“Why are you blaming me? Did I do anything then that aggravated you?”
“Yes! You survived without getting your extremities dirty. Sorry. That’s not your fault. It’s just that what’s wrong with Maylords is what was wrong with seminary and you’re finally asking the right questions and it’s too late. For me. Not for you. So pardon me for being a bit self-involved.”
“Go ahead,” Matt said, finishing his quarter-pounder. “I was dense about a lot of things. I don’t blame you for being mad.
Just … clue me in. Unless you think I don’t deserve to know.”
“It’s just that … man, I thought you always knew. I thought you were the one it worked for, and it was just me-screwup, ugly me-who didn’t get it right.”
“It was dumb luck, Jerome. That, and my being so screwed up already that I’d learned how to glide through reality without
really noticing. My fault. Not yours.”
“Mea culpa.”
Matt nodded. “My fault. We don’t need to put it in Latin anymore. What was I supposed to be so good at that you weren’t?” “Playing the secret power game. Man, I don’t want to go into this!”
Sweat was beading Jerome’s hairline, and Matt guessed it wasn’t from that actionably hot McDonald’s coffee he wasdrinking. Matt sipped his Fresca, glad he had chosen cool over hot. Or was that a habit?
“All I want to know about is Maylords,” Matt said into a lengthening silence. “We don’t need to discuss seminary days.
We’re both beyond that.”
“No! That’s the point. I’m still the same old asshole I was then. St. Vincent’s, Maylords, it doesn’t matter. I was cast in my
one role and here I stay, for eternity. I guess you could call it Purgatory, or Hell’s more like it. At least you get out of Purgatory, or you did. I’m still there.”
“Maylords is a secular institution, a store. They sell furniture for inflated prices. Okay, maybe that’s a little shabby, but it
isn’t a sin. Maylords isn’t a religious institution.”
Jerome snorted. “It’s still the same subterranean game: top dogs and underdogs, corruption and coersion. Hell, they all oughta be the mafia.”
“So something crooked is going on at Maylords.”
“Let me count the ways!”
“The nameless security forces-”
“Are window dressing. It’s a game. The management thinks it’s the CIA.”
“Furniture isn’t getting ripped off?”
“Please! The markup is horrendous. The stuff is worth one-fifth of what they charge wholesale, and nothing on the black market. They act like everyone and his brother is hot to make off with it, of course, but that’s just because the big cheeses like to play policemen.”
“So you’re saying the management ego is fantasizing a theft ring to add to their sense of importance?”
“Yeah. People in power fantasize a lot, but I guess you’ve never been in power, except for wearing a collar and an odor of sanctity.”
“You don’t know what I did after seminary, Jerome, and you sure don’t know what I did in seminary, that’s clear. Do we have to settle that old stuff before you can talk about what’s happening at Maylords? Because I’m ready to cast guilt with you stone for stone. Quit tiptoeing around the past. What’s your issue? Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on … then or now?”
” ‘Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.’ “
“I’m not that pure anymore, and I’m not sure I want to be, if that’s what keeps me from seeing the devils all around. Tell me about the devils, Jerome. I know they’re out there now. I had one on my own case for the last few months.”
“The devils are the people you know best, the ones you trust, that’s the worst part of it.”
Jerome rolled his waste paper tightly into the white bag, got up, and walked to a refuse container.
He dropped the bag inside with the panache of someone making a gesture far beyond the simple act he was performing to the naked eye.
Matt waited on the bench. Ethel M’s cactus garden had nothing in common with an old-time confessional, but Matt was sure it would serve.
Chapter 19
Mum’s the Word
“I do not see,” Miss Midnight Louise observes, “why we have to trek eighty miles to the north side of town when all the
criminal activity we are investigating is taking place in trendier parts south and west.”
“We are not hunting perps up here, we are after witnesses.”
“And what would witnesses be doing so far away from the scene of the crime?”
“The same thing we are, hunting.”
It does not help that we are conducting this conversation in the back of a beer truck hurtling over some of the city’s most potholed streets.
“Just because I have a cushy job as house detective at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino does not mean I have forgotten my streetwise ways,” she says. “We are heading right into gang territory.”
“Yes, but at least we have not been rendered shivless by some misguided human. Midnight Inc. Investigations fears nothing human.”
“I am not talking about the Crips and the Bloods and the Hell’s Angels biker gangs, Pop. I am talking about the Wildspats and the Shivmasters and the Distempers that operate up here. There are even the K-9 Packers and the Hydrophobias. Remember what happened the last time you tangled with an escapee from the Coyote nation. Those dog dudes give no quarter.”
“I am not looking for small change, kit. Besides, I have snitches up here.”
Louise leaps down from a beer crate to sniff the piss-yellow puddle on the truck floor. “At least you could have found a dairy truck to
hijack. This stuff smells as bad as hairball spit-up before it’s been laundered by a bile factory.”
“Actually, you can develop a taste for it,” I say from experience.
“You can develop a taste for anything,” she jeers. “I have seen the Free-to-beFeline heaped on your bowl at the Circle Ritz.”
“Miss Temple is a health food fanatic.”
“Not for herself, that much I have noticed.”
“She is only thinking of my better good.”
“Come on, Pops. Admit that you would love to muscle in on my private chef at the Phoenix.”
“Oriental cuisine does little for me, except for the koi.”
At this point during our culinary discourse the truck does a wheelie around the corner that slams Louise and myself against its
dented steel side. This adds indignity to personal assault by tilting so far over that the beer puddles around our captive feet.
Louise leaps atop a swaying carton, shaking her dainty black tootsies and sprinkling a yellow rain on my head.
The wild turn has shaken the roll-down door loose and I spy daylight. I head for it.
“Quick! Before we’re locked in here until the yahoo driving it comes back to release it.” Louise follows my orders for once and is out the vanishing crack of daylight like a furry eel.
We stand in the street and watch the beer truck roar into the distance, leaking yellow rain.
“So this is the mother country,” Louise says, gazing around.
I turn to take in your usual urban slum. The terrain is filled with small shabby crack houses, weed-choked sandy lots, cars lacking
wheels, and windows flaunting iron burglar bars like better domiciles flash white-painted shutters.
Fast-food wrappers skitter across the rutted streets, rasping like autumn leaves … not that Vegas, with all its palm and pine trees, is
much for fallen leaves in the autumn or any other season.
The flap of dry paper has Miss Louise making 180-degree turns with her back up and shivs out.
There is still nothing to be seen except urban decay.
I hear the distant rumble of a low-rider, so I shag Miss Louise out of the middle of the street and into the nearest vacant lot, which is