Cat On A Blue Monday

"My autobio is available in children's book sections everywhere. It is called 'Maurice, the Miracle Cat.' "He fans his nails--clipped, of course--in an affected way to examine them.

For all his down-home looks, this dude loves to put on airs.

"You have not heard any rumors of an attempted uprising against cats?"

"What nonsense!" Maurice says with a superior sniff. "I am told that cats are now more popular than dogs. Who would want to harm them?"

"You have been living the soft life for too long," say I, scowling. "The animal shelters work night and day shuffling cats out of their mortal coils, not to mention the random pieces of ricocheting metal that charge down the street, known as cars. You also overlook the bad old days, when our kind's association with what some authorities regarded as the wrong people led to a witch-hunt that consigned millions of our forebears to the fiery furnace."

"Ancient history." snarls the tiger-stripe before me.

Easy for him to say: he was not the wrong color in the wrong series of television commercials to boot.

Easy tor him to say: he was not the wrong color in the wrong century. Given that ancient history, it is lucky that a dude of my particular dark dye lot is here at ail.

I see that Easy Street has made Maurice--bet his original name was something simple like "Boots" or "Tuffy"--insensitive to social issues, and move on. it occurs to me, however, that any evil-deer wishing to do cats in general a public disservice could do worse than to begin with a visiting celebrity like Maurice. Perhaps I do not wish to stop this fiend.

But duty comes before poetic justice. As I wend my careful way between cages, avoiding cooing humans and raised stainless steel combs. I come across a strange rumor. It begins with a coy Siamese whose baby-blues hold a come-hither look. l have never cared for the oriental type--too skinny and too often cross-eyed and kink-tailed, and always temperamental--but I sashay over to find her chocolate-brown tail tapping impatiently outside the grillwork of her cage.

"What is the scoop, Big Boy?" she asks, nothing infantile about her baby-blues now that I am closer. "How did a he-man like you bust into this sideshow'? Are you an escapee from the Household Cat Division?"

Chapter 12

Wakeup Call

A ringing sound in his ears awoke Matt. He sat up in the dark, his body pounding with sudden alarm, his mind trying to remember. He often dreamed of the phone ringing, natural enough when his working life was spent answering it. Had that awakened him, or--

Another ring of the phone, a falsetto wobble from the main room. No dream, but who would call him at---he focused on the bedside clock-radio's LED numerals--four-thirty in the morning? Who even knew his phone number besides the hotline?

Awake and even more alarmed now, he got up and stumbled into the dark, trying to avoid the boxes of books he still hadn't unpacked, trying to find his way quickly through the rooms that still didn't seem his.

"Yes?"

He expected a pause and a hang-up, wrong number, or someone looking for a crack-of-dawn pizza.

"Matt?"

No mistake. Woman's voice he couldn't quite place.

"Yes?"

"Thank God!"

"Sister Seraphina! What--?"

"You've got to come."

"Come . . . where, why? Now?"

"Now, to the convent."

"What's wrong?"

"Our neighbor lady--a very old lady--is terribly ill, and Father Hernandez . . ."

"Yes?" he prodded.

"Father Hernandez is not functional. I need your help."

"Have you called an ambulance?"

"It may not be necessary, but you must come at once. More is needed."

He didn't want to get caught up in this, couldn't get involved in this. "Can't you handle it?"

"She's an old, old lady, Matt; from a generation that trusts only men in a crisis. It would be better if you came. Please, Matthias--Matt. "

He kept silent again. He had been asleep for only an hour;

Waking up so suddenly put his brain in deep-freeze. "I--l don't have a car, no transportation." Even to him, it sounded like an excuse, although it was true.

"Oh, Matthias, you must come quickly!"

He had never heard Sister Superfine sound so out of control, an old woman with a dysfunctional priest, an obscene phone-caller and now an injured neighbor on her hands.

"I'll get a car," he said, "and be there as fast as I can."

"Please hurry."

It was the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but even before she had hung up, he had switched on the small lamp by the phone and opened his almost-empty address book to a number at the beginning.

Chapter 13

Extreme Urgency

Temple was waiting outside her apartment door in a double-knit navy-blue jumpsuit, with her car keys and a tote bag, two minutes after Matt called.

"Of course you can have my car in an emergency," she had told him, not taking time to ask why.

Now she wondered. He hadn't sounded panicked, only deeply distracted beneath the haste, and oddly reluctant.

Footsteps pounded down the distant stairs and Temple went to meet them. At least he had remembered to forget calling the fatally slow elevator.

The low, night-wattage of the hall sconces made the Circle Ritz's interior seem eerie and isolated, like the limitless maze of corridors on an ocean liner. Temple almost expected the floor to lurch. What could be so urgent?

She met a running Matt by the elevator, where he reached for her car keys like a drowning man for a line.

She pulled her hand away. "I'll drive."

"You don't have to---" He reached again.

"Matt--no! This is an emergency; you might have to go fast. It's my car; I'll drive. Come on."

Temple headed for the door to the stairs and bulled through, Matt following and arguing too loudly.

"Temple! I don't want you involved." he insisted behind her. "I can drive fast--and safely, for heaven's sake. Give me the keys."

Even with their voices lowered to hoarse whispers, the words echoed up the concrete stairwell and buffeted at the safety doors separating them from resident sleepers.

Temple kept going--fast, clattering down the hard stairs in her slide on wedgies, the loose shoe backs slapping the soles of her feet as she skittered tight around each turn of the stairwell.

She charged out into the still, hot Las Vegas night, heading for the Storm until Matt caught up and hooked her arm, stopping her and spinning her around to face him in one economic gesture.

"You don't need to go." he said, insisted.

He must have dressed as quickly as she, yet in appearance he was the same unruffled Matt she always saw in his knit shirt and khaki pants, casual, calm. Except that now his voice vibrated a hint of exasperation she had never heard before, maybe even . . . desperation.

She hated to 'fess up--she didn't need to rise in the dead of night like a misdirected zombie on an errand of mercy--but if he wanted, needed, her car, she would have to admit what she knew.

"Yes, I do need to go, Matt, because you don't have a driver's license and I'm responsible if anything happens."

Stunned, he froze for a moment, and then followed without protest as she made for the car again. "I forgot, but--how . . . did you know" he asked over the Storm's top as she unlocked the driver's side.

Temple leaned across the seat to open the passenger door. "Lieutenant Molina." Matt really froze at that one. She was sorry the nearest streetlight was too distant to illuminate faces.

"Come on, get in." Temple started the car so suddenly the ignition gargled a protest. "Where are we going?"

Her question seemed to interrupt a series of questions he was asking himself. He shook his head to clear it. "Do you know where Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is?" He sounded resigned now. "Seguaro and Del Rey?"

"No, but I know the intersection, just tell me where to turn when we get there."

Even at five in the morning, Las Vegas streets sported traffic: if Chicago was the city that never shut down, Las Vegas was the one that never shut down or shut up. Temple guided the Storm along the fastest route at a slightly racy forty-five miles an hour. "What'll I say if the police stop us?"

"How did Molina know?" asked Matt. still dazed that she knew about his status--or lack thereof--with the Nevada State Motor Vehicle Department.

"How did she know about your license? Or your absence of same?" Temple flashed Matt a glance as a streetlamp flared overhead. His habitual calm looked more like numbness.

"She checked you out. Bet you didn't dream that I would be so dangerous to know. Yes, sir, Lieutenant Molina has a nagging curiosity about men of my acquaintance."

"Damn," he said, the only time she'd heard him swear. Why he said it was not clear.

"Yeah, Molina makes me say that a lot, too," Temple put in to lighten the atmosphere. "She is one stubborn daughter of a dork."

"Daughter of a dork?" That had shaken his unnatural calm.

"Well, son of a bitch is sexist, and besides, Molina's the wrong sex for it."

Matt's laugh sounded less like amusement and more like surrender. Obviously, things weren't going his way tonight, and Temple was one more unpleasant surprise. She wasn't supposed to know about his errand, and she wasn't supposed to know he didn't have a driver's license. Why? She was becoming almost as curious as Molina. Temple reflected.

"What are we riding to the rescue about?" she asked as she turned onto Seguaro.

He laughed again, wearily. "I don't exactly know. I recently . . . heard from an old grade-school teacher of mine from Chicago. She called out of the blue a few minutes ago, begging for help. l don't even know how she got my number?!

"Chicago? I thought you were raised on a farm."

He turned to face her at last. "What do you mean?"

"That's how you knew Midnight Louie was a he, you said on the day he came, that day we met by the pool. You said you learned that animal-husbandry sex stuff growing up on a farm."

"What a memory for detail! And checking out an animal isn't that arcane as long as it isn't big enough to kick you."

Matt leaned forward to adjust the air-conditioning fan. "The farm was my grandparents'; we went there almost every weekend when I was a kid, but I lived in the city, the old, inner city."

Temple nodded and eyed the neighborhood the Storm's headlights revealed in bright snatches. "Funny, I was here just today on an errand of mercy; I guess you'd call it."

"Errand of mercy?" He sounded struck by the phrase.

Temple took her right arm off the wheel and flexed it weight-lifter style, while

declaiming:

"Cat feeder for the world,

Litter-lugger, stacker of Tender Vittles,

Player with kittens and the nation's pet-sitter . . ."

Matt's laughter was relaxed for the first time that evening. Temple knew that her impromptu paraphrase of Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" wouldn't amuse him if he hadn't told the truth about growing up there. She sighed. Here she was, expecting every word to be a lie, like Molina, just because Molina had proved that Max Kinsella was living a lie. All men did not lie just because Max had, and besides, Max's sins were of omission more than commission. What were Matt's sins? Maybe she'd find out tonight, Temple thought with interest.

"Turn here," he said tersely.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, why?" "I can't believe it! I was just on this street a few hours ago, yesterday evening. l could have found my way here solo, even in the dark. The Cat Lady I visited lives near here. Does your old teacher keep cats, by any chance?"

"Only two, Peter and Paul,"

"Peter . . . ? A pumpkin-colored--"

"There she is! She shouldn't be waiting outdoors at night in this neighborhood," Matt hissed under his breath, opening his door and bounding out of the car before Temple had fully stopped it.

She followed as soon as she could wrestle her tote bag from the backseat, where it had fallen to the floor and wedged itself behind the driver's seat. Then she remembered Matt's concern and locked the Storm. By now he was conferring intensely with a woman whom the streetlight etched in pale grays.

She eyed Matt's former teacher with interest: tall and white-haired, she was leading Matt down the block at a rapid pace. "it was easier to tell you to come here than to direct you to a new address," she was explaining in the breathless voice of one who's been handling a crisis alone for too long.

"Fine, Seraphina," he said, turning to make sure Temple was all right. "This is a neighbor, Temple Barr."

The woman turned to give Temple a glance that took her in from top of the head to tippy-toes. Then she bustled on down the overgrown sidewalk, a bag like a doctor's swinging against her leg. Temple wondered if the woman was a doctor--or a nurse--and if so, why did she need Matt? And what kind of name was "Seraphina" and why just that?

"We look in on this elderly neighbor lady," Seraphina was explaining to Matt. She turned right at a walkway leading to the shadowy bulk of a house. "She's a bit . . . eccentric, and sometimes confused. She isn't always the most reliable person, cries wolf, but she called tonight again in a very credible panic. When I came over, I couldn't decide if her distress was physical or mental, but it was distress--"

"Then you didn't send for an ambulance?" Matt demanded, almost accused.

"I thought we'd decide about that . . . after." Seraphina had stopped at the front door to grope in her pocket for a key.

Temple reflected on how only elderly women came equipped with routine pockets nowadays. Her own jumpsuit had none, no doubt to preserve its sleek, wrinkle-free modern lines; too bad people didn't come with the same guarantee.

"None of this may be necessary--" Matt was saying with an impatience new to him "----me, Temple's car and Temple, this . . . entire emergency."

"It is necessary!" Seraphina retorted fiercely. "Do you think I would call on you if it weren't an extreme matter?"

Matt didn't answer for a moment. "You might think you were doing it for my own good," he said at last.

"For her good, I gave up on you when you graduated grade school; you're on your own, Matthias," she answered, then pushed a key into the lock and worked the heavy door open.

"I left Rose with her," she added, to Temple's mystification, if not Matt's.

Temple could only follow along like an unneeded comma, a trailing, expendable body tacked to the end of the mysterious rescue party. Her floppy shoes had made a disgraceful racket on the walk outside; they were no more discreet on the interior tile floors. But after four steps into the house, she stopped dead.

Even in the dark of night, even distracted by the emergency and the puzzling, unspoken byplay between Matt and this Seraphina woman, Temple knew where she was. Her nose told her so. Her nose said "Cats ahoy!" Cats to bow and port, and cats amidships. Cats high. cats low, cats large, cats small. Cats in hats, maybe, but most certainly cats in litter boxes, oh my.

A light switch flashed on at the older woman's sure touch, illuminating a staircase rising into the dark of a second story. Sure enough, cats were sprawling on the treads and balancing on the wrought-iron handrail and playing patty-cake through the bars of the decorative bird cage.

Matt and the old woman were working their way upward, stepping around cats as called for. He had taken the bag from her and from the rear, looked like a doctor making a house call.

Temple rushed to catch up with the pair, even though she felt redundant to their drama. The upstairs hall led to a bedroom, of course, where another old woman sat beside an even older woman who lay on the bed, her head tossing, her hands wringing. Blandina Tyler looked waxen and harried at the same time. Her eyes roamed the room's perimeter as if seeking escape---or an unseen enemy trying to enter.

"Noises again," she was murmuring in a monotone. "Betrayed by noises and lights and hisses. And Peter could not be found. They were coming for the Lord, and Peter could not be found . . . . Has the cock crowed yet?"

"Hush, Blandina." Seraphina rustled over like a veteran nurse and passed a calming hand over the woman's brow.

"The neighborhood roosters will be screeching soon enough." She glanced at the attendant. "Any change?"

The woman named Rose shook her grizzled head. "She may have hyperventilated while you were gone, but her condition got no worse, just the nonsensical ravings--"

Temple watched the two women, puzzled. They were past seventy, bespectacled, plain and rather clumpy, yet both radiated an air of cheerful competence polished to a high gloss, like retired nurses. Matt, she saw, watched the woman in the bed as if hypnotized by her. Did he know Blandina Tyler?

"They want me to die." Miss Tyler wailed suddenly.

"They will take all I have and draw lots for the rest. For the cats, I was in the garden when they came, with noise and lights--and where was Peter? Run away. I wasn't going to struggle, but then--oh, it's horrible, horrible, Profanity.

'Pray for us now and at the hour of our death--' I don't want to die that way!"

Her clutching fingers reached for the women trying to calm her agitated body. She clung to their hands as if to sanity.

"She's no better," Seraphina judged. "Call the ambulance, Rose," As her friend rushed from the room. Seraphina bowed close to the stricken woman. "I've brought the sacrament, Blandina. You needn't worry about dying untended."

"Not . . . Father Hernandez!" Blandina both begged and ordered. "Not . . . him. He wants me in heaven without my cats, and I won't have that. I'd rather go to hell!"

"Now, you don't mean that, and it won't happen, and not Father Hernandez, Someone else."

"I won't have it from you!" Blandina Tyler said with a trace of her earlier sharpness. "You go too far, with your short skirts and bare heads. Sacrilege, Profanity, and so cruel--" Her face contorted as if seeing a nightmarish vision.

"Not Father Hernandez," Seraphina said firmly, stepping aside to reveal Matt, looking like an angel of the Lord, all golden-haired and as handsome as a prince in a fairy tale.

The sight of him struck Blandina silent for a moment.

Then she looked him up and down with the old suspicion that Temple recognized; she had been its recipient only hours before. "He's not wearing-"

"I called him in the dead of night," Seraphina reminded her.

"Isn't it . . . dawn yet?" the old woman asked in a sudden pathetic, trembling tone. "The nights have been so long lately."

Matt drew a side chair to the bed and sat on it. Sister Seraphina lifted the black bag onto the bedside table she had emptied of clutter. She opened the bag and drew out a shining length of pale satin as long as an albino snake, wider than a ribbon but not as broad as a scarf.

Matt took it and put it around his neck. Temple had a momentary vision of a World War I pilot with his silk scarf . . . but that was off-key. She kept trying to place this scene into some context she could recognize, and failed utterly.

Matt glanced at her briefly, the first time he had acknowledged her presence since introducing her to Seraphina, then lifted one end of the satin length to his face and kissed it.

Seraphina handed him a small glass bottle holding clear liquid, leaning near to whisper something in his ear.

"We are gathered," Matt said, "at the side of our friend Blandina to bring health and healing to her spirit and body." He stood, and with several ceremonial shakes, sprinkled the bottle's contents on the bed and around the room. When a strong sprinkle came in Temple's direction, she started as if it was acid, but Matt no longer noticed her, not anyone in the room but the sick woman.

"She attended daily Mass," Seraphina murmured to Matt, adding with a smile, "despite Father Hernandez, and made her confession every Saturday."

He nodded, then leaned forward with great concentration and almost visible compassion, to place his palms on the old woman's head. She sighed deeply, and then the tortured tossing of her head subsided.

Seraphina took another small glass bottle and some cotton balls from the bag. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Temple.

"Should I leave?" a voice asked. Temple was startled to find it had been hers.

Matt did not look up, but Seraphina smiled and shook her head. Temple backed up until a piece of furniture stopped her, and set her heavy tote bag on the floor as slowly and quietly as she could.

Matt pressed his thumb to the bottle, then tilted it. His thumb-tip glistened as it reached toward the sick woman, touched her forehead and made a mark there. He repeated the ritual, anointing the palm of each hand.

Temple squelched a wild wondering if that gesture tickled. Clearly, it did not. Blandina Tyler calmed even more as Matt intoned: "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in His love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. May the Lord who freed you from sin save and raise you up. Amen."

Matt then leaned forward and spoke intently, in a low tone, wishing Blandina peace of mind and body, true serenity of soul and spirit. Temple couldn't absorb all the words, just as she could barely absorb the meaning of this scene, but she absorbed the same calm that visibly quieted Blandina moment by moment.

"Our Father," Matt began, "Who art in Heaven . . ."

Seraphina joined in, and Temple was surprised that she still knew the words as well as she did--okay, an Our Father was like the Pledge of Allegiance or riding a bicycle; once you learned to do it, you never forgot--except that she alone charged ahead at the end with her favorite, thundering, dramatic line, "For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory--" The others stopped, even Rose, who had returned to the room and stood in the doorway watching and nodding with a solemn look on her round, woebegone face.

Temple sat down on what was behind hers-an old-fashioned trunk, she saw as she turned--and caught Blandina's cane, which had been propped against the trunk, before it fell to the floor. When she reinstated it, she noticed that the

rubber tip was damp and dotted with curds of fresh dirt.

Blandina had been out in the garden, Temple realized. Maybe that's where the ravings about a garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, had risen to haunt her mind; and that comment about Peter and betrayal and cocks crowing . . . obviously, the woman was very religious. Obviously, Temple was attending a religious rite. Obviously, Matt had presided here at Seraphina's behest.

Except that nothing was obvious to Temple beyond the incomprehensible obvious. Who was who and what was what--and did she really want to know?

She heard Matt's voice murmuring again, and this time she didn't listen. She was beginning to feel like an eavesdropper, after all.

Then she heard the thin, pale wail of a nearing emergency vehicle and felt relieved that something, something she understood, was coming to take charge of this situation that was so perplexing and even, in its way, frightening and disturbing.

When the heavyset man and woman pounded up the stairs--the siren had apparently banished all cats--with their equipment and their gurney and when Blandina Tyler was checked fore and aft and was being noisily bounced down the stairs. Temple finally looked up from her front-row- center seat on the trunk.

The black bag was shut. Matt was silent and scarf less. Seraphina was looking much relieved and toward Temple, then to the person referred to as "Rose."

"Forgive me for forgetting introductions," Seraphina said. "I am Sister Seraphina O'Donnell and this is Sister Saint Rose of Lima. This is Matt's friend. Temple--"

"Barr," Temple was proud to find herself reporting. Sister Seraphina O'Donnell. Sister Saint Rose of Lima. The words made no sense. "Rose" did. She smiled at the woman, who beamed back.

Temple decided that only good Girl Scout behavior would save her. "I . . . urn, was supposed to come in the morning and help Miss Tyler feed her cats. I suppose if I stopped at your house--" she carefully included both women in her glance "--you could let me in. There are . . . an awful lot of cats."

"We know." Rose chuckled a little. "You're a darling girl to suggest it," she added with a tinge of Irish brogue, "but we can do it. We're used to Miss Tyler's fascinating felines. In fact, we adopted a couple of them."

Temple didn't try to argue. A person lost in space, time and sense does not argue. as Alice in Wonderland had proved long ago.

"I'll ride with her to the hospital," Sister St. Rose of Lima told Sister Seraphina, who nodded and retrieved the black bag from the bedside table.

Mart did not offer to help her with it, Temple noticed, and Matt was always polite beyond belief.

"What about her cane?" Temple asked with belated concern, hefting the colorful stick.

"She won't need it until she comes home," Sister Seraphina assured her, following Rose out into the hall.

Temple nudged Matt, who had not yet moved, then went out in turn.

Downstairs, the rooms glowed with the silent red strobe of the ambulance light outside the open front door. Cats' eyes gleamed in the dark, as green as Christmas foil.

"Apparently she has a lot of cats," Matt said when he came downstairs, still sounding dazed.

Temple was able at last to have something in common with the odd old women named "Sister"--wry laughter.

"That's an understatement," Temple said. "Do you know how many there are?"

Sister Seraphina answered while Sister St. Rose of Lima---what a long name; no wonder it was shortened to "Rose"---went out to the ambulance.

"We think seventy-three."

"Aren't there laws?" Matt asked.

"City regulations," Seraphina corrected in a voice that was pure schoolteacher. "Her cats keep her happy. Who's going to complain about how many she keeps?"

"Maybe . . . somebody," Temple said.

Both of them looked at her, the Silent Woman through all of this.

"Miss Tyler was getting odd phone calls," Temple began, thinking. "No wonder she ended up so hysterical tonight.

That's a lot of pressure for an old lady living alone to take, with nothing but watch cats around."

"Phone calls?" Matt was suddenly incisive, as he had not been all evening, but just as he had been when Temple had limped home after being assaulted in the Goliath parking ramp a few weeks before. "What kind of phone calls? Obscene?"

Sister Seraphina, in shock, which seemed foreign to her, sat down on a shapeless easy chair"-and half-rose when a sleeping cat rocketed oil' the cushion and into the darkness.

"Obscenely weird," Temple said. "Hissing sounds. Maybe wheezy breathing. And when I was over here feeding the Cats this evening, she mentioned sounds and lights outside the house."

Seraphina shook her head. "She was always calling the police about that, but they never found anything. They finally stopped coming."

Matt lifted a tiny, but adult, white cat from the third step of the stairs and sat down. The harsh hall light above painted his face with deep shadows of strain, or of thought.

"I got a call at the hotline from an elderly woman not long ago . . ."

"That must have been Blandina," Sister Seraphina said. "She called us at the convent at least twice a day."

After a silence, Temple spoke. "She was old, she was alone and frightened, she cried wolf to everyone who would listen. What if there really is a wolf?"

"Why?" Matt demanded.

"Well, the reason I'm here---" Matt looked alarmed as Sister Seraphina's expression grew alert, but Temple wasn't about to tattle on Matt's missing driver's license to old Teacher Seraphina, no way. The generations had to stick up for each other, no matter what "_is that Miss Tyler's niece, Peggy Wilhelm--"

"Darling girl," Seraphina interrupted enthusiastically.

"Never abandoned her aunt,"

"Anyway," Temple went on for Matt's benefit, "she raises purebred Birmans, and is exhibiting them at the cat show downtown this weekend. And one was shaved."

"Shaved?" The question came simultaneously from both listeners.

Temple, assured of a rapt audience now, nodded solemnly. "Shaved from head to tail, and around the body."

Birmans are long-haired cats, and this one was a potential champion in its class, maybe even a Best of Show. Birmans are the sacred cats of Burma, but they're not supposed to have tonsures like monks. This one does. Peggy has to stay and guard her other cats, so I came over in her place to help her aunt feed the kitties last night. I can't help wondering if the incidents are connected."

"Not," said Matt to Seraphina, "to mention the obscene calls to the convent."

"Convent?" Now Temple could express full indignation and ignorance. "What convent?"

"Ours," Seraphina said serenely. "It's really just a large house; there are so few of us left. We Sisters of Charity belong to Our Lady of Guadalupe now," she added for Temple's benefit, "Rose and I and a few others. Blandina was our neighbor and we looked out for her--and the cats when Peggy wasn't around."

"Someone is making obscene phone calls to a convent?"

Temple demanded in disbelief. Oh, Alice, lend me your Tylenol-Three, your caterpillar and a full deck of cards!

"To one of our nuns, Sister Mary Monica,"

"She's over ninety and seriously hearing-impaired," Matt explained quickly, as if that made any difference.

"So that's why you're here," Temple charged.

"Guilty," he said, sounding exactly that. "Sister Seraphina called on me because she thought that I, being a hotline counselor, would know about the creeps that do this."

Matt and Sister Seraphina exchanged a quick glance that was not lost on Temple. More was here than met the eye. Oh, boy, was that an understatement!

She decided to stick to the facts she knew, Ma'am, just the facts, and Sergeant Friday could take a flying . . . flip.

"So," said Temple, toting insanities, "Two houses practically next door to each other are receiving nuisance calls, and now one resident is . . . I don't know, either ill or hysterical.

Miss Tyler seemed to have her marbles all in a row when I was here this morning."

"She's been under a lot of pressure," Seraphina said firmly. "Recently she's had a little feud with Father Hernandez, our parish priest. Despite her devout ways and the parish development program, they came to a parting on the issue of whether cats go to heaven." She sighed.

"Oh," Temple said. "I was raised Unitarian. I'm not good on this theology stuff."

Seraphina's smile was the kind that would melt barbed wire. "Neither was Father Hernandez," she said. "We tell children that heaven will be what they imagine. Why can't we tell old people, who are closer than us to both childish simplicity and heaven, what they need to hear? Father Hernandez refused to allow even a scintilla of chance that cats could cajole Saint Peter for entry. Blandina was furious, and worse, frightened. Those cats are all she has."

"Besides her niece," Temple put in.

"A niece, however devoted, is not the same as the creatures she saved, as the creatures who came to this house and found a haven here. Her rescued cats made Blandina feel useful, and that is a boon at any age." Seraphina sighed again, though she did not strike Temple as the sighing type under other circumstances.

Temple considered that old nuns were not so different from elderly maiden ladies who had too many cats and thought that their time had passed, that they could save no one but themselves and a few dozen abandoned animals. Except that nuns tended to go in for abandoned souls. Was Matt one?

In the dark of early morning, the cats hid and moved and hungered for food. Like a school of silent fish, they shifted through the vast depths of the old house, now missing its mistress. Temple thought of the tinfoil troughs she had filled not a day before, and of how empty they would soon be, and of how empty this house would be without Blandina. She saw the cane abandoned against the bedroom wall, and heard the cats crying for love and food, food and love.

She saw an Outsider who railed at the safeness of all little worlds, who dialed deaf, ancient nuns with even more ancient obscenities, who harassed old women and cats. She remembered the things the old woman, wandering, had said in her bed, and became profoundly disturbed.

"Blandina had no hearing problem," Temple said. "Maybe she went out to face the night lights and sounds tonight. What made her sick? What made her so sick at heart and soul that she thought of Christ betrayed by Peter?

I'm not particularly religious." Temple confessed, "but wasn't there a lot of the New Testament in what she said tonight?"

They were watching her, the old woman and the man she did not know.

"There was fresh dirt on Miss Tyler's cane tip," Temple said, "In the bedroom."

When they rose, it was a foregone conclusion.

Seraphina led them through the house's labyrinthine ways to the back. Dawn was bleaching the horizon white. The bushes flared like black fires against the sky.

Cats milled around their feet in the kitchen. Cats clamored for milk and honey and Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.

They went outside. No cocks crowed.

The garden was still and empty. Blandina would not trust her precious cats to an outside environment, and most rescued cats disdained the cold, cruel outer world that had orphaned them.

The three of them went their separate ways in the garden, lost in separate thoughts, searching separate ways.

Light blotted up the darkness slowly, hardly seeming to win, but sure to.

Temple had more to think about than old women and cats, but she kept looking for Something.

She found magenta-flowered oleander bushes burning bright against the indomitable dawn, scrub cactus and strange flowers, sluggish lizards hissing away in the underbrush.

The backyard was large, and fenced in with stone five Feet high. The sky was blushing pink. She walked back toward the house, thinking of feeding the cats, even though it was early. It would save a trip later.

She came to the back door, and the light was just enough that she saw what they all had missed seeing on the way out.

She didn't think that she screamed, but the other two were there in what seemed to be too long an instant.

"My God!" said Matt.

"Peter!" Seraphina said in shock, then repeated the name in a voice of distraught love.

Temple saw what Blandina had seen, in her own backyard, on her own back door: the beige convent cat, half of Peter and Paul, nailed--crucified--by his outstretched front paws to the heavy wooden back door.

Chapter 14

Cat Crime

"He's not dead," Matt said, coming into the kitchen's bright fluorescents. "Can you find a towel?"

Temple and Sister Seraphina scattered in shocked relief - Temple for the terry-cloth dish towels that she had spotted yesterday under a stack of unused foil roaster pans in the pantry, Sister Seraphina upstairs for parts unknown.

Both women had scurried into the house--averting their eyes from the open door---as soon as they had found the claw hammer Matt had asked for in the shed at the back of the garden. Temple felt guilty about failing to rise to the occasion while she comforted Sister Seraphina in the kitchen, but--after all-----Matt had spent his summers on a farm and was better prepared to deal with animal tragedies.

Temple was a city girl through and through. She had to avert her eyes from road kill, even if it was a bird or a squirrel or a rat, although she noted the exact location and invariably called animal control to pick up the remains, hoping they would do so before she had to drive that way again. In fact, she would often change her route for a while to make sure the road was clear. If everyday traffic fatalities upset her that much, a crucified cat was more than even a good Girl Scout should have to cope with when there was (thank God for the small favors of long-institutionalized sexism) a man around to see to it.

So, still feeling guilty when Sister Seraphina leaped over cats to hurtle down the stairs with a bath towel, Temple manfully offered to take the towels out to Matt.

The cat lay on its side on a wooden bench, unconscious, Matt said.

"Are you sure?" she asked, handing him the towels.

"I think it's in shock. We may be too late. But the . . . foot injuries weren't enough to kill it. Do you know of a vet?"

"Yes, and---" Temple checked her watch. "They've just opened, thank God." She instantly blanched, wondering if invoking the deity over a cat was disrespectful.

But Matt didn't notice. He was wrapping the cat up like a baby in swaddling clothes.

"I'll drive; you carry," Temple suggested briskly, heading back into the house to collect her tote bag.

Sister Seraphina was waiting in the kitchen, white-faced. "I'll feed the cats," she said as they came in. She peeked gingerly into Matt's bundle. "Will he--"

"We'll try."

"It's too bad you couldn't stay for seven-o'clock Mass. I'd like you to meet Father Hernandez."

Matt didn't look at all sorry, just worried. "I'll have to pass on that."

"Of course," Sister Seraphina murmured.

"And we'll call with news," Temple promised, jingling her car keys.

She and Matt rushed out, avoiding cats, and into the Storm as fast as she could unlock it.

Temple barely noticed the morning warming up and brightening all around her; she was just glad she could drive in daylight as she pushed the Storm around corners and down lightly traveled streets at forty miles an hour, getting a slew of dirty looks from more moderate drivers.

"Hold the bundle up," she suggested to Matt. "Maybe they'll think it's a sick baby."

He obliged; the cat was too unconscious to care.

"That's the most awful thing I've ever seen in my life," Temple said by way of small talk. Her knees were inclined to shake, she noticed, and so had her voice on the last sentence.

"Quite a night," Matt answered in his usual understatement.

She wondered what it would take to jar his composure. She just may have seen it. She had a feeling that the cat's plight had restored Matt's equilibrium, even as it had almost tipped her totally off the scale of sanity.

"Who would do such a thing?" she asked, knowing the question was expected, and useless, and unanswerable, but needing to ask.

"I don't know. Someone sick is the obvious answer. But in what way?"

"And why the convent cat on Miss Tyler's door? Who was the target of this act?"

"Usually the kind of people--or kids----who torture animals aren't too fussy about the targets. They just want to find someone who cares, who'll be hurt and shocked and frightened."

"It could be kids, couldn't it? That's even creepier."

"Adults don't normally do this sort of thing. If they're inclined to atrocity, they've graduated to abusing people by the time they're all grown up,"

Temple shivered at Matt's cynicism, new from him. It bespoke a darker world view than she had suspected he glimpsed.

She spun the Storm around the last corner and pulled into the lot, relieved to see only a sprinkle of cars for staff members. She ran around the car to open the door for Matt and clattered ahead to open the vet's door.

An empty waiting room, Good, Temple thought as she stormed the desk.

"We've got an emergency, a terribly abused cat."

The woman on duty looked up, her face struggling to blend an expression of anger with sympathy. "Take it right in. I'll buzz Dr. Doolittle."

"Dr. Doolittle?" Matt mouthed in amazement as he followed Temple into the first examining room.

She shrugged and watched him lay the bundle on the tabletop, then reached out to stroke the cat's forehead.

Energy and a rush of air came in with the vet. "What happened?" she asked, peeling back the towels to reveal Peter's inert form.

Temple and Matt consulted each other with a glance. Matt spoke. "We found him nailed to a door. He's not dead, but I don't know how bad--"

"Your cat?" Dr. Doolittle asked. She knew Temple had Midnight Louie.

"No," he said quickly. "A . . . friend's. An elderly lady's."

Dr. Doolittle made a sound of disgust as she put on a stethoscope. An assistant hurried in. "You two had better wait outside until we get a good look at him."

They edged out into the antiseptic hall, then into the waiting room, where they could read dog and cat magazines or peruse free literature from manufacturers of dog and cat products--Yummy Tum-tum-tummy or Free-to-be-Feline. Not easy to forget where you were in a veterinarian's waiting room, Temple mused. Not easy to forget what brought you there. . . .

She and Matt sat on adjoining free-form plastic chairs and stared at the vinyl-tiled floor.

"Reminds me of the hospital emergency room," Temple said finally.

"Yeah."

"At least Lieutenant Molina isn't here."

"She might have to be here yet."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not homicide, but it's pretty close."

"A tortured cat is not the kind of thing the police can deal with," Temple objected, for the idea of Lieutenant Molina being drawn into her life again was just too awful to contemplate. "Animals are legally viewed as property. That poor cat is worth what somebody would pay for it, period, and you know that's not much."

"Still," Matt said, "the police Gang Unit might be interested, especially if they've got Satanist activity in the area, and they usually do."

Temple sat forward on the chair designed to slide her deep against its back. "Satanists?" she whispered. "I never thought of that!"

Matt shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "The cat's owners are nuns who live in a convent next to a church; the cat was nailed to the door of a devoted churchgoer who takes in stray Cats. Crucifixion is a potent symbol to modern Christians, no matter the victim, no matter the denomination."

Temple resisted the chair seat's slick pull on her weary and stunned body, resisted slumping into her seat like a scarecrow who'd seen too much and was finally too scared to crow back.

"Satanism," she repeated, truly chilled to the bone.

Dr. Doolittle was there almost as soon as they heard her coming. She sat down on an empty chair.

"He is in shock. He's lost a lot of blood."

"Yeah, the door was pretty smeared," Matt said.

Temple stared at him. "I didn't see any blood."

"It was still darkish. I noticed it as I was getting him off and daylight was breaking."

"We need to transfuse him." Dr. Doolittle was being professionally brusque. "As soon as possible."

"Then do it," Temple gave permission. "I'm sure the owner will okay it, if Peter needs it."

Dr. Doolittle sighed. "That's just it. We usually have one of our office cats available, but a customer fell in love with the last one and adopted it. We haven't taken in a replacement yet."

"I don't understand," Temple said. "Office cats?"

Dr. Doolittle took off her tortoiseshell-rimmed yuppie glasses and rubbed her face with a bony hand bearing the battle scars of her profession.

"'We're a vet's office. Everyone's always dumping unwanted or wounded animals on our doorstep. Some we place. Some we keep. It's handy to have a healthy cat around when blood donations are called for. We just happen to be out at the moment."

"What are the qualifications for a blood donor?" Temple asked.

"We prefer a big, strong, healthy donor. And of course it must be a cat."

"Louie!" said Temple, standing.

Matt was standing too, "The Circle Ritz?"

"We'll be right back," Temple told the vet on the way out the door.

Getting into the Storm fast was becoming a habit. The driver and passenger doors slammed simultaneously. Temple gunned the motor and headed for home.

The Circle Ritz was quiet. Late workers hadn't left yet; early birds were long gone. They raced up the three flights of stairs, automatically ignoring the elevators.

Temple flubbed putting her key in her own front door; her hands were shaking so much. "Let's hope he's here. Come on, Louie, You old layabout, be laying about----"

Inside, the apartment was cool and serene, like a scene from a decorating magazine on another planet. So much had happened since Temple had left here in the wee morning hours at Matt's urgent behest.

They stood stock still, absorbing the unoccupied peace of the place like refugees from a far uglier world. Temple eyed her pale sofa, only black cat hairs, like the trail of the Yeti in the Himalayas, all advertisement and no substance.

She ran into the small kitchen, looking high and low. Free-to-be-Feline untouched in the bowl, but the tempting top layer of Shrimp Oyster Aloha was gone.

To the office, Matt behind her, and no familiar dark form sprawled all over her paperwork. To the main room again and--no help for it----her bedroom, which Matt had never seen, through no fault of her own, but now. . . .

Oh, Lordy, she hadn't straightened up in here. Clothes everywhere and toppled shoes and--oh, to die; how had she forgotten about them?--four Cosmopolitan magazines fanned like a hand of playing cards by the bedside table; she read them only for the horoscopes, honest.

And there, like a fat black spider, smack dab in the middle of her crumpled zebra-striped, red-piped coverlet.

"Midnight Louie!" Temple squealed, picking him up in one surprised, limp, large armful. "I knew I could count on you!"

"Have you a towel?" Matt asked.

"No, a carrier in the storage closet."

"No time," Matt pronounced, going into her bathroom and coming out with a bath towel that featured a top-hatted Fred Astaire doing a signature glide.

He wrapped Louie and headed for the front door.

Louie wasn't going to like that, but Temple jangled her key ring and tan after them.

Once more into the Storm, The Fred Astaire towel was doing a cha-cha in Matt's grasp, but Temple was too busy driving unsafely to watch.

The vet's. Out of the car, into the office. Matt bearing Louie like a veiled sacrifice into an examining room. Temple trotting alongside, wailing apologies as she patted Louie's only visible part, the top of his head.

Dr. Doolittle there, talking seriously as an attendant whisked Louie away. "Your cat should stay here all day to recover, but he'll be just fine. We won't know anything until this afternoon. Call at four."

Temple and Matt stood outside the veterinarian's office, watching the sun glint off the second-story windows across the street. He had called Sister Seraphina from the receptionist's phone. Diagnosis: still alive. Prognosis: we won't know till four o'clock.

Temple threw herself behind the wheel again and hit the bucket seat like a sack of couch potatoes.

Matt was in the passenger seat as if materialized there, as if he were the Mystifying Max and had always been there, but invisible.

"Where to?" he asked, but he sounded as if he didn't care.

Temple started the car engine, not blaming it one bit for choking.

"The emergency room," she said, "My style this time."

Chapter 15

Soul Food

Not another car was parked between the slanted parallel lines pointing to Fernando's Taqueria, which could have more accurately been called "Fernando's Hideaway," so modestly was it squeezed between a dry cleaner's and an old fashioned barbershop that didn't open until eleven o'clock.

"Breakfast," Temple said, turning off the Storm's engine with a happy sigh to know that the car would stay idle and stay put for a while, "is on me."

Matt looked dubious in a disinterested sort of way. Granted, Fernando's was not impressive from the outside. And as they entered to face garish yellow walls, mercifully softened by dim lights, and bare Formica tables and gray plastic chairs, Temple had to admit to herself that it wasn't impressive on the inside, either.

"Isn't a taqueria for takeout food?" Matt looked around, his doubtful glance pausing on a blackboard with the menu written entirely in Spanish.

"Normally," Temple plunked herself down at a table for four and set her tote bag on the empty chair beside her. "Fernando's isn't normal, but it's clean, out of the way, and the food is fiery enough to compete with a shooting star. Plus, the coffee is so strong that your spoon will stand up and do a Mexican hat dance in it."

Matt pulled out an opposite chair, looking around in a shell-shocked way that Temple just knew an order of Heuvos Rancheros Fernando would do much to overcome.

"You do like Mexican food?" she asked in an anxious afterthought.

"Normally," Matt said, "but today isn't normal." He eyed the empty little restaurant again, so bate of frills. "This place is pristine, though, for a hole-in-the-wall."

"I figured that's what we needed at the moment--a hide-out, a modest little hole-in-the-wall for two."

Matt nodded slowly, looking as if he would rather be adjusting the silverware and the place mat or turning his water glass in his hands, only there wasn't any of that.

A Hispanic man emerged from the rear and deposited a bouquet of stainless steel silverware wrapped in a doily of plain white paper napkin in front of each of them.

"I'll order," Temple said, because she knew the menu and because she didn't think that Matt would be good at small decisions right now. "I'm having the House Heavenly Hash--onions and cilantro on the side of humus-that's eggs--swimming in the house sauce, which is very green, very thick and very spicy-hot. And coffee." She repeated the order in fairly decent Spanish to the waiter, who nodded, disdaining to write anything down.

Matt shrugged. "The same, I guess."

"Okay, but I'll order your sauce on the side--they have a great tomatillo salsa that will leave your tonsils unscalded. Y agua," she told the waiter last, pointing to them both.

Now Matt would soon have plenty to fiddle with.

"This doesn't strike me as your kind of place," he said.

"It is now. But you're right." She hated mixing metaphors, mixing Max and Matt, but there was no escape, not even for a verbal magician. "Max found it," she admitted. "I'm not that adventuresome. Max always said that the best thing about Fernando's was that nobody here speaks English. It's perfect for six-cups-of-coffee mornings."

"Oh," Matt leaned back to let the waiter set a tall, olive-green, nubby plastic glass before him. "Did Max have a lot of six-cups-of-coffee mornings?"

Temple smiled, shakily. If she wanted to find out the scoop on Matt, she would have to dish up a bit of her and Max. "No, and not too many mornings, either. He usually slept until eleven. Fernando's is a little more lively then."

"I keep the same hours," Matt noted after a slow sip of water.

"You going to be able to get off of work tonight?"

"Maybe, if they can call someone else in. But there's no point. I won't get any sleep anyway. I'm not used to normal work hours now."

Temple nodded. "Then the best thing to do is to start mainlining caffeine and keep going until . . . what time do you usually get home? Three-thirty A.M.?"

He nodded.

"And Sister Seraphina called you at--?"

"Four-thirty. ' '

"Then the cat was attacked before four."

He nodded again, clearly not as interested in the night's exact chronology as she was. "Temple, you must be wondering--"

"I am beyond wonder," she said quickly. Nothing was worse than an ex-reporter's need-to-know, and right now she was so very needy. "I'm too tired. But I am congenitally nosy-"

"You've got a right to know." he began, leaning back again as a heavy, white-porcelain cup filled to the brim with molasses-dark--and thick----coffee was placed before him.

"Leche, por favor," Temple asked the waiter before unfurling her paper napkin and drawing out the spoon. How long could she put it off?

A small blue pitcher of milk arrived, and then the waiter left. Temple poured a pale stream into her coffee, stirring until the black color softened. The cup was too full. She'd have to drink it down a little before she could mix the just-right shade of tan.

"I don't have a right to know anything," she said after another moment. "Of course . . ." She sighed. "Given my wild imagination, it might be in your best interests to head me off at the pass."

He sipped the steaming coffee as if to gather Columbian courage. "I was a priest."

Four little words. Hearing them put Temple in the kind of daze Matt had visibly occupied ever since Sister Seraphina's call. She was getting hooked on a priest--after the debacle of Max? Oh, puhleeze. No. . . .

"You'll have to bear with me," she made herself say. "I'm a fallen-away Unitarian. We know a little about everything and not much about anything. You were a priest?"

He nodded.

"An . . . Episcopal priest?"

He shook his head, but couldn't help smiling at her hopeful tone. "No."

"No." Temple contemplated her coffee cup, and then added enough milk to bring the contents lapping at the brim. She concentrated on spilling not a drop as she lifted it to her lips and sipped, saying a little prayer so she wouldn't spill, so she wouldn't spill her overflowing uncertainties. "I didn't really think that Our Lady of Guadalupe was big in the Episcopal Church, but they do have nuns, I think, and they do call them 'sister'?"

Matt nodded. "You know more than you think you do."

"But you were a Catholic priest?"

"Yes."

"The kind with the usual vows--um, poverty, chastity and obedience?"

"Yes."

"The celibate kind?"

He tried hard not to hesitate. "Yes."

"And now you're not a priest, officially."

"Yes."

"But if you were a priest, why did Sister Seraphina call you? Why didn't she ask this invisible Father Hernandez everybody talks about but nobody sees? And why would an . . . ex-priest perform some kind of rite?" Temple knew her spate of questions was a form of denial, yet she denied on, like poor befuddled Peter in the Garden. I know you didn't want to do it. Aren't you . . . disqualified from doing that now? Isn't it a . . . sin?"

Matt leaned forward, his arms and hands curved around his coffee cup as if defending it, or seeking warmth.

"It's a judgment call and a delicate situation. In an emergency, if the person is dying, Sister Seraphina could administer the sacrament herself, even a lay person could. But if the person's condition is more uncertain, and a priest is available . . . Father Hernandez was not. Miss Tyler had been having a fierce feud with him and would have been even more distressed to see him."

"I know about that," Temple put in. "Father Hernandez had this perfectly silly notion that God doesn't allow cats in heaven. If poor Miss Tyler had seen Midnight Louie, I'm sure she would have seen the point in that."

"The theological point," Matt said, "is that animals don't have souls, and only those with souls can get to heaven."

"Only those with souls in apple-pie order," Temple added solemnly, wondering about Matt's.

"The . . . sacrament used to be called 'Extreme Unction' and was associated with the dying. Nowadays the church recognizes the healing nature of the ritual and it's given under much less rigorous circumstances. It's called the anointing of the sick, and the reason you were so puzzled by it--besides being such a fierce Unitarian--is that a lot of Catholics haven't witnessed it, even today. It was the most private of the sacraments, and to some, the most frightening. To a devout Catholic like Miss Tyler, the sacrament could have a strong healing and calming effect, as you saw. Sister Seraphina was right that she should have it, was right to decide that Father Hernandez would upset her, was even right to call on me. A woman of Miss Tyler's generation would not have accepted a nun administering a sacrament; priests and doctors are like gods to such women."

He laughed wearily at their delusions, and then said with the intensity of someone convincing himself: "I was part of the necessary psychological efficacy of the sacrament, as well as its spiritual aspect."

"But Miss Tyler is feuding with Father Hernandez! How can she do that if she's such a devout Catholic?"

Matt smiled his first full-wattage smile of the morning. "Devout Catholics, more than anyone else, consider themselves privileged--no, obliged---to point out personal failings to their parish priests."

"Oh. It must not be fun to be a parish priest."

"No."

Were you!"

"For a while."

"Oh."

Out from the kitchen came the waiter bearing two large oval plates heaped with mounds of food. Mexican food had an earthy, yet limited color range--yellow to red to brown and was not highly textured; everything was chopped into such tidy, digestible piles. Yet it was . . . Temple searched for the proper mental tribute: it was Yummy on the Tum-tum-tummy. Especially when that tummy was dancing a solo of uncertainty.

She and Matt studied their plates with awe after the waiter left.

"That's a lot of food," Matt said finally. "I don't know if I've got the stomach for it."

"One taste and you'll know you don't. That's what makes Mexican food so much fun; it's an endurance contest."

He offered a pale smile and spooned some of the milder salsa on his eggs. Temple made sure her eggs were basted in green sauce and took a big bite.

Umm, who would believe minced vegetables could have such zip? Those scrambled eggs, no matter how fluffy, could taste so substantial?

"This isn't bad," Matt admitted, forking up another bite.

The warm food and hot coffee, the combination of bitter and fiery tastes--the very alienness of eating Mexican food at eight O'clock in the morning--revitalized them both, as Temple had hoped it would. It was hard to stay down in the mouth when your taste buds were on fire. Temple doused her eggs with a speedy helping of onion-potato hash with cilantro.

For a few blessed moments, they just ate. When they had to take a respite from the culinary fireworks, they sat back by mutual agreement. Temple broke the silence first. Again, she always was doing that sort of thing, rushing in where fools would keep their lips zipped.

"You still didn't explain why an ex--priest can administer a sacrament in an emergency."

Matt dabbed his lips with the flimsy napkin, as if to brush away the meal's heat as well as its traces. "Once a priest, always a priest." He used the rueful, solemn tone that announced a truism said long before he had repeated it. "In any emergency, I'm called upon to perform priestly duties if no other priest is available. If I came upon a dying accident victim, for instance."

"Why did l get the feeling that Sister Seraphina was . . . I can't say glad, but why did I feel that she was challenging you to do this?"

"She was a grade-school teacher of mine. She knew when I went into the seminary, although I entered from college.

She knew when I left, although I was years and miles away by then. Talk gets back. Every parish is a news bureau; nuns have some kind of nationwide intelligence system . . . or the Holy Spirit whispers deportment reports on former students during prayers, or my Guardian Angel rattles on me--I don't know. But she knew, and she knew where to find me now, when she needed me. And she needed . . . she's disappointed in me, in my leaving, on some level that maybe she doesn't even admit to herself. She didn't mind forcing me to face my ambivalent position. I've left the priesthood, but the priesthood will never leave me."

"That's . . . cruel," Temple said.

"No, just harsh, a religious life does not fear harshness."

Temple shook her head. "I never would have guessed it." She thought for a moment. "Say, that's how you dredged up that black suit you wore when you played the organ for Chester Royal's memorial service! That's why you can play the organ at all!"

Matt held up his hands in surrender and laughed, out loud this time, and long. "You always have to put two and two together, did you know that? You're insatiable."

"Yeah, but what do I do when two and two add up to three?"

He sobered immediately.

Temple took another stab at her eggs, then rolled the corner of her napkin. "Matt. I have to tell you. we ex-Unitarians are pretty tolerant, but I have severe problems with religions that can't let others live and let live according to their honest lights."

"So do I," he said promptly.

"I mean, fundamentalists basically concentrate on judging other people and finding them guilty on all counts, whether they're Christian or Muslim."

"That's why there are so few Catholic fundamentalists, although there are a goodly number of conservatives."

"But, I mean, a church that in this age of AIDS won't condone safe sex with condoms because it's also birth control! Well, that's more than a harsh position; that's insanity."

He stirred in the hard plastic chair. "I don't want to argue theology or logic with you. A lot of these issues have liberal and conservative positions within the church, especially in America."

"Now l may be wrong," she said. "I don't pay a lot of attention to religious matters, to tell the truth. But, Isn't the church against premarital sex?"

"Yes."

"Against all forms of birth control?"

"Well . . . there are natural methods--"

"Against divorce?"

"Yes . . . but again, there are instances--"

"Against . . . masturbation?"

"All sexual acts must be open to the conception of children--"

"Matt!" Temple leaned forward, over her decimated plate of cooling food. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't have to take positions on any of these things anymore, now that I'm not a practicing priest. I don't have to tell anyone else what to do anymore." He seemed relieved, but he still didn't get it.

"Matt!" Temple knew that she sounded even more exasperated, but she couldn't help it. Conundrums demanded solving and she was sitting across from a walking, talking human conundrum who wasn't facing the facts of his new-how new?--existence. "What are you going to do? What can you do, now that you're not a priest? You move in any direction that's middle-class comfortable, reasonably independent and sexually active other words, normal--and you sin, right? Well?"

Chapter 16

Catechism

"Most of us marry ex-nuns, fast."

"Isn't that a little . . . limiting?" Temple asked.

"The blind leading the blind? Yes, but who else has anything in common with us? Why do you think I'm here-- doing my nightline job, living at the Circle Ritz? There were many good reasons l went into the priesthood, and some wrong ones. The church agrees that the wrong ones outweigh the right ones. Now it's up to me to figure out how to live postpartum, if you will; to decide what kind of ex-priest I'm going to be, what kind of Catholic, what kind of man."

Matt drank his cooling coffee, down to the dregs--and dregs did inhabit this bitter, strengthening brew; Temple could taste the grit of fresh grounds when she was halfway through her cup.

"I'm sorry you had to find out." Matt went on, almost to himself. "Sorry that Sister Seraphina had to find out, sorry that what I am is still less than what I was. I've got a lot to work out, more questions that I can't answer than even you could ask."

"I'm sorry. I'm nosy. I'm pushy--"

"You're right," he interrupted, without denying her unflattering self-description. "I'm facing a lot of contradictions."

He spun the oily black dregs of his coffee in the white cup as if looking for tea leaves to read--nope, too superstitious, Temple thought; an ex-priest couldn't even do that.

Temple studied the contradiction sitting across from her. She was attracted to Matt. had been from the first, even though---fresh from Max's inexplicable desertion--she knew better.

She found Matt handsome, but then, that was obvious. She had always squirrned at her attraction to the obvious, but she also understood that the very things that were not obvious about Matt attracted her even more. Now she was getting down to that nitty-gritty--with escalating interest! If she didn't know why he had left the priesthood, she could wonder why he had entered it.

"The girls in high school must have gone crazy when you went into the seminary," she mused, knowing she was dangling for history, for answers, for rivals.

He quirked a smile. "Girls always want what they can't get."

"Boys do, too. That's high school, isn't it?"

"High school must have been a piece of cake for you," Matt said matter-of-factly, expertly, easily, turning the spotlight from him to her.

"Why?" Temple was indignant.

"You're outgoing . . . I was going to say irrepressible. You're so easy with people. I bet you were the most popular girl in your class."

"Bet again! I was the shortest. With glasses, I never could adjust to contact lenses. I was known to get good grades and to be a 'good sport,' although I couldn't play sports worth a stinky pair of sweat socks."

"I wasn't good at sports, either," he said quickly, "Except for the martial arts."

"That's hard."

"But it isn't a team sport."

"Still, I bet the girls were angling for you."

His expression grew dreamy, softened as hers had when she had thought back to the adolescent wilderness of high school days, which did great things for a face that didn't need any help. "A couple of them actually asked me to the senior prom. They didn't know yet," he said.

"They asked you? I'm impressed, but not surprised. Didn't you go?"

He looked down, away. "No."

"But you could have. What harm would it have done? Senior proms are such a rite of passage," Temple said in her dreamy turn. "Maybe you were better off not going, though. I went, and was I sorry."

"Why?"

"Why?" Temple wanted to clutch her hair, although she knew such a gesture was theatrical, "Because I was forced to go! Wouldn't you know that in front of the whole debating team, I would get asked by dweeby Curtis Dixstrom because I was the only girl shorter than he was--and the creep knew that I was too 'intellectual' to hold out for a jock or a class president. So I went."

"And you surprised yourself and had a good time?"

"You sound like my mother did then," Temple said sourly. "'Oh, go, dear, and maybe you'll meet somebody else nicer.' l didn't want anybody 'nicer,' I wanted somebody cooler. So I went, and loathed it, and Curtis got seriously drunk at the after-prom party and I ended up driving him home, and me too, in his father's dweeby Volvo station wagon."

Matt tried not to laugh. "You always end up taking responsibility, don't you?"

"You always turn personal questions back on the interrogator, don't you? You don't much like talking about you."

"No, I don't. We wouldn't be now if Sister Superfine hadn't used her nationwide nun intelligence network to track me down."

"Superfine? Oh, Seraphina/Superfine. Isn't it . . . disrespectful to call a nun that?"

"You bet it is. Catholic kids nowadays are almost as disrespectful as public-school kids. And it isn't really disrespectful. Only popular nuns get nicknames."

"I was going to ask you where these nuns get their names.

Do priests change their names?"

He shook his head. "Only nuns, I never thought about it that way, but it's probably sexist. Nuns are expected to give up their old identity, but priests aren't. Of course, brothers take new names as well."

"Brothers? Oh, brother. There's a lot about the Catholic Church that's Greek to me."

"There's even a Greek Orthodox Catholic Church." Matt mustered a teasing twinkle. "And in it, priests can marry."

"And still be Catholic? Amazing. Maybe you could . . . change churches."

Matt sobered and shook his head. "Celibacy wasn't the reason I left; it isn't the reason for a lot of ex-priests."

Temple's heart sank. Celibacy made a lot of sense in the current uncertain social climate, but she couldn't imagine any healthy prime-of-life person contemplating it forever.

"In the old days," Matt was explaining in his informative, neutral voice that so efficiently distanced him from the listener, from himself even, "boys entered the seminary from grade school. Now they enter after high school, or even after college, so there's no wav the candidates haven't had a chance to experience a normal social life."

"You mean that some priests aren't virgins

"The promise is for the duration of their priesthood."

"Forever."

"Forever."

"Except . . . in certain cases," she parroted his earlier answers about matters of ironclad dogma.

He nodded ruefully, "Except in certain cases."

"I'll never figure it out," Temple said, pushing her plate away and resolving to change the subject. "Any more than I'll figure out why anyone would harass an elderly woman like Miss Tyler."

"Kids would," Matt said promptly, "and this is gang territory."

"What isn't nowadays?" Temple asked with a shudder. "And making obscene phone-calls to a convent." She contributed another, deeper shudder to the conversation.

"Were you serious about Satanists?

The waiter retrieved their empty plates. Matt braced his elbows on the table and scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands. "There's not as much of it out there as the alarmists think, but it is a possibility. Satanists are known to be cruel to cats."

"And the attack on Miss Tyler's niece's cat at the show is strange. That seemed more of a prank, or the work of a malicious competitor."

"Could people get that worked up over a cat competition?"

"There's status and money in it," Temple said promptly, "and where there are status and money, there also is a motive for mischief."

"Sounds like another beatitude, only I'd call it a maleficitude."

"It's the oddest coincidence," Temple said, reaching for the small green chit the waiter slapped to the table before Matt.

"You drove, and then some," Matt said, sliding it off the table and pulling out his wallet.

New, Temple observed, like a lot of his clothes looked. Why hadn't she noticed that and come to correct conclusions before? Because nothing about Matt was particularly noticeable, until you knew his history, and then everything was more fascinating than ever . . . Oh, dear Lord, Could a congenitally curious woman ever have had a more perfect subject of interest?

"What are you doing the rest of the day if you're not resting?" she asked.

"If you don't mind dropping me off at the convent, I'll see how Sister Seraphina and Miss Tyler are doing. I can get home all right during the day."

"I'll stop by the vet's and check on Louie and poor Peter."

"How free are you today?"

"As free as a rock-concert ticket at a radio station, why?"

"Want to practice your self-defense techniques at four?"

"Not really, and you'll be dead tired--"

"That's why I'll need to do something like that."

"You must think I need intense help."

"No, but not many weeks ago you were confronted by thugs looking for Kinsella; now you're driving me around bad neighborhoods in dark nights. You need it. By the way, have you gone to group yet?"

"I will, I will, when I get a minute!"

"Four o'clock okay?" he asked, eyeing her hopefully.

"Okay." She thought he was crazy to push himself this hard after a night's lost sleep, but maybe that was exactly the way he kept himself sane.

Chapter 17

Cross Not the Cat

"You looked tired. Matthias," Sister Seraphina said in the cool visitors' room of the convent, the elderly air conditioner's hum as domestic and comforting as a refrigerators.

"You lost as much sleep as I did," he countered, "and it's just Matt now."

Her eyes shut in brief, placid admission of the correction.

"I do not work a night shift like you do, and the old don't need much sleep---luckily so, for we seldom get it. Nor do we change old habits easily. Matt, I think that you should meet Father Hernandez now."

Matt maintained silence. He had no desire to meet this Father Hernandez who was reduced to feuding with parishioners about the afterlives of cats, with managing fund drives to keep the parish alive, and with retreating to the bottle when the maddening daily wear and tear had become too much. Mostly, he didn't want to meet Father Hernandez because no matter how badly the man had failed, he had not deserted his post, he had not yet left the priesthood. Father Hernandez's mere existence, with all its cracks and fissures, would seem a rebuke. Matt realized that he was still raw from his severance with his vocation and only imagining that a man whom he was not willing to judge would be a harsh judge of Matt Devine. Father Hernandez would not even know Matt's history, unless Sister Seraphina had told him. Had she?

Matt finally rose without comment and let Sister Seraphina lead him out into the hot, post-meridian sun, which already fell less scaldingly on his fair skin. Autumn was coming.

He was given the grand tour on the way to the rectory. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church had a cool, old and ornate interior, laced with white plasterwork and pastel statues of the saints that most other Catholic churches downplayed now, confining even the Virgin Mary to a discreet side altar.

The blinding, blue-collar magnificence reminded him of his home church of St. Stanislaus in Chicago, the architectural opposite but spiritual cousin to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Working-class people were inspired by churches of blatant beauty, perhaps because their daily lives held so little of it.

The school was a pair of dull, one-story adobe wings enfolding a sandy-surfaced, scruffy playground. The once bright painted-metal monkey bars and swing sets had paled and peeled to a dull burnt-sienna undercoat in the dry desert sun. Now the playground was empty and not even the dust stirred. Behind the schoolrooms' glinting glass windows, shut to keep out the heat, lay teachers tried to inspire the restless students for another nine-month school year, that everlasting pregnant pause between the blessed deliverance of too-short summer holidays.

Matt was remembering everything he wanted to forget, but he could regard this unexpected odyssey into another priest's parish as a form of penance. The church was too successful at converting confrontation into endurance. He had not yet found a new place in the church, or outside of it.

At least the rectory was foreign. St. Stan's had been red-brick-grand, with tidy white trim, and peopled by three priests and the eternal housekeeper: that prototypical elderly, devout and devoted (if sometimes waspish) cook and cleaner and dorm mother--always female and always above any kind of depraved suspicion--who committed herself to serving a houseful of religious men.

Here a large, lumpy Mexican woman whose charcoal-dark hair glinted with silver strands as shiny as fresh paint opened the door, not one of those forbidding Northern gatekeepers whose severe gaze would make any caller feel properly guilty for being there and disturbing Father.

Spanish coos urged them into the artificially cooled dimness. The tile floors were hard and so was the heavy, dark Spanish furniture, as plain and somber as a cross. Colorful cloths draping the backs of wooden chairs provided welcome warmth and softened the austerity.

"Is Father Hernandez in, Pilar?" Sister Seraphina asked.

"Si, si. But he is now with Mr. Bums, the lawyer." Pilar sounded most impressed with this visitor.

"We will wait," said Seraphina, who did not sound impressed. A successful teacher never sounds impressed by anything, Matt reflected, and she had certainly been that.

She claimed a hard bench in the hallway. Mart, after strolling down the

passage to examine the wall decorations--a citation from the Knights of Columbus, a modern chrome cross with a gilded figure of Christ on it--joined her. He was reminded of benches placed outside of the principal's office for misbehaving students to warm until a higher authority was good and ready to deal with them.

"You'll like Father Hernandez," Seraphina said suddenly, in a warmer tone, "although lately he seems lost in some labyrinth of his own. Before--"

Before, he had been a good priest, as Matt had been. Matt leaned his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands; the fingers dovetailed, and then realized the position could be construed as an informal one of prayer. He had so many reflexes to disconnect.

At last the closed door down the hall cracked open. Voices bled from the room beyond, intense voices.

"You must concentrate on the developmental fund-raising program, Father, or there will be no OLG! I can't understand your distraction at such a critical time. And you must make up with Blandina Tyler. What is this nonsense about cats in heaven? You mustn't allow an old woman's silly fantasies to affect your fiscal judgment. She's recently been threatening to leave her estate to her cats--so the Ladies' Flower Guild says--and not to Our Lady of Guadalupe. That would be disaster."

"She may do as she wishes," a testy voice answered. "The church does not tailor its theology to fit the notions of its wealthier members."

"Yes, yes, Father---"

The men were moving into the hall now, ending their meeting.

"But--" continued the first voice, soothing, reasoning, warning, "this is such a minor matter. Cats! Sneaky, selfish creatures, but people who fancy them can be fanatics. It's bad for the peace of Miss Tyler's body and soul to work herself into a state over such a triviality."

The attorney was fully in the hall now, an earnest man in his worried mid-thirties, wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit that would look at home in a barbershop quartet. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on his rather prominent nose, giving him the prissy look of an accountant, oddly contradicted by a smile exposing a thin silver line of braces.

Such was the lot of a parish priest nowadays, Matt ruminated unhappily: keeping well-meaning parish volunteers happy while facing the realities of a waning congregation, sisterhood and priesthood, and a youth population that was eroding into the camaraderie of the gangs instead of attending Mass, and regularly receiving stolen goods instead of Holy Communion. Not to mention the unwed-pregnancy problem.

Matt stood, Sister Seraphina rising beside him, as the parish priest came out into the hall, wearing black slacks and a short-sleeved black shirt with the usual pastoral notch of white clerical collar showing.

Traditional garb for today's more modern priests and hot in a desert clime, Matt couldn't help noting. His neck broke out in a sympathetic rash as he remembered the imprisoning circle of starched linen. Father Hernandez's appearance surprised Matt even more. He had expected someone roly-poly, like the housekeeper, someone warm and cheerful and now obviously incompetent and harassed. Instead, Father Hernandez reminded Matt of the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Catholicism's only televangelist in the late, unlamented fifties. Father Hernandez was tall and thin, his skin the color of rich Corinthian leather. His attractive, rather ascetic face was framed by a handsome halo of silver hair.

"Visitors," Father Hernandez announced with an air of relief. "Sister Seraphina. Is this your . . . friend from Chicago?"

"Matt Devine," she said quickly. "Father Rafael Hernandez. And Peter Burns here is the parish attorney and also a dedicated parishioner who donates much time to Our Lady of Guadalupe."

Matt shook hands with both men, surprised by the priest's anemic grip, but not by the lawyer's businesslike, Toastmaster knuckle-cruncher. Matt gripped right back, but got no reaction, just a curt acknowledgment and farewell.

Odd, but Matt would have picked the lawyer as the tormented man who had recently hit the bottle that Sister Seraphina had described, not the priest.

"Come in." Father Hernandez gestured them into a study equipped with the mandatory four or five comfortably upholstered chairs, useful for receiving prominent community members offering money, or bereaved families making

funeral arrangements, and fellow religious.

Matt sank onto old leather with relief; it was cooler than cloth, and the rectory air conditioner was old, audibly cranky and patently ineffective. No wonder a sheen of sweat had polished both the priest's and the lawyer's faces--or maybe the discussion of parish fiscal matters had produced the moisture.

Father Hernandez threw his long frame into an old-fashioned leather swivel chair behind a massive glass-topped desk. Pen-holders, papers, a calculator, the large glass ashtray for guests or the occasional parishioner bearing a rare

Cigar, a missal and breviary--the flotsam of a religious and administrative life--met and mingled on the parish priest's desk. Matt had used one like it once, and knew its makeup as a geologist knows the strata of the various geological ages of the earth. Here and there amid the scattered papers, loose paperclips glinted like veins of silver.

Father Hernandez leaned his weight on one leather-upholstered arm and swung the chair into a familiar and favorite position. "Before you say anything, Sister Seraphina, I'll tell you that I called the hospital. Miss Tyler would have nothing to do with a visit from me, as I told you; besides, the emergency-room doctors' diagnosed hysteria, gave her a prescription of Valium, and are sending her home with her niece. Now that we know the cause of her episode, it's clear that her condition was due to mental shock rather than a physical breakdown."

Seraphina nodded. "You're quite right, but we didn't discover . . . the animal until Blandina had left in the ambulance."

Father Hernandez tented his long fingers and shook his solid sterling head, bishop material if looking the role had anything to do with it. Matt envied the man's air of churchly charisma, of an attractiveness untainted by movie-star good looks. Why should such a man--and Matt had seen the type before, the kind who could charm money out of a cuckoo clock and make it seem a privilege to the donor worry so much about a fund drive that he risked everything: Career, parish, fund drive, and even his priesthood, which was quite a different matter than a mere career, by diving into a bottle? Perhaps Seraphina had jumped to conclusions there.

"The cat," the pastor was musing with impressive melancholy. "Poor . . . Peter, did you say? I could never tell him and Paul apart, but then, I'm not much of a cat person. It must," he added with a mahogany glance at Matt from under bristling pewter eyebrows, "have been traumatic to take him down, given your situation, Mr. Devine."

He knew, Of course. Seraphina would consider it only right that he know. "You mean the implication of blasphemy?"

The pastor nodded solemnly, "Most disturbing. We are used to graffiti on the school walls, obscenities scratched into the rest-room doors, but then the vile phone-calls to Sister Mary Monica, and now . . . this."

"You think that they're related? Miss Tyler was receiving bizarre phone calls as well."

Father Hernandez laughed, the sound's harshness as disturbing as the sight of a crucified cat. "Miss Tyler's cats and calls and health and will! I'm tired of such . . . unworthy speculations on Miss Tyler. Something worse may be abroad, eh Matthew, was it?"

"It was Matthias; now it's Matt."

Father Hernandez spread his hands to show calm acceptance, the gesture as broad as a blessing. Veteran priests often assumed the unconscious mannerisms of the vocation;

Matt saw that now, as he saw residual gestures in himself. He was surprised that anyone would be shocked that he had been a priest, given the signs, but Temple certainly had been.

"Sister Seraphina tells me you mentioned Satanism."

The question's directness sent Temple flying to the farthest fringes of Matt's mind. "I meant that only in the sense of misguided individuals playing at the trappings of satanism, Father. Not a . . . serious . . . outbreak."

"Hmm," Father Hernandez balanced his chin on his tented fingertips. The dark eyes that regarded Matt grew suddenly haunted. "It wouldn't surprise me if it were the real thing, Matt. Not with the unholy mischief that's been happening around Our Lady of Guadalupe lately."

"What do you mean?" Sister Seraphina interjected.

The pastor's eyes avoided hers. "I . . . haven't told you everything."

"There's more?"

He shrugged. "I found the holy-water fonts in the church filled with red liquid before six-o'clock Mass last week."

"Red--?" Sister Seraphina couldn't bring herself to ask more.

"Dye," he answered quickly, "In the holy water. Red food coloring. Disposing of it properly will be quite a challenge. And the communion wine was also colored water."

Sister Seraphina's lips foided. She said nothing, but her eyes held such a look of disapproval that Matt could imagine her saying, "And was that too great a disappointment, Father?"

Still, the tricks around the church tugged at his interest. No wonder a sober and steady priest might find his grip slipping. Matt imagined himself celebrating Mass again, concentrating on the ritual and the prayers, achieving a recognizable spiritual state and then, at the most sacred, sacramental moment for priest and congregation, saying, "This is my Body, This is my

Blood," and sipping from the gloriously gilded chalice--thin, colored water, not wine. Transubstantiation indeed.

Add other, more brutal harassments, such as a convent cat crucified, and Matt could understand that a priest might need more than meditation to steady his nerves.

"Maybe your friend could help us," Sister Seraphina said into the lengthening silence.

It took Matt several long moments to realize that she addressed him and finally look up. His face remained blank.

"The plucky Miss Barr," she prodded him. "You mentioned that she has had some involvement in detection."

Temple came winging from the back of the beyond with a fiery crown of red hair and a shining sheriff's badge in the palm of one hand, like a pixyish saint.

Matt laughed. "She handles public relations, and happened to have murder rear its ugly head at a couple of events she stage-managed, that's all. She's no professional, although----"

He stood up, hands jammed in pockets, stunned. "Although . . . the reason she was working the cat show this weekend is that there's been some funny-business there. Miss Tyler's niece had entered some cats, and one of them was shaved."

"Shaved," Father Hernandez echoed in complete confusion.

Matt nodded. "To disqualify it from competition, they thought. It was done with animal clippers, down the length of the body from head to tail and around the middle."

"My God--" Father Hernandez's warm-toned skin, as dark as a George Hamilton tan, turned sallow. "Don't you see? Remember the legend of how the donkey's back was marked at Jesus' birth for all time?"

"A cross," Matt heard his own hoarse voice say. "The cat was shaved in the shape of a cross. Then it's related!"

"To what?" Sister Seraphina exploded. "Pranks? Except for Peter, that is all we're talking about. Childish pranks. We sit next to a building housing two hundred and sixty-five children and teenagers, after all."

Father Hernandez's eyes slid away from her again, Matt noticed. The gesture was guilty. Most good Catholics had a hang-up going back to grade school about deceiving nuns, but Matt would bet his best--and now useless--clerical collar that Father Hernandez wasn't telling anyone the full story. Maybe that was the secret he kept between himself and his most recent confessor, Jose Cuervo.

Chapter 18

Blue-ribbon Blood Sacrifice

I have been ill-used a time or two in my multitudinous lives, but nothing can quite compete with serving as a combination feline pincushion and a victim of the late great Count Dracula.

The average person would not believe the sort of ghoulish rituals that go on in the hidden back rooms of the local veterinarian's office, such as blood extraction through the victim's (me!) jugular vein.

When my little doll hands me over to the enemy, even I have no idea of the torments in store. And this indignity comes alter my debilitating day at the cat show!

No doubt the attentive reader is wondering how I escaped the cage labeled "Percy" to return to the soon-to-be site of my newest betrayal--that is, home to the Circle Ritz in time for Miss Temple Barr to scoop me up unceremoniously and hasten me oh' to see the vet.

I wish that I could say that my great strength, savage nature and wily feline brain were responsible for tripping the latch on my steel cage. Alas, these are modern times and such primitive attributes are seldom necessary. Nowadays it is who you know that counts. In this instance, it is who it is that knows me: one

Electra Lark, cohabiter with the reclusive Karma, landlady of the Circle Ritz and a bosom buddy of mine for almost three months now.

Naturally, she would know me in a darkroom, and she does almost as well across a crowded hall, even at a cat show.

"Louie!" I hear bellowed in dulcet tones.

I turn to scan the indifferent passersby. The judging is temporarily over and, yes, Midnight Louie is the last one left behind, stranded high and dry under the odious pseudonym of Percy, may his offspring have tape worms!

How could I have missed the slinky muumuu in electric shades of magenta, silver foil and chartreuse? For once I wish that I was as color-blind as certain erroneous experts insist that my kind is.

This vision bustles over, and I see that it is carrying a straw bag the size of Rhode Island. Miss Electra Lark is not the least inhibited at subjecting me to an interrogation I cannot begin to answer.

"Why. Louie," says she when finally and truly positioned before my cage. "What are you doing here?"

The answer should be obvious. so I say nothing. She fingers the ribbon affixed to my prison, then spots the paperwork and roots in her gigantic bag. Finally she draws out a pair of rhinestone-trimmed Ben Franklin glasses, pokes them up to her eyes and frowns at the news that I am "Percy."

She looks at me again, just to make sure, and I give her a one-word greeting to let her know she's got the right dude and the wrong name and number.

"You've got to be Louie." she mutters under her breath. "Percy is described as a tiger-stripe." She eyes me again and begins to speak as it I can understand every word, which I can, but this is not supposed to be generally known. I fear that Miss Electra Lark has developed some eccentricities from her clandestine association with the ineffable Karma.

"Temple must have entered you in the Household Pets category," she informs me quite incorrectly. "Then . . . she was called away by that early morning emergency of Matt Devine's--I would sure love to know what that was about! And so she asked me to come over here and watch Peggy's cages while Peggy went to the hospital to see her ill aunt, and then . . . Temple forgot to mention in all the excitement that she'd entered you yesterday in the Household Pets contest today!"

Satisfied by her convoluted logic, she beams at me. "And look at you. Louie! You won." She leans forward to unhook the ribbon, and then hesitates. "Unless this Percy won and you somehow ended up in his cage."

I nose my ribbon fondly to tell her it is mine, all mine, and show my claws, delicately, for further evidence.

"No need to get testy about it! All right, here goes the ribbon, pinned to my shoulder, and here goes my back--"

With which mysterious comment she swings open the cage door and lifts me up, and onto, her capacious bosom. I told you that we were buddies. A scent of gardenia nearly gags me, but I control my distaste.

After all, I am being borne out of the cat show with my Best of Class blue ribbon in plain view of all and sundry by my own personal bearer.

It is not a bad exit, it I do say so myself.

Chapter 19

Confidence Game

At four o'clock that afternoon, Temple found Matt waiting for her by the pool, sitting cross-legged in his gi on the blue mats, meditating.

Only twelve hours had passed since he had received the frantic call from Sister Seraphina. Temple marveled at his cool, collected calm. He did not look frazzled, worried or weary.

Temple, on the other hand, felt all of those things, and was sure that she looked it. At least the mirror over the bathroom sink had told her just that after she had slipped on her gi and paused to drag a brush through her thick ted curls. She resembled a Raggedy Ann doll with a blank, bloodless, white-muslin face. Shock, she thought, and aftershock.

The last thing she felt like was a lesson in self-defense, but--from what Matt had implied--the martial arts had been his sanctuary even before the church. She sensed that learning--and teaching----kept that cool of his impeccably in place, and that his hard-won tranquility was a shield.

"How is Miss Tyler?" she asked abruptly, breaking his reverie.

He looked up and nodded reassuringly. "She's home from the hospital already, with her niece. She was simply showing the effects of being terrorized at her age. What about Louie- and the other cat?"

"Dr. Doolittle says they're both resting comfortably."

"Do cats ever rest any other way?"

"No, I guess not. Louie can come home at six. Peter will have to stay a couple more days."

"How are you doing?" he asked next.

"Too tired to give in to it, I found the strangest thing on my living-room sofa. A blue ribbon. Do you suppose a good fairy is giving me a commendation for doing good deeds?"

"Maybe it's a reward for progress in your self-defense lessons."

"Hardly, I asked Electra to watch Peggy Wilhelm's cats at the show as long as needed; maybe she left me a ribbon to cheer me up. But she's not back yet. That's really odd."

"Minor League compared to what we've been involved in lately. Let's get to work." Matt rose with the supple ease that always surprised her. She had associated martial arts with kicks and grunts, not control and serenity.

Feeling far from serene herself, Temple kicked off her slip-in wedgies and stepped barefoot into the shade with Matt and back in time to their first lesson. The plastic of the mats was slick and cool on the soles of her feet. For a moment, the stress of the past few hours seemed a lifetime ago. Then Temple reminded herself that the reason they stood here doing this was that two men had assaulted her with their fists only a couple of weeks ago. She wondered if the blows she suffered then were any less stunning than the gantlet Matt had recently run through the byways of his hidden past--only, he had been forced to drag along an unwanted witness: her.

She pushed these distracting thoughts from her mind. Matt was serious about teaching; she must be serious about learning.

"Did you find the pepper spray I left in your mailbox?" he asked.

She nodded. "A couple of days ago, Where did you get it?"

Matt shrugged. "At a gun show at the Convention Center." His mouth tightened. "If I had known, I would have bought some for Sister Seraphina and Miss Tyler's niece."

"Gun show? You?"

"That's where you readily get that stuff. It's legal. The point is, use whatever defensive weapons you carry---and you know what they can be?"

She nodded. "The pepper spray, ah . . . the wheel-lock device in my car, my car keys, a rolled-up newspaper--"

"Right, Whatever you can lay your hands on is fine, but in the end, you are your own best defensive weapon. You have to be prepared to resist with nothing more than yourself."

Temple sucked warm desert air between her teeth. "That's just it. There's so little 'self' when it comes to me. I wouldn't intimidate a gerbil."

"That's not the point. Intimidation may not be the weapon you need; on the other hand, if it is, you can do it. Say you're attacking me--"

Temple quashed any smart remarks. He was an ex-priest, after all, and she found it horrifying how much that new knowledge inhibited her usually flagrant imagination.

"Come toward me," he advised, "as if you meant to do me harm."

Temple charged gamely.

Matt's stance changed to braced feet and slightly extended arms. "No!" he bellowed in a deep voice, straight from the gut of a Marine drill sergeant.

Temple was so shocked that her heart nearly stopped. It resumed with cumbersome, heavy beats.

"Jesus!" she said, clapping her hands over her throbbing organ. She felt like a hero in a romance novel. Then she realized that her expletive had its origins in the sacrilegious and should have been deleted. "I mean, oh, my goodness---"

Matt waved away her apologies. "Authoritarian rage can give even a rapist pause. The loud 'No!' brings back that scared three-year-old inside everyone who's ever confronted a parent. You try it."

"Me? Bellow like a wounded bull? I don't think so."

"Weren't you P.R. director for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis? Didn't you say that you acted in school drama productions? Aren't you an ex-TV reporter? You must have some dramatic instincts--"

Goaded, Temple answered all those questions with a wrenching, growling, basso, Greek-tragedy "No!"

Matt jumped, unprepared for the little girl with the big voice, and Temple almost scared herself. Then he smiled.

"You ever heard that a gun looks scarier in a woman's hands because they're smaller than men's, and the gun looks bigger?"

"No, I can't say that I have, but then, I don't frequent gun shows," Temple answered with great virtue.

Matt only shook his head. "Well, from you, a rock- bottom 'No!' sounds much more definite precisely because you are so petite. Surprise is your best weapon. Use it."

"The mouse that roared."

"Exactly."

"What else can you teach me?"

"Well, the human body has two vulnerable areas. Can you guess what they are?"

Temple was at a loss. She felt vulnerable everywhere, especially since the attack.

"What's covered and protected in professional sports?" he prompted her in the approved style.

"For women? Nothing, unless they play men's contact sports. For men . . . heads, I guess. Faces."

"Good."

Temple paused. What she had to say next would not be polite. Especially to a priest, Jesus. Should she be a good student or a sensitive friend?

"What else?" Matt prodded.

Temple sighed. "Groins," That was better than balls, at least.

"Right," he said, not the least nonplussed.

He was all instructor now, and Temple saw that naked wasn't the best disguise; distance was.

"The human body has its limitations, because it's erect," he went on. "We can either lunge forward or retreat backward."

Matt mimicked those motions, making a mock dive for Temple and then retreating. "What happens?"

"If you attack . . . you drive forward and your face is vulnerable."

"And if you attack my face?"

She pantomimed his suggestion, her fingernails going for his eyes, and watched his upper body flinch away.

"You can step in," he prompted, "and--"

She stepped in, lifted a knee, jabbed with it, and then froze the motion. He was right. An attacker exposed either his face or his groin; he could not protect both. All Temple had to master was the willingness to attack one or the other with all the skill and power at her command.

Self-defense, she realized, was a dirty business. Almost as dirty as having no defenses at all had been.

After learning another dozen ways of turning an attacker into creamed corn, Temple retreated to her apartment to take a shower. She wasn't accomplishing a lick of work, but she had never been so busy.

Matt had insisted on getting to work in his usual fashion, so Temple dashed out again in the Storm solo, this time to the vet's to pick up Midnight Louie.

Dr. Doolittle was gratifyingly positive about Peter's prognosis.

"He's such a mild little guy," she said by the front counter, where Louie, looking as unhappy as Nero Wolfe on a forced outing to a five-and-dime, lay in lackluster disarray after he had been retrieved from the place's mysterious private regions. "What a shame someone had to sneak up on such a good-natured cat and commit mayhem."

Louie yowled plaintively at that, no doubt identifying with the injured Peter now that he had been shanghaied into blood-donor duty.

"As for this big galoot, give him lots of meaty food, maybe kidney and liver," Dr. Doolittle advised. "He'll need to rest and recuperate for a while."

Louie's ears had perked up at the mention of food. Temple feared that her battle to convert him to Free-to-be-Feline pellets had encountered another setback, this time on doctor's orders.

She pushed her tote-bag straps as far up on her shoulder as possible and then lugged Louie out to the car. She had to put him down to open the door. He stood twitching his back on the asphalt, looking groggy. She was afraid that he might take off in sheer disgust, but when she opened the passenger door, he hopped up on the front seat in the disconcertingly doglike way he exhibited at times.

"Well, Louie," she told him as she put the Storm in gear and backed out of her parking spot, "you missed a lot of exciting developments yesterday while you were at home lounging and today while you were taking a rest cure at the Veterinarian's. Now you'll have to stay put for a while longer. I think I'll shut your escape hatch until you've had a chance to recover your strength."

Louie blinked and curled up on the seat in a big, black ball. He really was such an intelligent, docile cat, Temple thought as she patted his ears.

Chapter 20

Blood Brothers

Granted I am weak in the knees from my involuntary blood- Letting at the House of Dr. Death. This does not mean that I cannot lift my head a little and do some brain work. Contrary to Miss Temple Barr's notions, when I am laying about is when I do my most intense cogitating.

As for the charge of "lounging" about yesterday, she is, of course, utterly unaware of my unofficial outing to the cat show. In addition, the mysterious blue ribbon she puzzles over when she brings me home is no mystery. The perceptive Electra Lark brought both me and it home, and by then I was in a mood to be transported, although I usually prefer my transports to be made in the company of a female of my own species, if have any say in the matter.

Nonetheless, people will believe what they will of me and my kind, and it suits me to be underestimated. I get a lot more done that way.

While I am sequestered behind the innocent facade of the veterinarian clinic, in what I can only describe as a kennel, redolent as that word is of my least favorite species, the canine kind, I do a little mild sleuthing.

How, you may ask, can Midnight Louie, flat on his side--well, not exactly flat; I do have a generous amount of muscle around my midsection---accomplish what Mr. Matt Devine and Miss Temple Barr have not achieved in running from pillar to post in a car all day'?

For one thing, thing I have reached an age where I know how to produce the most results with the least effort. This is an art, like myself, that is much underestimated in these hectic modern times. For another, I speak the lingo of the chief witness to the mayhem.

Poor old Pete is a little jaundiced around the gills, and he was yellow to begin with. He lies on his side, looking quite flat and pathetic, a tastelessly cheery lime-green bandage on his foreleg holding a thin, transparent tube in place. Through this elongated straw can be seen the slow, rich trickle of a ruby-red substance: yours truly's life blood.

Despite public opinion, I abhor unnecessary roughness, especially when it is directed toward me. And although I have drawn my share of blood in my day, I do not resort to fancy technology to do it. Yet I cannot begrudge the poor schmuck in the adjoining cage 'a second chance at life, especially when he is the prime witness to the bizarre goings-on in the shadow of the convent. So I interrogate him gently.

"Say," begin I in a growling undertone that the attendants are likely to overlook, it am a past master at passing for an innocent bystander in stir.) "Who did your nails?"

My breezy relerence has all tour oi his limbs twitching, al- though only two were assaulted. Sometimes shock is the best incentive.

He spits weakly, and then asks, "Who wants to know?"

"Your blood brother in the cell next door; Midnight Louie is the name; crime is the game. What is the name of your attacker?"

"I am a pacifist," he says after a moment's silence.

"You are a pincushion," I point out brutally, "and unless you come clean and tell me the truth, who is to say that your pal Paul or some other neighborhood dudes might not get the same treatment or worse?"

"What can you do about it?" he demands in a thin, yet derisive voice.

"More than you can," I inform him. "Now talk."

So he does, oft and on, between visits from attendants. The story i squeeze out of him is not much help, it seems he was not accosted, but snatched. Only he says "abducted." These pacifist cats are somewhat unnatural. but everybody has a right to his political position.

This I find interesting. It betokens a crime of premeditation rather than of opportunity. Many a dude or doll of my type has been rudely run over--or more intentionally rubbed out--just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time: i.e., on the public street when a wacko of the human sort is feeling mean. Few have been the victims of premeditated mayhem. I will not speak of the unspeakable---of the attraction my species holds for the murderous actions of satanists and so-called scientists then and now. But there are less nefarious reasons that we might become victims of crime. The corporate cats, Baker and Taylor, were of the unspeakable---of the attraction my species holds for the murderous actions of satanists and so-called scientists then and now. But there are less nefarious reasons that we might become victims of crime. The corporate cats, Baker and Taylor, were kidnapped from a bookseller's convention to confuse a murderer's trail. I wonder if a scheme of the same sort is in play here and now.

The unforthcoming Peter, with prodding, reveals more: a damp cloth was slapped over his kisser, he recalls, that smelled "sweet" and "heavy, like a baby diaper."

I diagnose a dose of chloroform, and Peter also admits that he was not conscious during the distasteful deed of hammering his extremities to the door.

Was the perpetrator infected by mercy--or by a desire for quietude and swift action? I favor the latter, not finding much mercy in the method of Peter's suspension.

After I pull what I can from the poor dude, I lean back to mull over the few pathetic facts I have obtained. One, Peter was plucked unwilling to be the object of this experiment in suspended animation; he did not stumble into the perpetrators hands. Two, the perpetrator was prepared to execute just this act; it was not a spur-of-the-moment impulse. Three, the perp is either one sick puppy, or he---or she--had some unsuspected hidden motive in mind, beyond terrorizing Miss Tyler and any inadvertent passersby, which happened to include my good friend Miss Temple Barr and her good friend (and getting better) Mr. Matt Devine. There is nothing like shared shock to bring persons of the opposite sex closer.

It is a pity that the shock of awakening to be whisked off to a vet's office to have blood drained does not do much to endear the feline sort to the aforesaid whisker-offers.

Chapter 21

Mortal Complications

When the phone rang, Temple awoke, aware that stilettos of moming light were stabbing through the mini-blinds on the French doors to impale themselves in the bare wooden floor.

She wanted to lurch upright to answer the phone, but King Kong was sitting on her chest. Her mildly nearsighted eyes strained to focus. Holy cats make that Kitty Kong! And make that her entire torso, not just her chest. Midnight

Louie was arranged thereon, tail end pointedly trned to her face, front paws kneading her abdomen in alternating rhythm.

"Ooof." Temple struggled up. "Off!" She caught the phone on the fourth ring, before her answering machine could kick in, but she was panting.

"Hello?"

"Miss Barr?" By then, Temple had felt for her glasses on the nightstand and clapped them to her face. The clock read seven.

"Yes."

"Sister Seraphina O'Donnell," the voice cut in, using such an eflicient tone that Temple unconsciously sat up ramrod-straight in bed.

Beside her, Louie remained lying on his side, where he had rolled when she had risen, licking his disheveled fur and casting dirty green looks over his shoulder at his ex-mattress.

Too bad that wasn't his ex-mistress, Temple thought in irritation. She never did wake up well, God and the Mystifying Max knew for very different reasons.

"How did you get my number?" she asked.

"The yellow pages, you are listed under public relations, you know."

"Oh, and Matt mentioned my profession yesterday," Temple remembered. "You don't forget a thing."

"I hope not." Sister Seraphina sounded grim. "I shall have to remember a great deal shortly. And you as well." She sighed. "I'm sorry to call so early--"

"And I'm sorry I forgot to call last night," Temple interrupted. "Sister." She found the title awkward. Using it as an afterthought separated from the preceding sentence didn't help hide that. "Peter is going to be fine?"

"Good." The nun's tone was strangely flat.

Before Temple could react to this odd disinterest, the nun's voice was crackling over the phone with brisk sentence after sentence, each one more shocking than the next.

"I'm afraid that you'll have to come to the convent again. Miss Tyler was dead when Rose stopped by to collect her for six-o'clock Mass. It could be a . . . suspicious death. We called the authorities. Lieutenant Molina wants to question you as well." There was a pause. Temple could hear a rustling sound as Sister Seraphina covered the phone receiver with her hand to listen to someone else at the other end of the line. "Actually," her voice amended when it returned, "Lieutenant Molina doesn't want to question you, but fears that she must." the nun reported dryly.

"That's me, the obligatory interviewee. What about Matt?" Sister Seraphina paused for a long moment. "I haven't told him yet. He'll be upset. It would be better for you to tell him when you collect him. Lieutenant Molina wants to see him, too."

Temple noticed that statement required no amending, and she couldn't blame Molina. If the lieutenant had to interview people about a murder at seven in the morning, beginning with Matt Devine was as pleasant a prospect as any.

As soon as Temple clicked down the interrupt button to end the call, she lifted a forefinger and punched in Matt's number, which she was beginning to know by heart, Beginning? She had memorized it the first time she saw it.

When the phone stopped in mid-ring as it lifted off the hook, Temple winced. This time Matt had had only three hours of sleep. He sounded like it.

"Yes?"

"Temple."

"Temple--?"

"I know this is the middle of the night for you, but we're wanted by the authorities."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your favorite long arm of the law, Lieutenant Molina."

"Temple, what's going on?"

"Miss Tyler died during the night. Make that passive tense: was probably killed."

Now he was strangely quiet, so Temple went on.

"Apparently Molina is conducting interrogations at the convent. As some of the parties who were the last to see the victim alive, I imagine our testimony will be of high interest to her."

"She'll be highly interested in our testimony, period."

Matt sounded chagrined. "My cover's really blown now, isn't it?"

"Well, yes," Temple admitted, "but l won't tell anyone about your ax-murdering days, l promise."

"Thanks- Did Sister Seraphina say how Miss Tyler died?"

"No. Maybe we're supposed to be surprised."

"I bet we are," Matt said. "Give me three minutes and I'll be ready--or at least dressed."

"Too bad," Temple muttered as she hung up. Things were all backwards lately; she and Matt were always getting each other out of bed instead of into it. Given the recent revelations, that was probably for the best.

"Another golden dream pounded to glitter dust," she told Midnight Louie as she swooped her legs over his grooming bulk and to the floor.

He favored her with a glance implying that anyone so cavalier about his comfort deserved some discomfort of her own. Then he resumed stroking his glossy side, red tongue raking along black fur under a flare of white whiskers.

Temple shivered in the tepid air conditioning. However groggy, she was not too dazed to realize that an old woman was dead. She had just met Blandina Tyler, but somehow she had spiraled deep into the old lady's life--and now death. She wondered what Molina would make of that. She wondered even more what Molina would make of Matt now.

They were both too sleepy and too stunned to say much in the car.

Matt turned to her when they were halfway there and announced, "I applied for my driver's license yesterday. I figured I didn't need one until I got a car, but now I see that it could come in handy in an emergency."

"You mean every other day."

He smiled at her. "Looks like it." Then he sobered.

"Much as l . . . blamed Seraphina for overreacting the other night, it's a good thing I did the anointing. That turned out to be Blandina Tyler's last rite."

"So it was worth coming out of the closet for?"

His glance was grim. "We'll see. Now Lieutenant Molina will be on my case."

"Yeah!" Temple wiggled her toes in her high-heeled sandals and grinned. "Maybe not mine, for once."

By the time the Storm crept along the curb in front of the convent and stopped, terminal sobriety had set in again. She and Matt sat in the car for a few seconds after she'd killed the motor.

"I wonder who will take care of the cats," Temple said.

He shook himself out of a reverie. "Miss Tyler must have made some provision. Whatever, they'll be well-to-do; Seraphina told me that she had inherited family money."

"Maybe she left a bequest to Peggy Wilhelm to look after them. You've never met Miss Tyler's niece?"

He shook his head, then cracked the door and got out.

The morning sun hadn't reached enough height to sizzle yet. The air was balmy, pleasant. Birds sang in the bushes, invisible but enthusiastic.

Sister St. Rose of Lima opened the door, a wizened, bespectacled elf now wide-eyed in dismay. Spry, she led them along the hall to the visitors' room, then scurried away as if what was inside was too painful to confront.

Temple saw why when she stepped over the threshold. The plain room was crowded with people ill at ease with each other. Peggy Wilhelm sat on the carved wooden chair, her eyes as raw as uncooked eggs, biting her lip while Sister Seraphina bent over her, murmuring.

Father Hernandez paced impatiently by the window in a long black cassock topped by a white, choirboy smock edged with lace along the hem and the sleeves. Obviously, he'd come straight from early morning Mass.

Paul, the cat, perched in the ajar window, watching the priest's trapped-mouse movements with sharp, certain feline eyes.

Molina's brunette razor-cut hair was bent over a notebook in which she was making some cryptic memo. She looked up when Temple and Matt entered, her intense blue eyes registering a tricky blend of disbelief, suspicion, curiosity and relief.

"And there isn't even a convention involved this time," she noted to Temple. Almost everybody else looked perplexed.

"Wrong, Lieutenant," Temple retorted in cheerful contradiction. "A cat show closes tomorrow at the Cashman Convention Center."

"Cat show?" Molina's wrinkled nose indicated she'd had enough of cats in Chez Blandina to last her for some time.

"Step across the hall for a moment. I've got some questions." She eyed Matt, "For you both."

Molina brushed past them in her bell-bottom navy pant suit while Temple reflected that she hadn't seen bell-bottoms or a pantsuit on anyone since her grade-school days. Molina was showing an alarming new tendency to be trendy. Was it Matt, or Memorex?

The room across the hall was plainer and smaller than the visitors' room, furnished with a hard blond table and several cafeteria-style wooden chairs with forest-green and chartreuse vinyl seats. A heavy, Spanish-style wooden crucifix clung to the pale wall like a large, eavesdropping fly.

"Looks like an interrogation room, doesn't it?" Molina suggested in a satisfied voice. "Father Hernandez hears the nuns' confessions in here."

"Don't expect any from us," Temple warned. Matt flashed her a cautioning glance. He wasn't aware of her long-standing, and tart, verbal fencing-match with Molina. He wasn't used to being under suspicion, and he certainly wasn't used to having something to hide.

"How did you get involved in this one?" Molina asked Temple, nodding to the chairs and perching on a corner of the uncompromising table.

"Electra Lark, my . . . our landlady, thought I could do the cat show some good." Temple sat down and crossed her knees.

"Did you?"

Temple felt herself flush. "Not really. I haven't had time and there wasn't much left to do to promote it. Electra really thought I could help Peggy Wilhelm."

Molina flipped through her notebook pages, but Temple suspected it was a gesture meant to hide the fact that Molina didn't need to look up anything. "This Peggy Wilhelm is Miss Tyler's niece?" Temple nodded. "What kind of help would she need from you?"

Here's where it got uncomfortable. Temple squirmed on her unattractive and utterly rear-numbing chair and crossed her ankles.

"Peggy had been getting weird telephone calls."

"So I heard. That doesn't answer my question."

"Electra thought I might be able to . . . find out what was going on."

"Since when do you work for the phone company?"

"It wasn't just the calls," Temple said, well aware that she hadn't made any progress on that problem at all. "The first day of the cat show, Peggy's prize Birman was sheared like a sheep."

"So what has that to do with what happened next door last night?" Lieutenant Molina could not have sounded any more weary, bored and disgusted.

"Maybe nothing, but it certainly made Peggy frantic about staying with her cats at Cashman Center, so l volunteered to come over here and help Miss Tyler feed her cats, which I did, Thursday morning."

"That was the first time you met her?"

Temple nodded.

"And the last?"

She eyed Matt, "Not . . . no."

"We came over here early the following morning," he said, stressing the "we."

Molina was too busy frowning down at her notebook to see Temple's relieved smile.

"Sister Seraphina indicated that she called on you two for help. Why, I can't imagine."

Temple was sure that Molina had never spoken truer words.

"Sister Seraphina seemed reticent to discuss that predawn expedition," Lieutenant Molina went on. "Nothing makes a cop more suspicious than reticent nuns, especially this cop. Nuns are used to cooperating with authority, and when they go wish washy on me, I get very nervous."

"'We' didn't come over here," Matt volunteered into the ominous silence. "I did. Temple drove me."

"Now why was that, Mr. Devine?" Molina asked, folding her arms.

He smiled at her with serene understanding. "I think you know why, After all, you Yourself told Temple why I couldn't drive. No license."

"You woke up your neighbor at--what was it?"

"Four o'clock."

"At four o'clock in the morning, because you're such a law-abiding Soul that when Sister Seraphina called, you knew you needed a driver."

Now Matt squirmed on his slick, plastic chair seat, "No, I knew I needed a car. Temple reminded me of my illegal status."

"So Miss Barr is the rigorous upholder of the law. How interesting."

The lieutenant's bright baby-blue eyes consulted Temple with exaggerated wonder. Was Molina attempting to be sarcastic?

"It was an emergency," Temple said flatly. "We both did what we had to do: get there as fast as the law would allow."

"Not a little faster?"

Temple swallowed. She had been driving, "Maybe a little."

"Did you know the nature of the emergency?"

"Only that it involved Miss Tyler and there was no time to be lost."

"Why? According to the ambulance report, she was agitated but generally well. The hospital didn't keep her."

"Sister Seraphina said--" Temple began.

"Sister Seraphina said a lot to a lot of people in the past couple of days," Molina observed. "Too bad she won't say much to me. In fact, she wouldn't say anything until you arrived." Here the sapphire gaze as sharp as broken glass landed--and stayed--on Matt.

"Maybe I should leave," Temple offered. She had already seen Matt forced to explain his background once in the past forty-eight hours. She didn't need a repeat performance, and he probably didn't relish witnesses to his recital.

"Stay." Molina pointed to Temple's chair like someone disciplining a dog. "You witnessed the first night's disruption. If I'd needed to question you separately, I'd have done it. Now, Mr. Devine, the floor is yours, just tell me what happened, in sequence."

Matt thrust his hands in his pants pockets and stared at the tabletop alongside Molina. "Sister Seraphina called."

"How did you know her?"

He didn't shift position at Molina's interruption, probably realizing that there would be many such intrusions. "She was a teacher at my grade school in Chicago."

"Chicago?" Molina purred like a puma at this crumb from Matt's mysterious past, "Catholic school?"

"Saint Stanislaus."

"Polish?" Molina asked, her narrowed eyes flashing to Matt's blond hair.

He nodded, oblivious, concentrating on his story, on the sequence of events.

"She was vague about the trouble, but I never doubted her. Nuns from teaching orders never kid around."

Molina nodded, and then started as Matt suddenly stared up at her and continued. "She said to come fast. I thought of Temple's car. I wanted to borrow it. I never remembered, or cared, about the license. Temple insisted on driving. That's when she told me you had looked into my 'background' and found out that I didn't have a driver's license."

"Does that bother you that I checked?"

"Yes. You had no cause."

"I'm a cop. Cops are curious. That's cause enough."

"No official cause."

Molina farmed out a hand----strong, no-nonsense nails, heavy class ring, "Enough for official instincts."

Matt glanced back to the table. "Temple drove, not too fast."

"Not too fast and not too slow, just right, like Baby Bear," Molina mocked. "Miss Barr always treads the line of legality on those high heels of hers. One day she might fall off."

Matt flushed but didn't look up again. "We met Sister Seraphina at the convent door. She explained that Miss Tyler was deeply distressed, possibly physically, certainly emotionally and spiritually. She wanted me to administer the anointing for the sick, to calm Miss Tyler in case her condition was . . . serious."

"You?" Molina stood up, arms still folded over her chest.

"Where was the pastor of the parish?"

Temple could see truth and loyalty battling in Matt. "Miss Tyler was miffed with Father Hernandez over the issue of whether cats go to heaven or not. She would have been disturbed rather than soothed if he had come to her bedside."

"Still, parish spats come and go. Surely she wouldn't object to his attendance in a grave illness?"

"Seraphina didn't think her condition was that serious, and she didn't think that Father Hernandez was suitable."

"He was the parish priest. He should have been called.

Wasn't he furious to have been ignored?"

"I don't know."

"This is odd! Everybody is walking around Father Hernandez like cats on a hot tin roof. He has always struck me as the autocratic type who wouldn't take kindly to that.

Why was he not called and you were? Why?"

"That was the problem, and what Sister Seraphina felt too loyal to tell you." Matt sighed. "He was incapacitated."

Molina drew that in, mangled her lower lip for a few seconds, and digested the information, "Confessions indeed.

You are saying that Father Hernandez was--what? Spit it out."

Temple could see Matt's hands knot into fists in his pockets. Her own hands tensed. Molina could be a chain saw at times, and Matt was ready to explode at the touch of a scalpel.

Molina missed nothing, and would pass up no advantage. "Tell me; otherwise, I'll have to force it out of Sister Seraphina, Or Father Hernandez himself. What was he?"

"Drunk on tequila, I suppose," Matt said in a dead, disowning voice.

It wasn't Father Hernandez he disowned, Temple thought, but his own feelings about this shameful news.

"I see." Molina sank back against the desk, as if borne down by the tawdriness of the revelation. Temple saw that she hadn't liked forcing this particular secret into the open.

"Now I can understand Sister Seraphina's reticence. Nun or not, she's acting as an enabler by hiding the problem, you know," she added almost gruffly. "Religious loyalty aside, she needs to get him into treatment."

"Maybe now," Matt said.

"All right, Scandal in the parish, but couldn't she have administered the sacrament in an emergency? She doesn't strike me as someone who would crack under pressure."

"She could have, but she knew that Miss Tyler was of an age and an era that would be scandalized by a nun taking on such sacramental duties, even in an emergency."

"So she called you. Because . . ."

"Because I was a priest."

Molina stood again, sincerely shocked. No, not shocked, startled.

"You're a priest? I suppose the hotline is pastoral work, but--"

"The hotline is a job," he interrupted, looking up with chilly control. The cat, so to speak, was about to emerge utterly from the bag and the worst was almost over. "My job, now, I said I was a priest. Past tense."

Molina's dark head nodded slowly. "Of course you would be obligated to act as necessary in an emergency. What are you doing in Las Vegas?"

He didn't miss a beat. "My job, just my job, There aren't many available for men with my educational background."

Molina suddenly spun to Temple. "Are you Catholic?"

"No, Unitarian. Sort of, Well, I was a Unitarian."

They both looked at her.

"I'm sorry." Temple shrugged. "I know it's supposed to be an undemanding faith, but I just sort of . . . fell away. What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?"

"What is that comment, an ethnic slur?" Molina retorted.

Temple gulped, and then she got it. "You're Hispanic--and Catholic?" Minnesota had a small Hispanic population, and Temple had always assumed the name "Molina" was Italian.

"Hispanic, yes, Catholic, sort of," Molina mocked Temple, She scowled, annoyed at having to explain herself. "My daughter attends Our Lady of Guadalupe School."

Daughter? Temple couldn't imagine Molina as a mother. Well, maybe as a mother, but not as a wife. And Hispanic, with those Celtic-blue eyes?

"Now that everybody knows where everybody is coming from," Molina resumed with a wry tone, "maybe we can get back to the facts. You--" she nodded at Matt "--anointed Miss Tyler. You--" she quirked an eyebrow at Temple"--watched in stupefaction, Then what?"

Temple answered, figuring Matt needed a break. "Then Sister Seraphina decided that Miss Tyler wasn't improving and called nine-eleven. Rose--Sister Saint Rose of Lima accompanied Miss Tyler in the ambulance. After the medical crew left, we all got to talking and realized that maybe Miss Tyler's ravings about Saint Peter and being betrayed in the Garden weren't just religious confusion and death fears.

I had noticed that the tip of her cane had fresh dirt on it, so--"

"Wait," Molina's hands elevated like a traffic cop's.

"You--you noticed that the cane tip had fresh dirt on it. I can see that you are riveted by religious ritual, Barr, but what made you even think of the cane at a time like that? "

"It's a riveting cane. No, really! It's hand-painted and carved. I noticed it leaning against the trunk I was sitting on in Miss Tyler's bedroom and . . . I saw the dirt crumbling onto the floor. So we all hurried out to the garden, and that's where Matt discovered the crucified cat on the back door."

Lieutenant Molina didn't move, she just glanced wearily at Matt, who resumed the tale. So the atrocity done to Peter surfaced, down to how Matt had freed the animal. Temple cringed to think of bracing a claw hammer on the wood and delicately pulling long carpenter nails through a cat's paw, not once, but twice. Even Molina looked impressed.

That's when Temple decided that Molina would also be relieved to hear that Peter was doing well, thanks to Midnight Louie's blood donation. She did remember Midnight Louie--?

"Miss Barr. I remember every scintillating detail about your exceedingly bizarre circle of acquaintances including the feline," the lieutenant assured her in exaggeratedly lucid tones. "In fact, I am developing quite a fascinating file on the whole kit and caboodle."

"Happy to oblige you with entertainment," Temple answered.

Molina resumed the interrogation. "And neither of you saw Miss Tyler since then?"

"No," they answered in unison, like well-trained school children. Then they glanced guiltily at each other and looked away. They had sounded rehearsed. "Neither of you returned to the Tyler house, or to the convent or to the church?"

"I did." Matt seemed relieved to have the floor to himself.

"I came back here to confer with Sister Seraphina."

"What did you confer about?"

"Miss Tyler. Father Hernandez."

"You knew that Miss Tyler was coming home from the hospital, with her niece?"

"Yes."

Molina turned to Temple, who wondered why this double interrogation wasn't giving the tall lieutenant whiplash.

"You knew that?"

"Matt mentioned something about it later."

"When, and where?"

"Four P.M. Friday, in the pool area of the Circle Ritz."

"Taking a dip?"

"No . . . learning how to take out a drip. Matt was teaching me some self-defense moves."

Molina's head whipped toward Matt again. "What do you know about self-defense?" Her skepticism was not quite a sneer.

"I've practiced some martial arts."

"Well, Mutant Ninja ex-priest." Molina's head swung toward Temple again. "Did you learn anything?"

"How to combat persistent bullies who are bigger than I," Temple said quite deliberately. "The eye gouge, the groin kick, the biting-off:-body-parts technique."

Molina grinned. "Not much art to that."

"I wasn't teaching Temple tae kwon do," Matt put in. "Just the basics of sidewalk self-defense."

"Then what happened?"

"I went to get ready for work at seven," Matt said.

"I went to the vet's to retrieve Midnight Louie and check on poor Peter," Temple added when Molina looked her way again, before turning back to Matt.

"Anything odd happen on your shift at the hotline, any out-of--the-ordinary calls?"

Matt's smile was charmingly crooked. "All our calls are out of the ordinary, Lieutenant, but none last night were noticeably so. Are you thinking the nuisance caller might have wanted to leave a message last night?"

"Maybe," Molina stood up with an air of finality. "The crime-scene team is working over the house. When they're done, I'll want to hear what the three of you have to say about the cat incident, so stay around."

"Where?" Temple mouthed at Matt behind her back as the lieutenant drifted out the door like a navy-blue shadow.

Matt grinned with relief that the interrogation was temporarily over. "That's one question I can answer, the convent kitchen. A great place to stay out of the way. Come on, let's find it."

Temple couldn't help feeling like a trespasser as they wandered the convent's many halls. Maybe a former priest had the right to make himself at home here, but she didn't.

Perhaps she had been infected by years of Protestant superstition about Catholic clergy and Catholic Church structures. She kept expecting to run into something she shouldn't around a comer, something mysterious and semi-creepy --a shadowed statue with a bank of lit candles twinkling eerily before it, or one of those kitschy red-velvet upholstered kneelers you saw in the background of cheap European vampire movies.

This convent showcased only spanking-clean walls and floor and simple pieces of furniture. When they located the kitchen, down two steps at the back of the house, they found Pilar rattling around in the space big enough to hold an empty table for eight.

Pilar shook her head and began a litany of commiseration without waiting for a more formal conversational cue.

"Oh, terrible, so terrible, what happened to Miss Tyler! I was shocked. The sisters all stirred up before breakfast . . . police cars in the neighborhood, sirens."

Matt pulled out a chair near the table's corner for Temple, then another at the head for himself, so they sat at right angles.

"We had to leave the apartment building without breakfast ourselves," he put in.

"No breakfast?" Pilar repeated, scandalized. "The sisters all are over at the church praying for Miss Tyler's soul-- those who are not here waiting for Lieutenant Molina to question them. Questioning the good sisters, can you imagine? I do not know what that woman is thinking, and a member of the parish, too."

"Oh, she attends church here?" Temple pursued.

"Not often enough," Pilar responded with a frown, banging around in the cupboards. "Not morning Mass, but most Sundays. I suppose her work might call her away, but that's hardly an excuse for missing a Sunday obligation. This police stuff is no job for a woman and a mother." She snapped a pair of pale orange Melmac plates down before them with unnecessary emphasis.

"Women do everything nowadays," Temple said.

"Not good work for a woman with a child, who cannot even guarantee to be home at the same time every evening."

Pilar sniffed with contempt. "Poor little Mariah, and what kind of a saint's name is that? I pretend that it is Maria, but no--I am corrected. It must be pronounced 'Mah-rye-ah.' "

Her back to them like a disapproving black wall bowed by print apron strings, she rattled pans and mixing bowls by the stove.

"Mariah. It's better than Tiffany," Temple put in.

"What's wrong with Maria, as in 'Ave Maria'? Nothing stays. No family discipline, no respect for the church, for the saints' names. The neighborhood is a dumping ground, and now poor Miss Tyler is killed in her own home, while her niece is sleeping there."

"Were . . . the cats all right?" Temple asked.

Pilar's bulky body twisted from the stove. "And what was done to that cat!" She crossed herself hastily, her long middle finger tapping forehead, chest and each shoulder in turn. After a shudder of distaste, she turned back to her stove top. "A cruel but calculated thing, Blasphemy."

When she faced them again, a plate of thick, steaming pieces of French toast was in her hands. She bore it to the table, putting it clown beside Matt's place. "There you are," she said in a gentled tone. "You like raspberry preserves, syrup?"

"Yes," Temple and Matt answered again in irritating tandem.

Pilar knew just what to do. She fetched servings of each, later bringing them cups of fresh, midnight-dark coffee and a small, rose-colored pitcher of half-and-half.

Then she stood beside them, stubby hands crossed over her apron front, and, like some gruff guardian angel, watched them eat.

"This is wonderful," Temple said, realizing how hungry she was when her stomach growled at the mere sniff of food.

"Sisters won't eat it," Pilar said in disgust. "Too upset. Even cats won't eat it. Good that you do. Do you want sugar?

Mr. Devine?" she asked solicitously, hovering over Matt's coffee cup.

He took her anxious presence in perfect stride. "Everything is fine as is. Thank you, Pilar. I can see that the sisters are well taken care of here."

"And Father Hernandez, I also cook for him at the rectory, and must run back and forth, back and forth." She rolled her hands into the apron folds. "He is not much for breakfast lately. Do you suppose that Mrs. Molina will have the nerve to question Father Hernandez?"

Temple nearly choked on her coffee to hear the name of Molina preceeded by the honorific of "Mrs." Molina an ordinary Mrs.? Never!

"What does Mr. Molina think of his wife's occupation?" Temple inquired demurely.

Pilar's sniff was a snort this time. "No Mr. Molina. Maybe there never was one. Who is to say? All I know is that Mariah Molina is in the third grade at the school, and I have never seen a wedding band on her mother's hand."

"Many widows don't wear wedding rings," Matt pointed out charitably. '

"More divorcees," Pilar answered with scorn. "Some even have the nerve to come to church and up to the communion rail. You can't tell anymore who is who and what is what. Even the church is confused. Priests and nuns are priests and nuns no longer, and married people get dispensations--"

"I think you mean 'annulments," Matt suggested quickly, obviously stung by her dismissal of ex-anything.

Pilar didn't pause for corrections. "No wonder poor Miss Tyler is dead. Nobody respects anything about the church anymore. Next they will be slaughtering nuns and priests in their beds, like in the heathen countries. I only pray that

Miss Tyler did nothing foolish with her will, like leaving her money to all those cats, instead of to Our Lady of Guadalupe."

"Lately she'd been saying that she would, hadn't she?"

Pilar eyed Temple with skepticism. "Old ladies are tyrants around the parish priest. They want attention like a small child, and they use the promise of their money to get it. Father Hernandez was foolish to anger Miss Tyler."

"What could he say?" Temple asked. "Apparently a cat in heaven is not a kosher Catholic concept."

"He could have talked around the matter, without lying. Instead, he told her no, no cats in heaven. Now there may be no dollars in the development fund. In my day, a priest did not have to scramble for money; the Sunday baskets were full. We were all poor, but we all gave what we could. Today churches must rely on the rich, like any other beggar. Are you done?"

The question came so sharply it sounded like an accusation. Temple studied her empty plate with its free-form design of syrup contrails.

"Yes," she admitted, only to have the plate whisked away.

"And you, Mr. Devine, do you want more?"

Temple frowned. She had not been offered more.

"This was plenty," he said, looking up at Pilar with that six-million-dollar-man smile. "The toast was wonderful."

"More coffee?" Pilar coaxed.

"Perhaps a bit more coffee, if it's not too much trouble."

"No trouble," Pilar said, clumping to the stove in her lace-up shoes.

When she returned to refill Matt's cup, she gave Temple a cursory glance. "I do not suppose that you want anymore."

"No," Temple said, too amazed by the byplay to consume anything at the moment.

She analyzed the situation. Pilar treated Matt like a favorite pupil, but Temple like some unwanted playmate dragged home from school unannounced.

And Matt Devine just sat there, soaking up this female consideration like he was born to it. Maybe Pilar could smell a priest; certainly Matt knew exactly how to handle a devout woman who lived to cater to the clergy, particularly the male clergy.

Temple sipped the last bitter drop of coffee in her cup. She had pictured priests as totally isolated from women, but in a parish setting, she saw, they were surrounded by them, utterly off-bounds, of course, but interacting daily, and even in the most intimate domestic setting with a housekeeper.

She had assumed that celibacy went hand in hand with innocence, with perhaps a secret and noble struggle underneath. She would expect a priest's ignorance to render him slightly gauche and awkward, despite the education of the confessional. Matt Devine was neither gauche nor awkward in this setting. He knew his way around these women like a master thief knows the layout of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He knew how to handle them without seeming to, without their noticing it any more than they should. He was forever "Father"; they relied upon him and deferred to him and considered him their own.

Pilar didn't think about all this, of course; she just reacted from instinct, as did Matt.

Temple's own instincts grew uneasy at this insight. Matt's background made him a smoother customer than she had thought, smoother than maybe he realized himself. He was a performer of sorts- after all. A spiritual prestidigitator.

He was beginning to remind her a lot of a missing magician named Max Kinsella.

Chapter 22

Hissturbing Questionsss

The door to the kitchen snapped open and a wizened face peered around the dark walnut doorjamb.

"Psst!" Sister St. Rose of Lima hailed Matt and Temple loudly enough to pass for a screaming steam kettle.

Pilar's stolid back remained turned to the room as water ran and her elbows cranked in and out over the sink. Apparently no dirty dishes lasted longer than an angelus bell in a Catholic kitchen. Temple mourned the last sweet licks of syrup on her plate that were disappearing under a baptism of sudsy water, leaving a plate that would now be squeaky-clean and innocent, unlike the rest of them, except maybe for Sister St. Rose of Lima, whose ancient, baby-doll face was wrinkled with unconcealed conspiracy . . .

Temple and Matt rose quietly and went to the door, where a whispered conference revealed that Sister Seraphina wished to meet them in the rectory while the lady lieutenant--that is the way Sister Rose put it with an awed precision--was interviewing Miss Wilhelm in the convent.

Temple and Matt exchanged one mystified glance and went out, not speaking until the warm light of day was bestowing hot haloes of amber sunlight on their heads.

"Sister Seraphina is showing signs of giving Lieutenant Molina as much trouble as I do." Temple mused. "I thought nuns were sworn to respect authority."

"Authority isn't as obvious as it once was," Matt said, "neither religious nor civil. I'm sorry to learn that Lieutenant Molina is a member of this parish. It could prejudice her."

"In pursuing the case?"