Chapter 32
Checkmatt
Matt thought nothing of answering his doorbell, even though it seldom rang, perhaps because it was always either Electra or Temple, and he had just seen Temple, so it had to be Electra.
He couldn't have been more surprised if it had been Kitty O'Connor.
"Just a few questions," Molina said, walking in uninvited, and looking around even more uninvited. "My, my."
She stopped in the foyer to survey his new living room suite.
Matt eyed it past her shoulder and admitted to being impressed. The fifties sofa snaked through the room like a red upholstered highway, islands of lamp and table to either side.
An especially effective touch was the black cat sprawled on the sofa end.
"Who's your decorator?"
"Mr. or Ms. Goodwill. With a little push from Temple."
"And the cat is on loan to add to the ambiance?"
"I didn't think 'ambiance' was in your vocabulary, Lieutenant."
"Every time I visit the Circle Ritz, I add new words to my vocabulary. Like genius loci."
"You've got me there. And it's even in my native Latin."
Molina nodded at the cat. "You know the literal meaning: a local deity; you just don't recognize the avatar. What's he doing here?"
"Louie? What does any cat do anywhere? He's been showing up lately; so often that I've taken to leaving the bathroom window open, like Temple does."
"From her house to your house." Molina flashed him a bolt from her medicinal-strength baby blues. "Wonder what cat snit is driving him from his former home, sweet home? Maybe a territorial dispute?"
"With a man rather than a mouse, you think?" Matt shrugged, even though it pulled like a steam burn on his taped bandage. "None of my business."
"Mine, though." Molina grinned. "And you're my business too. My official business."
She pulled a narrow reporter's notebook from her jacket pocket, along with a pen. "Don't worry. I'm not going to sit on that thing with Midnight Louie. But you can."
Matt did.
"Bienvenido," she announced ominously. "Nice name. Welcoming name. Nice fellow. A little anxious about the fuzz. Sixties reflex. Tends to say more than he has to."
"He did verify that I was hard at work from seven to three?"
"Oh, yes. You are a sterling worker." She flashed him a smile. "I would expect no less. Just as Bennie Cordova is a sterling wit-ness.
Matt shifted on the sofa. It was an unyielding architectural form, elegant but unforgiving. He tended to slump when sitting on it, and that didn't help his taped-together wound.
"So what did Bennie say?"
"Way too much. One of those watched pots that starts out impossibly slow to come to a boil, but then bubbles over and over and over when it gets there."
"I know Bennie."
"Then you know what he told me, all in the effort of clearing you of possibly being anywhere else not only around midnight but well into the next day."
Matt sighed.
"Why didn't you tell me in my office?"
"What?"
"The assault. Why didn't you report it to the police the next day? Why didn't you get to an emergency room that night, or a private physician the next day? Why suffer in silence, other than you've had the training for it?"
Matt laced his fingers together and studied them, the secular form of prayer.
"It's not anybody's business."
"With Clifton Effinger dead, it is."
"Clifton. I'd forgotten that was his full name."
"Clifton."
"Obviously, I couldn't have had anything to do with it."
"Still, you turn up wounded at around the same time the Effinger killing went down."
"Then it if as murder. You're not fully candid with me, either."
"I don't have to be."
"Look, this was a private--"
"Private what? No attack is private. If it was just a mugging, why not race to the ER, run to file a police report, list the missing money?"
"Nothing was missing, except my blood."
"So you frightened the mugger off before he got anything?"
Matt was tempted to agree, but he always had trouble lying to Molina. Maybe she reminded him of the younger Sister Mary Seraphina.
"Martial Arts Matt to the self-defense?"
She was actually teasing him, which made him feel even guiltier.
"No, I didn't do a damn thing to defend myself. I didn't even know I'd been hit until afterward."
"Ah." Molina sat down, notebook on her trousered knees. "That's why the big secret. Plain old macho mania. You didn't want to admit you'd been sucker-punched."
Matt remained silent. There was a lot more he didn't want to admit.
"So now you're stonewalling: nothing happened. Nothing the police need to know about.
Sounds familiar. You're starting to develop unpleasant habits from associating with Miss Barr, such as keeping things from the police."
Matt resisted the impulse to lift his hand to guard his side from her probing. "It's not something you easily tell even your confessor."
"So what's a mugging? I get unlikely confessions all the time."
His slow sigh of surrender pulled each of the tapes taut, like tiny thorns. Remember me, you bastard.
"If you want to call it macho anything, I guess it might support your theory if I tell you the mugger was a woman."
"A woman? Knifed you? Street person?"
Matt laughed. "Like Elle MacPherson is a street person."
Molina frowned, but not at what Matt expected her to react to. "How do you know who Elle MacPherson is?"
"Got a TV. Got a remote control. Sometimes don't get the news turned off fast enough to avoid A Current Affair."
"It's hard to keep 'em down in the rectory, once they've seen MTV. So. Your mugger was a chic street person. I can see you might be a bit chagrined to report a female mugger. Big, strong martial arts expert like you. So that's it. You swear that this incident had nothing to do with the Effinger death?"
"You'd make a good confessor. What do I get for withholding the facts? Six Hail Marys and an Our Father?"
"You get off the hook."
"Put me back on."
She had been stuffing the notebook and pen back into her side pocket, but now she stopped. "What?"
"I can't swear it had nothing to do with Effinger. It had a lot to do with him. I just don't know what."
"Speak," she barked, as if addressing a particularly intelligent dog.
So Matt told her of Kitty O'Connor's miraculous appearance by the Circle Ritz pool ten days ago, with a location for him to begin looking for Effinger.
"You felt from the beginning she was challenging you?"
"It was as if we were talking on two different planes, or from two different planets maybe.
Like she wouldn't give me the info on Effinger unless I passed some test of hers. So I let her see my anger, I. . . played it like she wanted it. Maybe meaner than I was."
Molina nodded.
"Then, when she came back--it was like I had betrayed her, her expectations. I asked if she had mistaken me for a hit man, and when I told her that I hardly would kill anyone, that I had been a priest until recently . . . she reviled priests. Called them murderers and fornicators. She said I was like that too, that I'd just killed my first man tonight. And then she cut me. I told the truth. I didn't feel it, didn't understand it, any of it, until she was gone."
Molina had stopped taking notes, and was sitting rapt, spell-bound. "Fascinating." Matt doubted that she often slowed to a complete stop over the mystery of anybody's behavior.
"What a psycho."
"Is that what she is? I kind of took her for a demon of some kind, maybe just a minor one, but she sure raked me over the coals."
"How?"
"She was so taunting ... so personally taunting. As if she thought she knew me. This is a woman who would have respected me if I was a killer, but loathed me for having been a priest."
"How did she taunt you?"