Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“But Molina’s undone all that. Everything I wanted to preserve at any cost. Between her and Kathleen O’Connor, they’ve left me nothing to protect, not even myself.”

“What was seeing a call girl going to preserve and protect?”

“Not her. She’s dead.” Matt stared at the same parquet squares that tiled Temple’s floor, as if he saw a corpse there. “Molina made that plain, although she wouldn’t tell me where, when, or how just wanted to know every move I made last night. I wouldn’t tell her.”

“Aha! That’s why she came to rattle my cage. She knew I can’t resist … a mystery. Listen.” Temple sat forward. “If Molina thinks she can use me to get to you, just like she wanted to use me to betray Max, you’ve got to see that it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for more than a year. If we don’t let her divide us, we can survive.”

“No! Vassar is dead. She was killed because she was with me. You’re with me here, now. You could be next.”

“Vassar? That was the girl’s name? Was she really?”

“Really what?”

“A college grad.”

“Probably.”

“You’re saying that Kitty will kill any woman you’re with, for any purpose?”

“Probably. She doesn’t make any exceptions for likelihood or age, young or old. Remember Sheila and Mariah at TitaniCon? The almost-accidental injuries, the car that drove after all of us into the bank of glass doors?”

“That’s right. Mariah Molina was a target at that convention too.”

“So was I. Remember the aspergillum I picked up after we got off the elevator? It’s a sacred object, a holy water sprinkler. Kathleen used it as a goad in my back as we descended, like a gun. Just to remind me she could get that close to me, or to Mariah, or to you.”

“Mariah? That’s why … that’s why you went to Molina about this, not me! You figured she needed to know, and that she could help you.”

“I figured … wrong.”

“So why was a call girl the solution?”

“That’s what Kitty wanted. My innocence.”

“How could she be sure you still had any?”

“Like any personality hooked on controlling others, she knew how to sniff out any vulnerability.”

Temple collapsed against the sofa’s hard upholstery. “So you and your staff advisors figured a call girl would be invulnerable.”

“Yeah. Were we wrong.” Matt sat on the couch, at the other end. He hunched forward, laced his hands, not quite approximating prayer. “The unspoken assumption was that since Kitty coveted something so personal as my virtue, that if I ‘lost’ it, as the expression goes, she’d lose interest. And if the means of my ‘loss,’ was a stranger, a professional, it would be too impersonal to merit Kitty’s rage. Plus, everybody thought, including me, that a call girl counted for so little that Kitty wouldn’t regard her a suitable object of revenge. Looks like everybody was wrong.”

“You can’t know Kitty did it.”

“No. But I did it. Somehow I did it, even if Kitty never came anywhere near Vassar. So Kitty has destroyed my innocence, one way or another. I’m responsible for a woman’s death. Vassar is dead. I left her alive just hours ago, Temple, and now she’s dead. Something I did led to her death. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Temple had heard that phrase a few times in her life. She had muttered it herself. Never with the finality, the seriousness that Matt Devine used.

“I’m sorry. I guess Kitty wins.”

“It’s not a game. It’s a woman’s life. Death. Vassar … she was on a threshold. She wasn’t the stereotype I’d expected. She was a living, bleeding human being. She had a past and future. Now—”

“Matt, I am so sorry. I hate to see Kitty win. She’s bedeviled Max’s life for almost twenty years and I hate, hate, hate to see her mess you up too.”

He nodded. “I’ve seen the guilt he carries for his cousin’s death. He tries to move beyond it, but it seeps out, no matter how sophisticated or cynical he tries to ap-pear.” Matt regarded Temple with a look from the heart. “Molina has always tried to prove that Max isn’t good enough for you, but a man who feels that deep a guilt, that long, has worth that a man—or a woman—who’s never been tested can’t guess at.”

Temple found herself unable to speak for a few seconds. “Thank you. It’s been kind of lonesome defending my druthers this past year.”

“That’s why I never—”

“Never what?” Temple held her breath, knowing that a revelation hovered.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Yes, it does! It matters that this one person has blighted Max’s life, and now yours.”

“Temple, I admire your heart in defending Max and would be honored to have it defending me, but I’m … indefensible. We’re talking here and now, and a woman dead within hours. Molina only came to me privately because if I’m identified as a suspect, her role in my actions will have to come out. I told her I wouldn’t say anything—”

“What did she say?”

“She said I damn well wouldn’t say anything unless I was brought in for questioning and then I’d have to tell the truth. I think she’s hoping to avoid an accounting. She wouldn’t tell me much about Vassar’s death, except that it was from a fall, and could be judged an accident. Or”—his expression grew even graver—“a suicide.”

“Then it’s not an obvious murder.”

“Does it matter?”

“It does if there’s no evidence to charge you with a crime.”

“I’m charged already, in my own mind. So it wasn’t Kitty O’Connor, it wasn’t murder. So Vassar jumped to her death somehow? So I drove her to suicide? I was the last person she ever saw. It must have been something I said. Or did. Or didn’t do.”

“And you didn’t tell Molina exactly what that was?”

“No. She wouldn’t tell me the details of the death, and I wouldn’t tell her the details of my … assignation. Just how I followed her directions and got there, I thought, unfollowed. And that I was there.”

Temple couldn’t stifle a smile.

“What?” he asked.

“You and Molina, good Catholics both, tiptoeing around the moment of truth.”

“You Unitarians would face it straight up, huh?”

“Yeah! Better than acting like two parallel lines and driving past each other. It reminds me of some crazy Puritan dance where couples don’t ever touch. Whew. Molina is so not the right person to pursue this case.”

“What case? The woman is dead. I was there. End of story.”

“Matt, there is so much story you haven’t told me.”

“And that would make a difference?”

“I think so. And so would Max.”

“Kinsella?”

“Yes. He’s got to be in on this.”

Matt ducked his head. “Well, he already is, in a way.”

“You told him too! You turned to everyone but me. This … Ambrosia chick, Molina, Max, even Max?”

“Yes, I guess I did.” He examined the parquet floor between his feet.

“Why? Haven’t I proven I have a nose for news, for skullduggery? Didn’t I nail the Stripper Killer? Am I so unsympathetic I don’t listen to my friends’ problems, so stupid that I wouldn’t have a clue to how to deal with a stalker, so selfish that I don’t care what happens to other people, so … useless I can be left out of the real adult talk like a dumb kid—?”

Matt finally looked at her, driven to her defense. “No, Temple. You’re smart and tough and kind and true and nervy and beautiful and—”

Her eyes opened. Literally. There was a kind of wonder in what they saw.

“Matt. The other day. When we had an … encounter in my hallway. You know, with the groceries. You almost-Then you blamed yourself for being ‘selfish.’ Was it because of your situation with Kitty, that you were seeing a way out of it, but just couldn’t do it? That it was … me?”