Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 3

Grim Pilgrimage

Matt was accustomed to institutional decor--plain, functional and eternally dingy no matter how well scrubbed.

The Las Vegas county jail had one additional attribute: an enigmatic air of sordid doings just beyond reach.

Matt signed in and submitted to a brown-uniformed woman jailer who clipped a plastic visitor's badge to the collar of his knit sports shirt. She was short and stocky, with buzz-cut bleached blond hair. Despite the gun holster riding her amply padded hip, she looked no more dangerous than a veteran hairdresser armed with a black blow dryer.

Appearances, Matt reminded himself, were deceiving. His own were a prime case in point.

"Lieutenant Molina okayed this,'' the woman noted by way of verbal confirmation. ''The prisoner has no lawyer yet to do the honors.''

"I understand he's representing himself."

She looked up, interested. "You know the old saying--"

"Anyone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client."

She nodded. ''You a lawyer?"

Matt spread his arms to display casual sports shirt and khaki slacks. ''Do I dress like one?"

Her lips approximated a smile, as much expression as she could muster in her stern, bureaucratic job. She nodded him past.

Everyone beyond the small entry area was either armed or wearing a visitor's badge like his.

Matt was finally escorted to the naked and neutral space he expected from years of seeing television shows. He had hoped for the high-tech glass barrier and the twin phone receivers, simply because the novelty of the arrangement would take his mind off the difficult task ahead.

He talked to hundreds of people on the phone, but never saw their faces.

Indeed, it was the quintessential scene of cliche: facing hard chairs, intervening wire-reinforced glass barrier. The setting reminded him of a bombed-out confessional, where the bare bones of furniture remained standing, oddly isolated, after the sheltering walls of true confidentiality had been blasted away.

The word that came to mind again was "naked." A bored but watchful uniformed officer on guard did nothing to allay that impression.

Matt sat where indicated, and waited.

In a couple of minutes, a door beyond the barrier opened. His quarry appeared, wearing a loose jailhouse jumpsuit colored a garish orange.

A small man, he looked almost boyish in the outfit, but there was nothing juvenile about his expression when he saw Matt: distaste screwed tight into contempt. And Matt didn't even know the man.

Contempt always made Matt nervous; as if he had done something wrong he had forgotten about. Conditioning. Right now he was trying desperately to do something right, only he didn't quite know how to go about it. Who was lying? Embittered blackmailer in jail, or honest parish priest? During his campaign to harass the Our Lady of Guadalupe congregation, Burns had threatened to expose Father Hernandez as a child molester. Was this charge a baseless taunt, or the simple truth spoken by an unlikely source? Matt was the only one on earth, besides the two men involved, to know of the blackmail. Hernandez denied the allegation, of course, but denial was a way of life to those addicted to unholy pursuits. Either way, whether Matt reported the facts to the diocese or did nothing, he might be abetting a monster. He had to know the truth for the sake of his own conscience. Success would depend on correctly handling this volatile man. Matt was good with people, but he was used to dealing with well-intentioned people.

Peter Burns was about as ill-intentioned as anyone could be. He was an aggressively unrepentant murderer.

"Well" Burns had planted himself in the chair opposite Matt and snatched up his receiver.

''So much for the holier-than-thous. No one from Our Lady of Guadalupe has visited me but you."

"I'm not from Our Lady of Guadalupe."

''You could have fooled me. You sure were hanging around the old parish lately. Just what was your angle?''

"Sister Seraphina at the convent asked me to help with the obscene phone calls."

"What are you, a lineman for the county?'*

Matt resisted his cynicism. "I'm a telephone hotline counselor,"

"That's a nun for you. Runs into an obscene phone caller so she calls on a telephone counselor for help."

Matt didn't bother explaining that there was a lot more to it than that. "Did you enjoy making those calls?" he asked.

"Me? I haven't enjoyed anything since I was about four years old. The church saw to that."

"What about abusing the cat?"

"Frankly--" Burns leaned back in the chair.

Matt, hearing his feet knock the barrier between them, almost jumped. The only barriers he trusted to hold here were psychological ones.

Burns watched him with a dawning smile, an open-mouthed opportunist's almost-smirk.

Taunting. "Frankly" he went on, . "I enjoyed all of the stuff I did--the cats, the old nuns, the old bat in her cathouse. It was like a license to commit Halloween, you know? Very liberating."

''Not . . . completely.'' Matt eyed the bland surroundings.

Burns shrugged. "What's your name?"

"Matt Devine."

"Whew!" Burns's stalled smile made a daring loop-de-loop into a high-pitched laugh.

"Perfect. Devine as in 'devotional duty,' and Matthew after one of the four gurus of the Gospel. I bet you were born to be teacher's pet at St. Mary's of the Holy Cross-eyed Hallelujah Chorus.

Old Sister Mary Malaria calls, and you come running like a good boy to dust the blackboard erasers and find the nasty kid who's making naughty phone calls. What do you want here? Plan to shake some chalk dust in my face? Don't bother. I'm proud of what I did. No holier-than-thou is gonna make me feel otherwise. So what brought you here, Mr. Matthew Dee-vine?"

Matt didn't bother correcting the guy on the fine points of his first name. "It isn't the calls, and it isn't the cats."

Burns shifted again in his hard chair, restless as a twelve-year-old kid. "Yeah. It's the Big One.

Murder. What do you want to know?"

"You'd tell me?"

"Sure. We're not in court. And, anyway, I'm demented, didn't you know? Why else would an upstanding pillar of the Church and the Court kill a nice old lady, his own great-auntie, no less?

Anything I say can't be held against me, because I'll say something else in two seconds."

"I'm not here about Blandina Tyler's death."

Burns's lips puckered in a mock-pout of disappointment. "What would it be, then?"

"You didn't just call the convent."

"Oh, yeah . . . my little anonymous notes to the rectory." Burns leaned forward, avid. "Father Raf-a-el Hernandez send you? Bet he's still sweating silver bullets. Hit the Coors, did he, the good Father, after my letters got to him?"

"No one sent me."

"You're a real busy-body, Matthew. None of this is your business."

"It's all of our business. I grew up Catholic, too."

''Aw, poor baby. Bet you were an altar boy, right?"

Matt's nod felt stiff even to him.

''Hey, that's okay, Matthew. Somebody's got to get the gold stars on their school papers.

Somebody's got to wear those little gilded halos."

Matt set his teeth. He hated his full name enough in the correct form. Having a more common form constantly hurled at him was like being whipped with a dead snake. Maybe Bums wasn't so crazy to represent himself; he would be terrific in the courtroom.

"You're creating an extreme to rebel against." Matt suddenly unleashed his own weapon, psychobabble. "Some people demonize the people and institutions in their past. You've sanctified them. I'm not this paragon you need to create just to tear down."

"You're here, aren't you? Doing your good deed of the day for someone else? You have nothing to do with this, Devine. Why bother?"

Matt decided to try candor. "Look. I was reared Catholic. Like you, I didn't have a perfect life, or perfect parents. I've had my own problems with the past. I just want to know the truth about your accusations."

Burns was watching him with brittle, clever eyes. "You heard my whole sad story in that lady lieutenant's office."

"I can sympathize," Matt said. "You had a rough upbringing: born out of wedlock, handed to a foster family who never stopped reminding you of your 'unworthy' origins. I'm not saying it was right. We're both products of a less enlightened time."

"Listen to yourself! 'Products.' 'Less enlightened.' You're intellectualizing, Mr. Phone Shrink.

You're dodging the bullet I caught in my teeth and spit back at the world. I bet you envy me.

Matt barely stopped himself from pushing away his chair as if avoiding a spitball. ''You know what you hate," he conceded.

Burns nodded, pleased. ''Most people, they get so confused by the idiocy they're taught when they're kids they don't even know that. I even looked like what they said I was: a bastard. I never grew much; maybe I wanted to stay small so no one would notice me and call me names.

And it was worse when they didn't call me names. 'You! Come here,' my foster-grandwitch would yell, pointing her cane like the damning finger of God. And, God, it hurt when she poked me with it, hit me with it. Hit me with religion, over and over, with bad words. Yeah, it made me ugly." He looked up, eyes as corrosive as dry ice. "Nobody made you feel ugly."

"Don't be so sure."

"You sound like you mean that."

Matt said nothing.

"You still go to mass?"

"Not . . . often."

"Fallen away but unable to cut the apron strings to Mother Church, eh? Then why do you care if my charges against Father Hernandez are true or not?"

"If they're true, they should be pursued."

"Truth is the last thing anyone ever pursues, especially about themselves." Burns pouted his lips again. His forefinger traced an invisible pattern on the drab Formica tabletop. "Why wouldn't they be true? Why not?''

"You were harassing the entire parish structure. You weren't a genuine obscene caller, you just mimicked one to upset the nuns. A lot of your tricks were diversions, so no one would guess your real target was Blandina Tyler. So, yeah, your blackmail of Father Hernandez could have been another smokescreen. It had the proper effect; it kept him away from the Tyler house."

"He didn't run to the diocese with it, though, did he? Makes you wonder. Makes you in particular wonder, Matthew."

Matt shrugged. "If it's true, and if you're as bitter toward Our Lady of Guadalupe and the church as you say, I wonder why you haven't produced any evidence yet.''

"I got a few other things on my mind."

"Or, you were just play-acting again, playing the blackmailer as you enacted an obscene phone caller, and as you aped a Satanist when you crucified the cat."

"You think I was just play-acting that, huh?"

"You tell me."

''I don't have to, Matthew. I'm free. You're not my prosecutor, or my parole officer or my shrink or my confessor. I don't have to even give you a hint. Besides, what would you do if you had any evidence?"

"I'd make sure it was investigated."

"By whom? The church? You know how they kicked everything under the cassock all those years. Years and years of innocent kids being abused, and all they did was send Father to some monastery to mumble penance."

"They're cleaning house now."

''Because they have to! It's prime-time news. Hard copy. A current affair that happens to have a very long history. I know why you're here, not to uncover anything, but to hush it up. You make me sick. Whether it's an inconvenient kid on the way or an inconvenient kiddie diddler, you all conspire to sweep it under the rug. You hypocritical goodie two-shoes can't keep your noses out of telling everybody else what to do, but you never wake up and smell the shit you forgot to bury in your own back yards. And the women are the worst."

''Maybe that's because women have no power but the aura of superiority the church confers on them."

"An aura's the same as a halo, isn't it? Blessed Virgin Mary-Blue-Gown with her eyes cast down, as blind as Old Lady Justice. The Law is just as crooked, and wouldn't you know it hides behind some woman's skirts for its symbol of integrity. Yeah. The church is a man's game, and the church knows power, but the church is over a barrel now, just like you are, not knowing what nasty scandal in their precious priesthood is gonna hit next. So watch and wait, Devine."

His sneering paraphrase of Christ's instructions to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane--like Eden, another garden of betrayal--made Matt wince. Burns smiled and executed a lawyerly lunge for the verbal kill.

"As for Father Raf-a-el Hernandez and whether my threats of exposure have any basis in evidence or act . . . guess!" he finished triumphantly.

''You're bitter, and have reason to be."

''Don't turn the other cheek. When I tried that I got my cheeks pounded. That's what they all did, used religion as a club, a cane. Baby Jesus this and the Advent windows opening every week before Christmas and endless stories of the Blessed Birth from the point of view of the Magi and the shepherds and even the damn donkey. Who was the child who was born on the outskirts of everything? I was the Baby Jesus, and there was no room in the inn."

Matt once might have shuddered at such angry blasphemy. Now he had to admit that Burns had a point.

"You loyalists with your plaster saint patience," the prisoner muttered, calming somewhat.

"Don't underestimate me. I'm a product of Catholic schools, I've been . . . involved with the church all of my life."

"Tell me about it, only I never fit in; I was always a walking, talking sign of sin. Hypocrisy is the hallmark of the church. Look at these aberrant priests, saying mass and seducing altar boys on the same Sunday morning."

"That's just it; they are aberrant. You must remember many good priests and dedicated nuns from your school days."

Burns snorted. "Is nothing bad enough to turn your stomach and vomit up the past? What does it take to make you angry, golden boy?"

Matt answered without hesitation. "You don't want to find out."

Burns looked into his eyes and finally shut up.

************

But Peter Burns had made Matt angry. The interview had been like spending a long, dark night of the soul, not alone, but in dialogue with his own dark side.

Once, young and impressionable. Matt the child had dreaded the church's bogeyman: he wondered if he could hear the Devil taunting him in his mind to do the wrong thing. Peter Burns had resurrected that primitive fear, for he was everything Matt had tried not to be: bitter, unforgiving, vengeful, exuding the pus of murderous rage until he threatened to infect everyone around him.

Within half an hour of that jailhouse encounter, Matt was in his favorite place for psychic rest and recuperation, for meditation, if not prayer. He wasn't sure that he prayed any more, but at least he thought in peace.

Around him sandy desert paths wound through a wilderness of cactus. The land was gently rolling, giving the illusion of mini-hills and valleys. Though groups of people wandered the sere landscape with him, at times he was alone. At other times, their chatter and their presence, as benign as that of squirrels, would confront him with the existence of the everyday.

He did not quite have to eat locusts, but he was as far removed from reality here as anywhere in Las Vegas. And, like the others who enjoyed this private garden of thorns, he gained admittance for nothing.

The Ethel M. Chocolate Factory was located on 2 Cactus Garden Drive south of Tropicana, Filing through the front doors for a tour of the pristine premises brought an instant release from the frenetic pressure to have expensive fun on the Strip. The people here were engaged in the benign business of making life sweet. If you wanted to buy their sweetness, gift-wrapped by the pound, they would oblige. They would give you one taste-bud-smothering sample for nothing.

An extra attraction was the extensive cactus and botanical gardens out back, a low-pressure invitation to gawk at nature in an unnatural consolidation of its wonders.

Tours of the gardens were ''self-directed." That meant you could get lost here, and no one would notice.

Matt wandered the familiar paths, marveling at nature's stubborn survivability. Most cactus blooms lasted only a day, but hundreds sprouted. Cacti were the camels of the plant world, able to hoard water in the burning summer. They could survive the winter night's chill temperature plunge. These plain, often ugly growths' dead-green color seemed more a matter of camouflage than beauty, yet they could flash those spectacular, one-day-wonder blossoms. They wore their own crown of thorns, stabbing anything that blundered into their midst to the quick with inches-long quills.

Today, each plant reminded Matt of Peter Burns. The cactus was twisted and thorny, yet superbly adapted to its hard-scrabble environment for those very reasons, just like Burns. Matt could see how, encountering a diatribe like the one Peter Burns had unleashed on him, priests in the old days would attempt to exorcize such perverse blasphemy. Nowadays, they more often needed to exorcise themselves.

Seeing Burns had reminded Matt of the past, of a deeper and older injustice he needed to pursue. There was another man he needed to confront, for his own sake, the man who was his sole reason for relocating to Las Vegas in the first place. Matt knew why the business of earning his daily bread, of finding shelter had postponed his mission. Meeting Temple and getting drawn into her dangerous quandaries was another, unanticipated detour. Temple herself, and her attractions, had become a formidable distraction. . . . Maybe he had welcomed diversion from his real, ugly and difficult goal. Maybe vengeance was the Lord's alone. And maybe the long-gone man he sought was a mirage like so many other things in this city, this dry, hot indifferent desert.

Matt sighed. With his fair coloring, he shouldn't linger in such unfiltered sunlight. But he liked the heat, the searing sun. It was cleansing and uncompromising. It would bleach the freshest bones as pale as the fangs of T.S. Eliot's three white leopards. It would, in the end, atone for everything.

His mind, prickled by the thorny past, returned to the immediate problem. Burns would be no help with Hernandez, as Matt had expected, but he had needed to try. He would have to find other avenues. Molina was out; she was too closely connected to Our Lady of Guadalupe and would instantly suspect more than he wanted her to. So were other law enforcement representatives; they had their own rules to follow, as religious orders did, and did not discern any fine line between crime and punishment. Temple was out as well; she was too curious. But she had mentioned somebody once. . . .

Matt waited until a nearby clot of tourists--men, women and children in wrinkled cotton bermuda shorts and t-shirts advertising an array of Strip attractions--passed through the small shop on their way out.

Then he followed.

No one was in the cool, narrow white room with the glass case displaying a bevy of chocolates like a toothsome Sleeping Beauty of Sweetness.

The ladies behind the counter, their hair shrouded by white plastic caps, reminded Matt of certain nursing orders of nuns. Order: that is what one found at Ethel M's, and a pristine environment that did not feel prissy.

Food for the soul. Matt bought two boxes while the women stole glances at him, giggling, as if he were a movie star that they did not quite recognize.

He did not quite recognize himself either.