Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

"What are you? Junior detective?" The ache was no longer just in Temple's ankle. "Sure, out of the country, and all over it."

"I can see Molina's point." Matt looked annoying calm. "He traveled, and I assume he was clever at deceiving people?" Temple nodded glumly. "Physically fit?" She nodded again. "Molina is not incompetent, however much you'd wish her assumptions were wrong."

"You're right. See! I don't wish everybody to be wrong. The point is, with your stepfather dead, killed in that place and particular way, I don't know what to think about the first death anymore. I even wonder if this second killing means that Max is . . . back. But then that makes him a murderer, and I won't believe that I lived with a murderer."

Matt kept silent, pleating a corner of the newspaper he'd held since the conversation had taken this turn.

''You don't believe that you loved a murderer," he finally corrected her in a subdued voice.

'*We can love terrible people, Temple, even people who behave terribly to us."

''Your stepfather?" she suggested quickly.

He shook his head. "He was too cruel, too alien. And he hurt my mother, too. But she . . . put up with it. She saw no other answer. Her family, the church, the way society thought about abusive men then certainly encouraged her to play the martyr, even to relish the role. His violence became her secret crown of thorns. She would win honor in heaven by forgiving it, and him, by enduring it, and him, by being the perfect doormat. She became his silent partner. I knew, even when I was still pretty young that she had sold us out, but I loved her anyway, though I didn't understand."

"You're saying that if you ever at any time had a decent relationship with someone, you have a big stake in believing that they didn't use you, didn't abuse you. You become a little blind."

He nodded, then tossed the mangled newspaper aside.

"Why should you listen to me? Why should anyone listen to me? I've figured out my own case down to the finest point. I've sat with counselors and shrinks and worried my own past to shreds, until I thought I had turned into cerebral stone. 'The Thinker' as boat anchor. I've learned exactly why I became what I became, am what I am now. I just don't know how to change it."

"Maybe it's too soon," Temple pointed out. "Does your underlying motive mean you fear relationships because they were so painful to you? Are you afraid to be disappointed, to be hurt?"

Matt shook his head. "That would be simpler. I suppose there's an element of that; there always is. But my monster wears its hide inside out. I'm not really afraid of being hurt; I'm afraid of hurting."

Temple sat up, away from the comforting pillows. She looked at Matt as if she had never seen him before. She had never felt the need to look at Max Kinsella that way. Perhaps she should have.

"You think . . . you would have killed Cliff Effinger, if you had found him before someone else did?"

Matt regarded the floor. Louie, moved by some mysterious feline impulse, merowed impatiently and twitched his tail, as if urging Matt to 'fess up.

Matt looked up with dead-serious eyes. "I would have hurt him, Temple, if I could have. I don't know if I could have stopped myself."

"What if he was still bigger, and meaner? He could have hurt you, killed you, had you entangled again."

Matt shook his head. "Not now. He's not . . . wasn't . . . dangerous to me anymore.

Knowledge is power, and power is temptation. I've thought of finding him, confronting him for so long now, and so much more lately, I even wonder if I . . .if I did."

"Matt . . . you'd know."

"Would I? Denial is a magic cloak. Only it doesn't make you invisible, it makes things you don't want to see invisible. I remember a tragic case at my first parish, a newborn infant found in a toilet at the grade school." He shut his eyes at her gasp of shock, but didn't look up when he opened them again. "Umbilical cord attached. Dead, of course. Drowned at birth, perhaps during birth. It was a several-cubicle facility, children were coming and going in gangs of thirty.

Certainly, she was in there at the same time, the mother. The scandal was hushed up. The church was better at that in those days. They finally found the mother, the murderer, the victim.

One of the youngest nuns. She had no memory of the act, or any act that led to it. No memory.

All of it was so foreign to her religious commitment that she blotted it from her mind. She couldn't blot it from her body. Call it a form of hysterical psychic blindness. Apparently a lot of clergy are capable of that. Something about trying to be holy blinds one to ordinary evil. Look what I did to my apartment. I barely remember doing that."

"That, but not your stepfather," Temple broke in, horrified. "You're not delusional. Matt, and neither am I. I know you didn't do it! You didn't kill him."

Matt smiled, wearied by his self-examination, yet amused by her defensive nature.

"Tell that to the skeptical Lieutenant Molina. She'll point out that you didn't know Kinsella was an IRA terrorist, either."

Chapter 19

Phone Alone

Matt sat by the telephone, home alone.

The phrase 'days off' meant more to him now. Working nights made every day an ''off'' day, in a sense. It freed normal business hours for his abnormal pursuit of the truth--the truth about Father Rafael Hernandez and perhaps about himself.

He had been derelict. His personal life and the crazy way his past and present was intersecting--Temple and the Gridiron hi-jinks at the Crystal Phoenix, his stepfather's shockingly odd death in the Phoenix casino, so bizarrely reminiscent of the Mystifying Max's dramatic exit--had distracted him from this unpleasant mission. No more.

Now the phone receiver was pressed to his left ear again, while his right hand--hardly knowing what it was doing-- scribed circles within circles on his note pad.

"Who did you say was assistant pastor when Father Hernandez was at Holy Rosary? Frank Bucek. How could I reach him? I know it's been a long time. ... St. Vincent Seminary. Indiana.''

Matt dutifully repeated the information. Pretend, Pretend that he was writing it down, dealing with unfamiliar syllables.

He wasn't. He most decidedly wasn't, which was why his insides cramped in a cold, iron grip.

Father Frank Bucek. Once upon a time, long ago, assistant pastor at Holy Rosary in Tempe, Arizona. And many years after that. . . Matt's spiritual advisor at the Indiana seminary.

An image of the man floated on the pale blank wall of Matt's bedroom. A spare man in a black cassock with knife-keen gray eyes and a receding hairline. Devoted, energetic, another apparently perfect priest. And, long before the seminary, he had been Father Hernandez's assistant pastor in Tempe. The trail from Our Lady of Guadalupe had led right back to Matt's own ecclesiastical roots.

Father Furter, the older guys in seminary had called Bucek. Matt didn't know why until later; the nickname came from Frank N. Furter, the cross-dressing protagonist of The Rocky Horror Picture Show , These days. Matt knew what that film was about, sort of, from popular repute. He suspected that the Legion of Decency would have condemned it back in the fifties. Now, it was a cult film precisely because it was naughty, not nice.

The nickname had no significance but to display the seminarians' rebellion and harmless irreverence. Lives steeped in study and prayer need a healthy dose of mischief. Father Frank had been a straight arrow, Matt remembered; he would swear to that. He recalled the man's other nickname: Father Furtive. Matt smiled at that one, which did mean something. Father Bucek seemed to have as many eyes as an Idaho potato. He always knew when mischief or a seminarian's defenses were up. A hard man to fool, Father Furtive.