Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 2

More Blessed Beast and Children

Even though it was Saturday morning, the playground thronged with milling, laughing, squealing children.

Temple also studied an awesomely interwoven melange of scampering, barking, quacking, braying, howling animals.

Obviously, animals were an attraction kids adored, but she couldn't picture this melee on the elegantly landscaped grounds of the Crystal Phoenix. She didn't even know what she was doing here, except that the whole thing was her idea.

"Lemonade?" Sister St. Rose of Lima chirped beside her, holding up a Big-Gulp-size paper cup.

While Temple hesitated, the diminutive nun quickly added, "It's on the household."

"I think you mean 'on the house,' Sister," Temple said, taking the beverage.

"Whatever." Sister St. Rose's elderly eyes softened behind the magnifying lenses of her plastic-framed spectacles. "Oh, how nice to see the parish presenting such a fine face to the world after that awful business with poor Miss Tyler.''

"This mob scene certainly does resemble a casting call for Noah's Ark," Temple admitted, surveying the panorama she had stage-managed down to the last detail, including the refreshments. About to sip her lemonade, she regarded Sister St. Rose of Lima sharply, "Oh . . .

you haven't been doctoring the beverages again--?"

"Goodness, no! This is not an emergency. Besides, the bishop's brandy is almost all gone from the last time."

"I don't doubt it." Temple's nostalgic smile vanished with a sip of tart lemonade.

''Anyway, at fifty cents a glass, we couldn't afford it," Sister St. Rose added a trifle sadly.

''How's business at the lemonade stand?" Temple glanced at the long white tablecloth that hid a trio of pushed-together card tables.

Stainless-steel urns with spigots alternated with signs reading Lemon-Aid Our Lady of Guadalupe. A ragged line of people crowded the tables, eager for cool liquid refreshment.

Temple blew a breath upwards to lift her bangs from her forehead. She sometimes thought the whole town was a mirage glimpsed through a shimmering force field of heat. Even in late September, Las Vegas simmered with desert heat, which accounted for the indelicate bouquet of animal stew hanging over the playground.

. "Rose!" The nun's twin came bustling up, wearing the same serviceable pastel cotton blouse and skirt, except on second glance Sister Seraphina O'Donnell was taller, wider, slightly younger and much spryer. "Would you take over my spot at the lemonade table? Channel Twelve has come to film a feature," she added rapturously enough to be announcing a sighting of Tom Cruise--or, in her own hierarchy of heavenly treats, the angel Gabriel. Temple didn't detect much difference between the two mythical beings.

"That's wonderful. Sister," Temple said, proud of how quickly she'd mastered the native form of address around Our Lady of Guadalupe. Not bad for a fallen-away Unitarian who hadn't been inside a church of any denomination in years.

"And it's your doing, dear."

Temple let only two people in the world call her ''dear." One was her energetically outgoing landlady, Electra Lark; the other was Sister Seraphina. Both were over sixty and both were candidates for She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed t-shirts, though neither would ever don such a homely item, for quite different reasons.

Sister Seraphina turned to survey the bustling playground, pushing her slipping trifocals against the bridge of her nose. "Combining an animal blessing ceremony with a giveaway of Miss Tyler's cats was so ingenious. But I'm glad you talked the Humane Society into handling the placement of the cats."

Temple glanced at another rank of cloth-covered card tables, this one staffed by volunteers from the local-animal welfare' group.

"That's a cardinal rule of public relations. Sister. Kill two birds with one stone whenever you can."

''I doubt the Humane Society people would approve that expression in this instance, or any other, but it is apt. We not only publicize the parish fund drive, but find homes for the late Miss Tyler's excess of cats."

"We hope," Temple answered cautiously. "Finding homes for dozens of cats is no sure thing."

She panned the scene again, as critical as any old-time director. Leaping lizards! But bless you, she thought at second glance from a safe distance, approving the Technicolor-bright two-foot-long iguana perched on a pre-teen boy's shoulder. Her publicity-conscious eye also dwelled fondly on the picture-perfect, pig-tailed seven-year-old girl with a pet goat, and an ancient Hispanic woman carrying a truly magnificent rooster with splash of black-taffeta tail feathers worthy of a chorus girl at Bally's.

All creatures great and small, feathered and scaled, furred and coated--and their fond owners old and young--made first-class grist for the ever-grinding mill of the media cameras.

Who could resist animals and kids--at least from a distance?

And then the drama. . . . Temple studied Father Rafael Hernandez in his long black cassock with the shorter lacy white over thing. (Temple knew there was a name for this garment; she would have to ask Sister Seraphina what it was.)

Two adorable eleven-year-old altar boys, similarly smocked, clung to his side as he moved from group to group, a silver-haired shepherd blessing the helpless beasts to ward off illness and mischance.

''What a mob. I supposed you're responsible," a voice announced above Temple's right shoulder. ''You have a parade permit for this?"

Temple snapped her head around and found what she expected: Lieutenant C.R. Molina of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, loitering with intent.

"Are you serious?" Temple demanded.

Molina shrugged. "Unfortunately not. Can't you tell I'm off duty?"

Temple took in an oversized denim shirt studded with the occasional rhinestone, jeans and--my turquoise tootsies! -- beaded moccasins on Molina's size-nine feet. How lucky that Temple herself had paired her quiet khaki culottes with a red-and-white top and her Plexiglas-heeled, red grosgrain-ribbon-trimmed Stuart Weitzman heels. If Molina was putting on the dog, she didn't want to be caught looking like one.

"Supporting the parish fund drive?" Temple asked, knowing Lieutenant Molina lived in the neighborhood.

Molina nodded over her semi-sparkling shoulder at the long table without the lemonade.

"Supporting the Humane Society. I'm getting a couple of Miss Tyler's cats."

" You like cats?"

"I don't have much choice," Molina said wryly.

Temple couldn't imagine the towering homicide officer doing anything against her will, so she squinted toward the animal adoption table. A pair of half-grown tiger stripes meowed in a wire cage while an attendant filled out forms. She spotted a young girl in blue jeans and L.A.

Gear sneakers fidgeting before the cage just as Molina called, "Mariah! Got a minute?"

Mariah. Temple straightened as this genuine mythical beast--hard-nosed Lieutenant Molina's pre-teen daughter-- ambled over with a docility sure to vanish utterly in a couple of years when the hormones kicked in.

Meeting a mini-Molina did nothing to make Temple feel adult and superior. At ten or eleven, Mariah matched Temple's height (five-feet-flat) and outweighed her by a good twenty pounds.

Temple faced a chubby youngster with grave dark eyes nothing like Lieutenant Molina's spooky electric-blue ones. And braces were in the cards, Temple remembered. She winced for this awkward almost-adolescent whose mother was a local cop and who faced at least four years and a likely attack of ego-erasing acne before any signs of a silk purse would emerge from beneath the rough-cut, lumpy denim. Given the kid's plain-clothes mother's femininity quotient, Mariah didn't have much of a role model for turning from cabbage moth into Monarch.

But Mariah Molina wasn't Temple's problem, thank God.

''You're the cat-lover?" she asked the girl.

Mariah nodded shyly. No smile. Probably hiding the braces-doomed teeth.

"And a fan of gerbils and hamsters, which she already has too many of," Molina added with patience that was either maternal or paternal. With Molina, it was hard to tell when the authoritarian cop was speaking or when the woman was, if ever.

Father Hernandez and his entourage were edging toward the trio just in time to break an uneasy silence.

"I'd better get the cats ready for their official baptizing," Molina murmured, moving toward the completed paperwork and the cage.

"You can't baptize cats," Mariah remarked with a dubious giggle, her widening eyes half-tempted to take her mother literally even as she watched Temple for agreement.

Temple would have liked to have bent down to reassure the child, but there wasn't a height difference, dang it.

She did lower her voice, at least. ''Don't mention 'baptizing' the cats when Father Hernandez is within earshot. He got into quite a fight with their last, and late, owner over that very issue."

"Miss Tyler was crazy." Mariah dismissed her benefactress with pre-teen disdain for such as yet personally unexperienced states as insanity.

Wait'll she hits thirteen! Temple thought. "Miss Tyler was cat-crazy, that's all."

''And that's okay?"

"That's fine, as long as you don't have too many."

"Do you have any?"

"That's debatable." Temple glanced at a pair of cat carriers parked under the shade of a towering oleander bush pruned into a tree shape. "One cat seems to have me. His name is Midnight Louie."

"Did you bring him here to be blessed?"

"Yes." Temple sighed. "He's not too happy about it, to tell the truth."

"Isn't he a Catholic cat?"

"He isn't even a domesticated cat. But I figured since this was my idea, I should participate."

"Why are there two carriers if you only have one cat?" Mariah asked. All kids under twelve love to demonstrate that they can count.

"The other cat isn't mine. Say, are those the L.A. Gear sneakers with the red lights in the heels that blink every time you step? Let me see! Cool."

Mariah had turned to display her footwear, her midnight-brown eyes warming at Temple's interest. "How'd you know about that?"

Before Temple could answer that no pair of unusual shoes debuted without her knowledge and probable panting after them, Molina as well as Father Hernandez and his altar boys had converged on them for the ceremonials.

Father Hernandez's ascetic and slightly careworn face smoothed into a smile as warm as the day. "Carmen. Mariah. You've taken two of Miss Tyler's cats? What a fine act of charity. I must admit that cats are not my favorite beasts."

Temple tried to keep from sinking right through the play-ground asphalt. Lieutenant C.R.

Molina's first name was Carmen! As in Miranda? Or, in Molina's case, as in Miranda rights? Ay, yi yi yi. . . .

Molina, sensing the direction of Temple's thoughts, flashed her what could only be interpreted as a dirty look. ''You can call it an act of charity, Father," she told the priest, ''but I call it an act of self-defense."

She smiled as she gently yanked the long, black braid threading down Mariah's back. The girl smiled up at her mother, sudden sunshine, then bent to remove the first tiger-stripe kitten from the cage. It squirmed in her arms, rolling perfectly round yellow eyes.

While the solemn altar boys--Hispanic angels with honey-colored skin and India-ink eyes--

stood at attention. Father Hernandez intoned some soft Latin syllables. His upraised hand, oddly held in the edgewise position of a karate chop (Temple noticed now that she was acquainted with that art), pantomimed a sign of the cross on the hot, arid air.

Tiger kitty kept still, and retired gracefully when returned to the cage. The sibling was extracted, held, and--no doubt cowed by the crowd--kept reverent silence while it underwent its own blessing.

"And you, Miss Barr." Father Hernandez turned to Temple with a sly smile. "You've been doing so much for Our Lady of Guadalupe lately that I will have to make you an honorary parishioner . . . what can I do for you?"

"Uh, nothing! That is, you can do my cat. I mean, bless him. I guess.''

Stunned into stammering by the threat of conversation. Temple hustled over to the tan-colored carrier, bent to pinch the metal latch to the open position, and hauled out a very reluctant Louie.

"Come on, big guy. You know you hate being penned up. I'm the cavalry here. Don't fight me."

"My, he is massive," Father Hernandez commented.

"That's right. Father." Sister Seraphina had come over, trailing television cameraman behind her. "You didn't see him the night of the fire alarm. This poor cat almost met the same fate as poor Peter."

"No!" Father Hernandez was shocked, as anyone would be when reminded of how the convent cat had been nailed to Miss Tyler's back door. Peter had survived nicely, but Temple doubted that the clergy at Our Lady of Guadalupe would ever get over such perverse violence.

''Then he must have a special blessing."

Father Hernandez's hand reached for Louie's forehead, while the big tomcat wriggled in Temple's arms.

He was slipping through her grasp, all nearly-twenty pounds of him, his shiny black fur licorice-slick. Temple bent her knees to prop Louie's weight on her thighs, feeling his hind claws curl into the folds of her crinkle-cotton skirt for purchase. In a minute she was going to look as if she'd been tattooed by a staple gun.

"I'll take him."

Matt Devine's voice came out of the blue like a miracle. Although he had driven here with Temple, he had vanished after their arrival, she had assumed to confer with Father Hernandez.

But Matt was here now, almost as magically as the Mystifying Max had always managed on stage, cradling Midnight Louie like a fussing four-footed baby, and holding him out to Father Hernandez.

Mariah Molina stared up at Matt, who was a stranger to her, not because he was movie-star-handsome, or as blond as she was dark. Mariah wasn't quite old enough to fixate on either attribute. What she did notice--Temple knew with sudden sympathy--was that Matt might be old enough to be her father. Her apparently absent-without-leave father.

Temple was a bit miffed to observe that mother was as transfixed by Matt as daughter, and Lieutenant Carmen Molina was darn well old enough to know better.

Father Hernandez murmured and waved his right hand. Louie struggled fruitlessly in the grasp of a martial arts expert, scowling with flattened ears as if he were being cursed instead of blessed.

If beasts could talk . . .

But not even Midnight Louie could do that. Matt returned him to the carrier with no more incident than a parting yowl. Then Matt opened a smaller, powder-blue carrier and brought out a small shadow of Louie.

"Midnight Junior?" Father Hernandez joked.

"Midnight Louise," Temple put in. She was always fast on her feet with a quip.

Everyone gave this one the obligatory lip-quirk it deserved.

"The Humane Society people, called her Caviar.'' Matt stroked the little cat's fine, fluffy fur.

"Welcome, Caviar," Father Hernandez intoned in high-priest solemnity, before returning to the Latin litany he was bestowing on all the animals.

Sister Seraphina leaned near to Temple. "He should do it in English, or he could do it in Spanish, but he's old-fashioned. He says the ancient Latin soothes the animals."

It soothed Temple, who liked the long, Latin names of healing herbs and drugs. Father Hernandez's Latin blessings had hummed around the gathering all afternoon, like the drone of lazy, overeducated bees. Behind him, the camera's Cyclops eye focused on cat and company.

Then the vignette dissolved. Matt turned away to whisk Caviar back to her carrier. Father Hernandez and bracketing boys moved on to the old lady with her rooster. The television camera clung close behind, its lens leering over his white-garbed shoulder.

"We'd better get our booty home, Mariah," Molina was saying briskly, hefting the heavy cage back to the Humane Society table and handing one young cat to her daughter while cradling the other.

Tiger stripes. Wouldn't you know. Temple thought, that Molina would go for a critter that wore prison garb?

"Awkward age," Seraphina murmured at Temple's elbow, "When I see these kids, I get such an itch to teach again. But . . . I'm too old."

''You're not too old," Temple said automatically, watching Matt Devine approach Molina and child. He patted the two cats, smiled at Mariah and began talking seriously to Molina. What about?

''Besides," Temple absently reminded the nun beside her, "think of what stalks even grade school kids nowadays. Gangs. Drugs. Weapons."

Sister Seraphina glanced at the trio that Temple studied, her benign face puckered with uneasy memory. "Our grade schools were haunted in the old days; we were just too innocent to know it."

"What do you mean?" Sistet Seraphina's self-accusing tone brought Temple's attention back to the conversation at hand.

Seraphina's expression grew both more guarded and more thoughtful. "Some youngsters have always grown old before their time. It's not the street, or the playground, that damages them, but what they grow up with at home. At least nowadays we admit it."

"You mean . . . drugs, even then?"

Sister Seraphina's head with its clumsy curlicue of permanent waves shook a definite "No."

"Cigarettes and alcohol then, mostly harmless stuff to be sampled in secret and forgotten afterward, after the dare was done. No, in the old days the poison was the secrets themselves, only then the Family was sacred, untouchable. You didn't dare suspect, and you certainly did not dare interfere."

"You're talking about child abuse," Temple said.

"I often wonder," Seraphina said, staring at the charming tableau of children and animals with priest and altar boys moving methodically among them, "how much damage we did by being so innocent. We made ourselves into hypocrites before all those children who knew what life was really like, or what their lives were really like. We prattled of saints and suffering and mortal sins. Sometimes innocence is a greater sin to atone for than guilt."

"Have you ever questioned being a--?"

"Being a nun? My vocation?*' Sister Seraphina's wry, amused eyes pierced Temple's confusion, then melted into the ineffable content Temple had always sensed in her. "Never."

Her mouth hardened. "But I do question innocence when it is a shield for the evil-doer. And there are evil-doers among us, Miss Temple; all around us."

The nun's darker tone carried more weight than Father Hernandez's lulling Latin murmurs.

Temple glanced around the sunny playground, feeling an internal shiver. Here, too? That kind of evil? But Peter Burns was in jail. It was over, wasn't it?

She saw that Molina and daughter had left. Now Matt was standing sentinel by the two cat carriers, under the green and fuchsia dapple of the oleander, watching Father Hernandez with an expression Temple couldn't name: part vigilance, part anger, part bleak hunger.

Matt had worn robes like that once, had blessed, if not in Latin, at least in English, and perhaps not animals, but people. Temple herself had seen him bless Miss Tyler when she lay ill.

The Anointing of the Sick, which used to be called by the more dire name. Extreme Unction.

What did it feel like to wield such invisible power, to assume a position of arbitrating between God and man or woman? Or had Matt always seen himself as a mere intermediary? Now there was a long Latin word for you.

She watched him with concern, remembering how unwilling he, the ex-priest, had been to judge Father Hernandez's odd behavior during the uncertainty of Miss Tyler's death. She remembered even more strongly how uncertain Matt Devine was about being judged by Father Hernandez, who was not an ex-priest.

"It's never easy, dear," Sister Seraphina was saying encouragingly. "Judging situations.

Judging people. I've made my mistakes," she added, a bittersweet twist to her lips as if she had just sipped sour lemonade.

Temple glanced at Matt again. He had made his mistakes, too. Was he still making them?