Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

At last the two hours were finally over.

He could go home knowing that Kitty O’Connor would never trouble his life, work, or mind again. At least not in person.

The parking lot was deserted except for Mike’s souped-up Honda Civic and his own bland white Probe. Lights shone unwaveringly. No distant motorcycle throb threatened the night.

She’s gone.

Ambrosia played that song often for left-behind lovers. I have to learn how to take it.

Matt had never comprehended that one could miss an enemy, or miss watching for an enemy, rather. He was like a soldier in No Man’s Land. Armed but not dangerous to anyone, because nobody was there. Trudging through mist that looked haunted, but was disconcertingly unoccupied.

Except that he was used to bogeymen, and women, leaping out of the dark in the radio station’s deserted parking lot. Now they might be all ghosts: Clifford Effinger… Kathleen O’Connor … Elvis. Vassar? You’ve Got a Friend. Really?

A woman was waiting by the one lit parking light. Matt felt his heart stop again, although his feet kept on trudging.

There was no running away from ghosts, he’d learned that much in Las Vegas.

This one stepped forward in female form, hair black as tar, skin pale, lips rosy, eyes unreadable in this bogus light. “Hi,” she said, shy and not shy. “You’re Mr. Midnight, aren’t you?”

He nodded, not bothering to deny the hokey handle. A “handle” was an air name, he had learned since working at WCOO. We Care Only for Others. Yeah, right. And ad revenue.

She offered the night a breathy laugh as an apology. “I’m sorry for botherin’ you, but I didn’t know how else to reach you.”

“Knowing how to ‘reach’ people is always a problem,” he said.

“I know. I do … outreach work myself. Kind of what you do, but face-to-face. Sorry.” She stepped forward, thrust out a hand. “My name is Deborah Walker. Deborah Ann Tucker Walker, to be specific.”

He looked at her outstretched hand, heard her stretched-out name, and couldn’t help smiling, especially at the soft, Southern grit in her voice. Deborah Ann Tucker Walker could not be put off, not politely, anyway.

“Mr. Midnight,” he said, shaking hands. Her palm was soft as dough, but his own palm detected the small calluses of the dedicated housewife or craftswoman.

“You don’t have to give your real name,” she assured him. “I give mine only because I have so dang many of them. Not to my credit or shame. Just fact. Married twice,once too long. I got past that, and then I tried to help other women who couldn’t. Not too different from what you do.”

“Not different at all. What do you need?”

“Your time. And I think you might need me, rather than vice versa.” She smiled, widely. “I’m not used to dealing with celebrities. Not too many of them came through Al-abama, exceptin’ Jimmy Buffet.”

“What are you doing here? I mean, in Las Vegas?”

“My second husband moved here to follow his job.

`Whither thou goest’ and all. I was a Quaker for quite a while, but I do believe in my Scriptures.”

“A Quaker? For a while?” Matt couldn’t help sounding intrigued.

She grinned. “I’d like to talk to you about a mutual friend. If I tell you about being a Quaker, would you tell me about being a Roman Catholic priest?”

He paused. The station sometimes broadcast his past as a program hook, usually in press releases, but not on the air. Not every night for the world to tune in on. They liked Mr. Midnight to be a nondenominational man of mystery.

A mini-me for the masses.

“Only thing open is fast-food joints,” he warned. “Shoot. I like slow food. But I can adapt to anything.”

“I bet you can. Where’s your car? You can follow me to Tinker Bell or Ronald Colman Donald or Warren Bur-ger King.”

“Tinker Bell would be good. I always liked to eat fairy mushrooms.”

“Right.”

He got into the Probe, keyed up the motor, and waited for her car, a Honda Civic he had mistaken for Mike’s of all things, to pull in behind him.

What was it about the WCOO parking lot? Central Casting Central? A séance site for the Las Vegas universe? An alternate Elvis nexus? Did everyone show up here, at least once? For their fifteen minutes of fame? Too bad his had lasted so long.

*

“Thing is,” she said, sucking on the straw in her chocolate malted milk, “it was the best success I’d ever had, and the worst.”

“Vassar,” he repeated, to make certain.

“Right. Vassar.”

“You called in the song for her on Ambrosia’s show! How did you know her?”

Deborah frowned. “Do you ever really know someone like Vassar?”

“I didn’t,” Matt confessed. Confessed. He knew what that word really meant. Sacramentally. He didn’t fool around with it. He didn’t expect a former Quaker to get it.

But she did.

“Well, I didn’t really know her either, even though we talked a lot. Who could?”

“I only saw her the once.”

“I saw her several times, but I wasn’t gettin’ anywhere.”

“Anywhere … where?”

“Well, I was like the AA buddy you don’t want.”

She tilted her head as if posing for a Glamour Shot mall picture. Matt had to remind himself that Southern courtesy was real, even if it had been parodied so much that it looked phony.

“Vassar didn’t want you in her life,” he said.

“No, sir. Not at all. Oh, she did … and sometimes she didn’t. I just tried to be there for her, all the time.”

“Some people are fragile,” he agreed. Wrong again.

“No, Vassar wasn’t fragile, exactly. She was … spooked? That the word? So tough, some ways. I envied her. I really did. But we Southern women are like willows. We bend. Too much, too long. I don’t much know how to deal with Blue Northers, I admit it. You know what a Blue Norther is?”

“No—”

“Well, it’s a storm, you see. Comes out of nowhere, but usually the North. It’s blue like a Yankee uniform. Dark, sudden, sweeps everythin’ away before it. Don’t look so worried. I’m not a reactionary. I’m a modern woman. I’ve been up, and down, and up again. Anyway, it’s unpredictable, but you know when it’s there, a Blue Norther.”

Maybe that Norther had swept Kathleen O’Connor away before it, Matt thought. She was from Northern Ireland, a Norther kind of woman, icy, sudden, unpredictable. Dead.

“Anyway,” Deborah Ann said, that being a favorite in troductory word, “I’ve been volunteerin’ for an outreach program for fallen women. Only we don’t call them that to their faces. For vertically challenged women, if you get my drift. Oh, you’re finally smiling, Mr. Sober Face. I don’t blame you. Listenin’ to Other People’s Troubles is the opposite to usin’ Other People’s Money. No fun.”

“So you made contact with Vassar. Knew her.”

“Contact! That’s somethin’ that electrical outlets do. People get to know each other. Vassar wasn’t easy, but she was … innerestin’.”

“A hard case.”

Deborah laughed, softly, like she did everything but think. “You could put it that way. Not easy to reach. Defensive, the shrinks would say.”

“What would you say?”

“Hurt some. Not about to be disappointed again. Like you? Like me? I reckon we all have been hurt some.”

“Did you know what hurt Vassar, why she’d do what she did for a living?”

“No. I’ve learned what it must have been like. She’d tell me about her clients sometimes. They didn’t sound much different from the guys you could end up marrying. Some guys were sweet and lonely, she said. Some thought they could own you. A lot just wanted nostrings stimulation and release, one step up from a blow-up doll.”