Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I’m not Catholic. I’m Unitarian. Ursula is a nonsectarian name in my case. I don’t know why it’s in the family. An aunt got saddled with it too. So, what about Matt? You’re going to accuse an ex-priest of murder?”

  “It’s not that unthinkable. Non-ex-priests have been accused of a lot of felonies lately.”

  “Right. Matt. You have really flipped.”

  Even as Molina sat back on the sofa, a black cat jumped up on either arm, as if to say: I’m all ears.

  Feline muscle, or eavesdropping, did not dissuade her.

  “All I can say,” Molina went on with a relish Temple would have to describe as personal, “is that you sure know how to pick ’em. So I can’t prove Kinsella was involved in the matter of the dead man in the Goliath Hotel ceiling over a year ago, so I couldn’t prove he was the Stripper Killer, but he’s guilty of something, and proving it is only a matter of time.

  “Then there’s nice Matt Devine. I must admit that I was rooting for you to ditch Kinsella for Matt. What’s not to like? Sincere, ethical, untouched, good looking, apparently honest—”

  “What do you mean, apparently?”

  Molina shrugged, shifting the polyester-blend navy-blue jacket on her shoulders.

  Polyester-blend, navy-blue. Ick, Temple thought, trying to distract herself from the ugly news that was coming. Who could believe anything that came from the lips of a P-B, N-B-wearing person? The unlipsticked lips of such a person? Whose eyebrows needed a serious shrubbery trimming.

  But no matter how much she denigrated Molina’s persona, Temple couldn’t banish the chill, sick feeling in her stomach. Molina wouldn’t be here unless she had some serious stuff on Matt. Molina wouldn’t be here unless she thought she could use Temple to turn Max—or now even Matt—against his own best interests. Temple curled her toes in the bunny slippers until they dug into the walnut parquet floor and braced herself. With a cat it would be called digging in; with a short woman, it would be called maximum resistance.

  “Who, where, when, or why could Matt ever be a suspect of murder?” Temple asked. Give me your best shot.

  “A call girl, at the Goliath Hotel—your favorite and Kinsella’s too for mayhem—last night, because he freaked at the idea of sexual intercourse, or he had sexual intercourse and freaked afterward. Take your pick.”

  Whew. Temple’s toes did not uncurl, nor did her hidden fists unfurl, nor did her breath stop being held.

  “That’s your idea,” she finally said, “of who, where, when, why. I still don’t get the why. Why on earth would Matt be there with that kind of woman to do that? Never in a million years. I don’t believe it.”

  “One answer, three little words, your own, and quite brilliant in their way. I can see why you’re a public relations ace: Kitty the Cutter.”

  “Kitty O’Connor? The poison ivy of Ireland? Oh. She assaulted Matt once, but that was a long time ago.”

  “It didn’t end there. She’s been stalking him.”

  Temple said nothing. She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that Kitty’s attacks had continued, and especially couldn’t believe that Matt hadn’t told her.

  “My own daughter was involved.”

  “Mariah? That’s crazy. What would she have to do with Kathleen O’Connor?”

  “TitaniCon?” Molina asked, invoking the recent science fiction convention at the New Millennium hotel. “The car that chased you from the parking ramp over the pedestrian bridge and crashed into the hotel’s glass doors while your party escaped down the escalator? You, Matt Divine, and my own daughter. Oh, yes, I heard about it. Matt said that every female in his company was in danger at that event, including Mariah. Kitty had claimed him for her own; either he’d cooperate, or she’d take heads.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Amazing. Can it be that anyone in Las Vegas fails to confide in Temple Barr, amateur sleuth?”

  “Sarcasm does not become you, Lieutenant. I like it better when you’re just plain mean.”

  “I am not mean,” Molina answered rather astoundingly. “I am trying to save lives, including my own daughter’s. The fact is that Kathleen O’Connor elected Matt the most dangerous man in Las Vegas to know. Her price was his virtue, and he’s probably the only man in Las Vegas who still has…had…any.”

  Temple was on a dizzying mental merry-go-round fixated on tense: has…had. She had no idea she cared that much. Or did she?

  “So…to save all the women he knew, he had to find a woman he didn’t know and…render himself undesirable to Kitty the Cutter?”

  Molina nodded.

  “Hence the call girl. Last night? But—?”

  “But what?”

  “I mean, we were all so busy last night, you and Max and I, chasing each other and trying to catch the Stripper Killer all at the same time, Matt was…oh, poor Matt. How’d he ever find a call girl?”

  She looked to Molina for an answer, admitting her superiority in this one, sleazy instance, and met an evasive gaze, a slightly flushing face, a guilty expression.

  “You? You turned him on to a call girl? And you’re really Catholic!”

  “This not about religion. This is about abusive stalking.”

  “Which is not the stalkee’s fault.”

  “It is if he snaps under the pressure and kills the very woman who is the source of his salvation. You probably know Matt better than anyone. Could he snap? Get violent?”

  “No!” Temple spoke from gut defense, before she remembered how Matt had torn his own apartment apart once, almost a year ago, when she’d first met him, when he’d been hunting his abusive stepfather. “No,” she repeated more softly, more sanely. Matt had acknowledged the rage within himself. Didn’t that banish it? Unless he had been forced into a corner so against his every instinct. “No.” This last one sounded pretty unconvincing.

  “You defended Kinsella, and look where he stands. Are you simply a sucker for flawed men? There are plenty of women like that. I see them every day.”

  “You work on the dark side,” Temple answered. “The rest of us live in the light. Mostly. Or maybe we just like to think so. But thinking so can make it so. I will never believe the worst of my friends. I won’t. You’ll have to prove it to me.”

  “No, I won’t. You don’t fit at all into this equation. I have to prove it to a prosecutor.”

  Molina stood up.

  Temple stood, too, although in her case it wasn’t very impressive. “Are you saying something happened to the call girl Matt was with last night?”

  “It’s more something that didn’t happen,” Molina said. “She didn’t wake up to have a morning after.”

  On that information she turned on her pathetically low heels and left.

  Temple was too shocked to move to show the woman out, which allowed Molina to pause and call through the ajar door, “Fasten your chain-lock. There may be a murderer in the building.”

  Temple still didn’t move. For one thing, she didn’t believe for a moment that Matt had murdered somebody. But then she’d have never believed he’d patronize a Las Vegas call girl. And what was this about Kitty the Cutter stalking him? How long had that been going on? And why did Molina really call on Temple with all this bad, if vague, news, other than to lecture and to taunt?

  She must have wanted exactly what was just about to happen. Too bad. It was going to happen anyway.

  Temple rushed to the kitchen door to grab the keys to her apartment, then her glance fell on her bunny-slippered feet.

  “Watch the door,” she instructed Louie as she skied over the slick wooden floors to her bedroom to change into proper interrogation garb. “Don’t let in any sex killers,” she mumbled as she fled.

  Midnight Louie eyed Midnight Louise. An observer, of which there was no longer one, could well imagine the two consulting each other: Did she say “sex killers” or “sex kittens”?

  Chapter 5

  Flaming Sword

  Midnight Louie did not watch
her half-open door while Temple changed into a capri-pants-and-top set with so many chicly beaded hems at the extremities that she felt (and rattled) like a Victorian lamp shade….

  He and Louise had absconded the premises by the time she came charging back from the bedroom, her feet attired in black patent leather mules instead of the soft and soulful bunny faces.

  Temple’s outfit had all the bells and whistles that passed for current fad except a pocket, so she dangled her unit key ring from a handy thumb and ran, not walked, up the service stairs to the floor above.

  She knocked on Matt’s door, rapped really, and was ready to start scratching like a rodent when the door didn’t instantly fly open.

  “Who is it?” he asked from inside finally, as he had never done.

  “It’s me!”

  The announcement brought silence.

  Temple’s courage faded at this unhappy omen. Matt was always glad to see her. Well, almost always. Except lately he had seemed…distant. How could she have missed it? Dummy! He was trying to avoid the targets of Kathleen O’Connor’s hate campaign.

  Temple rapped again. “Compared to the women you’ve been hanging out with lately, I’m pretty harmless, really.”

  The door jerked open. Matt’s face was about as stiff as the mahogany the door was made of.

  “What do you know about the women I’ve been hanging out with lately?” he asked.

  “That they’re dangerous. Kitty the Cutter. Lieutenant Molina. Your friendly neighborhood call girl.”

  “How do you know any of that?”

  “Molina told me.”

  “Molina?”

  He had spit out the name in a way Temple found totally satisfactory. At last someone else beside her was regarding the homicide lieutenant as the Great Satan, the Enemy, She Who Is Not to Be Obeyed!

  “Why in God’s name,” he went on, mostly asking himself, not her, “would Molina run right off to you and spill her guts and mine?”

  “I think she’s trying to do with you what she did with Max: use me to pressure you. But I didn’t fall for that the first time and I’m hardly about to do it the second.”

  “Temple, just your being here is pressure.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I can help.”

  “Nobody 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 assignation. Or…deal. Yeah. I was desperate. Everybody told me that was what I should do. It began to make sense, under the circumstances.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Ambrosia…her off-air name is Letitia, 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 grass cloth covering the living room wall as if facing a firing squad with Ronald Colman’s classic-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! Vassar is dead. She was killed because she was with me. You’re with me here, now. You could be next.”

  “Vassar? 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 TitaniCon? The almost-accidental injuries, the car that drove after all of us into the bank of glass 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 assumption 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 Vassar. So Kitty has destroyed my innocence, one way or another. I’m responsible for a woman’s death. Vassar 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. Vassar…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 appear.” 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.”