Before I can express surprise or doubt or disdain, the doorbell rings.
At the Circle Ritz, doorbells do not just ring. They chime. In a related series of notes. Like a song. In other words, they make a production number out of it.
But like most production numbers, it does raise an audience: in this case, my Miss Temple from the depths of sleep, who robot-walks from the bedroom to the front door in her Hard Rock Café T-shirt and (cringe) Christmas bunny slippers from her mother.
“Fasten your seatbelt,” Miss Louise advises me out of the side of her mouth that is not busy licking whiskers into submission. “It is going to be a bumpy ride.”
Now I know what human dame she reminds me of!
Chapter 4
Fallen Angel
Temple shoved her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose before reaching for the doorknob.
She hated being seen in glasses now that she wore contact lenses, but no way was she going to find anyone still at the door if she paused to insert the contacts.
She hesitated before turning the knob. Maybe she didn’t want to see anyone. Talk about a hard day’s night. It wasn’t every morning she woke up with a stiff neck from being half strangled and runny eyes from being half basted with her own pepper spray. But this might be Electra, the landlady, who had heard about the showdown at Baby Doll’s and was worried about her.
So she edged the door open enough to know she should never have left the soft, warm solace of her bed. Molina! At nine o’clock low in the morning … Temple’s own personal nine o’clock low, when she needed to sleep in after getting home assaulted but safe. Thank God Max was gone already. She blinked. Max was gone, wasn’t he? Oh, God, there’d be hell to pay if he wasn’t.
“You can unchain the door, Miss Barr. I am the police,” Molina pointed out.
“I’m not sure I want to see the police.”
“Too bad. I want to see you. Open wide.”
“I had a rough night,” Temple complained on a half yawn, fumbling with the chain mechanism. “Can’t this wait until later? I’ll come to headquarters and make a statement or whatever.”
Molina marched in the instant the chain released. “I don’t want you at headquarters. I don’t want a statement. The officers at the scene wrote up a pretty lurid report as it was.”
“Lurid? About me?” -
“No, about ‘Tess the Thong Girl.’ “
Temple cringed, but had to hustle to follow Molina into her living room.
The Looming Lieutenant—Temple, at five-feet-flat in bunny slippers couldn’t help regarding the almost-six-foot tall homicide officer as akin to the Great Wall of China—stopped so suddenly that Temple almost rear-ended her. What a revolting thought that was!
“He replicates?” Molina demanded.
Temple peered past Molina’s navy-blue personal uniform. Louie. And Louie? Omigod, she was seeing double. Maybe Molina’d make her do a drunk test. Touch her nose in a straight line, or walk on her toes, or whatever.
Trying to focus, Temple immediately noticed certain inalienable differences in the two black cat images confronting them.
“That’s Louie on the left,” she explained, “and the other one is smaller, longer-haired, and female, as even a blind man could see. That’s Midnight Louise, from the Crystal Phoenix hotel.”
“I must say the fine points of feline anatomy are lost on me,” Molina answered. “They look like clones to me. I’d hate to think there was anything in any way resembling Midnight Louie in greater Las Vegas or Clark County.”
“Louie is an original,” Temple asserted huffily. “Butthen Nicky and Van from the Crystal Phoenix hotel renamed little Caviar Midnight Louise. Don’t you remember, Lieutenant? It was during the champagne celebration in the Ghost Suite after the Gridiron show. You were there.”
“I must have been there earlier. No champagne for working cops.”
“Oops. Maybe you weren’t there right then. It seems like you always are, though.”
Molina’s smile was tight-lipped. “No, I missed the feline renaming ceremony.” She eyed the two cats sitting side by side near the living room’s single sofa. “I suppose I should take a quick look around.”
Before Temple could say yea or nay—or what the heck for?—Molina was bowing and stretching all over the place while doing an intimate search of the furnishings and accessories.
After ten minutes she returned to the living room. “I figured the place would be clean, but better safe than bugged.”
“I am bugged, Lieutenant. I am bugged that you’re here, this early, upsetting my domestic routine. And my … cats.”
Molina eyed the duo, who were returning from accompanying her every move. They settled in tandem in the exact same spot she had first seen them. Obviously she was not used to cats that behaved like paired Dobermans.
“These animals are acting like police escorts and I don’t like it.”
“So sit down, chill out, and don’t move. I’m sure they’ll stay put then. Can I get you some coffee?”
“ ‘May I,’ ” Molina corrected automatically, and then had the grace to look embarrassed.
Temple guessed that she was getting the grammatical correction reserved for the lieutenant’s daughter, poor little Mariah. Well, the twelve-year-old wasn’t so little anymore, she was taller than Temple! But she was still “poor” for having Molina for a mother.
Temple forgot the coffee and sat. “Is this going to be a maternal lecture or a police warning?”
“With you wearing those slippers—?” Molina’s dark caterpillar eyebrows lifted as she stared at the paired bunny faces on Temple’s toes.
“My mother gave these to me for Christmas, so what’s it to you?”
Molina lifted her hands in tandem, presenting the palms of peace, and forestalling further banter.
“Far be it from me,” she said, “to critique a mother’s abysmal choice in Christmas presents. I’ve inadvertently committed a few of those myself. I can see that anthropomorphic slippers are off my list forever. For that I thank you. The lecture part is this: you are a civilian. You have no business playing undercover investigator at striptease clubs. You have no right to risk Midnight Louie’s happy home life by risking your own life in a dark parking lot. I don’t care that it came out all right and the perpetrator was captured. You could have gotten killed, and, believe it or not, Miss Barr, I would be very unhappy about that. But you know all this and will take me about as seriously as you would someone who would give you bunny slippers for Christmas.”
“I am wearing them,” Temple said uneasily.
“That’s the lecture part,” Molina went on. “The police part is this: you may think I’m off base keeping an eye on you and your associates, but as of last night you are now involved with not one, but two murder suspects. Some people might consider that a coincidence. I am a law enforcement professional and I consider it a weakness.”
“Two? What’s wrong? Is persecuting Max not enough for you now? That’s why I went to Baby Doll’s, you know, because you were so bound and determined to nail him as the Stripper Killer. Were you off base!”
“In this case. That doesn’t change the fact that he was all over the scenes of the crimes in various guises.”
“As were you!”
“Me? What gives you that idea?”
“Max. Max saw you more than you saw him. He is a magician, after all. You want to talk about me taking risks! What about a homicide lieutenant who’s secretly undercover investigating her own ex … whatever as a murder suspect and trying to pin the rap on my current … whatever.”
Molina’s nostrils flared. Temple shut up. She’d been goaded into committing truth, but realized that the truth always came with a sting in the taiclass="underline" the other person’s particular truth. Molina would lash back.