Still, she could talk better from a sitting position and she had to start rebuilding her stomach muscles for Monday morning.
“Morrie, I owe you for helping me out with this. With the captain, the doctor, and Mariah. I also owe you some explanations.”
“No, you don’t. But I am curious enough to take them.”
“One, Rafi Nadir. When I realized I was pregnant, I was cooked. My career was shot. I was too Catholic to get an abortion, but a patrol officer is at too much personal risk and I wasn’t going to subject a child to a dead mama. I was damned if I’d let a man put me in a corner like that. I secretly resigned the LAPD, grabbed what I could, and ran. I had a good record despite my brutal ‘initiation.’ I used my mother’s maiden name, got a patrol job in Bakersfield, and eventually worked my way to Las Vegas.”
“And Nadir?”
“He didn’t take to being low minority on the totem pole. I had ways of checking. He really blew it after I left, and got kicked off the force.”
“It takes a lot to get kicked off the LAPD.”
“Tell me about it. Along with New Orleans, Chicago, and Minneapolis, L.A. is considered one of the most minority-unfriendly forces in the country. Maybe it’s changed by now. I did make lieutenant in Vegas.”
“This Nadir guy turning up here must be a nightmare.”
“Worse. I’d never dreamed of such a thing. Now he’s found me, and therefore, Mariah. He’s not stupid. He knows he’s her father. He wants her to know it.”
“I see your problem.”
“That’s not the only one. I may have been wrong about Rafi. I may also have been wrong about your pal Temple Barr’s longtime sweetie, the Mystifying Max Kinsella.”
“You did have a hard-on to nail him for that old Goliath murder.”
“That’s how you saw it? I was too convinced he had done the murder? Look. He had just finished his magician act contract at the Goliath Hotel that very night. Then this dead man dropped from the ceiling above the gaming tables, where only a cousin of a garter snake could go. To top it off, Kinsella was not to be found or heard of after that for more than a year. Any judge would have issued a warrant on probable cause, but he skipped town right after that murder, which is obviously still unsolved.”
“Obviously, he came back to haunt you. As did Nadir. Why?”
“My rotten luck?”
“You don’t believe in luck, Carmen. You believe in hard work.”
She patted her stomach gingerly. “Whoever did this was running amok in the Mystifying Max’s well-concealed house. I finally traced Temple Barr to the place and went in on my own to check it out. I interrupted, or just preceded another Max Kinsella fan as disenchanted as I was. Maybe more. Someone was going through the rooms, slicing his clothes into shreds in the closets. And I thought I despised the guy.”
“Maybe it was that big alley cat of Miss Barr’s, Midnight Louie, miffed at the man for vanishing on her again.”
“Nice try. A knife did the slashing, a big butcher knife from the block in the kitchen. That’s what grazed me. It probably had a ten-inch blade.”
“Four inches can kill you.” Alch picked up the empty food bowl, then donned his purse-lipped thinking hard expression. “Seems to me your biggest problem is keeping your B and E secret. That could kill your career. You could go the lawyer route with Nadir, hold him at bay for a while.”
She thought too. “Maybe I should do something even more draining about him.”
“What’s that?”
Molina picked at a loose thread on the bargain percale sheet hem. “Maybe I should talk to him first.” She sighed, and it hurt. What didn’t these days? “When I can stomach it.”
A Deeper Shade
of Black
Black. Black.
Everything was black.
He was in a tomb. Or a tunnel.
Did he see a flicker of light? No.
Did he feel anything?
Only the slightest twinge of consciousness after long unconsciousness.
Or could he be sure of that?
He was either blind, or his mind was a blank, like a blackboard with no writing on it.
Wait. Blackboard. That was a concept. He had a mental picture of it, framed in wood.
His mind was not black. Only his senses were.
No feeling, no sight, no hearing, no smell.
But taste. A bad, dry taste in his mouth, like he’d tried to swallow a toad.
Toad. Another concept. Another mental picture.
Something or someone was keeping him prisoner like this. Sense deprivation.
An abstract concept. Not a thing, like a blackboard or a toad.
He could think in concrete terms, in concepts and analogies.
He just couldn’t see, hear, taste, smell.
But he could think. That was a hopeful sign. A spring, a feather, a dove . . .
Ideas were spinning in the blackness of his blackboard mind, but he felt even that feeble grasp on beingness fade to a deeper shade of black.
There was no where, no what, no when.
No who.
No one else.
Nothing.
A Winning Pair
of Diamonds
“Oh! I almost squashed Midnight Louie again.” Kit jumped up again before sitting on Temple’s living-room sofa.
“He’s hard to squash.” Temple watched the big black cat stretch luxuriously, claiming even more territory with his long muscular body and extended legs and tail. “He’s reclaiming the sofa because you used it for a bed before Aldo exported you to whatever hidden love nest you’ve been calling home lately.”
Kit sat where Louie wasn’t. As petite as Temple, she could fit in the small space the resident alley cat wasn’t hogging at the moment. Temple perched on the sofa arm.
Their elfin figures and pose made them look like mother and daughter, and they sounded like it, with their matching slightly raspy voices. But they were aunt and niece, roughly thirty years apart. Temple was thirty about to turn thirty-one, and Kit was roughly sixty and planned to stay that way for a good long time.
Right now they were both going on eighteen.
“I never saw yours up close at the Crystal Phoenix party,” Temple said, peering hard at Kit’s left hand.
“I never saw yours at all that night.”
Midnight Louie suddenly stood, arched his back like a Halloween cat, and thumped his twenty pounds down to the parquet floor.
“Guess he doesn’t like girl talk,” Kit said.
They watched him stalk into the adjoining office with its tiny adjacent bathroom and the open window he used as an informal doggie door. Temple had long since given up treating Louie like a cat. He was more like a resident furry godfather, the Mafia kind. She sometimes wasn’t sure who was letting who live with whom. The only certainty was that Louie knew his way around Las Vegas inside and out, turning up as regularly as CSI personnel at crime scenes.
Letting him roam was less like letting a house cat loose in Sin City than exposing the town to feline muscle of the first water.
Speaking of the first water, which was a term for diamonds of the greatest purity and perfection, Temple slid into the spot Louie had vacated—hmm, warm—and fanned her left hand alongside her aunt’s. They both sighed.
“Yours is fabulous,” they said in concert, then laughed.
“Does ‘yours’ refer to the ring, or the donor?” Kit asked.
“Both, of course!”
“Temple, why didn’t you say something the night of the party celebrating the successful close of the Red Hat-Pink Hat case! You didn’t even wear your engagement ring.”