Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

She wasn’t used to a fatherly gaze. Her real father had vanished before she could remember him, a piece of history that labeled her mother’s shame. Pregnant by a blue-eyed Anglo. So she made up for it by marrying José Quintera and bore him seven black-olive-eyed ninos and ninas . Carmen babysat her stepbrothers and sisters all through her school years, and then she shocked everyone by getting a junior college law enforcement degree and turning cop.

And by keeping her mother’s surname. After all that kid sitting, she never intended to have any of her own, church ban on birth control or not. Then Rafi Nadir had pierced that life plan • with a pin though her diaphragm. Or not. Maybe he wasn’t lying. Either way: exit Carmen and, later, enter Mariah. Even her family didn’t know about Mariah. She’d thought it was safer that way. Had she been fleeing a ghost, in L.A., and chasing a ghost here in Vegas?

Her mother had never talked to her about her father. A shame and failure better forgotten. Like Rafi Nadir. Like mother, like daughter.

She’d made sure to spare Mariah the humiliation of a wayward father, or an indifferent stepfather. Matt had suffered from one of those stepfathers, unfortunately not indifferent, just mean and violent.

Molina shuddered and took another slug of scotch. She may have been wrong about Rafi’s motives, but he still wasn’t a candidate for Father of the Year.

The pain inside was getting more insistent than the pain outside.

Morrie put a hand on her shoulder.

“You just rest, kid.” He was only ten or eleven years older than she was. How’d she end up outranking him? He was a good cop, a better detective, and a great human being. Burned past him with ambition, that was how. Had a reverse edge, like Rafi claimed. Women barred for so many years, then suddenly becoming a politically correct carnation in the PD’s buttonhole.

Pain and—Dios!—helplessness made you think and rethink things. People. Events. Your life.

“I’ll handle the Crystal Phoenix case,” Morrie was saying. “I think we’ve got a couple leads to look at if Su doesn’t get too eager and tip our hand.”

Molina nodded.

“I’ll take you home now and get you settled. I’ll be looking in on you, so lay off those unauthorized B and Es and keep Dirty Larry out of your laundry for a while.”

She was nodding, agreeing, nodding off.

Morrie took the glass from her hand because it was weighing her arm down to the floor and dribbling yellow liquid like a two-year-old on the clean white tile bathroom floor. At least she wasn’t dribbling blood anymore.

And thank God Mariah was on a three-day school trip to the Grand Canyon. There was a Grand Canyon in her gut. She’d lied to Morrie. Shouldn’t have. Lying got to be a habit.

And the next thing she knew, she was staring at her bedroom ceiling, gently lit by the time from the bedside clock floating in red numbers on the ceiling.

Twelve-oh-one.

Thing was, was it twelve o’clock high, or twelve o’clock low?

Chapter 50

A Paler Shade of Pink

Temple had decided it was time to take the pink satin gloves off.

First, she’d been diverted in the store area from looking for Oleta’s booth by recovered memories of the whole ShangriLa/Kathleen O’Connor tangle.

She’d come to terms with those speculations. They had nothing to do with this place, this time, and this crime. She could fret over them later when she and Matt could talk long and privately again.

Now, she had to get Electra off the police list of suspects. This convention would be winding down shortly. Everybody would be scattering to the far four corners of the country. It’dbe all too easy for the police, even earnest Detective Alch, to stick the at-hand local with the whole rap.

This time Temple refused to let anything purple or red distract her on the way to Oleta’s booth. She stopped only to ask directions.

“Oh, yes, that poor woman!” said one purveyor at the RedHat-to-Toe booth.

This specialized in head and footwear, including rhinestone-studded reading glasses and red-and-purple anklets and sneakers, not to mention the ankle bracelets and huge hats.

The stork-tall seller herself was festooned in as many of her wares as possible, which made her resemble an overdressed emu, like songstress/clown Candy Crenshaw.

“Poor Oleta’s chapter decided to sell whatever many of her wares they could, and take the rest back to Reno to benefit the chapter.”

“They’re selling her items?”

Temple felt a sudden panic. Something key could have been among that merchandise, maybe hidden among that merchandise. Like Oleta’s tell-all book manuscript. Temple just knew that while Oleta might have spilled some of the juicy beans about her love life on the Internet she would have saved the best for the actual publication of her tell-all.

“Oh, don’t worry, dear,” said Madam Big Bird, “I’m sure it’s not all gone. You can still buy a memento.”

Eek! The stuff was probably selling like red, white, and purple hotcakes because people always like souvenirs from a murder.

It still made Temple shudder that 0. J. Simpson’s two kids by Nicole Brown had opened a lemonade stand to serve the media and crowds besieging the 0. J. estate after their mother’s brutal death. Maybe they were too young to realize that cashing in on their mother’s murder was awful. Or maybe they were just too much 0. J.‘s and not enough Nicole’s children. When a wife is abused in a household, the children can choose the abuser’s side to protect themselves.

So Temple really hated to join the three-deep crowd around the booth clawing for goods. She had to stretch, even on her three-inch pink patent J. Renee heels, to see what everybody was competing for.

Apparently Oleta was serious about being a writer. Her booth was piled with commercial diaries and notepads and stationery slathered with red and purple hats, heels, feathers, and cats dressed in all of the above.

The usual feather boas hung from corner racks, as did red hats by the brimful. No pink and lavender items that would attract Red Hat ladies-in-waiting decorated the booth.

Temple suspected that Oleta Lark, having displaced at least one older woman, didn’t like to cater to the younger women coming up behind her now that she was “an older woman,” and almost a Red Hatter.

Temple, with the tenacity of an entire life spent being too short to see anything, edged around the crowd to the side of the table and then peeked under the floor-length tablecloth. This was where extra items were always stacked.

She dearly wished she’d known enough at the Women’s Exposition to peer under the table skirt of the woman who had possessed among her stockin-trade rings related to the two men most dear to Temple.

Temple felt another chill. She’d spotted something big and bulky under the table. Not a body this time, thank God! Yet it was an item peculiarly appropriate to the convention, and apparently unique at the booth.

Temple wasn’t proud. She got down on her knees and dove for the prize, pulling it toward herself with much effort over a tidal wave of empty boxes.

When she wrestled the huge round hatbox close enough, she lifted it. Cardboard. She shook it. Nothing shifted or rattled. Empty. Drat it!

“Say! What’re you doing down there! Get up this minute.” Temple crawled back out from under the purple table skirt, dragging her prize with her.

“I just saw something perfect for my new pink hat,” she wailed in a Mariah-like tone of aggrieved excuse.

She’d also just patted down the suspect hatbox in secret andnow was mighty interested in conducting a private interrogation off the premises.

Temple rose from the floor, clutching an item that she knew would be the envy of all eyes: a crimson hatbox as big around as the bottom layer of a wedding cake, topped with a high mound of purple net flowers, and circled by a purple silk scarf with a design of red flowers. The exact same scarf design as the one that had wrung Oleta Lark’s neck.