Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

She began dipping nacho chips into the hottest of the three sal-sas. Matt had tried a small broken chip on it and backed off, happy to still have an intestinal track.

Matt suddenly understood why they were there, why he was there. He had wondered if Molina had some misguided purpose in distracting him tonight, but it was far simpler and more straightforward than that: he suddenly realized that he was here to distract her.

Molina had realized a very unlikely and difficult goal, and she needed to celebrate. Who else could possibly understand what it meant to her to finally corner Max Kinsella for a few precious seconds. Other than Matt, who knew both the obsession of tracking a man down and the bedeviling presence (and absence) of the once-missing magician?

"How did you meet him?" Molina twirled the short plastic straw in her wide-mouthed glass around and around, until the opaque lime drink spun like a whirlpool.

"He met me. Out by the pool, I think. One second I was alone in the water under the shadows of the palm tree and the passing clouds. The next moment there was a shadow the size of a soft-ball against the moon."

" 'A shadow against the moon.' " Molina savored the phrase with another sip of her margarita. "Very apt. He's a shadow all right."

"Why are you--were you--so ... rabid to find him? What did you learn tonight that was worth the hunt?"

She laughed and leaned her head on her hand.

Matt began to wonder if he would get home tonight. A woman in her position shouldn't drive with any suspicion of inebriation in her system. Not that it hadn't happened before, but not to her. Not to Carmen Molina. Molina had been high before she got here. He decided that Temple hadn't been the only one locked in a box tonight, not the only who was half-inebriated from getting out.

He knew what he was doing here with Molina now: serving as listening post and bragging wall and keeper. He wondered what roles Kinsella was playing with Temple.

That way lay madness. Molina had been right about that, even before she'd started drinking margaritas. Matt sipped his own. Delicious. Mild. Deceptive.

"A silver-tongued devil." Molina looked up.

In the restaurant's candlelit atmosphere--and every table hosted a dimpled glass bulb filled with a fat wax candle--her vivid blue eyes seemed to pale to match the stormy Caribbean color of the margarita pitcher in front of her.

It was already one-third empty.

"Yes," Matt said.

"Good with those damn locks, though. Good at evading questions. But I nailed him. For what? Seven minutes? I had him pinned to the wall. He was forced to say something. If only because he didn't want to create a scene in front of his wounded dove. Men have such predictable weaknesses."

"You said it. Slaves of chemistry."

Molina's brow furrowed under the fingers she kept running over and over it. "Women too.

I'm an equal-opportunity cynic."

"Well, you must have been a chemical slave, sometime."

"What do you mean?"

"It's obvious." Silence. "Your . . . Mariah."

She scooped up a chipful of the tar-and-paint-removing salsa, then thought better of it.

"You didn't care for my advice tonight?"

"I didn't need it. I've read the same lifestyle wire stories in the local paper. Fascinating facts to explain human behavior in a few paragraphs."

"You don't think that, from what we saw tonight, Barr and Kinsella are not together again?

The bit about the ring alone ..."

"I don't need to think it. I know it. So?"

"Well, you didn't seem too thrilled about it."

"I'm not. He's not good for her."

"We agree. He's not good for anybody." Molina lifted the heavy pitcher to top off Matt's glass and refill her own.

"Apparently he's good for opening trick boxes."

"Oh, that. Tricks, sure."

"What did he say? Or should I say, what did you ask?"

Just then their plates arrived. Matt's was empty but hot, and beside it landed a stainless steel platter sizzling with meat and vegetables all slightly seared along the edges.

Molina's was a huge oval ceramic platter filled with the soft tortillas, refried beans and burritos that ran into a sandpainting of red beans, beige tortillas and green chile sauce, like the colors on the Mexican flag.

Matt concentrated on building his first fajita without burning his fingertips, while Molina dug into her meal like an excavator.

"He says Effinger was the quintessential errand boy."

"Quintessential? He used that word."

Molina nodded, chewing seriously. When she finished, she drank water from the tall plastic tumbler floating a lime slice.

"Good for nothing and everything at the same time. They could always count on him to do his dirty little job, usually running drugs and money and messages, and then he'd fade away into the gambling joints and bars. Never got into big trouble. Never wanted to move up or know more. He was most valuable for being a nothing."

"That's some epitaph, isn't it?"

Molina put down her margarita glass without sipping it. "I suppose that was an ordeal, the visitation."

"It was bizarre. Memorializing someone you'd wished dead. Wishing you could have thought of some other way to handle him a long time ago. At least I didn't have to . . . officiate."

"What'd you do with the body?"

"Cremated it."

Molina's left eyebrow almost saluted her hairline. "Isn't that--?"

"The church is more liberal on cremation these days."

"And you? What're you gonna do with the ashes?"

"I don't know. I suppose it's quite a test of character," he added wryly.

Molina's face darkened. "Abusers are the worst offenders. Even when you know they've probably been subjected to it themselves. . . ." She shook her head. "The cases I saw in south L.A. gave the phrase 'beaten down' a whole new meaning. It's like abuse is this evil demon that possesses one generation after another. Nobody comes out of it human."

Her vehemence made Matt realize that he'd seen one case of domestic abuse, close up and personal, and had encountered a few dozen more in his work. Molina had probably seen hundreds during her career, especially if she'd started as a neighborhood uniform.

"Effinger," he said quickly. "He was the quintessential penny-ante man. Even in his domestic life. He yelled, he cursed, he stormed. He hit. But there wasn't anything systematically sadistic about it. My mother's pretty 'beaten down,' but I think maybe she could sit up and breathe a little, with the proper encouragement. And ... I came out of it without a mark."

"A mark that shows." Molina sighed and pushed away her massive plate. "You can't tell me that everything you've ever done, or not done, in your entire life wasn't shaped by that domestic violence."

He couldn't. "How'd we get into this? I thought we were talking about chemical destiny."

"Mariah. You'd asked about Mariah."

"No, I didn't mean to ... I just meant that you've obviously loved, and lost."

She folded her arms on the tabletop, looked at him as if gauging the depth of his soul.

"You. Know. Nothing. Father."

Matt's head snapped back. There it was. The old accusation of not living enough to know how to forgive others their lives. Priesthood. In his denomination, ostrich-hood. So some parishioners said.

"I was trying to warn you about spells. And demons," she said.

"Sounds . . . superstitious."

"Sounds . . . real. Marian's mine. All mine. No custody problems simply because I was dumb enough to get pregnant but smart enough not to marry the father."

"Listen, I don't need to know--"

"You mean you don't want to know. All right. So I meddled in your emotional life. So you're going to get what you don't want to know in spades.

"You've read it all in your morning Lifestyle section. The classic pattern. The man who's all charm, energy, idealism. He was a cop. I was a cop. Just uniforms. He was Lebanese-American. I was Anglo-Hispanic. I was a big clumsy girl who'd never had much chance of a social life, so I was old enough to know better, but too young to resist.