Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “She’s not ‘a cop’,” Rafi said. “She’s a lieutenant, and a damn good one. I used to be a cop too. Are we both not good enough?”

  “No, no! You’ve been great. It’s just that you’re not, like, on the brink of something. Like I am. You’ve brinked out.”

  “You’re on the brink of a good kick in the pants of reality.” Rafi’s face was grim. He was speaking generalities, Matt knew, but he’d accidentally nailed the imminent reality for his daughter.

  “I’ve gotta do what I’ve got to do,” she was saying. “You’re just too old to understand and maybe I need a more hip manager, anyway.”

  Matt found his fists clenching. “Brat” was too kind.

  Mariah tossed her product-rich curled and blow-dried mane of hair. “I bet Nilla knows somebody who isn’t just…a, an amateur. If Mom’s your only track record, it doesn’t look good. Nilla says my voice is special. She likes me.”

  “Well, we don’t,” Molina said, standing. “Forget me, which you apparently have. You will stop dissing your father like that after all he’s done for you!”

  Carmen registered that she was using a trite parental line only after she realized she’d given away the game. She and Rafi locked gazes, each surprised at defending the other, then mutually dismayed.

  “Adults always gang up on kids,” Mariah ranted, not even absorbing her mother’s slip.

  Matt had forgotten the deep fears and the conflicting overconfidence leavened by self-doubt that drives teens, and he ought to know. He’d seriously wanted to kill someone at that stage.

  The household tabby cats, spooked by overwrought emotions, picked that time to race through the living room, bounding over Carmen’s and Rafi’s laps on the couch and using the armrest as a springboard to dig into Matt’s khaki-covered knees.

  Amid the diversion and exclamations, including ouch! Mariah’s stormy expression cleared. “Father?” she said, plucking out the word from the current sound and fury. “Are you talking about Matt? Mr. Devine? He’s an ex-father.”

  All three adults eyed each other, obviously eager to use that misconception as an excuse. Molina had simply gotten rattled and referred to Matt by his former title.

  “She means me, kid,” Rafi said, rubbing at his black denim-protected knees. “Those cats come armed with switchblades.”

  Mariah bent to pick up one of the lean striped cats, now calm. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” It was half order and half hope. She looked back and forth at the couple on the couch.

  “I was surprised when I first figured it out too,” Rafi said.

  Molina bit her lip and kept silent, wisely not making it a mother-daughter blow-up.

  “You? Surprised?” Mariah looked from Rafi to Matt next.

  “It’s true,” Matt said.

  “Then there’s a whole lot of things that aren’t true!” Mariah looked around wildly, clutching the cat that was about to use its flailing claws to escape her grip.

  “What about my dead hero cop father, who died when I was two?” She stared at her mother. “You have that old clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper with the lousy-quality photo. You kept your maiden name because your married name would always remind you of what you’d lost.”

  And you!” She whirled to face Rafi. “Why’d you show up so late? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know when I first saw you at the teen reality show. We hit it off, remember? Without me even knowing you were my daughter.”

  “But you must have found out, oh, not before long. You didn’t tell me for a long time.”

  “No…I wanted to, Mariah, I did, but I’d been, not my best self, and when we started working together, I really enjoyed it and—”

  “And,” came Carmen’s voice, strong and certain. “I wouldn’t let Rafi continue to tutor you unless he swore not to tell you. That was my job.”

  “Well, it’s a big fat fail, isn’t it? You not good at your job? Big freaking too bad.” Mariah turned a bitter, angry face on her mother. “You know what’s best for everybody, but it’s all lies with you. I don’t ever want to see either of you again. You should have stayed lost,” she yelled to Rafi as she charged down the hall to the bedrooms, the two cats fleeing from her clomping platform shoes.

  A door slammed, then slammed again.

  “I need to talk to her privately,” Matt said. “Someplace away from you two, out of the house. In the yard?”

  “There’s a swinging bench on the back porch. In the shade.”

  “A swinging bench, Carmen? Really?” Matt asked. “You don’t strike me as the type.”

  “I’m not. It came with the house.”

  Matt eyed each of them in turn. “Both of you two settle down, drink a little beer, exchange some low-key recriminations and realize you only did what you thought best at the time and Mariah is going to have to grow up fast to see that. I’ll do my best to get her there.”

  “Why did you drag me out of the house?” Mariah lounged almost off one end of the double-seated swing set, as if Matt had rabies.

  Matt was amazed to think how fast a guy could go from hot to not with a teen girl.

  “The one thing you don’t want to do now, Mariah,” Matt told her, “because it is so clichéd and a Disney heroine would die before doing it, is to throw yourself across your bed, sob your heart out, and call all your BFFs to B&M.”

  Her eyes widened in the dark, owl-like makeup outline of what he’d seen advertised as “the smoky eye”.

  “Can a priest even say those initials?”

  “Ex-priest. I assume you’re referring to Bitch and Moan. I just did. And I can also tell you that Best Friends aren’t Forever and last about six minutes at your age. You’ve already got a cool singing gig going and the green eyes in school are out there looking for you. Envy is a Cardinal Sin and it runs wild among tween and teen girls.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I spent eight years at a parish school that went from kindergarten to senior high school and I would rather fight Isis than Mean Girls, who are shortly going to gang up on you in junior high because you’ve got ‘too much’.”

  Mariah did not look enviable, though. She was a mess. Her hair was tangled and looked “over” everything. Her red-rimmed dark eyes had a horror movie poster rawness and any makeup she used had smeared.

  “Am I wrong?” Matt prodded.

  “Everybody lies to me. Did you know about Them before?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know why until your mom ’fessed up to me this afternoon.”

  Mariah’s ridiculously high platform shoes easily reached the concrete patio floor and pushed the swing into gentle motion.

  Las Vegas was hot in the summer, but not very windy. Dry desert air pressed down with the sensation of ironing, although Matt knew Mariah wouldn’t know the clean, sharp smell of it. His mother had always had an ancient steam iron swathed in its electric cord at the back of a shelf in a closet.

  It was a pity some hearts and minds were sometimes consigned to the back of shelves and wouldn’t ever be smoothed into a wrinkleless state.

  Matt’s shoe toe scuffed the concrete to keep the swing’s soothing maternal rhythm going. “Your mom didn’t know her own father. Hasn’t. Ever,” Matt said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I didn’t know my birth father until I found him several months ago.”

  “And you’re a priest!”

  “Was a priest. That’s part of the reason I became a priest. My mom was ashamed of getting pregnant out of wedlock, so she married the only creep who’d have a woman with a kid.”

  “My mom didn’t marry anyone.”

  Matt nodded. “My mom’s quite a bit older than yours. She didn’t have a way to make a living and support a child. So she married an abusive man.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yes, it was. I try hard not to blame her for her decision.”

  “He hurt you too.”

  Matt nodded. “People didn’t t
alk about domestic violence then. I know, Mariah, girls get told the facts of life early nowadays, so you know that girls and women can get ‘caught’ without ‘protection’. A lot of single mothers now are wary of letting men live with their children.”

  “But Rafi is my father!”

  “It’s complicated. It was a tragic case of miscommunication. Each one was trying to do the best thing, but they were young and under pressure. Your mom will tell you it’s her fault. I know she was acting on the most instinctive motive women have: to save and protect her child.”

  “Rafi was abusive?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, nooo. I mean he’s been really standing up for my singing with my mom…oh. Because she lied, she was afraid to have him around. How did that happen? He said he didn’t know who I was at first.”

  “I’ll say it plain and simple. They’d been thinking of getting married, but their jobs were shaky because they were both minorities. They wanted to postpone kids. Your mom got pregnant, and thought she saw evidence Rafi had sabotaged the birth control so she’d have to quit her job.”

  “So he wanted me.”

  “But for the wrong reason, she thought. So she ran, Disappeared. He didn’t know why. She could have been killed. He was devastated and left the L.A. police force, drifting until he ran into you and found a reason to pull himself together again.”

  “Wow. That’s a Lifetime movie. And I brought them back together again. Do you think they’ll get married? That would be even cooler. I could star in the movie.”

  “They’ve both been through whole Lifetime movies separately. It’s hard to say what they’d want to do now. What would really be cool is you giving them a chance to make peace with each other and you.”

  She nodded, her distant eyes envisioning the autobio pic.

  “And you can start, Mariah, by dropping the diva act. You’re a smart, pretty, talented girl, on the way to wise, if you understand you now have what your mom and my mom and I never had, real parents trying to do the best for you.”

  Mariah regarded him sideways. “I think you’re leaving something out.”

  “No. What?”

  She gave him a small smile. “I think you think I was being pretty dumb and spoiled and that all the rest of those good things don’t matter if I go that way.”

  “A-plus.”

  They did a high five.

  “I’m sorry I dumped you for the Dad-Daughter Dance, especially since you and your mom had a hard time early on. You really are pretty cool and cute, but I think it’s better if I go with my father.”

  “I do too,” Matt said.

  “Did you like your real father?”

  “Yes. He’s a great guy. My mom remarried. She married his brother.”

  “No! That is so Lifetime movie un-be-lieve-able.”

  “Anything can happen with those crazy adults.”

  “I guess,” said Mariah. “We just have to understand they’re going through a stage.”

  When Matt took Mariah back to the living room, Rafi and Carmen were lounging in separate chairs, looking away from each other.

  Matt had no idea how to start the conversation back here in the common yet emotionally claustrophobic living room.

  “Do you have any questions, Mariah?” Rafi asked. He looked at Carmen, desperate for a clue.

  Mariah shifted her weight on the tippy platform shoes, uneasy for once at being the focus of everyone’s attention.

  Then she ventured a response.

  “Is there anybody I know who isn’t a, you know, bastard?”

  The stunned silence was answered with Rafi’s bellow of laughter.

  “Me,” Rafi said. “I have a large Greek Orthodox Christian family. Our roots go back to the Phoenicians. They’ve been unhappy I’ve been so distant. They’d love to meet you. You have many cousins.”

  “Oodles of half cousins on my mother’s side,” Molina added, “if you want to go to a family reunion.”

  “Well, maybe we can try that out in not too long,” Mariah said, “because I have a secret too.”

  “And what’s that?” Matt asked because the parents were afraid, very afraid. He was too, but he hid it better.

  “Your fiancée has asked me to sing at your wedding,” she told Matt.

  “I thought she was ‘over’,” Matt said while Carmen and Rafi stared in shock.

  “Doesn’t mean she doesn’t have good taste.”

  “D-I-V-A,” Matt warned.

  “Just kidding. What? I am still a kid, you keep telling me.”

  16

  Bless Us, Father

  As a public relations expert, Temple was used to plunging into new settings and situations as a five-foot-zero bundle of energy on spike heels that dug into any assignment like mountain-climbing pitons.

  She’d learned long before that small girls and women have to be dynamic not to be overlooked and underestimated. Or stepped on, physically or metaphorically.

  So when Matt knocked on her door to collect her for their errand, he couldn’t hide the confusion on his face.

  Temple wore a classic beige summer suit, short-sleeved but long-skirted, and carried a slim navy-blue envelope bag on a thin shoulder strap, not her signature large, jazzy tote bag. He stepped back to view her shoes, navy pumps.

  “That’s not a three-inch heel,” he said.

  “Two-and-half.”

  “That’s not a summer sandal style.”

  “Classic closed-toe pump.”

  “No hat?”

  Temple shook her abundant red-gold curls. “I only wear one when driving the Miata with the top down. I assume we’ll be taking your car.”

  “Well,” Matt said, “I suppose the only thing you’re missing is the black lace doily on your head and you’d be the perfect model of a nineteen-fifties Catholic churchgoer. We’re only going to the OLG Rectory, not the church. How did you know that navy is the inevitable color of Catholic school girl uniforms?”

  “Is it really?”

  Matt nodded, then shook his head. “Are you actually nervous?”

  “Yeah. Father Hernandez is…imposing.”

  “That’s the man’s temperament, Temple, not the priest’s. He’s just a humble parish priest who’s not so humble.”

  Temple stepped very close. “Now, if I were going to see you, I’d wear my new resale shop Manolo Blahnik heels and a thigh-high slit skirt with a cocktail hat tilted over my right eyebrow.”

  Matt pulled her close, as close as close could be, by her elbows and kissed her the way a dame dressed like that should be kissed. “Shall we stand up Father Hernandez?”

  She teetered back as he steadied her. “No. I don’t see a man about a wedding every day. Now I’m thinking I ought to.”

  Matt stroked the linen lapel of her suit. “The prim Save a Soul Mission lady from Guys and Dolls is an inviting look too.”

  “Hopefully not for Father Hernandez,” Temple said, well, primly.

  The Rectory resembled a grander, bigger house left over from an earlier era, red-brick, two-story, eight stone steps in a neighborhood of established one-story older bungalows. It was not only Father Hernandez Temple dressed to please. She didn’t want to run into parishioner Lieutenant C. R. Molina looking like a frump. Not that Molina, as a professional woman committed to neutral-color pantsuits suitable for covering a gun holster, cared about what Temple would call a “wardrobe”.

  At five-ten with the attitude of a mother superior and stern dark eyebrows Temple itched to pluck into a more flattering arch, the two of them were oil and water in all respects. She’d have traded her wishy-washy blue-gray eyes for Molina’s electric blue any day, though.

  And now, with a gazillion wedding chapels in Vegas, Temple was going to be married in a family church in Molina’s backyard.

  Matt held Temple’s elbow as he rang the doorbell. The housekeeper came at once, an overweight, beaming woman with natural silver highlights in her thick dark hair. “Miss Barr, Mr. Devine,
Father is waiting for you in his study.”

  “Thank you, Pilar,” Matt said.

  Temple checked her analog watch to make sure they weren’t late. Father Hernandez seemed a man you would not want to keep waiting.

  To Temple, the “study” was out of a vintage English mystery. Dark paneling, bookcase-lined walls blinking gold from hardcover title spines, a huge old desk, and, behind it, in a broad Golden Oak swivel chair, the neat contained figure of Father Hernandez, with his Old-World bearing and piercing black eyes.

  By God, if you were married by Father Hernandez, you would feel “married”. For eternity.

  Temple, from her family’s membership in the Unitarian Universalists, an inclusive multi-faith church with humanist and social justice concerns, not dogma, wanted to know what Matt had grown up with, wanted to glimpse the renounced priest side of him. Wanted to see every side of what had made him the man she had to love.

  She was startled to find Father Hernandez’s dark eyes regarding her with a shy twinkle. “Miss Barr. How could I miss you that first time in the congregation at Mass with Matt? Quickly grasping the ups and downs, when to stand and when to kneel, and the responses of the Holy Mass, your fiery head of hair shouting you were an outsider in this Hispanic neighborhood, but you would not be caught napping, eh?”

  “You’re only as much of an outsider as you choose to be, Father Hernandez.”

  He nodded. “Very wise. I made an outsider of myself for a certain bad time, for which I owe Matt, and you, many thanks. I admit I felt disappointed that such a promising young man left our brotherhood, which is sometimes lonely.” He sighed. “But the vocations we are called to may change as we face ourselves, and I am happy to be asked to marry you here at Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

  “It’s a beautiful church.”

  “My family in Chicago,” Matt added, “wanted the Polish Cathedral.”

  “Certainly a majestic site, and honoring your ancestry,” Father Hernandez said diplomatically, for him.

  “But it’s so echoing and huge,” Temple said. “Who could hear the vows? My family in Minneapolis would have chosen a parklike outdoor site or a historic mansion. That would have been more intimate but not…personally significant.”