Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (25 page)

“Got me there, Tyler. Kind of a bouncer, isn’t he, around the strip clubs?”

“Yeah. He got around. Worked ’em all: Kitty City, Baby Doll’s, Les Girls. Haven’t seen him lately, though.”

“Not lately,” Molina stressed, wanting to be sure.

“No.” Tyler shrugged. “Used to be around all the time.”

“When did he drop out?” Morrie asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t thought about it. A couple weeks ago? Hey.”

“Hey what, Tyler.”

“After Cher Smith was killed, I guess. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Alch repeated, pulling away the photo.

He traded it for a piece of heavy, nubbly paper.

“This a police sketch?” Tyler asked, impressed.

“Naw. The person who drew it did police sketches in the old days, but we use computers now.”

“Yeah. I use computerized equipment too. It’s all digital, man.”

“We’re not digital yet. Funny, that used to mean doing it by hand. Anyway, this guy’s face ring a bell?”

Tyler frowned, squinted, visibly thought.

Molina said not a word.

“He could have been wearing something different, could have looked different,” Morrie put in so smoothly no one would ever know he’d been coached. Maybe not even Morris Alch. “Tall guy, I hear, way over six feet.”

“Now that’s something that’d stand out around here.” Tyler’s sneer was back. “Most guys who come in are on the short side.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that observation before.”

“Like you said, I get to eyeball the whole place. I’m here mostly for the music, but I notice things. Tall guy would stand out.”

“You look like you’re not missing any inches, so you mean most of the customers are like me.”

“Yeah.” Tyler stood up to stretch, showing off. Five nine maybe. “Not shrimps exactly, but no, uh, Schwarzeneggers.”

“You think Arnold’s that tall, really? Or just overbuilt?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not as tall as he looks in his movies. This guy, though? I haven’t seen him. He must be a bad dude, he gets his own police sketch. Computer too good for him?”

“We like to try different methods.” Molina pulled the image off the small table crowded with buttons and dials where Tyler had dropped it when he couldn’t make the subject. “People react to different things.”

“Yeah, and I gotta make sure this crowd reacts right to that little honey about to strut her stuff onstage. Sorry.”

Tyler sat down and started playing the tabletop dials and buttons like the Phantom of the Opera pulling out all the stops on the organ.

Molina eased the door open, admitting a blast of earsplitting sound.

She and Alch slipped outside, sealing Tyler into his cocoon of equipment and the sound of silence.

“Get me chapter and verse on the kid,” she told Alch. “School, parents, age, everything.” Molina shouted into Morrie’s better ear as they wove their way through the cheesy tables to the door and the parking lot.

“You get what you wanted, Lieutenant?” he asked when they stood at last on the pulsing asphalt, the building behind them thumping like a herd of buffalo but thankfully muffled.

“No, Morrie. You did.”

Tempted

If the nights were no longer his own, belonging to WCOO and, more recently, Kitty the Cutter, the days were Matt’s to do with what he would.

The Circle Ritz parking lot, he was relieved to see the next mid-morning, was bare of a red Miata.

He got into the sun-warmed, whitewashed Probe that had been his landlady Electra’s once-pink signature car and drove onto streets thronged with white vans, pickups, and sedans designed to repel the relentless sunlight.

He didn’t know where he was going, just somewhere else. To think. Ethel M’s cactus garden crossed his mind. So did the shore of Lake Mead.

Instead, he found himself heading into Molina territory — not on her account, but because the stucco spire of Our Lady of Guadalupe beckoned him like a parental finger.

The church was in its midday lull, between services, empty.

Matt dipped his fingers in the stainless-steel-lined holy water font — no longer bracketing bowls at either side of the entrance arch, but now a footed and carved stone structure upheld by angels.

That’s what he loved about Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was always in retrograde, like a planet frozen in its eternal orbit. The more modernity shouldered into Catholic churches, the more Our Lady of Guadalupe became a quaint, intractable anachronism. In an ecumenical world, OLG remained staunchly Catholic with a capital
C
. Matt genuflected before entering an empty pew, noticing that his knees were beginning to begrudge going through the familiar motion.

The vigil light signifying the presence of the Eucharist burned true-blue blood red above the elaborate altarpiece. The altar itself had long ago been turned to face the pews, one glaring concession to change. Matt remembered masses said with the priest’s back to the congregation, so he faced only the crucifix and the presence of God. That made the ritual more solemn somehow, when the congregation eavesdropped over the priest’s shoulder. Secrecy always conferred solemnity, or else why whisper during confession in those dark, private booths in the old days?

Matt’s eyes inventoried the familiar artifacts: the embroidered altar cloth, the flowers provided by the Ladies’ Altar Society, the simple pulpit awaiting a preacher the way a clay pot does its plant. The Stations of the Cross marched down the side aisle walls, the bas-relief wood carvings resembling petrified flesh. Everything was as soothing and familiar as it had been when he had come to church as a child, sitting silent beside his mother (nobody in the congregation spoke responses then, but were seen and not heard like good children of God). He realized the peace he had felt in church was literal. It was the only place he and his mother had escaped the bitter harangues of Clifford Effinger.

No wonder he had hoped to make the church his permanent home.

A door cracked open behind the altar.

Matt smiled at the familiar, secret sound, betraying the rich liturgical life that was always being led behind the scenes in a church. Every day had its meaning, its patron saint or significance in Church history. The Church calendar was a phantom image of the secular calendar, with its major “feast days” only reflected in a few secular holidays. The word “holiday” was itself an evolution of “Holy Day.” And the secular calendar was Gregorian, after all, determined by a Pope hundreds of years ago.

Father Raphael Hernandez crossed from the sacristy door to genuflect painfully on the red carpeting in front of the altar.

He wore the long cassock abandoned by most modern priests but its solid black dignity suited his angular Iberian features. He was the model of the reserved, dedicated priests Matt had known as a child. The father figure he had aspired to become.

The vigil light glinted off the small round black buttons closing Father Rafe’s cassock from neck to hem. Matt found himself remembering Temple wearing a soft black knit dress that buttoned up the front, and him undoing some of them.

The vigil light’s red heat seemed to flood his face. He wanted to censor the thought, then resisted. Too much had been censored. Self-censored and confessed. What he had felt and done had been natural, honest. That part of himself was as worthy of embracing as the urge for commitment and service that had brought him to the priesthood.

Father Rafe spotted him, started a bit theatrically, and then came striding forward.

“Matt. Nice to see you here. I’ve missed you at a few masses.”

Matt rose, shook the thin hand. “I like to visit other parishes. Different decor, different music.”

“I wasn’t implying you had missed a Sunday —”

“I know. I wasn’t implying that your sermons were anything but inspirational. I did that even when I was…a priest. Visited other congregations.”

Father Rafe sighed. “I’m so involved with my little world here. That’s what got me into trouble.” He frowned and looked hard at Matt. “Are you troubled?”

Matt nodded, relieved.

“You need the sacrament of reconciliation?”

“Not…yet, Father. Just to talk. To discuss ethics. Right and wrong.”

“If it’s something involving the female sex, I admit I’m not your man.”

“Nothing like that. At least not directly. It’s about the nature of evil.”

“Evil?” Father Rafe frowned again. “You mean that literally.”

“Yes.”

“Sit down.” He gestured to the polished oak pew as if it were an easy chair.

Matt knew that there were no easy chairs in church. He sat, though, jamming his feet under the descended kneeler.

“I know a homicide lieutenant,” Matt began.

Father Rafe nodded, understanding that this was prologue.

“She deals with the results of evil, day in, day out. I honestly don’t know how she does it, faces so many dead souls, knowing they were killed by malice. I admire her.”

“It is a debilitating job. I have such a one in my congregation.”

Matt didn’t acknowledge the relationship. OLG was Carmen Molina’s parish, this was a story. No names would be given, to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

“Like you, Father,” Matt went on, “I’ve heard confessions…administered the sacrament of reconciliation as we say now. I like the old, plain title better. Confession. I liked absolving people of their sins, which they themselves had named. You and I know that as we priests became aware of the true wrongs in society we had to read between the formulas to find the violent spouses, the child abusers, and persuade them to seek help beyond mere forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness is never ‘mere.’ It is the greatest of the divine gifts.”

“Yes, I know that. Especially since I’ve been led to forgive beyond reason, beyond right myself.”

“Forgiveness heals the wronged as much as the one who wrongs.”

“I know that too. I’ve seen evil in human form, and have seen that the origin of that evil is all too human. But.”

The priest’s dark, peaked eyebrows lifted and held the position.

“What if, Father, you encountered truly irredeemable evil? Someone who would slaughter innocents, persecute children, spit in the face of God only because it was there?”

He thought about it, the implications. “You are discussing demonic evil.”

Matt nodded.

“Inhuman evil.”

“It would seem so.”

Father Rafe considered it. He had a face that could have sat judge for Torquemada. Of all the priests in Las Vegas, he was the only one that Matt could imagine conducting an exorcism.

“I believe in pure evil,” the older man said, speaking slowly. “I believe in the Devil. I believe the Devil can make use of humans who let him.” He tented his fingers, considering every implication of Matt’s question. “I believe in you, Matthias, named after the disciple who replaced Judas. But I do not believe that any human being is so unremittingly evil that he would be on an equal footing with the Unholy One.”

Matt absorbed this. “Then anything once human keeps some lost core of humanity, no matter how debased?”

“I believe so.” Father Rafe grimaced. “It is an act of faith, my belief in ultimate good. It is an act of reason to admit the existence of pure evil.”

“Is it a sin to do what is necessary to save someone else from pure evil?”

Again the eyebrows raised. “I’m just a parish priest, not a theologian.”

“That’s why I’m asking you. You see people at their best and worst every day. Theologians do so only on Sunday.”

Father Rafe chuckled. “Theologians are theorists. Very necessary, but sometimes annoying. So are parish priests. We don’t say what you want to hear.”

Matt shrugged. “As long as you tell us what we
say
we want to hear.”

“I’m sorry you’ve encountered such evil. Your stepfather —?”

“Was a piker. I’ve learned to…forget him.”

“Forgive him?”

“I suppose so.”

“And this other evil?”

“I’ve truly never encountered anyone so devoted to destruction for its own sake. My conundrum is how to stop it.”

“No.”

“No? Innocent lives may be lost, ruined.”

“No. Your conundrum is how to heal it.”

“Heal evil? This evil demands my soul.”

Father Hernandez was silent, then crossed himself, his lips moving in prayer. “I don’t doubt that you are tried. Remember Our Lord, taken by the Devil to the top of the Temple and offered every worldly thing.”

“Mere materialism. He was not offered the chance to save the lives of his disciples, to do good by doing wrong.”

“One can never do good by doing wrong.”

“If a kidnapper holds a child with a gun to its head and won’t surrender, isn’t it right that a police sniper shoot him?”

“That’s between the police sniper and his conscience. But suppose the kidnapper’s gun is defective and can’t fire?”

“The only way to find out is to risk the child. Sacrifice the child.”

“Or to negotiate.”

“And while you negotiate, the kidnapper panics and shoots.”

“You are not a hostage negotiator, Matt.”

“Yes, I am. If you only knew how much I am.”

“And the item under negotiation? It can’t be a child.”