Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

he’s going.”

“He that Anglo dreamboat I saw you with at the opening?”

“No! Matt’s just a friend.”

Rafi shrugged. “You knew who I meant right off. Just a friend? Couldn’t tell it by me. Kinda strange, isn’t it, how the dead guy in the Murano looked so much like him?”

“Creepy, but Matt has nothing to do with that crowd. He was there with Janice Flanders.”

“He `just a friend’ of hers too?”

“Uh . I don’t know. She’s divorced.”

“And you got a boyfriend.” Rafi’s desert-dark eyes drilled into hers.

“Right. My boyfriend wasn’t anywhere near Maylords, thank God, otherwise Molina would have made him on the murder.

Trust me. She’s had it in for him ever since a killing at the Goliath Hotel where he was working, over a year ago.”

Rafi nodded all through her little speech. He looked about as convinced as Molina had when Temple had tried to explain

her personal situation in the past.

What was it about her? Didn’t she look as truthful as an A-plus lie-detector graph on sight? She certainly felt that way.

“About Carmen and me.” Rafi’s fingers played with his Sprite glass as idly as if it had contained straight vodka.

Appearances were deceiving, Temple reminded herself. She had seen Rafi with a glass of clear iced liquid half a dozen times at strip joints when she had been trying to be a one-woman amateur undercover operative to save Max’s skin. And never once had it dawned on her that he was drinking soda pop.

“About Carmen and you,” she prompted.

He smiled. “You can’t wait to get the goods on her, can you? I almost feel sorry for her.”

“That would be a first! Anyone feeling sorry for the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD!”

“Is that what they call her?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“She was a maiden once, but she wasn’t always iron.”

Temple pasted on her stock deeply inquisitive look and kept silent. That had always gotten her a revealing monologue or two when she had been a TV news reporter.

She was innately inquisitive, and had always been looked on as harmless as a head-cocked West Highland white terrier. As an independent woman she had come to loathe her nonlethal appearance. Except that people routinely forgot that terriers were bred to root out vermin. Mercilessly. Which worked to her advantage, didn’t it? Sometimes “cute” was camouflage.

Rafi Nadir obviously found her harmless enough to bare his soul to … or past parts of it.

“We were both token minorities on a force notorious for ethnic prejudice.” His eyes grew distant. People’s did, when they were zeroing in on their pasts. “Maybe we each envied something about the other. She was so wary and controlled, had tobe, like a panther. I was-it was a macho place and time, and I had that down-but I wasn’t quite the right kind. So. She toned me down. I pumped her up. It worked for a while.”

“Was she always so unfeminine?”

“Some women came into police work early. They were all female. Not cute like you. Pointed. Nails. Heels. Tits. Caused a lot of the wrong kind of trouble. Most cops have wives who find the job competition enough, much less the temptation of women cops. Carmen, she went the other way. All business, no gloss. That sorta intrigued me. I tried to help her live up to her name.”

“The opera, you mean?”

“Yeah. I know something about opera, at least what they were named.”

“Did she … sing when you knew her?”

“No.” He folded his arms on the slick Formica tabletop, leaned closer.

Temple heard the deep bass boom-badda boom-badda boom boom throbbing in the background, vibrating the table surface under their folded arms. That primitive beat would never back the soulful wail of classic torch songs that Carmen belted out at the Blue Dahlia. Even that selfindulgence happened only on the odd nights when she felt like dumping Lt. C. R. Molina. Then Carmen came out of the dressing room in a black velvet ’40s evening gown and scatted like a contralto archangel.

Rafi stabbed a droplet of tabletop condensation with a pristine fingernail (Temple always found it creepy that, for such a

jerk, his nails were clean as a whistle). One of those fingerails drew the drop into a comet trail.

“I found out that she sang. On key. Had sung in school choir. Had soloed. I talked her into finding a no-name club and working it off-the despair and downers. I created Carmen.”

Well! Temple was well and truly blitzed. Rafi Nadir as impresiario? As Brian Eno, manager to the Beatles? Colonel Parker to Elvis Presley? Get outta here!

“It’s a fact.” He’d read and answered her skepticism in half a heartbeat. “I got her patronizing the vintage stores, buying into the ’30s and ’40s looks. She always thought she was too big to be attractive. She always thought being attractive was a sm. Christianity is one woman-hating, repressive religion.” Temple blinked.

“Yeah. I know. But I’m not Muslim. My family is Christian. It’s okay to dis your own race or religion.” Rafi laughed. He sipped his Sprite as slowly as if it were 100-proof vodka. “We dudes are all the same, under the foreskin.”

Gack! He had made a rather sophisticated, if crude, play on words, and cultures. Not to mention a self-enlightened one.

“Are you sure you’re the Great Satan Molina thinks you are?” she asked.

He laughed, not nicely. “Hell, yes. I am now. Then, I was as stupid as Carmen was. Only I got nailed by it, and she just sailed free of all that. Teflon Woman.”

He drained the harmless dregs of melted ice cubes. “I lost my career. Okay, it was partly my fault. When the cards are stacked against you, sometimes you make the deck turn faster, just to get it over with.

“What I don’t get, or forgive, is the way she dumped me. Maybe she saw that my career was sinking like a stainless-steel stone. Whatever, she just left. That was it. Not a word, not a note. Gone. She was gone. No explanations, no reasons, no apologies, no hysterics. Nothing left behind that I could blame. Except me. That was cold. And that’s why I’ll never forgive that

-”

Temple cut him off. “Is that when you decided that underachievement was your business, your only business?”

“You’re one of those annoying reformers, aren’t you? Always looking on the bright side. Let me tell you, there’s no bright side in the real world. You work law enforcement, you see the dark side. You don’t need no black helmet, no light saber. You see the dark side every day. There is no Good Ship Lollipop. No wonderful world of Oz. Trust me.”

“Maybe I should. Maybe you’re not really the rotten guy everyone thinks you are.”

“Maybe.” He leaned over the table. Very close. “Maybe you’re wrong. The world is full of wrong dead women. Born optimists. Maybe Carmen got it right. Cut and run. Maybe you should do that too. Now.”

Temple did not believe in turning tail.

On the other hand, maybe Rafi Nadir had a point. If he really was a redeemable guy, this was a warning. If he was not, this was a Warning.

Temple turned tail, and left.

Chapter 46

A Rubdown with a

Velvet Glove

Temple made the parking lot of the Circle Ritz, and counted herself lucky.

She turned off the ignition.

She then deplaned. Or, in the case of the chic little Miata, first she got her left foot out of the car. Then she got her right foot on the tarmac. Then she shimmy-shimmied like her non-sister Kate… .

And found Matt Devine waiting to help her to her feet. Ankles, do your duty!

“Matt! Hi.”

He pulled her up.

Whew. He pulled her up. Close.

“Hi.” Temple wasn’t used to repeating herself. “Am I your sister Kate?”