Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

troops.”

“Not … demoralized.” Alch twisted his neck, trying to see her face. “Maybe you motivated them.” “Huh?” She looked up, her face red from the lowered position.

“We’re all human, Carmen. Maybe we like to see a little of it in our bosses. Our ‘superior’ officers.”

“You’re enjoying this?”

“No, I’m enjoying getting to see that you’re human too. Just like the rest of us. You set yourself an impossible standard, you know. This Rafi Nadir can’t hurt you any more than you’re willing to hurt yourself.”

She straightened up. Thought that over. “What would you do now?”

“Figure out a way to tell my daughter the truth before somebody who didn’t like me had a chance to tell it to her first.” A long sigh, a longer swallow of beer.

“You’re right. Mariah comes first and foremost. I thought I was protecting her, but I suppose I was fooling myself. She’ll

like knowing her father’s a failure?”

“She’ll want to know her father, and make up her own mind. You can’t stop that. You can only supervise that.”

“Not good news, Morrie. Not what I had hoped for at all.”

He nodded at her. “Believe it or not, that’s a step forward, Carmen, not a bad step forward. At all,” he echoed her. Deliberately.

She glared at him-the Molina he knew and liked and who scared the hell out of him sometimes, in a good way he could rely upon-and then slapped a fin down on the table.

“I pay for my own beer.”

“Sure. But my advice is free. You can’t buy experience.” She left.

Alch reflected that this was the first time he’d ever had the last word with her.

Chapter 45

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“What a bitch!” he said.

What a bummer of a beginning, Temple thought with a sigh.

She and Rafi Nadir shared a table near the front of Les Girls, the better to avoid the performers attempting intimate relationships with a stainless-steel pole onstage.

“Why couldn’t she have been a real girl? Like you?” he asked.

“How am I different?” Temple asked. Let me count the ways.

“You’re-” Rafi’s eyes grew unfocused. “You’re nice. A guy feels good taking care of you. And you’re spice. You think you

can take care of yourself. I like that. I like … knowing you can’t, always.”

Temple figured this was as real as it got with Rafi.

“You’re conflicted,” she returned in fine Dr. Phil form. “You like girlie girls, but you also need women who don’t kowtow to anybody. You only think you like me, because you don’t know me. Do you?”

He blinked, sipped his Sprite on the rocks. ifig, bad Rafi Nadir.“You’re just trying to keep me away from her:’ he said. “Of course. You’re a bum combo, brother.”

“Brother? That’s how you think of me?”

“I have five.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. They hassled me and overprotected me and probably saved me some grief more often than I admit, and at times I could have strangled every one of them.”

“That’s it! Why don’t you broads appreciate what we guys can do for you?”

“Because we need what we can do for ourselves.”

“Without us.”

“Maybe. But it’s better with you guys.”

Rafi shook his head. “I never thought I’d see her again.”

“Good … or bad … that you finally did?”

“I don’t know.” He siphoned Sprite down to the ice cubes. “All I know is everything turned crappy after we split.” She’s gone.

Temple recalled the two words scrawled on Molina’s car outside the Blue Dahlia nightclub and restaurant.

Later those same words had magically showed up on the midriff of Gandolph the Great’s dead ex-assistant in the Las Vegas medical examiner’s facility.

How many romantic hearts had that primitive jungle beat been pounded into: She’s gone. He’s gone. It was in her own blood.

It had echoed eternally when Max had disappeared with no word.

She could understand Rafi Nadir’s confusion and uncertainty. What did that make her? Make him?

Only human.

“You’re a strange little duck,” he said.

“Me?”

“I’ve been brushed off by bimbos with diseases that’d make your DNA curl. You … you’re different.”

“I’m not-”

“No. I get that part. You’re not up for grabs. I don’t get why you bother with me when nothin’s in it for you, or me. Or why you’re so nosy about murdered strippers and homicide lieutenants when you’re a PR woman, for God’s sake. I shouldn’t be giving you the time of day. I don’t know why I am.”

“Maybe,” Temple suggested, “you’re really a nice guy. Somewhere in there.”

“No,” he said. “Not really. It’s you that’s way off-base.”

That’s when she began to regret being here. With him. Not much redeemable social value there. Still, if she could figure out how he and a straight arrow like Molina had ever gotten together, had conceived a child together, she might know why Molina was such a bulldog about incriminating Max in something.

Temple had to concede to herself that she was becoming exhausted by Molina’s eternal hints and allegations about Max, by how the woman used her position to harass Temple … and Max by proxy.

A twang of honesty made Temple also admit to herself that it hadn’t done their relationship any good. Temple could be as loyal as a Boy Scout oath, but the stress and suspicion had worn her down. Even pit bulls had to let go finally, out of sheer exhaustion.

“Say.”

Temple looked up. Rafi Nadir was regarding her almost sympathetically.

“I just meant:’ he said, “that you’re a whole different ball game than Carmen.”

“Was she always so buttoned down?” When he frowned at the expression, which didn’t mean much in an inborn burqa worldview, she went on. “Why is it she judges everybody by some inflexible standard, and doesn’t cut the rest of us any slack?”

He was nodding now, either a smile or a smirk (depending on your point of view) tilting the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah. She was always hard to read. That sorta was what fascinated me.”

Temple was fascinated by the fact of any man being fascinated by Molina. She knew her eyes probably widened.

Rafi would like that, saucer-eyed female audience. It would soothe his male ego.“I wasn’t used to women like that,” he

said.

“Like what?”

“Women trying to be like men. You’re right. I liked parts of it. Other parts-” He shook his head, his mouth twisting into

distaste as if the Sprite in his glass had turned to vinegar.

“Was that what you had in common? Excuse me, but you were both from cultures with a strong tradition of stomping on women.”

He stared at her, his dissolute hawk’s face focused totally on her.

Temple swallowed without having even sipped her white wine spritzer. (She knew the management; the management owed her. So she could order an effete white wine spritzer in a strip club. Or at least this strip club. And get it darn cheap too.) Temple picked up her spritzer. Sipped. Tried to look buttoned up and cool and calm. Like Molina.

Rafi burst out laughing. “You nailed it. I was a sexist pig, trying to get with a little looser male-female culture. She was an uptight servile broad, trying to get ahead in a very wired male sexist-pig environment. We were made for each other.”

Bitter as the last words were, a thrum of truth underlay them.

“So what happened?” Temple asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Fact is, Molina’s on my boyfriend’s case. The more I know about where she comes from, the more I know about where