Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“That’s why I got a cell phone. I’m calling from the Circle Ritz parking lot.”

“Don’t mention parking lots. Too many bad things have happened in them lately.”

“How is Vicki?”

“Fine. Except for being scared to death. The scariest part is that I can’t do anything to protect her. You’ve got to get me some solid information on this madwoman of yours, or she’ll really do some damage.”

“She’s not my madwoman!”

“Anger is a deadly sin. You sound tired too.”

“Yeah, well, I imagine we’re both pretty much at the ends of our ropes. I’m sorry, Carmen. It’s my fault that the Blue Dahlia parking lot has another bad memory for you.”

“Bad memory? Not this time. This time I’m just…aggravated. Who the heck does that woman think she is, playing mind games on my territory? Was she alone?”

“She always has been when she’s encountered me…or when she sees fit to confront me. You mean did she have an accomplice last night, with Vicki?”

“Yeah. It took planning. That outdoor sound setup was installed around ten yesterday morning. A couple of BD employees saw someone in white coveralls and a painter’s cap on a ladder messing with the roofline but it was near the neon sign and they thought it was maintenance.”

“Man or woman?”

“Couldn’t exactly tell, even when pressed. Workmen and mail carriers are the world’s most invisible occupations.”

“So what happened to Vicki?”

“Took her statement, gave her a card for a good trauma counselor, suggested she stay off the call-in lines of The Midnight Hour and away from you and WCOO. She didn’t see who nabbed her. The car had a dark-tinted glass privacy panel between the back and the driver’s compartment like a limo. Some of the car services around town do that. She saw and heard mostly you when she was on the pavement. She thinks you’re God’s gift to damsels in distress, though, despite not knowing what was going on, and is grateful you ‘saved’ her. I am not hopeful that she’ll have the smarts to avoid calling your radio show. Girls today are way too boy crazy way too young. It’s a shame that Mariah can’t skip adolescence like you did and go directly into the convent instead of junior high, but I guess nunneries are a dying institution.”

“I can see why parents get into that kind of repressive thinking.”

“This Kitty scenario doesn’t make sense. Sure, women can become obsessed, they can stalk, but, as usual, they tend to hurt themselves, not others. They get arrested, ridiculed, mentioned on the nightly news, put into mental hospitals. They don’t turn dangerous like this.”

“I don’t think Kathleen O’Connor ‘turned’ dangerous. I think she always was.”

“Then you do know something of her history.”

He did, and he teetered on the brink of telling Molina on a need-to-know basis. Something stopped him. Keeping other people’s secrets was too ingrained from his life as a priest. Maybe he could persuade Kinsella to come clean about this himself. Yes. This latest incident would persuade him if nothing would. Kinsella couldn’t stand innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. It was the one trait he shared with Matt, that old Catholic guilt syndrome. No one must pay for my actions, my sins, but me.

“Well?” Molina was demanding.

“I’m thinking.” True. So true. “I guess if we haven’t lived in a politically and religiously segregated society like northern Ireland it’s hard to understand how deep the hatred goes. That’s what she’s acting out: that bred-in-the-bone hatred where rage becomes your life’s blood, your air.”

“Unemployed terrorist is your explanation? Downsized into State-side harassment of ex-priests? There’s some more primal motivation, some ritual, just like there is with serial killers, that I know.”

“You think she’s really a killer?”

“I think she likes to put chaos in motion and sit back and watch the carnage. As you said, and Mr. Oscar Wilde before you: ‘Each man kills the thing he loves. The coward with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.’”

Matt nodded to himself. The most virulent hatred is rooted in love betrayed. His own hatred of his abusive stepfather was his reaction to a father figure who was anything but. You are supposed to love and protect me, the abused child cries. And no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realization that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily “normal” is very abnormal to a larger world.

“So.” Molina was interrupting his silence again. “What can you give me? Something solid, other than this crackpot IRA theory. I don’t know where you got that anyway. I called Frank Bucek and he didn’t remember finding anything like that about Kathleen O’Connor, although he did remember you asking him to do a search and retrieve on her.”

“I don’t know. She may have mentioned something herself. She’s said a lot of wild things to me.”

“I still don’t get how she found you, why she targeted you.”

“It was when I was trying to track down my stepfather. She noticed I was on his trail. She mistook me for a hit man, I think. When she found out I wasn’t one, she got angry, as if I had disappointed her.”

“You’re just too good to be true, that’s your problem. It’s very annoying, take my word for it.”

“I guess women like the bad boys. Russell Crowe. Puff Daddy.”

“Some who need their heads examined do.” There was an odd silence on the line. “The bad boys have a way of introducing themselves as Mr. Right. But Miss Kitty seems to have a thing for good boys. I suppose she’s no different from overcontrolling men who pick on naive girls.”

“I may be innocent, but I’m not naive.”

“So there’s nothing you can give me, nothing concrete on tracking Miss Kitty?”

He thought, remembered, decided to lie. One small sin down the slippery slope.

“No.”

As soon as he had hung up on Molina, Matt punched in another number.

Kinsella answered. They were now both plugged into cell phones. Matt pictured the whole world with a hand and phone clamped to one ear, mouths moving like cud-chewing cows, eyes gazing vacantly into the sky or the ceiling.

“Devine here,” Matt said, brusquely.

“Gad, you sound like you’ve taken lessons in phone etiquette from Molina.”

“Maybe I have. I’ve just gotten off the line with her.”

“My condolences.”

“Your Irish friend has crossed the line. I need to give Molina a real lead on her. All I can think of is that sketch.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“It’s been our little secret, we three.”

“Secrets are made to be shared.”

“That’s not the way you act.”

“I’m a mass of walking contradictions.”

“I know, and that makes you not as unique as you think.”

“What do you want?”

“Your permission to bring Molina in on the Kitty O’Connor loop.”

“My permission?”

“She is your demon.”

“It is your sketch. You commissioned it. Why an ex-priest would want a pinup picture of a demon, I don’t know.”

“This is not just an amusing game of harass-the-clergy anymore. A girl was involved in the latest incident. And Molina was there.”

For once something Matt said stopped Kinsella the Kool cold.

“Okay. Where can we meet?” he said. “When?”

“I don’t know if we can. That woman is watching my every move. It’s not just my apartment or my job anymore. It’s me, twenty-four/seven.”

“Go to the Oasis Hotel back parking lot. Park in the exact middle, as far as you can tell. What are you using for wheels now?”