He stood and went to the threshold to assist her.
The first thing across it was the faded red-rubber tip of a wooden cane as plain and solid as a church pew. Black, lace-up shoes followed with a floor-hugging shuffle. He wondered for the hundredth time where on earth old nuns got those ancient oxfords nowadays; there must be a Perpetual Supply House of Sisterly Shoes, similar to salvage stores that stock an eternal supply of military mufti.
Swollen ankles and shapeless calves were encased in the elastic pumpkin-tan of support hose, the opaque kind that looked like a mask used by a burn-victim burglar with an I.Q. of twelve.
Matt suddenly realized that he had never paid such close attention to a nun's legs before--no matter her age--and quickly brought his eyes to her face, blurring past an expanse of tiny navy and yellow flowers, a cotton duster with a snap front.
Her face was even more seamed than he had expected, though unrealistically flesh-tinted plastic was affixed to her ears like Silly Putty. The hearing aids. She was stooped, one gnarled and liver-spotted hand curled around the sturdy curve of the cane's handle. A large but flat wart rested near one eyebrow, whose thin, rakish gray hairs sprang every which way. Her eyes were the pale, gray-blue of great age, as tremulous as moonstones underwater, a late-life shadow of baby blue.
The anger that rocked him nearly blasted him back a step.
He was used to voices on the phone, long-distance victims, never viewed, and only heard. He never had to face them.
Afraid to say anything lest his voice shake with fury, Matt bent to take the old woman's elbow and lightly guide her along the uneven tiled floor. She arrived safe at his former chair and settled gingerly on the edge of the velvet seat, as if afraid that she might stick and never rise if she settled more fully into anything at her age. Which was--? He glanced at Sister Seraphina, who smiled.
"Sister Mary Monica is ninety-three," she said without his asking. "She can't understand when we speak in normal tones, which is just as well. She's vain about her age and would be in quite a pet if she knew I'd revealed such personal information. ' '
"This man--it is a man!"
Sister Seraphina shrugged. "One would think so, yet Sister can't really hear well enough to tell."
"How does he call only her?"
"We don't number enough to have a convent switchboard; there are only six of us here. Each nun has her own number on the phone in her room. We'd run ourselves ragged otherwise, and it seemed a modest luxury."
"Of course," Matt stared perplexedly at the tiny old woman. He bent down to make sure she could see his face, his mouth when it moved.
Sister Seraphina introduced him, her tones bellowing deep from the diaphragm with the ease of a nun who had been able to call an entire hollering playground to silence after a recess.
"This is Matthias, Mary Monica, my former student."
Sister Mary Monica tilted a hearing aid toward her friend, but kept her watery eyes on Matt. "A darling lad," she pronounced at the top of her lungs with the merest lilt of Irish brogue. "Are you a detective?" she asked him with great interest.
Matt almost laughed. Her deafness was an invisible cloak of defense the caller could not penetrate. His "victim" was pleased by the attention the incidents brought her way.
"No. I'm a counselor," he said, producing his own loud but deepest voice.
He watched her eyes read his mouth and her own mouth pantomime the right word. Coun-sell-or. She paused for a moment. "Like Perry Mason? I like Perry Mason. But I don't like Hamilton Burger."
Good old Ham Burger, the guy you always loved to hate on the oldest Perry Mason reruns. Matt smiled.
"Not that kind of counselor," he said slowly. "I work over the phone."
Her eyes were blank.
"Telephone," He pantomimed a rotary movement, then realized that most phones nowadays were push-button.
Still, she was old enough to get the idea. Her head nodded in long, slow swoops and rises. "Telephone," She pointed to Matt. "You call?"
"No! People call me for help."
She nodded and smiled again. "Maybe I should give your number to the one who calls me. Seraphina says he is a bad man, but he has never hung up on me."
Matt realized another thing. Her poor hearing had made telephone conversation difficult. Only family or close friends would have the stamina to try it, and she would have few of either left. Here was a caller who refused to go away, no matter how much of the conversation she missed. In a way,
Sister Mary Monica and her obscene phone-caller were a match made in heaven.
He straightened and turned to Sister Seraphina. "How did you figure out the nature of the calls?"
ln answer, she bent down to the old nun. "Tell Matthias about what the man says, Sister."
"Such a nice name, Matthias," Sister Mary Monica beamed at Matt, "The disciple who replaced Judas. A very fortunate and redemptive name, young man, Man. Oh, yes. Well, he must be very fond of philosophers."
"Philosophers," Matt didn't have to think to raise his voice; shock did it for him.
She nodded and gazed at her cane handle, "Always talking about philosophers, Mainly, Immanuel Kant. Kant this and Kant that. A learned young man."
Matt, puzzled, gazed at Sister Seraphina, who met him with a limpid look. He was about to repeat the philosopher's name--Kant--when . . .
"I see," said Matt. "And how do you know that he is a young man, Sister?"
Her head reared away as she gave him a don't-kid-me look.
"All of them are young men to me now, Matthias." Her laugh was high and thin, but much relished.
"What else does this caller talk about?"
"Oh . . . animals."
"Animals?"
She nodded. "He is a great animal lover, which is fine, because we have Peter and Paul here, you know. And many cats next door as well. He is always speaking of the pussies."
She paused. "And I believe-it is too bad you are not a detective, young man, because I think this is a clue! Like on Perry Mason." She invoked the name of Perry Mason as another nun would St. Peter's. She leaned forward and fixed him in the glare of her watered-down eyes, now fierce with conviction. "I think that he is a breeder of dogs by trade, because he is always talking of bitches."
The last word, loudly uttered, hung in the quiet convent air. Matt, appalled with himself, choked the desire to laugh.
Then he turned sober. True innocence was a weapon that could confound the sickest evil.
Sister Seraphina smiled as she had used to when a pupil performed with stunning excellence. "That was splendid testimony, Sister, worthy of a witness for Perry Mason. Now you must rest."
Sister Mary Monica looked at Matt. He knew he made an excellent audience. She pursed her lips, reluctant to leave the witness box, this fine, carved chair so judicial-looking.
"Come along." No one resisted Sister Superfine at her most persuasive--and her most commanding.
Once again the snail-slow progress was made; once again
Matt cooled his heels. While Sister Seraphina escorted her charge back to her room, he mused on the silence and respected it, respected a place whose clock kept the time of its oldest and most frail resident. Outside, in the distance, the Strip was heating up for the four-o'clock traffic jam, when it turned into a slow-moving river of hot metal and hotter tempers, while neon by the mile and the million candle watt was warming up in the wings.
Here . . . here was a million miles away. He sipped his ice-cold, strong tea.
When Sister Seraphina returned, he almost started.
"She's lucky," he said.
"No," she returned, "Saintly, I think, in the old sense of true innocence. I wish I had it; I wouldn't know what you asked, or that these calls are indeed obscene."
"I'm surprised you do," he admitted.
She was too old to flush, but he sensed the impulse. "Oh, Matthias, you would be surprised at what old nuns know nowadays. At least the very oldest are spared. We are a dying breed, you know, an
extinct species. I wonder that anyone would bother to harass us."
He frowned, "Perhaps another of a dying breed. What about changing the number?"
"We did. Three days ago."
"And--"
"The calls continue. And they're from someone who knows our routine. They invariably come after final prayer."
"Maybe someone in the neighborhood can see your lights go out."
"Not the way these old houses are constructed, to keep out the day's heat. They tend to be shadowed inside."
He glanced to the heavy wooden shutters at the window and nodded. Just then, a thump sounded outside the window. Seraphina leaped up from her chair, a grim look of teacherly discipline on her face. She had never resorted to the ruler, but her voice could be equally as sharp a weapon.
He moved quickly to the window and jerked the shutters wide. A pale yellow cat sat on the wide adobe sill, blinking sagely.
"Oh . . . Paul!" Seraphina bustled over to crank the window ajar enough to admit a fairly fat cat. "He is such a roamer, you know. Off on ecclesiastical missions, no doubt, to the mice and lizards instead of to the Romans and the
Ephesians,"
"Peter and Paul," Matt noted. "I don't suppose you allow Peter to go by 'Pete'."
She quashed a smile. They watched the cat loft to the floor with a soundless grace, then stalk over to the desk where the beverages reposed.
Matt saw Sister Seraphina crank the window tight again, and draw the shutters. Non-Catholics often envisioned convents as mysterious, cloistered, closed-up places. The reverse was true, but not here at Our Lady of Guadalupe lately. Sister Seraphina O'Donnell, that formidable teacher and now community organizer, was scared.
"I'm not the police," he said suddenly.
"We don't need the police," she said with swift repudiation. "We dare not have the police," she added more softly.
They stood by the sealed window like coconspirators, their voices softer than shadow.
"Is there a reason?"
She nodded, her face utterly grim, all business. "A good reason, Matthias." He didn't challenge her unconscious reversion to the old form. Besides, she was invoking the boy he used to be, or perhaps the man he had become, and had ceased to be.
"A very good reason," She repeated, real grief in her sharp eyes. "Father Hernandez, our pastor. There is nothing he can do."
"Of course the parish priest must be upset by this sort of thing, but surely' "
"Nothing, He is not . . . fully competent."
"What do you mean?"
"He does nothing lately but sit in his office at the rectory."
"How old is he?"
She laughed, a bit bitterly, "Oh, not so old. Not like us in the convent, Perhaps forty-seven. And he was fine, and functional, until two weeks ago."
"How could a man decline so completely in such a short space?"
"You ought to know, Matthias."
Her eyes probed deep, spoke volumes, chapter and verse, more than her mouth said. He felt as if he reared back from her words, but he had moved only mentally, into the past.
"I see," Matt said in a flat, nonjudgmental voice. "He drinks, a whiskey priest."
Black humor lit Sister Seraphina's pale green eyes.
"Tequila," she corrected primly. "He is, after all, a proper Hispanic."
Chapter 10
Cat Heaven
Temple sat in the Storm at the curb, gazing past its sleek aqua nose at the neighborhood.
This was one of the oldest parts of Las Vegas, so old that it had slowly ceded to becoming a Hispanic enclave. Most of the homes here didn't even have central air conditioning.
Ancient, wheezing, window models hung askew along the sides of the battered old houses, looking as abandoned as the cars stripped down to bare metal that lay marooned with empty fender sockets.
Temple sighed and gritted her teeth. Perhaps her Girl Scout tendency to volunteer had taken her too far this time.
"P.R." was not short for "Pet Reliever." What had she gotten herself into? The sun would soon be slinking behind the Spectre Mountains, and this neighborhood probably wasn't even safe for stray cats.
She studied the house again: a sprawling, distinctive, two-story Spanish place with a Hollywood twenties air, its pale stucco walls etched with the shadows of ancient bushes and pines planted when the only neighboring structures likely had been the church down the block and scattered houses on half-acre plots. The home had been expensive before all the ticky-tacky, ramshackle post-war housing had sprouted up just as Bugsy Siegel was doing gross things to the Strip, like opening a hotel as flashy as its name, the Flamingo.
A promise is nonreturnable goods, Temple reminded herself, fanning her Pink Panther sunscreen over the dashboard, gathering her tote bag from the passenger seat and springing open the driver's-side lock.
She emerged into still, searing heat, locked the door and slammed it. The street was quiet, almost too quiet. She began the long stroll up the flagstone walk outlined by a fringe of weeds that scratched her bare ankles.
"Merow."
The demanding voice belonged to a beige cat with a ringtail, who materialized beside her and began soothing her weed-whipped ankles with its furry sides as it wound past her calves.
"You must be one of my hungry customers," Temple speculated. "Come on down!"
It followed her, whether by invitation or inclination, one could never tell with a cat.
An overgrown courtyard--desert scrub--led to a shaded, coffered front door. No doorbell. Only a cracked wood sign warning: "No Solicitors."
Reluctant, she lifted the heavy black-iron knocker of vaguely Spanish design and let it fall on the metal back plate. She never knew how hard or how soft to bang a knocker, or if she could trust it to be heard, especially in these large, rambling houses. Now she had to decide how long she could wait in good conscience before trying again.
Waiting, something she was never good at, she changed her weight from foot to foot. At her ankles, the cat purred, drooling intermittently on her instep; luckily, the Claibornes had an indecently low vamp. At least Louie, no matter how hungry, didn't drool.
She finally gripped the knocker's smooth, warm metal--it was that hot on a Las Vegas September afternoon----again and had just lifted it when the door cracked preparatory to opening.
Clank! A feeble, interrupted knock. So she was announced to the suspicious face revealed by a sliver of Open door.
"Hi. I'm Temple Barr. Your niece, Peggy Wilhelm, asked me to come over and help you feed your cats."
"Why isn't Peggy here?" an elderly, suspicious voice asked.
"She had a . . . problem with one of her cats at the show and can't leave."
"Those dratted show cats. Not worth the powder they put on 'em, a shame to pamper those creatures when there are plenty of homeless cats to go around. Do you have a cat?"
"Sort of, He comes and goes."
"What's the name of Peggy's sick cat?" the old woman asked suddenly.
"Minuet!" Temple answered with alacrity, as if she were standing by a blackboard and someone like a teacher had demanded a right answer and she had better give it as if her life depended on it.
Open, Minuet, The door yawned almost wide enough to admit her. The yellow cat slithered through.
"Well, come in, then, Paul, too. No, Peter! We've got an extra mouth to feed, I see, so I can use help. I guess you're not a scam artist trying to bilk an old woman."
"No, I'm a P.R. woman."
"P.R., huh?" In the dim entry hall, the old lady turned to regard her and lifted an incredibly carved cane from the floor. It almost seemed that a long, thin totem was admonishing Temple. "Let's hope that stands for 'Pretty Reliable.' "
Humbled, Temple followed her guide deep into the bowels of the house. She had an impression of massive, old-fashioned furniture jousting the walls and each other, of magazines in table-high piles. Area rugs scattered hither and yon raised wrinkles to trip Temple's high heels, but not her hostess, who clumped t
hrough the clutter like a safari guide in darkest Africa.
Another impression took Temple by the shoulders and shook her. Pet odor: a thick, heavy aura composed of cat, litter box, shed fur, dander and sour milk--and a whole ozone layer somewhere near the ceiling of Tuna Breath, big time.
Temple struggled to breathe through her mouth and talk at the same time without sounding asthmatic. "How mandy cats do you have? I mean--" breath "--many."
"Oh, I don't know." A switch clicked. Overhead fluorescent lights flickered like heat lightning, then burst into artificial brightness.
They stood in an ancient kitchen that had battered wooden cupboards and a dangerously heaving quarry-tile floor. Newspaper clippings and notes covered every cupboard, and all of them fluttered from their Scotch-tape anchors like tattered sails under the lazy rake of an ancient ceiling fan. No expensive, computerized Casablanca models here. No Humphrey Bogart in a sweat-stained ice-cream suit, either, just counter-tops cluttered with bags and boxes of cat food, and cats, just cats on the floor. Cats atop the cupboards, Cats in the sink, Cats on the old olive-green refrigerator, Cats probably inside the old olive-green refrigerator.
Temple sneezed. "Oh, excuse me."
"You're not allergic to cats?" the old lady asked with even more suspicion.
"Not that I know of," Temple said, taking advantage of the light to study Peggy's aunt, Blandina Tyler. Never married, never sorry. Now eighty-four and still upright except for the aid of her cane. Canvas open-toed shoes over fish belly-pale white feet--oops! She was doing it again. Conducting a look-see from the feet up instead of vice versa. Bad habit.
Okay. White hair that had been that way for so long that it was tinged yellow as well as gray, gathered into a loose braid clown her back. One of those shapeless plaid cotton zipper-front housedresses old ladies who are not too svelte always wear. Comfortable and suitable for the mailbox out front or the nearest convenience store. Miss Tyler's hands were ridged with veins, but capable looking. Right now she had the cane hooked over one sinewy wrist and was tearing open a Yummy Tum-tum-tummy box.
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