"No," Cleo said. "It's more interesting for visitors if the cats are intermixed."
"And probably more diplomatic to keep direct competitors from seeing each other's animals," Temple added.
"Would anyone notice someone who shouldn't be here messing with the cats?"
Heads shook in concert. Cleo took it on herself to explain again. "Everybody's focused on their own cats, their own cages, on getting everything ready. An astronaut in full gear could walk in here and de-whisker every untended cat in sight. We'd never notice."
Temple sighed. "Wouldn't the cat cry if it was being suddenly shaved by a stranger?"
Peggy Wilhelm shook her grizzled, tight-curled head. "These animals are trained to be groomed and handled--both by owners and strange judges."
"What can we do?" a tall, thin young woman in a red knit sweater asked.
"Nothing," said Peggy. "Now, just watch each other's stands so it doesn't happen again."
"Great." A tall man in a plaid sports shirt grimaced. "We don't even open until five P.M. tonight. Maybe we should start a crime-watch patrol, any volunteers?"
"Good idea!" Cleo seconded.
Cat people moved away in an animated clump, discussing self-defense plans.
Temple eyed the skinny, shaved cat in the cage. "Somebody must really hate cats to do this."
"Or me," Peggy Wilhelm put in bitterly.
"It does look like a rival, doesn't it?" Cleo asked.
Peggy nodded. "Those phone calls were a warning. Maybe I should have stayed out of the show. Now I'll have to be here all the time the cats are present. I don't know who will take care of Aunt Blandina's cats."
All three shook their heads in downcast contemplation of the quandary, and its cause.
The abused Birman lifted a pale, unshaven forepaw and began to lick it.
"Maybe I could do it," Temple was horrified to find herself saying. She abhorred a vacuum in volunteering. "Just twice a day all right?"
Peggy Wilhelm was less than ecstatic. "Who are you? What do you know about cats?"
Cleo made a hasty introduction, and then added. "One reason I specifically wanted Temple to handle the cat show publicity is that she's been involved in crime at similar events before. She found the corporate cats that were kidnapped at the American Booksellers Convention last Memorial Day, not to mention a dead editor and several dead strippers at the Goliath competition last month--"
"Look," Temple interrupted in the interests of not sounding like the Typhoid Mary of murder, "I didn't 'find' the strippers' bodies; just the editor's, and that was enough."
"But can you feed cats?" Peggy Wilhelm wanted to know with the severe face of a wet nurse handing over a charge.
"I've got only one, but he's nineteen pounds, so I guess I do all right."
"What kind is he?"
"Alley,"
"Oh." So much for Louie, "I guess you could do it. I'll call Aunt Blandina and tell her you'll be over this afternoon.
She lives only a few doors from me, on Sequaro."
Temple pulled her fat organizer clutch out of her tote bag and wrote down the aunt's address and phone number, as well as Peggy's.
"Maybe we can talk later about the phone calls," she said, putting away her arsenal of information.
Peggy Wilhelm nodded while eyeing the new, punk-look Minuet at her pathetic grooming ritual. "I've got to find a sweater for the poor dear before she catches her death." Her eyes narrowed with fervor. "If I ever find out who did this to her, I'll shave them where it hurts!"
Chapter 9
Nunsense Call
Our Lady of Guadalupe was what its name implied: an aging parish in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. Matt watched skin tones on the street deepen as he neared the pale adobe tower he had steered by for the past few blocks.
Oleanders and rose bushes bordered the fronts of little old houses not much bigger than shotgun shacks. He hadn't heard that term until he had left Chicago for sunnier regions. It specified homes so small that a shotgun fired from the front door wouldn't expand its pattern enough to scratch so much as a sill before it exited the back door.
These sleazy, peeling constructions of slat board, along with the occasional stucco, wouldn't have survived a Chicago winter, nor would their residents. But warm climates allowed substandard housing to stand longer than it should; heat couldn't kill as easily and obviously as cold could.
Black wrought iron underlined a house here and there, usually in the form of burglar bars, though it was often for looks rather than for security. One enterprising homeowner had upended a claw-footed porcelain bathtub in his front yard, painted its inside the saccharine shade of bright blue that can never be found in nature and represents the Virgin Mary for some reason, and installed a plaster stature of her, head and eyes downcast modestly to the left, hands folded prayerfully over her flat breast. Despite the cheapness of the plaster icon, the sun carved graceful shadows into the folds of her long, gathered gown.
Yard ornaments--pots and vases and birdbaths and donkeys burdened with baskets of geraniums---scattered over the gravel and dirt like a pecking flock of gaudy, migrating terra cotta. Huddled under the dubious shade of ramshackle carports or a stand of scraggly trees stood hulks of Detroit's best---past tense. Twenty--year-old red Monte Carlos bleached rust-pink rubbed fenders with jazzed-up brown or Yellow Firebirds. Some newer-model cars tricked out with fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror had been restyled into bad-looking low-riders.
Matt heard the distant squeal of kids--lots of them. This grade-school playground would not be the vast, open area of asphalt he remembered from his Chicago school days, but a shaded, dusty patch with kids in clusters under the tree bordered edges, where the worn swing sets and jungle gyms creaked and shook to lazy users in the becalmed desert heat.
His walk had worked up a light sweat that evaporated as soon as it appeared. He paused before he came to the church, a low, cream-painted structure with a rusty tile roof, its single, square bell tower rising three stories on one side.
The church was planted deep in the neighborhood. Houses stretched away from it with hardly a demarcation line. The school and playground must sit on the other side, Matt decided as a harsh bell clanged and the screeching voices softened into giggles that cooled to faint laughter, then silence.
The houses nearest the church were obviously the oldest and largest in the neighborhood. Matt studied them, trying to pick out the convent and failing. In Chicago, churches were as obvious as dump trucks: large, lumbering edifices that called attention to themselves, established ted brick or gray stone behemoths with naves that aspired to cathedral heights. Rectory and convent were built to match, impressive structures that parish children passed with hushed giggles.
Here there was no institutional signal, just a lot of vaguely mission-style little houses, and then, the Big House. Matt nodded as he stared at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a low box with a pointed roof and that one plain tower. More churches should be built in such proper proportion to the people they serve.
Sister Seraphina had given him the address, but he headed to the two-story adobe building that he figured was the convent, and then looked for a number. It would be interesting to see if his Catholic grade-school instincts were intact after all these years.
When the address numbers got large enough to read, he saw he had been right. Matt smiled to himself. Maybe the lack of yard bric-a-brac had given the place away. It was too neat, too stripped down to the essentials. No matter the architectural style, every convent had that in common, that bare, clean, dustless feel. Rectories, on the other hand, no matter how modern, always broadcast an air of fusty, bachelor disorder on the brink of becoming unmanageable.
He entered a small courtyard edged in sun loving, white-and-magenta periwinkles and rang a doorbell.
Despite its modest exterior, the place was large enough to swallow all sound of the bell. Waiting at a convent door always felt like waiting for the Wicked Witch to open the Halloween portal:
which nun would come? Grade-schoolers at St. Stanislaus all had their favorites--and their mortally feared.
The broad wooden door swung open with an energetic swoosh that sucked hot air past Matt. A figure was framed in shadow.
"Matthias, Sister Seraphina greeted him with robust delight. "Come in."
Just before he stepped over the threshold, an unseen lurker darted past, a dusty yellow cat big enough to tap his knee with the tip of its tail.
"Peter!" Seraphina admonished in a fond tone no thirteen-year-old hardened case would heed. "You're a pretty pushy gatekeeper. Did he get hair all over you?" she asked Matt. She turned to conduct him to the visitors' parlor, and
Matt found himself expecting something: the billiard-ball click of oversizcd rosary beads. But that memory came from his earliest grade-school days. Nuns no longer wore robe and rosary and wimple. Still, Sister Seraphina had been in uniform--a black habit with white touches at the headdress---when he had made her acquaintance in the fourth grade. He secretly dreaded seeing her without her charismatic costume.
He had more than twenty Years to bridge; seeing her aged would be bad enough.
The dim hall was paved with quarry tile. She led him to a small room floored in the same dull red color, with interior wooden shutters drawn against the heat.
"Sit down. Would you like some lemonade? Iced tea?"
"The tea would be great."
She was gone before he'd had a good chance to look at her. Perhaps she felt the need of intervening props as much as he did. Her voice's sprightly tone had been familiar, but forced.
He looked around, and then sat down in a carved wooden chair of mismatched Queen Anne-Hispanic style, upholstered in maroon velvet. Convent furniture was never new, if a convent had been constructed in the fifties or sixties; its furnishings had once been new: blond, uncompromising lines that hinted at the Scandinavian but were too plain to pretend to a style that required a capital letter. If the convent was older than thirty or forty years, it was filled with hand-me-downs from the wealthier parishioners or some ecclesiastical rectory.
This chair appeared to be an escapee from the latter, but in one factor it was the quintessential convent chair, whatever its age: it was bare-armed and -legged, and hard-seated to sit on.
Still, it suited this warm climate and this Spanish atmosphere. Sister Seraphina did not.
She returned quickly with a tray bearing a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses, a saucer of fresh-cut lemons and a sugar bowl with spoon. Matt rose to help her install it on a desktop, then captured a lemon slice for his tea. The small wooden table next to his chair had no such frippery as a coaster, but it did have a doily with a solid center and an elaborate, airy edging that stood up like a clown's ruff. On this he placed his sweating glass, which now echoed his own condition, and confronted the past in the person of Sister Seraphina O'Donnell.
She was summing him up as well, he saw, so they simply sat and did so until her mouth folded tight to avoid a laugh, and he sipped his tea, Strong as shellac. He squeezed more lemon into it.
"You haven't changed," he began.
"All my ex-students say that," she noted complacently.
"They assume I must be ninety by now."
"You look great," he said.
"How do you know? How could you tell what I looked like before with the habit?"
"Do you miss it?"
She paused, and then shook her head. At least she still wore glasses, the frames as effacing as ever. Her hair was white with accents of gray, permed and cut into the modest Social Security, old-ladies' style that is easy and inexpensive to maintain.
She wore a silver crucifix inset into a largish wooden cross on a thin chain around her neck. Other than that, her dress was ordinary, though Matt thought he detected a thrift-shop look; A-line khaki cotton skirt; short-sleeved, blue-striped polyester blouse; low-heeled, sensible shoes that might not be real leather; no rings, no earrings.
For a moment, the outfit seemed oddly familiar. He puzzled to place it, and then smiled: a dead ringer for Lieutenant C.R. Molina's low-key, workaday garb. Trust a nun to find another uniform when her order did away with the dramatic medieval habit she was used to.
He took two more sips from his sweaty glass, and then set it down on the circle of doily for good. "So, Our Lady of Guadalupe isn't as tranquil as it looks. How did you get here?"
"Retirement," she said with a curl of her mouth.
Matt was startled to note the faint, pale sheen of lip gloss. As happened to many older women, white hair brought out the color of her eyes, hazel-green. The deep-rose lip gloss complemented the new color scheme. It wasn't vanity, merely a desire to look reasonably healthy at an age when everyone wrote you off.
"So many parochial schools in Chicago have closed," she went on. "The convents have become old-nuns' homes. At least here I can do 'community organization' work. But I'm out of the teaching game, and high time."
"Is Saint Stan's school closed?" Matt asked.
"Not yet. But there aren't nuns enough to staff it. All lay teachers nowadays, and even though they still accept substandard wages, it costs so much to keep it going . . ." She shifted on her chair, a hard-seated side chair with faded brocade upholstery. "Our Lady of Guadalupe is in the midst of a major fund drive to underwrite some renovation, and the grade school. It's vital to the parish, to the neighborhood?'
He nodded. His thigh muscles were beginning to feel the strain of the demanding chair. Catholic churches depended on their parishioners to underwrite everything --~if the parish were poor, it was endangered. St. Stan's served a large, working-class neighborhood, but everybody who was Polish was Catholic back then, and the widows' mites poured in until the statue of the Virgin loomed above a mass of shining candles.
"What's the problem?" he asked.
She fidgeted again on her chair, "I know you work nights and getting you out in the afternoon is an imposition, Matthias--"
"It's no trouble," he assured her, adding, "and I go by just 'Matt' now."
Her face froze. The ex-teacher was about to insist that the student would be called by his full and formal name. But those days were gone with the habit and the wimple.
"Matt," she repeated meekly. He wasn't fooled. "Well, Matt-- she enunciated the terminal t's like a machine gun spitting bullets "--some very odd things are happening since our fund drive began."
"Odd?"
"Disturbing," she corrected herself. She folded her hands on her lap--khaki-colored hands, plain, the nails virtually unnoticeable. "There have been noises outside the convent at all hours, even lights in the neighborhood, flashlights, all of it bright enough or loud enough to awake us, and alarm us."
"Kids," he diagnosed quickly. "Probably just hanging out, but it could be gang activity, or drug deals."
"Right next to the church?"
"Sorry, Sister Seraphina, but kids these days would do drugs in the sanctuary if they thought it was a safe place."
"It used to be." she commented sadly, "All those adorable little altar boys, growing up to be lookouts or drug runners."
"Not all," he said.
She smiled at him, then sobered. "That's not the worst. We've been getting strange telephone calls, At night."
"You mean the harassment may be specific?"
"It is now." She paused for emphasis. for dramatic effect, a teacher making sure her most sluggish student was getting this. "Sister Mary Monica has been receiving obscene phone calls for five days."
Matt winced. Nuns, especially old nuns, really were elderly innocents. Reared in a day when proper young girls were spared even the mildest oath, much less four-letter words, they had lived in a world that kept modern cruelties at bay. That did not mean they were completely naive, for most of them were wise and worldly enough to survive change, even to their ancient orders. But obscenity and its effects were not dulled by modern usage. It was a weapon among them, it amounted to attack. That made Matt wonder who would be sick enough to bedevil--and that wa
s the right word--these old women in this particularly savage way.
"A random caller," he suggested.
Sister Seraphina shook her curly, poodle-like head.
"Again and again, often several times a night?"
"Sometimes these people like the reaction they're getting.
The first call is random, and then they have your number."
"Sister Mary Monica is . . . somewhat deaf." Sister Seraphina conceded. "She doesn't have her hearing aids in at night, so she was slow to realize the nature of the calls. That might have . . . encouraged the caller. She hung up as soon as she realized that she didn't understand the conversation, of course, but he still calls back," Seraphina went on.
"Is anyone else at the convent getting these calls?"
Seraphina shook her head as she rose. "I'll get her so you can ask her any questions you might think of." She hesitated on the threshold. "It will take a while. Mary Monica isn't as fast on her feet as she used to be."
Seraphina was. She whisked away, leaving Matt to inspect the mostly bare walls. A crucifix was impaled to the plaster above the desk, on which the pitcher--not opaque green plastic, but real glass--sweated profusely. He heard the distant drone of an air-conditioning plant and reflected that it must have been installed after the place became a convent, for surely it had begun as a private house, a large private house, almost hacienda size.
Hard to imagine the raucous shriek of a perverted phone call disturbing this place of prayers and domestic calm, this last oasis for lives of long service. Yet Matt smiled at the notion of a misguided obscene phone-caller fixating on a deaf, elderly nun. It revealed the act for what it was: so unsexual, so pathetic.
Rustles and shards of sentences down the hall announced the stately arrival of Seraphina with the elderly nun. He really didn't want to meet Sister Mary Monica; he had nothing to ask her. Apparently Sister Seraphina had thought he should see her, and what Sister Seraphina thought--now as then--was what was done.
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