“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 Leticia, 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?”