Rabid (67 page)

She did, too. “Is there anything else you want to ask or are you going to leave now?”

The black-cloaked priest sat back on the couch and crossed his arms across his chest. “Were you sleeping with Sloan when he moved out?”

Nothing mattered now. Being coy was stupid, considering that Conroy was dead and the priest knew anyway. “I broke it off a week or so before he moved out.”

“Why did he break it off?”

Asshole wasn’t even listening. “I dumped
him
. He got possessive, like when he grabbed my arm that time outside your church. He started doing crap like that, thinking he owned me. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“What was your deal?”

“You interrogate everybody like this?” Leila sipped her drink. The scotch had undertones of lemon and bronze.

He turned over one hand to expose his pale, vulnerable palm. “In the seminary, one learns to discuss the nature of sins with penitents for confession.”

“This isn’t confession. You don’t even have your goddamn purple stole on. You didn’t kiss the cross and mutter over it. It’s not confession.” Leila shifted her cool glass to her other hand. “It was casual fucking. That’s all.”

He frowned. “That’s a harsh term.”

“It was just fucking.”

“There is no affection, no love?”

“It was just
ass
. Why make it more complicated, bring
love
into the equation, when it’s not there, when it was never meant to be there?”

Dante grounded his glass on the tray. “It’s a difficult distinction to maintain.”

“No it’s not. Fucking is friction and sex, fun, kinky. It’s a roller coaster. Call it ‘friendship with privileges’ if you’re squeamish. What did you and Beverly call it?”

“Not that.” His head turned away from her, tortured and Byronic again.

“Really?” Leila tapped her glass on the silver tray. “She loved you? She seemed pretty upset when Conroy left her. Didn’t seem like she was in love with another guy.”

“It’s not important.” He traced the rim of his glass.

Leila braced her forearms on her knees and leaned over. “Were you in love with her?”

Dante’s marble skin flushed rose. He inhaled through his nose, straightened, and crossed his long legs. His face had become academically calm, as if he had decided she were an interesting specimen. “Were you in love with Conroy?”

Her sarcastic laugh snorted through her nose. “Love is for fools. This has nothing to do with Beverly’s trial.”

“Yet you have so many lovers.”

“They’re not ‘lovers.’ I have friends. I have sex with my friends. I get some ass.”

“Not ‘make love.’”

“How soggy.” Her legs were tired from cooking at the lab bench all day, and she wanted to go to sleep.

“You’ve never been in love,” he sipped, “and you’ve never made love?”

“Sound like you’re
projecting
there, Monsignor.” Leila’s fingernails bit her palms. “Aren’t we talking about
you
? Priests exhibit classic narcissism, believing they have a hotline to God.”

He cleared his throat. “Do you think you can fall in love?”

“Nope. Don’t want to, either.” Leila shot her drink down. If she shocked him enough, he might storm out and leave her alone. She poured another glass of scotch. Her tongue and teeth were numb, and her legs were drifting toward ease. The numbness had to crawl inward to her stomach before she would be able to sleep. The alcohol had begun to numb her mind again, and she began to tell the truth. “Since I can’t make love, I might as well get fucked.”

“Is that what you’re doing, when you’re having sex with the men?”

Leila smiled though her teeth grated on each other like chewing sand. “I didn’t say only
men
.”

“Women, too?” His eyebrows rose slightly, surprised but not judgmental.

An innocent façade, she was sure. The perv probably liked hearing about lesbian action. “Yep.”

“What are you looking for, Leila? What are you missing?”

“You’re projecting again. You were out of control and destroying yourself. I’m happy with my life.” She crossed her arms across her chest and wished that her clingy black top wasn’t so low-cut and thin, almost lace. Her throat and sternum were on display. “You’re asking me the questions your little old priest asked you. This has nothing to do with the trial tomorrow. Ask relevant questions or we’re done.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t want your help. I don’t want a priest thinking he can help me.” Hot scotch swirled in the back of her throat.

He clasped his hands together and paused, licked his plush lips. “You were abused by a priest when you were young,” he said, “sexually, I would guess.”

Rage drove Leila to her feet and she walked toward the dining room to get away from him.

She wanted to smash the highball glass against the wall, but the glass was heavy and the antique plaster was friable, so she dropped her arm. Her hair fell around her face, curtaining her so he couldn’t see her face redden. She stared at the shadow of the glowing Tiffany chandelier above the dining room table and tried to breathe long and low because she was safe here, in her own home, in her own life. “You don’t know shit.”

“I know a lot about sexual abuse by priests. I could help.”

“You don’t know
shit
.”

“Was it covered up and the offending priest transferred?”

Her hands wound around each other. “Get out.”

“I wanted to ask, just to know, because it bothers me, where was your mother?”

The chandelier glowed and blue-speckled the walls. She set the empty glass on the dining room table and rubbed her palms together, staying calm. “Busy.”

Sandpapering sounds behind her. “I could help you.”

The Tiffany chandelier dangled precariously above the table. Rustling behind her like clothes shedding made her wince at the thought of a naked priest in her apartment. She was breathing too fast, like she was going to be sick. She inhaled through her nose, drew in air, and counted to three in her head. “I don’t want help.”

“I could help you. I’m a doctor.”

“You’re a
priest
. Some people who have been hurt by a priest don’t want to talk to a guy who wears the same uniform. You ever think about that?”

“I removed the collar.”

If he was naked when she turned around, if that motherfucker thought he was going to get some ass, she was going to break his neck. She had taken martial arts for seven years. Real hand-to-hand fighting martial arts, not a bunch of katas and pretty belts. “You’re just another hypocritical, ass-grabbing priest.”

“No, I’m here to stop the abuse and counsel the victims. That’s what the Holy Office does now. We stop the abuse.”

“So that’s what the Inquisition is doing these day? Abused kids?”

“Pedophile priests. They are sent to a Dominican monastery in Italy.”

“That’s the official story, anyway.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what we tell people.”

“I don’t care, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Have you ever talked about it with someone?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You’re living your life as an untreated survivor of abuse. It’s hurting you.”

“Was that your problem, too?”

He exhaled, and his breath sighed through the apartment, around the columns and plaster crown molding, into her bedroom. “No, I was just a callous ass.”

“I don’t give a shit. Get out.”

“Tell me who he was, and I can send him to the Dominican brothers in Italy.”

“I don’t want your help. And you
don’t
know shit.”

“You are right. I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Get
out
.”

Footsteps. The footsteps on the wooden floor ricocheted off the walls and moldings, and she knew he was coming at her.

He wasn’t going to touch her.

She braced herself.

She wouldn’t let him touch her.

“Leila.”

“Get away from me.” Her hands curled. Her fingertips retreated into her palms like snakes protecting their heads in their coils.

“I’m counseling children at the parish so they won’t hurt like you do. Memory is, as it were, the belly of the soul,’ and these priests are destroying children’s souls.” His whisper hissed like an ill wind near her shoulder, funneled around her ear’s pinna, slipped inside to her tympanic membrane, vibrated there and activated her cochlea, and traveled as neurotransmitters into her brain and she couldn’t block him out. Dante the priest was in her head, insistent, whispering, “But I don’t know how they feel. They’re too young to tell me, and I worry that I’m doing more damage. Tell me.”

“Go away.” The first knuckle of her index finger on her left hand cracked.

He whispered, low and soft, “Tell me what happened to you.”

His long, black shadow spread on the floor beside her, thrown from the stronger lamps in the living room. The glittering chandelier cut blue snowflakes out of the shadow’s human form, like a shifting demon slithering on her floor and grinning at her, or a black-robed priest lying on her bedroom floor while her oblivious mother slept two rooms down the hall.

She said, “Get out of my apartment.”

“Tell me what he did to you.”

“Get
out
.”

The shadow on the wood floor raised its arm, and a black sleeve fluttered on the horizon of Leila’s vision.

She whipped around, grabbed that extended black-clothed arm, and crammed it against his back, shoving up hard.

~~~~~

Chapter Twenty

The presses clattered, churning out long sheaves of newsprint.

Dr. Sloan’s Secret Lover Testifies

By Kirin Oberoi

Yesterday, in the Beverly Sloan murder trial, DA George Grossberg and ADA Georgina Pire elicited testimony from prosecution witness and Neuroscience department secretary Peggy Anne Strum that she had been having an affair with Dr. Conroy Sloan, the victim, that continued until his death. Strum also stated that she and the deceased had planned to marry next February after he had divorced his wife, his alleged murderer, Beverly Sloan.

Divorce is forbidden in the Roman Catholic faith, though widows may remarry in the Church.

~~~~~

Pushed, Dante fell towards the dark bed.

Crimson silk rushed at him out of the dark like a rogue wave. His arm was free, but his elbow tendons had been stretched to their limits. When his hands touched the bedspread, he sprang back, flipped over, and scrambled backward away from her silhouette in the lit doorframe. “Leila, what are you doing?”