Cat In A Diamond Dazzle

Chapter 8

Deep Waters

Lap-swimming was the most relentlessly routine discipline in the physical fitness lexicon.

And yet, Matt often thought while beating his way back and forth through the choppy chlorinated water, the combination of robotic motion and buoyant mental freedom produced a body/mind synergy with virtual reality overtones.

A swimmer became his own iron lung; breathing became a measured necessity rather than a forgotten art. While every muscle fought to keep the body afloat on its liquid treadmill, the mind made unauthorized excursions to the lower depths. Sometimes, while swimming in some pristine, heavenly blue pool, Matt's imagination plummeted to a childhood level of primal fear. He would recall an ancient episode from a Flash Gordon film serial. The-evilemperor-Ming from the planet Mongo, the guy with the Snow-White stepmother upstanding collar, had Flash tossed into a huge water tank . . . with a giant octopus.

Matt's glancing glimpses of sun-dappled water shadows below would suddenly sprout lurking tentacles where there were only pool-grooming hoses or the shadow of a palm blade. Or he would conjure the slice of a shark fin, thanks to more recent Spielberg-ian memories.

Today Matt saw or sensed no monsters of the deep, except the thrashing confusion in his own psyche. Every stroke accentuated the I-am-a-camera viewpoint. The airy, dry world above the Circle Ritz pool became a series of rapid intercuts: sky, palm tree, building edge, ruffle of agitated surface water, deeper water sliced by his body like a gelatinous aquamarine by a gemologist's diamond-edged blade.

Back and forth, his every motion was both ultimate effort and easy birdlike glide through an alien element. Sun. Sky. Spray. Kicking, carving. Thinking without thinking about it. Meeting monsters of the id and ego in the vasty depths. Glimpsing Leviathan in a teacup, Neptune in the iris of a chlorinated eye.

Matt touched warm concrete, pushed away, turned, then churned back the length of the modest pool in eight easy strokes of utter effort.

Sky. Sun. Shadow.

Plough the water into forever-vanishing furrows.

Sun. Sky. Shadow.

Shadow?

Matt reversed himself like a motor, instantly upright, treading water, his face and breath caught between warring elements. His eyelashes strained a liquid veil from his waterlogged vision.

The new silhouette of a bush beside the pool turned into a squatting man, knees jackknifed, elbows akimbo. Primitive man adapted such postures easily; over civilized man didn't have the joints or the humility for it.

Matt squinted into the corona of sunlight surrounding the figure. The black-by-contrast center resolved into lurid focus: Max Kinsella's protective coloring, a Hawaiian shirt.

Matt's squint became a frown. He felt like a grunt surprised by a Viet Cong during R&R.

"Something I can do for you?" he asked, implying that was the last thing he was inclined to do.

"Talk."

Matt grabbed the pool's thick curved lip, sank, gained buoyancy and pushed himself out of the water. He dripped like sunken treasure for a few silent moments.

Kinsella never moved, despite the puddle of water inching toward his tennis-shoed feet. No wonder Matt hadn't heard his approach.

Matt sat dripping on the pool's edge, unhappy and not too worried about showing it. He hated having to leave the protective overcoat of the water, the self-immersion in amniotic fluid, the cover for his almost-nakedness.

That's what he relished about the Circle Ritz. Almost none of its tenants used the pristine but out-of-date pool. No witnesses to his moment of leaving the water, a time when flashes of vulnerability would wring him like cramps. In high school he had avoided gym, using whatever subterfuge he could; he had avoided eyes and questions. Now, he no longer had body bruises to hide, but the habit had transferred to a shame of his body. No matter how much he understood that none of the old pain showed, or how much he was beginning to believe that his body might be a source of pleasure and admiration, he still hated revealing himself. Perhaps his pride feared pity, but no one could see the long-invisible wounds. Perhaps his fear dreaded pride.

Kinsella unbent with a dancer's fluidity. Matt couldn't hear a knee creak, but hastened to rise with him, as if to keep them on the same level, despite the considerable height difference. His usual self-consciousness in situations like this had another, nastier overtone. With Temple it took the form of sexual shyness. Now, Matt felt insufficient in another way, in strength and size. He was eight years old again, and helpless against a man's height and anger. At almost six feet, he had pretty much shaken that inner shrinking sensation, but Kinsella was unusually tall.

"You're quite an athlete," Kinsella commented as he turned a gaudy back on Matt to walk to the table and chairs Electra kept by the pool.

"Not really. I swim some." Matt grimaced at his automatic self-deprecation, grabbed his towel from the foot of an ancient lounge chair and followed. "I don't consider the martial arts work athletics."

"Discipline, then."

Matt shrugged, not bothering to mention his favorite term, meditation.

"I don't see that we have much to talk about," he said. Then he sat, dripping and dabbing at the rivulets sprinting down his face, wishing he could don his clothes.

Kinsella's dubious look seemed practiced. A magician was an actor as much as anything.

"We have something in common," Kinsella said. "Not," he added speedily as Matt maintained a cool so effective he could feel his face freezing, "Temple."

"I wasn't thinking of Temple," Matt answered just as quickly.

"Shame on you," Kinsella suggested smoothly. "She's worth thinking about. Even when she's on retreat."

"Is she on retreat, or in retreat?"

"Probably both. Not that I blame her. Look. You don't know me ... or, rather, you don't know anything about me that isn't misleading. But we have more than Temple in common."

"Such as?"

Matt suspected that he was watching a master of deception at work--on him. Kinsella must thrive on putting other people off balance and keeping them that way. Why had Temple taken off, leaving them--him--alone to confront each other? Matt suspected that she and Electra had skedaddled together, and knew he shouldn't begrudge her a temporary escape. But the last thing on earth he wanted to discuss with Max Kinsella was Temple, especially with their most recent and most intimate evening still lingering on his mind like an uncertain sin.

"So what is our common bond?" Matt inquired, assuming his most nonjudgmental confessional tone but bracing for more surprises.

"Dead men," Kinsella reported with gusto and a flash of cat-green eyes.

"Dead men in general?" Matt asked, still wearing his parish priest mask, though Kinsella had no reason to know of its existence. "Or special dead men?"

"How many dead men do you know?" Kinsella shot back.

"A few. And I guess all dead men are special."

"Hmm. You've heard about mine, I suppose."

"I don't think so."

"Temple didn't tell you about the man that was found dead in a custom cubby-hole in the ceiling above the Goliath gambling tables? Found dead the very night I vanished, never to be seen again ...

until now?"

"You may find your own disappearance astounding, but some of us don't."

"I bore you. Pity. I'm out of practice, I see."

"What did you do while you were missing in action?"

"None of your business." With a charismatically mischievous grin.

"Neither are my dead men."

"There's where you may be wrong, boyo. I think our late unlamented' deaths may be connected."

"How do you even know about the one that was related to me?"

"Would the name Molina mean anything to you?"

" She's talking to you?"

"She?" Kinsella sounded startled.

"She," Matt confirmed. "She wants to interrogate you in the worst way; you haven't obliged her?"

"Not yet, but if she is a viable conduit of information, I'm back now. Shall we say that proximity is everything."

"In that case, I can see why you're a suspect in the Goliath death."

"Not that kind of proximity," Kinsella said. "Dead men." He tilted back until the white plastic chair balanced at a gravity-defying angle. "Think about it. Mine at the Goliath five months ago; yours at the Crystal Phoenix last week."

"Mine? Yours? Death doesn't recognize the possessive."

Kinsella let the chair's front legs snap to the concrete. "Figures of speech are relative. Your dead man is more yours than mine is mine. Yours was a relative."

"How did you--?"

"Temple dropped an allusion; I picked it up and followed it to the morgue."

"Not technically a relative."

"A lot of people we have to live with aren't technically relatives."

"A ... stepfather."

"Close enough to count. Stepparents can be sore points."

"He wasn't a parent to anything but his own indulgences."

Kinsella's quicksilver features hardened with some emotion. Perhaps it was chagrin. "Sorry. I didn't know the connection was that close."

"It wasn't. I hadn't seen him in years."

Kinsella nodded, no doubt calculating the unspoken facts and weighing whether to bring them up or not.

"You never will see him again, as it turned out," he mused a bit morosely.

"But I did. After his death. Maybe."

Kinsella perked up like an Irish setter at the mention of quail. "Why 'maybe'?"

"I hadn't seen the man in seventeen years. In fact, I couldn't really identify him. Time had been hard at work, and death finished the job. He seemed a ... stranger. Death had changed him, his face.

Standing there in the morgue, in that ludicrously Spartan viewing room, I couldn't be sure who it was. "shed the job. He seemed a . . . stranger. Death had changed him, his face. Standing there in the morgue, in that ludicrously Spartan viewing room, I couldn't be sure who it was."

Kinsella mulled that, his long fingers flexing on the shaded plastic table, as if miming a magic trick.

"To be or not to be . . . Cliff Effinger. At least yours has a name and face."

"You didn't know the dead man at the Goliath?"

Kinsella shook his head.

"You still could have killed him."

A pause, then a nod.

"Did you?"

"No." With a slow, sad, sweet smile that acknowledged what such denials were worth on the open market. "Did you kill your stepfather?"

"Unfortunately, no. I don't think so. And no one else is asking, anyway."

Kinsella didn't pursue Matt's odd uncertainty. "What about this Lieutenant Molina?"

"She doesn't give up. She'll still be looking for you."

"Maybe."

"What does that mean?"

"Why did she ask you to identify the body?"

"Because I finally confessed my . . . relationship to Effinger."

"So?"

"She had a dead man in the morgue and she needed someone to confirm his identity."

"No, she didn't."

"What do you mean?"

"This stepfather of yours did the usual bad stepfather things, didn't he?"

Matt felt his muscles stiffen even as he maintained his relaxed posture. Had Temple told Max--?

Kinsella went on as if unaware of Matt's hesitation. "At least he did if he was Cliff Effinger. I asked around. Effinger left his happy hometown for Vegas, drank, gambled, got arrested for all sorts of lowlife offenses that don't add up to much jail time, but do comprise a long, documented trail. Look, Devine. Cliff Effinger left his fingerprints all over this town. Why did this Ms. Molina need you to schlepp on down to the morgue and stare at the copper pennies on his eyes?"

Kinsella's eyes--disconcertingly Midnight-Louie green-- focused on Matt like quizzical laser beams. Confused, Matt clutched at any nearby floating assumptions.

"I'm sure Lieutenant Molina had a reason--"

"So am I," Kinsella put in, with feeling. He leaned forward on the little chair, propping his forearms on his thighs. "Think about it. There was no reason to put you through that charade."

"Sometimes," Matt answered slowly, "women like that want you to confront yourself."

"She's that mean?"

"Not mean. Just in a position of authority with a benign sense of mission." He remembered Sister Seraphina prodding him into performing an anointing of the sick on Miss Tyler. The elderly nun had wanted him to face the fact that his former priesthood was always with him. Maybe Molina had wanted him to face his stepfather's death and his own hatred of the man. But she was a police detective, not a therapist. Besides, she couldn't have known about Effinger's family abuse, unless Temple had told her, and Temple was hardly on speaking terms with either Molina or Kinsella these days.

Speak of the devil. He looked up again to find Kinsella studying him. Except for the eyes, Max Kinsella was not a mesmerizingly handsome man. His face was angular and intelligent, his features so mobile that one glimpsed many men behind the frequently exchanged masks. Matt had encountered such chimerical personalities before; everyone had concealed a secret and insecure core. Every one could have charmed the snake off the Tree of All Knowledge in Eden.

"You're right," Matt admitted, wondering why he hated that fact so much, hated it almost as much as being virtually naked before a man in a Hawaiian shirt. "Having me identify a man with a police record doesn't make sense. I was so... confused at the time, that never dawned on me."

"Trust the police to confuse you. So you hadn't seen your stepfather in years?"

Matt nodded.

"And did it do you any good?"

"Did what?"

"Seeing him dead?"

"No."

"Hmmm. You weren't surprised by his manner of death, though?"

"He left home when I was sixteen."

"Voluntarily?"

Matt shrugged. He wasn't going to perform a post mortem on his family life for the benefit of the Mystifying Max.

"Maybe you don't care what he was up to all those years since then. I do, though."

"Why?"

The man stared at him as Midnight Louie was wont to do: an expression impassive, yet superior, and even vaguely prodding. An unspoken "Well?"

Matt saw the light, and didn't like it. "You're not sure Cliff Eftuv ger is dead, are you?"

"Look at me. The rumors of my demise were false."

Matt forgot Kinsella for once, plunging again into the cool, shifting ocean of the past. "I'd like to know for sure, for my mother's sake," he admitted despite himself.

"For your mother's sake." Repeated sardonically. "Well, then." Kinsella clapped flat palms to the tabletop. The gesture should have hurt. He grinned. "I'd say that we have more than one common interest. Let's forget our unflattering assumptions about each other and look into our pair of dead men."

"You're a loner. Why the buddy act?"

"I'm also supposed to be missing. I try to keep my personal appearances to a bare minimum."

Matt winced at the expression.

"Besides," Kinsella said, "it's better for Temple if most of the folk out there still think so. I could use a front man."

Matt laughed. "Another magic act, with me as the distraction. What do I get out of this?"

"You may find out who killed your stepfather, and why. Or . . . you may find out that he still needs killing."

"And why would I care?"

"Because, trust me, you do," Kinsella said, rising. "You can't help it."