Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 17

"I know. I heard about you."

"What?"

"Nothing bad. Only that you'd gone through the whole laicization process. I didn't. I just . . . walked away."

"I guess that's the norm."

"You were never the norm. In seminary, I mean. You were always different."

"Different? Me? How?"

"You kept to your studies and yourself. Oh, you played sports, did the community thing, but it was like you were never fully there."

"I felt pretty grounded."

"You never-" Jerome sucked on his own straw, as if swallowing his next words. He was drinking a cola, and Matt wondered about taking in all that caffeine so late at night . . . so early in the morning.

"I never what? I'm used to having my failings presented to me. Seminary, you know."

"You didn't have any failings. We all figured you were the one who'd never leave. Except I-"

"You what?"

"I never bought that, even though you always seemed like you were really meant to be there. I always felt you were escaping your past, but I had to honor what you were trying to be."

Trying to be? Matt wondered. Was he still trying to be something unreachably honorable? Not a priest, but a celibate. Would Max Kinsella consider honoring him for his . . . restraint with Temple? Would he be having this conversation with Kinsella ten years down the pike?

But this was now, and that was then, and it was disturbing news.

"All? You were all talking about me? I didn't talk about you."

"Maybe that's why-You didn't know what was going on. Did you?"

"I like to think I'm fairly observant."

"But then."

"But then ... we were kids. We were engaged in a very serious course of self-examination and study."

"I used to admire you."

"Used to?"

"I mean, back then, when I was just a kid. I was two years behind. You don't remember me, do you?"

Matt tried to, and then he tried to think of a way oflying and saying he did without actually lying, but Jerome cut through all that.

"I not only had hair then, but I had gla.s.ses." He looked up from his burger. He had pale blue eyes, rather soulful. "I wear contact lenses now. I don't much want to be what I was back then."

"It's understandable."

"Is it? How can you say that when you don't understand?"

Matt felt irritation scratching like his long-lost clerical collar. He'd finished a draining night shift at work; he was at worst a suspect in a murder and at best responsible for a woman's suicide. And now he was expected to make small talk with someone he didn't even remember from a time he wanted to forget.

And who expected him to do this? He asked himself. He did. He smiled wryly, at himself.

"I've got a lot on my mind, and, no, the brain is not turning back the alb.u.m pages very efficiently right now. Doing a live radio show is terribly draining. I'm told by those who know that there's a natural let-down' afterward. It's not my best time."

Jerome swallowed, not any food or drink, just his own very visible Adam's apple. "Mine neither. I'm not an after-midnight kind of guy."

"What's your job?"

"Day shift, obviously. I'm a picture framer." He shrugged. "Guess it's an outgrowth of all those Sacred Heart paintings the old folks at home had framed on the walls everywhere. You can't outrun your own history."

"No. You can't." The words cut Matt like a razor.

His own history was getting pretty lurid. He wondered what Jerome would think if he knew his old seminary schoolmate had been with a high-priced call girl just last night. Matt checked his wrist.w.a.tch with a spasm of guilt. This time last night he had been talking to Va.s.sar. She had been alive.

"I don't mean to keep you up."

"It's not you," Matt said hastily. This guy looked like people were always ducking out on him, and Matt didn't want to add that guilt to the load he already carried. "I was thinking of a ... friend."

"There's someone-?"

"Someone? Oh. No. I'm single."

Jerome nodded, looking a little uneasy.

"Something wrong about that?"

"No. Only it's obvious-"

"What?"

"That you're committed to marriage, since you equate being single with having no significant other."

"Yeah, I guess. Listen. We haven't seen each other in years and we weren't even in the same cla.s.s. I don't get-"

Jerome took a deep breath. "You never knew, did you? I kinda hoped it was that way, that one of us got out unscathed."

"Knew what?"

"What was really going on in seminary."

Matt felt the burger bites in his gut congeal with cold, as if slapped with an ice pack. Oh, my G.o.d, was this about the nightly news?

"If I was so ignorant, why are you looking me up?" he asked.

"I was hoping to find someone who escaped. Who got clear. If one did, it makes the rest of it, the worst of it, better."

"One! Are you saying it was that prevalent?"

Jerome shrugged, sucked on his straw even though only a few drops of melted ice water migrated up his straw. "Maybe not. It just Telt like it. To us."

"Was it peers, or instructors?"

"Both. Kind of like those British public schools used to be, maybe still are. Bullying and boys on boys. I think now it was all about authority, not s.e.x. s.e.x was just the excuse."

"I don't want to hear this."

"Why, when telling is the only redemption?"

"Why tell me?"

"I-I always admired you. I hoped you'd escaped what I couldn't. It's important to me to know that you did."

"Yes, I did. At St. Vincent's. I could swear that on a Bible in a court of law, but, Jerome, I didn't escape it elsewhere. I was at St. Vincent's because I was running away from the abuse at home. Not s.e.xual, thank G.o.d, but abuse."

"You were abused?"

"What kid hasn't been, to some extent, by someone at some time?"

"You believe that?"

"I've seen that. No family is perfect. Every generation has its own axe to grind. We all get sandpapered with someone else's issues. And we go on."

Jerome nodded, and neatly wrapped most of his burger in the tissue for disposal.

Matt hadn't managed to eat much either. Not so much because of Jerome Johnson, but because of Ashley Andersen, both Upper Midwest babies in a world far colder than a North Dakota blizzard.

"Maybe that's why no one messed with you," Jerome said meditatively. "I remember you working out those marital arts moves, alone. You were like ... oh, Luke Sky-walker in the first Star Wars movie, remember? Looking for the Force in yourself. I never thought it might be because ... you looked invulnerable. Like n.o.body should mess with you."

"They didn't. So maybe my past made me less likely to be abused. It didn't feel like it then."

"And now?"

"Now I'm strong in some ways, and weak in others. Hey, we're human, yes?"

"I always ..."

Jerome no longer seemed capable of finishing a sentence, and Matt, the stressed-out Matt who'd seen a bitter enemy make mincemeat of his life and more importantly of his conscience, was growing impatient with this stumbling loser who had nothing better to do than to look him up. The blind leading the blind was not Matt's current goal.

"I always ... liked you, especially," Jerome said, finally raising his limpid blue eyes to Matt's again, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with something unfortunately quite readable.

Holy Mother of G.o.d. Help me now and at the hour of my death, amen.

Chapter 23.

The Morning After: Fast Backward "In bright and early, Lieutenant?"

"Always, Chet. So are you."

"Yeah, but I got a great job. This is better than Eye in the Sky at any Strip hotel. This is Eye in the Sky central for all of Las Vegas."

"This" was Chet Farmer's wall-to-wall wired domain, stacks of audio and video equipment, a gray/black wallpaper of k.n.o.bs and switches and dials.

The high-tech surround would have creeped Molina out, but Chet thrived in it like a spider in an electronic/digital/ computerized web. There was a bit of the arachnid about him anyway: long bony limbs and such poor eyesight that he had to wear half-inch-thick lenses in heavy-framed plastic gla.s.ses despite living in the age of thin high-power optical lenses that gave everyone else a cosmetic edge.

There was no way to avoid describing Chet as a nerd, but he was a happy nerd. That was the blessing given to nerds along with extreme myopia and a socially-challenged existence.

"I need to see the Goliath tapes."

"Sure thing." He spun in his mesh-seated chair to pull some labeled tapes out. "Must be a sensitive case."

"Just hard to call. Why do you say 'sensitive'?"

"Su and Barrett both checked these out. Separately. And now you're here."

"Glad to hear they're on the job. Either one come up with anything?"

"Nope. Just a lot of faces and bodies milling through the casino and lobby area."

"I'll take another look. New eye, new ideas. Say from six to eight P.M. You make that look so easy," Molina said, envying the ease with which Chet played his electronic game board. "I had to let my twelve-year-old daughter take over the VCR at home. She's teethed on computers since third grade."

"That's cool. We can't afford any more computer-phobic generations. Do you know my folks don't e-mail?"

Chet was on the cusp of forty, Molina figured, so his parents must be senior citizens baffled by debit cards at the grocery store.

"At least I have a job where I have to keep up on some modern improvements," Molina said. "Try the hotel registration area first."

"Okay. There's the time in the lower right-hand corner." Molina watched the broken LED numerals flick through their predictable round.

If Su and Barrett had seen nothing, maybe nothing was to be seen. Certainly Va.s.sar hadn't checked in at the front desk. But Matt Devine had, and she wanted to know if he had been caught on tape. It was possible he hadn't. The tapes were pervasive but general. It would be easy to miss one person in the constant flood of bodies through a major hotel during the evening hours.

And, of course, Su and Barrett only knew to look for Va.s.sar and anything "unusual."

She forced herself to focus on the front desk clerks. Mattwould have had to pa.s.s through the lines leading to one of them.

That was the one given she knew, that no one else did. Who the man was that Va.s.sar had met.

The tape was black and white; no point wasting color on pure surveillance. It made finding Matt's very blond head harder. A lot of silver-tops came to Vegas and in black' and white blond was white.