Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 4

"I'm sorry. Maybe I can help."

"n.o.body can help, least of all you."

"What did I ever do to deserve that 'least'?"

His expression softened into resignation. Not acceptance, just resignation. He stood aside to let her enter. "Nothing."

Temple decided brisk professionalism was the best approach. She looked around. "I imagine Molina did a bug-search of your place too?"

"She find anything in your rooms?" Matt was suddenly alert and interested.

Temple shook her head. "Yours?"

He walked into the adjoining kitchen and handed her a mug.

"I'm not thirsty."

Matt just nodded to the cup in her hand.

It was a cream-colored pottery mug, bereft of motto or design. A standard-issue drinking vessel available in any discount store.

"Euw!" Temple had detected the dark bristly form submerged in the clear water. "Is that the kind of bug I think it is?"

"Yep. Molina found it in my doorbell chime unit."

"Most ingeniously ... revolting." Temple peered at the high-tech pest. "It looks creepy-crawly even if it's just wires and circuits. So Kitty the Cutter really was stalking you, all this time?"

"You mean since I first ... met her and she razored me?"

Temple nodded and put the mug down on the counter.

"No, actually." Matt's voice made a more optimistic lilt as he realized that Temple had asked a key question. "Actually . . . she left me alone after that. It's only been lately."

"Maybe after your stepfather's death early this year?"

"Well, there was that fourth nun attending his fake funeral we never found another trace of . . . yeah. You're right. Since about then."

Temple moved into the living room, sat dead center on the vintage red suede couch she had helped Matt buy from the Goodwill a few months before. She was deliberately reminding him of a time before Kitty had become a secret fixture in his life, when they had been able to go out and hang out and he didn't have to worry about someone watching.

"I can't figure out why a redhead looks so good on that scarlet sofa," he said. It wasn't a line, just a comment.

"It's got to make me look good." She grinned. "I brought it home from the pound."

His smile was almost transparent, but it was there. "You're always trying to save something."

"Yes," she said, and didn't add anything else, not easy for an energetic redhead.

He sobered again. "I'm beyond saving."

"You can't believe that. You're an ex-priest. Priests are born to save."

"Are they? Not to read the newspapers lately."

"That's not bothering you, the church scandal?"

"Of course it does, but it's strangely ... remote. That's what these last weeks have done to me. Made me a zombie, mired me in my own stupid troubles, made me no good to anybody else."

Temple shrugged and clasped her hands over her crossed knees. "Sometimes it's more than enough just to be good to ourselves. What is Molina trying to lay on you, Matt? What's she really trying to get out of you? Why doesn't she simply send a team of detectives to arrest you if she thinks you've done something?"

"Because she wants to peel my head like an orange just to see what's in it, mainly to protect her own career."

"Did you really have an ... appointment with a call girl last night?"

"I think the word is a.s.signation. Or . . . deal. Yeah. I was desperate. Everybody told me that was what I should do. It began to make sense, under the circ.u.mstances."

"Everybody?"

"Ambrosia . . . her off-air name is Leticia, my boss at work. Molina."

"You told them, and not me?"

"I would have told anybody, except you."

Temple must have looked like a kicked rat, because he suddenly leaned against the gra.s.s cloth covering the living room wall as if facing a firing squad with Ronald Colman's cla.s.sic-film resignation and weary gallantry.

"But Molina's undone all that. Everything I wanted to preserve at any cost. Between her and Kathleen O'Connor, they've left me nothing to protect, not even myself."

"What was seeing a call girl going to preserve and protect?"

"Not her. She's dead." Matt stared at the same parquet squares that tiled Temple's floor, as if he saw a corpse there. "Molina made that plain, although she wouldn't tell me where, when, or how just wanted to know every move I made last night. I wouldn't tell her."

"Aha! That's why she came to rattle my cage. She knew I can't resist ... a mystery. Listen." Temple sat forward. "If Molina thinks she can use me to get to you, just like she wanted to use me to betray Max, you've got to see that it doesn't work. It hasn't worked for more than a year. If we don't let her divide us, we can survive."

"No! Va.s.sar is dead. She was killed because she was with me. You're with me here, now. You could be next."

"Va.s.sar? That was the girl's name? Was she really?"

"Really what?"

"A college grad."

"Probably."

"You're saying that Kitty will kill any woman you're with, for any purpose?"

"Probably. She doesn't make any exceptions for likelihood or age, young or old. Remember Sheila and Mariah at t.i.taniCon? The almost-accidental injuries, the car that drove after all of us into the bank of gla.s.s doors?"

"That's right. Mariah Molina was a target at that convention too."

"So was I. Remember the aspergillum I picked up after we got off the elevator? It's a sacred object, a holy water sprinkler. Kathleen used it as a goad in my back as we descended, like a gun. Just to remind me she could get that close to me, or to Mariah, or to you."

"Mariah? That's why ... that's why you went to Molina about this, not me! You figured she needed to know, and that she could help you."

"I figured ... wrong."

"So why was a call girl the solution?"

"That's what Kitty wanted. My innocence."

"How could she be sure you still had any?"

"Like any personality hooked on controlling others, she knew how to sniff out any vulnerability."

Temple collapsed against the sofa's hard upholstery. "So you and your staff advisors figured a call girl would be invulnerable."

"Yeah. Were we wrong." Matt sat on the couch, at the other end. He hunched forward, laced his hands, not quite approximating prayer. "The unspoken a.s.sumption was that since Kitty coveted something so personal as my virtue, that if I 'lost' it, as the expression goes, she'd lose interest. And if the means of my 'loss,' was a stranger, a professional, it would be too impersonal to merit Kitty's rage. Plus, everybody thought, including me, that a call girl counted for so little that Kitty wouldn't regard her a suitable object of revenge. Looks like everybody was wrong."

"You can't know Kitty did it."

"No. But I did it. Somehow I did it, even if Kitty never came anywhere near Va.s.sar. So Kitty has destroyed my innocence, one way or another. I'm responsible for a woman's death. Va.s.sar is dead. I left her alive just hours ago, Temple, and now she's dead. Something I did led to her death. I'll never forgive myself."

Temple had heard that phrase a few times in her life. She had muttered it herself. Never with the finality, the seriousness that Matt Devine used.

"I'm sorry. I guess Kitty wins."

"It's not a game. It's a woman's life. Death. Va.s.sar ... she was on a threshold. She wasn't the stereotype I'd expected. She was a living, bleeding human being. She had a past and future. Now-"

"Matt, I am so sorry. I hate to see Kitty win. She's bedeviled Max's life for almost twenty years and I hate, hate, hate to see her mess you up too."

He nodded. "I've seen the guilt he carries for his cousin's death. He tries to move beyond it, but it seeps out, no matter how sophisticated or cynical he tries to ap pear." Matt regarded Temple with a look from the heart. "Molina has always tried to prove that Max isn't good enough for you, but a man who feels that deep a guilt, that long, has worth that a man-or a woman-who's never been tested can't guess at."

Temple found herself unable to speak for a few seconds. "Thank you. It's been kind of lonesome defending my druthers this past year."

"That's why I never-"

"Never what?" Temple held her breath, knowing that a revelation hovered.

"It doesn't matter now."

"Yes, it does! It matters that this one person has blighted Max's life, and now yours."

"Temple, I admire your heart in defending Max and would be honored to have it defending me, but I'm ... indefensible. We're talking here and now, and a woman dead within hours. Molina only came to me privately because if I'm identified as a suspect, her role in my actions will have to come out. I told her I wouldn't say anything-"

"What did she say?"

"She said I d.a.m.n well wouldn't say anything unless I was brought in for questioning and then I'd have to tell the truth. I think she's hoping to avoid an accounting. She wouldn't tell me much about Va.s.sar's death, except that it was from a fall, and could be judged an accident. Or"-his expression grew even graver-"a suicide."

"Then it's not an obvious murder."

"Does it matter?"

"It does if there's no evidence to charge you with a crime."

"I'm charged already, in my own mind. So it wasn't Kitty O'Connor, it wasn't murder. So Va.s.sar jumped to her death somehow? So I drove her to suicide? I was the last person she ever saw. It must have been something I said. Or did. Or didn't do."

"And you didn't tell Molina exactly what that was?"

"No. She wouldn't tell me the details of the death, and I wouldn't tell her the details of my ... a.s.signation. Just how I followed her directions and got there, I thought, unfollowed. And that I was there."

Temple couldn't stifle a smile.

"What?" he asked.

"You and Molina, good Catholics both, tiptoeing around the moment of truth."

"You Unitarians would face it straight up, huh?"

"Yeah! Better than acting like two parallel lines and driving past each other. It reminds me of some crazy Pur itan dance where couples don't ever touch. Whew. Molina is so not the right person to pursue this case."

"What case? The woman is dead. I was there. End of story."

"Matt, there is so much story you haven't told me."

"And that would make a difference?"

"I think so. And so would Max."

"Kinsella?"

"Yes. He's got to be in on this."

Matt ducked his head. "Well, he already is, in a way."

"You told him too! You turned to everyone but me. This . . . Ambrosia chick, Molina, Max, even Max?"

"Yes, I guess I did." He examined the parquet floor between his feet.

"Why? Haven't I proven I have a nose for news, for skullduggery? Didn't I nail the Stripper Killer? Am I so unsympathetic I don't listen to my friends' problems, so stupid that I wouldn't have a clue to how to deal with a stalker, so selfish that I don't care what happens to other people, so ... useless I can be left out of the real adult talk like a dumb kid-?"

Matt finally looked at her, driven to her defense. "No, Temple. You're smart and tough and kind and true and nervy and beautiful and-"

Her eyes opened. Literally. There was a kind of wonder in what they saw.

"Matt. The other day. When we had an . . . encounter in my hallway. You know, with the groceries. You almost Then you blamed yourself for being 'selfish.' Was it because of your situation with Kitty, that you were seeing a way out of it, but just couldn't do it? That it was . . . me?"

He shook his head and shut his eyes in denial even as he said, "Yes," as if confessing a failing.

"Oh." Temple sat back. She thought for a minute. "I'm flattered. And I'm too smart and tough and nervy to let Kitty the Cutter win. So we are in this together, with whoever we can get on our side, sans Molina. Okay? Okay. This means Max and Midnight Louie, too. Louie saved my hide just last night, so that's no measly ally."