Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Always money,” Temple noted, shaking her head.

“Maybe not.” Max eyed Louie. “What’s with the oversize furry ankle bracelet?”

“That’s Louie.” Temple was startled. “Midnight Louie, my … furry Valentine. Max. You don’t remember Midnight Louie?”

“He follows you everywhere like a dog?” Max asked, incredulous.

“Not just her,” Matt said. “He has a knack for being where the action is.”

“I don’t remember you having a cat,” Max said.

“I don’t, Max. Louie is ‘had’ by no one. He’s half alley cat and half bloodhound.”

“If you say so. I trust he won’t repeat what we say here.”

“Only in cat,” she assured him. “Why are you asking Matt about the time Kathleen O’Connor attacked him? She was really after you, wasn’t she? And you were so elusive. You weren’t even living at the Circle Ritz—”

“I lived at this ‘Circle Ritz’? Was it above a country-western bar or what?”

Matt remained silent, letting Temple talk her way out of this.

“We invested in a condo there,” she said, watching the high-heeled pump slip off her foot as her toes massaged Louie’s shoulder, “after you had whisked me away from my family and job in Minneapolis to accompany you to a big magic act at the Goliath.”

“What happened to our happy home?”

“Some bad guys from your counterterrorism past showed up, I guess. A man ended up dead in the Goliath gaming-area ceiling, and you ended your expiring contract by … vanishing without a word.”

“And you took up with an alley cat.”

“Not then. Not right away.”

“And,” Max said, “I assume Mister Midnight Two came into your life a lot later, too.”

“You were gone a year, Max,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I waited, but new people and a cat still came into my backyard.”

“All ancient history.” Max leaned forward to refill their ebbing glasses. He eyed Matt so sharply that Midnight Louie uttered a low growl.

“Quiet, kitty. You’re not the one we’re all worried about,” Max said. “Devine, I think Kathleen’s approaching you, what she did, is a key to her poisonous presence in all our lives. I need to know exactly what happened.”

“She accosted me leaving the radio station,” Matt recalled.

“Wait,” Temple said. “Did you know why? What did she look like?”

“She was a knockout, I bet,” Max said.

Temple was shocked. “You don’t remember her either?”

“Garry filled me in on her so vividly I almost feel I do, but no. Not this woman, this girl then, who ruined my life, destroyed my connection to my family, as I hear it.”

He stared hard at Temple. “She may have killed that man at the Goliath on my last performance night, forcing me to run and ruining our condo dreams, Temple. So why did she literally lash out at our mild-mannered ex-priest here?”

“Oh, come on,” Matt said. “You may not remember anything of your relationship with Temple, but you are not a man who lets go easily. Neither am I. I didn’t just duck out on the priesthood, I went through the whole ‘repatriation process,’ you could call it. I jumped through every hoop—”

“Climbed every mountain,” Temple put in.

“Honorable discharge.” Max nodded. “Not a piece of cake in that Church. I salute you. Seriously. I apparently tend to cut and run.”

“It’s funny,” Matt said, sipping soothing amber. “Kathleen O’Connor was not somebody you’d suspect came with claws. Not that tall, almost delicate. Attractive, seductive in a classy way, which I wasn’t buying. And then … she stung with her words first. The razor she used for a bloody underline was a complete surprise.”

“How, with words?”

“She knew about my past. She seemed to have something against me, my ex-vocation, the Church.”

“Oh, Mama,” Max said, his blue eyes glittering with comprehension. “Drink up, Master of Understatement. This is going to be a bumpy night.”

“I’ve gotten used to that,” Matt said. “Explaining why I am an ex-priest. Why I was a priest. Some of the older relatives in Chicago still don’t accept my leaving. I’m not going through that Inquisition again with you.”

“It’s not idle curiosity.” Max breathed out audibly. “We’ve all got a piece of the puzzle, only I’ve lost five-sixths of my pieces.”

“It’s not that bad, Max,” Temple said, leaning forward to put a hand on his arm. “The best one-sixth, your survival instincts, are still there.”

“Not enough to save Garry.”

She backed off. Reaching out made Matt edgy, and Max was beyond consolation.

But … he was on the track of some very tricky pieces that were almost a fit. Temple sensed that from how he questioned Matt.

“So,” Max told Matt, “Kathleen dissed you because she thought you were a wuss—”

Major testosterone surge from Matt’s side of the aisle. Temple’s fingernails creased her palms and held on tight. Louie was up on his haunches, although who he’d go for as out of line in her presence was anybody’s guess.

“—or because you’d been a priest.” Max finished.

Temple had seen Molina use that whiplash interrogation technique to startle an insight out of a witness. So had Matt, but he was not happy with this new triumvirate nor, unlike his usual temperament, feeling and not thinking first.

“She wasn’t real pro-priests, no,” Matt said, his expression fierce. “After the international scandals of child abuse by churchly authority figures, a lot of people aren’t, including me. The hierarchy was as bad or worse than any stonewalling government or corporate badass. ‘Mistakes have been made.’ Children abused. Lives ruined. Faith destroyed. ‘Mistakes have been made.’ In my own archdiocese.”

“Whoa, Father Matt,” Max said. “I apparently came up in the party line. I know my gut gets utter betrayal. What I’m here to tell you is, which may make your unlikely Fight Club night more understandable, so did Kathleen O’Connor. Which is why she razored an innocent bystander like you only a year ago, and slashed my teenaged heart into broken shards in Northern Ireland seventeen years ago, and maybe why she could be behind my head being broken into tiny shattered bits recently, too.”

Silence prevailed at the end of that speech. Shock and silence.

The Silver Cloud sailed into the dark distance like the Queen Mary, captained by a deaf and distant man in a chauffeur’s cap, while Temple and Matt breathed deeply and slowed their respiration until no one in the compartment could hear them.

Midnight Louie rose and went to rub on Max’s ankles. Unfortunately, he left a slash of black cat hairs like tar on Max’s pale linen pants legs.

Like the sticky, dark residue that old sins not forgotten forever leave on the psyche.

Chapter 32

The Key to Rebecca

Matt was the first to break the lengthening silence.

“I’ve seen many instances of galloping guilt in my church and in my counseling career, including my own,” he told Max, “but you probably have the world’s worst case. You always have to be a world-class contender, Kinsella, with memory chips or without.

“How do we find and get this ‘Typhoid Mary’ out of our lives before she hurts someone we really care about? Or at least I do.”

Max leaned forward, intent. “Here’s what I learned in Belfast, when I was in a condition to not forget a thing: Rebecca.”

“Rebecca,” Temple echoed. “You know I loved that novel when I was a kid.” She knew it was connected to the young Kathleen O’Connor, but she’d let Max bring Matt in on the mystery. It would help the two men bond. Listen to her! Did she want a happy ending to her own life story or to be a playground monitor? Or, maybe there was no separating the two elements.