cat in a crimson haze

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Matt shrugged. "Not that I know of."

  "You don't 'know of much, buddy. So all I got is a guy past sixty, lifelong gambler, from Chicago."

  "That's all I have."

  Eightball shook his head, which didn't disturb his haircut, because what little hair he had left was white and close-cropped. He looked more like a frankly bald cue ball than the black number-eight billiard ball of his nickname.

  He was a stringy little guy sparring with seventy-something whose face was sandblasted by time and--Matt knew--a lifetime in the desert. That meant he had been isolated from the Strip during his fugitive years, so he'd be starting from scratch. That was all right with Matt. He wanted somebody low-profile for this job, and you couldn't get anybody more low-profile than Eightball O'Rourke.

  "One thing," Matt said.

  Eightball raised whitened eyebrows as extravagantly bushy as his hair was scant. Mother Nature grew whimsical with old men.

  **I don't want Temple Barr to know about this."

  "Listen, my cases are confidential."

  "Sure, but if you didn't know my terms, you might let something slip."

  Eight ball grinned. ''That little gal is damn good about getting folks to let something they want kept private slip, isn't she?"

  ''Amen," said Matt.

  "She reminds me of my granddaughter Jill. When that much 'will' comes in a small package, it's the bottom line. You know about me and Jilly?" His nonchalant manner begged Matt to say no so that Eightball could fill him in.

  "Some," Matt said.

  "Well, do you know about me and the Glory Hole Gang and our cache of silver dollars?"

  "Stolen silver dollars, weren't they?"

  "Aw, we were young then, the boys and me. It was a lark. Spent our lives hiding in the desert when we didn't really have to. This house's the one my wife finally managed to buy for herself and our daughter."

  He glanced around the plain room and up to its high, horizontal fifties windows with a nostalgia unrelated to its attractions, which were few.

  "When the wife died, our daughter was already gone, so the: house went to Jilly, me being out of circulation. Jill gave me the place after the silver dollar thing was all cleared up. She didn't need it, not when she was married to Johnny Diamond--you know, the soupy-song singer at the Crystal Phoenix, but he makes lots of money at it." Eightball shook his head. "I don't know why grown men nowadays have to go around looking like Samson. Anyway, all the other Glory Hole boys live out at our ghost town attraction on Highway Ninety-five, except me. So my place is old, and the neighborhood is just this side of a trash dump, but it's the only house my family ever had. I like living here. I like being in a city with lots of people. I like having a job after all those hard-scrabble years hiding in the desert. I even like finding people, Mr. Devine, but I kind of like to know why."

  ''Maybe I don't know,'* Matt said carefully. ''Just see what you come up with, and we can go from there."

  Eightball lifted the plain blue check on the desk in front of him. "It's your money."

  "And ..." Matt began.

  Eightball screwed up his face as if he saw a spitball en route. This was it, his expression said, the hidden clause.

  "I'm looking into something myself. Something . . . someone . . . even more confidential.

  Maybe you could advise me in a general way from time to time."

  "Sure. Another missing person?"

  "No, not missing, but maybe a part of his past is."

  "There's books in the library, Mr. Devine. You know. How to Hide Anything and How to Find Out Anything About Anybody.' '

  "No," Matt said, sitting up straighter. "I didn't know. What section?"

  "Ask a librarian. I don't go by the self-help books. I write my own."

  Matt nodded, but he planned to check the library. He had to start somewhere.

  'This guy you're looking for." Eightball lived up to his unlucky name; he liked a hopeless case, for all of his grousing.

  "Yes?"

  "He's a mite younger than me, ten years or so. That could give me an edge in figuring out where he was and where he might be now. Vegas veterans have their patterns."

  "That's what I figured." Matt stood and held out his hand.

  Eightball O'Rourke wrung it until the skin burned. "Good luck at the library, sonny."

  ***************

  Matt didn't go to the library next. He went to the convent. What a route. Jailhouse.

  Poorhouse. Motherhouse. What a cast of characters. Murderer. Gumshoe. Nun.

  He'd had quite a day, Matt thought. A good thing his day job meant working nights.

  He stood before the front door of the rambling Spanish-style house, a box of Ethel M candy held in the shade so it wouldn't melt.

  Las Vegas was slouching toward the cool of autumn and winter, but the sun was still warm enough to melt caramel through a cardboard box.

  "Yes?"

  Matt unconsciously bent down to the wizened face peering around the door frame like an ancient child's. Sister Mary Monica was ninety and quite deaf.

  "I'm here to see Sister Seraphina O'Donnell,'' he enunciated carefully into the beige plastic appliance in her visible ear.

  Before the old nun could indicate whether she'd heard him, a voice bore down on her fast from behind.

  "Sister," it rebuked fondly. "You shouldn't answer the door. It might be someone we don't want to--" The door whooshed wide, revealing Seraphina herself ready to glower at a possible gang-banger trying to extort protection money, "Oh, Matt!" Her about-face in tone from challenging to charming would have flattered him if he'd been in the mood. "Come in."

  He stepped onto the quarry-tile entry hall floor, feeling the cool shade of the house settling on him like a cloak.

  Sister Seraphina swiftly shut and locked the door behind him, a silent commentary on the safety of Our Lady of Guadalupe's venerable neighborhood in these days of youthful crime.

  She shooed Sister Mary Monica back into the front parlor, where a television set blared out a soap opera, of all things. Ninety-year-old nuns were not what they had used to be.

  Farther down the hall, the visitors' parlor was the same tidy retreat of pale stucco walls, burnt-umber tile floor and Hispanic-black wooden furniture embellished with formal carving.

  Once ushered within. Matt noticed one of the convent cats, Peter or Paul, ensconced in a slice of sunlight on the window-sill.

  "Peter," Sister Seraphina said behind him, her voice content, all the industrious bustle gone.

  ''He's done beautifully. Doesn't even walk with a limp. Perhaps cats have nine lives, after all."

  "I doubt that's sound theology. Sister," he returned, surprised to hear the tease in his voice, to realize how quickly he fell into old ways.

  "Peter's theology consists of a firm belief in the power of the multiplied loaves and fishes, with an emphasis on the fishes." She sat on one over-formal chair and gestured him to another.

  Today the heavy wooden cross that was her daily decoration had been complimented by a pair of wooden button earrings. It still disconcerted him to see nuns in permanent waves and costume jewelry, with a touch of lip gloss or blush. He knew he was reacting in a more old-fashioned mode than his relatively young age required, but archaic symbols die hard and nuns were the everyday anchor of the Catholic faith.

  Matt remembered the oblong box wrapped in white paper and handed it to Seraphina like an apple to a favorite teacher. She had been that, as well as a sometimes feared one.

  ''Oh, Matthias, you shouldn't have, but how nice. My, Ethel M. Sister St. Rose of Lima's favorite. You always were the most thoughtful young man. ..." She pulled off the white paper and deposited it on a tabletop, then lofted the box cover with theatrical relish. "Lovely. Would you--? Well, I'll share them later with everyone."

  Their mutual smiles grew uneasy. The years and their present roles rose like a flood tide between them, a moat no number of chocolates could bridge.

  "How is everything here
now?" he asked.

  "Back to normal. The cat's recovery is splendid, as you can see. Sister Mary Monica has forgotten all about the obscene phone caller--that's beatitude for the aged: blessed are the forgetful. Rose and I no longer worry about Father Hernandez. He's been rock-steady since Peter Burns was unveiled as the worm eating away at the heart of our parish."

  ''No drinking," Matt said, hating to be explicit.

  ''I realize that you're worried, Matt. I realize that you felt a tremendous responsibility about knowing that Father was . . . not himself, but no. Matt, he touches nothing but sacramental wine these days. Amazing. I've never known someone to recover so swiftly from that kind of addiction,"

  ''It was fairly recent."

  Her permed white head shook briskly. "Still, once the bottle sings its siren song . . . look at Sister Rose and the bishop's tea! I didn't dream what we were drinking until afterwards."

  "We'd all had a shock. Even Lieutenant Molina didn't spill the beans."

  "Yes, most unlike her."

  "And Sister Rose meant well. She must have heard of restorative brandy."

  "But in tea! She hadn't heard enough about it. Ah, Matt, there'll never be another generation of nuns like us, true innocents."

  He kept silent, thinking that there might never be another generation of nuns, period.

  They were a dying breed, as priests were a wounded breed nowadays. His mind flashed back to the seminary. He saw the eager, scrubbed young women who had made up ten percent of the student body even in his day. They ached to become priests because the role was forbidden them.

  Now that the priesthood itself was tainted, perhaps these earnest, feminist, budding theologians could redeem it--if the church could overcome centuries of male centrism to admit women as fully functioning clergy. The women's motives were purer, of course, because they were would-be pioneers; that didn't mean they wouldn't fall into the same old traps. He wondered if anyone had the amazing grace it took to embrace a religious vocation anymore.

  "Matt? You're not still worrying about Father Hernandez? He's right as rain, I promise."

  Only it doesn't rain much in Las Vegas, Sister, Matt thought wryly. And you don't know the whole story behind the good Father's recent bout with the bottle.

  So here he was, Matt Devine, needing to know something much more sensitive from Sister Seraphina O'Donnell than Father Hernandez's relationship with alcohol, and needing to disguise his purpose.

  He had become like Molina, he realized, prying information from an unsuspecting witness.

  An ex-priest was used to keeping confidences, not extracting them. But Temple could do it, Eightball O'Rourke was right about that. And so could Matt, especially here and now, because Sister Seraphina trusted him. She thought they spoke the same language, she assumed they had the same objectives.

  And they did. Salvation. Their own souls. And the salvation of other souls.

  "You know something about alcoholism. Sister."

  "Are you surprised, Matthias? After all those years of teaching? Oh, we nuns were supposed to be utter innocents, but we saw more than everyone thought. We knew why certain fathers never came to parent-teacher meetings, why some mothers wore this sad, cringing, broken look, and their kids too." She shook her head, her mouth curled as if tasting spoiled milk.

  "Especially their kids."

  Matt digested this confession. ''Sure, the kids themselves knew what went on at home, but the rest of us kids never thought about those things either," he said carefully. "We would just get quiet when certain parents were mentioned, as if they were unspoken bogeymen, but we never wondered why. 'Mr. Johnson' was just 'like that.' Maybe mean, or maybe erratic and surely to be gingerly avoided. We never thought in terms of alcoholism, or abuse. We just thought that was the way life was. It was normal."

  "That's the trouble!" The flat of Seraphina's hand slapped her chair's ornate wooden arm.

  "There's nothing normal about alcoholism and abuse, no matter how common it might be, or might have become. Kids accept the unacceptable because they know nothing different. All those children. All those years. If we--we all . . . I!--had been better informed, had been more honest with others and ourselves, had been educated in the terrible cost of all addictions, we could have intervened."

  Matt knew real regret when he heard it. He had heard enough formal confessions, despite the sacrament's fading practice. The large, welcome space had suddenly shrunk to the claustrophobic dimensions of an old-fashioned confessional. The room seemed to darken with deep self-examination. Seraphina's worry perfumed the air like a sensor dispensing the odor of penance, she blamed herself for something, perhaps for years of somethings. Now, she could do nothing about it but rue the golden old days."

  He felt needlessly cruel. He didn't want to stir up the demons of ancient guilts; he knew their many guises too well in his own sleepless nights. "Holy innocents." That was what he and Seraphina had been encouraged to be, each in his or her own way, both in their own generations. Holy innocents had a way of discovering years later that they had been neither.

  "They say the family's disintegrating now," she was saying. ''Nonsense. These hidden flaws were always there. We just denied and ignored them."

  "Like the problems of priests," he put in.

  Her voice grew sharp, even fearful. "What problems did you have with the priesthood, Matthias?"

  "None," he said with a relieved laugh. "I had problems with myself, with my reasons for hiding within the priesthood. I admit that I was literally swaddled in that 'holy innocence' you mentioned. I craved it, I sometimes think. I was even worse off than you; I never saw the seeds of trouble sown in the seminary. The church was so rapt with the ideal of the priesthood that no one thought to wonder that some young men who would choose a sexless life in the modern secular age might have a natural barrier to an ordinary, lay life of marriage and children."

  "I've never talked with a former priest. That shows you how sheltered I am, so don't apologize. Matt. And don't blame me for being . . . curious. What was so . . . rotten about the church's pattern of screening for the priesthood that all these awful cases are hitting the newspapers now?''

  "Unholy innocence. In seminary, the emphasis was on suppressing the sex urge, on desexualizing, and even demonizing women. No one was sophisticated--or honest--enough to admit the existence of other sexual preferences, other ways of being sexual. In a way, pederast priests, or gay priests who were not celibate, could almost convince themselves that they were worthier than heterosexual priests who were not celibate."

  "Didn't you wonder about gay seminarians, at least?"

  "No. We were all so young, so feverishly dedicated to the vision of a religious vocation, so determinedly neuter. I've read the memoirs of other ex-priests. Some express a fear of being gay, but I never even noticed that. We may have made crude celibacy jokes among each other, but we only discussed the real nitty-gritty of our sexuality with our spiritual director. What about nuns?"

  Sister Seraphina reared back at the very thought. "No one has ever asked me that. We are almost all elderly now, I fear, and the aged achieve a neuter state so naturally, at least we nuns did. And women molest children far less than men, perhaps only because we are reared to be more law-abiding than from any moral superiority. I do think the role of motherhood is more intense and therefore less likely to be abused in such perverse ways. But what do I know about that? Or you? Perhaps I fool myself with the veil of innocence again. Still, I think I would know.

  Nuns live communally; we may be more docile by upbringing. We have not the priest's temptation to move alone through the church, to make solitary decisions."

  "Oh, pastors may look like they lord it over their flock, but, believe me, priests are not the free agents you suspect they are. Nor bishops. Not even the Pope."

  "Have you lost your faith. Matt?"

  The question was timidly put, coming from Sister Superfine, but it was the most serious issue yet. He paused before answering.
/>   "I don't think so. I recognize that I had a true religious vocation. I understand that finding it once was my salvation. I will never lose respect for the many dedicated religious I knew, no matter what the headlines read. I will never judge a brother, or a sister." He could feel his lips trying to smile. ''I am impatient with bureaucracy, with hypocrisy, with lack of tolerance, and sometimes the aisles of Mother Church seem jam-packed with all three. I recognize all the modern conflicts: the church is patriarchal; its institutionalized sex-phobia has caused endless crisis in the lives of laity and celibate clergy. I'm not decided on every shade of these issues. My conscience may ultimately decree a position that puts me outside the doors if those inside them can't accept what I must be. I don't know yet."

  Seraphina shuddered. "Such . . . questions you raise. I'm glad I'm retired, waiting as usefully as I can until I'm called to the place where there are only answers. I still don't understand why you left."

  "To do that, you'd have to understand why I entered the priesthood."

  ''And--?" Her ungoverned eyebrows lifted quizzically, like an ancient, anxious terrier's.

  Matt had never seen Sister Seraphina at such a genuine loss. It made her look very old.

  He answered in a rush, like a seven-year-old kid making his first confession. He was surprised by how practiced it all sounded,

  "I entered the priesthood to become perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect. I entered the priesthood to become the perfect Father. I entered to avoid sex and marriage and children because I was terrified of all three. Don't worry, I have never broken a priestly vow, but not because of my faith or strength. How could I be tempted by what terrified me? I am named for the apostle who replaced Judas after the betrayal and death of Christ, yet I found myself finally walking away from the shoes of the fisherman at the age of His death--thirty-three."

  "But why, Matt? You were a model student, and devout even as a boy, the perfect altar boy, in fact. Was it perfection ... was it--?" Sudden suspicion enlarged the pupils of her eyes to matte black. Her voice became a whisper. "Matt, as an altar boy, you weren't ... abused. By Father--?"