Where did he come from? No matter. Go with the flow, as long as it was feline.
She zigged and zagged and bumped into blondes fleeing in the opposite direction. Where was Paris Hilton when you needed her? Overbooked, that’s where!
She was entering the portion of the house allotted to the Teen Queen coaches, running her memory of the day’s schedule sheet through her mind like a white shirt through a mangle.
Friday, Xoe Chloe interview with Beth Marble, office number three at two P.M. And at three P.M… . in office number four. Oh, my goddess! Oh, no! Let it not be Louie’s low-flying tail vanished through a doorjamb just ahead. Temple almost turned an ankle making a right-angle dodge to follow him.
Office. Very … plain. Almost stripped. A scale in the corner. A chart on a wall.
A body in a leather desk chair, throat tilted back. Face … darkened. Red black. Unrecognizable.
And oh, holy moley, wholly Molina! Mariah standing in front of the desk, chair and all. Screaming. Screaming for all of her just-teen worth. A real little belter.
Something bad in the neighborhood. Someone dead in the neighborhood. The dietitian. The mousy, by-thebook, plain-Jell-O dietitian. Marjory Klein.
Found dead in her office chair. By Mariah.
Temple raced up to put her hands on Mariah’s shaking shoulders, pressed down hard.
“It’s okay. I’m here. Hel-lo! Look. Even the silly cat that’s been prowling around the place is here too. Hewouldn’t risk his skin if it weren’t safe. Have you ever known a cat that wasn’t totally cool?”
Those last two words finally jerked Mariah’s focus off the dead body.
“Cat?” she asked. “Cool?”
If a cat could look at a queen, or even a dead body, maybe she could too.
Louie used the opportunity to twine around Mariah’s ankles, over and over again. It was fine feline therapy but it wasn’t enough. Mariah suddenly spun into Temple’s embrace. Grabbed on to her like a leech. A growing girl big enough to rock Temple off her bare heels.
But Temple recovered and held on back. They were roomies, after all, and that went way beyond silly reality shows and even Mother Superiors in common.
“I’m sorry,” Temple told her. “So, so sorry. I was afraid it would come to this. Hoped not.”
Mariah just sobbed. Temple remembered sobbing that hard. Long ago, when she was so young that every setback, real or imagined, was a total tragedy.
This was all too real though. This was a tragedy, period. The dead woman was such an unlikely object of another person’s venom. Of murderous hatred.
Just yesterday she’d been earnestly urging legumes and cruciferous vegetables on that hopeless Xoe Chloe creature.
Temple found herself crying along with Mariah.
Still, another part of her brain sounded warning. This will bring Molina herself into the equation.
Not a good thing for either Mariah or Temple. Or Xoe Chloe, for that matter.
Later, Temple was very glad she and Louie had been the first to arrive on the murder scene. That meant that she and Mariah were partners in interrogation. She could ful-fill her undercover role and stick up for the poor kid if necessary.
Temple was relieved that Molina hadn’t shown up, yet wasn’t surprised to see Detectives Alch and Su arrive shortly after the uniformed officers had come, dismissed the EMTs, and sent for the coroner and the crime scene team.
Molina would want her favorite investigative team on scene in her stead. While patting Mariah’s back and being otherwise the wise, stable big sister, Temple was madly speculating whether Alch and Su would see through her colored contact lenses and blonde blow-dry job to the annoying amateur sleuth they knew and could do with a lot less of.
She and Mariah huddled together on one of the giant leather ottomans that dotted the house’s domestic landscape, in a corner of the murder room where everything else was thankfully obscured.
Morrie Alch squatted down before them, as you would with children, leaving his petite Asian-Americanprincess partner, Merry Su, to do the looming.
A man in his comfy fifties, he was graying a little, gaining even a little more around the middle, and putting a heck of a strain on his aging knees at the moment.
“You’re the young lady who made the sad discovery,” he told Mariah. “Mind if I sit down here and ask you some questions?”
Her earlier sobs had quieted into the occasional hiccup. She knew Detective Alch but she wasn’t supposed to show it. Her color grew high and feverish, and her dark eyes burned with anguish.
“I guess.”
“Okay, sweetheart. What’s your name?”
Like he didn’t know! Temple thought.
He got up, knees creaking, and sat beside Mariah,pencil poised over a narrow-lined newspaper reporter’s notebook.
His pencil needed sharpening. It didn’t need his gesture in licking it first but the whole act made him into Uncle Morrie, a man to be trusted.
Temple know no homicide detective was a man to be trusted, including Mariah’s own mother.
“Who are you?” Su asked Temple in a far less gentle tone.
“One of the other contestants.”
“So which of you got first dibs on the corpse?”
Morrie cleared his throat to signal Su to go easier. He might as well have waved at the moon.
“Well?” Su insisted.
“I was here first,” Mariah said. “Alone. I found … her.”
“She had an appointment,” Temple pointed out quickly. “That’s why, when I heard the scream and recognized her voice, I knew where to go. I must have reached the scene only seconds after she came in and found Mrs. Klein dead.”
“I’ll thank you not to put testimony in the girl’s mouth, Miss—?”
“Ah, Ozone.”
“Ozone?”
“It’s a stage name. Like Axl Rose. Or Sting.”
“Why don’t you step this way, Ms. Ozone Sting?” Su suggested.
Temple hated to leave Mariah to the mercies of kindly Detective Alch. The kindly part was true, and he was certainly well aware he was interviewing his boss’s kid, but all of that only went so far in the homicide biz. Temple, meanwhile, was totally undercover and totally suspicious.
“Now.” Su sat Temple down on a most uncomfortable modern sofa in the room’s opposite corner. “You tell your story.”
“It’s not a story. Mariah and I are roomies. Roommates. She’s a ‘Tween Queen candidate and I’m a Teen Queen one. They pair us up, little and big sisters.”
“So you feel a responsibility for the girl?”
“Yeah, right. Of course.” And why wasn’t Mariah’s mother here now?
“You’ve never met her before?”
Maybe that was why. Conflict of interest. Not wanting to finger her own kid. Or her own kid’s secret babysitter. Temple was on her own here. Thank heavens for Xoe Chloe.
Su’s almond Asian eyes were bent to her notebook. Temple danced around the truth as if it were a Maypole. “Nope. We’re all strangers here.”
“And you are?”
“Xoe with an X.”
Su’s ballpoint pen (unlike Alch, she was unlikely to change her mind or anything else) stopped dead in the middle of one line. “And how do you spell Zoe with an X?”
“Easy. X-o-e. Zoe-ee.”
“And ‘Ozone’ is your last name? Do you spell it with an X?”
“No. And I actually go by Xoe Chloe Ozone.”
“Where do you go by this?”
“Performance art. In the clubs. You know. And at the Rollerblade havens.”
“You’re a Rollerblading performance artist?”
“That’s it. Body and soul. Synthesis. That’s my thing.”
“So, what did you find when you entered the crime scene?”
“Uh, you mean, the room?”
“Yes.”
“Well, um, the scale.”
“The scale?”
“Yeah, the weigh thing. I do not like scales. I don’t suppose you much avoid them, being one skimpy girl, butwe’re all on television here and every ounce looks like a pound.”