Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 25

Ring of Fire

"Guess what?" Temple's voice asked over the telephone.

"I couldn't begin to," Matt said.

"I was out on errands and stopped at a couple of resale shops and I found the neatest brown leather bomber jacket, just seamed enough to scream 'Indiana Jones.' l got it because I'm pretty sure it'd fit you."

"Why?"

"Why am I sure it would fit you?"

"No, why would l want such thing?"

"It's a perfect prop for your next promo photo; trust me. You've got to snap up these things when you run across them. Anyway, I have a ton of releases to pound out for the Crystal Phoenix, but when I'm done, I'll run up with it, if that's okay?"

"Sure it's okay."

Matt shook his head as he hung up the receiver. He couldn't decide whether Temple was a frustrated costumer or a consummate PR woman. Either way, he was looking forward to seeing her more than he was any jacket.

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

An hour later. the doorbell rang.

"That was fast work," Matt said, swinging wide the coffered door.

Except that it was Lieutenant C. R. Molina who stood there bearing arms, instead of Temple bearing apparel suitable for shooting . . . with a camera.

And Molina's arms were concealed, although her actual arms were not.

Matt was sure now that he was Alec in Wonderland.

"Uh . . . what can I do for you?" He wasn't sure whether she was here as an official or as an acquaintance.

"Plenty, l hope. Got a few minutes? You're not due at ConTact for a couple hours."

"Guess you don't need me to answer your questions."

"Sorry." She brushed past him, pausing in the wide archway to the living room as if the Kagan sofa were a stop sign she was obligated to heed. "That is really . . . red."

She moved Farther into the room before turning on him. "What's the matter?"

"I never know how to take you. Getting a surprise visit from you is like getting one from the IRS. Is it a friendly, inquiring call, or gangbusters?"

"The IRS never makes friendly, inquiring calls." Molina grinned. "I do. And this is one of them, but I don't think you'll like the implications."

"I never like the implications. It comes of having led a cloistered life for so long."

"Oh, come on! You priests were the worldliest religious order in the church. Can l, ah, actually sit on this?"

"Sure."

Matt watched her, amused. Temple would certainly dismiss the solid-color suit and Molina's blunt Dutch-cut hair, but the effect was rigorously functional, which would serve anyone who didn't want to distract from the essentials of her job.

Molina squirmed a bit before accepting the fact that she was properly supported by the sculptural, armless sofa. Then she reached into her jacket pockets. She reminded him of Captain Kangaroo. He had never seen her carry a purse, a habit that added to her strong air of command of herself, and others.

Nuns who taught school, for instance, had never carried purses either, now that he thought about it. "No frills" was the message: no makeup, no trivialities; no need to produce evidence of my identity unless I feel like it; nothing to weigh me down but authority.

He remembered his grade-school teachers in their full, long, black habits, and the nun who directed the choir who prowled the lines of trilling students, swinging the gigantic, knee-length rosary suspended from her belt-cord. It felt like a lethal weapon, that swinging arm of wooden beads. Sister Mary Lariat, they called her behind her back.

Still, those muffling habits conferred a kind of magical power on their wearers.

In a sense Molina was a magician, bureaucratic-style, though she'd despise comparison to the Mystifying Max: everything came out of the pockets---her police ID, a notepad and pen, maybe even an occasional Kleenex.

Now it was a small, clear-plastic Baggie that emerged, weighed down in one comer by a nugget of metal.

"You recognize this?"

Matt leaned forward on the hard kitchen chair to take it. The room's arched white ceiling provided reflected light. Matt felt something in him lurch: heart or hormones, which he didn't know.

"It looks like--l can't swear to it. I only glimpsed it for a second. Where on earth did you find it?"

She nodded. "Looks like that to me too. Small enough."

"Didn't that Shangri-La woman skip town with her confederates? She's the one who last had it."

"Right." Molina's lips tightened to grimness. "Found it at a murder scene."

"That has nothing to do with Temple."

"Oh, right." She shook her head as if mere babblers should just be ignored. "It was found at what may be the second murder some in a series. In both cases, neither victim had any personal belongings or jewelry on or near the body."

"Except for this ring."

"Except for that ring."

"That's . . . freaky. That's odd. But what has it to do with Temple? She was not the last person in possession of this thing. You saw it taken from her yourself."

"I know who took it from her and l know who gave it to her.

What l don't know is much about this missing magician, Shangri-La, and I don't know why this ring would have surfaced--deliberately. I'd say--at this particular murder scene." Molina fidgeted on the sofa seat again, unaware of her discomfort with its severely chic fifties form.

"I'm not going to ask her, and I'm not going to ask him, at least not until l have more of a notion to what's going on. You know a little about both of them and about everything else involved here. You get to be my guinea pig."

"Lieutenant . . . what do you want? I suppose you don't want me to tell poor Temple her ring has been found, and where, but what else?"

"The victims are complete mysteries. Both women, both stripped of personal belongings other than their clothes, which is even odder; each killed miles from the other, one near the presence of this ring. I want to run the facts of the cases by you, see if anything rings any alarm bells. One of them was killed in a church parking lot."

"What does that have to do with it? Or me?"

"Don't sound so exasperated. I thought you might have some expertise in that area, that's all."

"Church parking lots? I don't think so." He sighed. "What denomination was it?"

Molina produced a narrow notebook from her other pocket and flipped pages. "More Holy Roller than Holy Roman Catholic Church, admittedly. 'Desert Spring Well of Christ Triumphant.'

You frown. Does that mean you know it?"

"It means I've seen churches like it. Tiny, unaffiliated, often either interesting or seriously weird." He stood up.

"I'm not through."

"Neither am I. l want to look it up in the phone book."

He returned from the kitchen with the formidable bulk of the Las Vegas phone book and began riffling the yellow pages even before he sat back down. "Do you know that Las Vegas has more churches per capita than most U.S. cities?"

"Heard that."

"A lot of Baptist congregations, tons of Mormon ones. The usual Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal. Then the zillions of Churches of Christ and Churches of God.

Inspiring, isn't it? Only one Unitarian Universalist Church, though. I guess we can't blame Temple too much for neglecting to attend."

"I don't care what church Temple Barr would be attending if she were a churchgoer. I should have figured she'd be something Wishy-washy like a Unitarian."

"A fallen-away Unitarian," Matt amended, smiling. "Here's the Sacred Well or whatever is, under 'Nondenominational.' I guess! No, I haven't been there."

"I didn't think you had."

"I could have been. I've visited a lot of local churches. Most cities don't have this rich range."

Molina shook her head. "To each his own hobby."

"What do you want me to do, if not offer expert testimony on churches?"

"I want you to come to headquarters, review the evidence, see if anything seems remotely familiar, or connected."

"To Temple?"

She nodded.

"To Max Kinsella?"

She nodded again.

"I can try, but the odds are--"

"I've been in Vegas a lot longer than you have. I know what the odds ate." He shrugged and handed the ring bag hack to her. "Guess Temple won't get that back for a while."

"Maybe never, if these cases aren't closed."

"Really? The police can do that? The ring must be valuable."

"You really so anxious to see it back on her finger again?"

"No. But it hurt her to lose it. You saw that."

"Better you be hurt than she?"

He shrugged again, then changed the subject. "You say the two murders were far apart.

Where was the other one?"

"The first one." Molina stood, jamming the Baggie into her bottomless pockets. They never bulged, but they were never empty. If she ever made captain, they should nickname her

"Kangaroo."

"It happened at the Blue Dahlia," she added on her way to the door. "I found the body, or, rather, Carmen did. But that's classified information."

She never turned hack to look at him, never slowed down. She simply left.

He stood in his open doorway, staring clown the empty hallway leading from his apartment, realizing why he had been called in as a semi neutral observer. More than two people he knew were personally linked to the puzzling murders. Lieutenant C. R. Molina's alter ego Carmen was too.