Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (26 page)

“It’s my soul.”

“Your soul. You and I know what that means. Your soul is immortal, as you are not. You must not sacrifice it.”

“But what is sacrifice, and what is self-defense?”

“I don’t know enough about the specific situation to say. Surely the Devil has not appeared before you to tempt you.”

“He has,” Matt said gravely.

Father crossed himself again.

Seeing the ancient gesture invoked was strangely comforting.

“I’ll pray for you,” Father Raphael said. “Every day at mass.”

Some would have said that was no solution. Matt respected the power of prayer, even if prayer might not solve his problem.

“Thank you, Father.”

The man’s hand leaned on his wrist as he pushed himself to his feet. It was a gesture acknowledging Matt’s comparative youth and strength. “I can’t tell you how to defeat this devil of yours. I was not very good at defeating my own devil.”

“But you did.”

The older man smiled, an expression that turned his stark, ascetic face handsome. “Yes, I did. With your help. I am sure that you will find a way to outsmart your own devil, which is not of your making, is it?”

Matt shook his head.

“You are fortunate to share with Our Lord the role of an innocent tried. I hope you find an easier path to redemption.”

Matt did too. Perhaps the answer was to renounce all hope of his own salvation.

He let his knees sink into the padded kneeler, remembering the oak-hard kneelers of his childhood. Even here things had become easier, less deliberately harsh. It made for less agonizing decisions.

Kitty the Cutter had placed him back on the cutting edge of ethics. That’s what she really wanted — not his body, but his divisive soul. Should he be the Lamb of God and go peacefully to the Cross to save the world? Or should he be the Soldier of the Lord, ready to smite Satan in all His forms?

He remembered the sadistic charade of the Blue Dahlia parking lot.

With Temple he had glimpsed his passionate, loving, sensual self.

With Kathleen O’Connor, and with Cliff Effinger before her, he had glimpsed his passionate, hating, homicidal self.

Which was the best/worst way to save his soul? A sin of the flesh, or the sin of murder? Cain had been the Judeo-Christian culture’s first murderer but before that his parents, Adam and Eve, had lost paradise through a sin of intellectual superiority, though succeeding generations had chosen to convert hubris into a sin of the flesh.

Europeans, for centuries less puritanical than their American brethren, had long ago learned to rank sexual sins low on the totem pole. Americans called them cynical; they called themselves realists. Americans still flourished the scarlet letter: better death than disgrace. That presumed the death of the innocent. What about the death of the guilty at the hands of the innocent?

American society still had, today, a legitimate role for the executioner as well as the executed.

Matt let his mind and his emotions dance an interlacing pavane of imagined action and reaction.

He recognized that he could kill Kitty O’Connor. He knew the martial arts moves that would do it. Everything would stop there. Certainly his brave new secular life. He’d be lucky to get life imprisonment but what was he facing now?

He knew a hatred of what she was doing that shook him, made him think the once unthinkable.

She had revived his rage against Cliff Effinger, that childish fury of knowing the whole world was turning a blind eye to a terrible wrong, and the urge to right it by the most violent means, by yourself.

Weighed against the dark balance of his thoughts now, murder, a spiritual and social violation, a sexual act seemed trivial. He began to see the European point of view, and it wasn’t cynical, it was practical.

So. He would sleep with someone not of his choice, of his free will.

Would letting it be Kitty spend her poison and save others at the sacrifice of his self-respect? Or would cheating her of her prey make her deadlier than ever?

There was only one way to find out. He must act and find out before her game became lethal to some innocent bystander. When she’d found out what he’d done, maybe she’d kill him.

He stood, still not sure what he’d do, directing a prayer to the altar: that God would give him the wisdom to sin in the manner least hurtful to the most people.

He genuflected on the way out, and touched the water from the font to his forehead, chest, and shoulders. Head, heart, and arms to act with.

Charming Fellow

I am pretty excited when I hit the home place again.

I know I am hot on the trail.

My Miss Temple has been playing with a sketch of the very charm I have seen dangling on Miss Hyacinth’s neck.

Only this interesting item is no longer dangling from that stringy and fuzzy throat. It has been nicked. It is caught close in the second shiv on my right mitt. And let me tell you hiking home the whole long way with one foot cramped to hang on to my prize has not been easy.

Several Good Samaritans have spotted my limping form and given chase, trying to save me by condemning me to the city pound.

The dedicated operative lets no discomfort dissuade him from the necessary heroics. My Miss Temple is interested in this bauble, so like any swain I have snagged it for her. Too bad it was at the sacrifice of playing the cringing toady with Miss Hyacinth. I could retch at my masquerade, except I am picturing my Miss Temple putting two and two together, and not having any notion of how to make it four.

Perhaps if she discusses it with Mr. Max they will finally make some progress.

Not that I wish to encourage her discussing anything with Mr. Max. He is much too big to share our bed.

So I claw my way, three-handed, so to speak, up the slick black marble face of the Circle Ritz to our patio and cast myself panting on the cool slate stones shadowed by the sole palm tree honoring our exterior.

It is not unusual for me to arrive at Chez Ritz by the dawn’s early light, so I pop the easiest French door and finally stagger onto the parquet tiles of home. My mitt is numb from holding onto my prize. I can barely loosen my grip to release the item onto the floor.

I collapse, knowing nothing but Free-to-be-Feline lies in my bowl as goad and reward. I might as well have headed straight for the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, where there is some real eating adventure.

After recovering from my night of long treks, I amble into the bedroom, relieved to spy a familiar lump under the comforter. Like many a tea drinker, I like only one lump, not two, of sugar…so I am even more relieved to see that this is the case, although how Mr. Max Kinsella could have beaten me back here even with the assistance of wheels I cannot imagine.

I leap upon the bed, ignoring my sore pads, and excavate the edge of the comforter most likely to cover the end where intelligence resides in my Miss Temple.

“Luffffuhhh,” she finally murmurs affectionately. Well, she murmurs. It might be more of an annoyed murmur.

I spot a stray red curl escaping the zebra stripes that cover her and snag it affectionately. Well, it might be with more of an intention to annoy.

With roommates of such long duration as Miss Temple and I, the line between affection and annoyance is always whisker-thin.

“Owww, lufffuhhh!” she complains, her endearing murmur having escalated into a less endearing mewl.

Aha, I am making progress.

I pat at her nose, just visible now.

“Owww!” She sits up, fully aroused. “Louie! Did you just knife my nose with your claws?”

It is so hard to be misunderstood.

I reach out a mitt again, and massage her nose.

“
Louie
! That hurts. What is the matter with you? You do not often put your claws out, not at home, at least.”

Could I sigh, I would. But that is another rare thing that dogs are better at than my breed. I lift the paw again and dangle my prize from it, hoping that her eyes are open enough to see that my shivs remain in a gentlemanly closed position. It is the trinket I have snatched from Hyacinth that has scratched her.

“What is that? Have you got some tinsel caught in your paw? Did you walk on a open can while you were out!” She is sitting up now, all attention, torn between concern and annoyance, like a fond parent. “Let me see, you poor baby. Hold still!”

I sigh metaphorically and let my grasp relax, so that the item drops to the comforter.

“Where are my glasses?”

As if I would know. In fact, I do, and I paw them off the night-stand, also onto the comforter.

She claws at the black-and-white pattern until her one of her pathetic fingernails clicks against the red metallic glasses frames and she installs them on the same nose I was forced to abuse.

“I swear I saw your paw pierced by a piece of tin can…. Is there blood on the coverlet?”

Please. If I were bleeding, I would be licking it.

She feels the comforter surface again and finally, finally pulls up a plum: my offering, fresh from the sinister collar of the treacherous Hyacinth, who after a stint on cable TV has been reunited with the same evil mistress who stole Miss Temple’s semiengagement ring only weeks ago.

Of course I cannot tell Miss Temple all this. I have to leave something for her to figure out on her own.

“Louie…” She leans over to snap on the bedside light. We both blink in the flood of artificial sunlight. “This isn’t a piece of tin. It’s gold. Real…eighteen-karat-marked gold. And I’ve seen it before. At the Rancho Exotica. And now I know what it is. Ophiuchus!”

Miss Temple practically stands up in bed, she is so excited.

“This is it! The charm I spotted on that woman at the Ranch. The larger-than-life symbol that was used to contain the dead body of poor Professor Mangel! The thirteenth sign of the zodiac! The sign of the Serpent. The calling card of the Synth. Louie!”

She comes back down to terra cognita again and hunkers down beside me, kisser to kisser.

“Where on earth did you get it?”

And she waits.

Like I could tell her.

Like I would.

A Place of Concealment

“Aren’t you afraid,” Molina asked when Matt called, “that your girlfriend might be tapping your line?” She sounded weary and annoyed. Annoyed with him.

“That’s why I got a cell phone. I’m calling from the Circle Ritz parking lot.”

“Don’t mention parking lots. Too many bad things have happened in them lately.”

“How is Vicki?”

“Fine. Except for being scared to death. The scariest part is that I can’t do anything to protect her. You’ve got to get me some solid information on this madwoman of yours, or she’ll really do some damage.”

“She’s not
my
madwoman!”

“Anger is a deadly sin. You sound tired too.”

“Yeah, well, I imagine we’re both pretty much at the ends of our ropes. I’m sorry, Carmen. It’s my fault that the Blue Dahlia parking lot has another bad memory for you.”

“Bad memory? Not this time. This time I’m just…aggravated. Who the heck does that woman think she is, playing mind games on my territory? Was she alone?”

“She always has been when she’s encountered me…or when she sees fit to confront me. You mean did she have an accomplice last night, with Vicki?”

“Yeah. It took planning. That outdoor sound setup was installed around ten yesterday morning. A couple of BD employees saw someone in white coveralls and a painter’s cap on a ladder messing with the roofline but it was near the neon sign and they thought it was maintenance.”

“Man or woman?”

“Couldn’t exactly tell, even when pressed. Workmen and mail carriers are the world’s most invisible occupations.”

“So what happened to Vicki?”

“Took her statement, gave her a card for a good trauma counselor, suggested she stay off the call-in lines of The Midnight Hour and away from you and WCOO. She didn’t see who nabbed her. The car had a dark-tinted glass privacy panel between the back and the driver’s compartment like a limo. Some of the car services around town do that. She saw and heard mostly you when she was on the pavement. She thinks you’re God’s gift to damsels in distress, though, despite not knowing what was going on, and is grateful you ‘saved’ her. I am not hopeful that she’ll have the smarts to avoid calling your radio show. Girls today are way too boy crazy way too young. It’s a shame that Mariah can’t skip adolescence like you did and go directly into the convent instead of junior high, but I guess nunneries are a dying institution.”