Unknown - Cat_In_A_Hot_Pink_Pursuit

She wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. The ostensible reason was to feed the cats, Caterina and Tabitha, who were also up and hyper, looking lean, mean, and neglected. Meee-ow. Feed me. Their girly caretaker was gone.

Not to worry. Mama to the rescue.

The underlying reason to feed the cats was to search the fruit/vegetable drawer, then the freezer, for something sweet, fatty, and delicious.

No such animal in the Molina household.

Drat!

Wait!

What the heck is this?

A non—Weight Watchers frozen dessert.

Caramel. Chocolate. Six hundred calories. Thirty-three carbs. Eighteen grams of fat …

Mariah must have imported this anti-diet bomb to the family fridge.

No, she’d been fanatic about low-fat, low-carb foods the past month. Probably because she’d been hoping to get The Call from the Teen Queen people.

How could a detective-mother have missed that change of habit?

Been a little busy at work?

Molina balanced the frozen dessert package on one palm, weighing its presence here as well as its calories.

The frozen package chilled her hand. The icy chill drove deeper as she realized … this wasn’t just some forgotten purchase. This was another “gift” from the anonymous stalker.

She slid the kitchen drawer open and pulled out a large plastic baggie, one-handed. The frozen container might not hold prints and there probably wouldn’t be prints anyway, but she would check.

Meanwhile, her daughter was on her own in the Teen Queen Castle, which was also beset by stalker incidents.

Okay. Temple Barr was on the teen scene. Not bad for an amateur. A gifted snoop. But no professional. What to do?

For one wild moment, Molina wanted to rip the dessert from the protective baggie, gobble it down, eat the evidence, take two aspirin, and think about it in the morning.

She picked up her cell phone.

Something bad in the neighborhood? Who you gonna call?

What was happening with Mariah, and how could a mother under siege deal with it? Not to mention Rafi Nadir stalking out of her past like a mummy brought to life.

Who you gonna call?

The latest number on her instant dial was Larry Paddock’s. Paddock. Hip, available, suddenly there and suddenly interested.

Not … unattractive. Probably a damn good undercover cop.

Suddenly there.

Molina hit a preprogrammed number. It was answered despite the late hour, thank God, but she’d expected no less.

“Molina. No, not exactly. Got a minute? Or twenty. Good. Thanks, Morrie.”

Chapter 30

The Extent of the Law

Matt still saw stars, not his fellow guests on today’s live edition of The Amanda Show, but from the intense television studio lights.

The lights made everything beyond the hot, faux living-room set seem unreal. No matter how many times he appeared on the talk show, and this was his seventh or eighth visit, he never lost the sense that everything on camera happened in an overcivilized dreamtime, not unlike the Australian aborigines’ mystical cycle.

Nothing mystical about leaving the studio for Chicago’s hyperactive streets. Now he was in a cab on traffic jammed Michigan Avenue near Water Tower Place.

New York City soared, a stone forest primeval with thin tall buildings. Chicago squatted. The city’s broad, heavy-set edifices were also high and huge, but Chicago post–Carl Sandburg was more a sumo wrestler of a city. Manhattan was a wirewalker.

Now Matt was trading one thick tower for another, from the TV studio to an office building a few blocks farther up Michigan Avenue.

He carried a slim aluminum briefcase, accoutered more as a celebrity dilettante than a legal eagle. He’d bought it for this one occasion: broaching the law offices of Brandon, Oakes, and McCall. That decades-old name had been on the papers giving his mother title to the old, two-flat residence in the city’s decaying Polish section almost thirty-five years ago.

By now, sitting on the hot seat of a television talk show set was old hat and Chicagoans he had contact with coming and going might recognize him. Might comment on the day’s topic. Tell him about their brother/sister/kid who should be on The Amanda Show He had become what Temple so aptly called a semicelebrity. A regular on a surviving talk show. Not quite Oprah. Not Ellen. Not The View. But comfortably second tier. When it came to being in the spotlight, Matt liked second tier fine. That was where the fitful public limelight didn’t fry your private life for dinner.

Dignity was not necessarily a requirement for the job but he’d managed to keep his, so far, during his media ramble. Dignity would be the key to getting any kind of honest attention from Brandon, Oakes, and McCall.

And dignity was the reason he was visiting this old established law firm. His mother’s. She wanted to know more about the man who had sired him. A boy, really, from what little she’d told Matt about the circumstances of his conception. A young man determined to volunteer for a foreign war his family had the means to keep him safely out of. Meeting a girl from the wrong side of the WASP tracks in a church on the eve of shipping out.

It was hard for Matt to imagine his timid, conservativemother being young enough to fall into first sex with a stranger she’d met in a church, before the flickering candles at a saint’s station.

But she had. And what came of it? Only him, a fatherless child in a working-class Catholic neighborhood that didn’t forget sins of carnal knowledge.

Matt found himself shaking his head in the back of the cab, which smelled of chewing gum and smoke. Its lurching progress through the rush-hour traffic was making him sick. Or something else was.

His mother was fifty-four now, looking remarkably young yet leading a life circumscribed by her underachieving job and the Church. What good would it do her to know the name of her particular hit-and-run Joseph?

He had died, that privileged boy who’d rejected his get-out-of-war free card. Over there somewhere. The family lawyers bought amnesia from mother and son with the title of a two-flat that would keep them, with a spare unit to bring in steady rent. Matt’s mother had never known more than his father’s first name but he’d been somebody, whoever he was. Any seed he’d sown on the way to annihilation was … so much wildflower along the highway. Unnamed, unnoticed. Unacknowledged.

So much chaff in the wind. Then he thought of his stepfather, Cliff Effinger. Why had she married him when he’d been just a toddler? He’d asked that question at six and he still asked it of himself today, almost thirty years later. Effinger. Now dead, and Matt not sorry one bit. A mean, lesser man than the sainted boy Mira met at the saint’s station in the church.

How could she? How could she have turned them both over to an abusive creature like Effinger? Unless she’d felt she deserved punishment? Unless she’d been so beaten down that she’d needed to marry a permanent punishment. Matt finally had grown old and big enough to banish punishment, but it hadn’t been soon enough.

His mother wasn’t to blame; it was the social milieu that said that pain was a fallen woman’s only lot. It was her righteous, callous family and the Church he’d run to himself at the earliest opportunity for ultimate approval. Holy Mother of God. He too had deserted her for his own petty salvation.

Matt probed for the right bills as he paid off the cabby and got out to face a fifties building of pale stone and castlelike crenellations.

He didn’t need this. Want this. His mother did. A bad idea. If he … she … learned nothing, it was another disappointment in a life replete with too many. If they learned something, it was … a slap in the face; they weren’t wanted here, not even Matt with his seminational media profile.