The dog snorts, which is what you can expect from the breed while eating. "People are easily misled by milk-sucking parasites like him. He has done nothing for this hotel except decimate the fancy fish supply." The animal snuffles among a selection of orange rinds and apple cores before pulling out the butt end of a hot dog. "Besides, from what I hear, he has moved on to another establishment."
"Oh?" Caviar says in a way that begs for answering.
I have got to hand it to the kid. She manages to sound supremely uninterested just as the dumb cluck is spilling the info she wants the most.
He scarfs up some odds and ends I would not deign to bury, then feeds her the info while his mouth is full. "New place. On Lake Mead. Eatery called Three O'Clock Louie's.' Sounds like your friend has found a new gig with a better water view and more carp, where he can stay up later these days."
"He is not my friend," Miss Caviar is quick to establish.
"Then why do you want to find him?"
"Personal business," she answers, flexing her hardware.
The dog eyes the glint of her front claws stretching and retracting in a rhythm no one could mistake for expressing contentment. He backs away, dragging some of his ill-gotten gains with him.
"Yeah, well, I do not intrude in vendettas, lady. I doubt you could do more than nick a few loose hairs off his chinny-chin-chin, but I would like to see that lout get his comeuppance, so I will let you off easy this time. Now get out of here before I lose my appetite and forget I swore off cats!"
He lunges, feet braced, ears back, his loud and uncouth barker at full cry.
Caviar lunges too, fluffing her hair into a fat black aura, and arching her back like a midnight rainbow.
"I have had enough of you, too, fellow," she says in a tone between a growl and a hiss. "You should know that I am the new house detective at the Crystal Phoenix, and I do not welcome passersby of the wrong sort. You will have to do your snacking elsewhere from now on."
"Or else?" he snarls.
I tense, readying myself for a leap to the rescue. Much as Miss Caviar deserves a lesson, I cannot allow even maybe-kin to lose all nine lives to a dirty dog in my presence.
"Get back to the Araby Motel where you belong," she screeches, executing some swift and subtle moves she probably learned off an Oriental shorthair, which is exactly what that breed of cat usually get their opponents by.
The dog's threatening growl has escalated to a howl. He is backing away in big, bounding jerks, rubbing his long ugly snout in the dirt. Four dark furrows now tattoo his nose. Even as I watch, they well with bright red blood.
He dashes off; leaving a trail of droplets a near-sighted wombat could follow.
The triumphant Caviar drags his leavings back to the Dumpster, pantomimes burying the mess and ambles off, no doubt to attend to her beauty routine and cadge another disgusting hand-out from Chef Song.
I remain in the shade, mulling the cruel twists of fate. I am not only rumored to be living elsewhere under a pseudonym, but I have lost my old job to a female. What is this world coming to?
Chapter 28
Missing Connections
The water, warm and velvety, felt like partially set Jell-O.
Matt pulled himself through the pools turgid length, rhythmically angling his shoulder and face toward the overhead sun as he took a deep breath every other stroke.
Swimming was always a surreal experience. Immersed in an alien element, he battled to remain part of it, yet apart from it, moving with a shark's constancy.
His every breath came on a smelling-salt slap of chlorine. Through blue-tinted goggles, he glimpsed the world moving in a way that couldn't be sensed by walking on Mother Earth. A slash of palm frond waving against a blazing blue sky. A flash of the Circle Ritz roof spinning away as he made a splashy turn at the pool's far end. A black dot oared across the sky just as he rolled for a gulp of air, then submerged again.
Doing the Australian crawl was a fractured experience united by the water's tepid, seamless presence, an amniotic fluid buoying a rather restless fetus.
On the twenty-third lap, Mattes routine twist for air showed a man's face masked by sinister wraparound sunglasses hanging over him.
Matt wrenched himself into a full roll and came upright, treading the gelatinous water, trying to focus through droplet-spotted goggles.
"Frank!" he said, as much with relief as recognition. Temple's tales of shady characters and dark doings at the Crystal Phoenix had gotten to him.
With a wry grimace of acknowledgment, the man retreated to the shade while Matt drew himself, dripping, onto the hot concrete bordering the pool.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
Matt's wet feet left Friday footprints on the concrete. He collected his towel from the elderly lounge chair beside the one Frank had settled upon with gingerly reluctance.
''Quite a quaint place," Frank said instead of answering, pocketing the intimidating sunglasses to squint at the Circle Ritz's black marble bulk shining like a mausoleum in the sun.
''Even a little sinister looking."
"Speak of the Devil." Matt looked Frank up and down, from the gray suit and tie to the wing-tip shoes resting so incongruously on the cement.
"Unwritten FBI dress code." Frank loosened the utterly unimaginative tie. "Out of the church and still in uniform."
"Still on duty?" Matt asked, throwing his damp towel on the lounge seat before sitting.
"Always. You still keep in good shape."
"Always. And swimming is so routine, it's good for meditation."
"Yeah," Frank said, "routine has its uses. Once we go the suit route in the hot, humid Virginia summers, the heat elsewhere doesn't bother us. And priests are used to overdressing."
Matt self-consciously dabbed chlorine-perfumed droplets off his shoulder. His damp bareness suddenly symbolized the vocation and past that he had thrown off like an itchy black suit.
''I still can't believe you're an FBI agent." Matt said.
"You'd be surprised how many ex-priests end up in law enforcement. Makes sense. We've acquired the education, the people skills, plus a highly overdeveloped sense of right and wrong.
We know how to knuckle under to rules and authority. We believe we can change the world, or at least the dirty under soul of mankind."
"Speak for yourself. So what brought you here besides rank curiosity?"
Frank laughed apologetically as he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his suitcoat pocket.
"Bad habit. Every good celibate deserves, or develops, a compensatory but less condemnable vice--food, drink or these. Mind?"
Matt shook his head, actually enjoying the acrid odor of the freshly lit cigarette Frank soon inhaled as hungrily as a man breathing air through a straw.
"What are your vices?" Frank wanted to know.
"Nothing. Yet. My greatest weakness was always my lack of weaknesses."
"Granted. Everybody is entitled to a weakness," Frank mused. "Makes us human. Maybe your apparent perfection was why you could leave with laicization. Few of us need apply for that rare status, because we won't be granted release from our promises."
He regarded Matt with piercing, almost painful curiosity. "Besides, the only allowable conditions are so humiliating. Either admit lacking free will and maturity at ordination, or confess to such insatiable lust for women that you can't live without one, or be dying in an unauthorized married state and facing eternal damnation without emergency laicization. Ugly, bureaucratic word, isn't it?" Frank eyed Matt. "You don't look like you have terminal anything, and didn't have a wife already. You certainly don't strike me as possessed of a manic lust for women as the church defines it, and you were the most mature seminarian in your class. How did you manage it?"
Matt stared at the pool, an emerald-cut liquid aquamarine glinting under a ceaseless spotlight of sunshine.
"I made my case, and they accepted it."
Frank hissed out an exhaust of smoke. "It's none of my business;
I'm just a little envious. Of course I wondered what you were doing in the seminary, as everybody must have. Seminarians are always misfits of a sort, like raw recruits in the Army. You were so smart, so smooth, so self-contained. And you looked like a movie star. I wondered if your vocation was revenge, to drive some girl-all girls--crazy."
Matt laughed. ''My vocation was to save my own sanity, and it did. That's why it was misdirected. Too selfish."
''Laicization is seldom granted. Most ex-priests exit into a moral limbo of sorts. I had to marry in the Episcopal Church, but you're free to be Catholic--"
"I'm not free yet," Matt said abruptly. ''When you married. Was your wife the first woman--
?"
"No. I wasn't a virgin bridegroom. Went a little crazy after I left. I didn't know how to do it at my advanced age, have relationships. So I . . . experimented before I got it right."
Matt felt himself flushing. "I wasn't asking that. I just wondered if she was the first woman you dated. Usually former priests begin--and end--with ex-nuns, but you said she was a widow."
"Sandy's no ex-nun, for sure. Listen, Matt, if you're going to go around asking questions on any level, you better figure out how to phrase them exactly so you learn what you want to know." Frank's sideways glance was embarrassed. "Then you won't learn more than you need to know. Here we go again, me offering direction and you listening. At least I've been through the mill first. That's the worst, learning to socialize with the world of women in a whole different way. That, and overcoming all the avoidance therapy we get in seminary."
Matt nodded. "What about coming to terms with church doctrine? Now that I'm out here, it doesn't seem possible to live by it."
Frank's hearty laugh came like a burst of machine-gun fire. His heavy shoe ground out the cigarette on the concrete, then he picked up the flattened butt and wrapped it in a fast-food napkin he pulled from his pocket.
That was Father Furtive, terminally tidy, Matt thought. How had he made the awesome transition between the priesthood and the secular world?
"Feel a bit more compassion for confused parishioners during confession?" Frank asked.
''No, it's damn hard. We exit the priesthood as we entered, awkward ugly ducklings no matter the outward sophistication. We're overeducated, over-ethical and under experienced. Haven't you learned by now that there's no way not to sin, not without losing our humanity, and certainly our humility? The secret is to select sins that do the least damage, to others and one's self."
"First, do no harm,' " Matt quoted the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors. "Isn't that a principle of the Tao?"
''Yup. We grew up on a culture and a church that insisted we must do good, even if it meant imposing our notion of good on people who didn't subscribe to it. I've concluded that in matters of spirituality, the absence of malice is more important to the human soul than the presence of some rigorous system of perceived rectitude. More people have been hurt by being forced to fit someone else's notion of 'good' than by being allowed to be human."
Matt absorbed his words, realizing that Frank had become an automatic outcast by leaving the priesthood. His renegade marriage was just that, unsanctioned by the church in which he had grown up and made his promises to the priesthood. Matt still could be perfect, if he did things according to Hoyle and the Holy See.
He could marry in the Church, if he could find an un-divorced woman. If he was lucky, he would find a perfect life partner the first time out, commit only a few venial sins of longing and lust, and enter matrimony as virginal as Mary, avoiding the pitfalls of sexual trial and error. But then the onus would be upon selecting the right partner in the dark, and both of them would go half-blind into the most important alliance of their lives. Failure would push him into the divorce trap, which would forever enjoin the perfect ex-priest to lifelong celibacy again.
Matt began to see what Temple had meant when she had asked him what on earth he would do. Temple was shrewd, but she was also trouble. She wasn't Catholic, and didn't understand or kowtow to the culture. Maybe that was why he liked her so much.
"Theology and human behavior mix like oil and water, don't they?" Matt said finally.
Frank nodded. "Human behavior is always a conundrum, but inhuman behavior is worse."
"Are you counseling me again?"
He shook his head. "Warning you. It's not easy. Compared to this, checking out Rafael Hernandez was a snap."
Matt held his breath. "That's what you came to tell me?"
"He's clean, Matt. I used my contacts from twenty-five years ago, I used computers. I even used some pull in the various dioceses. Nothing. Not a word of scandal or complaint. I interviewed several ex-altar boys by phone. Hernandez can be a bit severe, even a little pompous, but misconduct--never."
"You're absolutely sure?"
"Certain enough to stand up in a court of law and swear that I was unable to unearth a scintilla of evidence."
When Matt said nothing, Frank pulled out another cigarette and lit it in disgust. "What do you want, Devine, a chorus of archangels announcing the news from on high? I did my best, and I'm satisfied. Why can't you be?"
"Sorry, Frank. I appreciate the favor. It's just that the price of being wrong is so high."
"It always is, we just don't notice it in every case."
"So." Matt bent to pull his canvas shoes on dry feet. "Now you can concentrate on what really brought you to Las Vegas." He shrugged on a shirt that still clung damply to his shoulder blades.
"Hinting? I'm not about to talk about that. Seal of the professional," he punned with one of his rare flashes of humor as he stood with Matt.
"I'll walk you to your car. Maybe you could leave your phone number."
''Sure." Frank pulled out a card, scrawling his home number on the reverse with a ballpoint pen. "I travel a lot, but messages reach me everywhere. You have any questions, call. If you don't, let me know how you're doing. I'm curious to see what you end up doing,"
''Professionally or personally?"
"Both." He-opened the wooden gate to the parking area.
Matt tucked the card in his shirt pocket, spying Frank's car right away. A rental Taurus, forest green. Perfect for a priest, or an FBI man. He began to see the logic of Frank's new profession.
Pulling up next to Frank's authoritatively nondescript car was Temple's lurid little Storm.
He watched her car absently, thinking about what he and Frank had discussed.
Frank was opening his car door when Temple came clicking around behind it, grocery bag in one arm, tote bag on her opposite shoulder, oversize prescription sunglasses slipping down her narrow, upturned nose.
"Hi," she began, then glanced at Frank and stopped cold.
"What are you doing here. Miss Barr?" Frank's recent affability had hardened into alertness.
"I could ask the same of you. I live here."
"Do you?" Frank turned to Matt with surprise, as if wondering why Matt hadn't volunteered this fascinating fact. "You know each other?"
Matt was momentarily tongue-tied. More was going on here than the obvious. How did Frank know Temple? Had he been checking on Matt?
"We're neighbors," Temple said into the growing conversational gap. "Matt teaches me martial arts."
"Are you trying to say we shouldn't worry about your safety. Miss Barr?"
"I'm trying to explain how Matt arid I know each other, although I don't know why." She shifted the bag. "I've got some frozen yogurt. I'd better get inside."
The paper bag was slowly slipping down her hip.
"I'll get it." Matt said. He turned to Frank. "Thanks for stopping by.''
Frank was eyeing the grocery bag in Matt's arm, then Temple, speculation running visibly wild.
"We'll talk again," he told Matt. He nodded at Temple in a way that was not quite farewell, got in the car and drove away.
"Well." Temple was eyeing Matt with equal curiosity. '*How do you know FBI Agent Bucek?"
"I went to school with him."
Matt didn't feel like unreeling chapter and verse of the connection at the moment. ''And you?"
''He's the government goon who interrogated me along with Molina and Ferarro, the homicide twins from the LVMPD." She preceded him to the wooden gate, and pulled it open for him. "Hey, just kidding about the 'government goon' part. He was perfectly polite, but I got the impression he can be formidable when he needs to know something."
"He can."
"Sounds like the voice of experience, and isn't he a little old to be in your class?"
"I didn't say we were in the same class, just at the same school."
"Curiouser and cursiouser." Temple clattered into the building ahead of him.
Matt could feel the condensation on the frozen yogurt carton seeping through the brown paper, softening it to pulp. It wasn't the only thing that was sweating.
They were silent in the elevator, both facing forward as if the cubicle was crowded and they were on their best, most indifferent behavior.
"Matt," Temple said suddenly. "Did you hire Eightball O'Rourke to protect me?"
Chapter 29
A Ghost of a Chance
Temple surveyed her new home away from home. The first pair of high heels she had been able to wear in days sank past their plastic heel caps into plush carpeting the color of cafe au lait.
Beige grasscloth wallpaper was interwoven with silver strands. A computer screen cursor winked encouragingly from a neatly petite laptop floating on an otherwise empty sheet of inch-thick glass. A laser printer in the same ivory-color casing rested atop a nearby cart.
Against the wall, a row of walnut-veneer two-drawer file cabinets awaited the opportunity to conceal any clutter that Temple could generate.
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