Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 11

A Thrush in the Bush ...

"I'm sorry," Matt said. "I know I've left you dangling lately; at least I feel like I have."

"Is that what the Ethel M candy and this is all about?" Temple glanced around the restaurant, a dimly lit place as cozy as the small brass lamps that warmed every table, even their intimate, for-two model. "An apology?"

Matt's smile was softer than the incandescent light filtered through their lamp's pleated, mauve chiffon shade. "And I might need some help," was his sheepish answer.

"That's what friends are for," Temple said briskly, unrolling a forest green linen napkin that covered her meager lap like a lawn.

Despite her delight at Matt's sudden invitation to ''a nice dinner," despite this slightly hokey, undeniably romantic atmosphere, she wasn't going to make the classic Casablanca mistake of expecting too much. A kiss is just a kiss, after all.

Especially one committed at a high school prom held on the high desert more than fifteen years too late.

Matt moved his knife and spoon into more perfect union with the fork opposite, so they bracketed the empty, white linen space like spit-polished pewter soldiers on parade.

The "Blue Dahlia" was truly a find beyond the normal reach of a social novice like Matt, Temple thought. How on earth had Max Kinsella--master discoverer of the underestimated asset--missed this gem? Maybe the restaurant was too new; Max was definitely old news now.

Matt, on the other hand, was a front-page item, at least to her. Tonight he wore a lightweight ivory blazer she had never seen before over an open necked pale yellow shirt. She was glad she had broken out her green silk Hanae Mori dress; tonight might be an occasion, after all.

"After all you ... did for me," he was saying, "I feel that I've been derelict--"

"You're the world's worst delinquent all right, Devine," she interrupted. *'Listen: you didn't have to wine and dine me in retaliation for my makeshift prom night on the Big Sandy. That was just an experiment; me being a bit madcap . . . wild, impulsive creature that I am."

Her nonsense didn't break the ice, for there was none, but it broke through the thin skin of self-justification that was draping Matt like a cocoon. Temple hated apologies, especially when they were unnecessary.

Maybe her tactic worked, for Matt decided to quit tiptoeing around the reason for this evening out like a wild duck waddling around the dangerous puzzle of an ice-fishing hole. He inched his spoon a trifle closer to the knife--now was that a Freudian slip or what? Temple speculated--took a visible breath and began.

''I didn't end up in Las Vegas by accident. Temple."

She refrained from saying, too bad, and adding that she had always figured him to be a member of Gamblers Anonymous on the run from a cabal of mob accountants in New Jersey.

"I'm , . . looking for someone," he said.

She refrained from saying that almost everybody is.

'I'm . . . looking for a man."

Oh, no! Was this true confession time? Had Matt discovered that he was gay, after all? Well, hell, a thoroughly modern woman could use a good gay friend or two, of either sex, but it helped a lot if she didn't find them physically attractive. Temple sipped from her water goblet, trying to keep the ice cubes from clicking against her teeth. They were sexy, crystal- clear ice cubes, too, probably made with distilled water. Oh, well. The Blue Dahlia made an ideal romantic rendezvous, but there was no point in being flattered now.

"I've never been here before." Matt had noticed her looking around. ''I hope it's all right."

'Terrific." Temple resisted the urge to let a cold cube slide into her mouth so she could crack her teeth down on it and see if het fillings held.

''He's my father."

"Huh?" Temple was startled enough to scan the room again.

"The man I'm looking for," Matt said patiently.

Temple prided herself on not letting any relief show, although underneath the table her toes uncurled against the satin-smooth purple leather lining her best Kelly-green high heels. "Why the big secret, then?"

Matt wasn't quite listening, at least to her. "He's my stepfather, actually."

She nodded. This was going to be a complex night, given how Matt was leaking vital information at 33 1/3 speed. Laser disc, lightning-fast he was not.

That meant this information was important to him, that and the shamed way the word

"stepfather" sidled out of his mouth like a mud-spattered dog peeking from under the best couch. It also told Temple that this was not to be the romantic evening out that she might be inclined to hope for.

She wriggled her tootsies free of the confining toes of her shoes. Thanks to an old-fashioned floor-length tablecloth, no one could see her informality. No one could see her play footsie with Matt, either, because it wasn't going to happen, at least not tonight.

One thing that was going to happen tonight had her second-most-primitive urge polishing its pistons, though: curiosity. Matt was finally going to squeeze out some details about his family.

Temple slid her knife to line up with the tines of Matt's meticulously placed fork opposite her. ''Is he a good stepfather or a bad stepfather?'' she asked carefully.

Matt sighed again, a short, frustrated huff of air. ''Maybe okay by some people's lights. Bad by mine."

She nodded, not surprised.

Having gone this far, Matt must have decided to plunge in with both feet. His eyes and fingers fussed at the arrangement of the tableware while his voice and mouth rattled off a messy cornucopia of facts.

"My real father--odd expression, isn't it?--left my mother while I was still an infant. I don't know why, and she would never say. I knew her as a single mother, working all day and worrying all night. I guess finding a man to take care of her answered half of that unhappy equation. They got married, of course. I wish they hadn't; then he wouldn't have been real, my fake father. But they did. No big ceremony, but a church wedding. Marriage was it for women in St. Stanislaus parish, even as recently as the liberating sixties; that, the single life, or living in sin, which was as good as the streets for a Catholic woman. So she married him, and then we were all stuck. For eternity."

"You got away," Temple observed.

"Escaped, you mean. You're probably right. Into the neighborhood when I could, later into school. Finally into the seminary."

"What was wrong with him?"

"He drank. Just beer. Mom said at first, but 'just beer' can drown even a dry alcoholic, and he was a career beer-drinker. That's what men did in poor, working-class neighborhoods in Chicago. They drank. They still do. Only with him, the hard stuff came later."

"Did you have brothers or sisters?"

Matt's head shake was a gesture so abrupt and tight it resembled a tiny shudder. No, thank God, it seemed to say.

"After my real father left, there were no others. I think--"

Temple waited, beginning to understand what it must have been like for Catholic priests in the old days, behind their dark wooden confessional doors, listening and waiting and wondering when to speak, when not to speak.

Matt looked up, his expression both guarded and searing. "I think when my mother found out what my stepfather was really like, she made sure there were no more children." His eyes shut. ''It would have been a sin, of course. A mortal sin. She didn't go to confession much after he came along."

''Is your mother . . . still alive?"

"Sure." He seemed surprised by her question, which was natural, since everything he spoke of seemed steeped in the bitter dregs of days-gone-by. "She still lives in the parish. Retired.

Goes to confession now. He left, years ago, but after I did. She was a . . . beautiful woman."

"How many years ago did he leave? How old--"

"Was I?" Matt's mouth stretched clothesline tight before he spoke again. "When he left?

Sixteen. It was before I went into the seminary. I never would have left her alone with him."

"So . . . why do you want to find him now?"

Matt shook his head. "I was just a kid then. Maybe I'm still just a kid in a lot of ways. I don't .

. . understand. I need to understand that before I can understand"--his pale hands spread in the lamplight, over the empty place setting, as if offering an unconscious blessing on ...

nothingness--"this."

"Where you are today, you mean?" she prompted.

This time his smile was ironic, and personal, and quite charming. "Where I was before today.

But why I'm looking for him isn't the reason I asked you here. It's how. I've been trying in my own clumsy way to make inquiries, and nothing seems promising. I thought you might have an idea or two. You know how to get things done."

"Certain things." Temple sighed in her turn. How touching that Matt found her the Quintessential Organizer, the Fixer, the Solver. "Why do you think he's here in Las Vegas?"

Matt shrugged. "That was the only thing he cared about, cutting out on Mom and me and spending a few days--and half her paycheck--in Las Vegas. I came to regard the city as a kind of personal savior, after a while. For all its Sodom and Gomorrah reputation, it got him out of our house and our hair."

"But, Matt, that was--'' Temple was not adept at mental math, so there was a telling pause while she calculated and he hung on her every grimace.

"Seventeen years ago,'' he finally furnished for her.

''Seventeen years. So much has changed in Las Vegas since then, so many new places to gamble elsewhere in the country have cropped up since then. Your stepfather might have moved on to Atlantic City, or the new riverboat establishments near Chicago. He might be--''

''Dead,'' Matt finished for her, his tone as grim and final as this ultimate in four-letter words.

She nodded. "Maybe you'd be better off if he was."

"I'd be better off knowing that's for sure."

"Can I ask one . . . personal question?"

"You will anyway."

"Why not look for your . . . real father?"

Matt looked dumbfounded. "He's not real to me. He's not the one who--"

Temple hung on every word, recognizing the importance of this answer, above all the others.

Matt must have recognized it, too. He suddenly grew silent, leaving her to twist slowly in the weightless vacuum of his unfinished phrase. " The one who ..." Who what? Hung the moon?

Killed the goose that laid the golden egg? Made a priest out of young Matt Devine?

"Was your stepfather's last name Devine?" she asked,

"No. That was my birth father's name. Mom went back to it after he left. I had never taken his name."

"Then your mother must account for the Polish in you."

"Yeah. Kaczkowski. I swear to God," he added, smiling. "Devine, I don't know. Might be Gaelic."

Gaelic? Like Kinsella? Oh, no! "Hey," Temple said, recovering, "at least your real father left you a pronounceable last name; that's something."

He nodded, lost again in his quandary.

"As for your stepfather, from what I've seen of Las Vegas regulars, they stay pretty faithful to the old town. What are you doing, checking the casinos and hotels for his name?"

"Yeah." He hesitated. Temple suspected that he was coming to the issue that really troubled him, and that more was troubling him than his family history. ''And lying a lot." "Why?"

"Can you get information from unsuspecting people without lying a lot?"

While Temple considered that question, a cocktail waitress in a gathered skirt about a centimeter longer than the control-top line on her off-black pantyhose sauntered by to offer them menus and take drink orders.

Matt kept his nose in the eyebrow-tall menu and his eyes on the entrees, though Temple noticed that the waitress's skirt was just the right height to scratch his nose, were it or she so inclined.

Temple always wondered why the taller the woman, the shorter the skirt; on her this ebony ruffle would be nearly knee-length. Glancing around, she saw that the serving staff were all dressed in sophisticated black-and-white. Maybe Central Casting had sent them over from the nightclub set in a forties movie. The men wore tuxes and pencil-thin mustaches. The women wore lots of abbreviated black with pencil-thin white-lace ruffles in all the right places, from bustier to bustle, including the black satin pillbox hats tilted over their right eyebrows like vintage bellboy caps. Caaall for PhilUllip Moooor-ris the, Cat, perhaps? Hot-cha-cha. Where is Jimmy Durante when you really need him?

Matt emerged from his menu only when the waitress had sashayed away. He leaned across the snowy linen to Temple. He spoke sotto voice, despite the growing buzz of other diners.

"This place was supposed to be quiet and have some good food." Matt frowned. "I didn't know about the, er, ambiance."

''I suppose all this black-and-white is a rather perverse reminder of your past," Temple couldn't resist commenting.

Matt remained unruffled, despite the environment and despite suffering from the recent embarrassment of revealing a past. ''Most of the religious I knew were post-habit days," he said to quash her sense of mischief. ''I was referring to the noise level."

Temple noticed only then that a trio had appeared in a dim corner lanced by needles of spotlight. A tenor saxophone was running up and down its liquid metal trills, while a snare drum in the background emulated a soft, rhythmic rattlesnake. A piano's bluesy, throaty tinkle underlay it all like a smoker's cough.

''Isn't it odd," she said, "that they're making all these nun movies--like Sister Act and Nunsense --only now that nuns wear civilian dress?"

"Now it's safe. Less chance of offending a habit-wearing hardliner these days."

"I guess people have always been fascinated by priests and nuns," Temple mused. "First there's the distinctive uniform; then there's the celibacy mystique."

"I've never heard celibacy called a 'mystique' before," Matt said dryly, leaning back to make room for the waitress and her lethal ruffled hem. She deposited a lowball glass and a long-stemmed, slow sip of leg before him at one and the same instant.

"What's that?" Temple stared at the dark, murky drink in front of Matt, not having noticed his order.

"A Black Russian. What's yours?" He nodded at her long-stemmed glass.

"A White Lady. I felt like something . . . elegant. At least we're in tune with the color scheme."

They laughed and lifted their glasses. Then they sipped their drinks and began to talk of more important things, like themselves.

Matt had another confession to make. "I'm glad that you like the place, and that you could come tonight. I was worried that you might think I was avoiding you."

"I know you've got commitments. Matt. Besides, I've been busy too."

"So I noticed. With what?"

"Oh, it's fabulous." Temple's natural optimism loved an audience to bubble over on. 'The Crystal Phoenix has hired me to reposition the hotel for the new family market. That's like playing Tinkerbell with a whole, real little world, a magic kingdom without Disney's capital letters, or capital investment. And then I was roped into working on a Gridiron skit-- you know; the annual political satire show like in Washington. Awful Crawford is show chairman this year and got writer's block on a production number, so I've invented the most outrageous, unbelievable Theme-Hotel-from-Hell. Trying to out Vegas is a real challenge."

"I bet, but why bail out Buchanan? Isn't he your bete noir?"

"Black beast' is too good a phrase for the lowlife! Bargain-basement bastard is more like it."

Temple settled down, not wanting to ruin a lovely evening. '*But my skit is lots of fun. Maybe you, uh, might want to go to the Gridiron. With me. To see it performed, I mean."

''Sounds great. If . . . my exploits as an amateur P.I. don't require me to be elsewhere."

Temple nodded her understanding, already planning what she would wear to the Big Event.

She'd never had a date for a Gridiron before. Not in Minneapolis, and not even here. Last year, Max had a conflicting show at the other end of the Strip; even a professional magician couldn't be in two places at once. Temple winced to recall that less than a year ago, she and Max had still been together.

In the background, a torch singer was tuning up the vocal chords. Temple let a few seductive riffs of sound coil around her blue mood like the cigarette smoke nicely absent from the restaurant. In seconds, she was back in the present, and pleased to be there. Umm, this place was a genuine find. So romantic. Matt was looking soulful, thanking her again for being understanding.

"I'm so lucky that you live at the Circle Ritz, too," he was saying. "It's like I was . . . guided . . .

there. Mrs. Lark, Electra, has been so supportive, and you, you're my 'open sesame'--"

Temple's tootsies curled again, sans shoes but with pleasure, as if they were the turned-up toes on an Arabian Nights slipper.

''It's amazing,'' Matt went on, ''how many doors you've opened for me. To the past, and to the future."

The music had assumed a familiar rhythm. You must remember this. Temple told herself. A kiss is just a kiss. A new day is just another sunrise. Don't blow it. Don't fixate on old news.

A woman's low, dusky voice had joined the sax's soulful whine. Burgundy dark and deep, it moved from times gone by to singing of the man that got away. Then came the drums'

relentless, coital beat, like the rain and the rocking chair and the train pumping its iron-hearted way out of town.

And after that, the beat/beat/beat of the tom-toms, night and day. And the man that got away. And the frail that wails near the jail. House. Jailhouse rock. No, wrong song. Wrong era.

Wrong time. A kiss is just a kiss, and fundamental rules apply. Always. No matter how many kisses, how many near-misses. As time goes by. As time goes bye-bye.

"Temple." Matt leaned nearer, looking concerned.

She saw him through a musical mirage of stained glass, as if through a rain-rippled train window and he was leaving town, or she was, and nobody could run fast enough to reach the fleeing coach, to hear the rhythm, catch the beat, listen to the song.

Two and woo, love and you, missing and kissing and such a familiar song, a familiar voice ...

Matt's hand covered Temple's on the table. He still looked concerned. Concerned is nice, but

. . . dammit!

Temple twisted away from Matt, leaving her hand in his custody, like a living creature coiled in the safety of its shell. She turned to the murky stage, to the sleet of bright, piercing spotlights and the melody so familiar, in reprise.

The singer sat sharp as a silhouette in a pinspot, a brunette butterfly pinned on white damask . . . her skin tapioca satin, the flower in her hair a dark, velvet growth. Her figure was as murky as an El Greco portrait, her features carved from backlit salt.

She sang.

The old, slow-train blues classics.

In a deep, true alto that made Temple's bones vibrate like the strings of an abandoned cello in a warehouse.

She made everything moot. The past. The present. The man in black. The man in blond. She was ... so familiar, like the song and the ache.

"Matt--!" Temple managed to warn him with the last, surprised breath that was in her.

At last he turned away from her toward the shadowed, tiny stage that had caught Temple like a light-jeweled net in a silver sea.

The announcer, wherever he was, took this opportunity to add a slick, baritone coda to the night's first set,

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, an appreciative round of applause for our own 'Blue Dahlia'--our mistress of moody blue mystification, the incomparable Carmen."

"Of course. Carmen," Temple breathed, not surprised so much by the name, but by its presence here. "Makes you wonder what the bloody hell the 'R.' stands for!"

"Carmen?" Matt repeated with maddening confusion. "Isn't that--is it possible? Lieutenant Molina?"