Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“Certainly, Lieutenant. I’ll page Mr. Nadir at once. He should call you back in a couple of minutes, if nothing urgent is under way.”

Molina snorted after the woman hung up. Nothing would be more urgent to Rafi Nadir than this call.

She paced in the homicide unit’s tiled women’s restroom, holding one hand to her touchy stomach. No one usually came in here between shifts. It was 7:00 A.M. Monday. She’d come in early to make this call. Her wound still squealed at any stretching movement. She was worn ragged from concealing her condition and lying to everyone about her absence for a week a month earlier.

Still, she needed to pace, cradling the cell phone against one shoulder, waiting for it to ring.

“Carmen?” His voice was low. He was holed up somewhere semiprivate too. Lord!

“We need to talk privately,” she told him.

“Not much of that in Las Vegas.”

“What about your place?” Better his than hers.

“I’m not where you visited before—”

“I know.”

“All police, all the time,” he said.

“You got it.”

“I’m on night shift.”

“Morning. Nine A.M.”

“Ten.”

“Done,” she said.

“Tomorrow. Tuesday,” he said.

Same old, she said, he said.

“You got it.”

“You want to hint what this is about, Carmen?”

“What has it always been about?”

“Fine. Tell me when you get there. You want directions?”

She’d let him tell her, a pulse in her neck throbbing. She really didn’t feel up to this. But if she waited to feel better about it, it would never happen.

Now it was Tuesday morning, and everything about the visit made Molina uneasy.

She’d debated between taking her personal Volvo or a cop car. She hated having her personal license plate on display outside Rafi Nadir’s house, but a police plate was worse. It was daylight. She’d have preferred the dark of night. But he worked then. Couldn’t be helped.

She’d driven the neighborhood first, looking for parked cars with people in them. Nada. Nobody under surveillance.

The house was modest, not more than fifteen years old, the first edge of the wild housing boom that had hit Vegas and environs like a whirling dervish and had not stopped until the mortgage bust. Now the Strip was booming with obscenely priced high-rise condominiums, like Miami Beach, and sales had nearly stopped.

Rafi’s house was distinctly low-rise. Still, it was as respectable as her twenties bungalow in Our Lady of Guadalupe parish. She could have afforded something modern and sleek in the suburbs, but she’d wanted Mariah to know her Hispanic roots, to be part of a real community that only church, school, and home within walking distance can provide. Call it old-fashioned . . . being a single mother gave her the opportunity to do what she believed in, no questions asked. By nobody.

She walked up to the door, facing north, smart in this climate. On the other hand, when you barbecued supper in the backyard, you broiled too. The idea of Rafi barbecuing was so funny, she smiled.

Unfortunately, she was caught in the act when he opened the door before she could ring the bell.

“So this is a social visit,” he said, raising dark, heavy eyebrows.

“Sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

“And that makes you smile. Come in, anyway.”

She entered like a cat, slowly, sniffing out the atmosphere. Also, she didn’t move that fast with eighty-some stitch scabs still pulling at her side and stomach.

The new carpet was a pale sunset color, beige-peach. Developers and people who wanted to sell their homes loved those blah neutrals. The walls were off-white. They were in a cathedral-ceilinged main room-den with an eating bar dividing it from the small kitchen.

Everything was tidy. Tidier than Casa Molina. No kid, no cats, no working mother in residence.

Rafi was wearing khakis and a black T-shirt. There were dark circles around his eyes—swarthy skin was prone to that—but he looked trimmer, tauter. Funny, he was looking better and she was looking worse.

“You still like calorie-free Dr Pepper?” he asked.

“I can drink it.”

He popped two cans and brought her one.

After eyeing the seating pieces, low, beige, and cushy, she opted to hike one hip on one of the three barstools drawn up to the den side of the eating bar. She wasn’t about to mire herself in upholstered furniture when she couldn’t be sure of pushing herself up again without a slight struggle or a grunt of pain.

Rafi leaned on the counter behind the raised eating surface like a bartender.

“So what do I owe—?”

“We need to talk, I told you. I don’t want to do this right now. About you meeting Mariah. It’s not a good time for me.”

“And Mariah, when would it be a good time for her?”

“In my book? Never.”

He just watched her. That was different. He’d never been wary before.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in denying anything,” she said after a bracing sip of Dr Pepper. She hadn’t had one since . . . well, since the day she’d decamped without warning, without word. Leaving L.A. fourteen years ago.