Unknown - Cat_In_A_Hot_Pink_Pursuit

Theater was like that. She just hoped the police found some likely suspect for the string of murders that had wiped out three generations of one family so far, a family already decimated by a miscarriage of justice that never ended.

Every blonde seemed to be ahead of Temple on the play list and every blonde seemed to do a Britney Spears song with every Britney Spears move ever patented.

The program alternated ‘Tween and Teen Queen candidates, and Xoe Chloe was programmed dead last … wonder how that had happened, Temple thought, eyeing Dexter Manship at the judge’s table. The peeping place she’d found was far stage left, behind a gargantuan array of gladioli spears. Nobody backstage or in the audience had spied her, so she was able to watch her competitors swivel and shake their way to true mediocrity.

When Mariah came through the curtain, it was like watching a tennis match. Snap her head to check her roomie’s poise. Great. The judges. Positive. Mama. Stunned. The guy with her had to put a hand on her arm to keep her in her seat, or maybe to keep her from going for her semiautomatic.

Mariah looked, what? Girly grown up without seeming trashy. She looked all of nifty fifteen. She let the music precede her, as opposed to walking up to the mike and waiting like the other girls had, amateurs all. Make ‘em wait. Then she began the strong yearning song of the lonely young Wicked Witch of the West from the Broadway hit, Wicked. Lyrics and melody showcased Mariah’s girlish contralto. Even Molina was relaxing, tilting back in her chair. Shocked, awed, and smiling. “Defying Gravity” along with her daughter.

Way to go, roomie!

Temple joined the applause and watched the judges’ pencils scratching high on their rating forms.

Somebody poked her in the back.

“Who is that?”

She turned. Rafi Nadir loomed over her and did not look happy.

“My roommate.”

“Not the kid. She did okay. Who’s that with—?”

He wasn’t going to say but he was glowering at the unidentified man with Molina. Or maybe he was glowering at Molina.

Rafi did not know that Temple knew their personal history, so she just played dumb.

“Who?”

“Never mind. I’ll go check the crowd.”

He eyed Savannah Ashleigh, who had both cat carriers at her side. She’d take one or the other cat out from time to time and pretend the kitty was writing in the scores. Of course, she got lots of closeup camera attention every time she produced one of her gorgeous Persians.

Rafi vanished without another word, leaving Temple time to look around for Louie. Louie loved Persians, from her observation.

Yup. He was under the judges’ table, the old dog! And snuffling at Dexter Manship’s shoes. Maybe the old boy’s sniffer was getting a little dull, to be diverted from nearby unfixed Persian pheromones to a neighboring guy’s shoes!

Now he was nudging the Elvis impersonator’s boots.

Louie must be losing it.

Oh, well, it happened to the best of them. Who knew how old he really was? Right now she herself felt about forty.

And nothing was happening.

The judges were watching. The audience was watching. And the police personnel were watching. Just watching.

Not only that, the evening event was almost over. Temple suddenly discovered a whole herd of butterflies in the pit of her stomach.

Xoe Chloe was up in two shakes of a blonde mane.

Time to stop fretting over hidden killers and start thinking about something serious, like sudden debilitating stage fright.

Why had she ever agreed to this debacle? Sure, it’s fine for Xoe Chloe to make a fool of herself, but Temple had inherited some legitimate theater genes that demanded a decent performance.

Oh, well. Temple closed the curtain on her peephole and withdrew backstage to wrestle her contrary muse, Xoe Chloe, to the mat. Hopefully shaving foam free… .

The preprogrammed karaoke trio segued into the theme from James Bond.

Xoe Chloe burst through the side curtain, not the center one, on Rollerblades.

She spiked concrete on the space before center stage. Threw off her bicycle helmet, kicked off the blades. Tap danced up the three stairs to the mike.

She grabbed that sucker by the throat, tilted it almost horizontal like a rock star and strutted around it while rapping in rhythm, kick boxing, clapping, ostrich feathers flapping, on a beat in a counterpoint to the snare drum scratching and her high-heeled boots stamping and her blonde hair shaking and she said and she said, who knows, but the rhyme was the rhythm and rhythm was the reason and this was the Xoe Chloe season and … one … more … time, and then another … we speak to the sisters and we speak to the brothers and we walk around the world and watch it spin, and then we take it out for a walk and let the bows begin.

The applause was the climax to the routine. The judges were scratching furiously. Temple was blinking like the idiot she felt she was: standing center stage, the mike slowly swinging back to its proper upright position.

Louie was streaking out from under the judges’ table—all their heads bent to the score sheets—and … apparently panicked by Temple’s raucous routine, climbing up the judges with his claws.

Climbing up one judge’s sturdy sleeve in particular, which resulted in a dark hairy object flying up, up, and away, toward the pool.

“Louie!” Temple wailed into the mike.

The audience started singing “Louie, Louie” as if cued. But the dark flying object, or DFO, was not Midnight Louie. It was someone … something else.

A thing Temple knew well from personal experience. A black wig.

Elvis’s sideburned headpiece.

Everyone eyed the bald man in the glittering jumpsuit, now flailing his arms at phantoms.

For Louie was gone.

Only the naked head was left.

The center of all regard.

The bull’s eye that Alch and Su and a waiter and a man in the audience converged on.

Dexter Manship leaped up, snatched the score sheet from under the captive as he was rushed away, and leaped onstage to push Xoe Chloe away from the mike.

“Forget the fuss, dear hearts. We have our winners.”

All the candidates rushed onstage to hear the verdict, pushing Temple to the back.

A hand was in hers, squeezing hard. Mariah’s. Manship’s voice carried over everything, including the scuffle as Elvis was led away.

By the fringe of the pool, a rapt Crawford Buchanan was blabbing into his ever-present mike, unaware of a black stalking form closing in on him at foot level.

The black cat pounced, leaping, claws out.

Backpeddling, Crawford and his mike took a plunge into chlorinated water. No one even heard the splash. The night had an unhappy ending. He didn’t drown.

Chapter 56

As Blind as Bast

Naturally, having masterminded the revelation of the criminal, I am thereafter ignored.

As soon as the police personnel present swarm the faux Elvis, they compare notes and conclude he bears a decided resemblance to a computer-aged image of … ta-dah! … Arthur Dickson.

The whole tawdry scheme is immediately clear to all and sundry, as it has been to me. (Naturally, I eavesdrop shamelessly, and unnoticed, as they gather to exchange notes.) When ailing Crystal Cumming, aka Beth Marble, brought her scheme for the reality show to the producers, one of the silent partners was Arthur Dickson, forced underground by his narrow escape from prosecution for the first atrocity at his signature mansion.

Beth Marble, who no doubt took her false last name from the sad monument to the life and death of her shattered daughter and her own imminent fate, knew the mansion had passed through many hands. She envisioned it as a court of justice for the woman who had, perhaps inadvertently yet concretely, contributed to the final downward spiral of her unfortunate daughter.