Funny. Everyone . . . Gandolph, the Synth, Molina . . . thought Max Kinsella was the major player, the center, the man to get, one way or another. And he knew the key to himself was and had always been Temple, because she was pure of heart. And far from simple.
Max pushed the glass of fine wine back toward Gandolph and sipped the tart tomato juice. What he really cared about had become nobody’s concern but his. But this world wouldn’t be fit or free for anyone to live in, including Temple, if he didn’t follow his fate card to the final shuffling of the deck. If he wanted Temple, free and clear of any past shackles, his or hers, he’d have to finish this final charade.
He’d need his wits, and his iron wrists, and his ever-calculating nerve and his indomitable Irish soul on this job before it was over.
Dudley Do-Right
“Say, who’s spinning the major new wheels outside?”
Matt was shuffling through the coffee and cookie line in the sterile meeting room, picking up stirring sticks and packets of sugar and powdered creamer to dilute the sludge-strong coffee in the big aluminum urn.
Someone answered the question. “You mean the chick magnet? Not me, brother. I’ve got kids to support.”
Matt already felt a little awkward. He’d hadn’t attended a meeting for area ex-priests at Maternity of Mary Church’s community rooms in Henderson for months after his first visit.
Everything here was the same, as plain as a convent: beige vinyl tile floors, inexpensive folding tables, metal chairs, Styrofoam cups, even the echo from no carpet or drapes. Holy Mother Church frugal. The show was saved for vestments and mass. Priests were the church’s underpaid but cock-of-the-walk peacocks, and he wasn’t one anymore. He wasn’t even the same as he had been a few months before.
“Silver is the coolest car color,” another man said.
Then Matt realized that it was his car, his relatively new silver Crossfire two-seater, they were all talking about. And blushed.
God! He was a real boy now. He wanted to sleep with a woman without benefit of matrimony. He shouldn’t lose it like this back on the old stomping grounds. Actually, he didn’t want to sleep with Temple without benefit of matrimony; he’d gladly marry her first. Except she wanted to sleep with him and wasn’t sure she was ready for matrimony. What’s a good Catholic boy to do?
Matt turned from the table to the filling room, knowing he looked sheepish.
“It’s mine. The car.”
He was going to add an apology when Nick, whom Matt characterized as the Progressive Cleric, ex-version, came over and pounded him on the back.
“Good going, Devine. Losing the lust for a simple Honda Civic provided through parish donations is the first sign of becoming a civilian. What’s it do?”
The same first question Temple had asked. This time Matt didn’t hesitate.
“One forty.”
The men in the room nodded sagely. Who would have thought it? Priests could be guys who talked cars and speed. Their first names and thumbprint IDs began to come back to him: Jerry, the Really Nice Guy, with acne scars and thick glass lenses; Paul, the Earnest Thinker, already in trifocals and thinning hair; Damian, the Theologian, bald and distant; Nick, the Coach.
They were a mixed bag as to age and home state, all the city of Las Vegas had to offer in terms of resident ex-priests. LV wasn’t exactly a Mecca for the religiously inclined, at least not along the Strip. It had one of the country’s largest numbers of churches of all denominations in the residential areas, including Molina’s home parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It even hosted one of Temple’s Universalist Unitarian churches, housed in a shopping center. Okay, he’d looked it up, thinking if they got married soon . . .
“The first and last time you attended was a zoo,” Damien noted with a chilly quirk that passed for a smile. “What brings you and your fancy new car back now?”
Damien was an ascetic. The disdain in his voice echoed the stern voices from Matt’s seminarian past. The original Father Damien had founded an island refuge for lepers when they were truly pariahs. Matt felt right now that he’d kinda like to go there.
“Lighten up, Damien.” Nick pulled Matt into the circle. “Attendance here isn’t mandatory, like Sunday mass. You’re just jealous of the wheels.”
This was so absurd that everybody laughed, including Damien. A little.
“I forgot about that,” Matt said as he took a seat in the circle. “They were offering such good deals and the mileage is pretty good—”
“God, Matt, are you going to plead guilty for avarice or energy consumption, make up your mind! Religious or secular sinner?” Jerry joked.
Matt sighed. “Probably both.”
Nick leaned back in his chair, the natural leader. “Let’s introduce ourselves and our life states,” he said, looking around at two new guys, both older.
They went around the circle. Phil and Tom were new in town, Phil a college instructor, Tom an administrator for the local National Public TV station.
“That means I’m working my old con: raising money.”
Everyone laughed. Parish priests were renaissance men in every respect except husband and literal father.
When Matt’s turn came, he merely said he was a radio counselor at a local station.
Nick didn’t prod him to say that he was the radio shrink in town, Mr. Midnight, syndicated nationally and a frequent national talk show guest. A man who had an on-air popularity. A man who made money. Even ex-priests could get jealous, and the group’s driving force was support, not rivalry.
Matt decided that he should have asked to drive the old Probe he’d passed on to Electra tonight. That anyone would look at his car had never occurred to him, although Temple sure had, and sure had looked good in the passenger seat. He felt a shiver that was surely confessable just thinking about that. The questions he wanted answers to were so corrosively personal that his hands were sweating, as they had in the dark St. Stanislaus’s confessional in Chicago when he was eight and was trying to decide whether to declare a “bad thought” to commit murder, or not.
That was then. This was . . . so now. His unthinkable, unsayable sin didn’t involve bodily harm to his hated abusive stepfather, but bodily delight with his beloved Temple. Definitely a better class of failing. Only she wasn’t his. She was hers. And there was the rub.
“Matt,” Nick said, regarding him with kind eyes. “You’ve obviously come tonight because you have something the group might be able to help you with. What is it?”
There it was. The pastoral role of the priest. To succor the sick, uphold the shaken.
He didn’t know these men well. He feared they might, would, judge him. And Temple. He couldn’t stand them judging Temple. Still, he needed . . . something. Help.
“I’d mentioned before I’d met a woman,” he said, “but she was claimed. I don’t think she is anymore.”
Nick smiled. Jerry smiled through pursed lips. Damien lifted an intellectual eyebrow. Tom nodded. Phil sighed. Paul frowned.
It was Eve and the Garden all over again.
“You’ve got guts.”
Nick pulled Matt aside as the men shuffled out, the hour near eleven P.M. Matt needed to get to the radio station for his midnight show.
“Listen, Matt, we all have our way of integrating into the secular world. No one way is right.”
“The church says—”
“You the definitive expert on the subject?”
“No, but I know what’s expected of us.”
“Perfection. Right. Listen. The love of your life—don’t deny it, I can tell—the love of your life grew up in a different church, with a different standard. I admire the UUs. Their hearts and minds are in the right place, and so is yours. Look at it this way. The woman you love is eminently lovable, good, kind, and true.”
Matt nodded. He loved Temple for her heart and mind. The body came after. But, oh, boy, did it count.
“She’s also imperfect, as we all are.”
“May
be.”
Nick laughed. “God, I envy you that first dawning of total love. I had it. I’m happy and so is my wife, but life dulls the edge. The point is, Matt, that her experience, her standards, are valid to her. You have to respect that. Falling in love isn’t a conversion assignment. You’re not among the pagans, looking for babies. You give. She gives. You love. She loves. If you love her, you accept her. As she needs to be accepted for the moment. Capisce?”
“Are you the godfather, Nick, or the Godfather?”
“I’m Italian. I’m Catholic. I’m both, you’d better believe it. And do as I say.”
“Which is love, unconditionally.”
“Is that so hard?”
“No. In this case, not at all.”
He left with a lighter heart, knowing now what he had to do.
Rushin into Trouble
“Any idea,” Temple asked Randy after meeting him in the New Millennium lobby the next day, “why the honchos called this top-secret meeting?”
“Other than murder?”
“Shhhh!” Temple eyed the hotel’s Spaceport entry now behind them. It looked like a flying saucer, the fifties’ riveted-silver-metal variety. Crowds of squealing people were still pouring through the doors that goosed them with a whoosh of air as they decompressed into the hotel’s interior.
Silver-skinned and clad robot types directed the tourists to various areas, including an upward-flowing water slide that would take them to the external roller-coaster ride that circled the hotel’s solar system every half hour.
Between the exotic elements snaked the usual lines of bag-toting tourists checking in and checking out.
“Shhhh!” she repeated. “In Vegas hotels, even the crystal chandelier drops and robot valets have ears.”
“We’re meeting in one of the high-roller suites. Those have the least access and the most security.”
Temple was glad she wore what passed for a power suit in Vegas: white silk suit with a cropped and fitted jacket and slim skirt, with high-heeled gold sandals. With her red hair the outfit was spectacular. With her hair blond these days, it was stellar.
“You look very Heather Locklear today,” Randy commented in the private elevator. Temple didn’t consider that a compliment. At least the gilt woven-leather tote bag on her shoulder proclaimed her as another kind of working woman. She normally didn’t wear metallics but was finding that blond hair dictated a certain style. No wonder they all looked alike.
Her heels clicked on the marble lining the halls on the suite level. They weren’t going to sneak up on their bosses.
Randy had donned a tie for the occasion, a sure sign that this was a serious pow-wow. They both had better report positive ways of spinning the recent murder.
The suite’s entry mimicked a real front door, like Temple’s Circle Ritz condo, but this one had double doors, stained-glass sidelights and transom, with entry torches shining even during daylight hours.
Randy rang the bell.
The door took its own sweet time about opening, probably because there were so many honchos inside, no one was lowly enough to tend to practical matters.
The door opened into a wall of dark navy polyester suit and black shirt with a white tie. What did the museum muscle think this was, a touring company of Guys and Dolls?
“Da,” he said.
Temple was always tempted to answer “da,” as in Da-da. Or Dada, the art movement. Or da-DAH, the theatrical presentation syllables.
All of these creative possibilities were lost on Boris, whose broad peasant face never showed its teeth. He stepped back, drawing attention to his unimaginative brown shoes.
She and Randy crossed a foyer paved in a mosaic of multicolored marble and stepped down onto the living room’s thick off-white carpet. A wall of distant windows framed the very tops of the Strip’s highest landmarks against a background of vivid blue sky.
The pale cream grasscloth walls hosted paintings from the hotel owner’s private collection of French Impressionists.
Such huge and luxe suites went for $30,000 a night, or more, but were often given gratis to major domestic and foreign high rollers called “whales,” visiting ex-presidents and film stars. A lot of Las Vegas insiders had never seen such a layout, and Temple was making her debut as one who had.
The usual suspects had gathered in the huge dining room under a pair of vintage Lalique crystal chandeliers. Natasha, the muscleman whose Prince Valiant haircut grazed the bottom of his rear suit collar, stood guard by the granite-topped sideboard loaded with various samovars, plates and napkins, and finger food so elegant it defied description.
Temple always avoided that kind of spread, not wanting to discover mid-mouthful that she was eating an exotic pet . . . like a snake or a tarantula. One could never trust high-end chefs in their race to be edgy and unexpected, especially since the Fear Factor reality TV show had made the public mass consumption of living vermin its main dish.
Being an animal lover, although not a vegetarian, Temple often walked a fine-line foodwise: raw unadulterated body parts were off her list, so none of the no-doubt pricey varieties of caviar on the buffet were for her. But truffles were all right. Also chocolate. And Strawberries Romanoff. Deviled eggs were iffy.
Everyone nodded at the new arrivals and continued eating voraciously. All had red-rimmed eyes and furrowed brows. Obviously the higher-ups really had been up . . . all night, discussing whatever crisis this was: bungled theft, tragic accident. Or murder. She’d been up worrying too, and not only about the public relations fallout of sudden death. She was haunted by her first impression that the dark, dangling body was Max’s. His midnight visit the other night proved that he was out prowling somewhere in the service of counterterrorism. Could this Russian exhibition be connected to his shadowy current concerns? The Synth? Shangri-La?
The lowly flacks had just been called in for the post-decision duty roster.
Randy shrugged at Temple, having come to the same conclusion, and attacked the buffet with gusto and little or no conscience for the contents of the platters.
Olga Kirkov, the ex-ballerina turned exhibition director, already sat at the boardroom-long dining table with its malachite top and pale beige travertine stone base. Correction: she sat at the head of the table, in one of the cream leather captain’s chairs.
Gradually, they all took their plates and cups and settled at seats flanking her down the fifteen-foot expanse. Temple and Randy chose seats opposite each other, in the exact middle, so they could parry questions from each end.
Dimitri Demyenov, the Russian government representative, was backed by his bodyguards now that door duty was over. Temple watched him, thinking that he wasn’t as ignorant of the English language as he appeared to be.
Ivan Volpe, the Parisian descendent of fleeing White Russians during the nineteen-teen Revolution days and curator of the exhibition, remained standing, the obvious spokesman. Temple began to realize that this ritzy secret meeting was for her and Randy’s benefit. It was a pre–press conference strategy session.
“Mr. Wordsworth, Ms. Barr,” the aristocratic curator began, “we are faced with a terrible crisis. We haven’t invited the emissaries from the co-sponsoring corporations, or the art media that are covering this installation and debut. Given the uncertainty about the nationality or motive of our personal Hanged Man, who had the rather bizarre name of Art Deckle, are we to forge ahead or admit to the tragedy and say it was . . . a personal act, having nothing to do with the exhibition? I report directly to the owner and executive board of the hotel consortium, which promises to do anything necessary to safeguard this exhibition and see that it continues its mission to foster international culture and accord.”
Temple had withdrawn her reporter’s notebook (slim and lined) and made notes on the last bit of gobbledygook. Volpe always spoke as if every syllable was quotable, so he would appreciate attentive underlings.
Opposite her, Randy was assiduously doodling in a way that passed for rapt record
ing.
So, if this was “Murder on the Siberian Express” . . . how much dodging and burning could even the most pompous museum curators do to hold back the inevitable tide of media interest? Temple may have been a bit hard-headed on this subject. She’d faced the disruption of murder on more than one assignment. Between living in one of the fastest-expanding areas in the U.S. with an annual tourist influx pushing toward forty million a year, the odds in Las Vegas for serious crime, including murder, were staggering.
It was a miracle the place was as safe and secure as it was. And it was, basically, thanks to hotel-casino security forces backing up local law enforcement. The city was Oz on the Mojave, and the “palace” guards were rigorously trained and employed to make sure it remained safe for Dorothy Tourist and the Gang. No Wicked Witches ruled here, if you excepted Shangri-La and her performing Siamese, Hyacinth. But Temple was a little biased on that account.
She dared to ask a question. One she regarded as fairly safe.
“Sir,” she asked Volpe during a pause when he downed the steaming contents of one samovar that smelled slightly festive. “Murder will out, but this death is clearly ambiguous. It could be just a tragic accident.”
The aristocratic white fuzzy eyebrows lofted while the dark eyes beneath sized her up. Oh, God. She couldn’t help that she looked like the Sugar Plum Fairy as a blonde.
“You’re right,” he surprised her by saying. “The death is indeed ambiguous. The police and coroner haven’t declared a cause, and the coroner’s office, thank God, is far behind on its case load. So we may be lucky enough not to get a determination until after the exhibition moves on to the Frick.
“However . . .”
Temple stopped basking in her good-student mode and held her pen poised above a blank line, ready to record the nitty-gritty that was about to issue from those pale, wrinkled Russo-Parisian lips.
“The excellent police in this city have identified this man, at least under his alias, and have informed us of his criminal career here. We do not know his real identity and, whatever the cause of death, we feel we need to know if he was connected with someone else. Perhaps they may discover an international connection, even with such as Chechen rebels. I merely mention the more dire international possibilities.”
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