Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 21

An Inspector Calls

Matt felt as serene as the blue rectangle of cool water in the pool three stories below. He had just been beside it in the warm November sunshine, doing his tai-chi routine and then a more conventional Western meditation on the blue mats.

His panicked feelings about the ConTact caller had receded like a high tide. His head and emotions were clear; he felt exonerated, forgiven. Having just gotten up an hour before, he was hacking together a cold breakfast: cereal, milk and half a cantaloupe, when the doorbell rang.

Who could that be? he wondered, discounting Temple. She was off turning Midnight Louie into a TV star, and landlady Electra had lots of weddings scheduled for her attached wedding chapel, the Lovers' Knot.

So he opened the door, cantaloupe cleaver still in hand. Lieutenant C. R. Molina stood there, looking like an enlisted woman in navy blue.

"C--" he began to greet her.

She held up a hand he was surprised to see was not white -gloved.

"None of that Carmen stuff, Devine. I'm here on official business."

Her officer act was second to no one else's. Crisp, authoritarian, humorless, she could have been an archbishop. He gave way as she entered, glancing sardonically at the large kitchen knife.

"Just, ah, butchering the breakfast cantaloupe. You care to see?"

"No. Put your food away. This will take only a few minutes. I hope."

He reluctantly left her in the barren living room, looking at his things--or the lack of them--

in her see-all, know-all way. In the kitchen he threw his partially assembled breakfast in the refrigerator. The cereal would get soggy, but that was hardly a major loss.

He glanced down at his white gi and bare feet. Hardly formal enough attire for an official police visit, which is no doubt why they love to make them unannounced. Control is the name of their game, and they are used to getting, and keeping, the upper hand.

He hurried out again, wondering how many conclusions her penetrating eyes had drawn from his few possessions.

"Coffee?" he asked.

"No. For me it's lunchtime, which I usually don't have time for, except at my desk." She was studying every piece of furniture frankly, the phone on its wobbly secondhand table, the single and ugly floor lamp, the odd book, the sparse wall ornaments.

"Looks like a class photo," she commented when pausing before a huge horizontal black-and-white picture.

"Eighth-grade graduation photo. St. Stanislaus."

"And you are ... let me see if I can pick you out of the lineup. Hmm, there. Second row, far left. Cute as a little blond bug."

"I don't know about the cuteness, but I am on the left, I remember."

"You hang up a photo and don't know where you are in it?"

"I didn't have much to hang up, and I haven't much looked at what I did hang up. Too busy."

She turned from the wall. "I'm impressed," she admitted. "So uncluttered, even ascetic. I would have thought ex-priests would go in for material possessions after years of not having very many."

"Rectories are usually crammed with parishioner hand-me-downs, dark heavy old pieces, rather depressing. And I haven't had time to furnish this place. Temple wants to take me to the resale places, but--"

"But you'd see more of the same you saw in the rectories. Can I sit?"

"Of course. I forgot to make it plain. Have only the one sofa, though."

"This one will seat three or four. It ought to do for us, don't you think?"

"I can stand."

"I'd rather you didn't."

Matt shrugged and followed her over to the plaid sofa, wincing upon remembering that only one cushion was unsprung. If he could maneuver her onto the good one-- But Molina was not one to be maneuvered, even for her own comfort. She sat on the second-from-left cushion (sprung), forcing him to select the end one (also sprung).

"I'm investigating a death," she began.

"Not a murder?"

"Not... yet. Have you ever heard of a man named Darren Cooke?"

"Not until very recently."

"How?"

"Temple mentioned him in connection with a cat commercial her Midnight Louie is in.

Apparently he's some sort of entertainer."

" Was some sort of entertainer."

"Sorry. I know he is dead, but I knew so little of him when he was alive, that it hasn't really hit home. His death, that is."

"Maybe this will hit home."

Molina drew a business card from her side jacket pocket and threw it down on the empty seat cushion between them. This was the unsprung cushion. The card lay on the tautly plumped cushion as if on a presentation pillow. It was a ConTact card.

"I-I recognize the card, but what has that to do with Darren Cooke?"

"It was found in his possession. If you'll turn it over, you'll see the name 'Brother John'

written on the back. In Cooke's handwriting, I might add. Was he a phone pal of yours?"

"I don't know. All my callers are anonymous."

"You must get some clues to their backgrounds, though: ethnic, regional, education level, and so on."

"Yes. Most don't call more than once."

"But some do."

"A rare few."

"--who would therefore stick in your memory?"

"Possibly."

Molina narrowed her eyes, letting their electric blue diminish to two slits, like in an armored tank. "You're being fairly evasive for the good, honest ex-priest you are. What are you hiding?"

"Uncertainty."

"Yes, priests aren't trained to deal with that."

"Listen, Lieutenant. I'm not a priest any longer. I'm not hiding behind a clerical robe."

"I can see that." Molina eyed his gi with some amusement.

It made Matt feel like a twelve-year-old playing at martial arts. He understood that part of her interrogation technique was to juvenilize subjects so they would respond to her as an authority figure. He'd had enough of playing an authority figure, but guessed that if Molina wanted to go head-to-head with him in this mode, he could pull up enough experience to outgun her. She had gone to Catholic schools herself, after all.

"Lieutenant," he said, donning his parish-priest demeanor that cowed the faithful and drove the preteen girls wild, despite his best intentions, "you must understand that I cannot jump to hasty conclusions. My job is to help people, not hunt them down. I accept them for what they say they are, and we go from there. There was one repeat caller who had delusions of being Somebody. He was a sexual addict who hated himself for his addiction, as so many addicts do at times. It's possible he was this dead man. I'll just have to wait and see if he calls again, and since his calls have been so erratic, that may be quite a while."

Molina sat forward on the sprung cushion, oblivious to its discomfort. "Was your frequent caller suicidal?"

Matt nodded. "At times. He was older, had more at stake, including a marriage, his first. I referred him to three top psychiatrists, but he delayed contacting any of them. A common denial mechanism. He was using me as much as he used any woman; he's an inveterate manipulator, too hooked to stop."

"Hmm. Could be Darren Cooke. If we got a tape of his voice would you recognize it?"

"Maybe. It was distinctive, strong. But a lot of men with strong voices call me, and claim to be big winners or Somebody, and they're compulsives, all right, but gambling is their game, or drinking or drugs.

Our callers are really anonymous, given the huge base of troubled people here in Las Vegas."

"But he was suicidal?"

Matt nodded again. How many ways did he have to say it?

"Cooke's death certainly looks like suicide. Was your caller distraught enough about his addiction that he would have killed himself after having ... entertained a woman?"

"Very much so. He was trying to follow the straight and narrow, had a new wife and a baby daughter that he adored. All addicts build their fantasy worlds on a foundation of self-loathing. I hope I do hear from him again," Matt added in a burst. "I hope my man is not your man. That mine is alive and still has a chance to beat his addiction."

Molina nodded, picking up the ConTact card and slipping it back into her pocket.

"Why did this man keep calling you?"

"He said I helped him."

"You sound dubious."

"The trouble with all addicts is that they'll say anything to win the world over to believing that they don't have problems, or that they've got their situation well in hand. You must know that. Deception is their stock in trade. They're so used to it, they hardly recognize it as deception. It's called 'delusional sincerity' in the textbooks. They believe their own lies."

Molina nodded as she stood and walked toward the door. "I've dealt with a lot like that in interrogation rooms." At the door she turned back to him. "Listen, don't get your Catholic conscience in a wad over this guy. My guess is suicide will remain the diagnosis. But he's a famous guy and we have to investigate his last days just to be sure. You any good at martial arts?"

Her last question caught him off guard.

"I've studied for years, but I've never had to use it. So I guess I don't know. I like it for the mindset, the meditative quality."

"A pacifist to the core," she said, laughing.

"Maybe," Matt conceded sheepishly.

"Maybe not," he told the door after it had shut behind her.