Mariah looked up and Temple nodded. “At my request.”
“You tell my mom what to do? Awesome.”
“I asked her.”
“Oh. That doesn’t usually work for me. Just asking.”
“Mothers are like that. Luckily, your mom is not my mom.”
“You sound like you mean that way too much.”
“Guilty.”
They settled down to read various pages, Temple perching on the tub rim, Mariah sitting on the closed throne. Then they exchanged sheets and read some more.
“What do you think?” Temple asked finally, turning on the bathtub faucet again. The Teen Queen Castle’s water bill for this period would be humongous from resident spy work alone.
“This stuff is Tabloid City. The kind of thing you’d see on CBS Investigates today. With that Dan Rather-not guy with the so dingy buzz cut. Why do old guys do that?”
“Maybe so there’s less gray showing.”
“Oh. Anyway, this case is so clear.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like a movie. Old-guy husband is major upset that his young bimbo blowup doll wife”—Mariah looked up to make sure that Temple had noticed she was drawing on her brand-new info on blowup dolls—“is divorcing him and getting half of his money, along with a new boyfriend. She even gets the house while the judge is considering everything. This house. And she invites the new young boyfriend over. Think Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.”
“And Bruce Willis is the Die-Hard husband?”
“Right. So Bruce goes bonkers and puts on this ninja outfit with the Spider-Man hood—he was big on martial arts, remember, and Elvis and also Zen stuff, which you’d think wouldn’t be, like, getting him into murder. So he shows up and shoots away at everybody and paralyzes the wife’s daughter from her first marriage, wings the wife, kills the boyfriend, and disappears down the hidden passages and they never catch him.”
“That left a lot of loose ends,” Temple said.
“Yeah, but they’re all, like, so old now. What could they do?”
“As you get older, Mariah, and you will, even old enough to drive a car, you’ll be struck by how young all the old people who used to be around you actually were.”
“Huh?”
“Age is relative. And bad blood has no expiration date.”
This Mariah considered, biting on a painted nail that Temple grabbed away from her mouth before it became a serrated edge and ruined her ‘Tween Queen score.
Mariah was still mulling over the implications. “You’re saying what’s happening now could go back to this stuff way back when?”
“Just add twenty years to everybody’s ages.”
“Well, the husband would be sixty-something. Too old to totter around here, I’d think.”
“And the wife?”
“She was a lot younger. Forty?”
“Forty. Only ten years older than I am.”
“No!” Mariah regarded Temple with true horror. “You’re only ten years away from that! I’d be … twenty-three, and old enough to drink.”
“And vote.”
“That too.”
Temple felt oddly deflated by the notion that she was only ten years away from forty. She’d always thought of herself as only ten years away from twenty. It was the same thing but much more depressing looked at from the other end of the telescope.
Mariah speared a blurred photocopy image. “She’d be thirty-five, the girl who was shot.”
“Too old to compete here.”
“Yeah. Not to mention crippled. None of it makes sense. They’re all too old.”
That was Mariah’s callous teenybopper judgment. Temple shuffled the copies around. No matter how she juggled the dates and the dramatis personae, these murderous sinners and sinned against were indeed “too old” to be part of the Teen Queen reality show.
Unless … she was looking at the wrong parts of the Teen Queen show. And the wrong reality.
Chapter 44 1
Old Tyme Revival
If Molina prided herself on anything, it was on being a thorough supervisor. The minute Temple Barr asked for copies of the Dickson mansion murders, she’d ordered extra copies for Alch and Su.
“Savannah Ashleigh’s bodyguard,” Su said, looking up from the documents.
Unfortunately, Molina knew exactly who Savannah Ashleigh was: washed up cinemactress; neuterer of Temple Barr’s cat, Midnight Louie; judge at the Teen Queen contest.
“Bodyguard?” Molina bit.
“This guy is forty. Too young to be the ex-Mrs. Dickson’s boyfriend and no way her ex-husband. Still. A bodyguard. That puts him on the premises with the wherewithal to commit murder.”
Molina was not pleased to see a contemporary photo of Rafi Nadir spun across the table right in front of her nose. Her blood ran cold. Cliché, yes. Fact, you bet!
She kept all her physical reactions dampened as she frowned at the photograph in her custody, knowing she was being watched carefully by her troops. Seeing Rafi Nadir again a couple weeks ago had been easy. No one would believe he’d been a former lover and was even Mariah’s father. He was a loser. She was a winner. She’d frozen, ignored, brushed by, brushed off, rushed out of there. Maylords Fine Furniture was just a crime scene and Rafi Nadir was just an innocent bystander in that instance. Or not so innocent. He’d found her again and now knew about her, who she was, what she was. Homicide lieutenant. He had reveled in delivering the murderer to her, bound over. And Temple Barr had reveled in helping him to do it.
Maybe she thought turnabout was fair play. Molina had pursued Temple’s significant other; now Molina’s ex-SO was in a position to embarrass, if not pursue, her.
But what about Mariah? Temple was supposed to be protecting her. Instead the poor kid had already had the rare life experience of finding a dead body. Now she was in danger of finding out her father wasn’t a dead-hero cop but the disgraced private cop currently on the reality show premises. Molina’s hands started trembling with fury. Alch was watching her curiously. He knew. Too many people knew. Just not Mariah yet, thank God. She spun the photo back to Su as if returning a tennis serve.
“We’ll put him on the possibles list.”
Molina put her mind as well as her emotions in cold storage. Nadir had been interred in the box of her past, which was locked up, like a gun in a cabinet. Safe behind steel doors.
Now … his orbit and her daughter Mariah’s had intersected in this insanely trivial place, a reality TV show. His daughter Mariah, who he’d ensured had entered theworld by foul means, not fair, but who’s existence he had never suspected.
Not even the sleaziest producer could have scripted such an ironic, maddening moment. And Molina had to keep the peace, keep the secret, no matter what. What was Temple Barr trying to do? Destroy her before she destroyed Max Kinsella? They had a deal.
Everyone but Alch was watching her under the mistaken assumption that she was brilliantly analyzing the case at hand. She needed to distract them from watching her chewing on the conundrum of her personal and professional life and onto something else… .
“What about the cat?” she asked.
“Louie?” Alch smiled at a closeup shot of the feline in question. “The usual suspect. Big, black, and known to the police.”
“Cut the humor, Alch.”
“You’re the one who sent the kitty pillow.”
“My daughter shares the room.”
“Oh, I see. The pillow was a two-fer: Trojan horse for the roommate and motherly gesture for the kid.”
“Trojan kitty,” Su said, snickering.
“The reality show may be a joke. What’s going on there isn’t. Who else on the grounds is suspect, just because?”
Su frowned, which drew her creatively plucked eyebrows into the kind of fretwork you’d find on an Asian table. Molina had never dared inquire into the inspiration for those brush-stroke eyebrows plucked into lines beginning thick and ending as fine as a mouse-hair brush. She didn’t know if the motive was cultural or simply creative. But they made Su memorable. She’d never seen the like, and nobody else had dared to inquire either, not even sticklers for uniformity at high rank. It would be one mystery this homicide lieutenant would never solve.