Rabid (53 page)

Dante, looking out the bright front window, asked, “Do you know that man?”

Bev glanced past Dante though the treeless front yard. A man wearing a black suit slid sideways out of a black Porsche, closed the door and polished the handle, and walked up to the door. The doorbell buzzed in the foyer.

Bev frowned at the ladies, who frowned back, and she answered the door. “Yes?” Bev asked him.

The man held out a set of chunky black keys and said in that oily voice, “Sorry about the delay, but I think you’ll agree that your new Porsche 911 Carrera 4S is worth the wait.”

“I didn’t buy a Porsche.” Bev stepped back and prepared to close the door.

“Sign here,” he said and held out a clipboard with a pen attached.

She swallowed the hot saliva materializing in her mouth. “There’s been a mistake.”

The guy leaned back to look at the house numbers. “Is this
Doctor
Conroy R. Sloan’s house?”

The air around her thinned, as if the house teetered on a mountain top above the clouds. If she fell out the doorway, she would keep falling and bounce off rocks protruding from the cliff.

Bev said, “He passed away.”

The man backed up a step and appraised the black dress she was wearing. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” She pressed on the door.

The door half-closed before the guy pushed it back and breezed off, “So you don’t want the car?”

“No,” she said and punched the door open wide. “We don’t want the car.” He backed up. “We don’t want Conroy’s stupid, ridiculous car.” She stepped outside, following him down the sidewalk. “How could he buy a
new Porsche
, when he has two daughters to send to college? What sort of an idiot would spend a hundred thousand dollars on a car when we don’t have a tenth of that saved for the girls’ college?”

“Hey, lady, I’m just delivering it.” He backed up and held the clipboard in front of him, as if she might stab him in the chest. “And it was only eighty-four grand.”

The other women ran outside. Mary grabbed Bev’s arm.

Lydia said, “Let me see that,” and grabbed the paperwork out of the man’s hand and slapped it open, perusing. “He put down ten thousand dollars on the car, so now there’s only thirty thousand missing.”

“Why would he do it?” Bev turned to Mary and demanded. “Why would he have affairs, so many affairs, Leila and that horrible Peggy woman, and buy a new Porsche and move out and leave his children?”

Mary gathered Bev against her soft chest but didn’t say anything. Mary’s perfume was sultry, tropical. Bev yanked away from her to go after the Porsche guy again.

The guy snatched the paperwork from Lydia and sprinted to the car.

“Let me see that!” Bev yelled. “I want to know what that bastard did!”

The guy climbed into the car and zoomed away in a black smear across the cold afternoon. It was a Porsche. It could zoom.

“Bastard!” Bev yelled after the howling Porsche and against the frigid air blowing by her head and blowing icy trails from the corners of her eyes into her hairline. Mary and Lydia wrapped their arms around her and walked her inside the house.

“Bastard,” Bev sobbed.

~~~~~

Dante sipped tea in Bev’s living room while everyone else filtered away. The cleaning crew showed up, cleaned up, and got out. Finally, he and she were the only two left, sitting across the living room from each other, sipping lukewarm tea from the only two unwashed cups.

They sat, not saying much, drinking tea, listening to opera, until dusk. Bev looked so tired but didn’t cry, and she slid farther into a drunken stupor.

He tucked the girls in at nine and settled Bev in her bed at ten, building up a pillow battlement for her arm, and he removed her other arm from his neck, gently drawing her fingers from his hair, saying that he was needed elsewhere, even though the soft skin on her hand roused him when he kissed her palm then covered her breasts with the blue blanket.

He took a cab downtown. He was embarking on the road to his drinking problem again, and he knew the terrain well enough to realize that he shouldn’t drive at night anymore.

He drank slowly and steadily until after midnight, amongst the other folks in the Dublin, waiting for Leila to show up. After seeing her professor-lover prayed over by an Inquisitor, Leila would need a drink, too.

At one o’clock, he gave up.

She had to go back to her apartment. He realized that this assumption, that she would go home, and it was not necessarily accurate. Moderately buzzed, he bought a paperback at the bookstore next door and called a cab to take him to her apartment, where he leaned on the doorjamb and waited for her.

At two-thirty, he began to doubt. He read the little book, a mass market edition of a minor prize winner from two years before, and the alcohol slowly metabolized out of his veins, leaving his blood volume inadequate and his head dizzy.

At five minutes until three, his deadline, the elevator doors creaked open and Leila stumbled out. Her golden dress rode high on her slim thighs.

Priests should not notice thighs.

She stopped when she saw him. “Jesus, Dante. What the hell are you doing here again?”

The pathos of it was shocking, him waiting at a girl’s apartment in the wee morning hours. “I need to talk to you.”

“This is ridiculous. It’s three in the morning. Don’t you ever need to talk during the day?” She found her clanking keys in her purse and shouldered past him. “Go home, Monsignor. Are you too wasted to drive? Do I need to call you a cab again?”

“I came by taxi. I can call my own, but I need to talk to you.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“It will not take long.”

“I don’t care.” She turned the key and the lock clicked.

“I want to understand why.”

“It’s too late for this.”

“Then tomorrow? Supper? Coffee?”

“No, I mean it’s too late for this.” She pushed the door open. “It’s too late for everyone for this. It doesn’t matter why. There are more important things in life than rehashing the past, like taking responsibility for your own life.” She stepped inside and turned, her hand behind the door to close it in his face.

He didn’t want to be aggressive but she was closing the door and he would have to go back to the empty rectory with nothing but questions again. He pressed his fingertips against the door with his hand arched, the least threatening posture that kept the door open.

She rolled her eyes. “This is turning into stalking.”

“I just need to talk to you. I promise, I will not repeat what you say. I need to understand.” From an internal coat pocket, he extracted his thin purple confession stole. The embroidered gold cross shone on top. “I can wear this. Anything you say will be under the seal of confession. Lawyers could not ask me to reveal it.”

“I’m not afraid of lawyers. I didn’t kill anybody.” She gazed at him steadily.

“Roma would not allow me to discuss it with anyone, no matter what.”

“I don’t care about your religious magic. I’m tired and I’m drunk, and I’m going to bed.”

“Please. I don’t understand why you had the affair with him.”

The door had less inward pressure on it—she must have dropped her hand from the back side, and he pressed the door open a few inches.

“Fine.” Leila stepped back, leaving the door open.

He decided this was a tacit invitation. He followed her in and closed the door behind himself. Was he halfway back to his old habits, half-drunk in the living room of a woman’s apartment, or had the priesthood tempered him? His drunken sex with Bev rode up in his mind and he cringed. The road he’d traveled in the priesthood had been steeply uphill but not very long.

Leila returned from the kitchen with a bottle of scotch, a bottle of water, and two highball glasses. “Go ahead,” she said. “Put on the stole.”

“Do you wish to confess?” One loop of the fabric slipped out of his hand and swung in the air by his leg.

“No, but you said you’d wear it, perv.” She set the glasses and tall, full bottle on a gilt tray on the coffee table. The mirror on the bottom of the tray doubled the dark bottle, and the green glass torpedo stretched down though the wood table. “Put it on.”

“You do not even like the collar.” He kissed the cross in it and tossed the stole around his neck. The free ends hung down his chest.

“Yeah, but I’m very drunk, and I’ve had a very weird day, Monsignor.”

“Do not call me that. Just-ah Dante.”

“Just-ah Dante, the incognito Inquisitor.”

He felt like he was falling apart. “Don’t say that.”

Leila kneeled beside the coffee table. With her long, slim legs tucked under her, she looked childlike. She unclipped her hair, and the long, black silk of it spilled down her back, again so young, almost a child-woman, and the pedophilic connotations revolted him. He should shrink his own head to ensure that innocence was not becoming too appealing to him.

She tipped the scotch bottle and poured one expert ounce into each highball glass. “Water?”

“Yes,
per favore
.”

She poured three ounces of water over the scotch in his glass, a nice ratio, and set the bottle on the tray.

“Cheers,” she said and tossed her shot back, no grimace on her smooth features, and poured herself another.

For all his musing, Leila was no ingénue.

He said, “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” and stared at the azure chandelier above her dining room table. The cups around the light bulbs looked like miniature stained glass windows depicting tulips. Cardinal Varchetto had one just like it in his office in the Vatican, but he had not allowed restorers to rewire it, lest they damage it. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Depends on what you think it is.”

“Is it a Tiffany, circa nineteen forties, perhaps?”

“Thirties.” She added water to her glass this time. “No one’s ever recognized it.”

“I’ve never seen one lighted up.
Bella
.” He sipped his drink. “Where did a graduate student get a Tiffany chandelier?”

“Inherited it.”

“That’s right. Your father.” He looked up, startled. “And-ah, the Louis Quatorze table in the entry way? And the rest?” He pointed to the French antiques around them, inventorying. “Genuine?”

“Yeah.”

“And the plasterwork?”

“Turn of the century Parisian.”

“Which century?”

“Nineteenth,” she admitted.

“The Vatican would love them. Cardinals would stab each other to get them. They would tear each other’s red robes and trip each other down stairs and send the IEA to steal them.”

His line of sight drifted up to the chandelier, which cast blue-tinged, watery light over the apartment.

She said, “I had a revelation today during Conroy’s funeral.”

“Ah?” Dante picked up his diluted scotch and leaned forward.

“Conroy was using GFP-labeled rabies virus to trace neural connections from the gut up the vagus nerve, extremities, optic nerve, to the brain. That data’s pretty good. I’m planning a couple of papers out of Conroy’s and my data.”