Cat on a Blue Monday

"In pursuing my past."

"Why do you think she'll bother to do that?"

"In her own way, she's as curious as you are and she has all the official means of prying at her fingertips. I suppose the crucified cat points to a religiously troubled killer, Why not me?"

"Listen, Devine, you are trouble, you are not troubled."

"I thought I was the self-defense teacher."

"In matters of physical prowess, in criminal matters, I'm the expert. Why do I feel that 'prowess' is something that has to do with 'lady lions' on the African savannahs and not me?"

"You've got plenty of prowess," he assured her, "in unexpected areas."

Matt paused at the rectory door, then pulled the wrought-iron hinges open with a mighty tug, as if he expected the door's weight and was ready for it.

They submerged themselves in another passage through cool interior shade, in a peace perfumed with lemon oil and candle wax and a faint odor of old incense.

Voices drifted into the silence like swimmers floating onto a deserted shoal, striving voices, one male, and one female.

Matt's pace quickened as he made for Father Hernandez's office door. Once there, he paused and turned to Temple with an expression of firm regret.

"I'd better go in alone."

"She summoned both of us."

"Yes, but--"

Beyond the door, Father Hernandez's voice rose to an angry rail, reminding Temple of the keening associated with an Irish wake. There was nothing Irish about this place, this time, this cast of characters, although the wake notion was all too apt with Blandina Tyler soon to become the centerpiece of her own.

Matt slipped through the door without seeming to open it.

Magician! Temple's resentful thoughts hissed after him. Subtle and self-concealing, discreet. The bitter words surged back and forth in her mind like angry surf. Max had confided nothing, revealed nothing unnecessarily, had shut and locked doors behind him that he never came again to open, and too many of them bordered Temple's emotional premises.

She waited outside this new closed door, unable to keep from overheating snatches of dialogue; unable to avoid dissecting and interpreting it.

Father Hernandez's voice came louder, deep and uncontrolled, a berserk organ rambling in a minor key. It ebbed and flowed in time to her softer mental surf. Temple could picture him pacing, his dramatic cassock skirt straining against his long, lean strides, his figure erect despite its distress. He did not look like a bendable man in any respect. Yet the voice was unkempt and slurred, touched with the tequila's thick, tart tongue.

Seraphina's mission was obvious to Temple whether she was invited in or not: to restore reason, if not sobriety, to Father Hernandez before Lieutenant Molina sat him down and peeled his mind like a Muscat grape fat with foreign intoxicants.

"I have failed," he raged in a three-penny-opera voice, rich and sonorous for sermons and now directed at himself like an accusing Greek chorus that would be heard through closed doors no matter what. "A serpent is loose in our little Garden of Eden, of Gethsemane."

Sssserpent loossse, As in Eden. But a serpent sounded more at home in Gethsssemane, the garden of purely human betrayal, Temple thought.

Matt's calm murmur--so damned priestly--was harder to decipher. Maybe Temple was irreverent to put it that way in her mind; maybe it was immaterial and irrelevant to care how she put it to herself. She paused before the sealed door, guilty but determined. Matt was the core of her concern. What would this crash course in troubled Catholicism do to him?

"Falsely accused!" Father Hernandez's best pulpit tones cried. "There is a Judas among us."

How he hissed the incriminating words! Falsssely accusssed. A Judassss among usss.

"Scandal!" the drunken voice raved.

Sssscandal, Temple heard.

"This is the Man!"

Thisss isss the Man.

Could Father Hernandezsss be the hissing caller? Certainly his rich, Hispanic voice, blurred by liquor and desperation, broadcast a susurration that an old woman on a phone might mistake for hissing.

"Snakes!" he ranted.

Ssssnakesss. On the phone. In the parish. In the pastor's raving words.

Matt's voice suddenly came clear and strong, urging control and sanity, banishing the bad dreams, or the memories?

Did Father Hernandez harbor bad memories of driving an elderly parishioner to distraction and ultimate death before she could change her will and cut the church from it like a plump plum doomed to wither on the apostolic vine?

A priest who killed? How? How, when he was drowning himself in tequila and paranoia?

Temple couldn't stand it. Eavesdropping was not her long suit--in hearts, clubs. Or even when it came to aces up her sleeve in spades. She needed to confront her suspicions in person, which is no doubt why Max's disappearance had so thoroughly confounded her. Her hand reached for the dark iron doorknob, then turned it.

The overheard dialogue clarified the instant that she entered the somber study. She felt as if she had walked onto the set of a play and the actors were now enunciating with Masterpiece Theatre perfection for her benefit. Certainly the scene was striking.

Father Hernandez was facing Matt, as dark and brooding as a tragic hero in his coloring, his old-fashioned black cassock, his tortured priestly passion.

"Some priests walk away," he was saying. Bitterness and regret seasoned his accusing voice. "I cannot."

Ssssome priessstsss, the snake hissed in Eden, in Las Vegas.

Matt, as innocently blond as any first-communion angel of seven years in a winsome white suit, answered the challenge with a lift of his head and his voice. "Some priests stay when they do more damage than if they left."

That reply caused Father Hernandez to recoil, to sink into one of the upholstered armchairs designed for the comfort of his flock and put his face in his hands.

In the ensuing silence, Sister Seraphina wrung her wrinkled old hands and glanced from one man to the other.

"We must give each other the benefit of the doubt," she urged. "We must support each other in our separate ways."

Father Hernandez withdrew his hands and turned to the peacemaker, his red-rimmed eyes empty and wounded.

"Separate is different for all of us. Don't worry, Sister. I will pull myself together for the police lieutenant." He smiled as he shook his head to clear it. "She is only a parishioner, after all. I have heard her confession." That assertion made Temple blink. She would love to hear--even overhear--C.R. Molina's confession. "I have always been able to appease my parishioners," he added with a touch of the old arrogance, "Except for Miss Tyler."

"A priest's role is not to appease," Matt put in.

"Walk in my shoes, Fisherman!" Father Hernandez's black-coral eyes blazed. "What is most unappeasable is Satan, and he is out there, be certain of it."

Shoesss of the Fisssherman. Mossst unappeasssable. Ssssatan. Isss. Csssertain.

Temple heard hisses, and there was no one there----only a conscience-wracked parish priest. Conssscience-wracked parisssh priessst. And Ssssissster Sssseraphina. And Matt Devine, who could not possssibly be party to this cssselebration of disssassster and doubt.

"You look tired, my dear," Ssssissster Sssseraphina whissspered to Temple.

She was; no point in denying it. She was even beginning to look forward to the nexssst ssstage of Csss. R. Molina'sss inquisssition. My asss, Temple thought, fed up with suspicions that hissed through everybody's most unconscious word choice. Pardon, she thought again contritely, in deference to the religious environment. Balaam'sss asss.

Lieutenant Molina found them, of course, even in the refuge of the rectory, about ten minutes later. She skeptically eyed the assembled foursome, then addressed only Father Hernandez.

"I'll need to ask you some questions. Alone."

The other three left without any parting pleasantries. No good days or goodbyes. It was obviously not a good day, and they would obviously see each other again.

"I should talk to Peggy," Sister Seraphina muttered as much to herself as to Temple and Matt on the way back to the convent.

"So should I," Temple said. "We," she added in deference to Matt.

He was more intimately involved in this death than she, after all. Temple had only fed Blandina Tyler's cats-once. Matt had administered her last sacrament.

"Why?" Matt asked, his eyes distant and troubled.

"She's the only one who's going to tell us what really happened to Miss Tyler. Molina won't."

"What would Peggy know?" Sister Seraphina asked with a wrinkled brow.

"She should know as much as Molina saw fit to tell the victim's only relative. I'm hoping that will be time of death, the method, maybe even a speculation on the motive."

At this pronouncement, Sister Seraphina and Matt exchanged a lightning glance. They were doing a lot of that lately, Temple had noticed. She wondered if the same suspicions that danced the polka in her active imagination were making a slow, reluctant saraband through their minds: Father Hemandez had a lot to lose if Blandina Tyler had lived to leave Our Lady of Guadalupe out of her will. That worry could have turned him to the bottle. Could it also have goaded him into the unreasonable acts bedeviling the convent and its neighbor: the crude calls, the midnight ramblings and rustles, the brutal attack on Peter? Could it have caused him to kill the old parishioner before she acted on her threat?

Sister Rose admitted them to the convent, and they returned to its one public room, where Peggy Wilhelm nursed a cup of tea that smelled of apple and almonds. Not even hot, pungent herbal tea could steam the pleats of worry from Peggy's pleasant round face.

She stirred at their entrance. "I'll have to contact the neighborhood funeral parlor--Lopez and Kelly, isn't it?"

Sister Seraphina nodded.

Peggy went on. "I don't know when the police will . . .release the body, but no doubt the funeral people can see to all that. I'll have to go back into the house and . . . pick some Clothes for the funeral, feed the cats."

"I'll go with you," Sister Seraphina said promptly.

"I'll feed the cats," Temple volunteered. "I know the routine."

Matt said nothing. The practicalities of death were always women's work, Temple supposed. He was designated to come along later, in cassock and vestment, to intone and bless and bury; only he didn't do that kind of work anymore. Father Hernandez would have to do it, whatever his condition--or involvement.

"What," Temple asked, unable to restrain herself any longer, "did Lieutenant Molina tell you about the . . .crime?"

Peggy's eyes were as dull as tepid tea, scummed over with sorrow and shock, their expression deadened. "The medical examiner at the morgue will determine the cause of death. I found her at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck, with numerous bruises and contusions. She could have tripped on a cat, or several cats, but the lieutenant admitted that she didn't like the severity of the marks around her head and throat. Her cane was broken into several pieces. I guess it didn't take much to kill Aunt, either way: accident or murder. It must have happened after midnight, the lieutenant said. I was sleeping in the downstairs back bedroom, and no one next door at the convent heard anything."

"Whose rooms are nearest the Tyler house?" Temple asked.

"Only Sister Mary Monica's," Seraphina said in wry tones.

Matt nodded wearily. "She's virtually deaf."

"Convenient," Temple noted grimly. "If it was murder, it looks as if the killer knew the neighborhood. But was he--or she--the one who made the nuisance calls and harmed the cat?"

"Paul's the roamer," Seraphina said suddenly, nodding at the statue-still ocher figure of a sitting cat on the windowsill.

"Peter rarely goes out. He's the homebody."

"Then someone came inside the convent to get him," Matt realized with growing alarm, "Someone who had easy, unchallenged access to the place."

They mulled that without comment. Temple's mental list included Father Hernandez, the loyal but narrow-minded Pilar, even Peggy Wilhelm, who was often at her aunt's house and often visited the neighboring nuns who were her backup cat feeders. And she had been at the scene of the crime the whole time, ostensibly asleep. So if Father Hernandez was suspect, why not a nun, or assorted nuns? Even virtually deaf Sister Mary Monica?

"The entire matter rests on the will," Temple said half aloud. "Did Molina say anything about that?"

"She asked about it," Peggy admitted. "Not too nicely.

She pointed out that it didn't much matter whether Aunt Blandina left her estate to the cats or the church; I was out of the picture either way."

"Did that bother you?" Matt asked.

Peggy paused for a moment before shaking her head. "Why should it? I'm a cat breeder. That means I'm a little nuts about the species. I'm happy to see so many abandoned animals have a chance at a decent, protected life. As for the church, I really didn't have that much contact with my aunt. I didn't earn a place in her will; if she wanted the church to have everything, fine. I just hope the cats weren't left out entirely. But she wouldn't have done that, no matter what."

That was all Peggy knew, all they could know. When Sister Rose bustled in to tell them that an officer wanted to see Miss Wilhelm, they tensed in concert.

Their visitor was not Molina, but another detective, a wiry man with a luxurious mustache who identified himself as Detective Sanger. The crime-scene team was through. Miss Wilhelm could collect some clothes for her aunt's funeral, but otherwise the bedroom and stairs were still off-limits.

"What about the cats?" Temple asked indignantly.

Detective Sanger rolled his eyes. What about the cats?

"They need to be fed and watered twice a day."

"Do it then," he told her, "but stay downstairs."

"What about the upstairs cats?" Peggy wondered, the ones that preferred to stay on the second floor.

"They'll just have to walk down the stairs to eat," he said.

"They've been all over that place since forever. I guess they can't do any more to mess up the crime scene."

"It was a crime . . . then?" Sister Seraphina asked.

The detective eyed her sincere face. "We don't know for sure yet." His voice was the standard detective-issue gruff.

"Just do the essential business and get out."

They chirped agreement like doves in their little nests are reputed to agree, and then eyed each other after the detective had left. Maybe, Temple was thinking for them all, they would find some overlooked clue in the chaos.

Temple, Seraphina and Peggy decamped with a will for the Tyler house and their designated duties. Where Matt went next, he didn't say, but his face was a study in graceful abstraction when they left.

The trio was greeted at the Tyler door by a coven of milling cats--thirteen pairs of eyes the gold, copper and verdigris color of old coins gazing up to heaven and human faces for manna and Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.

It was messy, sometimes smelly, bend-and-twist work, but Temple was glad she could concentrate on feeding the multitudes while Peggy and Sister Seraphina went about unearthing funeral clothes upstairs. She counted their slow overhead steps in a series of loud creeks, then stopped with a can of

Finnyky Feast half-open and smelling to high heaven.

This old house made more sounds than the mews of its many feline residents, and Blandina had not been in the least deaf. Suppose she had heard a step in the hall and come out to investigate? Her cane could have been ripped from her hand and used to strike her until she fell down the stairs, the victim of an apparently nasty accident.

How could Molina prove or rule out murder in such murky circumstances, with such ambiguous clues as bruises, and stairs the murder weapons? Perhaps the cane . . . now broken and in police custody, was it the murder weapon?

Temple would have liked to see it again, for more than the dried dirt on its rubber tip.

A raucous meow reminded her that standing with an open cat-food can in hand and two dozen open, empty mouths at her feet was not a particularly safe occupation. Thump. A big brown-and-white tom had leaped atop the cabinet. Meroww, he said.

He was not as eloquent as Louie, but he made himself understood. Temple dropped a dollop of what looked like minced eel bellies into an empty pie tin. Boston Brownie was at it in a twinkling, and so were the lithe, lean cats that joined him atop the cabinet for a feast.

Now that their benefactress was dead, Temple wondered, would the authorities evict these cats from their overcrowded haven? Miss Tyler's death exacerbated everybody's problems. Lieutenant Molina was forced to investigate a suspicious death in her own back yard. Matt was confronting his past in great, stunning wallops. Father Hernandez, hiding from something past or future, now stood in an unavoidable spotlight. Sister Seraphina fended off obscene phone-callers and held everything together, while Peggy Wilhelm nursed a shaved cat and buried a well-to-do aunt whose cats and money were sure to be bones of contention for the framers of city statutes and decipherers of legal complexities equally.

A vibrating fur boa suddenly encompassed Temple's ankles. Cats curved around her calves, making her wobble on her usual high heels, turning her into an island of comfort and consideration, making her a prisoner of their endless needs.

Temple wondered if Blandina Tyler had ever felt that way.

Chapter 23

It's in the Cards

It is never possible tor the born overachiever to rest on his laurel.

Actually, what I normally rest upon is a tot more personal and less prickly than laurels, but that is another story.

I am recovering from my ordeal as Blood Bank Boy of the Year when a certain irritation, a rather noxious itch in my ears, a haunting restlessness, indicates that I am being summoned by the imperious, if not imperial, Karma. I must confess that I am sorry to have sniffed out this telepathic dame. Like all advocates of alternative realities. she is more than somewhat flaky. I am not referring here to the state of her skin, but to that of her mental capacities.

Now that she has got my number, I foresee that I will rue the day I ever investigated Miss Electra Lark's premises and discovered the resident prophetess. (This foreseeing is not restricted to psychic cats. you will observe, but is also accessible to the ordinary street dude it he is so foolish as to think he has anything to look forward to.)

Right now I am anticipating a hot climb in the dark to the filth-floor penthouse, where I will find the sublime Karma hiding behind something and teasing me with whatever it is she has to hide.

These telecats would be a pain in the neck it they were not already a pain in the previous life. I have a feeling that I have felt Karma's hooded claws riding my destiny in other places and at other times. I am no more amenable to that idea now than when I was a hot-blooded kit accepting worship and mummification at the hands of long-gone Egyptians. Why is it that those who are gods in one culture end up as garbage in another? I could go on about my noble origins and sadly fallen slate, but time is fleeting and I do not have too many lives left.

I bestir myself, which makes me feel like last week's stew, and slip through Miss Temple Barr's accommodatingly loose French doors. (These French are notoriously loose in every manifestation.) I naturally recall that my normal egress--the small, high, open bathroom window--has been closed for my own good. This means that I will have to put myself to considerable trouble to achieve another escape route. Which cannot be doing my own good much benefit, but those who determine one's own good do not worry about such trivialities.

So I am out on the patio and up in the blink of an eye, if it is a lizard's peeper and rather slow to blink. I stand on the penthouse patio, girding my loins for another encounter with the elusive Karma. This loin-girding is a figure of speech and somewhat obscure. It certainly is not the fun it should be.

I push my way back into the shadowy interior. All is still, which means that Miss Electra Lark is nowhere in the vicinity. I have nothing against Miss Electra Lark, other than her taste in household companions and furnishings, but I am not eager to be caught trespassing on her turf. She is a buxom lady who is quite capable of sweeping me out the door without so much as a by-your-leavings.I am in luck, as usual. Faint light flickers from the many prognosticating orbs--otherwise known as crystal balls stationed around the room. The light glows green, and I realize that I have once again stumbled upon the hypnotic eyes of the prescient Karma.

"You rang." say I in a bored, Maynard Krebs manner. (I am fond of vintage television reruns on the cable channels when I can get my mitts on a remote control.)

I cannot say that Karma uncorks a sigh, but she certainly looks askance.

"Louie . . . Louie . . . Louie," she breathes, "Such a common and undistinguished name. Sometimes one must descend to the cruder tool. I see a cogitation of cats in disarray, abandoned, threatened, At sea."

"Maybe they met up with an owl with a three-pound note." say I. "I myself might skip town with some bird with dough about now."

"Louie . . . Louie . . . Louie. You are incorrigible."

"Flattery will get you nowhere," I warn her wan-coated silhouette.

A pale paw flops out from under the sofa fringe, which begins doing a distracting hula at this interruption. I almost miss seeing the several oblongs of pasteboard pinned to the carpet by tour admirably sharp claws.

"I have been studying the Tarot." Karma announces.

"I am not unfamiliar with the pharaoh." I riposte. "We go back a long way together."

"Tarot," she repeats. "T-a-r-o-t."

"As in tommy-rot." I answer.

"More like tomcat-rot," she purrs, "but unfortunately, your health appears to be splendid." Oh, Louie . . . Louie . . . Louie. Do you recognize this card?"

"I am not unfamiliar with cards." I assert as I train my discriminating peepers upon the oblong she shoves forward with one agile claw. I see a picture of a dude in a funny hat who looks as it El Greco has scratched his portrait in a sandbox; he makes a mighty odd Jack of any suit I ever saw.

"The Thin Man." say I.

"Oh--" She no longer uses my name as an expletive. "This is the Hierophant, fool."

"Say, I knew a few of these Higher Ophants in my early days.

They usually led the parade when Ringling Brothers came to town."

Karma's sky-blue eyes cross with consternation. I do like to ruffle her fluff. "The card of the Hierophant represents the figure of the Priest," she announces in high disdain. "In ancient Greece, far from my lost Burma, he was the interpreter of mysteries. Here, I fear he is the heart of the mystery. I have drawn the Hierophant repeatedly in the past few days."

This I do not doubt. I can see the claw marks on the card. In fact, the figure of the Hierophant, now that l look more closely wears that funny pointed headdress reminiscent of either a dignitary in the Ku Klux Klan or a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church, Strange bedfellows, even on a Tarot card.

I have not encountered any animated bed sheets, otherwise known as Grand Dragons, lately, but I have heard a lot about the Catholic Church all too recently from the person of the abused Peter, but no bishops. So who is supposed to be the dude on the card?

"Does not sport the big ears of a Crosby," I say. "Does not look like Dumbo."

"Neither." Karma says with great precision, "do you, but that is no excuse. Do you not sense the connection instantly?"

"I do not know many priests, not to mention even fewer elephants."

"But . . . you know . . . more priests than you know."

I hate it when she leaks cryptic words like they were precious drops of Bailey's Irish Cream. From eavesdropping on my little doll, I have my suspicions about a certain person, but they are vaguer than Tarot cards.

"One," I snarl, "but he may be in the past tense."

"There is no past tense in life. Louie. All present problems merge past and future. I fear that you are not capable of distinguishing such differences, but you are the only tool available."

"Listen," say I. "I am sick of being compared to a pair of household pliers. I am not a tool, or a fool, l am a feline being! If you insist on being abstruse, I will have to resort to my own methods."

"Your methods?" Karma sounds particularly scornful.

"I have my ways."

"Your ways! Study my ways, and learn." One long, pale scimitar of nail, the blood showing pink through its pearly surface, taps the dude with the upstanding headdress. "I have often drawn the Hierophant reversed of late. You, of course, realize what that means."

"He has undergone sex-change surgery?"

"At times." Karma says, "I suspect that you deliberately play the fool to claim some connection, however remote, with the symbols of a higher consciousness, at other times. I do not. The Hierophant in itself represents a third party, a dark horse suddenly on the scene, a surprising development, and of course the church, or he who represents it. Reversed, it denotes a rude rejection of all religious beliefs, perhaps during youth, It speaks of emotional disturbance; someone is distrustful of others, or to be distrusted."

I say nothing, not knowing what to make of this gibberish, and Karma tilts her head at me. "Speaking of the Fool, you will see that I have drawn this card, too, as well as the Emperor, which is heaven and spiritual things under the all important sign of Libra, as I mentioned before. And the Emperor reversed, which is chicanery. Also see here the Tower reversed, another Libra card, and the sign of an obsessive, distorted mind and spirit, of reality skewed to suit an unscrupulous, twisted mentality."

I wait for her to associate this last description with me, but am disappointed. "Quite a cast of characters," I comment, cocking my head to denote intelligent contemplation. I am getting the hang of this oracle routine.

"These are not from a single cast of the cards, but the same figures have appeared repeatedly. Obviously, your task is clear, and formidable. You must find the true Hierophant, who will lead you to these other cards whose roles are less clear: Death, Deviltry, Justice and Judgment, as well as Temperance."

I hold my Temperance and say nothing. Death, Deviltry, Justice and Judgment are fully familiar to me, if not as cards, and I have always handled them well, in my own unenlightened way.

Having done my penance at the feet of Karma and her magical, mystery cards, I bow my way out of the Arcane Presence and head for my particular ever fruitful source of wisdom and all knowledge--the hot, bustling sidewalks of Las Vegas. Nevada. And whoever I can find on them with a tale to tell--man, woman or four-footed friend.

Chapter 24

Money Business

Matt was waiting in the shade of a tall stand of oleanders when she came out of the rectory.

Lieutenant Molina paused for a moment, then regarded the notebook she had been tucking into the deep side pocket of her navy jacket. "Will I need this?"

He smiled. "It's not confession time. I just wanted to talk to you."

"I'm not good to talk to right now," she said, without a softening smile.

Matt could understand why she intimidated Temple. Lieutenant Molina was serious, direct, and competent to the point of a matching plainness of dress and manner. All women who competed in a once thoroughly masculine field like medicine or police work adopted that protective coloring--or lack of coloring. Women who would be priests shared that same single-minded purity of performance that sometimes made them seem slightly inhuman.

"Did Father Hernandez offer any new information?'' he asked.

"Only that the pranks around the convent phones had spread to the church. Red dye in the holy-water fonts, that kind of thing." She frowned, her expression abstracted.

Matt wondered if she envisioned her daughter's hand dipping into a still surface of blood-tinged water. "Did he consider Satanists, or would-be Satanists?"

"He didn't mention it. I thought of it. Look, I can check with the ritual-crime team, but I doubt it's anything like that. Father Hernandez certainly is frightened of something he wasn't a few weeks ago. He puts on a good act, but he's scared white down to his cassock hem. Perhaps it's fear of losing the Tyler estate. I've got a call in to the parish lawyer's office."

"There's something I don't know if I should tell you," Matt began.

He realized from the instant, hungry flare in her eyes that even by mentioning it, he had gone too far to retreat. His false sense of familiarity with Lieutenant Molina through Temple tended to make him forget that she was a seasoned homicide detective, and was not about to play games with anyone's conscience.

"What?" she demanded.

"Father Hernandez," he continued, wishing he hadn't mentioned it.

"He drinks," she finished for him in a clipped, unshocked voice. "That rumor's been running riot over the parish for two weeks. Something new for Father Rafe, all right. He's Old World, autocratic, often an infuriating pastor, at least for those of us who don't feel that clutching rosaries is the beginning and end of devotion. But he was never a drunk."

"Then you agree that this new behavior is disturbing."

"Sure it is, so's yours."

Matt blinked as if to shake the hypnotic gaze of a cobra. Lieutenant Molina's eyes were such a deep, lucid blue that it was hard not to fall into them, and fall into her eternal trap, maybe. Everyone in the so-called helping professions dealt in charisma of one kind or another.

"Mine? What's so disturbing about my behavior?" He used the disarming tone that worked so well on lady librarians, nurses and church housekeepers. "I'm pretty low-key."

It did not work on Lieutenant Molina. Her narrowed eyes reduced her compelling blue pupils to fractured glimpses through bristling eyelashes. "That could mean that you've got something to hide, or that you'd prefer to hide, something more than your past profession. This case--if it is murder and it is a case--reeks of some sort of religious kink. Anybody with a religious background is a suspect."

"At least that leaves Temple out for once," he retorted. "She'll be pleased to learn that lukewarm Unitarianism has such protective qualities."

"No, it doesn't. Miss Barr is a born victim of guilt by association."

"You're referring to the magician."

"And others." Molina's single arched eyebrow had far more effect on her stoic face than it would have had on anyone else's, The Mr. Spock syndrome.

"That's what I was going to suggest, that you check the background of everyone involved with Miss Tyler. You must have ways of finding out everything from how many fillings they have in their teeth to what their confirmation names are."

"We have ways, as you well know. Are you still miffed about my discovering your absent driver's license?"

"No."

"Or reporting it?"

"Maybe."

Lieutenant Molina had turned so that they were strolling into the hot sun and back to the convent. Matt glanced at the sports watch on his left wrist as a burst of childish screeching exploded somewhere behind the church. Mid-morning already; the kids had been let loose for recess.

Molina stopped dead, her head lifting like an animal's-- alert and relying on some secret sense. Did she consider her young daughter, playing so near what could be the scene of a particularly cruel murder of a defenseless old lady? But all murders were cruel.

Then her corrosive gaze rested on him again.

"So you're still annoyed that I looked you up?" she pressed.

"I still wonder why. Maybe you were trying to protect Temple from another mystery man."

"She needs protection." Molina's voice grew low, almost angry. "That woman should not be let out without a leash, or at least a license. No, it's not Miz Barr I worry about." Molina leaned nearer. Matt was struck by her solid size, her height so like his own, the training that made her formidable in many ways not expected in a woman. "I want Max Kinsella," she said, her words underlined with an intensity he had never heard from her. "Nobody does a vanishing act without leaving traces. In his case, the only clue so far is a dead body at the Goliath Hotel. Nobody gets away scot-free with an open file on my desk."

"You think he'll come back," Matt said with sudden in-sight, "For Temple."

"Why not?" Molina's tone grew defensive, as if she'd had to defend her interest in this old case before, to colleagues and superiors. "Look at how Kinsella arranged for the condo, even before he vanished. Everything set up in both their names so Miss Barr could simply take it over. He knew he might be leaving."

"You think Temple knew that, too?"

She backed off suddenly, even gave a small laugh, a laugh that dismissed her own passion and pursuit. "Maybe, maybe not. Certainly she didn't stage her own attack. Those men meant business. It's a good thing you're teaching her some self-defense. If she's going to keep sticking her neck out, she should learn how to keep it from being chopped off. How does--did--a priest get involved in martial arts?"

"We're allowed hobbies, you know. And prayer and meditation aren't too different from the contemplative side of many martial arts. But, to answer your question, I wasn't always a priest. I started tae kwon do in high school."

"Catholic high school in Chicago?"

He nodded.

Lieutenant Molina stopped walking again and glanced toward the church, past it to the unseen school and playground. The streets were quiet now. Recess was over. "I don't know if I'll keep Mariah in Catholic schools. It's a solid education, and God knows, there's less violence and gang activity than in the public schools, so it's good for her now. But later it might betray her."

"Too Catholic, you mean?"

She nodded, and then looked away. Matt realized that she had fallen into the trap everybody did, that of consulting him, without him even trying to encourage it. She stuck a hand in her jacket pocket, angry about forgetting herself, her position, her authority, and his position as a possible suspect, however remote.

"Did they betray us," he asked softly, "or did we betray them?"

She recognized an ambiguous question, too, especially when it was so germane. Her look was swift, and as swiftly reestablished their relationship of hunter and hunted.

"Maybe it was a victimless crime," Lieutenant Molina said briskly, stepping up her pace toward the convent. "I'll check out everyone's background--I was going to do it anyway--beginning with you. What seminary did you attend?"

"Saint Vincent."

"Where?"

"Batesville, Indiana."

"How did a confirmed Midwesterner like you end up in Vegas?"

"Looking for luck, I guess. Aren't you from someplace else?"

"I'm asking the questions."

"I couldn't find a job anywhere else," he admitted after a moment, "Too much Catholic education."

Her smile was wry, but not unfriendly. "I couldn't either.

Do me a favor and get Miss Barr to drive you home or something. I could use a vacation from her inquisitive face."

He nodded and waited in another patch of shade by Temple's Storm, Las Vegan enough to know to get out of the UV's. In Chicago, snow had been the element worth fearing; here, it was unheard of, and something as simple and treasured as sunshine could be lethal.

When Temple did come out, it was from Miss Tyler's house. She joined him by the car.

"That is an excessive number of cats," she commented, "especially when you feed them and clean their boxes."

'That going to be your job for a while?"

"Super pooper-scoopers, I hope not! Peggy was busy selecting clothes for the funeral with Sister Seraphina, so I pitched in, literally." Temple pantomimed pitching out something, presumably feline waste. "Say, you don't want a cat or two, in case they're not covered in the will?"

"Not after what you've described," Matt said hastily.

"Ready to go?"

"Yeah, I want to close down the cat show and make sure no more malicious tricks have been pulled." She started around to the street side of the Storm, then stopped and stared almost as narrowly as Lieutenant Molina, down the road to the church. "Say, isn't that the wimpy lawyer we met yesterday who just pulled up at the rectory in the silver Camry?"

Matt squinted into the bright sunshine. "I'm not sure--"

"Well, let's find out."

Temple threw her jangling key ring back into her tote bag, hoisted the bag high on her shoulder and began pacing toward the car in question in a no-nonsense manner.

Matt was startled to find himself jogging to keep up.

"Temple! It's none of your business."

"Do you spell that 'nun'?" she shot back over her shoulder with a grin. "Sister Seraphina called you in as a consultant, and I came along for the ride, or the drive, rather. I bet what's-his-name has got the will, and inquiring minds want to know what's in it."

He caught up with her. "Do you think the lawyer or Father Hernandez will tell you?"

"No, but I'd bet that Father Hernandez will tell you. He looks like a man desperately in need of a sympathetic ear of the right sort."

"What sort do you mean?"

"Someone in your unique position."

They were huffing up to the rectory door now, the effort of walking fast in unshaded sunshine sheening their faces.

Matt began to see what Lieutenant Molina meant about a leash. He stopped Temple at the threshold by grabbing her arm. She did not seem to take exception to the contact.

"What's so unique about my position?" he asked, knowing he was asking for it, whatever it was, but inquiring minds need to know, as she had pointed out.

"You know the priesthood, its pressures and rewards.

You're out of it, so you're hardly one to point fingers, no matter what Father Hernandez has done."

"And what has he done?"

"Dived into a bottle, for one thing." She bit her bottom lip. "But there's more to it than that. I bet you could find out if you went about it the right way."

"Why would I want to?" he asked stiffly.

"Because it might be important to why Miss Tyler was murdered."

"The jury isn't in on that yet."

Temple sighed and rolled her eyes. "Of course she was. And maybe all the other stuff--the phone calls, the cat shaving and crucifixion--was just diversion." She shrugged.

"You can keep me in custody if you want, but what would it hurt to go in and ask?"

He released her quickly, realizing that his grip had become tight, almost desperate. He definitely did not want to become unofficial confessor to Father Raphael Hernandez. He had left all that, hadn't he?

Temple was shameless. Public-relations work must do that to even the most sensitive soul, Matt concluded. Once inside the rectory, she clicked down the hall on her pert high heels and didn't pause until she reached the ajar office door. Then she nudged herself through.

"Sorry to disturb you, Father Hernandez," she apologized brightly. "I didn't know you had company. Oh, Mr. Burns!

Do you happen to know yet if the cats were covered in the will? I've just been feeding them, and I don't know how long poor Peggy can fend off the animal-control people once their number is generally known."

Matt groaned inwardly at her bull-in-a-china-shop routine, except that with Temple, it was more like Bambi in a Baccarat-crystal showroom. Unlike Lieutenant Molina, she was not physically impressive; in retaliation, she could on occasion become as cute as hell and achieve the same ends. Her victims talked, despite themselves.

He heard the surprised--and dazed--voices invite her over the threshold and tagged along behind.

A legal-length white document of several pages was indeed splayed atop the flotsam on Father Hernandez's desk.

The pastor was looking far more dazed than the attorney. Neither man challenged the newcomers' right to know. Matt suspected that had less to do with Temple's unruffled chutzpah than with the contents of the will. He found himself becoming seriously curious.

Temple settled with Shirley Temple confidence in one of the comfortable chairs built to hold more than twice her bulk. Matt took another and assumed a neutral expression.

"The cats." Father Hernandez ran his fingers through his thinning, sterling-silver pompadour. "It appears that they are indeed in limbo." He quirked an apologetic smile at Temple. "You may not be familiar with the term."

"Oh, but I am. Does that mean that they're to be . . .evicted?"

"No, no . . ." He waved a soothing hand.

Matt recognized all the proper murmurs and gestures--patented Good Shepherd, parish-priest style--and recognized that they were being performed by an automaton.

Father Hernandez had just had an unexpected shock. He turned, as Temple had, to the lawyer.

Lawyers love an audience.

Burns riffled lovingly through the long pages that had been folded four times and tended to curl shut.

"I know that this document created much speculation," he admitted, "but I couldn't reveal the late Miss Tyler's latest will until it was a matter of record, as it certainly is with her unfortunate death. Father Hernandez has just had some excellent news." He cast a puzzled, almost hurt glance at the shell-shocked priest.

Lawyers are not often the bearers of good news and when they are, they like to enjoy it. But Father Hernandez wasn't doing that, so he turned to his new audience, announcing with a smug flourish, "Miss Tyler did not change her will as she supposedly threatened to do. She was more bark than bite, if you will forgive a canine analogy used in connection with a feline-lover of such long standing."

He bowed to Temple, then glanced triumphantly back to Father Hernandez.

"I happily report that Our Lady of Guadalupe is the sole beneficiary of the will. That means a considerable boost to the parish-development fund, but first I must inventory the contents of Miss Tyler's safety deposit box to estimate the exact amount."

Father Hernandez silently tented his prayerful fingers and propped his long face upon them. He did not look like an administrator who had been granted his dearest wish.

"She made no provision for the cats at all?" Temple asked in surprise.

Burns shrugged. "No. I mentioned it, as a matter of fact, but she insisted that when one is facing the afterlife, one must not be bound by the things of this world."

"But--" Temple was not taking this well. The intrepid investigator had vanished into the persona of a crusading animal advocate. "They'll be caged and shipped off to the animal shelter! In sixty hours, most of them will be dead, and they're house pets, not feral animals. It's . . . awful. Can't anything be done?"

Father Hernandez bestirred himself. "The church is also heir to her house?"

The lawyer nodded.

"And its contents?"

Again, a nod.

"I suppose we can delay the disposition of the cats." His hand brushed his forehead as if checking for a headache that he could not quite feel but suspected was there. "The . . .sisters can take care of them, perhaps arrange some better solution."

"The city authorities will not tolerate substandard conditions for long," Burns put in discreetly.

"No one is living in the house any longer," Father Hernandez said impatiently. "Why is it anyone's business but ours?"

"Because it is public knowledge now," the lawyer replied.

"Yes." Father Hernandez sounded depressed even further by this obvious news. "Public knowledge is all, even in matters of life and death. What will the public think? Well, be damned to the public!"

Matt winced at the fury in Father Hernandez's voice. He sensed that this very fury was what the pastor had been trying to douse in quarts of tequila.

"You don't mean that," Burns was saying in obvious contradiction of the facts.

When priests and lawyers tell each other lies, what is to become of the rest of us? Matt wondered. He felt his own unacknowledged bitterness rising like bile in his throat.

He glanced at Temple. She was watching the two men's interchange with the bright, uncommitted gaze of an observant bird. She cared about the cats, but at the moment she was measuring these men and their motives as the best way of defending the defenseless.

He wanted to be out of here, this room of subtexts and unspoken thoughts. To be alone in his bare rooms at the Circle Ritz, so devoid of personality and past, or back in his safe, soundproofed cubicle at ConTact, listening to long distance agony, eavesdropping on life.

Matt's palms felt damp. Much as he hated to admit it, Temple had been right. Something was drastically wrong with the state of Father Hernandez's body and soul. The will in the church's favor had done nothing to restore his peace of mind. The church development fund was the least of his problems. Might murder be the worst of them?

When Lieutenant Molina did as he had suggested, as she had meant to do anyway, and looked deeply at every person involved in this sad and apparently well-plotted death, what would she find?

Chapter 25

One Less Orphan Animal

"This is great!" Chortling, Cleo Kilpatrick pointed to the photos of bizarre-looking cats in both Las Vegas's Saturday morning and evening papers.

Temple nodded at the naked Sphinx on the Review-Journal second front and the semi-naked curly coated Rex in the Las Vegas Sun. She hadn't noticed her successful handiwork, mainly because she'd skimmed the papers for news of the possible killer's successful handiwork--the death of Blandina Tyler.

Beyond the two women stargazing at the local papers, cats, cages and breeders were bustling around the huge exhibition space in the process of shutting down the cat show. An entourage passed. From their midst, the exiting Maurice, the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy cat, gazed out majestically from a carrier emblazoned with his name and a portrait of the product he represented.

"I'm so glad," Cleo went on as her glance paused on the procession, "that you didn't get any more publicity for that dreadful Maurice. Frankly, commercial cat foods are not the best feline nutrition."

"Oh, are you a Free-to-be-Feline advocate?"

"Most definitely."

"Then tell me one thing: how am I supposed to get a cat to eat it?"

"It will take a bit of patience at first--"

"Wrong. It takes patience to the bitter end."

"Cats can be finicky."

"Louie isn't finicky. That's the only stuff he refuses to eat."

"Sometimes they have to be encouraged to do what's good for them. Don't feed him anything but Free-to-be-Feline. If he gets hungry enough, he'll eat it."

Temple nodded, not bothering to say that if Louie got hungry enough, he'd leave home. She wanted to avoid explaining that Louie was free to eat elsewhere, lest she get another lecture on roaming cats. Miss Tyler's cats seemed happy enough confined indoors, but they had been abused on the street. Louie hadn't; he had survived quite nicely without Temple or her Circle Ritz condominium. Any cat that showed the ingenuity to ensure that he could come and go deserved his freedom and whatever free lunch he could find, Temple thought.

Then her eye fell on another exiting cat. "What about that little black one?" she asked, pointing to the undecorated cage near the front registration table.

"You mean the Humane Society cat? Apparently no one adopted it. It'll go back to the shelter."

"Oh." Uh-oh. Temple edged over on tentative heel clacks. She didn't need another cat. More untouched mounds of Free-to-be-Feline. More black hairs all over her off-white sofa. As soon as she approached, the cat rose from its sitting position and began rubbing its face against the grille, gazing at her with big harvest-gold eyes, its little pink mouth opening in a series of silent meows. "How old is it?"

"Looks about nine or ten months," Cleo said.

"What is it?"

"Basic domestic shorthair in basic black. An ordinary alleycat", in other words."

"I meant the gender."

"Oh. Probably female. It would have to be fixed."

Temple read the small card affixed to the cage, "Caviar" Forty-five dollars with shots and a discount on spaying.

Temple reached out a hand, which the cat's jet-black nose instantly nudged. She stepped back as if the cage grille were electrified. This is how it began with Miss Tyler, she told herself: such a pretty, sweet cat; such a shame that no one would take it, that it would have to go back to the Humane Society. What was the matter with people? No one would probably take it there, either. Not a kitten, too old already.

Cats in cages were streaming out the open rank of exhibithall doors in their owners' firm grasps, fancy cats that were guarded, groomed and displayed like expensive dolls. Louie would probably go nuts with a competitor in the home place, but he was gone so much. She would enjoy having a calm, spayed female, a loving homebody, around.

A woman stepped up to the table and began gathering the Humane Society literature that surrounded the cage. Temple watched her resentfully.

"Excuse me." The woman stepped in front of Temple to take the card from the cage and stuff it into a canvas bag with the other unclaimed pieces of paper.

She opened the cage door, a pushy woman who didn't care about shoving a potential customer aside, so sure was she that it was too late and little Caviar had lost her last chance.

The woman reached in and took out a stainless-steel bowl of water, a small plastic litter box, somewhat used. Then the cat was trained. The Humane Society woman, who certainly didn't seem that humane if she was going to snatch this poor cat right back to a place where its life expectancy was maybe three days, reached in and removed a stainless-steel bowl of unappetizing green pellets.

Temple experienced an epiphany of the cat kind. "Oh," she heard someone saying in an enchanted voice, Hers.

"Does she really eat Free-to-be-Feline?"

The woman, who would have had a perfectly ordinary, nice face if she hadn't been intent on whisking a caged creature back to its doom, looked at Temple oddly.

"Sure," she said.

"Well, then--" Temple dug in her tote bag for her checkbook. "I've got a whole case of Free-to-be-Feline at home."

"Temple, are you sure?" Cleo Kilpatrick asked in an undertone at her elbow. "What about your other cat?"

"He's very . . . versatile. I'm sure he'd love a little friend."

Cleo drifted back to supervise the chaos of the disassembling cat show while Temple bent over the table to make out her check. The little black cat rubbed and purred like a wind-up toy behind the silver grille.

Temple soon discovered that purchasing a homeless cat was a lot harder than finding one. The Humane Society woman went from Madame Defarge to Lieutenant Molina, reeling off a roster of highly personal questions. Was Temple married? No. Were there any children under seven in the household? No, Temple said, surprised by that question after answering the first in the negative. Other animals? Only Midnight Louie. What was he? A stray cat she had taken in. How old? Possibly eight or nine, said the vet.

Madame Inquisitor did not inquire into Louie's sexual capabilities, which was good, for Temple had to sign a document stating that she would have the female called "Caviar" spayed at the first opportunity. Of course she would have done it without signing her soul away to the Humane Society; with Louie around in an unaltered state, it would be irresponsible not to.

As for what Midnight Louie did in his unaltered state when he was out and about on his rambles, Temple tried not to think about that. She supposed she would have to bite the bullet one day and deal with Louie's rampant masculinity, but he was such a fine, clever cat the way he was, and quite valuable as a bodyguard. She would hate to ' 'alter" any of these desirable characteristics. Maybe he was too old to get into much trouble; certainly he never showed any signs of having indulged in a cat fight for the favors of a lady.

While Temple rationalized away her worries about Louie, the Humane Society lady accepted the check, gave her a copy of the adoption agreement, then handed her Caviar, who, recognizing this as her big audition for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--and Free-to-be-Feline--was still purring madly.

The cat fit atop the flotsam in Temple's tote bag, hardly adding to its weight, unlike Louie. Also unlike Louie, she showed an admirable inclination to sit still and be carried.

Temple, heart pounding as if she'd just left the biggest designer-shoe sale in six states, couldn't help showing off her impulse purchase. She trotted down the aisles cooing at her tote bag and oblivious of stares until she came to Peggy Wilhelm's stand.

Minuet had been taken home after her assault, but the other Birmans sat calmly in their carriers and regarded Temple and her animated tote bag with delft-blue saucer eyes while Peggy broke down the show cages into flat pieces for easy transport.

Peggy looked over her shoulder to register Temple's approach, then brushed a hand through her mop of grizzled hair and shook her head, "Such a sad show, in every respect."

"Not every." Temple tilted her tote bag to show its contented contents. "I've adopted the Humane Society cat."

"Oh." Peggy Wilhelm looked hungrily into the bag at the furry black wedge of face staring up at her. "What a great thing to do! You mean no one had taken it? How sad." Peggy's voice thickened as she turned away. "Sorry. This has been a lot of strain, with Aunt Blandina dying, and Minuet. Now I've got all of Aunt Blandina's cats to worry about ..."

Do you ever! Temple thought, remembering that the will had ignored them. It wasn't her place to inform Peggy of this latest blow, but she could confirm her suspicions in a roundabout way.

"You're sure that your aunt would have made provision for their upkeep, though?"

"Oh, positive. Aunt Blandina would have never, ever left her precious cats out in the cold, even if she did leave most of her money to the church. I mean, she would have died first."

The oddity of the expression under the circumstances made Peggy grimace as she realized what she had said. "Oh, I am exhausted silly over all of this! You know what I mean. I was happy to help her out with the cats, but she did have much too many, and couldn't stand the idea of giving up a one. Even letting the nuns take Peter and Paul was a wrench.

So she'd hardly leave her babies out of the will."

"What about you? Don't you mind being left out? Everybody assumes that you will be."

"Oh, I've got my own life and a decent job at the library. I don't have any needs, any family of my own. Spinster and overenthusiastic cat person, just like my aunt. We weren't much alike otherwise. But I do hope she didn't leave her money to the church!" Peggy added with surprising passion. "A lot of evil can be done in the name of religion, especially if it has money."

"Do you mean all religion, or just Catholicism?"

"Well, the Catholic Church isn't exactly enlightened on the matter of sexual repression, is it?" she asked brusquely, slamming sheets of cage grilling together with such energy that the clashes made her Birmans' chocolate-colored ears slant back in distress. "Or premarital sex or birth control or looking after inconvenient babies that aren't aborted."

"Then . . . you're not a practicing Catholic?"

"Not since I was old enough to move away from home. Look, maybe I sound . . . disillusioned, but the only people who slavishly toe the church line these days are old fashioned old ladies like my aunt. They wear their tiny little silver feet against abortion and send money to the missionaries and get sent tons of holy cards and cheap rosaries and requests for money. And they are courted for their money, you better believe it. Most of them need that attention so much that they'd rather leave their money to the church and the foreign pagan babies and the unborn babies than to their own kin, than to their own flesh and blood."

Peggy's hands and voice were shaking now, and she had given up stacking cage sides. The Birmans crouched in their carriers, sensitive to their owner's strange tirade. Temple's tote bag stirred as Caviar thrust out a curious and unintimidated head to see what the matter was.

"It's just been too much." Peggy said that quickly, before Temple could say anything, could back off or apologize ... or even pose more questions that might answer the suspicion that was now rising in her mind--the notion that Peggy Wilhelm was far more than what she had seemed, and had far more reason than previously suspected to commit unreasonable acts involving cats, her aunt and the Catholic Church.

'Too much," Peggy repeated. "I don't care what that damn will says, what she did. I won't let them hold their damn money over me again. It was always a trap, and it was always the church before me. I did my duty by her, by her precious cats--I paid my debt--and now my life is my own again."

"Who are you talking about--'them'?"

"You obviously didn't grow up Catholic," Peggy said with an uneasy laugh. "My parents, my parish nuns and priests, my aunt--they all ran a tight ship when I was young and couldn't do anything about it. Well, now I can, and I'm not going to let their guilt trips get to me, that's all. I'm going to take my cats home and I'll come and feed Aunt Blandina's cats as long as they need it, and then it stops. It finally stops here."

She pushed the dishwater-brown frizz off her flushed forehead, then glanced again at the quizzical black-cat face in Temple's bag. Her white face crumpled like a used Kleenex.

"Oh, just take your damn cat and go," she urged with waves of the hand that wasn't covering her mouth. "I haven't gotten much sleep and the show is over. This time it's really over. Sorry."

Temple backed away, nearly stumbling over a clutter of cat carriers at the table behind her. She had seldom seen a personality come apart like this, even among friends and family. Now she knew why Matt was so reluctant to play Father Hernandez's confidant. Confession might be good for the soul of the penitent, but it swamped the recipient in a confusing, aimless barrage of unspecified ancient wrongs and festering emotions.

In some way, Temple had innocently triggered this upsetting deluge of emotion. Now, almost as disturbed as Peggy Wilhelm, she walked through the cold, echoing, gray concrete vault of the exhibition hall, which looked like a school gym the night after the dance, when all the illusion has been stripped away.

She glanced from time to time at her docile passenger, as if to comfort it against the miasma of human emotions now churning around them both.

But the cat was calm, only the people were agitated.

What a good thing that cats couldn't really know what was happening to them! Temple hated to think that Blandina Tyler's cats might sense that they had been disinherited, or that Midnight Louie might somehow know that he was about to get an unwanted roommate before it happened.

That was the great thing about animals; they never laid any burdens on their human companions. All they asked for was food, shelter and affection.

Come to think of it, they weren't too different from your average self-sufficient human being, either.

Chapter 26

Cat Inquisition

As soon as my dear departed Miss Temple Barr is safely off to the cat show Sunday afternoon, I whisk out the French doors to do some investigations of my own. I cast one quick glance at the penthouse before I put the Circle Ritz in my wake.

I dare not let my thoughts linger on the elevated occupant of that address, for that might tip her off to my itinerary. Much as I would hate to admit it to the object of my spiritual anxiety, the Sublime Karma (as opposed to the Divine Yvette, the object of my carnal devotion), I have found the clutter of cats she was

yammering about being in danger just days ago.

I am bound--not to the animal pound, or even to the Humane Society shelter for the poor and infamous. I am headed into Hierophant territory, off to Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose name I hear bandied about in recent days by my dear soul mates at the Circle Ritz. I include Mr. Matt Devine in that group, now that I and Miss Temple Barr have been seeing more of him.

The cathouse I am in search of should not be hard to find, with three key pieces of information in place: from what I overhear, it is very near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church; the grievously attacked Peter was a next-door neighbor, which means that his sadly diminished spoor should be all over the place; and it is home to seventy-some residents of the feline persuasion, which means that the super sniffing powers of my nose alone could find it from a six-block radius.

I have overlooked a fourth tattletale clue, ring around the collar, so to speak: a yellow police tape reading "Crime Scene: Do Not Cross" circles the house and tends to give away the location just a teensy.

I slip past it like a fleeting shadow. Getting in is another trick. These feline pensioners were not intended to get out. I explore the no-man's-land between the place and a neighboring house that no doubt is the convent famed in song and story, as I have been overhearing it lately. Sister Seraphina and her calling nuns. Or called-upon nuns, to be more precise.

The house is old by human standards, but I am a veteran at finding my way in and out of forbidden places. Some crumbled stucco near the rear leads to an under-porch crawl space. If there is anything I am into faster than a flesh-hungry flea, it is a crawl space.

I box aside spider webs and occasional spiders the size of a well-fed mouse. I range over broken boards and rats' nests and a whole subcontinent of creepy-crawlies, including scorpions. I finally find an opening and push my way through into what people call a utility room via the dryer vent pipe, which is not only loose, but just the size of my circumference.

After sneezing my way past a colony of dust bunnies the size of chihuahuas, I shimmy between the shiny white walls of washer and dryer and am home free. Actually, I am free to take measure of this home, which is now entirely occupied by my own kind.

A thousand rich scents sprinkle the air with fur, dander, and perfumes mostly neuter. Quelle disappointment! This is a house of eunuchs! At least I know that no physical force will be called for with either sex. I am torn between triumph at finding so many of my kind safe and sound and consternation that the price of safety is censorship in the ultimate degree.

Oh, well, we cannot all be tough, swaggering, fearless examples of our species.

I wade into this wilderness of my kind, swimming like Jacques Cousteau amongst an exotic cornucopia of creatures--cats striped and spotted, shaded and solid, black- and white- and zebra-striped; caramel-colored and brown; white and cream; calico and rum-tum-tiger; long-haired and short; tailed and tailless; big and small, tall and squat; male and female, and most often, neither.

I am struck by the vast variety and the noble sense of community among my kind. On the street, it is one for one's self. Never have so many coexisted so peacefully. The house, with its two stories and many rooms, is a sort of rookery, a shared territory both crowded and oddly orderly. I am humbled by this refugee community, this coagulation of every kind and kin until survival and mutual dependence have overcome the more territorial urges of instinct. Young voices mew while older ones purr caution.

I am greeted by open meows showing sharp teeth and line-fine whiskers.

No one heeds my progress. I am the ultimate outsider. The inspector-general. The cop. The Lone Ranger. I am recognized, but not claimed, so finally I must get down to business and start taking testimony.

No one has bothered to interview these key witnesses to many crimes. I hear tales of telephone calls, closely observed. Of an old woman growing older and more tremulous with each cowardly attack by ring and by wire.

I hear of her rushing to the closed windows and doors, watching, Her anxious cane occasionally impinging on an innocent extremity. Of long night vigils, of lights teasing the edges of the house.

I hear of the coming of the Chubby Lady With Birman Breath, distracted and worried, and oddly resentful of the cats coming to stroke her legs. Of the Sister Ladies, who are cheerful and loving with each other as well as with those of our species, who pet and coo and feed, whether it is the dear old Keeper or the numerous Kept they tend.

I hear, with some pride, of the sweet efficiency of my current roommate, who is known as Delicate Heels, and who has never spiked an inconvenient extremity to a floorboard and whose litter-box dredging abilities are second to none.

Speaking of none, none of these residents has been confronted with Free-to-be-Feline. Luckily, Delicate Heels has left the cooking to other, more experienced hands--such as Friskies and Yummy Tum-tum-tummy--during her tenure.

And I hear voices of worry, telling of having heard hissing over the telephone with their sensitive ears.

What kind of hissing, I ask. Like a snake's?

No, not like a snake's.

Like a fellow or sister feline's?

No, most definitely not.

Like a machine's?

They pause to consider that, and I recall the hiss of a television set that is not properly tuned to a channel.

Not like that, Mr. Midnight, they cry in chorus.

Then what is it like? I demand.

Like nothing, they say in cat concert. Like nothing on earth.

Perhaps that dratted Karma is right. We are not dealing with natural disasters here, not even with ordinary murder--for I trust the testimony of my kind's ears above their eyes and mouths--but with unearthly chaos.

This murderous snake may hail from beyond Eden to Gehenna itself.

Chapter 27

A Face Card from the Past

It was a scene from an English mystery: the principals gathered for the all-important Reading of the Will.

Temple wriggled her skimpy, tender derriere deep into the well-upholstered behemoth of a chair just like the other chairs gathered around Father Hernandez's now-familiar desktop.

Her dangling toes brushed the floor as she swung them all the better to kill time and to admire neat, Charles Jourdan navy pumps piped in red, so smart for the unexpected country-house killing, even though they required--ugh--pale gray pantyhose on a hot day. Miss Barr with a humid spike heel in the rectory. Ooh.

Actually, the occasion that brought them all together here, wondering, was not exactly the reading of the will, although the terms of that will would come to public light here. The meeting's real purpose, and the only reason she was included, along with Matt Devine, was the disposition of the late Miss Tyler's cats rather than her money.

How convenient, Temple thought, that Father Hernandez's office came with just the right number of chairs for such a group. Sister Seraphina sat on the edge of her cushy seat, uncomfortable on the visitor's chair, her sensibly shod foot tapping oh-so-subtly. A woman of action, she barely kept herself from fidgeting at the ahems and haws that proceeded from the church attorney at regular intervals. For a relatively young man, he was uncommonly fussy.

Peggy Wilhelm let her half-glasses lie docilely on her ample chest, suspended by their leash of silver beads. She had no expectations of anything in the will, and was not even ready to cast a cursory eye over its terms.

Peter Burns sat forward, the mahogany-colored calfskin briefcase on his knees serving as a table for his voluminous papers. Oddly, he seemed nervous and expectant, glancing from the priest to the nun, then to Matt and Temple, whom he regarded with obvious disfavor and a look behind his round glasses that said: What are you two doing here? He never even glanced once at Peggy Wilhelm, which spoke to how utterly she had been left out of the will, and out of everyone's consideration, except as convenient cat-tender.

Temple felt a flash of anger at the way Peggy had been overlooked. She was the Cinderella figure in the tale: overworked and over willing, asking for nothing but her fireside ashes and an unshaven cat.

Father Hernandez remained the cipher. Handsomely harried, his features seemed to sink deeper into his skull on every occasion, along with the maroon circles cast by his dark eyes, until the man himself was likely to disappear behind his own hidden worry. Max revisited.

Worry. Matt worried her. Temple glanced at him, his calm as evident as Father Hernandez's incipient hysteria. Ice or instability. Temple couldn't decide which facade was the least healthy.

But she had nothing to worry about. She was mere witness to other people's follies on this occasion, included only because she had shamelessly begged Matt to let her know if anything of the sort should transpire. Besides, somebody had to add a touch of flagrant footwear to this occasion: Matt wore rubber-soled Hush Puppies, as effacing as his everyday manner; Sister Seraphina, her habitual Red Cross battleship-gray model; Peggy, a battered pair of Famolare sandals; and the attorney, brown wing-tip oxfords--in a Las Vegas September!

Temple discreetly turned an ankle to refresh herself with a glimpse of an artfully curved vamp. Shoes were such a comfort, except when they were walked in! Perhaps the spiritual should never be expected to turn physical.

As Burns cleared his throat for the thirteenth time, Temple swept her feet together and demurely touched toes to the floor beneath her chair.

"I presume," Burns said, "that you all know that Miss Tyler did indeed keep and remember Our Lady of Guadalupe in her latest will."

Sober nods all around.

"When was this will dated?" Sister Seraphina asked out of the blue, a vertical line etched between her eyes just above the pale, amber-plastic glasses frame.

He consulted the document itself to make sure, although he obviously knew the date by heart. "August twelfth."

"And she wanted to omit the cats?" "Apparently they had palled."

Peggy Wilhelm frowned in her turn. Mr. Burns was obviously no cat person. Cats were like Cleopatra; age could not stale nor custom wither their infinite variety.

"I knew about her nineteen-ninety-two will," she put in. "The cats were definitely left a bequest."

"For how much?" Father Hernandez asked.

"Twenty-five thousand."

"Perhaps I should allow that sum toward their . . . keep or disposition," he said. "She surely wouldn't have wanted them put to sleep."

"No," Peggy agreed with a shudder.

"Before you commit funds to the cats, Father," Burns offered in an apologetic tone, "I should warn you that Miss Tyler's assets were not as ample as everyone, including Miss Tyler, imagined. She kept her funds in CDs; you know what the interest rates on those have been like in the past few years."

Father Hernandez sighed as heavily as anyone in the room at this comment, reminding Temple of Matt's comment that parish priests were often harried administrators more than they were ministers.

Peggy Wilhelm frowned again. "She was getting forgetful, but Aunt Blandina hinted that she had plenty of money to take care of the cats and the parish, too--at least before she got annoyed with the parish."

"Old people lose touch," Burns said flatly. "Lawyers see this all the time. I still may uncover some unexpected resources; she had notes and unexplained keys tucked into drawers all over the house, as many as cats." He granted Father Hernandez a cautioning glance. "But I wouldn't count my chickens, financially speaking, before I counted my cats.

And I wouldn't count on having much bounty to share with those cats."

"What about the harassment?" Matt asked. "Did that cease with Miss Tyler's murder?"

A thrill ran visibly through the people in the room at this reminder of unexplained events.

"Lieutenant Molina suspects murder," the lawyer said precisely, "but the harassment may have been mostly in Miss Tyler's elderly imagination."

"Not Peter," Seraphina said stoutly. "Not Sister Mary Monica's phone pal."

"Does he still call?" Temple asked.

Sister Seraphina shook her head abruptly. "No. And that worries me more than if he did."

But no one bothered to ask why. Seraphina was another old woman, an unreliable or even insignificant reporter of phenomena. Temple found her fingernails digging into the tapestry-upholstered arms of her fat chair. Why would the caller stop now? Seraphina was on to something. A glance at Matt's still--too still--face told her that he thought so, too.

Scary, she was beginning to read his lack of expression better than any expressiveness.

She was also beginning to guess where he had learned such patient stoicism--in the seminary, where young men were expected to listen and learn and not to challenge authority.

'It's so odd," Peggy said. "Her finally ignoring the cats after all this time, I feel cheated for taking care of them so much if she didn't care--"

"But you, did," Seraphina put in quickly, with a smile.

"You cared."

Peggy Wilhelm's face remained leaden, lost. She nodded without conviction. "Aunt Blandina used to mean what she said. It was the one thing I respected about her."

The young lawyer's pale, manicured hands hit the arms of his chair with a thump of emphasis. "It's too soon to do anything. The police have made no determination. I have possibly not tracked down all the estate assets. Be of good cheer," he urged with a hopeful smile that showed the dull silver flash of metal wire on his front teeth. "Perhaps Providence will find some answer for the cats. Certainly the story in the Review-Journal may help."

"Story?" Peggy wailed in concert with Temple.

Burns looked blank and a little hurt. "A reporter heard about the police report on all the cats, and a rumor that they might be legatees. I didn't see any harm in explaining their possible plight--"

"Oh!" Sister Seraphina seldom sounded disgusted, but she did now. "Mr. Burns. Don't you see? You've brought all the forces of animal control and flaky animal advocacy down on us before we're ready to deal with it."

Father Hernandez swiveled his bulky leather chair away from them all, putting his--and its--back to the desk.

The conference was officially over, with little resolved.

Nobody knew for sure that Miss Tyler had been murdered, except maybe Molina, and she wasn't talking.

Nobody knew how much money was coming to the church, not even the operative attorney.

Nobody knew what to do with all the cats, except the deluge of cat-lovers and cat-haters who would be sure to make their opinions known far and wide once the story hit the street.

Temple looked at Matt, to find Matt looking at her.

They needed to nail down something, and the obvious place to start--curses!--was with Molina and the issue of murder.

"I'd rather you called her," Matt said when she drove them back to the Circle Ritz.

"Why? She hates me."

"She doesn't hate you. Police lieutenants aren't allowed to hate. Bad public image. I don't want her to waste her time digging into me."

"Why? Are you a good suspect?"

"I'm a diversion, when the real case needs to be solved."

"Funny, I always thought you were a diversion, too."

He shrugged off her smart comment and opened the car door to a slow seep of Las Vegas heat. "I've got to work tonight. I'll see if any calls have come in from other old ladies. Miss Tyler's death may have forced her harasser to move on."

"Or to stop," Temple said.

"You think it was part o{ the whole . . . scenario?"

"Scenario. Very good, Mr. Devine. Yes, I do. And so was Sister Mary Monica. And Peter."

"But what was the scenario? Or more important, the point?"

"I don't know." Temple glanced up at the Circle Ritz's round, black-marble-encased exterior, her eye pausing on the third floor. "I hope my new kitty hasn't been too lonesome this morning. On the other hand, I hope Louie hasn't come in, discovered her and raised holy hell."

"Louie with a rival?" Matt cocked a blond eyebrow. "I don't think it will fly."

"Caviar's not a rival; she's a little sister."

"I don't think Louie is into little sisters, either."

"He must not be a Catholic cat," Temple said demurely.

Matt bit back a reply and vanished into the building at a trot, ahead of her.

Temple took her time getting her tote bag out of the Storm and walking into the air-conditioned lobby. Her thoughts were as sharp and as aimless as the blows of her heels on the sidewalk, and later, on lobby marble.

She took the elevator upstairs--Matt had probably used the stairs, but her high heels demanded more civilized methods of transport.

She turned the key in her door lock, eager to greet her new baby--and scared semi gloss white that Louie would be there and in no mood to discuss new roommates of the feline kind.

What had she done? Louie was a loner, an individualist, a me-only cat. How could she have thought he would welcome this dainty little pussycat simply because it desperately needed a home and was his favorite color, jet-black? What had Temple done? What would she say to Louie? Oh, Louie, Louie. . . .

Louie was nowhere about the apartment, Temple discovered after she tiptoed into the cool depths of her empty rooms. Caviar was curled atop the Cosmopolitan magazines in their Plexiglas rack, polishing a paw to shining ebony.

Temple sighed in relief and ran to check the two bowls of Free-to-be-Feline in the kitchen. One was mounded high, wide and handsome. One sported a dainty dip in the middle.

Obviously, Louie had not been in, or he had left in disgust.

Temple went back to kneel by her new acquisition. Caviar tilted her sleek head so Temple's long nails could scratch her chin. She purred, stretched and displayed a long, lithe torso, quite different from Louie's well-upholstered midsection.

Then the tender interlude was over. Duty called. Or rather, Temple must call to do her duty.

She looked up the Las Vegas police number, dialed it and waited through the super-smooth and polite, Star Ship Enterprise female computer voice, expecting it to purr "Captain Kirk" at any minute. After rejecting pressing a series of numbers that would connect her to a dozen unneeded departments, Temple stayed on the line and asked meekly for "Lieutenant Molina, please."

She got her on the first throw.

'This is Temple Barr. I--"

"Fine. Are you at home?"

"Er, yes."

"Good. I'll be by in twenty minutes. Think you can stay put?"

"Yes, Lieutenant."

"I've got something I want you to see."

"Er, don't you want to know what I called about?"

"No. Be there."

Another gracious conversation with the Amy Vanderbilt of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Temple hung up with a sigh. She wasn't any good at interfacing with police personnel. Why did she have to keep doing it?

She changed her clothes and ditched the pantyhose, but she kept the businesslike pumps on, with footlets, just because. She wasn't about to sit back and let Molina catch her napping at five-foot-zero.

She dangled her key chain in front of Caviar and was rewarded with several spirited boxing motions. "That's it, girl, you show that Midnight Louie what a tough cookie you are!"

She paced to the window and looked at the empty pool. No Matt waiting by his namesake mats, no Louie glaring resentfully up at her. She was glad not to confront Louie's reaction to her impulse purchase, but what if he had already come, seen and decamped?

Her doorbell rang, a lovely ding-dong sound straight out of the fifties and "Father Knows Best."

She skittered to the door and opened it to face Lieutenant Molina, looking her most official and towering.

Temple ebbed before the law, into her living room. "Is it about Miss Tyler's . . . death? Has the cause been determined?"

"No--and no."

Surprised to hear it put so plainly, and so cavalierly, Temple sat down on her shapeless sofa.

Molina stood there, glancing at Caviar. "Shrunk your cat?"

"This is Caviar. She was going to be sent back to the Humane Society."

"Your Midnight Louie may shrink her head--and then send her back to the Humane Society, from what I've seen of that black devil. You do rush in--"

"If you're not here about the Tyler case--"

"Why would I bother you about the Tyler case?"

"I was ... a witness."

"Not to the murder. But you may have been a witness to this."

Molina flashed a card from the depths of one of her ever useful jacket pockets. A flash card, Temple thought, like I'm in school and I have to get some equation right.

Molina's eyes shone with brilliant blue triumph as she slapped the card faceup on the sofa's broad, canvas arm.

Also face up was Max Kinsella, in profile and full-front views, looking about--oh, eighteen, his Adam's apple prominent in the profile shot. A lot of type supported the double images, and some bigger type ran across the top, Letters. Initials. I-n-t-e-r-p-o-1.

M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e.

And Molina was the cat who had caught the canary.

"Interpol--?" Temple queried.

"That's why I couldn't find anything on him," Molina announced with the glee of Lieutenant Gerard pouncing on Dr. Richard Kimball. "Look at the name. Look at it."

"Michael," Temple repeated dully. "Michael. Aloysius. Xavier."

"Kinsella!" Molina finished. "Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella. That's why I couldn't trace him

"Max," Temple pronounced slowly. "He didn't lie. What's this about the IRA?"

Molina began to pace. "He was suspected of being a member. Of course it was a while back. According to that card, he was sixteen. Still . . . that's an international terrorist organization. I knew he had a record somewhere!" She paused, as if her euphoria had let her down with a bang.

"This doesn't explain the dead man at the Goliath, or his supposed career as a magician, but I knew he was more than he appeared to be."

"I always knew that, Lieutenant," Temple said quietly.

"Not this!"

Temple looked at the card again. She had never pictured Max that young, that raw, that unfinished, but even here she saw the magician half-hidden behind the flat, unflattering black and white. Michael. Mike--? No, Max.

"Look at the description," Molina prodded.

Temple knew Max's statistics by heart, and the damning card confirmed them, only the height off. Height: six feet (and three inches yet to come). Hair: black; eyes: blue. . . .

She gaped up into the icy aquamarine of Molina's waiting eyes, which glittered with true-blue triumph.

"Max's eyes aren't blue!" Temple said. "They got that wrong." Maybe they got everything else wrong too. . . .

"Did they? I always wondered why a man with green eyes--a performer used to projecting a well-groomed stage image--kept a beige-and-blue sweater. I assume you're as sentimental as ever and it still hangs in your closet."

Temple flushed to remember an intent Molina taking Max's sweater to the French doors a few weeks before. "I'm just lazy, not sentimental, Lieutenant; no time to house clean.

And I never saw Max wear that sweater."

"Exactly. Why did he have it?"

"Most men are careless about color-coordinated clothes."

"He wouldn't be." Molina almost sounded as if she spoke from intimate knowledge. "Don't you get it? Contact lenses.

We know he was a wanted man at least once in his life. Who knows what he's been up to since he was sixteen?"

"I do!" Temple stood up, her voice and hand shaking, the Interpol card quivering. "I never saw any contact lens equipment; I never saw Max take them in or out, and I lived with him."

"Long-wear lenses. And he was a magician, after all. You only saw what he wanted you to."

That allegation hurt worse than anything Interpol might have had on Max. Temple lowered her eyes to the familiar stranger captured in cold type. "What did they say he did wrong?"

"Not enough," Molina admitted. "Enough to be suspected, to sit on some search roster for a while and be forgotten. The IRA is dirty, brutal business. I wouldn't get my hopes up, if he started there that young."

Temple rubbed her nose, which itched and maybe wanted to do something else undignified, like sniffle. "It's politics," she said. "Politics is always dirty if you're the underdog."

"I imagine he was, Mr. Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella."

"If you're the underdog, you're used to surviving."

"What would you know about it?" The question was personal.

"I knew Max, and you didn't."

The lieutenant reared back, then blew out a breath like a winded horse. "You didn't know enough."

"Neither," Temple said evenly, "do you."

"It's my job to find out."

"Thanks for the tip."

"You're not disillusioned, are you?"

"It's hard to disillusion a magician's assistant."

"You were more than that."

"Was I? I wonder. What are you going to do about the cats?"

"Cats?"

Temple told her about the will and the forthcoming article and the furor likely to arise over their collective welfare.

"Oh, rats," said Molina, her good mood ruined by the coming storm. "All I need is a raft of animal extremists all over the scene of the crime."

She snatched up her card like it was the ace of hearts.

"You do admit that this is the same man?"

"This is the man," Temple said, echoing Miss Tyler, who had echoed a classic scene of betrayal with a kiss in the Garden where Peter had betrayed yet again--and had been betrayed. Temple betrayed nothing but the facts, Ma'am, just the facts.

Molina read that in her eyes and had another reason to lower her triumph a notch.

"I thought you'd like to know."

"No, but I'm better off knowing. I'm not sure that you are."

"Why?"

"Politics, Lieutenant, are a lot less clear-cut than crime.

You should know that by now."

Molina tapped the card on her palm, then pocketed it. She was gone as fast and furiously as she had come, not with a magician's smoothness, but with sound and fury signifying nothing.

Temple went to the dormant cat. "Michael Aloysius Xaviar. Kind of rhymes with Caviar at the end, doesn't it, kitty? I just hope Midnight Louie hasn't done a disappearing act, too."

Chapter 28

A Clerical Error

"You look beat," Sheila said when Matt walked into Con-Tact at six-forty-five Wednesday evening.

He didn't argue, but slipped into his donated office chair and let it swivel him outward to face the sparsely furnished room instead of into the instant isolation of his phone niche.

"Lines been busy?" he asked.

"Quiet so far. They're all waiting until the weekend to explode." Sheila regarded him curiously. "Want some coffee?"

"Yeah, thanks." He was surprised. Everybody took care of their own needs around ConTact, but Sheila was a social worker and she sensed his mental fatigue.

She brought him a Save-the-Whales mug steaming with a full shot of coffee from the big aluminum urn in the corner.

"What's going on?"

"Oh, some friends of mine have problems. Thanks." He toasted her with the cup before taking a careful sip of the scalding brew.

"Don't you encounter enough problems here?"

"Sure, but old friends are old friends."

"They aren't tourists--?"

"No!" He laughed at the idea of Seraphina and company as tourists, then realized that Sheila had finessed him into explaining why the idea was so absurd.

"An old teacher of mine ended up retiring here. I help her out with the odd problem now and again."

"Mr. Goodwrench," Sheila said with a joking smile.

"Kind to old ladies and dogs." She looked relieved that an obviously old lady was the object of his attentions.

"Cats," he corrected without saying more, turning his chair to face the dead-end white walls of soundproofing.

"So you're tuckered out from playing handyman," Sheila pressed.

"Yeah," Matt answered, wondering what category of household task taking down crucified cats would come under.

He didn't want to talk about it, even think about it. So he jumped on the phone when one of the lines lit up, jamming on his headphones. He sensed Sheila standing behind him, hovering over him.

"ConTact," he announced to the caller. Whoever it was, that person would not stand breathing above him, brimming over with questions.

The voice began, a man's, sounding wired. Matt felt his pulse speed up for the crisis, beat to the rhythms of agitated speech, as his mind began sketching a mental picture of the speaker. He was plugged into the anonymous, distant night again. The presence hovering behind him lingered, then whispered away, defeated.

Matt breathed a sigh of relief that the caller was talking too fast and too hard to hear the ebbing presence. Then Matt heard only the caller, his troubles, his fears, his gravelly, desperation-edged voice. Connected again to someone who needed help and would demand nothing more than that, Matt breathed deeper, steadier, like an athlete, and entered his listening, concentrating, problem-solving mode. Nothing was as soothing to the psyche as other people's problems.

To his relief, the lines kept ringing and he kept jumping to answer them. That kept Sheila from offering any more favors and expecting any more answers. He was already obligated to answer to more than enough women. Lieutenant Molina, Temple, Sister Seraphina.

Still, at the back of his mind, the problems of Our Lady of Guadalupe swirled like leaves caught in an eddy.

His watch showed 2:30 a.m., when the first line rang again and he punched the button.

"ConTact. Can I help?"

' 'If you can help an old lady who has mysterious disturbances around her house," came a now-familiar voice.

"Sister Seraphina, what's the matter?"

She sighed. 'Tm sorry to call you, Matthias, but the police won't do and I know your number now, so you're stuck."

"You can call anytime," he assured her. "What's the problem?"

"First, Sister Mary Monica heard some disturbance from Miss Tyler's house."

"Sister Mary Monica heard?"

"Exactly," Seraphina's normally booming, cheerful voice grew grim. "I looked out her window and glimpsed a light in the second story, and then it went out. So I settled Monica down and watched. I never saw another light in the house, but several minutes later a flashlight bobbed along the side of the house to the garden. Mind you, Matt, I saw only a few firefly-fast glimmers; maybe I was staring into the dark too hard for too long. But I remembered poor Peter and got worried, so I called Father Hernandez at the rectory."

During the long pause, Matt imagined a dozen equally unfortunate scenarios. Temple would have been proud of him.

"He was . . . very bad, Matt. He insisted on coming over and stumbling about in the bushes with his own flashlight.

Of course he--we--found nothing, not after all that sound and fury. I finally got him back to the rectory. Matt, he needs you."

"No one needs me! I'm no longer practicing--"

"Father Hernandez is crumbling before my eyes. He made so little sense. I know his drinking isn't the primary problem; it's a symptom. The only alternative is to go to the bishop, and Father Rafe is such a proud man, and the parish is at such a delicate point in its fund drive--"

"And I'm the best that you can do," he interrupted a bit bitterly.

She refused to be buffaloed by his anger. "Yes," she said simply. "Please."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Come here when you get off work. Talk to him. I think Father desperately needs to share his problem, his sorrow, with another human being. He won't talk to me, to a woman, about what he must regard as a terrible failure."

"But to me he would?"

"He might. I don't know what else to do, Matt."

"Do you think you're going to win me back by making me function as what I used to be?"

"No. But I think you might win Father Rafe back to what he used to be."

"I'm that good?"

"You're the one person he might think would understand."

"He doesn't understand me."

"That's not what's needed here. We need to understand him, and to let him know that nothing can be as bad as he thinks. His isolation has distorted his thinking."

"So has the drinking. You're asking for a miracle here."

"No miracles. Just good pastoral care."

Matt's weary laugh came out as a brief bark. "I can call a cab and be at the rectory by three-thirty." He didn't want Temple in on this, not anymore. Besides, he couldn't use her indefinitely as a taxi service to his past. "You're lucky we live in Las Vegas, a town that never shuts down."

"Chicago's supposed to be the town that never shuts down, Matt, but the recession has done a pretty good job of forcing it to. I guess counseling is the one profession that never runs out of customers."

"Maybe." She had given him an innocuous-sounding name for this dangerous, unrequested intervention in an' other man's struggle with his own soul. Another priest's. Counseling, not ministry. All right. I'll be there," he promised.

"God bless you, Matt."

Las Vegas cab drivers, like their Manhattan counterparts, have seen everything. So the ponytailed driver of the Whittlesea Blue cab Matt called didn't raise an eyebrow when he was directed to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Las Vegas had more churches per capita than most U.S. cities; why shouldn't a midnight meanderer want to save his soul as well as spend a wad at some casino?

The neighborhood was dark, still and well-behaved. No lights glimmered now around the Tyler house, supposedly empty except for cats, or around the convent next door, but Sister Seraphina had made the proverbial "candle in the window" literal at the rectory.

Matt saw one thin, ivory wax candle winking in the rectory's kitchen window. He wondered if it was left over from last Advent or St. Blaise's February feast day, if it had been blessed or was merely an ordinary candle pulling ordinary candle duty.

Matt listened to the cab's wheels peel slowly away on the gritty pavement as he walked to the side of the rectory, then pushed the night's last button--the doorbell.

He heard the faint, hoarse ring of an elderly buzzer within, waited, then rang again.

Finally, other sounds came, like a blind man boxing his way through a maze. The door opened all at once, fully wide, filled by Father Hernandez, who looked smaller and older in civvies--a navy turtleneck and dark slacks. Matt would be willing to bet that he wouldn't touch a bottle while in uniform; even his breakdown would be regimented.

"Seraphina called you," Father Hernandez challenged. "What would we do without nuns to meddle?"

The question required no response, and Matt gave none.

He simply entered when Father Hernandez faced the inevitable and stepped aside.

"What are we supposed to do?" the pastor asked, traces of both bafflement and self-mockery in his voice.

"Talk," Matt suggested.

Father Hernandez turned and moved through the semidark kitchen, bumping into a countertop. Matt followed, avoiding comment, avoiding judgment.

The priest buffeted down the narrow, dark back hall ahead of Matt like a babe down a birth canal, caroming from wall to wall, blindly driving toward the light that poured like pale syrup from the open office door.

He lurched through that door into the room beyond, into his chair, which creaked to accept the body he threw into it. A green-glass-shaded banker's lamp lit the desktop's jumble without casting much light on Father Hernandez's face behind the desk, or on Matt's when he sat down in front of it.

Despite the hour, despite the situation, rectories had an ineffable cozy feeling, and Matt felt that trickle of warmth even now. Familiar ground, once his own. But not quite.

The desk lamp also illuminated the tall, clear bottle of tequila sitting under it, and the plain kitchen glass fogged with fingerprints beside it.

Jose Cuervo was evidently the friend of Father Hernandez that Sister Seraphina had suspected.

"Care for a glass? I almost said, 'Father.' " Father Hernandez gestured with a host's broad, sweeping hand to the solitary bottle and glass.

Matt realized he had never before confronted anyone who could be so dangerous to his own hard-won equilibrium. He nodded. He would get nowhere if he began on a holier-than-thou platform. Besides, he could use his own dose of Mexican courage.

Father Hernandez's dramatic eyebrows rose, but he pulled out a drawer and extracted a glass as plain and smudged as the one already in sight. He unscrewed the bottle cap and poured three inches of liquid into each smeary glass. No ice, no niceties.

Matt leaned out of his chair to accept it, then sipped. He'd had tequila before in a different form: the festive, saltrimmed, pale jade bubble of an oversized cocktail glass. Straight tequila burned like rubbing alcohol and had a sour, acrid aftertaste. He set the glass down on the desk, careful to place it on a clump of papers rather than on the naked wood, where it would sweat a pale ring into the finish.

Down the hall, the rectory's aged air conditioner droned like a snoring giant.

"What does she think you can do?" Father Hernandez asked after taking a long, almost loathing gulp of his drink. His voice wasn't slurred, but a bit loud and contentious. Matt didn't take offense; Father Rafe wasn't angry with him, although he might act like it.

"Sister Seraphina always had greater expectations of me than I could live up to," Matt replied.

"Don't they, though? Don't they all?" Father Hernandez leaned over his desk. "I don't blame you for leaving, you or any of the other thousands. It's not like it used to be. Everything's changed--the liturgy, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the parishioners." He eyed Matt carefully, as if he had to concentrate to see him, and maybe he did. "Was it the usual, celibacy? I can see that a young man who looks like you--"

"It wasn't celibacy," Matt said quickly. "Nothing so simple."

"Ah. You think celibacy is simple, do you? How long were you in?"

"Including seminary, sixteen years."

"It gets harder," Father Hernandez said, sitting back to drink again. "Not the celibacy, everything. Raising money, cutting corners when there are so few other priests and nuns to be found. We used to run on our clergy--our dedicated hundreds of thousands sworn to poverty, chastity and obedience.

Now we have all the worries and the expenses and none of the resources."

"I've seen the frustrations of parish life, Father."

"Yes, came, saw and left. Not like Caesar, were you? No conquering, just accounting, and accounting for yourself and your parish to the bishop, who hardly knows your name unless you become involved in some untidy abortion fracas or sleep with a teenager or disgrace your cassock by slopping a little liquor on it."

Matt winced at the corrosive tone. "Will the bishop have to hear about you?"

"Has already, I suppose. Spies everywhere. 'Father Hernandez is tippling a bit nowadays, Your Eminence. Perhaps you should send him somewhere to dry out.'"If only that were the worst of it!"

Matt sipped from his glass again, wondering whether he should probe for some indiscretion with a woman or with the abortion issue. Father Hernandez answered that himself.

"Women were never my weakness," he announced with boozy satisfaction, almost as an ordinary man would boast the opposite. "Not sex, and never the bottle, until lately. Did Sister Seraphina tell you about those odd calls to poor old Monica and the late Miss Tyler, who was so generous despite my lamentable lack of tact toward cats?"

Matt nodded. Father Hernandez leaned forward over his desk, clutching his glass in both hands.

"Do you still observe the sanctity of the confessional?" he demanded, staring into and through Matt's eyes, his gaze as piercing as laser light.

"I left officially; I didn't just walk away like some do. I . . . underwent laicization. I'm not a priest anymore. I can't observe what I can no longer practice."

"You can treat anything I tell you with the same seriousness, can swear to keep it eternally secret, as privileged information, even as a lawyer or a psychiatrist must do."

"The obligation no longer has the spiritual element," Matt objected.

"But if I asked you to . . . revert to that degree of confidentiality, would you?"

"I would have to," Matt answered unhappily.

He hated being asked to perform as a quasi-priest again, but he also understood that those were the only terms on which Father Hernandez would accept him as a confidant.

"If you were my confessor," Father Hernandez went on,

"I would have to begin my confession, 'Father, forgive me, for I have not sinned."

He laughed at Matt's partly appalled, partly puzzled expression, then sighed long and deeply. "You know about the convent getting anonymous phone calls? I have been getting letters."

"Letters?"

Father Hernandez disappeared behind the desk as he bent to wrestle open another old, and sticky, drawer. He surfaced with a large manila envelope, but before opening it, he refilled his glass and nudged the tequila bottle in Matt's direction.

"I'm fine," Matt said, indicating his almost untouched glass and registering the irony of the expression at the same moment. He was not fine, and neither was Father Hernandez.

"All right." Father Hernandez gulped more white lightning, then licked his lips. His hands came down hard on the plump manila envelop. "First, these are lies. I believe the term is 'damnable lies.' But we don't call Satan the Father of Lies for nothing. Lies can undo a life."

Matt nodded.

Father Hernandez sighed again, shakily. "I can hardly bear to show another human being such lies, but I'm sick of swallowing them by myself and saying, doing, nothing to defend myself. I think you will see why I can do nothing.

Nothing. But this." His hand waved at the bottle. "It's a coward's way out, and no way out at all, but it slows my mind from eating at itself so I can pretend to function. Every time I say Mass, I hope I will receive the grace to face this, and every time, I gain only enough strength to keep up the mockery. Now I understand why even Our Lord asked His Father to take the cup of His coming sacrifice from His lips in the Garden of Gethsemane. If what is in these letters becomes public, I will be crucified."

Matt steeled himself to receive the envelope Father Hernandez passed over the desk. Gethsemane again, Where Christ went to contemplate his foreordained suffering and death. And yet the act was not foreordained, according to church teaching; Christ could have refused; that was what made the fruition so significant. Matt never thought for a moment that Father Hernandez was exaggerating his situation.

He drew the rustling bundles of paper from inside the envelope as if they were snakes. He opened one white, business- size envelope, unfolded a crisp piece of typing paper and read.

He read three before he looked up again. Sweat crystallized on Father Hernandez's anxious face. He watched Matt like a child gauging a parent's reaction to a bad report card, uneasy but defiant, afraid but proud.

"And there's nothing to this?" Matt asked.

"Nothing. I swear on the Cross."

"Nor the charges about your previous appointments?"

"Nothing, there or here, then or now. You know what will happen if this . . . garbage becomes public."

"A media circus maximus."

"Bring on the Christians," Father Hernandez intoned with bitter drama. "Bring on the priests."

"So it should be," Matt said, his tone stern as any archbishop's. "Child abuse of any kind is a heinous offense. The sexual abuse of children by the clergy is unspeakable. I confess that I can't imagine how any man of God can shut his eyes to such acts, yet several have been proven to have done just that."

"Not me." Father Hernandez's dark eyes glowed like embers as his fist pounded his chest, not in the humble throb of a mea culpa, but in the emphatic rhythm of a Spanish dancer. "And now it has become fashionable to allege such things. You know how disturbed minds leap in when such ethical chasms open up, swallowing even the innocent. I am innocent!"

Matt spread his hands. "If so, you would be cleared, ultimately."

"Perhaps. And I say only perhaps. But the stigma." Rafael Hernandez held up his pale, damp palms from the glass they curved around. "Stigma. We know where that word comes from, from the nails through the wrists and feet; the stigma is the Crucifixion.''

Matt nodded.

"You know the position the church faces on such matters nowadays."

Matt nodded again.

"What would you have me do?"

Matt said nothing.

"If I went, as I should, to the archbishop, he would be forced to take the most stringent of actions. There would be publicity. Now, the church is anxious to demonstrate its eagerness to root out what it once covered up, and rightfully so. Yet mistakes can be made when such zeal is employed, when an institution of any kind is fighting for its integrity, its reputation. There is a new Inquisition at work."

Matt could not deny that.

"You talk to people on that hotline; you must speak to many disturbed souls, some quite unappealing. What do you think of the writer?"

Matt moved the three envelopes through his hands as if weighing them. "The police could do a better psychological profile. Yes, I know why you feel they mustn't be involved.

I'm no expert on anonymous letters, but I'd say an organized person did this. They seem to be printed on a laser printer, which rules out the ancient clue of the uneven typewriter keys. I sense someone intelligent taking almost a vicious pleasure in the perversity of the charges. Does the writer never ask for anything?"

"Nothing!" Father Hernandez clutched his head instead of his glass, his face taking on a distracted look.

"Then it could be a crank, some disaffected parishioner, or even an anti-Catholic bigot."

"I know what it could be. I also know what will happen if the letters are made public: a full-scale investigation, no matter how unsubstantiated the charges. After that, neither I nor Our Lady of Guadalupe will be worth much. Matthias, I have been a decent priest, perhaps not the brightest or the best, or the humblest, but to the extent of my abilities, I have been faithful to my vows and have tried to be of service to my parishioners and my duties. I don't know what to do. Perhaps this . . . correspondent will tire of baiting me and stop."

"Perhaps he--or she--will go public when you least expect it."

'True."

"The police would be your better bet," Matt said.

"Go to Lieutenant Molina? Never."

"Pride goeth before a fall, to be sanctimonious. Besides, this isn't a case for a homicide lieutenant."

"She would learn of it."

"Probably, but forget your image in the eyes of a parishioner. Lieutenant Molina is also a professional, and professionals don't buy what every anonymous crank might charge. The police investigate this sort of thing all the time and are well acquainted with anonymous letter-writers. They might give you more benefit of the doubt, and they certainly would investigate quietly. If they leaped to conclusions and filed false charges, they can get sued."

"What you're saying is that the church, my church, to which I have devoted most of my life, is more likely to persecute me than to defend me."

"Now, given the political climate on this issue, it has to avoid any appearance of favoritism, of sheltering anyone."

"So they will crucify me, with a mockery of a trial, as was done to Christ. We priests claim we walk in Our Lord's footsteps, or try to, but confront something like this, Matthias, and say then that you are prepared to face the Crown of Thorns from the hands of your own bishop and the whips and the scourges of the press."

"I believe your innocence," Matt said. "I do believe you, Father Hernandez. And if I do, so will others. Yet I see your point. Why pull down disaster upon yourself? Still, the pressure will draw attention to you in any event."

"You mean this?" He lofted the two-thirds-empty bottle. "I try, but my thoughts run around and around like mice on a wheel. Who? Why? When will the attack escalate? How?"

"That's why the good news of Miss Tyler's bequest hardly seemed to matter to you."

"Money." He shook his silvered head. "It is the means to a good end, one hopes. It is essential to life and bureaucracy. I wish the cats had gotten it, do you understand? No one would accuse the cats of misconduct."

"Father, we both should know more than most that false accusations are a terrible cross to bear. You, too, should ask our Father to take this cup from your lips." Matt pointed to the bottle. "Whatever happens, that is the first bridge to cross."

Father Hernandez shrugged and ran his fingers through his elegant hair, turning it into a ruffled halo. "I'll try. Harder."

"And I'll think about this letter-writer. It could be the same person who called Sister Mary Monica, and who tried to crucify the cat. We could be dealing with a truly demented individual."

Father Hernandez looked up, and actually smiled. "Thank you for that 'we.' That is more than I was willing to grant you when we first met. Forgive me."

Father, forgive me, for I have not sinned. . . .

Matt ran that ironic phrase through his mind as he left the rectory. His watch read, by the candle still burning in the kitchen window, five-thirty in the morning.

Dawn was a vague, teasing lightening of the dark along the eastern horizon. He jammed his hands, cold hands from tension felt but not shown, into his pants pockets and began walking back to the Circle Ritz.

Daylight would begin to shadow him soon, and he was not afraid of the neighborhood. He was not afraid of anything he might encounter on Las Vegas's stirring streets. He had spent two hours staring at the face of true, spiritual fear, and ordinary fear would never look the same again.

Chapter 29

Trespasser and Transgressor

After my fruitless explorations at the cathouse next to the convent, I pad my weary way back home. Interrogating some threescore possible witnesses--or do I mean witlesses?--I am eager to lay my considerable length on the cool black-and white tiles of the kitchen floor and contemplate the full bowl of Free-to-be- Feline while I decide which of Miss Temple's food stores I should raid instead.

Actually, the challenge of finding a suitable substitute for this odious health food has added a piquant character to my several daily meals at the Circle Ritz, providing an element of uncertainty reminiscent of my untrammeled days on the streets and sidewalks. I need to keep my survival skills sharp, just in case my current cushy situation becomes too confining.

I scale the buildings outside along my usual, well-worn route, lofting from patio to patio to decorative cornice ledge to open bathroom window in the twinkling of a private eye.

My street-worn tootsies make a four-point landing on the bathroom's cool ceramic tiles. Ah, home, sweat-free home, after a hot day on the job.

I hightail it for the kitchen, partly because the tiles there are cool, too; partly to indulge in my daily stare-down with the unbanishable Free-to-be-Feline.

I crouch before the elegant glass-footed banana-split dish that my attentive companion has seen fit to heap with Free-to-be-Feline. There it sits, an army-green mountain of pellets that would serve equally well entering--or exiting--a rabbit. I have seen more appetizing vitamin pills from the health food store.

I will, of course, not touch one crude pellet. I contemplate busting into the lower cabinet for a raid on Miss Temple's hidden stock of Finny Flakes, a toothsome, sugar-coated cereal product thoughtfully shaped into the miniature likeness of our piscine friends. Yum. I can put away whole schools of these little nibbles.

Then I notice a new variation in the unspoken food war that has been waged between us ever since my usually sensible roommate saw fit to introduce the foul Free-to-be-Feline to my menu.

Another bowl--in fact, a pink Melmac saucer from the upper cupboard--of the questionable comestible sits beside mine, this mound of pellets surmounted by a suggestive valley at the apex. Has some intruder been at my rejected food? My rear extremity swells to irritated proportions as I growl to myself, "Who's been eating my Free-to-be-Feline?"

The usual suspects come quickly to mind: the invasive mouse (but my alert presence alone would banish any vermin of that persuasion); the rapacious insect (but even the largest cockroach could not dispose of the apparent amount of missing FtbF); the unexpected visitor (but neither Mr. Matt Devine nor Miss

Electra Lark has previously shown the slightest inclination to snack on my food, whether I favor it or not).

There is, of course, one party so depraved, so predictably greedy, so . . . unclassy as to vacuum up any foodstuff to be found on a floor. I refer, naturally, to the domesticated dog.

I have become lax on my own turf, I realize, and did not sniff for intruders before bounding to the buffet. I lift my head and sniff for dog. Actually, dogs possess an overbearing scent that I should have noticed even in my mad dash for the eats.

I do not sniff dog. Instead, I detect a delicate scent of an unknown nature, not unpleasant, but not native to this environment. I press my sniffer to the floor near the second bowl of FtbF and reel at the flagrant trail of a foreign feline.

Now that I am alerted to the intruder, I race into the living room . . . to find a stranger ensconced on the off-white sofa, fast asleep.

My proprietorial instincts have given way to something quite different. Both my nose and my eyes are right on target: the individual who has been tastelessly filching my Free-to-be-Feline is a dainty, nubile number who is not hard on either of my prime senses, who is, in fact--free, black and female!

In an instant, I bound up beside her, anticipating a most enjoyable interrogation.

In the same instant, she is awake and transformed into a hissing banshee with a croquet-hoop back, bushy tail, poisonously slit golden eyes, bristling silver whiskers and as many sharp white teeth--all showing--as a barracuda with an overbite.

"Whoa! Wait a minute, Miss," I soothe in my best growl, which is only slightly intimidating.

She is having nothing of it, but backs against the rear sofa cushions, her admirably unclipped claws snagging the fabric, a phenomenon that will not please Miss Temple Barr.

"These are my digs," I point out diplomatically, "although I do not mind an occasional attractive visitor."

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law," she responds without softening her defensive posture.

I hold my temper and back off to the sofa's far end. It is obvious, despite her furry fireworks, that my intruder is of a tender age and experience; so young, in fact, that she has not yet had that odious operation known euphemistically as "fixing." Obviously, she needs someone to show her the ropes.

"You must have sensed my previous possession," I point out.

She shrugs, allowing the ebony halo around her head to settle down a bit. "It was either this or Murder Inc."

"I take it, then, that my tenderhearted roommate has saved you from the animal pound."

"I encouraged her to intervene, yes."

I nod sagely. "She is a delightful companion, Miss Temple Barr, but not the best cook. Did you really eat that Free-to-be-Feline?"

"It is a highly nutritious food, well balanced in all essential vitamins and minerals."

"I can see that you and Miss Temple hit it right off," I note sourly. "I can be magnanimous. However, I must insist that you desist from eating Free-to-be-Feline. I am training Miss Temple to forget it."

"I will eat what does me the most good." She looks me up and down with less than an admiring flick of her long, black mascara-coated eyelashes. "It would do you a lot of good, too."

"Listen, I am head dude around here. You'll do as I tell you.

If you're nice to me, I might even let you stay a while."

"What does that mean?" she snarls quickly.

I have never heard such ugly sentiments coming out of such a beautiful little doll-face before. I wonder where she got her feisty temperament. A life on the streets can do that to some, but it is a shame to see such a comely little doll so warped.

"I mean that it is my place, and if you want to stay, you have to play to my hand of cards, and right now I am holding all the aces."

"If you mean to imply that I must extend you any personal favors because I happen to need a home for the moment, that is an extremely sexist and patriarchal statement, not to say coercive. I am sure, however," she adds with a satisfied purr, "that you did not mean any such thing."

"Uh . . . no." I frown, which wrinkles my broad forehead and is--I am told--a dignified, attractive expression. Her last statement sounded oddly like a threat of some kind, which I am not used to hearing at my size and age, and especially from a petite little doll of tender years. No doubt her rough months on the streets have made her somewhat . . . touchy.

"What is your name, kid?" I ask in a kindly, avuncular manner that it costs me much effort to produce.

"They call me 'Caviar.' "

I nod, savoring the moniker. "A tasty choice. I sampled some of the best beluga from Russia when I was house dick at the Crystal Phoenix. You have heard of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, of course, the classiest joint in Vegas?"

"No," she says shortly, sitting down to lick her luxurious rear extremity into shape. I admire her tongue-and-teeth work.

"Anyway, this beluga stuff is like little black pearls, very costly and quite succulent, full of the salt of the sea. My old man has his own yacht, and is quite an expert in seafood, wherever he is."

"How nice. My old man was a scamp and a tramp and he left my mother flat. I do not care where he is, and I do not judge anyone by paternal lines. We cannot help who our fathers are."

"I can see that you have had some tough times, kid," I growl.

"You need someone older and wiser--and bigger--to look after you."

I get a solid gold eye cocked full at me. What gorgeous--and searing--peepers this doll has!

"I do not think so," she says.

"What are your plans?"

"To rest for the moment. I am tired of cages."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. I have been in the stir a few times myself, even with a sixty-hour death penalty."

She eyes me with respect for the first time. "Why are you still here?"

"I broke myself out."

She looks impressed, a little. "I guess you are big enough to manage it."

"Actually, I used brains, not brawn."

Now she stares at me again, as if I am a bowl of Free-to-be- Feline and she is on a diet. "You are quite amusing," she concedes.

Well now, this is progress. I stretch out along the sofa, until my mitts are almost within touching distance. I have met these embittered street girls before. They take delicate handling, but soon recognize the wisdom of putting themselves under the protection of a powerful dude, like yours truly.

"I have to warn you, if you stay here, you are in some jeopardy."

"Miss Barr seems most thoughtful and civil."

"Yeah, but she has scruples. These are things people get from time to time. She will probably have you undergo an unpleasant operation that will not do much for your future sex life. I know you are a young thing and not aware of what you might be missing, but believe me, this 'spaying' is a fate worse than death."

"I am quite familiar with this form of birth control," she says coolly.

"I can find you a cozy place nearby where you will not be subject to forced sterilization."

She eyes the comfy surroundings, then me. "Some hole-in-the-wall love nest? With you? I think not. I prefer the knife."

"You do not know what you will be missing?" I argue, appalled.

"Oh, but I do know. I have had these alley dudes trying to jump me since I was a kit. No loss."

"But these were not worldly, suave, accomplished dudes--"

"Can it, bud. I have seen it with my mother and others. Some dude jumps you from behind, and all you get out of it is a bite on the back of the neck, some pawing and mauling and a lot of hungry little faces nobody wants who are doomed to be run down, locked up or gassed at an early age. No thanks."

"You do not want kits?" I try not to sound too skeptical, as I never did either, but I was a guy and that was natural.

"Not in this rotten world."

"What about . . . love and sex?"

"What about it? I told you my father was gone as quick as he had come, no pun intended. My mother walked herself to a rail to feed us four. She always said I take after my father more than somewhat, but he took off before he even knew my name."

"Sure, it is a mewing shame, but that is the way it is, kid. I know my old man only from hearsay, too. And you must admit that our mothers are A-one."

"Yes, but they dare not spare we kits more than a few weeks, because some other guy on the run comes through, makes like Dracula in heat, and more kits are on the way. Plus, if the old man sticks around, he gets jealous of the babies and might break their necks some night so Mama will go back into heat. I do not much cotton to persons of the male persuasion."

"So I notice," I note with alarm. Most of the ladies I have known considered a dude a necessity of life. This little lady seems to have sworn off a lot of things formerly considered necessities by the general population. She is one scary little doll, although as cute as hell.

"You say they called you 'Caviar' in captivity?" I ask for lack of anything sensible to say. I am more than somewhat shook.

She retracts her last set of claws and licks her front mitt into the sheen of a black-satin glove.

"Yeah, but that is not my street name. Actually, I am named after my missing, unlamented father, who appears to have made quite an impression on my deluded mother."

"You are?" I ask to gain time and collect my wits. Could this little doll be on the level with all this?

"Yes." She pauses in her elegant grooming to lift her head and regard me with the icy disdain she apparently extends to all of the male persuasion. "My real name is Midnight Louise."

I would pale, if that were possible.

Chapter 30

Willy~nilly

Temple, Peggy Wilhelm and Sister Seraphina stood outside the Tyler house, eyeing its impressive bulk with an awe much resembling Dorothy and her friends regarding the Emerald City of Oz.

Temple was guilty of a lifelong identification with Dorothy, at least from the Judy Garland movie: she was a Midwestern girl with an inborn optimism in everything to be found over the rainbow; she really dug those ruby-red slippers;

and now she had--instead of Toto--a black cat named Midnight Louie as she ventured and adventured into evermore exotic terrains personal, professional and quasi-professional, if you count crime-meddling as a quasi-profession.

"You say that Lieutenant Molina okayed our going through the house?" Temple asked Sister Seraphina again.

"Cleaning the house," Sister Seraphina modified scrupulously. "It seems that there is no hard evidence of foul play.

The injuries that killed poor Blandina could have been received in a fall. The police have gathered what physical evidence there was, in case new information turns up, and the house with all these cats in it is a white elephant. If we don't deal with it, it will be declared a public health hazard, and Our Lady of Guadalupe is morally obligated to do something positive about the cats, having benefited from the will."

"And if we find anything . . . interesting in the house?" Temple prodded.

Sister Seraphina winked through her trifocals. "Then we give it to Lieutenant Molina and reopen the case."

"Forget it," Peggy said. "Sure, some flaky things happened at the fringes of Aunt Blandina's death, but there were no more incidents at the cat show. I bet a competitor just wanted to ruin poor Minuet's chances. She was a prime contender. And this phone and lights stuff--you know the way kids in this neighborhood act up."

"What about Peter?" Seraphina reminded her in a suddenly sober voice.

"How is he?" Temple asked, for she had delivered the cat, hot-pink bandages wrapping each front paw, to the convent the day before.

"Fine, but he won't be wandering for a while. Sister Rose is keeping him close to home." Sister Seraphina smiled at Peggy. "I know this is hard on you, dear. You've taken responsibility here from the first, with no hope of personal gain. I can't say I approve of your aunt leaving you out of her will, even if the church benefits. You will know you did your duty, as years go by, and that will be a comfort."

Peggy nodded sudden gratitude at the nun, and then glanced around through tear-glazed eyes. "There's a lot of history in this house."

"And cats," added Temple, pushing up the sleeves on her CATS! sweat shirt.

Peggy glanced at her sweat-shirt logo, as did Sister Seraphina.

They all three linked elbows and skipped up to the gates of this feline Emerald City.

Emerald eyes greeted them at the door, and meows and upturned bewhiskered faces pleading not just for food, but for attention. The cats were obviously missing the daily ministrations of Blandina Tyler.

Temple marveled at the dead woman's stamina. She was like the Old Woman in the Shoe with her flock of children. Temple was already wondering if she could handle two cats, and here Blandina had opened her door to dozens of hungry mouths and hearts.

The trio soon found that Blandina Tyler had been a collector of all sorts of things. String, for instance. Balls of it occupied the kitchen drawers. Temple threw them down for the cats, which schooled like piranha around the playthings.

"Look at this!" Peggy pulled a fistful of what looked like a limp tan octopus from the bottom vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.

Temple blinked, while Sister Seraphina came over with a puckered face, then grabbed the booty and laughed. "Support stockings! you know, those cast-iron things that require girdles and garter belts that old ladies wear. These things are as

stiff as rubber bands." She looked suddenly demure. "I think the best invention in the past thirty years was pantyhose."

"Amen," said Peggy Wilhelm. "I remember wearing this awful little garter belt that put welts into my skin, and in the early seventies, shorter skirts were always pulling up to show everything, until pantyhose came along."

"Early seventies," Temple repeated. "Gosh, I never got to wear long stockings in those days. My problem was socks that sagged around my ankles and those over big toes that made wrinkles in my tennies and hurt my feet."

"Now you wear high heels and hurt your feet," Sister Seraphina reproved, sounding rather motherly.

"They hurt less than those tennies jammed with oversized socks," Temple protested. "Besides, I'm wearing tennies now."

"Yeah, hot metallic-pink," Peggy jeered in good humor. "You wouldn't recognize low-profile shoes if they tripped you."

''Everybody has to have a hobby," Temple said in her own defense. "I also like to explore. Let's 'clean' some more."

By eleven-thirty they had rooted out six thirty-three-gallon garbage bags of support hose.

"Where do old ladies get these things?" Temple demanded as she opened a tempting, hard-sided suitcase from the forties in a back bedroom and spilled out another cornucopia of support hose.

Sister Seraphina laughed and shook her head. "It's the Depression mentality, which I'm depressed to admit I'm old enough to understand: save everything in case it might somehow be of use later. Save, save, save."

Temple shook her head and began exploring a 1930s' dressing table she would love to have: big round mirror, pillars of drawers bridged by a low shelf. Paint it white or silver and--wow! Maybe there'd be an estate sale. . . .

The shallow drawer in the bridge piece was filled with ancient tortoise plastic hair combs, hairnets, wads of thin, gray-brown hair, safety pins, and a plastic box filled with buttons, all of it resting on a yellowed piece of cockatoo wallpaper serving as a drawer liner. Temple removed everything, figuring the dressing table might bring some money in a sale--if she couldn't buy it beforehand.

Then she pulled up the lining paper.

Something lay beneath it. Something long and white and made of paper that would be folded four times. . . .

Oh, my seldom-sensible shoes! Temple peeled the elderly paper out from the drawer. A will, an old will.

She sank onto the tapestry-covered stool in front of the dressing table and read. I, Blandina Tyler, etc. To wit, etc. Sound mind, etc. She was quiet for so long that Sister Seraphina peeked in to see if Temple was still working.

Temple glanced at her with wide eyes, then went back to reading. Seraphina came and read over her shoulder.

"What is it?" Peggy Wilhelm asked from the doorway, her hands trailing more of the stockpiled support hose.

Temple jumped. "I found--"

"It's a will, Peggy," Seraphina said. Peggy moved into the room, her face flushed from hours of housework. "A will?"

"An old will," Temple said gently. "From the sixties." She held it out to Peggy

Peggy took and read it by the dim light of the single ceiling fixture. Temple and Sister Seraphina waited, having no right to say anything until Peggy knew what they already did.

"But . . . this names me as the sole heir. To everything. I don't understand. I was ... in my twenties then."

Temple rose to go to her, but Sister Seraphina's staying hand held her in place.

Peggy shook her head, then sat down on the edge of the nearby bed, onto which Sister Seraphina's steadying hand guided her.

"My parents had died," Peggy added with dawning insight. "I was alone by then. I--I didn't know Aunt Blandina ever cared that much."

"She did," Sister Seraphina assured Peggy. "And here's proof."

"She didn't have the cats then--" Peggy said slowly.

"She was a lot younger," Seraphina reminded her. "Perhaps more sensible. As we age, we get . . . peculiar. It's true.

My dear, Pilar was making us a lunch. Let me run next door and get it. You read this over. It's a gift, Peggy, A gift from the past. Accept it, and let it go."

Sister Seraphina left, an obvious believer in the efficacy of food easing shock. For Peggy Wilhelm was in shock; Temple saw that, and seeing that, she wished that the will was dated nineteen ninety-four. Apparently, Peggy had never accepted being left out of her aunt's will as philosophically as she had pretended.

Temple, however, was now alone with the stunned woman, not a comfortable position for a public-relations specialist who liked to put the best face on things.

"Sister is right," she found herself saying. "Here's proof that your aunt didn't discount her only living relative. She just got caught up in caring for the stray cats and became obsessive."

Peggy scanned the pages of the will again and again. Then her face crumpled like old support stockings. "Oh, Temple, you don't understand--you can't understand what this means to me."

"I understand that you realize you were not always left out."

"No!" Peggy squeezed Temple's hand, forcing her to knee beside her. "I can't tell Sister Seraphina, but--" Her free hand stroked her forehead, as if to install order within her cluttered mind. "Temple--! Oh, this is astounding. You don't know, and Sister Seraphina can't, she wasn't anywhere near this convent then. I lived with Aunt Blandina in 1969, for almost a year. Here, in this house, before the . . . cats."

"You came to stay with her?"

Peggy nodded.

"You attended Our Lady of Guadalupe Church?"

Peggy nodded. "Yes, for a while."

"A while?"

"Until it was a scandal," Peggy said in bitter tones. Her muddy brown eyes met Temple's. "I was pregnant," said this fifty-year-old woman with grizzled gray hair. "I was fifteen years old and pregnant. I was sent to Aunt Blandina's by my parents, so no one around home would know. Another city, a scandal twice removed: me and the baby."

"Oh, Peggy, I'm so sorry."

"You don't know what it was like back then. So hush hush, So much shame." Peggy pursed her lips as she folded the will shut, "Such grim business, Clandestine arrangements.

I even had the baby in this house to avoid a public record, to quash suspicion. A Mexican midwife." She smiled weakly at Temple's shocked face. "It was an easy birth, I was only fifteen. The baby was fine--and whisked away to some clandestine adoption process. A good Catholic home was promised. Infertile parents who ached for a baby.

Mine."

"Peggy--!"

"It had to be. They were all so disappointed. I was such a good girl, such good grades in school. They didn't want to know who, or why. I was such a good girl."

"You are," Temple said blindly, wishing for Sister Seraphina back, for Matt, for someone who knew how to talk to broken hearts, yet understanding that her very own age difference and religion gap made this confession, this release, possible.

"Now people are more realistic about it," Peggy said. "Then was the Dark Ages. It must be kept quiet at all costs. I was to forget it. My . . . my baby."

Temple had never felt more inadequate. She had never had a baby. She had not got religion. She was talking to Peggy from the dark side of the moon as far as experience was concerned. The only loss she knew was Max's disappearance.

"Did you . . . ever try to find the baby?" Temple whispered.

Peggy shook her head. "I tried to forget, like they all told me to. I thought they hated me. I thought they never forgave me. I even grew angry with Aunt Blandina, my keeper, and her cats. She couldn't keep my baby, but she could take in cat after cat in the years afterward. We never spoke of it, and my parents had died so soon after, only seven years. They left everything to her, to Aunt Blandina, at their deaths. I thought that was . . . punishment. I didn't want to speak of it, think of it, find anybody! But . . . cats. Eventually, I created cats, bred cats. I don't know why."

"Maybe the cats were your aunt's way of making up for letting that child go," Temple said. "Maybe they're your way of having something that depends on you." Maybe Midnight Louie was a Max substitute, right?

"She did care about you, even after it was all over," Temple forged on. "Look, Peggy, this will is dated after you said all of this happened. You were her sole heir then. She did care. Only, like Sister Seraphina said, she got old and . . . queer."

Peggy folded the will against her breast, like a baby. "Can I . . . keep this?"

"Sure. But let me copy it first. I guess we've got to keep a record. I'll get it back to you."

Peggy's troubled face threatened rebellion, and then subsided as Temple gently tugged the will from her grasp.

"Don't tell Sister Seraphina," Peggy begged her. "Don't tell anyone."

"No," Temple promised. "I won't."

But she was almost as troubled as Peggy. Somehow, she was sure, this discovery of the old, forgotten will altered every assumption anyone had made about Blandina Tyler's death, including those of Lieutenant C.R. Molina.

Chapter 31

Curious Confession

Louie still wasn't home when Temple checked in again, but Caviar was reclining on the sofa looking especially pleased with herself.

Temple untied and kicked off her metallic sneakers and settled beside the cat, stroking its silky head. Caviar had longer, finer hair than Louie, but her wise silence made her as good a thinking companion as the larger cat.

"Louie isn't boycotting us, is he?" Temple ruminated aloud. "I hope I didn't send him over the edge by bringing you home."

Caviar's purr was soft and steady, unlike Louie's sometimes rough and rowdy one. It made an ideal background of "black noise" for Temple's darkening thoughts.

What a quandary! Should she inform Lieutenant Molina of the newly found will, which was far too old to affect the current will, but which might point a suspicious finger at Peggy? It proved, at the least, that at one time Peggy had been the principal heir. Despite Peggy's gratified and even touching surprise at the discovery, it did not escape Temple that Peggy could have playacted that reaction, that she could have known years ago that she was an heir. That would mean that she might not have accepted her aunt's new resolve to endow the cats--at least not with the equanimity she apparently displayed.

Then there was the matter of Peggy's forgotten past. Temple twirled her finger into a lock of Caviar's ruff and frowned. Unwed motherhood still was not something to shout from the rooftops, but such young women today had many more options: they could keep their child and finish school. They could have an abortion, depending on where they lived and if parental consent was required, and if required, was given. They could bear the child and give it up to adoption.

In Peggy Wilhelm's day--the end of the fifties--unwed pregnancy was such a scandal, particularly in religious families, that she'd had only one choice: bear the child in shame and as much secrecy as possible, then give it up and forget it as quickly as possible.

Temple kicked her sock-clad foot against the sofa base, startling the droning Caviar, who flattened her ears back and moved down the sofa.

No avoiding it, Temple thought. Peggy Wilhelm could have been nursing a thirty-year-plus grudge against the aunt who helped her parents stage-manage the situation. Did she resent being forced to give up and give away the child? What about an aunt who now felt no responsibility to anyone or anything but her stray cats? Had Peggy come to resent her so bitterly, along with her devotion to the cats, that she attacked her own Birman to divert suspicion and eventually caused her aunt's "accidental" death? She was in the house that night. Motive and opportunity, as they say on TV.

Temple sighed again, driving Caviar a few inches farther down the sofa seat.

She had promised Peggy not to tell Sister Seraphina but not Lieutenant Molina. Yet the suspicion was so farfetched, and Blandina Tyler's death could be so innocuous. Old people are prone to debilitating, even fatal, falls.

The phone calls to Miss Tyler and Sister Mary Monica showed the workings of a sick mind, but anonymous callers were the least likely to act out their fantasies, whatever they were.

Or was Peggy Wilhelm shredding slowly through the years? Did she blame the church and her aunt for her disgrace and loss of self-esteem, especially now that attitudes were becoming more enlightened and less censorious?

The last question Temple confronted was the thorniest. She had been confided in. She had, in a sense, received a confession. She had promised not to tell one specific person; did that bar her from telling others?

Temple hashed the matter over until it was so shopworn she could hardly tell one end of the argument from the other.

One thing was clear: Blandina Tyler's intentions were not as cut-and-dried as everyone assumed. Another unavoidable clarity also tugged at Temple's mind and conscience for attention after the day's cleaning expedition: Blandina Tyler collected more than unwanted animals--string, stamps, stockings, maybe even . . . wills.

At four in the afternoon, Temple rattled around the apartment one last aimless time in search of Louie. Nothing. She put on her shiny sneakers and decided that since she had snooped in a dead woman's house, she might as well compound her sin and go snoop in a live man's apartment.

She slipped up the steps in rubber-soled silence and down the curving, dim corridor one floor above until she came to the short hall that led to Matt's door.

She had never been here--had never been invited--but she knew from the number of his unit, Eleven, where it had to be. Right above hers. The carriage lamps beside the doors were kept on day and night, not only for a homey touch, but because there was no daylight in this cul-de-sac.

For the first time, it struck Temple that the Circle Ritz's design, besides being forty years old and quaint, reflected the confidence of a simpler, crime-free time. These private entrances were isolated, and possibly more dangerous than desirable for that reason.

Temple recognized the beige cardboard in the brass frame beside the doorbell as the back of a ConTact card. "MATT DEVINE" was printed on it in ballpoint in the measured block letters of someone who has been carefully taught to be legible in matters of public record.

She rang the bell, surprised to hear the muffled yet mellow ding-dong from within; she had never heard another resident's bell, except Electra's, which was different, being in the penthouse.

Matt answered it, looking rumpled in a beige T-shirt, Bermuda shorts and bare feet.

"Were you sleeping?" Temple asked guiltily.

"No, but I, ah, didn't get to bed until seven this morning."

He glanced at his watch. "Did we have an appointment for a lesson? I don't doubt I forgot--"

"No, no. I'm not up to making like Sue Jujitsu today Anyway, but I wondered--"

He stepped back, opening the door and looking reluctant. "Come in. It isn't much, or rather, I haven't done much with it." .

Temple stepped over the threshold, feeling the move was momentous. A person's rooms could tell you a lot about the resident.

She glanced around, trying to look as if she was not. Bareness hit her like a heat wave: bare wood floors, bare French doors and windows, a secondhand sofa bare of pillows. Bracket-mounted bookshelves mostly bare of books and knickknacks. Boxes serving as tables, or simply clumped here and there as if clinging together for company.

"I'm not used to providing my own decor," Matt admitted with a shrug, ruefully eyeing his warehouse landscape. "And then, I'm not sure how long I'll stay in Vegas."

Temple tried not to look startled. Of course Matt would stay; she was far too interested for him to just fade away on her and move on. And of course her feelings and wishes had nothing to do with what he wanted to do, and would do.

So her sudden pall of disappointment as she stepped into the room so exactly like her own, but so much emptier, was not because of the blank slate of his surroundings, but due to the General Unpredictability of Anyone, which led her back to her conundrum.

"Have a seat." Matt gestured to the black-and-tan plaid sofa, wisely selected to conceal dust, dirt and wear and tear, then corrected himself, "Have the seat."

He sat on a piled pair of wooden crates.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm disturbed about something I can't see around."

"What's that?" he asked, instantly interested. Problems did not dismay him; in fact, they were a kind of security blanket, Temple saw. As long as he could concentrate on someone else, he wouldn't have to look too much at himself.

"I know something about somebody nobody else does," she said, realizing she sounded slightly childish.

"And you're trying to decide whether to go into blackmail or not?"

She wasn't in the mood for humor. "I'm trying to decide if I'm obligated to keep it to myself--or the opposite."

"Why is your knowledge a problem?"

"It's about someone involved with Blandina Tyler."

Speculation ruffled Matt's face like wind on water. "You're usually one to unearth information, not suppress it. Why does this instance bother you?"

"It's . . . very personal, and it's sad, and the person just poured it out to me because I happened to be there at a critical moment."

"Isn't that what crack gumshoes love?"

"I'm not a professional, Matt. I'm not even a dedicated amateur. I can't help it if I keep . . . finding out things about people. And this is so remote, so farfetched"

"Nothing about a possible murder is farfetched."

"I know. That's why messing around in one can do so much damage. And this person has been damaged enough."

Matt's brown eyes grew as distant as such a warm shade can manage. "We're all damaged enough," he murmured as if thinking of someone else. "By the age of three," he added ruefully. His gaze snapped back to her, sharp and intent.

"Look, I'm in the same boat you're in, only my silence has been invoked on professional grounds. I'm still uneasy about it."

"Someone confessed to you?"

"In a manner of speaking. It's not official, but ethically my hands are tied, so I guess I'll just keep sitting on them."

Temple felt her eyes widen and her voice lower. "Matt, do you suppose we're both talking about the same person?"

"I doubt it," he said dryly, "but you've got me awfully curious about who your confider is. You aren't bound by the confessional, Temple. You're free to serve your conscience or your civic duty or your instincts--"

"Or my curiosity," she finished in brittle tones. "Why do people keep telling me things?"

He laughed at her exasperation. "You don't seem like you'll harm them."

"That could make me the most dangerous of all," she said.

He nodded. "Let's hope none of your 'confiders' figure that out, especially if your suspicions are correct."

"Oh, I don't know. I don't seem to be doing much of anything right lately."

"Why do you say that?"

Temple lifted her hand and then let it fall despondently to the sofa cushion she was sitting on. "Oh, Midnight Louie's been gone for a long time. I'm afraid that it's that Humane Society cat I brought back from the cat show."

"You're not surprised about that?" Matt sounded shocked. "No, Louie wouldn't like that. Cats are very territorial."

"But she's such a little darling, and all black, too."

"Color coordination does not soothe the savage beast when his territory is involved. Is she spayed?"

"Not yet."

"Then Louie might overlook the obvious, but you could end up with kittens on your hands."

"Just what I don't need. Poor Caviar! I don't know what to do. Maybe I can find another home for her. Louie will come back, won't he?"

Temple's voice took a sudden, husky dive as she contemplated driving Midnight Louie off for good by bringing a rival home.

Matt watched her for a long moment, looking shocked again. Then Temple realized how much her fears of Louie's desertion echoed her earlier desertion by a black-haired, much bigger, two-footed male roommate--Max Kinsella.

Only this time, she may have brought it on herself.

"I'll get the other cat out of the place as soon as possible," she swore, already distracted from her moral dilemma.

Matt proved what a superbly insighted counselor he was by forbearing to point out that it might be too late.

Chapter 32

Cross~examine Not the Cat

I take a long, long walk while I count the follies of my youth.

Then I take an even longer stroll while I enumerate the follies manufactured during my middle age. This brings me up to the present day, and by chance to my old stomping grounds, the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino.

Though it is the usual hot day--say a hundred and ten in the shade--a cold chill has me in its icy grip. When the precocious Caviar, aka Midnight Louise, inquired where I was going, I told her I had business of a spiritual nature to conduct. She looked the usual dubious, so I informed her importantly that I am working on a case involving the welfare of hundreds of cats, and that I cannot be expected to sit around and chat with some wet behind- the-ears upstart.

Perhaps I was hard on the little doll, but I had to get out of there and think. Never have my past sins come back to haunt me so unexpectedly. In fact, I have never thought of my past activities as sinful until I have seen what my devil-may-care ways have wrought: an utterly unnatural female feline. Obviously, this misguided young doll is in desperate need of a protective male influence. In the past, I have regarded a protective male influence (mine) in a completely different light. Now I am saddled with the sudden responsibility of a . . . sire.

No doubt scads of my unacknowledged--even unconsidered--offspring run to and fro in Las Vegas. However, I have never confronted one in the flesh and fur before. This new, mature responsibility gives me the willies. It is as if I have seen my own ghost; in a sense, I have.

I slip around the side of the Crystal Phoenix and to the lush landscape between the hotel's two embracing white-stucco wings out back. Broiling tourists turn French-toast brown around the light-dappled pool, but I ignore the roar of the crowd and the of the grease--cocoa butter--with which they are well basted.

Under the tall calla lilies I shift like a shadow until I reach my Waldon Pond, my still, mysterious center, my place of contemplation and retreat.

Carp glide just beneath the pond's shining surface--a golden argosy of glittering scales and tender, hidden flesh. Also orange, black, blue-and-white, et cetera. These carp are very showy fish, especially when they are called koi.

Yet even their flashing fins do not distract me from my black mood. I think over my options and decide that the only noble course is to proceed to the scene of the crime and redouble my efforts to save the orphaned cats. When a dude is down and out due to some domestic upset, there is nothing like hard work to clear his brain and conscience. Well, there is nothing like work.

Who knows? According to recent events, some of these abandoned felines may be my kin. In fact, if I tote the mathematical odds of my lifelong activities of the procreative sort, most of them may be kissing cousins to a carp-lover of my all-too-close acquaintance.

Day has turned to dark by the time I arrive at the residence in question. Not only does the lack of light match my mood, but it suits my investigative m.o. This "m.o." stands for a fancy Latin phrase, "modus operandi," which I believe has something to do with computer communications and cool operators like myself.

I am determined that these household types will not elude my incisive questioning this time, even if I have to resort to my incisors, which are sometimes called "canines," a lousy word to hang on a fellow of another species entirely.

I have overheard a good deal about this case, one way or another. In addition, I am the recipient of the mystic Karma's confusing hodgepodge of clues. Most of these latter are closer to chopped liver than useful hints, but one incoherent bit has got me thinking. This is not always easy to do, especially when I am under a severe personal strain. I have not even had a chance to publicly spurn my Free-to-be-Feline in more than twenty-four hours.

If my hunch is right, I am on the trail of a twisted and complex plot combining revenge and larceny that has been hatched by a thoroughly despicable, twisted and complex person. If my hunch is not right, at least I can pick up a little Midnight snack later during my investigations.

I belly-crawl down the sandy space between the Tyler domicile and the neighboring house of holy repute in the approved U .S. Marine boot-camp manner. I am as silent as anyone whose delicate underbelly (and lots of it) is doing the equivalent of fire-walking over an emery board. Then I slip through the secret entry and work my way into the heart of the house.

Along the way, I find the usual buffet rest stops--Tin Pan Alley with hors d'oeuvres. Once I have dined, I reconnoiter the premises. I am happy to discover that the residents are in a restless state of mind. The uneasy witness is always more forthcoming.

Now the residents do not pooh-pooh my interest in the case, preferring to leave it to "the authorities," but bend my ears back with tales of things that go bump in the night. So many of them swirl around me, each with his own tale to tell--not to mention tails whipping past my kisser--that I do not know where to begin.

Settle down, I tell them. I did not bring a notebook. After I swear that their testimony is for my ears only, the conjunctive caterwauling begins:

Oh, whines a red tabby with a cream shirtfront, we have been unable to get a wink of sleep, with all the comings and goings, day and night.

That is what you have to expect in a house that has been visited by violent death, I reply.

But, purrs an attractive Russian Blue who has unfortunately been rendered sexless, that is the point. We have been visited repeatedly by someone who is obviously Up to No Good.

How, I ask, does she know?

She does not know, only has "a suspicion."

I harbor a strong suspicion that even when Miss Tyler's dependents are willing to talk, little of any worth will be forthcoming.

Who, I demand, has been in the house since last I visited?

That nice old lady from next door, volunteers a petite tiger stripe.

I ask for a description and get it: navy coat, silver head-markings, and a strange, translucent appliance sitting on the bridge of the nose.

Apparently these benighted feline fools are unaware that they are living cheek by cowl with a nunnery. This description could cover any one of the old dolls next door, none of whom are suspects in my book, pardon the nun pun. (Anyone who is familiar with the intricacies of my first case, the Wreck of the Remaindered Editor, is aware that such homophones as "none" and "nun" can be critical clues, but in this case, they are mere wordplay.)

A Great White cruises past me--all white, all muscle and, luckily, fully neutered--and informs me that Delicate Heels has also been back. This does not surprise me, though Miss Temple Barr's flagrant infidelity of late is getting harder and harder to take. First there is the black banshee camped in the middle of my pied-a-terre, who unknowingly claims an intimate connection to yours truly. Second, there are Miss Temple Barr's long absences while she cavorts by the pool and elsewhere with Mr. Matt Devine. I am not against some moderate, healthy exercise, but not at the neglect of family and friends. Then there is my little doll's skipping off to venues where dozens of my kind convene, such as the cat show, and last but not least, this entire house full of unclaimed cats panting for a new full-meal deal.

So pardon me if I am not enthralled by the praise heaped upon her from several dozen honeyed throats, all with an eye on a new home, sweet home. Mine. I almost snicker to imagine them encountering the current inhabitant. Let them match switchblades and repartee with the hard-as-snails Caviar and see how well they do!

I also hear tell of other visitors. "Birman Breath" is not highly regarded by the crew, most of whom are not pedigreed and are highly scornful of such pampered creatures and their personal pamperers. The description--grizzled-head female, portly and often leopard-spotted or tiger-striped--puts me in mind of Miss Temple Barr's hapless contact at the cat show, whose prizewinning entry was savaged by a dog clipper.

I perk up. I did not know that the cat with the new punk haircut was a Birman. I picture Karma shaved to the skin in a two-inch swath from eyebrow hairs to tail tip, and once around the middle.

The effect is both amusing and demystifying. The description of the most mysterious visitor proves to be the most provocative also. The particulars vary from witness to witness, perhaps gaining embellishment with repetition, but I think that at last I am on the trail of the villain who did such violence to Peter the convent cat.

As the residents tell it, this person is a monster indeed: dresses in my colors from head to toe to mitts, including soft soled shoes that do not smell of natural materials, such as leather. A faceless, hairless tan head. Sex undetermined.

I favor the male, and--given the black--either a burglar or a. . . priest.

This person has come and gone surreptitiously outside the house since before Miss Tyler's demise, a shy and elderly cream confides.

Since her death, the Great White puts in gruffly (this ex-he is evidently boss around here), this same person has become an intruder. He seems to be looking for something.

What of the night of her death? I ask.

Here there is a marked difference of opinion. Most of the witnesses were sleeping. It is only since their mistress's absence that they have become nervous by night and day, and notice more. Before, the only people around out of doors were repair persons and the like.

The quiet cream claims to have glimpsed the intruder's legs running down the stairs after Miss Tyler fell.

I ask why this news was not forthcoming on my last visit.

After an awkward silence, the cream confesses that the assembled residents "did not know whether to trust an outsider or not."

Just such an attitude, I remind them testily, has led to much grief for the great sleuths of history, from Sherlock Holmes up to my personal favorite, Seymour Katz, the Peoria P.I. whose exploits in Undercover Agent magazine I have followed since I was a kit.

Where, I ask them next, has the intruder been intruding about the house?

After an unclear chorus of replies, I get the gist: upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.

I decide to investigate the same turf and so I trot upstairs first. Naturally, the crime scene is a mess. It has been tainted by Lieutenant Molina's scene-team, which has laid a trail of unnatural chemical substances over everything. Then a convention of handy helpers has been through, among whom I recognize the subtle scent of my own little doll, which is music to my nose, unless she happens to be confusing a crime scene, which she is.

I trot down the fatal stairs, observant for any telltale traces. I see nothing but the expected cat hair gathering into dust bunnies here and there.

Finally, on the first floor again, I am struck by something one of the witnesses said. "Downstairs," I repeat in a contemplative monotone. "Is this downstairs, or is there more below?"

The Great White finds this question too obvious to answer, but a half-grown black-and-white with a freckle on his pink nose steps forward to say that a further set of steps beckons beyond the kitchen.

There I go, to find a painted wooden door handily ajar.

They are not allowed down there, the cream cautions in a quivery voice. The Great White sneers and says that doesn't mean that some of them have not been down there plenty.

I am not fond of basements. They are dark, damp, spider webbed, crammed with old, forgotten junk, and usually escape proof. Luckily, they are rare in Las Vegas, except in the older houses, of which this is one.

It occurs to me that others may have overlooked the basement, too. If people are searching the house, whether honestly or clandestinely, it behooves me to do so as well. I growl a warning to the others to remain upstairs, no matter what happens, and I trot down the dark stairs.

Ugh. Painted wooden treads, with those nasty black-rubber safety covers tacked on. Nothing says "dirty, dank, possibly haunted basement" to me like that shifty stairway to the lower depths.

My eyes adjust slowly to the eternal twilight here. Contrary to legend, my kind's sight is not keenest in the dark. My ears and super-sensitive whiskers serve me better. I hear a clink and a scrape in the farthest, darkest corner.

I slink in that direction, waiting for my fabled night vision to adjust and let me detect a scintilla of difference between darkness and shadow. Apparently my fabled night vision is waiting for another legend, the Robert E. Lee.

Before I reach the corner, I hear a single, grinding step.

A full moon of light beams into my bedazzled pupils, which slit tighter than the eye of a needle unreceptive to camels and rich men like the late, great Aristotle Onassis. Even as my vision adapts to the blinding glare, a pair of dark, shapeless human mitts looms toward me, bearing something white like a wadded up, wet diaper.

"A black cat! Perfect for the church door on Friday," intones a voice more distant than the announcer in a bus station. I see nothing but my approaching doom in the form of a wet, white cloud.

The revolting material is slapped across my kisser. At first I think I smell Pampers, but the odor is heavier. I struggle, claws boxing the air. I snag something--cloth, and then I am swaddled like an infant in a tough outer fabric that my flailing limbs tear at but cannot escape.

As I involuntarily slip into Lull-a-bye Land, I recognize the means of my capture: the storied cloth soaked in sleep-inducing chloroform that P.I. Katz is always encountering--and the equally fabled, and feared, burlap bag. Could it be that Louie is going for a Midnight swim?