Cat On A Blue Monday

Chapter 33

The Fur Flies

Temple, still despondent and now feeling guilty, in addition, entered her foyer without enjoying the usual glow her smart accommodations gave her.

Worse, Caviar had acted agitated from the moment Temple had returned from Matt's apartment, as if the cat knew that her fate--not to mention her reproductive future--had been decided.

She had been pacing the living room when Temple had peeked in, and she'd resisted all attempts to be picked up and calmed, despite her earlier docile behavior. Now she was yowling, regarding Temple with piercing owl-gold eyes and regaling her with even more piercing cries.

Temple just couldn't ship her off to the vet's, but she had to isolate her in case Louie returned. She wrestled Louie's cat carrier from the front storage closet, then struggled to push Caviar inside, feeling like a monster. Caviar complained in a soprano shriek en route, and even more loudly once locked inside.

Temple showered Caviar with soothing chirrups as she left the carrier in the kitchen, feeling like she was waving a cheery toodle-oo to Sidney Carton on the way to the guillotine.

Temple frowned. The cat's reversal of behavior was most odd, almost as if she were . . . well, upset about something. Had Louie come home?

In a lather of guilt and urgency, Temple began to search the premises. Perhaps now that Caviar was corralled, Midnight Louie would deign to show himself. She looked under the bed, in the darkest reaches of the bedroom closet, behind the bathroom doors, atop the office bookcases, under the desk, behind the green plant, on the dining-chair seats in one corner of the living room. No Louie anywhere.

Finally, she went back into the kitchen and opened every cupboard. The only track of a cat she found was an overturned Finny Frosties box. Caviar's yowls reached operatic heights. Glumly, Temple righted it and turned back to the room.

Her eyes fixed on the feeding bowls as her mind mused on the tale of two kitties: Caviar's Free-to-be-Feline was nibbled down to the bowl's bare bottom. Louie's was . . . what was Louie's? Temple certainly couldn't see the untouched mound of food beneath the newspaper tented over it.

She snatched up the newsprint like a magician expecting to reveal . . . missing Free-to-be-Feline, proving Louie had been here, and even recanted. All was forgiven, he was just hiding--

The Free-to-be-Feline rose to its customary heights. But, Temple realized, that didn't prove that Louie had not been here. Unless the newspaper. . . .

She looked at the open pages and saw for the first time the fine print of the Classified Ads section. Was this a mute message from Louie? For instance, was it opened to the "Pets" section, implying that he was off in search of a new home?

No, the top page was the first page of the Classified section. All that was on it were strange self-help group and service ads that sounded vaguely illegal--such as for piercing parlors--and, of course, the obituaries.

Of course, Temple skimmed the entries, horrified to read of a thirty-six-year-old man who had succumbed to a heart attack and a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had perished from an unspecified long illness. Good thing that she didn't peruse these things daily. It was a lot less safe out there than one realized.

Yup. Blandina Tyler had an entry, sans photograph, a scant two-inch listing of name, address, birthplace, former occupation--nurse--date and place of funeral: 10:00 a.m. Friday at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Suggested charities: Our Lady o{ Guadalupe and the Humane Society.

What did this obituary say, if it had been left as a message, which was ridiculous, because Louie couldn't read, no matter how smart he was. Yet Caviar had been so agitated . . . and now she was strangely silent. Temple glanced at the carrier to see a sober feline face following her every move with unblinking intensity. The words came into her mind as if seeded there by some supernatural agency and now bursting into full, logical bloom: Blandina Tyler. Funeral. Tomorrow. At the church so conveniently close to Blandina's own door, just down the street. Address.

Temple folded the paper. This was silly. She just had a feeling, and it had nothing to do with finding the Free-to-be-Feline under an Obituary section, as if the absent cat had meant to imply the stuff should be buried. Louie still couldn't read, not even to make a macabre joke. Yet only a cat could have batted the paper so neatly over the bowl. Caviar? Temple eyed the eerily quiet carrier again. Really, she couldn't read either.

Temple decided to check on the Tyler cats anyway. Peggy had given her a key. What good was a key if she couldn't use it?

First, Temple investigated her tote bag to make sure the Tyler house key was there--it was. She grabbed the big brass ring of her own keys, moved along the apartment's French doors to make sure they were latched, and went into the guest bathroom to be certain that Louie's high transom window was open so he could get in if--when--he came back.

Satisfied that the apartment was both secure against human invaders and still offered sufficient feline access, Temple went out the front door and locked it behind her.

If anyone saw her at the Tyler house and questioned her presence, she would say she was worried about the cats, plural. Mostly though, she was worried about the cat, singular. Very singular.

Temple had not counted on how creepy a house in which a person had died could look at night in a seedy neighborhood.

She stood beside the parked Storm, its cheerful aqua color now a flat charcoal gray under the faintly coral glow of the distant sodium iodide streetlights.

She knew that only cats moved in the dark, empty house in front of her, yet she remained reluctant to enter.

No rectangles of light checker boarded the convent next door. Its windows at the side and rear were obscured by tall oleander bushes, except for Sister Mary Monica's second story observation post, and she was probably abed by nine.

Temple jingled her huge key ring for the companionship of its familiar chime, then regretted the noise. Although she could claim that she was concerned about the cats, she couldn't explain her presence here in any really rational way.

The odds of Louie being inside, no matter how widely he got around, were nil. And this house had been the focus of unsettling phone calls and prowlers. However much Blandina

Tyler's elderly and lonely imagination may have amplified these incidents, someone of ill will lurked at the edges of the events that had brought both Temple Barr and Matt Devine to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Matt would consider her a bit looney if he knew she was standing here planning to enter a deserted house on the evidence of a disarranged newspaper and her own instincts.

Temple hitched up the tote-bag straps, straightened her shoulders and started up the walk. What did she have to lose? Still, she kept her weight on the balls of her feet, so her snappy red high heels wouldn't slap the sidewalk and alert someone who would question her right to be here--or alert someone else, who had no right to be here either.

Out of nowhere, the dark loomed up and ambushed her with a crushing sense of personal peril. A fist of fear squeezed her heart, making her pause to heed its wild pounding. The cooler night air chilled the goose bumps of sweat that had blossomed all over her body. She was alone in the dark in front of a house where someone had died a possibly premeditated, violent death. Suddenly the empty street and its distant lamps reminded her of a deserted parking ramp.

She dared not turn back to the curb to verify that her car stood there, alone, that she was not once again in that dangerous parking ramp, that two men were not even now behind her waiting to pounce and pound. . . .

No safety beckoned ahead, only the mute, dark house. The exterior entry light had long since burned out. She forced herself to walk to the doorway, every loud footstep a declaration of defiance. She couldn't let her recent beating turn her into a mouse. Temple's key scraped at the lock mechanism for many seconds, making surreptitious noises that she figured would attract at least a brace of Dobermans. On the other hand, a dog attack would be something different.

Nothing moved but a warm tease of breeze through the bushes. Sweat prickled Temple's scalp, and her heart still hammered.

Then the lock snicked and the door opened.

She slipped inside and quickly closed the door behind her to mask her presence, and to commit herself to the deeper dark before her. She stood there listening to the silence and the inner thunder of her circulatory system, then envisioned the day-lit house in her mind and groped for the light switch beside the door.

Evidently Peggy, or Sister Seraphina, had lowered the air conditioning now that only cats were in residence. The interior air was lukewarm, and thicker than ever with the smell of fur, fishy food and litter boxes.

Temple heard a thump deep within the house. A stirring cat, alerted to her presence, perhaps. She fumbled over the rough interior stucco wall for the switch and finally touched the plate's smooth, plastic surface.

Flick. Nothing.

That had happened somewhere else recently. Where? Ah, in Electra's entry hall.

Maybe this entry-hall light had burned out, too.

Temple kept her palm against the rough wall and moved forward by baby steps, wary of the many rag rugs waiting to trip the visitor in dark or daylight.

Her foot kicked something soft that scrabbled away. Not a rug, a sleeping cat.

" Sorry, kitty," she whispered.

Immediately her active imagination painted a room full of mortally insulted cats, schooling in the dark to wash over her until she tripped and fell among them. Then they would swarm her, their barbed tongues preparing the way for hundreds of feral, piranha-like teeth.

In the dark, even pussycats took on a sinister presence, especially if they were unseen.

Some light did penetrate the rooms as her eyes adjusted, but the dim, vaguely recognizable forms she saw only confused her more. Was that the edge of the refrigerator glimpsed through the dining-room archway--or the archway itself?

She tottered into the living room, leaving the safety of the perimeter. Her foot kicked something again, something heavy and inanimate that lay unmoving and didn't roll away when gently prodded. A dead cat?

Temple bent like a blind woman to pat the lump at her feet, not knowing what she would find, what she would touch.

A rag rug rolled into a cat-sized mass. She sighed and pushed it out of her way, starting at a shrill, hollow sound. Oh, an empty tinfoil roaster pan, driven over the hard floor by the moved rug.

Maybe the cats did need more food; maybe that was the inexplicable instinct that had brought her here: a psychic cat chorus chanting for Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.

She edged into what she hoped was the kitchen, her arms nailing ahead of her, although it was her high-heeled feet that were in the most imminent danger of encountering obstacles.

Cats must have eeled away from her in the well-populated dark. She never felt another brush with anything animate or inanimate. When her shoes hit the kitchen's ceramic tiles, her tension eased. Surely a light would work in here, at Commissary Central. Peggy must come over for an evening feeding. She would instantly miss a burned-out light. Now, where was the switch?

Temple cruised the room's perimeter, moving her feet in a soft shuffle now and then accented by the ting of a kicked tinfoil pan. Step, step, step, kick. Step, step, step, kick.

Her first circuit was hard on her shins and revealed no light switch at the expected level. Was the central overhead light operated by a dangling cord? Temple couldn't remember that either. Amazing what you don't look at in an unfamiliar house.

So she shuffled her way to the presumed middle of the room and began swinging her right arm to and fro above her head, trolling for any dangling strings. Of course she could be too short to reach it, and her hand might be missing it by inches.

Frustrated, she edged around the room's perimeter again, checking under cupboards, behind the countertop microwave oven and the breadbox, which both smelled strongly of tuna fish.

Inspired, she clasped the refrigerator, working her way around the predictable bulk for the wall behind it that she remembered. Halfway around the behemoth, she became aware of something that told her it didn't matter if she found a light switch or not, something that chilled her blood.

The refrigerator did not vibrate with a low, throaty hum, although it could be temporarily at the off cycle. Still, every working refrigerator she knew exuded a clammy exterior chill. This one was as warm as hour-old dishwater. Her questioning hand found the handle, slightly sticky with--sniff--halibut halitosis, and cracked the door, her eyes reflexively squinting shut against the expected glare of the interior refrigerator light.

Nothing. When she finished her shuffle at the hoped-for wall behind it and patted her hand up and down in the dark, she was not even mildly exhilarated to finally find a light switch under her fingers. The button stood at attention: up in the "On" position, but no light prevailed. Electrically speaking, the house was dead.

Temple clutched her tote bag to her side for company fully loaded, it was almost that big--and thought. Had the electric company jumped the gun and turned off the service? Had Miss Tyler's bill payments been delayed by her death and her power turned off? What about the cats? When had the power gone out? After Peggy Wilhelm's last feeding, but Temple wasn't sure when Peggy made her nighttime visits. Obviously, before it got as late and dark as this. Peggy would not want to be caught in a deserted house too late. Smart woman.

Well, Temple would just have to feel her way back to the front door and consult with Sister Seraphina next door on what to do now that the house was without power. Or she could feel her way forward in the opposite direction, deeper into the house, where she now heard scuffling sounds that didn't sound like cats. Noises that sounded like feet, moving in the distance.

Sure.

Blandina Tyler was worried about her cats and had come back to take care of them.

Sure.

Temple tried to ignore the anxiety that sent prickles rushing down her arms, the numb disbelief reaching out to paralyze her mind.

She was alone in someone else's deserted house. Someone else, who was dead. Yet she could think of a half-dozen perfectly ordinary explanations for why another person--a concerned individual like herself, a neighbor, a caretaker, a cat lover, a congenitally curious idiot with a suicidal streak--would be in the house.

Perhaps Sister Seraphina had noticed the power failure and come over to investigate.

This theory seemed even more likely when Temple realized that the scuffling sounds were coming from below. Sure, a good old-fashioned Midwest basement! The house was old enough for one. And someone had gone down to check the electrical box because of the power outage.

It would be a bit embarrassing to explain her unannounced presence, but not impossible. She was glib in awkward situations--most of them, anyway. She could talk her way out of anything; what else was a P.R. person if not convincing?

Temple was not convincing herself.

She edged quietly closer to the sounds, down a back hall jammed, she remembered, with brown-paper grocery bags full of newspapers. And support hose.

Hadn't there been a door there, another back door? Or a door to the basement?

Now she heard a voice.

Singing.

Okay. Must be a repairman. Who else would sing in a basement in the dark?

"Heav-y dev-il," came the first lyric.

Singing heavy-metal music?

"Up and up we go, where we stop nobody knows but Jesus."

Temple cocked her head to interpret the singsong voice and the odd words. Jesus? Must be a nun from next door, checking on the house, but what kind of song--psalm?--was that? "Nobody knows but Jesus ..." Familiar. An old spiritual. Nobody knows but Jesus-- Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen! Odd song for a Catholic nun.

Then the song changed, and was even odder for a Catholic nun to sing . . . unless she was an exceedingly odd Catholic nun.

"That old black devil got me in its spell, that old black devil that I know so well."

The voice was closer, but Temple couldn't tell the sex or the age any better. And the last words and melody were so familiar, too, but from another side of the compact disc to the first familiar phrase. Old black magic!

A streak of white magic suddenly outlined the door, edging it in a thin frame of light.

Temple retreated to the refrigerator, rounding its side to seek shelter just in time.

The basement door swung open until it smashed into the paper bags. Bright light bobbled around the back pantry in nervous shafts--a flashlight. A repairman would need a flashlight in a house with no power, she told herself. So would a burglar, herself talked back. Or a killer.

"Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

No, sir, no, sir, only old bags full."

The voice was so near, and it panted between the lines of the old nursery rhyme. Something thumped at the singer's rear.

Temple peered around the edge of the refrigerator.

The flashlight's erratic beam illuminated the pantry. A figure, humped and twisted, hunkered before the closed basement door. A big burlap bag lay on the floor, obviously filled with something.

Temple's horror-movie mentality filled in the blanks. Dirt from a basement grave? A pod person left by aliens? Dead cats?

No, live cats. The bag had moved, though the semi-human silhouette was turned away and did not see.

"Heav-y dev-il," came the singsong voice again as the figure turned to lift its burden. "You'll swing for it from the church door. Pox vobiscum." A chuckle punctuated the gibberish.

Whoever it was bent over farther to hoist the bag up on a shoulder, straighten to human height . . . and spot Temple.

Like a rabbit, she took off, through the dark and the cats, feeling things fly from her milling feet--tinfoil food dishes, water dishes (she felt her ankles splashed), surprised cat bodies.

She heard equipment--flashlight, bag, bowie knives, boomerangs, bullwhips, whatever--thump to the floor, and heard the softer thump of running shoes behind her. Like a jogger downtown, yeah, coming up from behind on the poor ordinary walker.

Temple's ankle crashed painfully into a barrier that would not give, twisting her foot until the high heel slipped sideways. A step. She didn't want to climb, but had no choice. Maybe she could find Sister Mary Monica's window and heave a brick through it; all right, heave her tote bag through it. Then she could scream out the open window, and by the time anybody came, the bogeyman from the basement would have ground her bones to powder.

Temple stumbled upward on her shaky heels, tripped and banged her knees on the steep steps. She was upright and running again before the pain registered. When her foot lifted and came down on level ground, she almost jolted herself into losing balance. Teetering on her high heels, she glanced back.

Darkness was rushing up the dark stairs. A shape like wind incarnate, as black as the night around it. No pale pattern of face or hands, just darkness.

Temple rushed down the hall, not wanting to bottle herself in a room but having little choice. She felt an open doorway and dashed through. She slammed the door shut behind her, knowing it wouldn't lock, and felt for something to drag across it.

At her back, the subconscious warmth of light beckoned. She found a trunk and push/pulled/kicked it in front of the door. It was heavy: maybe there was a body in it. Then she had to turn and see the light. Now there was a phrase for religious revelation-- She recognized Miss Tyler's vintage dressing table, saw it clearly . . . fire was creeping across its dusty surface, up behind its round mirror, around its twin columns of drawers.

Fire! And in a house full of cats. Temple grabbed a small round rag rug from the floor and began beating at the dresser--top, bottom, behind. Flames flared from the wind, then sank at the first blows. The dark returned, and so did the sounds. The scrape of the trunk as it groaned across the wooden floor. Wooden floor--oh, no! The floor would catch like tinder and drop into the rooms below and turn this place into an inferno, and she was stuck on the second floor. Forget cats! What about her?

Temple cast away the smoky, charred mat and caught up another of the pesky rugs. They worked pretty good as fire dampers. The dresser, made of old, tough mahogany, was slow to catch flame. Temple continued to beat the flames down into the dark from which they sprang, thinking. The fire had not been meant to flare until the person who set it was out of the basement and the house.

Now that person was up here, with her. What to fight first? Fire, the unknown intruder or her own fear? She ran to the window, a blotch of gray beside the bed, grabbed the bedside table--a spindly, old-fashioned model that would probably splinter, she remembered--and hurled it at the window glass. Once, twice, three times until they shattered together,

glass and wood.

In the dark of night, the sound was small, liable to be mistaken for a pint of whiskey dropped in an alley, or dogs overturning garbage cans again. In neighboring houses, television sets were blaring and windows were shut against the heat, air conditioners humming away and muffling all exterior sounds.

But some people in this neighborhood were too poor for central air conditioning, and their windows stayed open on a pleasantly cool, early autumn night--

"Fire!" she yelled, as instructed to do in case of rape. "Fire!" It really is!

Her answer came from behind, a white, suspended object that closed in on her face like a wisp of cloud smelling of hospitals.

At first the wet coolness was a balm to her overheated face. Then the sickly odor seeped into her nostrils and some force kept it pressed there. Chloroform. And a fire. If she passed out now, she was French toast.

Lessons. Do the unexpected. Don't tense, relax.

She went limp, let herself sink, against all her instincts, into the unseen person behind her. Air, blessed air, slipped between her face and the encompassing cloth.

It was enough. She ducked, half falling, and spun to face her attacker, grabbing her tote bag by the handles and swinging it in an arc over her shoulder. At the same time, she kicked a heel into what she hoped was the right height for a knee.

Her bag connected with a solid something.

"Jesus Christ!" hissed a voice that was neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human. Jesssusss Chrissst. The caller! No face to recognize, only a burlap-sack mask over the head, glaring at her as expressionlessly as Freddie Kreuger's sinister hockey mask.

Temple's left hand was digging in her bag for the big brass ring and came up with keys bristling between every knuckle.

A strong hand grabbed the bag from her grasp, but she had ducked to the floor and now she felt with her right hand until it closed over a smooth wooden pin--one of the table legs.

She struck again at the shadow closing on her. Struck for the side of the neck and the carotid artery underneath the thin skin. Hit right, hit hard enough, and cause instant unconsciousness.

The impact jolted her arm and shoulder, even as she lurched to her braced feet. Matt would disapprove of the incapacitating high heels, but she hadn't had time to lose the shoes. She did now. The dark form had crumpled to the floor. She bent and snatched off her shoes, then glanced at the dressing table. It had flared again. The mirror, framed in

tangerine curlicues, reflected a faint image of her own figure, her face haloed by wildly disheveled red curls. She resembled a barbecued cherub. This fire was getting too hot for her to handle, even with a rag rug.

She stepped toward the door.

A hand closed around her ankle.

Temple gave. Fell, still facing the half-open door with the trunk against it.

She turned and kicked out both stocking feet, as hard as she could, then leaned inward and struck out with the table leg, again and again, until it met resistance, until it knocked on bone and her ankle was free.

She scrabbled away, eeled out the door.

In the distance, someone screamed and kept on screaming.

She was sure it wasn't her. She was running downstairs in the dark, feeling soft, furred forms fleeing at her passage, like fish in an unlit tropical sea.

Oh, poor kitties!

The screaming grew louder and sounded like a siren.

She was at the bottom of the stairs when she heard their top echo to soft-thudding feet descending in a staccato beat.

Then she tripped. On level ground, and she tripped over another of those cursed rag rugs. She pushed it away, but it was heavy and . . . warm . . . and heaving and scratching.

The big front door heaved, too, and then groaned as something hit it from without. A few more crashing blows and solid wood splintered like veneer. The door broke open, swinging against the wall on screaming hinges. More horror show effects: huge, clumsy figures filled the opening, backlit by lurid red.

Temple looked up the stairs. The shadow had stopped in the leak of red light, pinioned by the glare of the incoming firemen's powerful flashlights.

"Upstairs," Temple shouted. Two men charged past in heavy rubber boots, smelling of cinders." Careful! That's a killer."

These men weren't the police, but they were armed against a bitter, flesh-eating enemy, fire, in body armor and with axes. Two thumped past her to collect the shadow, two thundered all the way up to confront the fire; another turned and stomped out again, perhaps to radio the police.

Beneath Temple, the burlap bag writhed and hissed as if housing a dozen snakes. Then it growled. Fascinated, the returning firemen, with the shadow in custody, stopped to watch, focusing their flashlights on the bag.

A portion of the burlap was soaking wet. It proved to be torn as well when a black snake shot out of a four-inch slit.

A furry black snake, Temple squealed hoarsely and scrambled away. The black snake retreated, to be replaced by a black muzzle.

Snarling, Midnight Louie boxed the bag until his shoulders and forelegs were through, then twisted and turned until the burlap was dragging from his hindquarters like a comical train. After a few more acrobatic antics, he finished delivering his bedraggled, nineteen-pound self from confinement.

Temple watched in admiring delight. "Louie! What are you doing here?"

"Are you all right?" A fireman plucked Temple up from the floor to her feet as easily as if she were a mislaid cotton ball. "You know this cat? What's going on here?"

Boots pounded down the stairs. "Fire's out. Arson."

"Can we get some lights on in here?" another big and booted man asked.

Footsteps pounded down the basement stairs behind a beam of powerful light.

In moments, lights blinked on around the house. The refrigerator burped into a happy hum again, and the distant air conditioner hiccoughed once, then began droning dully.

At Temple's feet, Louie growled and spit and tried to walk. He swayed like a drunken sailor and sat down suddenly, looking surprised and cranky.

"I think he's been drugged," Temple told the nearest fireman. One of the men keeping the shadow in custody kicked at a white rag half out of the burlap bag. ' 'Chloroform."

The fireman who had lifted Temple looked down at Louie, then addressed his mate. "We better get this fire victim some oxygen pronto." He scooped up Louie and strode outside. Temple followed on shaky legs.

A crowd had gathered around the huge, light-flashing fire trucks. If Louie had intentions of clawing the fireman who carried him, he was foiled by the heavy, waterproofed slicker the man wore. Thump-thump, the word was passed. Thump thump, clump-clump, a medic came to the front door with the needed gear.

Louie was pinned to the ground and treated, though he was not fond of the plastic mask and struggled as if his tom-hood were in jeopardy. He didn't relish the flash photo that was taken of him under care, either, but he calmed down when he could sit up and breathe ordinary air again.

Temple frowned at the photographer, who wore a Review- Journal I.D. card. She wanted to know Louie's name, anyway.

"I hope I'm not in that photograph," Temple grumbled after providing the information. It did not behoove a P.R. person to irritate the press. "I must look a mess."

Fire survivors often do," the woman noted dryly, moving away to take an overall shot of the crowd.

"What about the intruder?" Temple asked the firemen once the photographer was gone. She nodded toward the house.

"We're holding him for the police," said her fireman, who was young and freckled and struck her as fearless. "As is."

"Him? Are you sure?"

The fireman was amused by her incredulity. "Yes, Ma'am."

Temple thought about the suspect that assertion eliminated--Peggy Wilhelm--and breathed free again. She leaned toward the fireman, who didn't look too alarmed by a rescued maiden offering confidences.

"Couldn't we peek behind the mask before the police get here?" Temple whispered as close to his ear as she could get without hitting the hard and inconvenient fire hat. "I'm just dying to know who it is."

Chapter 34

The Bishop's Tea

"Temple!"

Sister Seraphina separated from the crowd and enveloped Temple in a big brown blanket that she definitely didn't need after so much exertion on such a warm night.

Temple was interested to know that formerly sleeping nuns wore voluminous navy-velour bathrobes that she had not seen the like of since a fifties' television sitcom. Sister Seraphina's bathrobe, especially with its long satin rope tied at the waist, more resembled Temple's notion of a habit than anything the nun wore in the light of day.

Sister Seraphina seemed unaware of her attire's fascination.

"When I heard that someone was found in there," she said, "I feared it might be Peggy--never you." She turned briskly to the identically clad woman behind her. "Sister Rose, you had better call Peggy Wilhelm and let her know.

She'll want to tend the cats--they're all right, aren't they?" she asked Temple in sudden anxiety. "What about this one?" She eyed Midnight Louie, who was remarkably content to sit at Temple's feet and groom his own, for the moment.

"That's not a Tyler cat; that's mine. He's been given some chloroform, but he's fine now. Sister, where is Father Hernandez

Sister Seraphina twisted to scan the crowd. "I ... I don't know. Perhaps he was sleeping and didn't hear--"

Sleeping like Peter in the Garden, Temple thought grimly. Or perhaps he was not sleeping at all.

"Sister Mary Monica saw the flames from her bedroom window," Sister Seraphina went on, "so we called the fire department. And then we did call Lieutenant Molina. And Matt."

Temple grimaced. Sister Seraphina had mentioned the two people she least wanted to see in her current state. Fire survivors, she guessed, couldn't be choosers.

In fact, one of the firemen was stomping over. He arrived to request the same information the news photographer had: name, address, a short statement. Temple complied and then asked a question of her own.

"What about--?" she began, still seriously seeking answers, when tires squealed and an unmarked Crown Victoria pulled up behind the Storm, followed by a squad car.

Like the Red Sea parting for Moses, the crowd parted for Molina, her partner and two uniformed officers. Temple cringed when Molina's crowd-scanning glance spotted her. Molina rolled her eyes and did not pause, disappearing into the house with an escort of police and firemen.

A uniformed officer remained outside to disperse the crowd, which was reluctant to return to late-night TV talk shows when something much more interesting to talk about was happening live on their very own street. Grumbling, people straggled off.

"We live next door," Sister Seraphina objected when her turn came.

"You the nuns?" the officer asked.

Temple, still clutching her blanket, bristled, but nobody noticed.

"The lieutenant wants to speak to you later at the convent." He frowned and looked up and down the street, obviously not seeing anything that resembled his idea of a convent.

"We'll go quietly, Officer." Sister Seraphina turned Temple toward the convent.

"I'll carry Louie." Temple bent down to scoop up the cat in her blanket and almost didn't unbend again.

What a mistake. Even freshly oxygenated, Louie weighed as much as a potbellied pig.

"Wait!" Temple cried, remembering. "My tote bag's in that house."

"Your purse?" The officer frowned again.

"In the bedroom where the fire was started."

He nodded. "I'll check. If we don't need to impound it for evidence, you can have it."

"Evidence? Impound? My daily organizer is in there, my apartment and car keys. I'll be helpless."

"I'm sure something can be worked out--" he glanced uneasily at Seraphina, than back to Temple "--Sister, Ma'am."

"Oooh!" Temple protested as he walked away. "Do I look like a nun?" she demanded of Sister Seraphina.

"You look like a slightly scorched madonna-and-cat right now," Sister Seraphina said with a chuckle. "Come on.

We'll get you some nice hot tea."

"I could use a nice hot toddy," Temple corrected.

Waiting in a convent visitors' room for Lieutenant Molina was not her idea of how to recover from severe physical and emotional stress. Carrying Midnight Louie wasn't an antidote, either.

She started to slog along the sidewalk with Sister Seraphina, her curiosity temporarily stanched and her stamina quashed. Another vehicle with a light on the top cruised to a stop by her car--a Whittlesea Blue cab.

Matt Devine took one look at her car and began running toward the Tyler house. The uniform stepped into his path; for an instant, it looked like a confrontation brewed.

"Matt, over here!" Sister Seraphina caroled. "We're all right."

He glanced at the Tyler house's ashen facade, which radiated red emergency lights, then started for them at a trot.

"Temple?" He anxiously searched her face, which was probably pale and smoke-smudged. "No one said you were here. And Midnight Louie! Are you okay? Really?"

"Well, I may have broken a nail or two--and Louie a claw, too."

"Let me take him."

Temple sighed relief when the nineteen-pound burden was lifted from her arms, which were shaking with strain for some reason possibly having to do with fighting off an arsonist--and maybe a murderer--only half an hour earlier.

Matt wasn't too enamored of Louie's bulk, either. He set the cat down as soon as the party was inside the convent door.

A yellow cat came to investigate--Peter or Paul--and the pair suspiciously sniffed noses, but no fireworks threatened.

"Come sit down, dear," Sister Rose urged in the kindly tones of a great-aunt, escorting Temple as if she were Belleek china.

Sister Seraphina was soon on their heels, but not Matt. At Temple's questioning look, she leaned near.

"I sent him to the rectory to see about Father Hernandez."

Temple let herself be shepherded into the overbearing visitor's chair. Sister Rose even scooted a needlepoint-covered stool under her feet, which naturally failed to reach the floor, then darted out of the room.

"Sister Seraphina," Temple beseeched, protesting as a needlepoint pillow--this one a tasteful scene of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane--was inserted behind her back. She shrugged off the smothering blanket. "I'm fine."

"No, you are not. You've had a dreadful shock. As much as Matt might be reassured by your offhand remark about only breaking a fingernail, I can see that you've been through a good deal more than that."

"Well, yes, actually," Temple admitted, intimidated by Sister Seraphina' s air of stern concern. "The awful man inside the house had Louie chloroformed and in a sack-- God knows what he intended to do with him--and he had set the bedroom dresser on fire and I tried to stop the fire, and stop him, and I really put some good moves on him. I'm new at this, but I think I had him cold before the firemen came."

"So that's what Mary Monica saw," Sister Seraphina said with a sigh of relief, sitting heavily on a nearby chair. "I was a bit afraid for her sanity. She said she saw the Devil dancing with an imp in Blandina Tyler's bedroom while the fires of Hell burned around them."

"I was the . . . the imp?" Temple demanded.

"Apparently. Her eyesight is not the best, and you do look a bit disheveled. When Rose and I looked out the window, we saw only the fire, but we called nine-eleven from Monica's room-phone right then. Poor Mary Monica. She has been sorely tried these last few weeks." The nun's softened glance sharpened again. "Did you see the intruder?"

"Yes, but not without a burlap mask. The firemen are sure it's a he, though. I wasn't, not even when we 'danced.' I thought of Peggy--"

"

"Peggy? Rummaging through her aunt's house in the dark, in disguise? Why?"

"Well . . . the will we found. She might have been looking for another version, a later one that left her everything, too."

Sister Seraphina shook her head. "Not Peggy."

"You don't know Peggy like I know Peggy."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't say, but I had good reason to suspect her."

"Apparently good reason to suspect Father Hernandez as well."

"If the intruder was a man, he wore black."

"Lots of men wear black, not just priests. And would a priest up to no good wear the clothes of his calling?"

"He would if he were a little . . . demented."

Before Sister Seraphina could answer--and her face was full of doubt, even outrage, at Temple's suggestion--Sister Rose tiptoed back into the room with a small silver tray upon which sat a tall glass of iced tea.

Temple's heart sank. What she definitely didn't need now was iced tea. Sister Rose's watery eyes were too solicitous to refuse, however, and she braced herself to take a swallow of the dreaded, cold beverage while bravely repressing the shivers of aftershock that were threatening her composure.

She took a ladylike sip, then her eyes widened. This iced tea packed quite a kick.

Sister Rose leaned near. "We keep a little something in the brandy line for the bishop in case he might call."

"How much of a little something?" Temple whispered back in a raw voice.

"Well, I didn't know how much for tea, so I put in a juice-glassful."

"Oh," said Temple, who began to think that she might make it through this night, no matter how long and dreadful, after all, thanks to Sister Rose's heavy hand with the bishop's brandy. At least it wasn't the pastor's tequila. Temple couldn't stand tequila outside of a margarita.

"I thought Matt would be along by now," Sister Seraphina commented to the room at large. She glanced at the schoolroom clock mounted on the wall.

Temple was startled to see that it read only ten-fifteen. She felt as if midnight was long since past.

Sister Rose settled on a side chair and they all regarded one another nervously.

"Those are . . . wonderful robes," Temple said, for lack of anything else to offer.

She was pretty sure that Father Hernandez wasn't coming, for the simple reason that he was under police custody in the house next door. But . . . why? The church had received the Tyler estate, lock, stock and barrel of cats. Yet the pastor had seemed little pleased and not at all relieved by that fact. Whoever had done whatever had been done--and Temple was not at all sure of the extent or intent of it--would have interesting reasons.

Sister Seraphina picked at the satin rope tie of her robe, looking chagrined.

"A gift from a Well-to-do woman in my last parish. She insisted that we old nuns must need something, and when I told her robes, she was ecstatic. She purchased twelve."

"Twelve." Temple was impressed by the parishioner's generosity. In lamplight, she was even more impressed by the robes' sober but lush quality.

Sister Seraphina shrugged. "She got them on sale. At Neiman Marcus."

Temple frowned, then started to laugh.

Sister Seraphina began chuckling. "They are very useful and quite durable, and probably cost the moon originally."

"What's Neiman Marcus?" Sister St. Rose of Lima inquired brightly.

"Just a department store," Seraphina said.

"Like Mott's Five and Dime?"

"Exactly," Temple said, shaking her head. She took a stiff sip of her tea and let her toes wiggle. Her pantyhose toes, she saw, were sprouting runs like weeds. "My shoes!" she wailed. "I forgot about my Italian-leather shoes. They're over there, too. The firemen probably soaked everything with water."

Sister Rose tsk-tsked in bewildered sympathy. Her faded pink terry-cloth scuffs were washable and had weathered several cleanings. Of course they were not Italian.

Sister Seraphina swiveled alertly to the hall. A moment later, Matt appeared in the doorway.

No one dared ask anything. He read their anxiety--at least Temple's and Seraphina's--but he could not guess the cause.

"Father Hernandez wasn't in the rectory," he said.

Temple and Seraphina settled back into their chairs with a mutual sigh and a significant look.

"Is it important?" Matt asked.

"It may be," Temple said. ''Someone was in the Tyler house. Someone had captured Louie and chloroformed him and stuck him in a burlap bag."

"Why?" Matt asked.

She went on wearily. "I don't know. Someone had started the house on fire in Blandina's bedroom."

Another voice added to the narrative. "Someone stopped him."

Lieutenant Molina appeared in the hall behind Matt, who quickly eased into the room to allow her entry.

Molina eyed the room's occupants, her glance pausing appreciatively on the nuns' robes before it rested on Temple and her libation.

"Apparently Queen Victoria here has been practicing her marital arts' p's and q's. She stopped him from setting the house afire and perhaps committing other violence." Molina sank down in one of the brocaded side chairs. "I could use some tea myself."

"We all could." Sister Seraphina nodded at Sister Rose, who scurried out like a dormouse on a secret mission.

Matt leaned on the edge of the desk near the door and watched them all, thoroughly perplexed.

"What exactly has happened?" he asked.

"My question precisely." Molina pulled out her notebook.

"We have a rather . . . distraught . . . suspect in custody."

"Suspect?" Seraphina emphasized.

Molina nodded neutrally. "We have the professional detective's bane, Miss Temple Barr, on the scene and heavily involved. We even have an unauthorized cat on the premises, the equally baleful Midnight Louie. Where is he now?"

"Somewhere in the convent," Temple supplied.

"We found a burlap bag somewhat . . . damaged, and a cloth soaked in chloroform. Apparently it had been used on the cat."

"Peter!" Sister Seraphina sat up. "That's how someone captured him for that horrible attack; they chloroformed him. Was it satanists, Lieutenant?"

"You tell me. We found a satchel of . . . tools near the bag. Hammer. Spikes. Looks like more of the same was on the schedule."

"Louie was a candidate for crucifixion?" Temple shuddered with a sudden chill and reached for the fallen blanket.

"Possibly."

"Has your prisoner said anything about that?" Matt asked.

Molina's blue eyes regarded him with the clear, emotionless stare of a Siamese cat. "Nothing . . . sensible. Yet."

The eyes returned to Temple. "I hesitate to ask this. I am not in the mood for original answers, but yours surely will be more coherent than his at this point. Why were you

there?"

"Well," Temple began, "it was the state of Midnight Louie's Free-to-be-Feline that first made me uneasy ..."

Molina shut her eyes, and Temple continued, glossing over the obituary page tented over Louie's dish and concentrating on her great specific and general concern for cats singular and plural, on her impulse to check on the Tyler cats, on her shock at finding an intruder and a fire in the house, and especially on her amazement on finding Midnight Louie in the bag.

"So it was all a wild coincidence," Molina summed up in a deadpan voice.

At that moment, Sister Rose appeared beaming on the threshold, a tray full of tall, iced-tea glasses in her hands, with Midnight Louie massaging her ankles as if begging for catnip.

"Sometimes things happen that way," Temple said as Sister Rose distributed the glasses.

They were accepted with distraction. Sister Seraphina took a large sip of her tea, then her lips puckered, but her face seemed not to register anything except the secret worry she carried for Father Hernandez. Lieutenant Molina's closed-mouth attitude to the identity of the man apprehended next door did nothing to allay her anxiety.

Molina let her glass sit on a side table as she poised her pen over the notebook but wrote nothing down, which was rather unsettling.

Matt sipped his tea politely, then braced it on one slack-covered thigh. "So Temple nailed the bad guy. Personally."

"Yes," Molina said in her disconcerting tone that was half-bored, half-mocking. "Do tell us about it."

"He found me in the kitchen," Temple began. "I didn't know he was there. The lights were off when I came in, and I was trying to find a light switch that would work when he came up from the basement--I didn't even know there was one!--dragging a bag. At first I thought he was someone from the neighborhood, or a repairman or something. Then he dropped the bag and went for me. I didn't want to go upstairs, but I ran into the stairs and was forced up. I tried not to get cornered in a bedroom, but there was nowhere else to go. I managed to drag a trunk in front of the bedroom door, and then I saw the dresser on fire. I threw a table through the window--"

"Good thinking!" Matt said approvingly, sipping his tea absently.

Molina watched him, and did likewise.

Nobody batted an eye. Sister Seraphina sipped her tea frequently and nervously, her face reflecting worries other than the specifics of Temple's ordeal.

Actually, it felt more like an adventure in the telling. Temple warmed up to her tale, or perhaps to her tea. She took a throat-soothing sip. "Well. There I was, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea." Here she glared at Molina. "He looked like a demon, all in black with a burlap mask over his face, only his eyeless eyeholes staring at me."

''His eyeless eyeholes'?" Molina queried, her pen skipping over the lined notepad.

"You know what I mean! And then, while I was fighting the fire with a rag rug--"

"A rag rug," Molina repeated in a tone of utter disbelief, her pen moving. She buttressed herself with a long slug of tea.

"--he got me from behind with a chloroform-soaked cloth."

"A chloroform-soaked cloth," Sister Rose repeated in awe, nodding and sipping tea with a broad smile. "You are a brave girl."

"I was smothering, and I knew that if I passed out ... so I gave him his ground--" she looked at Matt, who nodded approval "--and it surprised him, just like it was supposed to. The cloth lifted enough for me to twist away and slug his upper torso with my tote bag while I jammed a heel into his kneecap."

"Sounds . . . quite athletic," Sister Seraphina commented, guzzling more tea.

Temple refreshed herself as well.

"Then ..." she hadn't had as rapt an audience in years "... I picked up a table leg and when he charged me again, I hit him hard on the carotid artery."

"Carotid artery?" Sister Rose repeated the phrase as if it were Latin. "Is that something nice girls should do?"

"Definitely not," Temple said. "He went down for the count of--say, six. That was long enough for me to get out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He tried to follow, but then the door opened and this huge, helmeted figure blocked the exit and the whole Las Vegas Fire Department came in--my knights in shining slickers bearing battle-axes--and saved me and snagged him and even gave Midnight Louie the breath of life."

After a pause, Molina said, "You realize that none of this makes sense."

"No," Temple agreed demurely, "but it's a hell of a tea party story."

In the silence, Sister Rose giggled. "Poor Midnight Louie. Poor kitty. He should have some restorative tea." She poured part of her remaining half-glass into a huge glass ashtray--no doubt kept for the bishop's cigar if and when he came--and placed it on the floor before the cat, who was grooming himself within an ounce of his overweight.

"Cats don't drink tea, Rose," Sister Seraphina advised her.

Louie stopped his compulsive licking and tapped a paw in the dark amber liquid. He jerked his paw back and licked it experimentally. He cleaned his long, white whiskers of every last trace. Then he lowered his head and trailed his long, red tongue in the substance. He slowly settled into his haunches and began lapping rapidly at the tea, glancing up once at Temple but never pausing in his imbibing.

Everyone laughed, even Molina. In fact, Molina was looking a lot more mellow. Then she flipped her notebook shut and regarded them.

"This comedy of errors will prove to be more terror than error by tomorrow, I think. You all should know that the person I have in custody is someone who is intimately connected with this parish and has been for some time. You all will be shocked by the suspect's identity. I can't say exactly what's been going on here--I have a feeling some of you could say more, but won't. I can say I know the suspect's identity only because I am a member of this parish. Perhaps I suffer from conflict of interest on this case, but so do the entire lot of you."

She stood up. "I've got work to do. I suggest you all go home and examine your collective consciences. I'll be in touch. Count on it."

After Molina left the room, they were silent for a few seconds, staring at the floor and clinging to their damp-sided glasses of brandy-laced tea.

"Sister," Seraphina ordered, her voice grim but stalwart. "Get some more tea."

Sister Rose leaped up, ever ready to serve.

"No!" Temple's voice croaked like a thirsty frog's. "No more . . . tea."

"Don't worry," Sister Rose chirped. "I would never waste the bishop's tea."

With that, she poured the rest of her almost-empty glass into Midnight Louie's ashtray, which he eagerly emptied to the last, strong, delicious drop.

Chapter 35

White Elephant

"Do you think Molina would arrest us if you drove me home?" Temple asked.

She stood by the Storm, barefoot--or rather, in tattered hose. Her reclaimed tote bag and shoes drooped from her right hand, her key ring hung over her left wrist. Matt stood beside her, Midnight Louie drooping over his right arm.

"I think she'd arrest us if I didn't drive you home," Matt said. "You had a lot more of the bishop's tea than I did."

"So did Molina. She's much nicer when she's high."

"She was not high, and neither are you, really. You're just exhausted."

"I'm certainly not as high I used to be," Temple said, swaying into Matt and Louie, her head coming only to his armpit--Matt's, that is.

He straightened her, put the tote bag and the limp Louie into the Storm's backseat and baby-walked Temple around to the passenger side.

When she was installed in the seat, Temple stared through the windshield and counted stars. Actually, she couldn't see stars, just dusty water drops, but they glimmered almost like stars as the streetlights swept overhead in a soothing rhythm of light and dark. Sometimes it was nice not to have to drive.

"Speaking of Lieutenant Molina again," Temple finally said, "do you suppose that mean woman is ever going to tell us what really happened?"

"I think she's going to ask us what happened when our tea has had time to wear off."

"It's too bad that you weren't able to find Father Hernandez in time for our little powwow with the police," Temple added uneasily. She didn't want to say what she thought--what everyone undoubtedly thought. Father Hernandez had finally gone around the bend. But why? What had driven him to such sick extremes? And why wasn't Molina flaunting her shocking suspect? Was there more to the story, more that she wanted to tease out of some of them?

"Yes, it is too bad that I couldn't find him." Matt frowned as he thought about the priest. "Father Rafe is facing a lot of pressure." Matt shrugged off an invisible blanket of worry.

"Maybe he was called out on an emergency anointing. I can't believe that he would do what happened tonight."

Temple wasn't buying it. "You know more about these people than you're saying, just like Molina said."

"So do you."

"Yes."

"Lieutenant Molina is not as dumb as you'd like to think."

"Not dumb . . . just different. I can't figure her out."

Temple counted Stardust drops in the windshield. She really was rather tired, and more than a little scared, in retrospect.

"She found some minor information about Max and acted like she had the Holy Grail."

"What information?"

But that was about Max, and this was Matt. "Nothing important." One had to keep one's loyalties separate, sacred. All one's loyalties. Hadn't Sister Seraphina been trying to do just that? And maybe Father Hernandez, too, if the truth be known; the truth that Matt knew and would not tell, because he couldn't. And where were Peggy's loyalties now?

"I'm tired," Temple said.

"You should be."

"Will you put me to bed?"

"Electra will."

"What about Louie?"

"I'll put him to bed."

Temple awoke to the sun inserting needles of bright white pain under the nails of her mini-blinds, hurting everywhere, but especially in her head.

She lay there, lazy and darn well entitled to be, contemplating the ragged Aruba Red ends of three broken fingernails.

If Temple had good anything, it was fingernails. They practically had to be chopped off with a hedge-trimmer, and only the strongest metal files could dent their tenacious surface.

She did not look forward to repairing the damage to her handsome, homemade manicure.

So she lay there running the previous night's events through her mind, distressed to find that she was somewhat fuzzy on the details. Was it stress--or Sister Rose's tea?

She hadn't even looked at the bedside clock yet, although the level of light through the blinds suggested that it was later than she thought.

She still didn't move, lost in that delicious stage of waking when thoughts play ring-around-the-rosie and sleep is a fluffy, pure-white cloud just waiting to sink down and waft her away again.

A sudden, sharp hissing from the living room had Temple upright in bed in an instant, her head throbbing just above the nape of her neck.

Hissing! She hissed back in irritation as she jumped out of bed faster than she wanted to. A cat fight was in progress, and it was up to her to bust up the combatants. Matt must have let Caviar out of quarantine last night--oh, no! She froze for a second, suddenly grateful for the feuding felines. Holy cats! Now she knew who was the obscene phone-caller, and maybe the parish trick-player and amateur arsonist, and probably the cat crucifier. Meanwhile, she had animal husbandry duties to perform and scrambled into the other room.

Two black cats in such full, furry bristle that their tails resembled radiator brushes faced off on the sofa. Louie looked as large as a Chow Chow, but Caviar had managed to puff her smaller self up to the size of a blow-dried Pomeranian with a static-electricity problem. Obviously, no feline mating rituals were likely to transpire here.

Temple clapped her hands. "Now, now, kitties. Polite fur persons get along."

Neither spared her a glance. Temple sped over to clasp Caviar gingerly around the middle and lift her down to the floor.

Caviar stalked away in a sideways, hunched posture, keeping her eyes on Louie and her awesomely amplified tail presented.

Louie yawned, stretched out so he occupied most of the sofa length, and regarded Temple with a smug expression. My sofa, it seemed to say; my place; my person.

Temple fixed herself a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen, checked the time told inside the pink-neon ring of the wall clock and scurried back into the bedroom.

High noon. Electra should be up.

In fifteen minutes Temple was two floors higher, at the landlady's door, ringing the doorbell that may not work.

"Hi, hon," Electra greeted her when the penthouse door opened.

Temple winced. Electra was wearing neon-lime legging stopped by a glitzy neon oversized T-shirt. Her white hair was accented with lime-green spray.

"Matt told me you'd had another unfortunate encounter with a felon, only he said that this time you won. But you look a bit bedraggled, if you don't mind my saying so."

Temple glanced down at her well-bruised bare legs, and winced.

"I would say you should see the other guy, but none of us has seen him. Molina is being mum about the identity of the cat-hating, nun-baiting creep who tried to burn down Blandina Tyler's house."

"I'm lost," Electra confessed, "not having been in on the case. I still say you look as if someone frazzled your fringes."

"Actually, most of the damage done to me last night was accomplished by a little old nun."

"You've got to watch us senior citizens," Electra agreed with a chortle.

"Listen, Electra, can you do me a big favor?"

"Anything, dear girl--what is it? Another undercover gig? Maybe as a nun this time? With a habit and everything?"

Electra was getting enthused. "That would be a piquant change of pace from stripper Moll Philander. I could be . . . Sister Merry Maybelline."

"No, Electra, nothing like that. I need a home for a sweet, lovely little cat who was headed for the gas chamber. Her name is Caviar and she's--"

"Oh, no, dear. I absolutely could not."

"But she's wonderful. I'll pay for her spaying. Louie doesn't seem too fond of interlopers, and--"

"No, cats generally aren't."

"Have you been talking to Matt about that, too?" Temple asked suspiciously.

"No. This I know. I can't take your cat. Absolutely not." Electra's tones indicated that the sky would fall in such a circumstance. "I don't care if you have two, but no, I can't have it."

"Louie cares, apparently. And why not, Electra? You've got room. You like Louie."

"I'm, um, allergic to cats." Electra did not quite look Temple in the eye. "Can't breathe around them too long."

Sorry, Temple, but it's out of the question."

Temple had superb instincts. She could tell when she was being subjected to a verbal song-and-dance, and this was one of those tap-dancing occasions. Whatever Electra's real reasons for changing from the world's most accommodating landlady into a firm non-cat fancier, Temple knew she had not heard them.

Temple pondered. "Maybe Matt--"

"Yes. Ask Matt." Electra hushed her huge door shut, leaving Temple staring at the coffered mahogany panels.

Noon. The poor man should be up by now. At least he hadn't had to go back to work. Temple trudged down the back stairs to the lower floor, regretting that she'd worn her sequined tennis shoes. She didn't relish feeling short today, but was too tired yet to get up on her usual high horse.

Matt opened the door to her ring, wearing his gi, and broke into a sunny-day grin. "Here she is, Taekwondo Tessie.

You look as if you could use some caffeine straight up." Temple nodded, encouraged by his greeting. "Given all the job and sleep disruption you've had lately--mostly my fault--I'm surprised that you're mobile."

"No mea culpa's," he said. When Temple looked puzzled, he beat a loose fist thrice on his chest. "'Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.' Catholic talk. Latin for 'my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.' We used to get guilt in great big gulps in the church, but it's eased up lately. No sense in your clinging to the same outmoded behavior."

"Guilt has no denomination," Temple said, sitting on a seat of piled boxes and accepting the mug Matt offered her. "And it never goes out of style."

She sipped, then lifted her eyebrows with the coy surprise of a lady in a coffee commercial. "This is good."

"The real stuff. I had some before I went down to the pool and did my tai chi. Figure that: Western wired and Eastern tranquilized."

"Contradiction doesn't go out of style, either." Temple smiled. "Say, Matt, I've been thinking. Your place could use a few homey touches."

"Amen. Do you decorate, too?"

"No . . . but I match-make."

This time he sipped and raised noncommittal blond eye-brows at her, like a man in a coffee commercial. My, they were good at being arch.

"How would you like an undemanding companion?"

He looked leery. "How undemanding, and what kind of companion?"

"Caviar," she said sheepishly.

"Louie isn't having any of it, huh?"

"She's so much smaller; it's not fair to leave her to duke it out with that big lug."

Matt, smiling, shook his head. "Didn't you get proof positive last night that size doesn't always matter in a set-to? It's spirit--and, in a way, say the Eastern masters, spirituality."

"With cats, its claws out, and spirituality is just so much spit and hiss. Besides, I don't know the actual size of my attacker. Lieutenant C.R.--Can't Relate--Molina wouldn't tell us who he was."

"We have no official need to know." Matt also looked like he didn't want to know.

"I do!" Temple said. "Louie was nearly turned into a tacked-up poster boy by that creep. Not to mention that he set fire to a truly fine, vintage dressing table."

"I don't think Molina has a reasonable motive yet--and she doesn't know if Miss Tyler was murdered or not, and if so, by her suspect, who may be . . . insane and unprosecutable."

"Despite this grim scenario, and our unspoken suspicions, you seem fairly cheerful this morning."

His answering smile was warm. "Why not? My prize--and only--pupil has come through a field test with flying colors." Matt glanced at her fingers wrapped around the mug. "Except for some nicks in her manicure. And . . . the mission that Sister Seraphina called me to is over, no matter how unhappily. I doubt that Sister Mary Monica will get any more unintelligible, obscene phone calls."

"Well, then," said Temple, "if everything is hunky-dory except for the usual human tragedies, how about celebrating by taking a nice new friend into your life?"

"I've already got a nice new friend in my life."

The import of that statement almost derailed Temple from her mission to place a homeless cat. She smiled over her coffee mug and said nothing for a full five seconds.

"You should share your good fortune with the less fortunate," she said gently.

"Guilt again?"

"Always." Temple shrugged. "It works."

But they still smiled at each other.

The phone rang, and they jumped, guiltily.

Matt went to pick up the white receiver from the kitchen counter.

Temple let her eyes inventory the apartment. No color scheme yet. Caviar would fit in elegantly no matter what Matt did.

Matt turned with the phone pressed against his face like a compress, his expression serious.

"Two o'clock," he said. "Downtown."

Temple assumed a questioning expression.

"No . . . she's here."

Another pause. Who was calling? Electra?

"I'm sure she'll come." A pause. "Right. Good-bye."

He hung up, then eyed Temple.

"Two o'clock. Downtown. The police station. I think Lieutenant Molina is going to spill her guts, or at least try to get us to."

"Downtown!" Temple was thrilled. It sounded so official.

"You? And me? Why us?"

"I doubt it's only us. I suspect it's the whole Our Lady of Guadalupe crew. Molina was very cryptic, very Charlie Chan. I think this is 'the suspects gathered in the parlor' routine."

"But we're not suspects. She's got the perp."

"Maybe."

Temple sipped the last of her truly well-brewed coffee and stood up. "What did Molina say when you told her I was here?"

"Nothing, for about ten seconds." Matt grinned. "Now that she knows about my past, I can hear her wheels turning.

You're right; it's kind of fun to mystify Lieutenant Molina. Especially when she's wrong."

"Well, I better get ready for my official grilling. We might as well go together. Can I drop a cat off here on my way out?"

"I'll pick you up on the way down," he said firmly. "And why don't you give Midnight Louie a chance to warm up to Caviar?"

"I'm all in favor of warming up," Temple said, slipping out the door and kicking up a sequined foot as a parting gesture in the true burlesque style. All she was missing was the drum roll.

Chapter 36

Louie Dodges the Bullet

I owe a lot to this little dish of Caviar.

She provides a quiet and admiring audience when I make my triumphant return from the House of Wax and Wayward Kitties, although she has a mysterious, smug expression painted on her piquant little mug that much reminds me of the officious Karma.

I tell her that she shows promise.

"And one thing I do promise," says she, as fast as you can say Jackie Robinson. "Nobody has any say over where I go, what I do, or what condition I am in."

"All right, all right," I say. "I will let your foul bowl of Free-to-be-Feline rest beside mine in perpetuity in honor of your acts on my behalf, but that is the end of it. This place is mine, from the pink marabou slippers in the bedroom closet to the French doors and patio to the disgusting litter box in the second bathroom to the escape hatch at the top of said bathroom, and I lay down the rules."

"You lay down about twenty pounds," says she with the agile stretch of a cool cat, "but face it, your time has come and gone, Fatso. You are outdated. You are not with it. You are a dinosaur."

"Listen," say I, "dinosaurs are a very hot item nowadays."

"Jurassic jitterbug," she jeers. "I admit," she goes on, "that I do not like old dudes in any condition being nailed up anywhere--with the exception of my unesteemed, absconding father,

may his whiskers rot wherever he is--but do not get the impression that I have any sympathy for such benighted dudes as you. You are an anachronism."

"Listen," I hiss back, stung to defending my tom-hood, "I am not now and never have been a relative to an arachnid."

"I mean that you are out of time and place, seriously out of date. The only way I would give you the time of day was if I were a water-clock!"

"Now, now Caviar," I say. "Such a nice, genteel name for a little dame. Surely your esteemed mother reared you to be more of a lady."

"Ladies get stomped. And, speaking of names, what is yours?"

Here I hesitate. "I have been called a lot of things."

"I do not doubt it," says she with a dainty sniff.

"Friday, once. Sergeant Friday."

"You do look like an unlucky dude, not to mention passe."

"And . . . Blackie."

"Boston Blackie, no doubt," this little doll sneers.

She is arrogant, uppity, ignorant and downright insulting, but she is kin. I hold my temper, which is getting most temperamental at such restraint.

"And . . . Thirteen."

"Must be your age."

"Not . . . quite," I say, quashing a desire to cuff her halfway to the French doors.

I am always the gentleman, except when it occurs to me that the parents of this little doll could have exercised a tad of tough love. Since I am one of the said parents, it is sad to realize that she has passed beyond the reins of paternal discipline. No doubt my intervention now would be termed abuse. So I return to territorial rights.

"This is my place. I was here first. Miss Temple Barr is my person. No matter who you are, or what you did in the preservation department, which I admit showed promise, I am not giving up my present circumstances to make up for your past."

"We shall see," says Miss Caviar with admirable cool.

But she has forgotten entirely the issue of my given name. I was not born yesterday, and sometimes that is a strategic advantage.

Chapter 37

Resolution and Absolution

Matt wasn't surprised to find Sister Seraphina waiting in the office at the downtown police station. He was startled to find Peggy Wilhelm there, and so was Temple, he noticed.

He and Temple must be thinking the same thing: Peggy Wilhelm was tangential to the entire case--to the will, her aunt's death, even to the cat-show atrocity, if shaving a cat could be considered an atrocity by anyone other than a cat fancier.

Neither of them was surprised to find Father Hernandez absent, as he had been all of last night. Why was Lieutenant Molina drawing out the ugly inevitable, playing cat-and-mouse with all their fears? Had she found new evidence at the rectory? Did she need Matt's testimony on the blackmail letters to make the case? Perhaps that was the issue she would illuminate today.

Matt watched her with interest. She sat behind a big, cluttered desk in this large but cluttered office that was clearly not hers; the family photos on the long table behind the desk showed rows of smiling black faces. The office must belong to some superior who had been apprised of this meeting, had approved and then vanished to leave the details to Lieutenant Molina--which indicated that her superiors respected her enough to allow the occasional offbeat approach.

But the lieutenant was nervous, Matt decided, watching her fidget with folders on the desktop and avoid the gathering eyes. She displayed the brusque efficiency of someone who did not like what she was about to do, but saw no other way out.

Matt braced himself. So far, Lieutenant Molina had shown a talent for unearthing embarrassing facts--lacks--about himself. She had also recently confronted Temple with some unappetizing information about her missing significant other, Max Kinsella. What? Matt wondered. Temple was usually so honest and open, but about Max Kinsella she was a locked-room mystery. The room that occurred to Matt was a bedroom, so his speculations veered quickly away from that unknown territory.

Lieutenant Molina cleared her throat and tapped a manila folder on the glass-topped desk, a teacher rapping for order and attention.

They hadn't been talking to each other, idly buzzing back and forth; they needed no formal convening. Maybe Lieutenant Molina did. What did C.R. stand for, anyway? Was that her lack, her secret?

"This is irregular," she confessed, almost hesitant.

She didn't like this closed circle, Matt saw, this mystery that was sure to explode like a fragmentation grenade and strike somebody--an entire congregation of shocked and sorrowful somebodies--any more than he did.

"I am confronted in this case with a number of inexplicable, seemingly unrelated events." Her vivid blue gaze touched every listening face. "Of course they are not unrelated at all. There are also . . . elements that do not seem to make sense. They do. I should warn you that I am not seeking a solution here; I know it. I am hoping that some unclear areas will resolve themselves. As a start, I will report on the solution to the hissing and obscene phone calls to Miss Tyler and the convent, to the attack on the cat Peter, to the shaving of the cat Minuet at the cat show. These, we know, were all interconnected, but the logic linking them was . . . distorted.

"Before I begin, does anyone here have anything to say?"

They eyed each other, each looking sheepish and guilty, for each was probably concealing something. Matt knew Temple bore the burden of more knowledge of another person

than she felt comfortable carrying--but who was her confidante? He shared the same burden of Father Hernandez's blackmail letters. Did Molina know of those; would he be better off admitting their existence now?

Sister Seraphina had concealed Father Hernandez's flaw--his sudden dependence on a liquor bottle. Did she hide more?

And Peggy Wilhelm, was she hiding knowledge of her aunt's affairs that would make the elderly woman's death her possible murder--understandable?

"We think Blandina Tyler was murdered," Lieutenant Molina said. "Her murderer has not confessed, but this was a simple case, in that respect. Whether the suspect is sane or not, a jury will have to decide."

"Who?" Temple asked, brushing a frivolity of red curls back from her forehead. "If the case is that clear-cut, we deserve to know who."

Molina's sad, forbearing smile said that she knew, as a priest does, that clear-cut answers are always the most ambiguous at heart.

"I told you all last night," she went on, "that we held someone you knew and trusted, someone whose name would shock you. Perhaps I shouldn't even be telling you this."

"Telling us what?" someone asked from the doorway, someone who had arrived unnoticed.

Sister Seraphina stood. "Father Hernandez! You're not--"

"I'm not what?" he asked rather testily. "What is everyone else doing here? And why was I waylaid by Sister Saint Rose of Lima as soon as I returned to the rectory and sent here?"

"You weren't at the rectory last night," Matt said, dismayed by his unintended, but unmistakably accusing tone.

Father Hernandez turned to him, then ran a hand through his sleek silver hair. He wore full priestly garb: black slacks and the white notch of a Roman collar at the neck of his black, short-sleeved shirt. Add a black suitcoat and he could play the organ for any memorial service Electra might want to hold, just as Matt had once. Father Hernandez did not look like a murderer. He looked gaunt and weary, but otherwise elegant.

His brief descent into the hell of a tequila bottle had not harmed him beyond the obvious. The real hell had come through the mail in the neat, damning lines of laser-printed lies. Or were they lies? Denial was the bottom line of most serious human failings. Did Lieutenant Molina even know of the blackmail? Did she know of Matt's concealed knowledge of it?

"No, I wasn't at the rectory," the priest said, his tone sharp. "Am I supposed to always be at the rectory? I was... in the church."

"The church, at that time of night?" Sister Seraphina inquired. "All night?"

"The church is for every time--night or day--though we are forced to keep it locked against vandals at night in these terrible times. Didn't any of you even look there? Can't a priest be in a church? What is the matter with you people?"

Molina smiled. "Are you on the wagon, Father Rafe?"

He flashed her a look full of thunder that swiftly became a nervous throat clearing. "I hope so."

His glance crossed Matt's; they smiled, briefly brothers, no matter what.