She did lower her voice, at least. ''Don't mention 'baptizing' the cats when Father Hernandez is within earshot. He got into quite a fight with their last, and late, owner over that very issue."
"Miss Tyler was crazy." Mariah dismissed her benefactress with pre-teen disdain for such as yet personally unexperienced states as insanity.
Wait'll she hits thirteen! Temple thought. "Miss Tyler was cat-crazy, that's all."
''And that's okay?"
"That's fine, as long as you don't have too many."
"Do you have any?"
"That's debatable." Temple glanced at a pair of cat carriers parked under the shade of a towering oleander bush pruned into a tree shape. "One cat seems to have me. His name is Midnight Louie."
"Did you bring him here to be blessed?"
"Yes." Temple sighed. "He's not too happy about it, to tell the truth."
"Isn't he a Catholic cat?"
"He isn't even a domesticated cat. But I figured since this was my idea, I should participate."
"Why are there two carriers if you only have one cat?" Mariah asked. All kids under twelve love to demonstrate that they can count.
"The other cat isn't mine. Say, are those the L.A. Gear sneakers with the red lights in the heels that blink every time you step? Let me see! Cool."
Mariah had turned to display her footwear, her midnight-brown eyes warming at Temple's interest. "How'd you know about that?"
Before Temple could answer that no pair of unusual shoes debuted without her knowledge and probable panting after them, Molina as well as Father Hernandez and his altar boys had converged on them for the ceremonials.
Father Hernandez's ascetic and slightly careworn face smoothed into a smile as warm as the day. "Carmen. Mariah. You've taken two of Miss Tyler's cats? What a fine act of charity. I must admit that cats are not my favorite beasts."
Temple tried to keep from sinking right through the play-ground asphalt. Lieutenant C.R.
Molina's first name was Carmen! As in Miranda? Or, in Molina's case, as in Miranda rights? Ay, yi yi yi. . . .
Molina, sensing the direction of Temple's thoughts, flashed her what could only be interpreted as a dirty look. ''You can call it an act of charity, Father," she told the priest, ''but I call it an act of self-defense."
She smiled as she gently yanked the long, black braid threading down Mariah's back. The girl smiled up at her mother, sudden sunshine, then bent to remove the first tiger-stripe kitten from the cage. It squirmed in her arms, rolling perfectly round yellow eyes.
While the solemn altar boys--Hispanic angels with honey-colored skin and India-ink eyes--
stood at attention. Father Hernandez intoned some soft Latin syllables. His upraised hand, oddly held in the edgewise position of a karate chop (Temple noticed now that she was acquainted with that art), pantomimed a sign of the cross on the hot, arid air.
Tiger kitty kept still, and retired gracefully when returned to the cage. The sibling was extracted, held, and--no doubt cowed by the crowd--kept reverent silence while it underwent its own blessing.
"And you, Miss Barr." Father Hernandez turned to Temple with a sly smile. "You've been doing so much for Our Lady of Guadalupe lately that I will have to make you an honorary parishioner . . . what can I do for you?"
"Uh, nothing! That is, you can do my cat. I mean, bless him. I guess.''
Stunned into stammering by the threat of conversation. Temple hustled over to the tan-colored carrier, bent to pinch the metal latch to the open position, and hauled out a very reluctant Louie.
"Come on, big guy. You know you hate being penned up. I'm the cavalry here. Don't fight me."
"My, he is massive," Father Hernandez commented.
"That's right. Father." Sister Seraphina had come over, trailing television cameraman behind her. "You didn't see him the night of the fire alarm. This poor cat almost met the same fate as poor Peter."
"No!" Father Hernandez was shocked, as anyone would be when reminded of how the convent cat had been nailed to Miss Tyler's back door. Peter had survived nicely, but Temple doubted that the clergy at Our Lady of Guadalupe would ever get over such perverse violence.
''Then he must have a special blessing."
Father Hernandez's hand reached for Louie's forehead, while the big tomcat wriggled in Temple's arms.
He was slipping through her grasp, all nearly-twenty pounds of him, his shiny black fur licorice-slick. Temple bent her knees to prop Louie's weight on her thighs, feeling his hind claws curl into the folds of her crinkle-cotton skirt for purchase. In a minute she was going to look as if she'd been tattooed by a staple gun.
"I'll take him."
Matt Devine's voice came out of the blue like a miracle. Although he had driven here with Temple, he had vanished after their arrival, she had assumed to confer with Father Hernandez.
But Matt was here now, almost as magically as the Mystifying Max had always managed on stage, cradling Midnight Louie like a fussing four-footed baby, and holding him out to Father Hernandez.
Mariah Molina stared up at Matt, who was a stranger to her, not because he was movie-star-handsome, or as blond as she was dark. Mariah wasn't quite old enough to fixate on either attribute. What she did notice--Temple knew with sudden sympathy--was that Matt might be old enough to be her father. Her apparently absent-without-leave father.
Temple was a bit miffed to observe that mother was as transfixed by Matt as daughter, and Lieutenant Carmen Molina was darn well old enough to know better.
Father Hernandez murmured and waved his right hand. Louie struggled fruitlessly in the grasp of a martial arts expert, scowling with flattened ears as if he were being cursed instead of blessed.
If beasts could talk . . .
But not even Midnight Louie could do that. Matt returned him to the carrier with no more incident than a parting yowl. Then Matt opened a smaller, powder-blue carrier and brought out a small shadow of Louie.
"Midnight Junior?" Father Hernandez joked.
"Midnight Louise," Temple put in. She was always fast on her feet with a quip.
Everyone gave this one the obligatory lip-quirk it deserved.
"The Humane Society people, called her Caviar.'' Matt stroked the little cat's fine, fluffy fur.
"Welcome, Caviar," Father Hernandez intoned in high-priest solemnity, before returning to the Latin litany he was bestowing on all the animals.
Sister Seraphina leaned near to Temple. "He should do it in English, or he could do it in Spanish, but he's old-fashioned. He says the ancient Latin soothes the animals."
It soothed Temple, who liked the long, Latin names of healing herbs and drugs. Father Hernandez's Latin blessings had hummed around the gathering all afternoon, like the drone of lazy, overeducated bees. Behind him, the camera's Cyclops eye focused on cat and company.
Then the vignette dissolved. Matt turned away to whisk Caviar back to her carrier. Father Hernandez and bracketing boys moved on to the old lady with her rooster. The television camera clung close behind, its lens leering over his white-garbed shoulder.
"We'd better get our booty home, Mariah," Molina was saying briskly, hefting the heavy cage back to the Humane Society table and handing one young cat to her daughter while cradling the other.
Tiger stripes. Wouldn't you know. Temple thought, that Molina would go for a critter that wore prison garb?
"Awkward age," Seraphina murmured at Temple's elbow, "When I see these kids, I get such an itch to teach again. But . . . I'm too old."
''You're not too old," Temple said automatically, watching Matt Devine approach Molina and child. He patted the two cats, smiled at Mariah and began talking seriously to Molina. What about?
''Besides," Temple absently reminded the nun beside her, "think of what stalks even grade school kids nowadays. Gangs. Drugs. Weapons."
Sister Seraphina glanced at the trio that Temple studied, her benign face puckered with uneasy memory. "Our grade schools were haunted in the old days; we were just to
o innocent to know it."
"What do you mean?" Sistet Seraphina's self-accusing tone brought Temple's attention back to the conversation at hand.
Seraphina's expression grew both more guarded and more thoughtful. "Some youngsters have always grown old before their time. It's not the street, or the playground, that damages them, but what they grow up with at home. At least nowadays we admit it."
"You mean . . . drugs, even then?"
Sister Seraphina's head with its clumsy curlicue of permanent waves shook a definite "No."
"Cigarettes and alcohol then, mostly harmless stuff to be sampled in secret and forgotten afterward, after the dare was done. No, in the old days the poison was the secrets themselves, only then the Family was sacred, untouchable. You didn't dare suspect, and you certainly did not dare interfere."
"You're talking about child abuse," Temple said.
"I often wonder," Seraphina said, staring at the charming tableau of children and animals with priest and altar boys moving methodically among them, "how much damage we did by being so innocent. We made ourselves into hypocrites before all those children who knew what life was really like, or what their lives were really like. We prattled of saints and suffering and mortal sins. Sometimes innocence is a greater sin to atone for than guilt."
"Have you ever questioned being a--?"
"Being a nun? My vocation?*' Sister Seraphina's wry, amused eyes pierced Temple's confusion, then melted into the ineffable content Temple had always sensed in her. "Never."
Her mouth hardened. "But I do question innocence when it is a shield for the evil-doer. And there are evil-doers among us, Miss Temple; all around us."
The nun's darker tone carried more weight than Father Hernandez's lulling Latin murmurs.
Temple glanced around the sunny playground, feeling an internal shiver. Here, too? That kind of evil? But Peter Burns was in jail. It was over, wasn't it?
She saw that Molina and daughter had left. Now Matt was standing sentinel by the two cat carriers, under the green and fuchsia dapple of the oleander, watching Father Hernandez with an expression Temple couldn't name: part vigilance, part anger, part bleak hunger.
Matt had worn robes like that once, had blessed, if not in Latin, at least in English, and perhaps not animals, but people. Temple herself had seen him bless Miss Tyler when she lay ill.
The Anointing of the Sick, which used to be called by the more dire name. Extreme Unction.
What did it feel like to wield such invisible power, to assume a position of arbitrating between God and man or woman? Or had Matt always seen himself as a mere intermediary? Now there was a long Latin word for you.
She watched him with concern, remembering how unwilling he, the ex-priest, had been to judge Father Hernandez's odd behavior during the uncertainty of Miss Tyler's death. She remembered even more strongly how uncertain Matt Devine was about being judged by Father Hernandez, who was not an ex-priest.
"It's never easy, dear," Sister Seraphina was saying encouragingly. "Judging situations.
Judging people. I've made my mistakes," she added, a bittersweet twist to her lips as if she had just sipped sour lemonade.
Temple glanced at Matt again. He had made his mistakes, too. Was he still making them?
Chapter 3
Grim Pilgrimage
Matt was accustomed to institutional decor--plain, functional and eternally dingy no matter how well scrubbed.
The Las Vegas county jail had one additional attribute: an enigmatic air of sordid doings just beyond reach.
Matt signed in and submitted to a brown-uniformed woman jailer who clipped a plastic visitor's badge to the collar of his knit sports shirt. She was short and stocky, with buzz-cut bleached blond hair. Despite the gun holster riding her amply padded hip, she looked no more dangerous than a veteran hairdresser armed with a black blow dryer.
Appearances, Matt reminded himself, were deceiving. His own were a prime case in point.
"Lieutenant Molina okayed this,'' the woman noted by way of verbal confirmation. ''The prisoner has no lawyer yet to do the honors.''
"I understand he's representing himself."
She looked up, interested. "You know the old saying--"
"Anyone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client."
She nodded. ''You a lawyer?"
Matt spread his arms to display casual sports shirt and khaki slacks. ''Do I dress like one?"
Her lips approximated a smile, as much expression as she could muster in her stern, bureaucratic job. She nodded him past.
Everyone beyond the small entry area was either armed or wearing a visitor's badge like his.
Matt was finally escorted to the naked and neutral space he expected from years of seeing television shows. He had hoped for the high-tech glass barrier and the twin phone receivers, simply because the novelty of the arrangement would take his mind off the difficult task ahead.
He talked to hundreds of people on the phone, but never saw their faces.
Indeed, it was the quintessential scene of cliche: facing hard chairs, intervening wire-reinforced glass barrier. The setting reminded him of a bombed-out confessional, where the bare bones of furniture remained standing, oddly isolated, after the sheltering walls of true confidentiality had been blasted away.
The word that came to mind again was "naked." A bored but watchful uniformed officer on guard did nothing to allay that impression.
Matt sat where indicated, and waited.
In a couple of minutes, a door beyond the barrier opened. His quarry appeared, wearing a loose jailhouse jumpsuit colored a garish orange.
A small man, he looked almost boyish in the outfit, but there was nothing juvenile about his expression when he saw Matt: distaste screwed tight into contempt. And Matt didn't even know the man.
Contempt always made Matt nervous; as if he had done something wrong he had forgotten about. Conditioning. Right now he was trying desperately to do something right, only he didn't quite know how to go about it. Who was lying? Embittered blackmailer in jail, or honest parish priest? During his campaign to harass the Our Lady of Guadalupe congregation, Burns had threatened to expose Father Hernandez as a child molester. Was this charge a baseless taunt, or the simple truth spoken by an unlikely source? Matt was the only one on earth, besides the two men involved, to know of the blackmail. Hernandez denied the allegation, of course, but denial was a way of life to those addicted to unholy pursuits. Either way, whether Matt reported the facts to the diocese or did nothing, he might be abetting a monster. He had to know the truth for the sake of his own conscience. Success would depend on correctly handling this volatile man. Matt was good with people, but he was used to dealing with well-intentioned people.
Peter Burns was about as ill-intentioned as anyone could be. He was an aggressively unrepentant murderer.
"Well" Burns had planted himself in the chair opposite Matt and snatched up his receiver.
''So much for the holier-than-thous. No one from Our Lady of Guadalupe has visited me but you."
"I'm not from Our Lady of Guadalupe."
''You could have fooled me. You sure were hanging around the old parish lately. Just what was your angle?''
"Sister Seraphina at the convent asked me to help with the obscene phone calls."
"What are you, a lineman for the county?'*
Matt resisted his cynicism. "I'm a telephone hotline counselor,"
"That's a nun for you. Runs into an obscene phone caller so she calls on a telephone counselor for help."
Matt didn't bother explaining that there was a lot more to it than that. "Did you enjoy making those calls?" he asked.
"Me? I haven't enjoyed anything since I was about four years old. The church saw to that."
"What about abusing the cat?"
"Frankly--" Burns leaned back in the chair.
Matt, hearing his feet knock the barrier between them, almost jumped. The only barriers he trusted to hold here were psychological ones.<
br />
Burns watched him with a dawning smile, an open-mouthed opportunist's almost-smirk.
Taunting. "Frankly" he went on, . "I enjoyed all of the stuff I did--the cats, the old nuns, the old bat in her cathouse. It was like a license to commit Halloween, you know? Very liberating."
''Not . . . completely.'' Matt eyed the bland surroundings.
Burns shrugged. "What's your name?"
"Matt Devine."
"Whew!" Burns's stalled smile made a daring loop-de-loop into a high-pitched laugh.
"Perfect. Devine as in 'devotional duty,' and Matthew after one of the four gurus of the Gospel. I bet you were born to be teacher's pet at St. Mary's of the Holy Cross-eyed Hallelujah Chorus.
Old Sister Mary Malaria calls, and you come running like a good boy to dust the blackboard erasers and find the nasty kid who's making naughty phone calls. What do you want here? Plan to shake some chalk dust in my face? Don't bother. I'm proud of what I did. No holier-than-thou is gonna make me feel otherwise. So what brought you here, Mr. Matthew Dee-vine?"
Matt didn't bother correcting the guy on the fine points of his first name. "It isn't the calls, and it isn't the cats."
Burns shifted again in his hard chair, restless as a twelve-year-old kid. "Yeah. It's the Big One.
Murder. What do you want to know?"
"You'd tell me?"
"Sure. We're not in court. And, anyway, I'm demented, didn't you know? Why else would an upstanding pillar of the Church and the Court kill a nice old lady, his own great-auntie, no less?
Anything I say can't be held against me, because I'll say something else in two seconds."
"I'm not here about Blandina Tyler's death."
Burns's lips puckered in a mock-pout of disappointment. "What would it be, then?"
"You didn't just call the convent."
"Oh, yeah . . . my little anonymous notes to the rectory." Burns leaned forward, avid. "Father Raf-a-el Hernandez send you? Bet he's still sweating silver bullets. Hit the Coors, did he, the good Father, after my letters got to him?"
cat in a crimson haze Page 3