Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (2 page)

“Two age groups, thirteen to fifteen and sixteen to nineteen," Su said.

“
Got it. Teens-in-training and the full-media deal. Is
this a singing competition?”

Being a closet vocalist herself, Molina had actually caught a few episodes of
American Idol.
She found the
concept exploitive of the pathetic wannabes every art
form attracts and a mockery of true talent by letting the public select winners for emotional reasons. Look who they felt most sorry for.

“More than that: talent of any kind, made-over looks and improved attitude." Su was always eager to overexplain. "This is the triathlon of reality shows.”

Alch nodded at the unadulterated poster. "Yup. This
girl here looks real athletic, all right. I bet it challenges
her biceps to load on that amount of mascara and lip-liner
every day."

“
'Lip-liner?'" Molina called him on it. "Still keeping
up with the girly stuff, Morrie, even with the daughter
long gone?"

“You haven't hit the bustier stage in your house, I bet. Hold on to your Kevlar vest.”

Molina chuckled, imagining some busty contestant wearing a bulletproof vest in a glamour roll call on TV.
Whoa.
Maybe that would have a perverse attraction.

She tapped her forefinger on the oversize plastic bag en
casing the altered poster, protecting it for forensic examination.

“We've got . . . what? Dozens of teenage girl competitors from around the country pouring into a Las Vegas shopping mall in their Hello Kitty finery for auditions—
and one sick puppy already announcing that he's out
there waiting?"

“That's about it," Alch said. "No fingerprints. No way to trace the color copier to a local Kinko's."

“Kinko's are us," Su said.

“
No kidding." Molina frowned. "You know the routine.
Keep it quiet, keep an eye on the audition event. If we're lucky, the uniforms will find him before this ridiculous show launches. When?"

“This week's local auditions finish the selection process," Su said. "Then they narrow the field down to twenty-eight finalists in the two age groups and seclude
them all in a foreclosed mansion on the West Side. For
two weeks."

“
Two weeks?" Molina didn't like the wide window ofopportunity that much time afforded a pervert with a publicity addiction. "This could be the work of a kook as harmless as Aunt Agatha's elderberry wine. Or not. Keep on it.”

Molina was still at her desk, with a different wallpaper of paperwork covering it, at seven thirty that evening when someone knocked on her ajar door.

No one knocked in a crimes-against-persons unit. She looked up—glared—from her paperwork. As the only woman supervisor, she never let down her guard.

A man entered as if he owned the joint.

Brown/brown. Five ten or eleven. A stranger who acted way too at home on this turf. On her turf. In her hard-won
private office.

“Yes?"

“Working late?"

“
Always." She waited. His clothes were casual but hip:
blue jeans, black silk-blend tee, khaki linen jacket, big diver's watch face full of specialty minidials, and a sleek
gold bracelet with a subtle air of South American drug
lord. Couldn't see his shoes. Too bad. A man's shoes told as much about him as a woman's.

“You don't recognize me." He sat in the single hard-shelled chair in front of her desk, meant to discourage loiterers.

Recognize? No. He was way too hip for what usually showed up in police facilities, except for a five o'clock
shadow too faint to be anything but a trendy shaving tech
nique.

“You'll have to excuse me—" she began sardonically, still searching her memory banks.

“I consider that high praise."

“That you'll have to excuse me?"

“
That you don't recognize me in civvies.”

Okay. She ran a mental roster of uniforms, and came
up blank. This was beginning to get annoying.

“
I'm heading out," she informed him, slamming her
desk drawers shut, picking up the black leather hobo bag she toted to and from work and nowhere out on the job.

“How about a drink en route?"

“How about an ID? And . . . no.”

He laughed then. "You're usually onto this stuff. Tough
case on your desk?"

“They're all tough. What's your name?"

“You really don't recognize me?”

He cocked his head, and then she had him.

“Dirty Larry?"

“All cleaned up."

“Gone Chamber of Commerce! To what do I owe—?”

“How about a drink on the way home? Some noncop
bar.”

“
why?"

“
Personal police business.”

She didn't like the way he drawled that out but checked
her watch. Mariah had stayed after school tonight. Sock-hop committee at another student's house. Her baby daughter! Thinking about dancing with wolves. All harmless teenybopper stuff, hopefully. Staying at the Ruizes' for dinner until eight or so.

Dirty Larry, the Mr. Clean edition, waited. He watched
her with an amusement that hinted he knew the pushes
and pulls of her private life.

Bastard!
Her vehemence, unjust, pulled her back from the brink. This was a colleague, after all. An undercover narc. Maybe he had something for her. He'd be used to private rendezvous in public places.

“Okay. Five minutes?”

He nodded, got up, and ebbed into the hall. She speed-dialed the Ruizes and got a commitment that they'd keep Mariah until ten, just in case.

Chapter 2

Spooks

In a city built on urban fantasy hotels with sprawls that
rivaled the King Ranch, the Palms bucked the hotel-
casino trend and lived up to its name. It was an off-Strip
cylinder of gilded construction, like a tower of giant
golden coins.

“I am not dressed for this," Molina said, meeting Dirty Larry at the Palms's side entrance, as agreed, their separate vehicles parked in whatever spot could be found.

“
What
are
you dressed for?" He had an annoying
knack for taking her simplest remark as a springboard for some deeper meaning. Dirty Larry the Existentialist?

“A crime scene," she said. "You going to deliver?"

“Not here. Not now.
I'm
off undercover." He looked around. "It's kinda nice to be escorted by an obvious cop. Like having a bodyguard."

“I'm that obvious?"

“Like you say, you're not dressed for the Palms."

“A psychologist could speculate that you want to get me off my own turf, at a disadvantage."

“Off your turf, right. Is that really a disadvantage?”

She shrugged and turned for the door, moving into a stream of tourists in tropical print shorts and shirts.

She knew what she was and she knew what she wore:
low-heeled oxfords. Espresso-brown pantsuit. Oxford
shirt, faintest baby blue, open at the collar. Semiauto
matic in a paddle holster at the small of her back, steel blue. Talk about fashion coordination. Supermodels had nothing on a modern female cop.

They entered the usual jam-packed, ultra-air
conditioned smokehouse of a Vegas casino, an atmo
sphere lit by blinking slot machines that broadcast
bling-bling bluster and the clatter of coins spilling into metal troughs.

In
the craps area, Larry stopped to schmooze a pit boss
who passed him some VIP comps. Comps papered the
town, if you knew who to ask. The passes sent them to the
head of a line that had formed even though the Ghost Bar
had just opened, then onto an express elevator. Eerily, once aboard, all sound suddenly stopped, the casino's endless clatter replaced by the customary silence of half-pickled strangers packed together like kippered herrings in a tin.

The Ghost Bar perched fifty-five stories above all the hustle, a tourist attraction of the first water. Three of the four walls were glass and the view was jaw-dropping. Inside, the place was a
2001: A Space Odyssey
sixties wet
dream of blue neon, streamlined silver seating pieces,
and lime green accents. Icy in color and exclusive in attitude.

Molina took it all in with the same cool distance she used at crime scenes. She checked out the VIP clientele already seated as well as the ambiance and spotted several vaguely familiar faces. It took a moment to realize
that they were stars, actors and singers, not escapees from
Most Wanted lists. Odd, the jolt of false familiarity you could get from a household face.

“What do you think of the place?" he asked.

“
Playboy, Penthouse,
circa nineteen sixty-five.”

“You talking the magazines or improper pronouns?”

“Both.”

Posh or Mosh the Spice Girl wannabe did the waitress dip to lay two cocktail napkins on their sleek tabletop.
Bowing to the power of the chichi, Molina surprised
Dirty Larry, and herself, by ordering a pepper vodka martini. Larry ordered something called a Burning Bush.

Molina let her lifted eyebrows do the talking.

“Black Bush whiskey with peach, lime, creme de cassis, and a dash of cranberry juice for health."

“Gack," she said.

“It lives up to its name on the tastebuds. You can try a sip.”

He nodded at the twelve-foot-high glass walls.

“On the balcony, you can stand on a Plexiglas rectan- gle and look down fifty-five stories, if heights don't make you nervous.”

Molina stood, uncoiling her own impressive height, almost six feet. "Shall we dance?”

Seconds later they balanced on the ghostly plastic platform over nothing. A rectangle of aquamarine sparkled four thousand feet below, almost a mile, overrun by what looked like small brown bugs.

“The Skin Pool Lounge," he said.

“Not a glamorous name but a literal one?"

“Skinny dipping is only on Tuesday nights.”

Tuesday was the weakest night for customers, hence flashing the flesh. "Only in Las Vegas.”

They savored the glittering swath of the Strip's mas- sive hotels, laid out like jewels on black velvet or, more apropos to their profession, a glitter-dusted body on an autopsy table.

Take that, T S. Eliot,
Molina thought.
You and your "night anaesthetized like a patient on a table."

“
Shamelessly hokey but a must-see," Larry said.

“Hokey should be shameless. I like it. That surprise you?"

“Yes and no. I've been to the Blue Dahlia. That's shamelessly hokey too.”

She drew a breath, ready to retort, defend, deny.
In
stead she shrugged. "So?"

“So let's sit down and talk shop."

“Strange place for that.”

Their cocktails were waiting in glassware as kooky as the retro-modern furniture. The classic triangular bowl of
Molina's martini glass was supported by an off-center
curve of crystal. His drink was served in a rectilinear
tower of modernist glass.

He lifted it, not for a toast, but to offer a taste.

This was a way-too-early intimacy but Molina took
him up on it. Dirty Larry had a challenging edge but she
could match it. The bizarre ingredients produced a siz
zling effect that explained the cheeky name that refer
enced both the religious and the obscene.