Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“When did he drop out?” Morrie asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t thought about it. A couple weeks ago? Hey.”

“Hey what, Tyler.”

“After Cher Smith was killed, I guess. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Alch repeated, pulling away the photo.

He traded it for a piece of heavy, nubbly paper.

“This a police sketch?” Tyler asked, impressed.

“Naw. The person who drew it did police sketches in the old days, but we use computers now.”

“Yeah. I use computerized equipment too. It’s all digital, man.”

“We’re not digital yet. Funny, that used to mean doing it by hand. Anyway, this guy’s face ring a bell?”

Tyler frowned, squinted, visibly thought.

Molina said not a word.

“He could have been wearing something different, could have looked different,” Morrie put in so smoothly no one would ever know he’d been coached. Maybe not even Morris Alch. “Tall guy, I hear, way over six feet.”

“Now that’s something that’d stand out around here.” Tyler’s sneer was back. “Most guys who come in are on the short side.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that observation before.”

“Like you said, I get to eyeball the whole place. I’m here mostly for the music, but I notice things. Tall guy would stand out.”

“You look like you’re not missing any inches, so you mean most of the customers are like me.”

“Yeah.” Tyler stood up to stretch, showing off. Five nine maybe. “Not shrimps exactly, but no, uh, Schwarzeneggers.”

“You think Arnold’s that tall, really? Or just overbuilt?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not as tall as he looks in his movies. This guy, though? I haven’t seen him. He must be a bad dude, he gets his own police sketch. Computer too good for him?”

“We like to try different methods.” Molina pulled the image off the small table crowded with buttons and dials where Tyler had dropped it when he couldn’t make the subject. “People react to different things.”

“Yeah, and I gotta make sure this crowd reacts right to that little honey about to strut her stuff onstage. Sorry.”

Tyler sat down and started playing the tabletop dials and buttons like the Phantom of the Opera pulling out all the stops on the organ.

Molina eased the door open, admitting a blast of earsplitting sound.

She and Alch slipped outside, sealing Tyler into his cocoon of equipment and the sound of silence.

“Get me chapter and verse on the kid,” she told Alch. “School, parents, age, everything.” Molina shouted into Morrie’s better ear as they wove their way through the cheesy tables to the door and the parking lot.

“You get what you wanted, Lieutenant?” he asked when they stood at last on the pulsing asphalt, the building behind them thumping like a herd of buffalo but thankfully muffled.

“No, Morrie. You did.”

Tempted

If the nights were no longer his own, belonging to WCOO and, more recently, Kitty the Cutter, the days were Matt’s to do with what he would.

The Circle Ritz parking lot, he was relieved to see the next mid-morning, was bare of a red Miata.

He got into the sun-warmed, whitewashed Probe that had been his landlady Electra’s once-pink signature car and drove onto streets thronged with white vans, pickups, and sedans designed to repel the relentless sunlight.

He didn’t know where he was going, just somewhere else. To think. Ethel M’s cactus garden crossed his mind. So did the shore of Lake Mead.

Instead, he found himself heading into Molina territory — not on her account, but because the stucco spire of Our Lady of Guadalupe beckoned him like a parental finger.

The church was in its midday lull, between services, empty.

Matt dipped his fingers in the stainless-steel-lined holy water font — no longer bracketing bowls at either side of the entrance arch, but now a footed and carved stone structure upheld by angels.

That’s what he loved about Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was always in retrograde, like a planet frozen in its eternal orbit. The more modernity shouldered into Catholic churches, the more Our Lady of Guadalupe became a quaint, intractable anachronism. In an ecumenical world, OLG remained staunchly Catholic with a capital C. Matt genuflected before entering an empty pew, noticing that his knees were beginning to begrudge going through the familiar motion.

The vigil light signifying the presence of the Eucharist burned true-blue blood red above the elaborate altarpiece. The altar itself had long ago been turned to face the pews, one glaring concession to change. Matt remembered masses said with the priest’s back to the congregation, so he faced only the crucifix and the presence of God. That made the ritual more solemn somehow, when the congregation eavesdropped over the priest’s shoulder. Secrecy always conferred solemnity, or else why whisper during confession in those dark, private booths in the old days?

Matt’s eyes inventoried the familiar artifacts: the embroidered altar cloth, the flowers provided by the Ladies’ Altar Society, the simple pulpit awaiting a preacher the way a clay pot does its plant. The Stations of the Cross marched down the side aisle walls, the bas-relief wood carvings resembling petrified flesh. Everything was as soothing and familiar as it had been when he had come to church as a child, sitting silent beside his mother (nobody in the congregation spoke responses then, but were seen and not heard like good children of God). He realized the peace he had felt in church was literal. It was the only place he and his mother had escaped the bitter harangues of Clifford Effinger.

No wonder he had hoped to make the church his permanent home.

A door cracked open behind the altar.

Matt smiled at the familiar, secret sound, betraying the rich liturgical life that was always being led behind the scenes in a church. Every day had its meaning, its patron saint or significance in Church history. The Church calendar was a phantom image of the secular calendar, with its major “feast days” only reflected in a few secular holidays. The word “holiday” was itself an evolution of “Holy Day.” And the secular calendar was Gregorian, after all, determined by a Pope hundreds of years ago.

Father Raphael Hernandez crossed from the sacristy door to genuflect painfully on the red carpeting in front of the altar.

He wore the long cassock abandoned by most modern priests but its solid black dignity suited his angular Iberian features. He was the model of the reserved, dedicated priests Matt had known as a child. The father figure he had aspired to become.

The vigil light glinted off the small round black buttons closing Father Rafe’s cassock from neck to hem. Matt found himself remembering Temple wearing a soft black knit dress that buttoned up the front, and him undoing some of them.

The vigil light’s red heat seemed to flood his face. He wanted to censor the thought, then resisted. Too much had been censored. Self-censored and confessed. What he had felt and done had been natural, honest. That part of himself was as worthy of embracing as the urge for commitment and service that had brought him to the priesthood.

Father Rafe spotted him, started a bit theatrically, and then came striding forward.

“Matt. Nice to see you here. I’ve missed you at a few masses.”

Matt rose, shook the thin hand. “I like to visit other parishes. Different decor, different music.”

“I wasn’t implying you had missed a Sunday —”

“I know. I wasn’t implying that your sermons were anything but inspirational. I did that even when I was…a priest. Visited other congregations.”

Father Rafe sighed. “I’m so involved with my little world here. That’s what got me into trouble.” He frowned and looked hard at Matt. “Are you troubled?”