"I thought you'd like to know."
"No, but I'm better off knowing. I'm not sure that you are."
"Why?"
"Politics, Lieutenant, are a lot less clear-cut than crime.
You should know that by now."
Molina tapped the card on her palm, then pocketed it. She was gone as fast and furiously as she had come, not with a magician's smoothness, but with sound and fury signifying nothing.
Temple went to the dormant cat. "Michael Aloysius Xaviar. Kind of rhymes with Caviar at the end, doesn't it, kitty? I just hope Midnight Louie hasn't done a disappearing act, too."
Chapter 28
A Clerical Error
"You look beat," Sheila said when Matt walked into Con-Tact at six-forty-five Wednesday evening.
He didn't argue, but slipped into his donated office chair and let it swivel him outward to face the sparsely furnished room instead of into the instant isolation of his phone niche.
"Lines been busy?" he asked.
"Quiet so far. They're all waiting until the weekend to explode." Sheila regarded him curiously. "Want some coffee?"
"Yeah, thanks." He was surprised. Everybody took care of their own needs around ConTact, but Sheila was a social worker and she sensed his mental fatigue.
She brought him a Save-the-Whales mug steaming with a full shot of coffee from the big aluminum urn in the corner.
"What's going on?"
"Oh, some friends of mine have problems. Thanks." He toasted her with the cup before taking a careful sip of the scalding brew.
"Don't you encounter enough problems here?"
"Sure, but old friends are old friends."
"They aren't tourists--?"
"No!" He laughed at the idea of Seraphina and company as tourists, then realized that Sheila had finessed him into explaining why the idea was so absurd.
"An old teacher of mine ended up retiring here. I help her out with the odd problem now and again."
"Mr. Goodwrench," Sheila said with a joking smile.
"Kind to old ladies and dogs." She looked relieved that an obviously old lady was the object of his attentions.
"Cats," he corrected without saying more, turning his chair to face the dead-end white walls of soundproofing.
"So you're tuckered out from playing handyman," Sheila pressed.
"Yeah," Matt answered, wondering what category of household task taking down crucified cats would come under.
He didn't want to talk about it, even think about it. So he jumped on the phone when one of the lines lit up, jamming on his headphones. He sensed Sheila standing behind him, hovering over him.
"ConTact," he announced to the caller. Whoever it was, that person would not stand breathing above him, brimming over with questions.
The voice began, a man's, sounding wired. Matt felt his pulse speed up for the crisis, beat to the rhythms of agitated speech, as his mind began sketching a mental picture of the speaker. He was plugged into the anonymous, distant night again. The presence hovering behind him lingered, then whispered away, defeated.
Matt breathed a sigh of relief that the caller was talking too fast and too hard to hear the ebbing presence. Then Matt heard only the caller, his troubles, his fears, his gravelly, desperation-edged voice. Connected again to someone who needed help and would demand nothing more than that, Matt breathed deeper, steadier, like an athlete, and entered his listening, concentrating, problem-solving mode. Nothing was as soothing to the psyche as other people's problems.
To his relief, the lines kept ringing and he kept jumping to answer them. That kept Sheila from offering any more favors and expecting any more answers. He was already obligated to answer to more than enough women. Lieutenant Molina, Temple, Sister Seraphina.
Still, at the back of his mind, the problems of Our Lady of Guadalupe swirled like leaves caught in an eddy.
His watch showed 2:30 a.m., when the first line rang again and he punched the button.
"ConTact. Can I help?"
' 'If you can help an old lady who has mysterious disturbances around her house," came a now-familiar voice.
"Sister Seraphina, what's the matter?"
She sighed. 'Tm sorry to call you, Matthias, but the police won't do and I know your number now, so you're stuck."
"You can call anytime," he assured her. "What's the problem?"
"First, Sister Mary Monica heard some disturbance from Miss Tyler's house."
"Sister Mary Monica heard?"
"Exactly," Seraphina's normally booming, cheerful voice grew grim. "I looked out her window and glimpsed a light in the second story, and then it went out. So I settled Monica down and watched. I never saw another light in the house, but several minutes later a flashlight bobbed along the side of the house to the garden. Mind you, Matt, I saw only a few firefly-fast glimmers; maybe I was staring into the dark too hard for too long. But I remembered poor Peter and got worried, so I called Father Hernandez at the rectory."
During the long pause, Matt imagined a dozen equally unfortunate scenarios. Temple would have been proud of him.
"He was . . . very bad, Matt. He insisted on coming over and stumbling about in the bushes with his own flashlight.
Of course he--we--found nothing, not after all that sound and fury. I finally got him back to the rectory. Matt, he needs you."
"No one needs me! I'm no longer practicing--"
"Father Hernandez is crumbling before my eyes. He made so little sense. I know his drinking isn't the primary problem; it's a symptom. The only alternative is to go to the bishop, and Father Rafe is such a proud man, and the parish is at such a delicate point in its fund drive--"
"And I'm the best that you can do," he interrupted a bit bitterly.
She refused to be buffaloed by his anger. "Yes," she said simply. "Please."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Come here when you get off work. Talk to him. I think Father desperately needs to share his problem, his sorrow, with another human being. He won't talk to me, to a woman, about what he must regard as a terrible failure."
"But to me he would?"
"He might. I don't know what else to do, Matt."
"Do you think you're going to win me back by making me function as what I used to be?"
"No. But I think you might win Father Rafe back to what he used to be."
"I'm that good?"
"You're the one person he might think would understand."
"He doesn't understand me."
"That's not what's needed here. We need to understand him, and to let him know that nothing can be as bad as he thinks. His isolation has distorted his thinking."
"So has the drinking. You're asking for a miracle here."
"No miracles. Just good pastoral care."
Matt's weary laugh came out as a brief bark. "I can call a cab and be at the rectory by three-thirty." He didn't want Temple in on this, not anymore. Besides, he couldn't use her indefinitely as a taxi service to his past. "You're lucky we live in Las Vegas, a town that never shuts down."
"Chicago's supposed to be the town that never shuts down, Matt, but the recession has done a pretty good job of forcing it to. I guess counseling is the one profession that never runs out of customers."
"Maybe." She had given him an innocuous-sounding name for this dangerous, unrequested intervention in an' other man's struggle with his own soul. Another priest's. Counseling, not ministry. All right. I'll be there," he promised.
"God bless you, Matt."
Las Vegas cab drivers, like their Manhattan counterparts, have seen everything. So the ponytailed driver of the Whittlesea Blue cab Matt called didn't raise an eyebrow when he was directed to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Las Vegas had more churches per capita than most U.S. cities; why shouldn't a midnight meanderer want to save his soul as well as spend a wad at some casino?
The neighborhood was dark, still and well-behaved. No lights glimmered now around the Tyler house, supposedly empty except for cats, or around the convent next door, but Sister Seraphina had made the proverbial "candle in the window" literal at the rectory.