Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“Me?”

“You. It shows in how you partner Su. She’s a handful. She has issues. She respects you. I wish I’d had a partner as good when I was in her position.”

He literally sat back, absorbed this information. He wasn’t here to garner kudos. But he was touched. Maybe it wasn’t just Vicky. Maybe it was Su. And … my God, Molina?

Uh-oh. Morrie Alch, professional father substitute. Not quite what he was willing to settle for. Yet.

“Let’s call it a mutual admiration society,” he said.

“That’s why it’s so hard. But … who else could understand?”

Morrie nodded. He was doomed to “understand.” Not to be understood. All single parents were. Not a voluntary occupation.

“So,” she asked, “who was your daughter’s-Vicky, isn’t it?-mother?”

“You sure don’t dance around questions like this in interrogation. I guess I should be flattered you changed your style for me. What you really want to know is why we split and what happened to her.”

Molina shrugged as she pushed away her empty plate and drew the beer mug closer. “You tell, I tell.”

Alch heard himself chuckling again. “I feel like a snitch. Odd role reversal.” He put his plate with its ruddy smear of sauce onto the brown tray on top of Molina’s.

“Okay. She was a nurse. Emergency room. We figured maybe our odd hours would work out better together than with

some nine-to-fiver or other. And they did. At first.”

“So it wasn’t the hours. Or the overtime. Or being on call?”

“Nope. All the logistics were fine. Little Vicky worked out too. I did my share of diapers, feedings, drop-offs at preschool

later, things most nine-to-five fathers miss out on.”

“Diapers. I always knew you were an unsung hero, Morrie.” They smiled in mutual remembrance of smelly times past.

“Anyway,” he said. “Time went by. Enough time to think about another kid maybe.”

“What happened.”

“Job burnout.”

“Really?” Molina sounded surprised. “You’re the most unburned-out detective on my staff.”

“Hers. I learned my laid-back lifestyle the hard way. Emergency room is crazy, the hours, the stress, the danger, the dying. She started using. I never spotted it until it was a habit as big as the Goliath Hotel. All those rushing, come-and-go hours had ended up in needing a rush.”

“That’s how you got custody. Fathers didn’t often back then.”

“Sure, make me feel good about my age.”

“It’s a good age, Morrie. I just hope I get there with my sanity intact.”

“You will. Maybe it doesn’t look like it now. Adolescence is hell at any age. So what’s your story?” “You breathe a word-”

“Hey, I told you about my junkie ex-wife. Your history is worse?”

“No. I’m sorry. Losing someone to drugs is … the worst. Staying sane, and sober yourself, through it, that’s a major medal, even if you’re the only one who knows you earned it.”

Alch nodded, sipped beer. Was glad he didn’t have to speak.

“Okay. My turn.” She bit her lower lip, which didn’t hurt her makeup. She wore so little, if any, that no lipstick stained the beer mug. “Show and tell. ‘That guy.’ I’ve known he was in town for some time. I hoped, prayed, he’d never know that I was living here. Now it’s public record.”

“Who, what, when, where, and why?”

“Rafi Nadir, ex-police uniform, fifteen years ago, Los Angeles. And why? God knows I ask myself that plenty. I was a half—

Chicana woman on the force. You can imagine what that was like then and there. They put me patroling the streets of Watts.”

“Oh, great, playing the race card. Blacks versus Hispanic cop.”

“And the gender card: macho men versus woman in uniform.” She stared into the bottom of her empty beer mug. Alch got

up. “I’m buying this round.”

“Big spender.”

Around them families came and ate and went and came again.

Alch returned to the table, thinking he should have suggested a bar and grill. Except that this family chain restaurant was oddly apropos to their business.

And it was business. This was all about being dedicated cops and alienated ordinary citizens.

“You like Dos Equis?” she asked as he set the frosty mug in front of her.

“Beer is beer, but some is better than others.”

“Same could be said of people. Rafi’s Arab-American. An odd-man-out minority. At first, to me, he seemed sympathetic, supportive.”

Alch nodded.

“He had a future, Morrie. You know there are certain professions that demand your body and Soul. Police work. Medical work. Newspaper work, maybe.““Not banker, lawyer, accountant.”

“Nothing greedy. Nothing where you make much money.”

“Ask me about doctors nowadays!”

“Back then. When we were young.”

Alch nodded. He liked thinking about that, about then. When his back and his feet didn’t hurt, but things a lot more

interesting did, in a good way.

“Anyway, Rafi was on my side. It wasn’t fun being me on patrol. You know how they haze the new guys? Imagine how they can haze the new female. So, Rafi and I I… we were partners in prejudice: his ethnic origins, my ethnic origins and my gender.

“We lived together.” She checked him for disapproval level. “Bet your family loved that.”

“My family didn’t know that. I was on my own then. God, I was in my mid-twenties, I should have been on my own, but girls raised in ethnic cultures are always a bit retarded when it comes to knowing about real life. They like us to be helpless and innocent.”

“I’m betting that’s where Mariah comes in.”

“No. That’s where I left. I got a promotion, and he didn’t. It wasn’t much of a promotion, but it was something. That’s when I found out I was pregnant.”

“So? Things happen.”

“Not with a pinprick in a diaphragm, Morrie. Right then. Right after I got promoted! He knew I was raised Roman Catholic. He knew. What was I going to do? Abort? How was I going to handle more responsibility and weirder hours with a kid? I’d have to quit. Get some part-time brain-numbing job. Maybe stay at home, off the streets, change those diapers until I croaked of ammonia fumes.”

“He punctured your diaphragm to get you out of the picture on the job? He didn’t want to just dump you?”

She shook her head, then took a deep swallow of beer. “He wanted to own me. He wanted me barefoot and pregnant and

dependent on him. I saw it all through the pinprick of light in my little rubber artificial birth control device. That’s what the Church calls contraception. ‘Artificial.’ Like false fingernails or something. And getting pregnant is ‘natural.’ Maybe in my case it was God’s punishment for using birth control, I don’t know. It sometimes felt like that. Rafi had forced me into an impossible position, an impossible decision. I just knew I had to get out of there, right away, and never let him find me again.”

“And he didn’t. Until today. So what did you tell Mariah?”

“That her father was a cop. Who was killed. Helping a mo-torist on the freeway, ploughed into by a drunk driver.”

“Dead hero. Guess there wasn’t a convenient foreign action going on at the time.”

“No, there was just convenient lies.”

“That’s bad, Carmen,” Alch said. “Very bad.”

“I know.”

“That’s why you’ve been so jittery lately. You knew this Nadir guy was in town.” “I’ve been jittery?”

“Well, more like wired and jittery. Like-”

“If you say ‘on the rag’ I’ll choke you, Morrie.”

“Sounds like my Vicky talking. But I noticed something was wrong. Hell. We all did.”

She suddenly put her head down on her folded arms. “So it didn’t work. My soldiering through. I demoralized my own