Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 49

It's Not Over Until It's Over

They drove back to Las Vegas in silence.

Matt was beginning to think that being in the passenger seat was his new lot in life. Molina actually driving the Crown Vic felt odd. He supposed her driver hadn't hung around for what was obviously a very private quest.

"Did you learn anything?" Matt finally asked.

"A little. Not where they're going now."

"What do you mean?"

"Kinsella obviously has some place to go to ground besides the Circle Ritz."

"Obviously." Matt tried hard not to imagine where Temple would be tonight. He wasn't much better off than when she had been utterly missing, except he knew she was safe. He needed more than that now.

Molina pushed the window buttons until they lowered four inches. Chill night air played pinball through the car.

Although the pursuit into the desert in Kinsella's car had seemed endless, the Crown Vic swept into town so soon it made Matt blink. His watch said it was not quite midnight, and he was utterly alert.

Molina drove into the police headquarters' rear garage and parked. Then she led Matt down to another level, where the venerable Toyota station wagon he had seen at the Blue Dahlia was waiting.

"I promised to drop you home, didn't I?" she asked.

He nodded.

"How about dinner first?"

He was too startled to answer quickly.

"Come on! You don't want to go home alone to that empty red couch."

He still hesitated. He may have been used to being up nights, but he was emotionally exhausted. Being a third wheel could do that. He didn't want to stay up and think about it.

"My treat." Molina jingled her car keys like spurs meant to startle a reluctant horse into action.

He was getting curious. "All right. I don't know that I'm hungry."

"You'll be hungry when you get there."

He got into the passenger seat of her Toyota, thinking about buying his own car. Suddenly it seemed important. He had never owned a car. Always it had belonged to the parish. Even the Hesketh Vampire was on loan from Electra.

Molina drove in an edgy, distracted way that made him nervous. He wouldn't have expected it of her . . . such loose, laid-back driving five miles over the speed limit.

Cars still swarmed outside the Mexican restaurant she pulled up to. She regarded it through the dusty windshield like an old friend seen too infrequently.

" Mi Cocina." My kitchen. "Good fajitas. Great margaritas."

Matt was getting nervous. She had really rolled the second V in "margarrrritas."

Matt stared at her as she entered, and eyes snapped to attention all over the dining room.

She was known here. The host led them through two cavernous rooms paved in quarry tiles and past a chittering fountain to a quieter back room. People nodded and smiled all the way.

The back dining room, with its one rock wall, felt like a grotto. A statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe spread her ever-open arms inside a blue-tiled wall niche. Pierced tin mirrors winked from the terra cotta walls like warning lights.

Tables for twelve in the outer rooms were still occupied despite the hour. Here there was only a scattered couple or two, and the murmur of water trickling down the rock wall.

Molina didn't even glance at the menus they were handed. Matt studied the small print, cruising unfamiliar Mexican words, reading past the occasional spatter of salsa.

"Won't they close soon?" he wondered.

"Don't worry. They stay open as long as the guests stay up. No Anglo obsession with when they close, or when they open."

Matt nodded. The waiter came bearing three bowls of salsa of varying heat and a huge hot heap of freshly made nacho chips. Molina had been right; he might become hungry soon.

He ordered the chicken fajitas, as she suggested. She ordered a drum roll of Spanish phrases and finished up with a pitcher of "margarrritas" on the rocks.

His objection must have been as plain as one on a defense lawyer's face in court.

"It's cheaper this way," she assured him. "The pitchers aren't that big, the margaritas aren't that strong. Besides, the night is young."

"Not for me."

"That's right. If you were at work, you'd be starting to think about getting off. Off and into the arms of the Razor Lady."

"You didn't find her."

"We didn't find her." Molina shrugged, and unbuttoned her boxy jacket. She leaned back in her chair.

Matt wondered if the gun at the small of her back scraped against the chair rails.

"Not a bad night," she said, sipping the first margarita. "You got the girl. Sort of. I got the interrogation. Sort of."

"I trust we are equally satisfied."

"Now that was halfway sardonic, Devine. You're getting better. Not happier, but better."

"Is that what we're celebrating: your getting to buttonhole Max Kinsella against a semitrailer truck?"

"Hmm. You're making it sound a whole lot more interesting than it was."

"Then he didn't reveal anything cataclysmic."

"Cleared up some suspicions of mine."

"Anything you'd care to pass on?"

Molina actually managed to look coy, an odd effect on a woman of her size and authority.

"Not at the moment. But humor me. I've been after that guy for, oh, eight months. I'm sorry that Miss Barr had to get roughed up to bring him out of hid-tag."

She began dipping nacho chips into the hottest of the three sal-sas. Matt had tried a small broken chip on it and backed off, happy to still have an intestinal track.

Matt suddenly understood why they were there, why he was there. He had wondered if Molina had some misguided purpose in distracting him tonight, but it was far simpler and more straightforward than that: he suddenly realized that he was here to distract her.

Molina had realized a very unlikely and difficult goal, and she needed to celebrate. Who else could possibly understand what it meant to her to finally corner Max Kinsella for a few precious seconds. Other than Matt, who knew both the obsession of tracking a man down and the bedeviling presence (and absence) of the once-missing magician?

"How did you meet him?" Molina twirled the short plastic straw in her wide-mouthed glass around and around, until the opaque lime drink spun like a whirlpool.

"He met me. Out by the pool, I think. One second I was alone in the water under the shadows of the palm tree and the passing clouds. The next moment there was a shadow the size of a soft-ball against the moon."

" 'A shadow against the moon.' " Molina savored the phrase with another sip of her margarita. "Very apt. He's a shadow all right."

"Why are you--were you--so ... rabid to find him? What did you learn tonight that was worth the hunt?"

She laughed and leaned her head on her hand.

Matt began to wonder if he would get home tonight. A woman in her position shouldn't drive with any suspicion of inebriation in her system. Not that it hadn't happened before, but not to her. Not to Carmen Molina. Molina had been high before she got here. He decided that Temple hadn't been the only one locked in a box tonight, not the only who was half-inebriated from getting out.

He knew what he was doing here with Molina now: serving as listening post and bragging wall and keeper. He wondered what roles Kinsella was playing with Temple.

That way lay madness. Molina had been right about that, even before she'd started drinking margaritas. Matt sipped his own. Delicious. Mild. Deceptive.

"A silver-tongued devil." Molina looked up.

In the restaurant's candlelit atmosphere--and every table hosted a dimpled glass bulb filled with a fat wax candle--her vivid blue eyes seemed to pale to match the stormy Caribbean color of the margarita pitcher in front of her.

It was already one-third empty.

"Yes," Matt said.

"Good with those damn locks, though. Good at evading questions. But I nailed him. For what? Seven minutes? I had him pinned to the wall. He was forced to say something. If only because he didn't want to create a scene in front of his wounded dove. Men have such predictable weaknesses."

"You said it. Slaves of chemistry."

Molina's brow furrowed under the fingers she kept running over and over it. "Women too.

I'm an equal-opportunity cynic."

"Well, you must have been a chemical slave, sometime."

"What do you mean?"

"It's obvious." Silence. "Your . . . Mariah."

She scooped up a chipful of the tar-and-paint-removing salsa, then thought better of it.

"You didn't care for my advice tonight?"

"I didn't need it. I've read the same lifestyle wire stories in the local paper. Fascinating facts to explain human behavior in a few paragraphs."

"You don't think that, from what we saw tonight, Barr and Kinsella are not together again?

The bit about the ring alone ..."

"I don't need to think it. I know it. So?"

"Well, you didn't seem too thrilled about it."

"I'm not. He's not good for her."

"We agree. He's not good for anybody." Molina lifted the heavy pitcher to top off Matt's glass and refill her own.

"Apparently he's good for opening trick boxes."

"Oh, that. Tricks, sure."

"What did he say? Or should I say, what did you ask?"

Just then their plates arrived. Matt's was empty but hot, and beside it landed a stainless steel platter sizzling with meat and vegetables all slightly seared along the edges.

Molina's was a huge oval ceramic platter filled with the soft tortillas, refried beans and burritos that ran into a sandpainting of red beans, beige tortillas and green chile sauce, like the colors on the Mexican flag.

Matt concentrated on building his first fajita without burning his fingertips, while Molina dug into her meal like an excavator.

"He says Effinger was the quintessential errand boy."

"Quintessential? He used that word."

Molina nodded, chewing seriously. When she finished, she drank water from the tall plastic tumbler floating a lime slice.

"Good for nothing and everything at the same time. They could always count on him to do his dirty little job, usually running drugs and money and messages, and then he'd fade away into the gambling joints and bars. Never got into big trouble. Never wanted to move up or know more. He was most valuable for being a nothing."

"That's some epitaph, isn't it?"

Molina put down her margarita glass without sipping it. "I suppose that was an ordeal, the visitation."

"It was bizarre. Memorializing someone you'd wished dead. Wishing you could have thought of some other way to handle him a long time ago. At least I didn't have to . . . officiate."

"What'd you do with the body?"

"Cremated it."

Molina's left eyebrow almost saluted her hairline. "Isn't that--?"

"The church is more liberal on cremation these days."

"And you? What're you gonna do with the ashes?"

"I don't know. I suppose it's quite a test of character," he added wryly.

Molina's face darkened. "Abusers are the worst offenders. Even when you know they've probably been subjected to it themselves. . . ." She shook her head. "The cases I saw in south L.A. gave the phrase 'beaten down' a whole new meaning. It's like abuse is this evil demon that possesses one generation after another. Nobody comes out of it human."

Her vehemence made Matt realize that he'd seen one case of domestic abuse, close up and personal, and had encountered a few dozen more in his work. Molina had probably seen hundreds during her career, especially if she'd started as a neighborhood uniform.

"Effinger," he said quickly. "He was the quintessential penny-ante man. Even in his domestic life. He yelled, he cursed, he stormed. He hit. But there wasn't anything systematically sadistic about it. My mother's pretty 'beaten down,' but I think maybe she could sit up and breathe a little, with the proper encouragement. And ... I came out of it without a mark."

"A mark that shows." Molina sighed and pushed away her massive plate. "You can't tell me that everything you've ever done, or not done, in your entire life wasn't shaped by that domestic violence."

He couldn't. "How'd we get into this? I thought we were talking about chemical destiny."

"Mariah. You'd asked about Mariah."

"No, I didn't mean to ... I just meant that you've obviously loved, and lost."

She folded her arms on the tabletop, looked at him as if gauging the depth of his soul.

"You. Know. Nothing. Father."

Matt's head snapped back. There it was. The old accusation of not living enough to know how to forgive others their lives. Priesthood. In his denomination, ostrich-hood. So some parishioners said.

"I was trying to warn you about spells. And demons," she said.

"Sounds . . . superstitious."

"Sounds . . . real. Marian's mine. All mine. No custody problems simply because I was dumb enough to get pregnant but smart enough not to marry the father."

"Listen, I don't need to know--"

"You mean you don't want to know. All right. So I meddled in your emotional life. So you're going to get what you don't want to know in spades.

"You've read it all in your morning Lifestyle section. The classic pattern. The man who's all charm, energy, idealism. He was a cop. I was a cop. Just uniforms. He was Lebanese-American. I was Anglo-Hispanic. I was a big clumsy girl who'd never had much chance of a social life, so I was old enough to know better, but too young to resist.

"We were going to rise together like shooting stars in the department. He . . . encouraged me to sing, to find those funky old gowns, and there were a lot of them in L.A. fourteen years ago. He was flowers and optimism. And then, the thorns. You know how they start out: Mr.

Wonderful. You know what they turn out to be, Mr. Control-freak."

"He . . . started abusing you?"

Her eyes said, What do you think, you think I'd allow anyone to hit me?

He hadn't thought so.

She turned her margarita glass on its napkin. "He was too smart to use violence. I sometimes think he picked me because he wanted to make sure he wouldn't resort to violence. He liked manipulation. Lived for it. Men. Women. Children. He had a need to lead them astray, into the path most dangerous or self-destructive."

"You're talking about a psychopath."

"I'm talking about Kitty the Cutter."

Matt shut up. Molina was talking. What this had to do with Mariah, he couldn't imagine.

"Simple. He got me pregnant."

Matt tried to digest that, and couldn't. Happened a million times a year.

She leaned inward. "Wasn't supposed to happen. I was using a diaphragm and foam. The foam he couldn't fix, but the diaphragm . . . holes in it the size of a straight pin."

Matt knew she wanted shock, and she got it. She continued talking.

"Usually it's the woman, isn't it? Who's supposed to manipulate in that way? Not this time.

He thought my maternal instinct would take over, that I'd never look into the evidence. He thought I was a dumb broad."

"A cardinal sin," Matt put in.

Molina nodded. "I knew the first time I missed my period."

"So. What did you do?"

"I went to an abortion clinic."

The statement was like a slap in the face, and he pulled away from it before he could stop himself.

"Think about it, Mr. Priest. You've never been a woman, but think about being tricked into motherhood like that. By a man like that, who did it just because he could."

Matt didn't have to think long or hard. He thought he carried the burden of Effinger's abuse.

But no one had foisted a changeling soul on him, part himself, part the unwanted other, part the demon's.

"Why didn't you have the abortion?"

"Because either way he won." Her shoulders lowered, as they must have once long ago in a clinic office. "He wanted me to be destroyed, or to be a destroyer. I decided to be neither."

"Either way, your life was changed forever."

"So I chose which way."

"And if Mariah asks about her father?"

"She already has, years ago. Kids are ages ahead of us these days."

"And you've told her."

"I've told her that her father was a policeman who was killed in the line of duty."

"Was he?"

Molina shrugged. "Not yet."

"Then he's . . . still out there."

"Out there. And I'm in here, drinking margaritas. There. That wasn't so bad, was it? At least I didn't have an abortion."

"I don't know if I could have resisted, in your position."

"That's just it. You don't know. Thanks for saying so. I am so tired of men thinking they know what women should do. You're pretty sure what Temple Barr should do."

"Not really. But that's why you're determined to run down Kinsella. To you, he's the ultimate manipulator. The ultimate psychopath."

"I don't know if I'd call him a psychopath. Yet." She finished the dregs of the margarita glass.

"It was nice to have him pinned down and politely answering my questions, though."

"What about the dead men in the casino ceilings?"

"I can't tell you everything, now, can I?" Coy again, in her hard-edged way. "Part of a scheme to bilk the casinos in question of millions. Someone is always trying to break the bank in Las Vegas."

"And Effinger was a very small cog in a multigeared scheme."

She nodded. "Still, he was connected enough to tip off. Who tipped him off that getting to Temple Barr would get to you, hmmm? That's what the message on the body was about: how to find Temple. Once Electra Lark told me somebody's evil step-father had assaulted her, I knew my take on the note was right. Too bad none of you three characters panned out as prime suspects."

"Too bad? You want to nail us all to the wall now?"

A smile paired her shrug. "You are my crown of thorns. Anyway, my detective interpreted the note smears as "deadhead" at "Circus Circus," but I immediately thought of "redhead" at the

"Circle Ritz," knowing her propensity for trouble and connection to Effinger, through you."

"These big-time crooks would help that weasel out on a personal matter?"

"Your dragging him into headquarters wasn't personal to them, it was messing with their business. Big business. No, Effinger was useful enough to protect; that's why the lookalike was tossed to the authorities. As a distraction. And then Effinger became a liability."

"Yet now, even dead, Effinger still plays a distraction."

"Very good! Yes."

"Can I take it that I'm free to dispose of his ashes as I please? You have no further use of him?"

"Scatter the booger over Lake Mead. I care not, as long as the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't."

"This has been an odd dinner," Matt commented.

"Hint. It's time to go. What time is it?"

"Two A.M."

"Another hour and you can rendezvous with Our Lady of the Can Opener again."

"No thanks."

Matt watched as the waiter returned with a check. Molina signed it, that was all. She had a tab here, but he doubted that she came often. He couldn't see her kicking back like this on a regular basis.

She stood, reached in her jacket pocket and pulled out the car keys.

"I'll have you back at the Circle Ritz by two-thirty."

They passed through the other dining rooms, now cleared and deserted. Matt was impressed. He and Molina were the last to leave, but the staff bowed and nodded, as if they were royalty.

"Influence," Molina said proudly, her face showing the serene placidity of a Madonna's. A mellow Madonna's.

"Ah," Matt said as their footsteps echoed on the parking lot asphalt.

"Speak up."

"I don't think you should drive me home."

Molina stopped, thrust her hands in her pockets, frowned. "Why not?"

Matt plucked the car keys from her left hand.

"Because I don't think you should drive."

"Agh! Don't be ridiculous. I can drive. It's just a few blocks."

"I don't think so." He'd barely consumed one full margarita.

She'd had three-something. She was a tall woman, but not that tall.

"I can drive! It's an emotional letdown, not a chemical one. My blood alcohol level is barely .

. . point oh-oh . . . nothing. Well below the legal limit. Trust me, I know these things."

"I don't think you should drive. It doesn't matter what level you test at; it matters that if you should happen to be stopped, a cop would have to test you. I'll drive."

She folded her arms and glared at him. "You are such a goody two-shoes."

"Hey. You wanted to celebrate your cornering the Mystifying Max. You have. Maybe you should celebrate a little longer and leave the driving up to us."

"Us?"

"The two of me in your view."

"Funny. My focus is perfect. I could hit a target at least in the torso, if not the heart."

"Most encouraging. But I'm driving, or I'm not going anywhere. And if you try to leave alone, I'll call the police."

She suddenly conceded and walked to the passenger side of the Toyota. "If you have to be in control of something tonight, I guess it can be me."

The jibe hit home, but he just unlocked the car door and sprung the passenger lock. He knew better than to open the door for her. "I guess everything's chemical," Matt said as she got in.

"Get over it."

She took a cue from one of her suspects and refused to answer.

"Past Our Lady of Guadalupe and then north?" Matt asked as they drove deeper into the Hispanic neighborhood. He guessed that she didn't have to live here on her salary, but that she was making a statement.

"Now how will you get home?"

"I'll call a cab."

"Way out here? At night. Get real. This is 'hood, amigo. Anglo drivers don't come."

He didn't answer, realizing she was probably right.

"So I'm stuck with you. What a night! I have to let Max Kinsella go, and I'm stuck with you."

Matt said nothing, but she spoke up at last and began directing him. Her voice was deeper, like when she sang, and he suspected she was much drunker than she would ever show.

He recognized the driveway when he turned into it as instructed.

Molina leaned forward to pull the garage door opener from the console box, and he eased the car into the dark, clutter-crowded garage as gently as if he were cruising the Vampire into a mechanic's bay.

"Nice landing." She was sounding sleepy.

By the time they had turned on a yellow brick road of lights from the garage into the small squarish kitchen, someone was stirring down the hall past the living room with its lumbering nighttime shapes.

The same Latina woman Matt had seen at the house before came down the passage like an angry locomotive. "So late. You said only midnight."

"Work, Yolanda. A daring chase into the desert. Desperados apprehended on the seething sands. A woman levitated from a coffin."

Molina laughed softly when the front door closed behind her.

"You'll have to stay here, I suppose. Don't worry about the evil eye from Yolanda. I've never had a man stay over."

"A cab--"

"Will not come. Not at this hour." Molina looked around with slightly swaying deliberation.

"I guess the living room couch it is. There's a half-bath off the garage. Remember there's a preteen girl in the household and undress accordingly. We get up at seven A.M. Need anything?"

"I guess . . . not."

Matt stood and stared at the alien living room after Molina went down the hall on tiptoes.

How had he gotten himself into this? By being a good Samaritan, he supposed, and accompanying Molina on her girl's night out. Her otherwise solitary girl's night out.

Matt shook his head and sought out the half-bath. He couldn't be sorry.

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

Matt decided that nothing indecent could be read into taking off his shoes, so he did just that. He piled the sofa pillows on one end and punched them into the semblance of one wide bedroom pillow. Steps down the hall made him freeze like a cat burglar Molina's woozy theatrics cut no ice with this woman. "Mariah, she been sleeping since ten.

Like a good girl." Pointed. A glance at Matt. "I must go home now and leave you alone." Hint. "If you need me tomorrow, do not call until after noon." Bigger hint.

Molina laughed softly when the front door closed behind her.

"You'll have to stay here, I suppose. Don't worry about the evil eye from Yolanda. I've never had a man stay over."

"A cab--"

"Will not come. Not at this hour." Molina looked around with slightly swaying deliberation.

"I guess the living room couch it is. There's a half-bath off the garage. Remember there's a preteen girl in the household and undress accordingly. We get up at seven A.M. Need anything?"

"I guess . . . not."

Matt stood and stared at the alien living room after Molina went down the hall on tiptoes.

How had he gotten himself into this? By being a good Samaritan, he supposed, and accompanying Molina on her girl's night out. Her otherwise solitary girl's night out.

Matt shook his head and sought out the half-bath. He couldn't be sorry.

Matt decided that nothing indecent could be read into taking off his shoes, so he did just that. He piled the sofa pillows on one end and punched them into the semblance of one wide bedroom pillow. Steps down the hall made him freeze like a cat burglar.

Molina was laboriously tiptoeing back down it, her arms piled with pillows and blankets.

"Shhh." Her caution now was as elaborate as it had not been in the parking lot. "What was I thinking of? Bad hostess. Water's in the kitchen faucet. Good night."

Matt arranged hi? impromptu bedlinens, smiling. A night in the convent this was not. And for all the wrong reasons.

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

At about six in the morning, Alvin and Theodore of singing Chipmunks fame came squirreling across the waffle-cotton blanket covering Matt's legs.

"Ow!" he shouted before he could stop himself.

He opened his eyes to the milky pool of dawn leaking around the edges of the drawn miniblinds and two striped squirrels barrel racing from one end of the living room to the other, using his epidermis as springboard.

"Ow," he said more softly, sitting up to massage his abraded legs.

He only saw the girl in the ankle-length Beauty and the Beast T-shirt when the careening cats returned from a second foray over his flesh and circled her ankles for recess.

"You're the guy from the church," she said.

For a moment his heart raced in panic. Even out of the mouths of babes...

"You were with the red-haired lady."

"Right. At the blessing of the animals."

"You had the biggest black cat that I ever saw."

"Midnight Louie. And ... you and your mother adopted these two guys."

Matt attempted to smile benignly on the striped flying demons. They were having none of it and caromed off the top of the Naugahyde recliner all the better to spring at him.

"Girls," Mariah corrected. At her prepubescent age, gender was becoming destiny.

"Girls. Have . . . they been fixed yet? I mean, had their claws removed?"

"They're too young."

He nodded. Everything here was too young, except Molina.

Mariah stepped closer. "You've been here before."

"Once."

"How come?"

"I had something to discuss with your mother."

"My mother's always working."

"She has a tough job."

"I guess." She stepped closer, tilted her head.

Matt didn't see much Molina in her. Mariah's eyes were black-brown, her hair darker than her mother's and her features fuller, rounder. He wondered suddenly what kind of love this was, for a child who might or might not resemble you, or who resembled most her other parent, who might or might not be loved. Or hated. He suddenly recalled his handsome soldier father, his face a mystery in the flickering light of the saint's candles, his staid (now) mother swept away by one night's impulse.

Crazy. It was all crazy, how these children came here, how they were treated when they did arrive. Mariah Molina was unshaped clay in an art department tray. She was, what, eleven, twelve? On the brink of awful girlhood when her ears would have to be pierced and her music would have to be turned up to maximum and when who she was would depend all too much on how other kids saw her, or how she could make them see her.

Matt suddenly viewed the terrible obligations of being a parent and quailed to his soul.

"It's okay." Mariah came closer. "The cats won't hurt you. They're kinda nuts. Like little kids, you know. Antsy."

"I guess." He smiled at her serious, adult attempt at reassurance. And a little child shall lead them. "I'm not used to waking up in strange places, with strange cats."

"Oh, they aren't strange." She sat down on an easy chair and stroked the young cats as they zoomed past. "Tabitha was a witch in a different life, and she runs away all the time because she's afraid someone will catch her and cut off her tail." She related this primal anxiety with the calmness of a school shrink. "Catarina is the sensitive one and wants to be a wire-walker, but she has to go to school first. Do you like them?"

"I think they're wonderful," he said sincerely. Wonderful and terrible in the history she had invented for them.

"They're just alley cats."

"The best kind."

She nodded. "I'd better put the coffee on for Mom."

Matt blinked. Did "Mom" often come in late and a little tiddly?

"She's a sleepyhead in the mornings," Mariah said importantly. "I have to get her going for her job. It's important."

"Yes, I know."

"And I have to go to school." Said with a true martyr's tone. "I get to drink hot cocoa in winter. Instant, though. We don't have much time around here."

"I can see that. Especially with those cats."

Mariah giggled. "Do you always sleep in your clothes?"

"No. But I'm not staying very long. Where's the cocoa? I'll make it."

"Men don't make anything."

"Some can. A little."

"Well, don't spill the hot water on the floor. The cats run through it and dump their food and we end up with such a mess."

Matt was very, very careful with the hot water.

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

Molina drove him home after Mariah had left for school in her navy plaid uniform.

She wore sunglasses and cleared her throat a lot.

"I'm sorry I left you high and dry," she said after pulling up in front of the Circle Ritz.

"It's fine."

"Those cats are hellions."

"They're kittens."

"Mariah is a handful."

"She's a kid."

Molina pushed up her sunglasses into the headband position.

Her eyes were clear, blue and rueful. "You swim." It was a statement not a question. She had seen him in the Circle Ritz pool.

"Yeah."

Molina looked through the windshield, down the street. "I... promised Mariah I'd take her to Wet and Wild this summer. In a couple months. It's closed until then."

"Yeah?"

"I don't swim."

"You don't swim?"

"I didn't exactly grow up in a neighborhood with swimming pools on every block. Not in East L.A."

Matt saw that East L.A. must have been a lot like South Chicago. "I didn't either. But the high schools had swim teams, and the nearby Catholic college had a pool."

"In Chicago they had pools. Guess you Anglos get everything."

Matt shrugged.

"So. Would you go with us? I can't take her on those crazy, zigzag tubes."

"I guess I could."

She sighed. "Then I'll let you know when this adjunct of hell opens for the summer. Got to run."

He got the hint and exited poste haste.

Electra Lark was waiting to greet him at the gate to the Circle Ritz.