Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

The Persian formerly known as Sublime is more practical. “We have been taken out of solitary confinement and put into a common holding cell full of ruffians and bullies and shorthairs. You must save us!”

This is a tall order, even for Midnight Louie. Not only R & R—rescue and release—but C & C—coiffure and comb-out.

“How did this happen?” is all I can ask.

“Our mistress sought to enhance her failing career and profile,” Solange says, idly running a clawed forepaw through her bedraggled golden ruff, “by forsaking the reigning breed of the cat world—we luxuriously furred Persians—for the chic but déclassé bug-eyed, bony, nearly naked purse pooch of the dog world, the Chihuahua.”

“Dyed pink, no less,” Yvette wails. “As if my tender pink ears and pads and rose nose were not enough!”

I can testify that the formerly Divine Yvette’s witnessing is true. Her silver-gray coat was formerly so soft and lustrous that she almost looked faintly lavender in some lights.

Who would kick out a lavender cat for a faux-pink dog? Someone very mentally disturbed, but what does one expect from Miss Savannah Ashleigh, who tried to have me totally de-tommed?

Solange brushes near so I can feel the wadded lumps in her once full and smooth shiny coat. Her huge green eyes fix on mine.

“Overnight we were considered passé by all society, Louie, even Excess Hollywood. Our mistress left us here as a temporary shelter, but she never considered that we were not suited to push and shove for our places in the world. Granted our mistress was facing a fading career of her own, but she did not understand the degree to which Miss Violet was declining both in health and mind. We had no one to aid us, to even know of our plight.”

Miss Midnight Louise is pushing past my shoulder to inspect the sorry sight. “Did it ever occur to you pampered showgirls to save yourselves?”

This challenge drives She Who Was Formerly Known as Divine to spin, hissing and spitting.

“We cannot,” the Divine Yvette answers with some of her usual, charmingly adamant hauteur. “We are French.”

Chapter 27

Lies and Alibis

“Watson. Come here. I need you,” said the voice on Temple’s desk phone.

For a moment, she wasn’t sure if Sherlock Holmes or Alexander Graham Bell was calling.

However, Sherlock Holmes would never have admitted to needing anybody, not even his faithful friend and chronicler. And Alexander Graham Bell had famously called his assistant, Watson, on the first-ever phone, all right, but he’d called him “Mr. Watson.”

Besides, the voice was female.

Temple put it on speaker, an option she used to take computer notes with the phone far enough away that the keyboard’s rapid chuckling wouldn’t make the caller self-conscious. Knowing your words are being recorded in any fashion is stifling. Temple had learned that when she’d been a TV news reporter in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile she’d placed the contralto voice putting the kink in her workday. Luckily, she’d gotten a lot done in the morning.

“You ‘need’ me where, when, and why?” she asked Lieutenant C. R. Molina. “Is this, like, official?”

“Semiofficial,” came the answer.

“You’re doing a lot of that lately.”

A long pause. “Want to make something of it?”

“Dying to.”

Another pause.

“You’re acting pretty sassy,” Molina noted, “for a woman in a seriously awkward situation between her resurrected, injured ex and her impatient fiancé.”

“You’re acting pretty high-handed for a homicide lieutenant who’s been AWOL from work for dubious reasons.”

“I guess we’re both in hot water,” Molina said. “This is for Mariah.”

Temple was surprised by the almost maternal clutch of anxiety in her stomach at mention of the policewoman’s daughter. “Is she all right?”

“So far, but the mystery of that mutilated Barbie doll in her bedroom the night she ran off is unsolved. I want to recreate that night, and, Miss Temple Barr, you … were … there.”

“So were a lot of people, starting with that creep, Crawford Buchanan.”

“You’re right to despise the man. I never want to see him again unless I’m arresting him.” Molina’s voice softened. “This is a private party. Just you and me and Detective Alch. You don’t have to worry about Max Kinsella showing up. I need people with memories.”

“How did—?” Temple was glad she wasn’t holding on to a phone; she would have dropped it.

“By now, Miss Barr, you should be quaking at my preternatural grasp of your most intimate situations. Just shut up and come as you are. My place. Two hours. Put on your thinking cap.”

“I … might have an appointment.”

Temple had planned to visit Aloe Vera Drive to check on Violet’s condition and observe her hangers-on, that is, any possible-heirs and/or homicidal maniacs. Meanwhile, she had to stage-manage the momentous meeting of Matt and Max.…

When did a PI get to work her first case? Molina was about to tell her.

“An appointment?” The hard-edged cop emerged. “Now you really do.”

Silence.

Molina was gone, leaving Temple baffled. She had until 4:00 P.M. She reached over to hang up the old-fashioned desk phone and glanced at Midnight Louie, who’d soundlessly lofted atop the desk, the way cats do, even large ones.

“That night Mariah ran off was a zoo,” she told him. “People were coming and going in Molina’s house—me and Awful Crawford, Detective Morrie Alch, Dirty Larry the narc.… Molina must be nuts to think I can help her figure out how the Barbie Doll Stalker got a foot-long 3-D calling card into her daughter’s bedroom. And why is it so urgent now?”

The rogue Barbie doll was one of the loose ends from Mariah’s recent unauthorized—but excellent to her—adventure helping a disadvantaged girl win a place in the junior division of a televised dancing competition.

Temple made a face at herself and decided to think about the night Molina had ordered her to find and bring Crawford Buchanan to her house, counting on her to know where to find her fellow PR flack. In the later flurry over capturing a murderer at the dance contest, she’d forgotten that sinister object found in Mariah’s typically overfurnished teen bedroom, a Barbie doll. Of course the kid’s cop mother hadn’t, not for one moment.

Who knew what game Molina was playing now? She must suspect somebody, Temple concluded as she changed her sequined flip-flops for a pair of red patent leather pumps, locked her unit door, and went down a floor in the tiny elevator’s elegant wood-lined box, which for the first time reminded her of a vertical coffin. Hers.

In half an hour she was parking the Miata in the shade of Molina’s well-aged neighborhood near Our Lady of Guadalupe. Molina’s almost-as-well-aged Volvo was not in the driveway for once. Instead, a white Crown Vic showed Detective Alch had beaten Temple here. Or had been here even when Molina had called.

Temple sat in the Miata for an instant. She’d left the convertible’s top up for the drive. This part of town wasn’t a fun drive and wasn’t as safe for a small woman in a small car as public streets around the Strip.

She recognized a pang of guilt for the conspicuous rides she and Matt owned when a public servant drove an old beater. Considering, Temple decided Molina was more pressed for time than money. She worked her job as if it were a religious vocation, but Temple not only had a high-pressure job in a never-stopping town herself, she also had an accidental avocation so ingrained now that Molina had asked her for help.

Well, ordered. But the fact was really something. She thought of Max’s blasted memory and shivered with sympathy in the heat. Someone had to have put that mutilated Barbie doll in Mariah’s bedroom, and it hadn’t been the Barbie Doll Killer. It had been someone with one weird motive, maybe even the unknown stalker who’d entered the house before, the one Molina had always, and bitterly, believed to be Max.