, Carmen lived up to her name in the mirror.

For the first time in her life, C. R. Molina really looked at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t realized until now that she’d avoided that for as long as she could remember. The only thing she ever saw were her father’s blue eyes.

Never had seen the father, just the eyes.

Damn his eyes.

But now his eyes were gone. For the first time in her life she was a brown-haired, brown-eyed Latina. With this one, fresh glance she had seen reflected an entirely different life for herself.

So a glance had become a stare, the stare a plunge into the past. Always standing out, bearing the Anglo brand from her earliest play days in the barrio. “ Gringa ,” the others had called her. Later when they got older, their taunts grew more sophisticated. And then the boys had begun. “ Putona ,” they’d called her then. Whore, like her mother must be to have produced a blue-eyed child.

Only her. The seven children of her mother’s second marriage were all brown/brown, as the driver’s licenses read. Only she was brown/blue. Sometimes black and blue from defending herself and her mother’s honor.

Everything she was had been shaped by those damn blue eyes.

She eyed her new image with envy in the mirror. Finally she looked consistent. Even her father’s height, a second birth-curse bestowed on the daughter he’d never lived to see, seemed acceptable when her eyes were brown.

Amazing what a difference that one color correction made, culturally, psychologically.

And to think she owed it all to Max Kinsella.

In the mirror, her upper lip curled at the thought. She began to see and feel the downside of her disguise. Calling these contact lenses “soft” seemed an understatement. She’d had to cram the viscous floppy shapes into each eye, which went against every admonition to avoid touching and injuring an eye she’d heard in childhood.