Matt signed in and submitted to a brown-uniformed woman jailer who clipped a plastic visitor's badge to the collar of his knit sports shirt. She was short and stocky, with buzz-cut bleached blond hair. Despite the gun holster riding her amply padded hip, she looked no more dangerous than a veteran hairdresser armed with a black blow dryer.
Appearances, Matt reminded himself, were deceiving. His own were a prime case in point.
"Lieutenant Molina okayed this,'' the woman noted by way of verbal confirmation. ''The prisoner has no lawyer yet to do the honors.''
"I understand he's representing himself."
She looked up, interested. "You know the old saying--"
"Anyone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client."
She nodded. ''You a lawyer?"
Matt spread his arms to display casual sports shirt and khaki slacks. ''Do I dress like one?"
Her lips approximated a smile, as much expression as she could muster in her stern, bureaucratic job. She nodded him past.
Everyone beyond the small entry area was either armed or wearing a visitor's badge like his.
Matt was finally escorted to the naked and neutral space he expected from years of seeing television shows. He had hoped for the high-tech glass barrier and the twin phone receivers, simply because the novelty of the arrangement would take his mind off the difficult task ahead.
He talked to hundreds of people on the phone, but never saw their faces.
Indeed, it was the quintessential scene of cliche: facing hard chairs, intervening wire-reinforced glass barrier. The setting reminded him of a bombed-out confessional, where the bare bones of furniture remained standing, oddly isolated, after the sheltering walls of true confidentiality had been blasted away.
The word that came to mind again was "naked." A bored but watchful uniformed officer on guard did nothing to allay that impression.
Matt sat where indicated, and waited.
In a couple of minutes, a door beyond the barrier opened. His quarry appeared, wearing a loose jailhouse jumpsuit colored a garish orange.
A small man, he looked almost boyish in the outfit, but there was nothing juvenile about his expression when he saw Matt: distaste screwed tight into contempt. And Matt didn't even know the man.
Contempt always made Matt nervous; as if he had done something wrong he had forgotten about. Conditioning. Right now he was trying desperately to do something right, only he didn't quite know how to go about it. Who was lying? Embittered blackmailer in jail, or honest parish priest? During his campaign to harass the Our Lady of Guadalupe congregation, Burns had threatened to expose Father Hernandez as a child molester. Was this charge a baseless taunt, or the simple truth spoken by an unlikely source? Matt was the only one on earth, besides the two men involved, to know of the blackmail. Hernandez denied the allegation, of course, but denial was a way of life to those addicted to unholy pursuits. Either way, whether Matt reported the facts to the diocese or did nothing, he might be abetting a monster. He had to know the truth for the sake of his own conscience. Success would depend on correctly handling this volatile man. Matt was good with people, but he was used to dealing with well-intentioned people.
Peter Burns was about as ill-intentioned as anyone could be. He was an aggressively unrepentant murderer.
"Well" Burns had planted himself in the chair opposite Matt and snatched up his receiver.
''So much for the holier-than-thous. No one from Our Lady of Guadalupe has visited me but you."
"I'm not from Our Lady of Guadalupe."
''You could have fooled me. You sure were hanging around the old parish lately. Just what was your angle?''
"Sister Seraphina at the convent asked me to help with the obscene phone calls."
"What are you, a lineman for the county?'*
Matt resisted his cynicism. "I'm a telephone hotline counselor,"
"That's a nun for you. Runs into an obscene phone caller so she calls on a telephone counselor for help."
Matt didn't bother explaining that there was a lot more to it than that. "Did you enjoy making those calls?" he asked.
"Me? I haven't enjoyed anything since I was about four years old. The church saw to that."
"What about abusing the cat?"
"Frankly--" Burns leaned back in the chair.
Matt, hearing his feet knock the barrier between them, almost jumped. The only barriers he trusted to hold here were psychological ones.
Burns watched him with a dawning smile, an open-mouthed opportunist's almost-smirk.
Taunting. "Frankly" he went on, . "I enjoyed all of the stuff I did--the cats, the old nuns, the old bat in her cathouse. It was like a license to commit Halloween, you know? Very liberating."
''Not . . . completely.'' Matt eyed the bland surroundings.
Burns shrugged. "What's your name?"
"Matt Devine."
"Whew!" Burns's stalled smile made a daring loop-de-loop into a high-pitched laugh.
"Perfect. Devine as in 'devotional duty,' and Matthew after one of the four gurus of the Gospel. I bet you were born to be teacher's pet at St. Mary's of the Holy Cross-eyed Hallelujah Chorus.
Old Sister Mary Malaria calls, and you come running like a good boy to dust the blackboard erasers and find the nasty kid who's making naughty phone calls. What do you want here? Plan to shake some chalk dust in my face? Don't bother. I'm proud of what I did. No holier-than-thou is gonna make me feel otherwise. So what brought you here, Mr. Matthew Dee-vine?"
Matt didn't bother correcting the guy on the fine points of his first name. "It isn't the calls, and it isn't the cats."
Burns shifted again in his hard chair, restless as a twelve-year-old kid. "Yeah. It's the Big One.
Murder. What do you want to know?"
"You'd tell me?"
"Sure. We're not in court. And, anyway, I'm demented, didn't you know? Why else would an upstanding pillar of the Church and the Court kill a nice old lady, his own great-auntie, no less?
Anything I say can't be held against me, because I'll say something else in two seconds."
"I'm not here about Blandina Tyler's death."
Burns's lips puckered in a mock-pout of disappointment. "What would it be, then?"
"You didn't just call the convent."
"Oh, yeah . . . my little anonymous notes to the rectory." Burns leaned forward, avid. "Father Raf-a-el Hernandez send you? Bet he's still sweating silver bullets. Hit the Coors, did he, the good Father, after my letters got to him?"
"No one sent me."
"You're a real busy-body, Matthew. None of this is your business."
"It's all of our business. I grew up Catholic, too."
''Aw, poor baby. Bet you were an altar boy, right?"
Matt's nod felt stiff even to him.
''Hey, that's okay, Matthew. Somebody's got to get the gold stars on their school papers.
Somebody's got to wear those little gilded halos."
Matt set his teeth. He hated his full name enough in the correct form. Having a more common form constantly hurled at him was like being whipped with a dead snake. Maybe Bums wasn't so crazy to represent himself; he would be terrific in the courtroom.
"You're creating an extreme to rebel against." Matt suddenly unleashed his own weapon, psychobabble. "Some people demonize the people and institutions in their past. You've sanctified them. I'm not this paragon you need to create just to tear down."
"You're here, aren't you? Doing your good deed of the day for someone else? You have nothing to do with this, Devine. Why bother?"
Matt decided to try candor. "Look. I was reared Catholic. Like you, I didn't have a perfect life, or perfect parents. I've had my own problems with the past. I just want to know the truth about your accusations."
Burns was watching him with brittle, clever eyes. "You heard my whole sad story in that lady lieutenant's office."
"I can sympathize," Matt said. "You had a rough upbringing: born out of wedlock, handed to a foster family who never stopped reminding you of your 'unworthy' origins. I'm not saying it was right. We're both products of a less enlightened time."