Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 2

Media Man

Matt Devine stood in his living room at three-twenty A.M. fresh home from work, a record two pieces of mail in his hands.

Two pieces of personal mail in his lobby box at once. Imagine that.

One was a letter from his mother in Chicago.

The other was a suspiciously small padded mailer from a radio station in Las Vegas. WCOO-AM.

He never went to bed right after getting home from his eight-hour shift at the hotline.

Listening to other people's woes and then piloting them through crises ranging from overdosing on Oreo cookies to cocaine was a sedentary job, but it gave the nervous system a real workout.

So Matt left the two provocative pieces of mail on his red sofa seat and went into the triangular-shaped kitchen to microwave hot water for herbal tea.

Amazing how many appliances one person living alone could accumulate as "necessities." As a parish priest, he had only been vaguely aware of what equipped the kitchen or furnished the rectory parlor. Much of it had been donated, thanks to the Catholic parish tradition of raising money for serious needs at church, rectory, and school. So Matt had always taken the presence of shoves, lamps, and microwave ovens for granted, as if they were wild flowers that sprang up in season when needed or wanted.

Now that he had left the dematerialized world of a religious vocation, every way he tuned was a speed ramp driving him onto the consumer highway. He was a perfect novice consumer, conspicuous or not. Almost everything that secular people took for granted, from clothing to gadgets, was new--and probably lacking to him.

Matt took the steaming mug of Red Zinger (Celestial Seasonings; had the brand name attracted his spiritual side?) to his Goodwill sofa (Vladimir Kagan original From the fifties, according to Temple the secondhand shopper) and set it on the melamine cube table (low-cost high-style Kmart, not courtesy of Martha Stewart, whose hopelessly homebody taste seemed to be redesigning America back into post-war frou-frou these days).

He opened the package first, expecting a promotional audiotape. Radio stations were also trying to convince everybody they were essential, but he didn't have a radio, only a small color TV on a wire-metal stand that looked like it belonged in an old folk's home.

The tape label read AMBROSIA.

That's when it crossed his mind that the tape might be something sleazy. This was Las Vegas, after all, where sex-for-sale offered as many innovations and inclinations as theme hotels.

A letter folded in thirds shook out of the empty package.

It was addressed to him, which made Matt frown, as if he had discovered a dirty wad of gum on the sole of his shoe. Almost no one knew his address, and he was happy with that situation.

He was probably the only man in America who got no junk mail, none specifically addressed to him, that is. There was always the "Occupant" stuff that would dog an apartment address through all its generations of tenants.

"Dear Mr. Devine," it began. He read on, his wariness changing to wonder. Finally he just sat there, balancing the unusable tape in one hand and the letter on the palm of the other. The tape weighed heavier.

He set them aside and used the table knife he had brought from the kitchen to open his mother's letter. (Did he need a real letter opener? Should he buy one? Where? Pier One? A stationery store in the mall? Or save money and stick with the table-knife? Decisions, decisions.) She usually hand-wrote her letters on blue-lined notebook pa- per, tear-off sheets she folded into inexpensive business envelopes.

But this envelope was square and pale blue. The smaller sheets inside had a faint image of a butterfly in the upper left-hand corner.

He raised his eyebrows. Looked like Mom would know where to get a fashionable letter opener these days, now that her niece Krys had drawn her into the shopping mall distractions.

He was glad to see his mother expressing some personality; she had spent so many years repressing it. But as he read, he found himself biting his lip.

She had been thinking--always a dangerous pastime, he thought wryly. He read one paragraph over, then over again.

I was thinking about what you said when you came for Christmas, about your real father. You said that he might not have died in Vietnam like his family's lawyers told me when they gave me that settlement. I was thinking that since you were so successful in finding your stepfather, maybe you could look into finding out about your real father. I've written down all I know, all l can remember. Maybe you will see some clues in that. I realize that you're not here in Chicago to do anything, but maybe you could suggest some ways to start looking.

No. The last time he had gone looking for a man who had gone missing, a man who did not want to be found, the man had died. Been murdered. Horribly.

Now his mother was asking him to hunt down a dead man, so how much worse could it be? A lot, if the man were still alive. A lot more than either of them could handle.

Meanwhile . . . he set aside his mother's letter and picked up the audiotape again.

He supposed he could listen to it. What harm would that do? No doubt that little question often led teenagers to their first heavy-metal rock album. But first he'd have to find someone with a tape player.

Someone? only one person he knew was nearby and handy and definitely armed with a sound system. His accelerating pulse made it impossible to tell if this was merely a good idea, or a dangerous one.

First thing in the morning. He would have a reason-- an excuse--to see Temple.