Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (27 page)

“I can see why parents get into that kind of repressive thinking.”

“This Kitty scenario doesn’t make sense. Sure, women can become obsessed, they can stalk, but, as usual, they tend to hurt themselves, not others. They get arrested, ridiculed, mentioned on the nightly news, put into mental hospitals. They don’t turn dangerous like this.”

“I don’t think Kathleen O’Connor ‘turned’ dangerous. I think she always was.”

“Then you
do
know something of her history.”

He did, and he teetered on the brink of telling Molina on a need-to-know basis. Something stopped him. Keeping other people’s secrets was too ingrained from his life as a priest. Maybe he could persuade Kinsella to come clean about this himself. Yes. This latest incident would persuade him if nothing would. Kinsella couldn’t stand innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. It was the one trait he shared with Matt, that old Catholic guilt syndrome. No one must pay for my actions, my sins, but me.

“Well?” Molina was demanding.

“I’m thinking.” True. So true. “I guess if we haven’t lived in a politically and religiously segregated society like northern Ireland it’s hard to understand how deep the hatred goes. That’s what she’s acting out: that bred-in-the-bone hatred where rage becomes your life’s blood, your air.”

“Unemployed terrorist is your explanation? Downsized into State-side harassment of ex-priests? There’s some more primal motivation, some ritual, just like there is with serial killers, that I know.”

“You think she’s really a killer?”

“I think she likes to put chaos in motion and sit back and watch the carnage. As you said, and Mr. Oscar Wilde before you: ‘Each man kills the thing he loves. The coward with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.’”

Matt nodded to himself. The most virulent hatred is rooted in love betrayed. His own hatred of his abusive stepfather was his reaction to a father figure who was anything but.
You are supposed to love and protect me
, the abused child cries. And no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realization that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily “normal” is very abnormal to a larger world.

“So.” Molina was interrupting his silence again. “What can you give me? Something solid, other than this crackpot IRA theory. I don’t know where you got that anyway. I called Frank Bucek and he didn’t remember finding anything like that about Kathleen O’Connor, although he did remember you asking him to do a search and retrieve on her.”

“I don’t know. She may have mentioned something herself. She’s said a lot of wild things to me.”

“I still don’t get how she found you, why she targeted you.”

“It was when I was trying to track down my stepfather. She noticed I was on his trail. She mistook me for a hit man, I think. When she found out I wasn’t one, she got angry, as if I had disappointed her.”

“You’re just too good to be true, that’s your problem. It’s very annoying, take my word for it.”

“I guess women like the bad boys. Russell Crowe. Puff Daddy.”

“Some who need their heads examined do.” There was an odd silence on the line. “The bad boys have a way of introducing themselves as Mr. Right. But Miss Kitty seems to have a thing for good boys. I suppose she’s no different from overcontrolling men who pick on naive girls.”

“I may be innocent, but I’m not naive.”

“So there’s nothing you can give me, nothing concrete on tracking Miss Kitty?”

He thought, remembered, decided to lie. One small sin down the slippery slope.

“No.”

As soon as he had hung up on Molina, Matt punched in another number.

Kinsella answered. They were now both plugged into cell phones. Matt pictured the whole world with a hand and phone clamped to one ear, mouths moving like cud-chewing cows, eyes gazing vacantly into the sky or the ceiling.

“Devine here,” Matt said, brusquely.

“Gad, you sound like you’ve taken lessons in phone etiquette from Molina.”

“Maybe I have. I’ve just gotten off the line with her.”

“My condolences.”

“Your Irish friend has crossed the line. I need to give Molina a real lead on her. All I can think of is that sketch.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“It’s been our little secret, we three.”

“Secrets are made to be shared.”

“That’s not the way you act.”

“I’m a mass of walking contradictions.”

“I know, and that makes you not as unique as you think.”

“What do you want?”

“Your permission to bring Molina in on the Kitty O’Connor loop.”

“My permission?”

“She
is
your demon.”

“It
is
your sketch. You commissioned it. Why an ex-priest would want a pinup picture of a demon, I don’t know.”

“This is not just an amusing game of harass-the-clergy anymore. A girl was involved in the latest incident. And Molina was there.”

For once something Matt said stopped Kinsella the Kool cold.

“Okay. Where can we meet?” he said. “When?”

“I don’t know if we can. That woman is watching my every move. It’s not just my apartment or my job anymore. It’s me, twenty-four/seven.”

“Go to the Oasis Hotel back parking lot. Park in the exact middle, as far as you can tell. What are you using for wheels now?”

“A white ’93 Probe.”

“Gack.”

“So I hoped.”

Kinsella laughed. “Your boring taste is impeccable. I congratulate you. Good work. Park the Ignoro-car and walk on a zigzag course toward the lamppost with the Sphinx on it. Drop to the ground and get under the car parked nearest to the lamppost. Did I mention you should wear Rough Gear clothes? I’ll come by in a black Maxima.”

“A black Maxima? Isn’t that a little iconic?”

“Only you would ask if something was iconic. Yes. Just get into the backseat when I pause, and stay down until I say. It may be a while.”

“Have you always lived like this, like James Bond or Howard Hughes or somebody?”

“Longer than you’d care to think about.”

“I still don’t trust you.”

“Funny. I’ve always known I could trust you. It’s what I’ve disliked about you most. Later.”

Matt lay on the shaded asphalt, road grit prickling through his clothes.

He felt like a fool. Then he remembered how Vicki Jansen must have felt lying on the Blue Dahlia parking lot, bound and gagged.

He was here of his own free will, if against his better judgment.

He was doing what Max Kinsella had told him to do, and it was darn undignified.

He supposed Kinsella got a kick out of that.

But he was the undercover expert, and their enemy was now mutual.

Funny, a woman had made them rivals and another woman was making them allies.

Matt guessed that was life in the noncelibate world. He began to understand the deep fears of the Church fathers who had called woman the Devil’s tool.

It wasn’t demons they had feared, but their own impulses, both noble and base.

Groveling in the gravel did lend itself to philosophical and theological contemplation. It recalled his ordination, the long minutes of lying prone before the altar.

For I am a worm and no man.

Was that truly the thought of Jesus as he made the Way of the Cross? Was self-abnegation the only gateway to Godhood, or to any kind of religious transcendence?

Waiting obediently for Max Kinsella to show up was giving Matt all kinds of second thoughts.

He heard and saw some tires seize to a stop in front of him.

What he could see of the vehicle’s rocker panels was black.

He scrabbled out from his ignominious shelter, scraping his palms on sand and glass, and hurtled through the open rear door, crouching to pull it closed.

Maybe he’d hitched a ride with a lady blackjack player with a broken rear door latch. Maybe Kitty the Cutter was at the wheel, having eavesdropped on him with some demonic high-tech device.

Whoever was driving turned up the CD in the player as they lurched away.

Oh, my sweet Lord…

Only Max Kinsella, always the impresario for his own one-man show.

Matt pulled the black blanket on the backseat over himself and tuned out.

Many, many gratuitous bumps later — Matt suspected that Kinsella enjoyed every pothole — the car came to a gravelly stop. He heard the tires slow as if stuck to adhesive.

More likely desert sand. The CD player stopped.

“All right if I do a gopher and peek out?” Matt asked.

“You can jump on the hood and tap-dance if you want.”

Matt, blinking in the flat, bright light, glanced at endless scrub through car windows. “Where are we?”

“Where only the nuts and the G-men will find us.”

Matt dusted off his khakis, staring into distant nothingness.

“We’re on the fringes of Area fifty-one,” Kinsella added. “We go any farther in, we attract unwanted federal attention. I figure even Kathleen O’Connor doesn’t want federal attention.”

“Really. This zone is that touchy?”

“Area fifty-one is the Holy Grail of conspiracy nuts. It’s also real.”

“Can I get out, get in the passenger seat?”

“Why? Don’t fancy feeling like a mob abductee? It’s better than being an alien abductee.”

“I don’t ‘fancy’ being anybody’s abductee, including hers.”

“Sorry. Sometimes I slip into a European expression. It’s habit, not pretension.”

Matt got out of the car without comment, paused to be ironed by the searing desert heat, then slammed the back door shut. He opened the front door and entered the idling car. A blast of air conditioning ruffled his hair and soothed his indignation.

“Is all this drama necessary?”

“You said she was on you twenty-four/seven.”

“Seems like it.”

“Tell me.”

The trouble was that Kinsella looked and acted so bloody competent compared to the rest of the world. Matt knew most of it was stage presence. A magician is the ultimate controller, next to God Himself. A magician’s biggest and best illusion is the myth of his own omniscience.

Matt had been trained to honor omniscient figures, but now he resented it. So he laid out the details of Kitty the Cutter’s terrifying omniscience. Maybe it took one to outwit one.

Kinsella listened, his hands still clamping the steering wheel, unwilling to relinquish control.

Matt described the attack on him and his producer as they left the radio station. The ghastly setup in the Blue Dahlia parking lot, with the enthusiastic fan as an abducted witness.

“Why were you at the Blue Dahlia?” Kinsella asked.

“I wanted Molina’s advice on this. I figured it was a safe place to meet her.”

“Apparently safe places are no longer on your route now.”

Matt glanced through the car’s rear window.

“This is safe, for a while. Now you understand how terrorists work. They never rest. They’re always scheming. It’s not that they’re everywhere. They can’t be. But their victims are everywhere, and when they strike, it looks as if no one is safe. They have generated terror.”

“She’s one woman.”

“Is she?”

“That’s what Molina asked me, if she worked alone. Yes, until last night. Last night I couldn’t be sure. She could have had a driver. Witnesses saw a workman, or woman, putting up the sound equipment earlier in the day.”

“That’s the terrible beauty of being a terrorist. You put all your time into plotting, and it looks superhuman. Invincible. Not unlike a magical illusion.”

“It feels invincible too.”

“I know.” Max Kinsella lifted something off the seat between them, thrust it at Matt.

The morning paper. He read the second headline, not the one across the top, but three thick lines above the fold on the right.

IRA OFFERS TO DESTROY ITS ARMS

“So? They’ve been dancing the peace shuffle in Northern Ireland for three years. It’s been one step forward and two steps back every bit of the way.”

“So. This is how Kathleen discharged her anger for almost two decades: selling herself to buy arms. She’s not going to take this well. Peace is a threat to someone like her. It undoes all her life’s work. She’s more liable than ever to lash out at innocent bystanders.”

“She already has.” Matt gave him the short and sweet version of Kitty’s treatment of the girl.

“And this girl she kidnapped was just a groupie at WCOO?”

“I don’t like the term ‘groupie’.”

“Swell rock star you’d make. How’d Kathleen pick her out of the crowd?”

“Judas kiss.”

“Ah, Kathleen’s obsession has gotten seriously possessive. So this poor girl assaulted you with a postshow smooch and within twenty-four hours she’s the main course at Kathleen’s not-so-impromptu picnic at the Blue Dahlia parking lot?”

“How could Kitty know I was going there?”

“Had you ever been there before?”

“A couple, three times.”

“Molina does trill a good torch song.”

“So how, on the basis of my going there a few times, does Kitty know?”

“How many other spots around town do you patronize?”

“Uh, none. Not since I stopped hitting the joints looking for my stepfather.”

“She’s just covering all the bases, like a good terrorist. But you’re right. She’s tailing you twenty-four/seven. Or someone is.”

“That’s why I’m sneaking around to see Molina.”

“Strictly business, huh?”

Matt remembered the subject of his last discussion with her and felt a reddening surge of guilty fluster.

“Sorry. None of my business.” Kinsella’s smooth smile annoyed the heck out of Matt.

“Just business,” Matt managed to say, “sordid as it is when that O’Connor woman’s involved. You know she’s only tormenting me because she can’t find you.”

“I don’t know that. Why would she think you had anything to do with me?”

“We’re not complete strangers. She devotes all her time to it. She’s superhumanly omniscient, remember?”

“So she is.”

Matt couldn’t resist an urge to flash some omniscience himself after contemplating the varieties displayed by these two mortal enemies.