Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (32 page)

“
Mr. Buchanan." She makes the title and name
sound even more despicable than I could manage with
my most dismissive spit and hiss. "I cannot say I under
stand your influence with the producers, but ultimately
I am responsible for the ethical operation of this pro
gram. We are halfway through, only a week to go. I
submit that you can wait.”

She stands, forcing me to jump aside to preserve my
second most valuable appendage. If she has forgotten
my presence she is one miffed little doll!

I leap upon her desk, fangs bared, backing her up.

She strokes my back and, urn, upright member,
which is fluffed out like a radiator brush, should anyone
alive still remember that useful tool.

“
You are upsetting the cat," she tells Pukecannon.
"Whatever hold you have on the producers, the show is
almost done now and I no longer need to kowtow to
your demands. You already have extorted far more
scoops than any of the legitimate media. You will just
have to get your new information on your own. That
should be interesting, as I doubt you have ever got
anything in this world solely on your own.”

His already pasty complexion (the curse of a life on
the airwaves; luckily Mr. Matt leads an outdoor life that prevents such disabilities), pales. I love the way people
can change their skin color at the drop of a four-letter
word or even a two-letter word like no.

“
You will be sorry," he says, using the ancient play
ground threat heard around the world.

“
Not today," Miss Marble says. She pauses to run a
hand along my spine all the way to the tip of my quiver
ing tail. "And not any other.”

It is a great closing line, and I give her a two-tail
salute at ninety degrees upright in recognition of same.

Too bad it is ruined by this long, sustained piercing
shriek somewhere on the premises.

I beat Crawford Buchanan to the office door by six
teen lengths of my you-know-what versus his you
know-what.

Chapter 35

Diet of
Worms

Temple was resting in her room, trying to figure things
out, when she heard the scream, probably along with
everybody in the house, and what's worse, she recog
nized the screamer. She'd always had an ear for various vocal tones.

She took off at a dead run, the cute little flapping Xoe
Chloe mules keeping her from running quite fast
enough. So she let them fly off in the hall and pounded
on barefoot.

Knowing the tone of the scream . . . alto vibrato . . .
told her who but not where it was coming from. Her bare arms had broken out into so many goose bumps of unhappy premonition you'd think she'd been having a wet dream about Spike the Vampire.

Holy shiitake mushrooms!
she thought.
Let me be
wrong!

Her heart was pounding way past the safety zone, her bare soles hitting hard on the concrete beneath the carpeting.

Turn here? Maybe. Or there?

Or . . . maybe just follow the dark flowing contrail that was Midnight Louie, ears back, tail straight back, body low as a jet-black Maserati?

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 flee
ing 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-the
book, 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, dis
missed 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-American
princess 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 hic
cup. 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 ges
ture 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. Room
mates. 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."