"I imagine he was, Mr. Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella."
"If you're the underdog, you're used to surviving."
"What would you know about it?" The question was personal.
"I knew Max, and you didn't."
The lieutenant reared back, then blew out a breath like a winded horse. "You didn't know enough."
"Neither," Temple said evenly, "do you."
"It's my job to find out."
"Thanks for the tip."
"You're not disillusioned, are you?"
"It's hard to disillusion a magician's assistant."
"You were more than that."
"Was I? I wonder. What are you going to do about the cats?"
"Cats?"
Temple told her about the will and the forthcoming article and the furor likely to arise over their collective welfare.
"Oh, rats," said Molina, her good mood ruined by the coming storm. "All I need is a raft of animal extremists all over the scene of the crime."
She snatched up her card like it was the ace of hearts.
"You do admit that this is the same man?"
"This is the man," Temple said, echoing Miss Tyler, who had echoed a classic scene of betrayal with a kiss in the Garden where Peter had betrayed yet again--and had been betrayed. Temple betrayed nothing but the facts, Ma'am, just the facts.
Molina read that in her eyes and had another reason to lower her triumph a notch.
"I thought you'd like to know."
"No, but I'm better off knowing. I'm not sure that you are."
"Why?"
"Politics, Lieutenant, are a lot less clear-cut than crime.
You should know that by now."
Molina tapped the card on her palm, then pocketed it. She was gone as fast and furiously as she had come, not with a magician's smoothness, but with sound and fury signifying nothing.
Temple went to the dormant cat. "Michael Aloysius Xaviar. Kind of rhymes with Caviar at the end, doesn't it, kitty? I just hope Midnight Louie hasn't done a disappearing act, too."
Chapter 28
A Clerical Error
"You look beat," Sheila said when Matt walked into Con-Tact at six-forty-five Wednesday evening.
He didn't argue, but slipped into his donated office chair and let it swivel him outward to face the sparsely furnished room instead of into the instant isolation of his phone niche.
"Lines been busy?" he asked.
"Quiet so far. They're all waiting until the weekend to explode." Sheila regarded him curiously. "Want some coffee?"
"Yeah, thanks." He was surprised. Everybody took care of their own needs around ConTact, but Sheila was a social worker and she sensed his mental fatigue.
She brought him a Save-the-Whales mug steaming with a full shot of coffee from the big aluminum urn in the corner.
"What's going on?"
"Oh, some friends of mine have problems. Thanks." He toasted her with the cup before taking a careful sip of the scalding brew.
"Don't you encounter enough problems here?"
"Sure, but old friends are old friends."
"They aren't tourists--?"
"No!" He laughed at the idea of Seraphina and company as tourists, then realized that Sheila had finessed him into explaining why the idea was so absurd.
"An old teacher of mine ended up retiring here. I help her out with the odd problem now and again."
"Mr. Goodwrench," Sheila said with a joking smile.
"Kind to old ladies and dogs." She looked relieved that an obviously old lady was the object of his attentions.
"Cats," he corrected without saying more, turning his chair to face the dead-end white walls of soundproofing.
"So you're tuckered out from playing handyman," Sheila pressed.
"Yeah," Matt answered, wondering what category of household task taking down crucified cats would come under.
He didn't want to talk about it, even think about it. So he jumped on the phone when one of the lines lit up, jamming on his headphones. He sensed Sheila standing behind him, hovering over him.
"ConTact," he announced to the caller. Whoever it was, that person would not stand breathing above him, brimming over with questions.
The voice began, a man's, sounding wired. Matt felt his pulse speed up for the crisis, beat to the rhythms of agitated speech, as his mind began sketching a mental picture of the speaker. He was plugged into the anonymous, distant night again. The presence hovering behind him lingered, then whispered away, defeated.
Matt breathed a sigh of relief that the caller was talking too fast and too hard to hear the ebbing presence. Then Matt heard only the caller, his troubles, his fears, his gravelly, desperation-edged voice. Connected again to someone who needed help and would demand nothing more than that, Matt breathed deeper, steadier, like an athlete, and entered his listening, concentrating, problem-solving mode. Nothing was as soothing to the psyche as other people's problems.
To his relief, the lines kept ringing and he kept jumping to answer them. That kept Sheila from offering any more favors and expecting any more answers. He was already obligated to answer to more than enough women. Lieutenant Molina, Temple, Sister Seraphina.
Still, at the back of his mind, the problems of Our Lady of Guadalupe swirled like leaves caught in an eddy.
His watch showed 2:30 a.m., when the first line rang again and he punched the button.
"ConTact. Can I help?"
' 'If you can help an old lady who has mysterious disturbances around her house," came a now-familiar voice.
"Sister Seraphina, what's the matter?"
She sighed. 'Tm sorry to call you, Matthias, but the police won't do and I know your number now, so you're stuck."
"You can call anytime," he assured her. "What's the problem?"
"First, Sister Mary Monica heard some disturbance from Miss Tyler's house."
"Sister Mary Monica heard?"
"Exactly," Seraphina's normally booming, cheerful voice grew grim. "I looked out her window and glimpsed a light in the second story, and then it went out. So I settled Monica down and watched. I never saw another light in the house, but several minutes later a flashlight bobbed along the side of the house to the garden. Mind you, Matt, I saw only a few firefly-fast glimmers; maybe I was staring into the dark too hard for too long. But I remembered poor Peter and got worried, so I called Father Hernandez at the rectory."
During the long pause, Matt imagined a dozen equally unfortunate scenarios. Temple would have been proud of him.
"He was . . . very bad, Matt. He insisted on coming over and stumbling about in the bushes with his own flashlight.
Of course he--we--found nothing, not after all that sound and fury. I finally got him back to the rectory. Matt, he needs you."
"No one needs me! I'm no longer practicing--"
"Father Hernandez is crumbling before my eyes. He made so little sense. I know his drinking isn't the primary problem; it's a symptom. The only alternative is to go to the bishop, and Father Rafe is such a proud man, and the parish is at such a delicate point in its fund drive--"
"And I'm the best that you can do," he interrupted a bit bitterly.
She refused to be buffaloed by his anger. "Yes," she said simply. "Please."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Come here when you get off work. Talk to him. I think Father desperately needs to share his problem, his sorrow, with another human being. He won't talk to me, to a woman, about what he must regard as a terrible failure."
"But to me he would?"
"He might. I don't know what else to do, Matt."
"Do you think you're going to win me back by making me function as what I used to be?"
"No. But I think you might win Father Rafe back to what he used to be."
"I'm that good?"
"You're the one person he might think would understand."
"He doesn't understand me."
"That's not what's needed here. We need to understand him, and
to let him know that nothing can be as bad as he thinks. His isolation has distorted his thinking."
"So has the drinking. You're asking for a miracle here."
"No miracles. Just good pastoral care."
Matt's weary laugh came out as a brief bark. "I can call a cab and be at the rectory by three-thirty." He didn't want Temple in on this, not anymore. Besides, he couldn't use her indefinitely as a taxi service to his past. "You're lucky we live in Las Vegas, a town that never shuts down."
"Chicago's supposed to be the town that never shuts down, Matt, but the recession has done a pretty good job of forcing it to. I guess counseling is the one profession that never runs out of customers."
"Maybe." She had given him an innocuous-sounding name for this dangerous, unrequested intervention in an' other man's struggle with his own soul. Another priest's. Counseling, not ministry. All right. I'll be there," he promised.
"God bless you, Matt."
Las Vegas cab drivers, like their Manhattan counterparts, have seen everything. So the ponytailed driver of the Whittlesea Blue cab Matt called didn't raise an eyebrow when he was directed to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Las Vegas had more churches per capita than most U.S. cities; why shouldn't a midnight meanderer want to save his soul as well as spend a wad at some casino?
The neighborhood was dark, still and well-behaved. No lights glimmered now around the Tyler house, supposedly empty except for cats, or around the convent next door, but Sister Seraphina had made the proverbial "candle in the window" literal at the rectory.
Matt saw one thin, ivory wax candle winking in the rectory's kitchen window. He wondered if it was left over from last Advent or St. Blaise's February feast day, if it had been blessed or was merely an ordinary candle pulling ordinary candle duty.
Matt listened to the cab's wheels peel slowly away on the gritty pavement as he walked to the side of the rectory, then pushed the night's last button--the doorbell.
He heard the faint, hoarse ring of an elderly buzzer within, waited, then rang again.
Finally, other sounds came, like a blind man boxing his way through a maze. The door opened all at once, fully wide, filled by Father Hernandez, who looked smaller and older in civvies--a navy turtleneck and dark slacks. Matt would be willing to bet that he wouldn't touch a bottle while in uniform; even his breakdown would be regimented.
"Seraphina called you," Father Hernandez challenged. "What would we do without nuns to meddle?"
The question required no response, and Matt gave none.
He simply entered when Father Hernandez faced the inevitable and stepped aside.
"What are we supposed to do?" the pastor asked, traces of both bafflement and self-mockery in his voice.
"Talk," Matt suggested.
Father Hernandez turned and moved through the semidark kitchen, bumping into a countertop. Matt followed, avoiding comment, avoiding judgment.
The priest buffeted down the narrow, dark back hall ahead of Matt like a babe down a birth canal, caroming from wall to wall, blindly driving toward the light that poured like pale syrup from the open office door.
He lurched through that door into the room beyond, into his chair, which creaked to accept the body he threw into it. A green-glass-shaded banker's lamp lit the desktop's jumble without casting much light on Father Hernandez's face behind the desk, or on Matt's when he sat down in front of it.
Despite the hour, despite the situation, rectories had an ineffable cozy feeling, and Matt felt that trickle of warmth even now. Familiar ground, once his own. But not quite.
The desk lamp also illuminated the tall, clear bottle of tequila sitting under it, and the plain kitchen glass fogged with fingerprints beside it.
Jose Cuervo was evidently the friend of Father Hernandez that Sister Seraphina had suspected.
"Care for a glass? I almost said, 'Father.' " Father Hernandez gestured with a host's broad, sweeping hand to the solitary bottle and glass.
Matt realized he had never before confronted anyone who could be so dangerous to his own hard-won equilibrium. He nodded. He would get nowhere if he began on a holier-than-thou platform. Besides, he could use his own dose of Mexican courage.
Father Hernandez's dramatic eyebrows rose, but he pulled out a drawer and extracted a glass as plain and smudged as the one already in sight. He unscrewed the bottle cap and poured three inches of liquid into each smeary glass. No ice, no niceties.
Matt leaned out of his chair to accept it, then sipped. He'd had tequila before in a different form: the festive, saltrimmed, pale jade bubble of an oversized cocktail glass. Straight tequila burned like rubbing alcohol and had a sour, acrid aftertaste. He set the glass down on the desk, careful to place it on a clump of papers rather than on the naked wood, where it would sweat a pale ring into the finish.
Down the hall, the rectory's aged air conditioner droned like a snoring giant.
"What does she think you can do?" Father Hernandez asked after taking a long, almost loathing gulp of his drink. His voice wasn't slurred, but a bit loud and contentious. Matt didn't take offense; Father Rafe wasn't angry with him, although he might act like it.
"Sister Seraphina always had greater expectations of me than I could live up to," Matt replied.
"Don't they, though? Don't they all?" Father Hernandez leaned over his desk. "I don't blame you for leaving, you or any of the other thousands. It's not like it used to be. Everything's changed--the liturgy, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the parishioners." He eyed Matt carefully, as if he had to concentrate to see him, and maybe he did. "Was it the usual, celibacy? I can see that a young man who looks like you--"
"It wasn't celibacy," Matt said quickly. "Nothing so simple."
"Ah. You think celibacy is simple, do you? How long were you in?"
"Including seminary, sixteen years."
"It gets harder," Father Hernandez said, sitting back to drink again. "Not the celibacy, everything. Raising money, cutting corners when there are so few other priests and nuns to be found. We used to run on our clergy--our dedicated hundreds of thousands sworn to poverty, chastity and obedience.
Now we have all the worries and the expenses and none of the resources."
"I've seen the frustrations of parish life, Father."
"Yes, came, saw and left. Not like Caesar, were you? No conquering, just accounting, and accounting for yourself and your parish to the bishop, who hardly knows your name unless you become involved in some untidy abortion fracas or sleep with a teenager or disgrace your cassock by slopping a little liquor on it."
Matt winced at the corrosive tone. "Will the bishop have to hear about you?"
"Has already, I suppose. Spies everywhere. 'Father Hernandez is tippling a bit nowadays, Your Eminence. Perhaps you should send him somewhere to dry out.'"If only that were the worst of it!"
Matt sipped from his glass again, wondering whether he should probe for some indiscretion with a woman or with the abortion issue. Father Hernandez answered that himself.
"Women were never my weakness," he announced with boozy satisfaction, almost as an ordinary man would boast the opposite. "Not sex, and never the bottle, until lately. Did Sister Seraphina tell you about those odd calls to poor old Monica and the late Miss Tyler, who was so generous despite my lamentable lack of tact toward cats?"
Matt nodded. Father Hernandez leaned forward over his desk, clutching his glass in both hands.
"Do you still observe the sanctity of the confessional?" he demanded, staring into and through Matt's eyes, his gaze as piercing as laser light.
"I left officially; I didn't just walk away like some do. I . . . underwent laicization. I'm not a priest anymore. I can't observe what I can no longer practice."
"You can treat anything I tell you with the same seriousness, can swear to keep it eternally secret, as privileged information, even as a lawyer or a psychiatrist must do."
"The obligation no longer has the spiritual element," Matt objected.
"But if I asked you
to . . . revert to that degree of confidentiality, would you?"
"I would have to," Matt answered unhappily.
He hated being asked to perform as a quasi-priest again, but he also understood that those were the only terms on which Father Hernandez would accept him as a confidant.
"If you were my confessor," Father Hernandez went on,
"I would have to begin my confession, 'Father, forgive me, for I have not sinned."
He laughed at Matt's partly appalled, partly puzzled expression, then sighed long and deeply. "You know about the convent getting anonymous phone calls? I have been getting letters."
"Letters?"
Father Hernandez disappeared behind the desk as he bent to wrestle open another old, and sticky, drawer. He surfaced with a large manila envelope, but before opening it, he refilled his glass and nudged the tequila bottle in Matt's direction.
"I'm fine," Matt said, indicating his almost untouched glass and registering the irony of the expression at the same moment. He was not fine, and neither was Father Hernandez.
"All right." Father Hernandez gulped more white lightning, then licked his lips. His hands came down hard on the plump manila envelop. "First, these are lies. I believe the term is 'damnable lies.' But we don't call Satan the Father of Lies for nothing. Lies can undo a life."
Matt nodded.
Father Hernandez sighed again, shakily. "I can hardly bear to show another human being such lies, but I'm sick of swallowing them by myself and saying, doing, nothing to defend myself. I think you will see why I can do nothing.
Nothing. But this." His hand waved at the bottle. "It's a coward's way out, and no way out at all, but it slows my mind from eating at itself so I can pretend to function. Every time I say Mass, I hope I will receive the grace to face this, and every time, I gain only enough strength to keep up the mockery. Now I understand why even Our Lord asked His Father to take the cup of His coming sacrifice from His lips in the Garden of Gethsemane. If what is in these letters becomes public, I will be crucified."
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