The sergeant gave them no guff, being a disappointingly pleasant, helpful type. He called up , and they were duly instructed that someone would be down for them.
They had been here a couple of times before, and knew there was nothing glamorous about a police headquarters, except its lack of glamour. That's what gave it flavor, the sense of overworked people coping as best they could, with littered desktops and crowded offices and squad rooms, with busy bathrooms and eternally plugged in coffeepots.
Matt and Temple followed their uniformed guide into the elevators in silence, and were finally shown into a long, narrow office cramped for space but crammed with file cabinets and folders.
Molina sat at the room's far end, behind a desk covered with neat paperwork piles.
"This feels like going in to see the principal," Temple gritted through her teeth to Matt.
"Wouldn't know," he gritted back.
"Goody Two-shoes," she gibed.
Molina put her fingertips to both sides of her eyes, as if acknowledging a headache, or the sight of two such approaching.
"Sit."
The chairs she indicated were plain and wooden, a lot less comfortable than the Vampire's hard leather seat.
"From your call, apparently you both failed to tell me relevant information about the Darren Cooke death. It's not really my case, but when your"--she nodded at Matt--"hot-line card was found in the deceased's possession, someone had to check it out and I had the overriding interest."
Her vivid blue eyes floated in pale maroon circles of fatigue. Her abstract tone of weary disappointment was even more marked.
"I won't do it again, Mother!" Temple was tempted to shout. She glanced at Matt. He was giving Molina his rapt, polite attention, like a perfect student.
"I'm surprised you would hold back relevant information," she told him. He winced ever so slightly.
"Matt felt he couldn't violate the confidentiality of a client," Temple said.
"Unfortunate, but understandable. And what is your excuse for keeping my daughter at the sitter's long past suppertime?"
Now Temple winced. "I thought you--the police--would find it. I didn't realize until recently that you hadn't."
"And what didn't we find?"
"For one thing, my card, which Darren Cooke had possession of at the time of his death, apparently." Temple was falling right into the police patois. Had possession of indeed.
"You think this card is a witness, or what? And how did you learn that he did have it?"
"From his wife. She found the card, and incorrectly assumed that I ... was an inamorata of his."
"Again, please. In English."
"Oh, you know what inamorata means, all right! A musical person like you, Lieutenant. You just want me to squirm. I was attending his regular Sunday brunch, at his personal invitation."
"Why should he invite you?"
"We were working on the same set at Gangster's. Theater people make quick acquaintances and slow friends."
"And this happy crossing of paths made you bosom buddies with the late Mr. Cooke."
"No, but he had heard Savanna h Ashleigh, who once was very bosom buddy with Mr. Cooke, refer to me as 'Nancy Drew.' So --"
Molina pushed back her seat and almost laid her cheek on the desk. She laughed. Finally, her head lifted and she examined the objects hung on her wall as if inviting them to participate in her merriment. She even glanced at Matt with tear-filled eyes, expecting him to join her hyena act.
But of course he didn't. He was too anxious about his own confession to enjoy another's discomfort.
"Nancy Drew!" Molina was still laughing. "Perfect, and here I thought Savannah Ashleigh's brains were all in her purebred cat."
"They are," Temple snapped. "And she had a very hot fling with Darren Cooke a couple years back, if you're interested."
Molina the Poker-faced could sober up instantly once she had fallen victim to humor. She composed her expression to the usual deadpan. "Yes, Nancy?"
"I'm not gonna call you Bess. But I will tell you what I should have told you three days ago.
His wife thought I was ... the other woman. A other woman," she corrected. "An other woman?"
"And why would anyone think Darren Cooke would proposition you?"
"Because he did! But, don't worry, I left in a huff of injured virtue."
"Is that why his wife thought you and he had--?"
"The fact that I was there, that I went into his bedroom for a few minutes ... it was perfectly innocent, but I knew people would smirk and rush to the wrong conclusion, which was why I kept quiet about the other thing. It's enough to have a widow ringing you up because she thinks you were her dead husband's last lay and she wants to know his state of mind--"
Molina was her old, stoic self again. "Why was she so sure?"
"He always kept a trophy of his... inamoratas, on which he wrote the date of their one-night stand, as a kind of keepsake, or scorecard. For some reason, he'd written Sunday's date on my business card, so naturally his wife assumed--"
"Where did he hide that card? We searched that suite from whirlpool to coffeemaker."
"You'll have to ask Michelle."
"Michelle?"
"Yes, we became quite good friends once she realized that I wasn't his last stand, so to speak. She's French, you know. Michelle Bonard, a world-famous French model, but she's a wonderful mother and she even advised me on my love life."
Oh! She had been rattling on and then... Temple didn't dare look at Matt. Or Molina. She studied the framed document on the wall over Molina's shoulder. Some kind of degree, or award, with thick, tortured calligraphy.
"She's at the Crystal Phoenix," she finished.
Molina leaned forward to prop her elbows on what free space remained on the glass-topped desk. "Miss Barr's love life. Now that I'd like to hear. Wouldn't you, Mr. Devine?"
"No, I don't care for idle speculation."
"Then you're not cut out to be an investigator."
"I know I'm not. I was trained to hold other people's confidences as sacred, no matter what."
"And this is where your part of the confession comes in."
"No, not yet." Temple drew the harsh spotlight of Molina's attention back to herself. "You see, Darren Cooke really did need a Nancy Drew. That's what he told me in the bedroom. He showed me a manila envelope, an ordinary nine-by-twelve-inch envelope, but inside was an extraordinary collection of letters dating back, oh, a couple of years."
"Love letters?"
Temple shook her head.
"Blackmail letters."
"No, hate letters, pure and simple. From a young woman who claimed she was his daughter.
She was bitterly angry, blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her mother's life and her own. I was sure the police would find something as big as a manila envelope. But Michelle told me that you hadn't, as far as she knew, and that even she hadn't known about the letters.
Michelle said that you didn't even find my card because her late husband was exceptionally clever at hiding things. That was his whole life: hiding things, especially from himself."
"And yet he told you, a virtual stranger, all about the letters."
"He was feeling the pressure. That's why I think he was calling Matt. He really wanted to change, but his obsession with seduction was too strong. His wife knew about it, and thinks he was no longer able to attract the foxy young things he'd been used to. He was really anguished about those letters. And sorry that this 'daughter's' mother had kept her existence hidden from him. A couple of years ago, he and Michelle had a first child, a baby daughter he adored; maybe he would have adored this adult daughter if he'd had a chance. He wasn't as afraid of her as I thought he should be. I told him he had to contact the police--"
"Thank you for that." Molina inclined her head as slowly as Queen Victoria. Tall, dark-haired women with morning-glory eyes can get away with those sorts of gestures, Temple had found.
She couldn't.
"I told him that if he wouldn't contact the police, he should try some pricey, discreet Beverly Hills private-investigation agency."
"Astute, if not forthcoming."
"He wouldn't have done it. I could tell. And, then, when I was leaving, he made a veiled suggestion."
"Aha. The wolf pounces on the helpful little lamb."
"I was so angry. He was ignoring my advice, but apparently he could find me horizontally useful. I told him a no-shilly-shallying no and got out of there. I wanted to forget about the encounter. I both felt sorry for him, and despised him. So pathetic and so true-to-form. So when I heard he'd killed himself that very night, I figured that you'd find the letters."
Molina remained quiet, doodling on her legal-pad desk mat for a moment. "So you think he could have been murdered--?"
"Maybe. Though, the mood he was in, having struck out in his halfhearted seduction and worried sick about this disenchanted daughter, suicide could be likely."
"And what do you think?"
Molina had spun to drill her memorably blue eyes into Matt's.
He refused to bolt, speaking in a flat, reportorial tone. "You know I've been receiving calls at ConTact for several weeks from a sexual addict. A man with an impressive speaking voice. He's also an impressive manipulator, which comes with the addict's territory."
"You've concluded this was Darren Cooke?"
"This could have been Darren Cooke. I don't know for sure yet. If he never calls again--"
Matt shrugged, and then shrugged the sheepskin jacket, which was much too hot for a small office, onto his chair back.
Molina, Temple noticed, was riveted on his every move.
"The incident that Temple wants me to tell you," Matt went on, "was one I was reluctant to report to anybody. I'm simply not sure who I've been talking to all these weeks. This call came Sunday at about midnight."
Molina was no longer riveted on Matt, but on his testimony. And she didn't interrupt him as much as she did Temple. Sexist!
Matt toyed with a leather button on his new jacket. That way he could look down and talk more to himself.
"I tried not to judge him, but he would never take positive steps to work on his addiction. I found out last week that he was calling me not only from out of town--I was supposed to think I was vital to him--but that he'd been calling other phone counselors." Matt smiled sadly. "He had to know more than whomever he was dealing with. A tragic personality."
Molina could wait no longer for the tale to tell itself. "So. Sunday night. At midnight."
"I got another call. He alternated between dependency riffs and angry rejection."
"Of you?"
"Of course of me. In these situations, the counselor is the punching bag. He is everybody the caller thinks failed him in life. And then, his tone suddenly changed. I could hear him moving around with his portable phone, answering the door. Apparently what he craved was standing right there. 'Hello, baby,' I heard him say. 'Just what the doctor ordered. Come on in!' He hung up before I heard his visitor speak. That's all."
"That's all? You could have heard the arrival of the last person to see Darren Cooke alive."
"Yes, but what good does that do? I don't know who came to visit, or why or what happened next. Temple's main concern is that you find the missing letters. Perhaps his widow wo uld know where to hunt for them. She found Temple's card quickly enough."
"Temple's card. Marked with the ritual seal of successful seduction." Molina smiled conspiratorially at Matt. "Is our little Miss Temple as innocent as she would have us think? She has a nasty habit of withholding information from the police. See the Mystifying Max."
Temple jumped in. "I never knew where Max was or why he might have been gone."
"But now that he's returned . . . don't you know more?"
Temple hesitated. "Not enough," she muttered.
Molina hit the flat of her hands on the desk in dismissal.
"I've made what notes are relevant. Miss Barr, if we find that missing manila envelope, I'll have to ask you to identify the contents. Mr. Devine, I presume your hot line doesn't have caller ID?"
He shook his head.
"Why didn't you simply refuse this tiresome sexual addict's calls?"
"I didn't have the heart to cut him loose. He was genuinely troubled, and trying to find a way to help himself, albeit falteringly."
"Albeit. An old-fashioned term. Bet you learned that in seminary." Molina nodded. "Okay, youse two disreputables can go. Frankly, I don't think either one of you concealed anything worth spit, but don't do it again."
"Yes, ma'am," Temple said.
"Thanks," Matt added with a slow smile
They left, both feeling quite virtuous.
"Confession is good for the soul," Temple said en route to the parking garage.
"That's what I was brought up to believe."
"I'm glad she took it so well."
"That's because she doesn't think that what you saw and what I heard are important, thank God. I hope that this doesn't turn out to be one of your murders."
"What do you mean, 'my murders.' "
"Only that you are a verifiable murder magnet. Suicide would be a nice change of pace; though, speaking from a religious point of view, it's the far more tragic death."
"Can't go to heaven, and all that? That's the Holy Roman Catholic Church for you; kick even the dead when they're down."
Matt stopped under the low, dark concrete beams. "The sin of suicide is in the enormity of denying God's will in your life by taking your own life. A great sin. Granted, the suicide himself is a pathetic soul, often under the influence of severe depression."
"Then why punish him after death? In absentia. Seems cowardly to a mealy-mouthed Unitarian like me."
"We'd have to go into about two years of theology to examine all the issues."
"That's it. Why can't religion be more accessible than that? Why can't mercy be the operating system, instead of right and wrong as written down somewhere by self-proclaimed holy men who are afraid to let women and children and suicides speak?"
Matt shook his head as he buttoned his jacket. "I'm not going to argue theology with you; it's too darn cold. Better bundle up for the trip back."
Temple suddenly produced a wicked grin. "I will."
The Vampire coughed before the engine released its full power and took the motorcycle by the throat.
Temple donned Electra's helmet and hopped aboard, only wincing slightly at the stretch.
This time she wrapped her arms all the way around Matt until they met in front.
If he found their riding arrangement more claustrophobic than before, he couldn't say a thing over the warming engine's roar. They swooped down the corkscrew exit ramp, Temple wanting to scream as if she were on a roller coaster. She caught her breath while he paused to pay the ticket. Matt got the financially short end of the deal. Temple, clinging like a leech for the chilly ride home, couldn't get to the money she had jammed in her jacket pocket when leaving her trademark tote bag behind.
Outside, stars gleamed high in the sky. Except for a red lashmark along the horizon, the sun had vanished, letting the lights of Las Vegas perform their nocturnal magic.
Temple did feel she was on a roller coaster as streetlights streaked by. Passing cars became greased lightning as the wind pulled and pushed the Vampire to top speed.
Matt didn't go straight home, but headed into the dark desert, where the highway eventually became a road that swelled up and down, that curved right and left. Temple's bare fingers stiffened in the brunt of the wind, but that only locked them tighter into position, and pressed her closer to Matt, thigh to thigh, chest to back, warm cheek to chill faux sheepskin.
Not being able to talk over the wind rush and the Vampire's lonely howl in the wilderness underlined the ride's strange intimacy. After only a few minutes, the Vampire etched a semicircle in the empty, sand-dusted highway. In front of them, the lights of Las Vegas now beckoned on the horizon like an el
ectrified bonfire.
The Vampire sped straight for that tropical, topical warmth. Temple no longer considered the motorcycle a machine under human control, but an animate, metaphorical beast, a steed ...
a warhorse or a dragon or something so old that nobody alive knew its name anymore.
She knew that Matt had not known where they were going when he had headed into the darkness, that neither he nor she could say where they had been and that even the Vampire didn't need to know how to get back home. Click your heels, close your eyes and follow t he Strip's bright afterimage searing through your lids. The road became arrow-straight as they neared the city. Cars came crowding around again, like moths hungry for the Vampire's pale, gleaming silver skin and hypnotic howl.
Watch out, she thought. Vampires bite!
A more mundane mob of cars, vans, trucks and taxis finally slowed the Vampire to a docile speed. When they arrived at the Circle Ritz, Temple felt as if she had been trapped in an icy, crystal-clear bell jar amid a maelstrom of sound and speed, unnaturally alone in a vast natural world and yet not alone. Maybe this was how the Biblical prophets had felt when they saw God in mountain peaks and fiery bushes.
She dismounted, disoriented, to rejoin still, solid ground, and let Matt put the Vampire to bed alone. When he came out and locked the doors, she turned with a smile.
"That was scary, but it scared away all the anxiety too. Have you ever driven out into the desert like that, Matt? Just for fun?"
"I've never done anything just for fun," he said. "But I might be up for trying it."
"I'm sorry I criticized your religion's positions. They just seem so set in cold, hard stone."
"Don't be sorry. Maybe that's what religious positions are for: to be questioned, ridiculed and sometimes thrown out."
"Goodness! I think that's exactly what happened to us in Molina's office tonight."
After a pause of agreement, he laughed.
Chapter 25
Under the Volcano
I am beginning to chafe at my lack of freedom.
The Divine Yvette, of course, is used to being cooped up for her own good. I am used to being out and about for my own bad.
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