She got back to business to hide the pain. “So. No sign of Kitty the Cutter knowing where you were and who youwere with. She couldn’t have passed as the bellman. Or was he short?”
“He was,” Matt said with a certain spine-stiffening motion. “But so was the waitress who brought dinner. I never thought of that. She was … petite.”
“Could she—?” Max asked.
“That is such a repellent idea, that woman spying on me even as I’m going to lengths she drove me to .. I suppose she’d like that. What would make a person want to destroy another person?”
“Why did the fundamentalists attack the twin towers?” Max asked. “Envy. They can call it religion or politics, but it’s envy and fear. Kathleen is like that. She hates innocence. She hates freedom. She hates anyone with a zest for life.”
“Why?” Matt asked.
“Why you?” Max retorted. He sighed. “You trigger her most negative emotions. Don’t feel guilty about it. But I did. I was seventeen. You’re … seventeen, too, don’t you see? Kathleen’s getting too old to find true innocents cluttering the landscape. I’m too burned-out for her. You’re fresh meat. She can really do a tap dance on your head. Let her bring you down, and she’s won. Unlike most of Las Vegas and some people of our acquaintance, I don’t care to know what went on between you and the dead woman. That’s irrelevant. It’s what went on between you and the dead woman and Kathleen O’Connor, don’t you see? With her, it’s always a triangle.”
“An unholy trinity,” Matt said slowly, “as it was that night: Vassar, me, and Kitty O’Connor rolling in a room-service tray.”
Temple felt a certain satisfaction. She had brought the two men together to shake loose some facts, ideas, and maybe solutions.
She hadn’t expected it to be pretty, and she hadn’t expected to enjoy it. It hurt to watch Max’s self-protective cynicism and Matt’s injured innocence jousting as if they were each other’s worst enemies when their real antagonist, and the truth, was still out there.
And whatever had happened, or had not happened between Matt and Vassar, the call girl’s sudden death had made her a permanent fixture in his life, and that of anyone who cared about him Which, Temple thought sourly, included her, dammit.
Chapter 27
… Homicide Alone
Molina stood inside and pushed the garage door opener control, waiting until the single wooden door shook, rattled, and rolled all the way shut.
Nobody like a cop to follow home-safety rules. No neighborhood cat would slip under her closing garage door undetected, not to mention the odd, escaped serial rapist.
When she went through the door into the kitchen, locking it behind her, the house felt cool, dim, and suspiciously silent.
Then she remembered. Mariah was at an after-school game followed by a team pizza party. Some lucky parents with regular hours or even an at-home mom would be dropping Mariah off from a minivan around eight P.M.
So not even Dolores, the trusty neighborhood nanny, was here.
Molina wasn’t used to an empty, quiet house.
She draped her jacket over the back of a kitchen chair and pulled the paddle holster from her back waistband, heading for the bedroom to deposit it in her closet gun safe.
Even with Mariah not there, she never left her weapon unattended for a split second.
A sudden thump from the living room halted her instantly.
Only Catarina or Tabitha, thundering over the hardwood floors, slipping and sliding, on almost-year-old paws. The tiger-striped kittens had become cats, but still could revert to an adolescent romp.
“Hi, girls,” Molina greeted them as they charged past, one only two feet behind the other.
No answer. Their bowls were full of dry food and they didn’t need to make up to her for dinner.
Actually, she was glad they were growing up and settling down. Kittens were appealing and fun, but layabout adult cats were better medicine for the frazzled police professional.
Many of Molina’s peers were unwinding in a laid-back cop bar right now. She glanced at her watch. 6:05 P.M. She could have actually stopped by for once. Except that having made a habit of heading home to kid and kittens had made her a stranger in a familiar land. So had her rank. Face it. She was not a party person.
Ah. Mariah was gone. No need to listen to that pulsing, rapping, mewling, screaming rock/rap radio station. Save her from preteens going on thirty!
Molina backtracked to the living room, moved the dial to the easy-listening station she had once kept tuned in, and waited until “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” came drooling over the airwaves like a cool mint julep spilling between the cracks of an overheated wooden porch floor somewhere over the rainbow where bluebirds sang and crickets chirped and sap ran.
Ah. She stepped out of her loafers, worn because their low heels did not intimidate male coworkers shorter than she. She picked them up by the heels and carried both shoes and semiautomatic pistol toward her bedroom.
She paused at the open door to Mariah’s bedroom.
The same bright chaos as always. Textbooks in canted piles under discarded clothing scattered around the room like the Scarecrow after the Flying Monkeys had gotten through with him. Mariah could never decide which look-alike shapeless T-shirt and baggy pants were coolest of them all. Posters everywhere of sinister, pouting males and females masquerading as singers. If she’d seen these punks when she was walking a beat she’d have arrested them on suspicion of juvenile dysfunction. Stuffed toys enough to almost hide the state of the unmade bed.
Nothing straightened up as promised: “Tomorrow, I promise!” And tomorrow and tomorrow.
Molina shook her head and smiled. Better an untidy room than a messy head. And Mariah’s head was still mostly straight on. So far.
She moved the few steps down the hall to her room. So quiet now.
Maybe she would have a drink before dinner. There was a bottle of aged whiskey that had aged even longer in her kitchen cupboard waiting to serve in Christmas egg nogs. Somehow she never had time to have adults over for Christmas.
She paused at her bedroom door, remembering the crowded, noisy Christmases of her childhood in East L.A. The tiny bungalow crammed with tearing kids tearing wrappings off a Technicolor mountain of presents under a skinny balsam Christmas tree draped in miniature piñata figures and huge pinwheel-striped lollipops from the Christ child to every kid under twelve in the house, and there were tons of kids. Her eight half-brothers and -sisters, for instance, all younger. All kids still, and she, Carmen, had been older, an adult early, more their nursemaid than their sister, even when she had been only nine, or seven, or even five.
They danced around her imagination now, her half-brothers and -sisters, black-haired, black-eyed sprites with adorable faces … that needed constant wiping by her of food and tears, depending on the day or the occasion.
She loved them all … and it would be a cold day in hell before she would want to shepherd more than one kid, Mariah, to adulthood again. She’d been a mother most of her life. When she’d become the first in her family to go to college, a two-year college, it was more a betrayal than a cause for celebration.
Molina … Carmen … sat on the bed, gun and shoes sitting beside her, symbols of everything that had gone right and wrong in her life.
She so seldom had time to think. To remember. Now, even shattered images of Rafi Nadir washed over her in the dead quiet.
She couldn’t seem to control the memory flood. Was she drowning? Drowning in guilt? Or just stranded tired and alone for once? Sitting on the dock of the bay, on the tree above the flood, waiting to be rescued.
No. She rescued herself. Always had. She didn’t sit around waiting for anything. For anybody.
She started singing counter to the living room radio, softly, in harmony. It was odd hearing her own voice without accompaniment, without the boys in the band behind her.