Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

Alch said.
    “Meanwhile,” Su added, “I’ve found a lot out about Marjorie Klein.”
    “And—?”
    “She was somebody, Lieutenant. She has several books about nutrition and eating disorders on Amazon.com and
    eBay.”
    “Second coming, obviously,” Alch mocked. “Amazon and eBay. The new carnival hucksters.”
    “The point is,” Su said, pointedly, eyeing Alch askance, “that she was something of an expert in the field.”
    “Credentials accepted. What about her personally?”
    Su flipped pages, quoting. “Associate Professor at Great Western University in Michigan. Blue-collar school but well regarded. Assisted various nationally known psychiatrists in treating eating disorder cases. She had some professional chops.”
    “In other words,” Alch summed up, “she was an expert of a sort.”
    “Amazing.” Molina was truly surprised. “The show producers actually assembled some credible advisors, unlike our own CSI.”
    “It’s a national hit, Lieutenant,” Alch said, “no point in being a nit-picker.”
    “There’s always a point in being a nit-picker, Morrie, or at least some pleasure.” But Molina smiled.
    “Okay,” she went on. “This woman wasn’t a quack. Could she have professional rivals jealous of her new public profile with the Teen Queen gig?”
    “We’re talking academia,” Alch said. “Always rivals.”
    “I have the autopsy report.”
    “What’d Grizzly say?” Su asked.
    Molina smiled again. Her nickname for the burly brusque coroner, last name Bahr, had stuck. It gave her a certain cachet with him. Coroners were always a trifle vain, like Sherlock Holmes’s older brother. They loved the tribute of a nom de guerre.
    “Peanut oil. Peanut allergy. Deadly. Victims of this condition usually advertise it widely to avoid any contact with such a common food element.”
    “So the lima beans...” Su began.
    “Were both a medium and a message, I think.”
    “Wow.” Su was speechless for two seconds. “Any one of those girls could have had enough of Klein’s ‘beans and legumes’ philosophy. And peanut oil... it’s everywhere.”
    “What about the kitchen?” she asked Alch.
    He nodded, consulting his notebook. “Bottles of the stuff, raw peanuts. ‘Natural’ peanut butter floating in oil. Anyone could have accessed it.”
    “Wasn’t the kitchen normally off-limits?”
    “Yes, but the show reveled in rebels.” Alch looked up at Molina. Pause. “One Mariah Molina made an unauthorized midnight raid on the kitchen Tuesday night. And Xoe Chloe caught her with a hand in the Chips Ahoy.”
    A silence held in the small, narrow office.
    “I suppose no one is exempt from suspicion,” Molina said finally. “I am at a loss for a motive.”
    “According to witnesses, Klein was particularly hard on your daughter,” Su said. “She was on the most stringent diet.”
    “Nobody else got bad news from the nutritionist?”
    “Everybody had to consume more soy protein, low-fat dairy, and milk.”
    “None of that is a motive for murder,” Molina objected.
    “Agreed.” Alch sat forward on the damned uncomfortable plastic shell chair. “We need to dig deeper into the victim’s personal life.”
    “Hah!” Su crossed her arms over her size zero Donna Karan jacket. “Nutritionists don’t have personal lives. Klein was a divorcée for twenty years, an academic drudge, a nobody outside a very narrow arena of expertise.”
    “She was somebody enough to get drafted for the Teen Queen Castle show.” Molina sat back. “Find out more. Find out more relevant facts. Find me a motive.”
    Alch and Su stood. “Right,” he said.
    “Wrong,” Su murmured as they shouldered out the narrow door together.
    Molina leaned back in her chair’s cheesy tilt setting. She couldn’t agree with Su more. This murder was all wrong. The vie was all wrong. They were all wrong, or they would see the connections that were now invisible. But, like a magician’s hidden mechanisms, those threads had to be there.
    Magicians. At least Max Kinsella had nothing to do with this case, thank God and Harry Houdini.



North into Nowhere

    The Circle Ritz was a kitschy piece of fifties architecture clinging to the fringe of the exploding ultramodern Fantasia that the Las Vegas Strip had become.
    It was round, faced with black marble, and sported triangular balconies at the “corner” units.
    Max drove his latest dispensable vehicle, a black Toyota Rav4, into the familiar lot. He knew every