Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 36

Not just Virginia. Quantico. FBI headquarters. Matt wondered what the place had got its name from. "I have something," Frank announced.

He'd always boomed out sermons and homilies in the priesthood, hadn't allowed any mumbling among the altar boys. Nothing retiring about Father Frankenfurter.

"On . . . the woman."

"On your persecutor. Kathleen O'Connor. No 'Kathy,' for her, at least not with the IRA."

"I asked you to look into her months ago, and you didn't find anything."

"Ah, Matt, me boyo. That was before nine-eleven and the IRA began playing ball-o with the English and American authorities. Can you believe it? The enormity of the World Trade Center attack gave the IRA pause. They'd been in peace negotiations anyway, then said publicly that the scale of the attack on the U.S. was so extreme that they would never bomb Britain again."

"They're terrorists."

"Yes. Who believed them? And of course they have their hard-nosed elements who will never give in or never give up mayhem. But, by and large, begorra, they've been as sincere as you can expect of reformed terrorists. And ... they're cooperating with the authorities, so this time I finally got some information on the bane of your block, Kathleen O'Connor."

"She's dead."

"What?"

"I just identified the body. A motorcycle accident."

"And it was her, for certain?"

"I saw her face. It was sc.r.a.ped and bruised, but hers, no mistake. I identified her on the coroner's examining table."

"Ouch. I don't like those places. They make you not quite believe in immortal souls, seeing all those mortal remains so still and shattered and such dead meat. So you're sure."

"Yes, but I'd still like to know more about her."

"I don't know much more. They admitted to knowing of her, but said that she had long ago become a rogue agent."

"How do you become a rogue IRA terrorist?"

"You don't take orders, for one. The biggest no-no. That's true of any para-governmental agency."

" 'Para-governmental agency'? We've got them too?"

"We've got everything we need in a modern, dangerous world. And sometimes it isn't enough. Anyway, Kathleen went off on her own years ago. Would send money home. They tagged her as working South America, the Irish-Latino community there, which is almost as big as the German-Latino community, aka the Hitler has-beens. She sent them money periodically. They didn't ask where it came from or where she was."

"So she supported them, and followed her own agenda, unsupervised."

"They didn't want to supervise her. Found her way too unstable for terrorism. A kind of Fury. Who's the mythological creature with the serpents for hair-? G.o.d, my memory. Methuselah doesn't sound right. Too Biblical."

"Medusa. That's Greek."

"Right. Miss O'Connor was a human Medusa to them. Every lock of her raven-black hair was sheer poison to touch. Apparently some of them tried."

"Raven-black?"

"Yes. They say she was a beauty the way an honorable death is beautiful. A terrible beauty, to quote the poet. Were they right?"

"Maybe. Her eyes were plastic and her face was ... eroded . . . at the end. It wasn't a beautiful death."

"Yes, we did use to say that in the church, didn't we? 'A beautiful death.' I don't see much of those in the FBI. I suppose one thinks of a very old person, fading away without pain and faithfully shriven. Does that much happen in our Alzheimer's, post-HMO world anymore, do you think?"

"No," Matt said. "Nothing much beautiful in the way of death happens out here in No Man's Land at all."

"Extreme Unction we used to call it. I loved that phrase. It put Death in a caliph's tent with serving men and girls. Extreme. Unction. The Final Anointing. Extreme Unction. Now it's called Last Rites. Loses in the translation, doesn't it?"

"The church has lost a lot in the translation lately, including respect and dignity. Do you ... let on what you used to be?"

"Not recently. Everyone's eyebrows lift. 'One of those.' We were blind. I'm glad I left, and I'm glad you finally left, Matt. That you're out of all that scandal."

"Not quite," he said ruefully. At the shocked silence on the phone line, he added, quickly, "Now I'm only suspected of adult heteros.e.xual misconduct. What a relief. It's all right, Frank. I'll survive."

"Better than Kathleen O'Connor."

"So there was no report of her operating in the U.S."

"She disappeared on them, after all these years. And, frankly, they were just as happy to have such a loose cannon out of the way. I'll report her death, and your confirmation of it. She left no fingerprints anywhere, was just a rural County Clare girl who went north to Londonderry and found a cause. What made her so lethal, we'll never know."

"No."

Matt hung up, thinking that Kitty the Cutter was still pretty lethal to his circle of acquaintances.

An image of her body on the autopsy table flashed into his mind, including the spidery tattoo on her naked hip. No final anointing for her, except with the medical examiner's scalpel, and he probably used much more brutal instruments.

For a moment the official description of the sacrament of Extreme Unction flashed before Matt's eyes too; he'd looked it up again only recently: the anointing with oil specially blessed by the bishop of the organs of the five external senses (eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands), of the feet, and, for men, of the loins or reins; while saying "Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking, carnal delectation." Carnal delectation. The phrase had always stuck with him, even though anointing the loins is generally omitted in English-speaking countries. He never forgot the section ending: "and it is of course everywhere forbidden in the case of women."

Apparently anointing female loins was itself an occasion of sin. Now he would forever a.s.sociate a tattoo of the worm Ouroboros with "carnal delectation." He wondered if attending a woman's autopsy was a confessable sin.

Having delved his own possible weaknesses, he returned to the living room to minister to Max Kinsella, possible self-confessed murderer, but the sofa was empty ...

... except for Midnight Louie, who had taken Kinsella's place.

Matt stared at the big black cat and the big black cat stared right back at him.

Was Kinsella a shape-shifter?

Or was it Midnight Louie who pulled all their strings? The tomcat yawned, showing pearly whites.

Oh, the shark, dear, waits closer than you think.

Chapter 47.

Suitable for Mourning Max so seldom called ahead to advertise one of his patented surprise appearances that Temple couldn't help feeling a frisson of dread when she picked up the phone and it was not only Max speaking, but he was asking if he could come over.

Max? Asking? After all, he had once called the Circle Ritz and this apartment home. Temple really didn't mind him popping in unannounced. Unpredictability was one of Max's many charms, at least to her.

"I've been out carousing," he warned her. "Carousing?" Another surprise. Max drank only with meals, and only with happy meals, like with her. "With Matt Devine."

Surprise number three was a throat-choker.

Max. And Matt. Together. Over a friendly gla.s.s of ... something? What could they possibly have in common to talk about? Besides her.

"You're not coming over," she asked, "with news I'm not going to like, are you?"

"Like what?"

"Oh, that Molina has eloped with Russell Crowe, or that Rafi Nadir is an undercover agent for the IRS, or that you're going into the priesthood."

"Would Molina eloping with Russell Crowe be good news or bad news, in your opinion?"

"Half and half. He is a major movie star, but he's also spoiled and cranky and immature. Actually, it would be a heck of an entertaining match: Gladiator vs. Xena the Barbarian Princess Cop."

"Sounds like a play card for the World Wrestling Federation. No, nothing that worthy of Access Hollywood. And why would I enter the priesthood at this scandal-ridden time?"

"For the surprise factor?"

"I've got enough surprises right now that I don't need to go looking for trouble. And I've got a bottle of very good Irish whiskey, mostly full."

"Max! You're not driving with an open bottle! If the police-"

"Relax. My car is right in your very own parking lot and nudging up next to an extremely curvaceous little red Miata with its top disappointingly up."

Temple ambled to her French doors and slipped out onto the patio, from where she could see her parked car, which was why she tried to park it there. A prized new possession needed to be always within easy view.

She glimpsed a new black car beside it, wondering how long it had been there. A while, if he had been visiting Matt. Why go back to the parked car to call her? she also wondered.

Max was in his favorite element now, the dark, and leaving other people in the dark too.

"Are you going to come up in the elevator like a Real Boy?" she asked.

"Of course. I'll even knock."

"No, ring the doorbell. It's a lovely chime. I don't hear it enough."

"You might want to put some Leonard Cohen on." Uh-oh. That was Max's brooding black Irish music. They closed the conversation quickly. When Temple went back into her living room, Midnight Louie had pulled a Max and sat still as a statue in the middle of her coffee table, looking as if he had been there for generations.

She smoothed his black-satin head as she went to the kitchen and rooted out the heavy Baccarat crystal gla.s.ses suitable for premium Scotch, Irish whiskey, and terminally spicy Blood Mary mixes, yum-yum. Max didn't call her his Paprika Girl for haircolor reasons only.

The doorbell rang through its leisurely melody. Like the era of the building, the fifties, it had time to slow dance through even a practical purpose. That was an era when women in high heels waltzed through domestic ch.o.r.es with vacuum cleaners and single strings of pearls around their necks.

Domestic ch.o.r.es didn't have that quaint glamour anymore, but Temple swept open the door with the panache of that decade's leading ladies, Loretta Young or Donna Reed.

Max leaned against the doorjamb. Like many really tall men, he favored the disarming slump. Tonight, though, he just looked tired, not insouciant.

"I've got the best gla.s.ses down," she told him.

He swung through the door, planting the whiskey bottle on a nearby countertop. "We don't have to drink this."

She eyed the four inches ebbed in the bottle. "You and Matt did that much damage? I guess I deserve an equal crack at it. You wouldn't have brought the medicinal stuff if you didn't think I'd need it."

"I need it," he said shortly.

"You don't 'need' anything addictive. Never have."

"Never have been where I'm standing now."

"Then sit down. I'll pour. Neat, I presume, the way the b.l.o.o.d.y British take it."

He nodded as he pa.s.sed her the bottle and she uncapped it, pouring the ruddy-amber whiskey three fingers deep in each elaborately etched gla.s.s. It glistened like amber, and Temple supposed that many once-living things had been entombed in more than one gla.s.s of hard liquor. Entombed and resurrected.

"How can I sit down?" Max demanded.

She came bearing a gla.s.s in each hand, and peered past his indignation-stiffened form to Midnight Louie sprawled like the world's biggest Rorschach inkblot on her pale sofa.

"We move the cat. He was sitting on the coffee table just a minute ago."

"He must have known I was coming," Max complained, taking the gla.s.ses as Temple bent to lift Louie in her arms and return him to his tabletop post. "I don't know if I much like him listening in."

"It's not like he cares what we say, Max. He's a remarkably sensitive animal, but I doubt that English is his second language."

Max stared silently at Louie in answer. His stare was returned in kind: intense, challenging, immobile.

Temple had the oddest feeling that man and cat could talk to one another, but that the relationship was decidedly wary.

The staring match ended when Louie rose, jumped to the floor, and stalked off into the office.

"He knows when he's not wanted." Temple went to the portable stereo to let Leonard Cohen's monotone ba.s.s throb through the room. She shook her head. "If your stare didn't do it, that music would have. Not exactly anything to cuddle up to."

Max sat dead center in the sofa and claimed one gla.s.s for a hasty sip.

"So how," Temple asked, sitting beside him, "was Matt?

Is he getting over that poor woman's death at all?"

"He's got other things to think about now. So do I."

"The bad news you said was only half bad."

"It depends on how happy you are to hear someone is dead."