Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“It was a Big Lie, Carmen, and I could make a Big Stink about it if I wanted to blow up your credibility with Mariah. But that would hurt her more than we could hurt each other. So. I’m not backing down on the bottom line that she knows me as her father. Someday. And maybe I’ll earn a chance from her you never gave me.”

“Below the belt, Nadir.” Lieutenant Molina was back in there, punching.

“Deserved, Officer Molina.”

Amazing. Rafi had offered her a built-in way of fending off Boyfriend Day and ceding his own high moral ground over her own pretty unforgivable fiction of a dead hero father.

And from the steadfast, noncommittal look he was giving her, he knew it.

“Deal?” he asked, extending a hand.

She met his gesture halfway. “Deal.”

It never made it to a shake. They shared a mutual understanding for the first time in many years. Molina felt a burden liberate her chronically clenched shoulders, not ready to explore yet what had changed, and why they were holding hands.

“Guys!” a voice chided.

Hands dropped; heads turned.

“Hey, it’s awfully quiet in here.” Mariah stood in the hall archway, looking perfect ’tween queen with her new bobbed haircut and the leggings and short skirt, cell phone in her hand, frowning as she looked from one to the other. “Am I going to have to insist on a feet-on-the-floor-at-all-times policy around here?”

Rafi laughed his head off, recognizing that she quoted a parental edict for entertaining boyfriends, which Mariah didn’t have quite yet. She was too busy trying to be a media star.

Mariah eyed them suspiciously.

“What are you doing out here?” Molina asked, more flustered than she ever wanted to be.

“I thought,” Mariah said, tossing her Katie Holmes hair, “it’s what you wanted. I’m supposed to quit ‘hiding in my room.’”

“It’s okay when there are people in the front room trying to hold an adult conversation without having it drowned out by Justin Bieber.”

“Yeah. You’re just sitting here. Don’t think I don’t know that something is going on. Embarrassing, dudes.”

Mariah made a face and vanished back down the hall, her bedroom door shutting with a clap a second later.

Molina blinked at their quick dismissal by the resident media princess. “Daughters and mothers,” she told Rafi. “This is a rough stage. She seems to accept you,” she admitted.

“I accept her.” Rafi smiled. “I’m not under the daily pressure with her you are. Say, that’s nice.”

Molina was confused by his apparent change of subject. “What?”

His forefinger made a circling motion near the protective wing of her hair. “Those thin, big hoop earrings you’re wearing nowadays.”

“I did have pierced ears, if you remember. From babyhood. It was a cultural thing.”

“I remember, and you used to wear tiny turquoise stud earrings, your sole concession to femininity off the job.”

“I … they’d closed down, the piercings, so I thought I’d try again. Not for wearing at work nowadays either, of course. That’s … silly.”

“No, not for at work. But not silly.” His eyes squinted at her for too long to be comfortable. She was seeing the hunky young cop again. “If you do any more Carmen gigs,” he said, “throw out the retro silk flower over your ear and go with high-end shoulder-duster earrings.”

She shot him a glance. If? Why … why?

“They’d uplight those electric eyes.” Her manager speaking again, after all these years.

Carmen didn’t know what to say. Any answer would tick off Molina.

Rafi’s lips made a slight moue. “Mariah sure missed out there when she inherited your dark voice and my dark eyes. On the other hand, we get to see yours.”

Chapter 57

Invitation to a Duel

From an early evening wedding to a worknight. Matt usually came in a half hour early for his Midnight Hour talk show, which ran two hours, thanks to popular demand.

Hosting a live radio talk show five nights a week was a responsibility. He’d been used to relentless timetables when he was a parish priest, so he always allowed for small, unexpected delays. Oooph, those 6 A.M. Masses. Now he was a night owl.

And he’d much rather be at the Circle Ritz having another honeymoon night with Temple. She’d made his mother shine and he wanted to return the favor.

He filled two tall cardboard glasses with chilled Dr Pepper and headed from the station kitchen to the control room, where he lifted them to greet his boss, Letitia.

She was nearing the end of her nightly gig as “Ambrosia,” the black-velvet voice of consolation and Top Fifty songs from recent decades fit to soothe the savage soul.

Ambrosia cooed soft encouragement to her latest caller and started Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” to put that stressed caller to bed.

“Matt,” she mouthed through glass, waving him closer with a flounce of one long, knuckle-brushing orange chiffon sleeve. She dressed like Joan Rivers for the red carpet, if Joan had been black, thirty years younger, and weighed two hundred pounds more.

But hyper and abrasive were the opposite of Ambrosia’s style, on or off mic.