Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (11 page)

And the last (thank whatever gods may be!) was a Strange Man who looked like Simon Cruel, i.e., Cowell, on
American Idol.

Two of the four judges knew TempleBarr, for better
or worse. Was this going to be a cakewalk or a shambles or what?

More like, or what.

Temple, ex-TV newswoman . . . ex-community theater thespian . . . former repertory theater PR woman . . . decided to regard this debacle as an opportunity to stretch her dramatic muscles, i.e., her I.Q. Insincerity Quotient.

“Zoo-ee," Savannah Ashleigh was reading from her cheat sheet with her usual skill at the cold read, rhyming
Zoh-ee
with gooey.

“
Zoh-ee,"
Aunt Kit corrected. Smartly.

“
A zoo, all right," the Simon clone bellowed loud
enough to reach the back of the line. His diction was
Aussie, not British, but just as scalding as Simon's.
"Child. Give those capris back to the zebras, there's a
good sheila. 'Twould be a mercy."

“Mercy," Elvis repeated, frowning down at his sheet.
He probably needed reading glasses. (The real Elvis
would be—my gosh!—seventyish by now.) Maybe this guy's vision would lose focus going from the sheet to her.

“So why are you here, my dear?" a woman with a wireless mike popped out of nowhere to ask. She was almost as astounding as Xoe Chloe. A woman past early middle age was a rarity on TV and this one was fighting age all
the way: phony black-dyed hair, all Shirley Temple
ringlets where Temple's was all long, razor-cut bob. Her
papery complexion emphasized baby bright blue eyes
and an attitude of relentless good cheer.

Temple
shrugged. It directed attention to her shoulder with the temporary tattoo: a tail-lashing crocodile.

“If you don't know, lady, I don't know. Somebody said I should. I'm blowing this gig. It's been unreal."

“Now wait a minute." Savannah was squinting at Tem- ple, sans the glasses she obviously needed. "You look—"
Temple
cringed, expecting the dreaded word, "familiar."
The Ann Landers with the mike seized her arm. "This girl is not all brash insouciance. She's got goose bumps." So would anyone with those vanilla-ice-painted talons running crosswise on her forearm!

“You can see she's trying to make a statement," Savannah said. "Girls these days think they have to be so hard. You can be a lady and succeed."

“
Why?" Temple answered. "You obviously didn't.”

“What d-d-do you mean?" Savannah was stuttering. "Succeed or be a lady?"

“Both. I'm outa here. I got a grunge band to run.”

“Really?" Elvis had finally exchanged his shades for a pair of half-glasses to read her entry blank. He regardedher over their rainbow titanium rims. "I think you're all bluster and sass, young lady. I think you're a fake.”

Coming from him . . . now Temple was considering stuttering.

“But a sublime fake, mate," the Australian Simon was
saying. "This girl has cheek. Love that bicep croc. And
the underlying sentiment: 'Green Machine.—

“You would," Aunt Kit noted. "You're nearly breaking your neck to see what those hip-huggers are embracing from behind.”

Temple
, recognizing her advantage, shook her Cher
locks and her booty at one and the same time. "Dream on,
old dude.”

At that moment, the middle-aged angel with the mike—she really did remind Temple of the good witch
Glinda from
The Wizard of Oz
movie, all that chirpy up
beat optimism—thrust herself into Temple's field of vision. Cameras were rolling from the sidelines.

“I'm Beth Marble, creator of this show. And I sense, dear girl, that despite your bold front, you're really desperate to make the cast. Isn't that true?”

Temple
eyed the Simon-clone. "I think he's the one
into bold fronts." Then she stared into the emcee's impos
sibly sincere eyes, heard that impossibly syrupy voice,
and managed to nod, gruffly. If one can nod gruffly, Xoe Chloe was the girl for the job.

The four judges' vastly incompatible heads were nodding together as annotated pages passed back and forth.

Scratch "annotated." Not a Xoe Chloe word. How
about . . . pages scribbled with cool graffiti.

“Do you do anything entertaining?" Elvis looked up over his granny rims to ask.

“The lambada," she said, "while clipping my toenails.”

“
At least she confesses to clipping them," Savannah ven-
tured. "That's a start. We could really fix her look, but—"
They all frowned at Xoe Chloe. Temple sensed she was
losing her audience, particularly Simon Pieman, whose real name was Dexter Manship, and who was sitting back with his arms crossed over his designer T-shirted chest, one bicep bearing a Crocodile Hunter tattoo. No sell, the body language screamed.

Temple
thought she knew the type and what pulled his Hell's Angel's chain. She boogied around in a tight little
circle, all the better to show off the back of her waist-high
thong panties almost fully revealed by the plunging low-rise capris. Rise? Heck, they'd never heard the word.

Temple
'd seen this classless getup on a teen mall
salesgirl at Frederick's of Hollywood last week, her at
tention drawn to the outfit by a pair of clucking old
ladies. She had proudly and promptly appropriated it for bad girl Xoe.

Dexter was moved to chuckle. "I said she was cheeky. Let her in. We could use a juvenile delinquent.”

Aunt Kit was frowning at Xoe's sheet, looking like
someone about to cast a dissenting vote. Temple nailed
her with a quick, pleading look the instant Kit looked up,
her mouth already open and the no verdict on the tip of
her tongue.

Temple
watched long enough to see the surprised expression forming, then looked away, defiantly sullen. Actresses ran on empathy and prided themselves on seeing beneath the surface. Aunt Kit should be a shoo-in now, and Simon Pieman was all Xoe's—muscles, tattoo, and libido. But the Elvis impersonator . . . what was he doing here, except maybe as a tribute to the Elvis-loving man
who'd built the house and was now long gone. And
maybe because Elvis, dead or alive, real or false, always drew a crowd.

Temple
did a series of three quick-on-her-feet cramp rolls and assumed a
West Side Story
stance. "Hey, Officer Elvis, you ever do any break dancing during your film career?"

“Break dancing? I invented it in my `Jailhouse Rock'
routine." He seemed surprised she had appealed to him as
a dancer. No, shocked. His persona was mired in the
seventies. His Vegas audiences were determinedly middle
middle-middle. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road.

“I do the mosh pit thing," she said. "You'd go over big today if you had one.”

He laughed at the idea of a bunch of moshing middlemiddle-middles, then glanced at the others. "I might be able to teach this one something, if she'll listen."

“Why, Mr. Presley, I would always listen to you . . . sing."

“
You talk tough, Xoe Chloe," he answered sternly, "but
you haven't worked until you've worn your tail and toes off on a rockabilly dance floor. Are you game?"

“Sure. I got rhythm."

“Thank you. Thank you verra much.”

On that surreal closing note, the judges conferred
again, checked their watches, eyed the long line behind Temple, and the anxious face of the woman named Beth
Marble who held the portable mike. And was possibly the
real power here.

“In," Dexter Manship declared for them all.

Temple
got in a mock curtsy before she allowed her
self to be hustled off to the sidelines by another gofer
with clipboard. She was in. In! She'd made it, purely on her hidden punk power. Her Inner Bad Girl.

The gofer, one of the twenty-something girls in hot pink who ran errands, sat Xoe Chloe down with another sheaf of papers to sign.

Xoe could have cared less, but Temple read every last
word, appalled at giving blanket permission to be
recorded in every media known to man and woman but
mostly audio-video, in all forms, now and in the future. In
the universe.

She'd be ceding all rights to her own self . . . except
that own self was purely fictitious at the moment. Luck
ily, the phony driver's license Molina somehow got for
her attested that "Sharon Carlson"—please! No wonder "Zoe Chloe" had been born—was nineteen and therefore free to sign away her own rights to privacy.

She finally signed the thing with an
X
for Xoe and
dated it.

Miss Pretty in Pink came back and asked for a real
name.

“It is a real name. Mine."

“We need a normal name."

“
I'm as normal as you are:' Temple said. Being a
teenager again was more fun than the first time! You could
act out and act up and everyone thought it was the norm.

“I need a real last name," the hot pink chick repeated.

Temple
rolled her eyes, sighed, grabbed the clipboard and wrote "Ozone" after the
X.

“
X Ozone? I don't think so."

“
Have you ever heard of the Artist Formerly Known As
Prince?"

“Maybe."

“
He used an alien scribble for years. In purple ink yet.
I think it was algebra. Surely you've heard of algebra?
Why can't I be X Ozone? It's better than X Chromo
some.”

Miss Pink frowned. "Chromosome. I've heard of that name. Somewhere. Maybe it's Greek."

“See! I'm famous."

“Is there an apostrophe between the
0
and the Z?" That gave Temple pause. "Yes, two," she said. "Just chill.”

The woman put the equivalent of quote marks after the
0
and darted away on her pert pink patent-leather slides.

She was back in about two minutes after conferring with the angel lady with the mike.

“I'm sorry. We need a real last name. Like legal.”

She hadn't asked for Temple's
real
last name.

“Carlson," Temple said, appropriating her mother's
maiden name, and her aunt's, which Molina had some
how come up with. She added the name to the
X
with a flourish.

“Carlson. Isn't that a cavern somewhere?"

“
In
the brain:' Temple said soberly. "You're right. A cavern in the brain. We all have a Carlson cavern in the brain."

“I knew I learned something in science class." Beam
ing, the young woman bore away all the rights to Tem
ple
's brand-new persona.

Shoot.

Chapter 12

Turnabout
Foul Play

"Stabbed through the neck," Officer Dunhill said. He was
young and looked a trifle green. "The entry point is
ragged. Really vicious.”

Molina stood there in the lukewarm early morning
dark of another 24/7 Las Vegas eternity. She'd asked to
be called on any teen deaths.

The girl lay in the middle of one row, halfway between
the fat painted line that delineated parking places on either side. Probably attacked just as she was leaving, or about to return to a car.