Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 11

Picture Perfect

When the phone rang, Matt was sta nding in the kitchen eating his usual noon brunch of cereal, yogurt and an orange.

He stared at the instrument, usually silent. When his phone did ring, it was rarely a friend--

he had practically none--or a relative--they were all distant or dead. Usually it was unwelcome news.

Chewing, he took his time heading for it, wondering if the high-tech yodel would stop before he could get there. With no answering machine, the caller would forever remain a mystery.

Mysteries didn't bother Matt. He was used to keeping a respectful distance from the Unknowable. Knowing too much was the enemy.

He picked up the phone, mouth clear. "Hello?"

"Molina," was all she said, and all she had to say. "Got a pencil handy?"

"Pen." He patted his shirt pocket for the drugstore Rollerball always clipped there. A pen was an employee's best friend at ConTact.

"Take this down: Janice Flanders," she went on before he could even click the point out.

"Sixteen Forty-nine Wilder Lane. Five -five -five, seven-two -four- eight.

Matt scribbled the information one-handed on the phone-book cover's skimpy white border. "What--?"

"Most of the time we use computer identification programs. Used to rely more on actual artists. This is one of the best. You might try her on your phantom stepfather."

"Thanks, but I thought--"

"Just let me know if this leads anywhere."

He jerked the phone away from his ear. The dial tone suddenly buzzed there like an angry hornet. Whew. Molina wouldn't earn any public-relations awards with her tone on that call.

He felt dully resentful, like a kid who's had to deal with a teacher who's snappish for no known reason. He felt punished rather than assisted. He would have mentioned her rudeness, but she was gone too fast to challenge.

The name and numbers he had slashed down were barely readable. He almost felt like forgetting them. Help this surly he didn't need ...

But, then, guardian angels don't always come clothed in feathers and cumulus clouds; sometimes they wear sackcloth and ashes. Matt smiled wryly. Molina probably hated helping him out on what she judged a wild-goose chase. She probably hated being helpful. Heck, she probably hated him. That was a new thought; people usually liked him. Matt considered. Maybe he was losing his polite seminary edge.

No sense in putting this off. He dialed the number, waited a decent number of rings, and was rewarded on the fifth one.

"Flanders Folios." The voice was friendly but briskly businesslike.

"I'm calling for Janice Flanders."

"Speaking."

"My name is Matt Devine. Lieutenant Molina at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department recommended you. I'm trying to find someone I glimpsed a few days ago."

"Is this police business?"

"No, personal. Private."

"Who did you say--?"

"Matt Devine."

"No, the officer's name."

"Oh. Molina."

A pause. "Don't remember working for a Molina. He been there long?"

"It's a she, and I don't know."

"When do you need the sketch?"

"Whenever's convenient. I, ah, work evenings, so it'd have to be during the afternoon hours."

"Great! All my clients are on opposite schedules. Listen, why don't you come over now; we can discuss details when you see what I've got in my studio."

He agreed, she told him rough directions and that was that. Matt hunted up his checkbook, then tried to find a place to carry it. A moderate climate called for casual dress and checkbooks fit best inside jacket breast pockets. He settled on taking his nylon windbreaker and stuffing the checkbook in the side pocket. Before he left, he consulted the slimmer book under the tabletop phone book, a street guide to Las Vegas/Henderson.

From the squirmy lines of her neighborhood streets, it was a newer development. He prayed his checkbook was up to commissioning the first portrait Cliff Effinger had ever had. For the first time since Molina's call, a chill of excitement gripped him. Would this artist really be able to conjure an identifiable likeness from the scattered motes of Matt's memory?

*******************

The neighborhood lived up to his expectations, and had been that way for perhaps fifteen years. The lots were larger of lawn and the homes lower of roofline than the trendy new homes sprouting ski-slope roofs and winking expanses of Palladium windows in nearby Henderson.

Still, the watered grass and clipped bushes rustled of California-ranch affluence. The Hesketh Vampire's raunchy motor seemed obscene on this decorously deserted street. Matt turned the motorcycle into the long concrete driveway and parked it behind a red Jeep Cherokee.

The walkway led to a roofed portico. White tatters of Halloween ghost figures fluttered among the front plantings. Inside the front window, a kitchen-witch figure with a twig broomstick peered out.

When Matt rang the bell, he waited a long time; so long that he began the useless debate of wondering whether it worked, and how long he could decently wait before trying it again.

The wood door swept open as if presenting a jack-in-the-box, only this was a Janice-in-the-box. He wondered if the box contained chalk, or Crayolas.

She opened the outer glass door. "Mr. Devine?"

At his nod she stepped aside to admit him. The darkness inside was disorienting. In bright climes, houses are always shadowed shocks of unseen terrain.

"Come on back to my studio."

He followed, glimpsing a formal living room and dining room before going down a long hall, turning into another hall, passing closed doors and finally emerging into what must have originally been a back bedroom.

Now it was a combination solarium/studio, the back wall and ceiling pushed out and up into two massive wings of glass. Everything was white--the composition floor, the painted walls, the slip-covered daybed in one corner. An outside patio, its boundaries marked by hanging baskets of bright flowers, extended beyond the sight line to parallel the family room and kitchen, he would guess.

"Quite a contrast, isn't it?" she asked with a grin. "I hate these Sun Belt houses--all dim hallways and plantation-shuttered windows. It makes sense to keep out the heat and the sun, but back here I wanted light, and I'm willing to pay to keep the studio cool."

"This part of the house is below the peak of the roof, facing north, isn't it? So you get indirect light, anyway."

"You have an artist's eye. This assignment should be easy."

"Not an artist's eye. Maybe a sense of direction. I grew up in the frozen north, where we're always trying to face things south. Here, the opposite applies."

"Amen. Have a seat."

The seat was white vintage wicker, with a floral-covered pad and a round, framing back.

"This is charming," Matt couldn't help commenting, his eyes finally adjusting to the lavish spill of daylight.

He could have said as much of his hostess. Janice Flanders sounded like an accountant, someone plain and no-nonsense who did people's taxes. This woman was not particularly frilly, but much more feminine than her name. She wore fashionably faded jeans that looked as if they'd gotten that way through wear rather than manipulation. Her shirt was loose and vaguely Native American in its soft, desert colors.

Long supple beaded earrings in iridescent earth tones undulated like small, personal serpents from her ears. Her ash-blond hair was anchored at her nape in a silver clip. And a slim belt of conchos circled her narrow waist.

He remembered to look at her feet last, shame on him! Temple would definitely find nothing there to envy: soft chamois moccasins, also beaded and probably Native American work.

"It's kind of you to see me so quickly," he said.

"Kind, nothing." Her earrings shimmied like a sandstorm around her lightly tanned skin. "I can use the commission. I do a lot of family portraits now. Mall caricatures now and then.

Mostly evening and weekend work. I enjoy consulting during the weekday hours."

"What will this involve?"

"Me asking questions, you answering, describing. Who do you want me to sketch?"

"A man I knew years ago, and thought I saw a few evenings ago. It may be impossible--"

"Don't even think that." She laughingly leaned forward, fanned a hand with long, thin tanned fingers. Her left hand. Ringless.

"All right. But I don't know what this... project will cost... Miss Flanders."

Her hands fanned and gestured again. Rings circled the forefinger and fourth finger of her right hand. Amethyst, amber. "I usually get two hundred. It takes, maybe an hour. I draw as you talk. Is that okay?"

"Fine. If a check's all right--?"

"Sure. You were referred by the police, weren't you?"

"By a particular police lieutenant."

"A woman." She sounded impressed. "Would you like something to drink before we begin?

It helps to have something to worry at while you're trying to remember. Lemonade? Iced tea?"

He requested the iced tea. Sipping it might disguise any bitter twist of the lips as he described Cliff Effinger to this sunny, sophisticated woman a world away from harsh Chicago winters and harsher domestic realities.

She vanished through a doorway he hadn't noticed, one that connected to the kitchen and family room he had theorized. Neither were as sun-infused as this room, but when he stood to see the vista, they were as clean, cleverly accoutered and inviting.

"Decorating must be a hobby of yours," he called into the kitchen, seeing no one, but hearing the pleasant clatter and clink of glassware.

"I'm a compulsively visual person," she caroled back. "My fellow students at RISD would blanch at the western mode of design, but I've grown to love it."

"Risdee?"

"Rhode Island School of Design."

She came back into the room on that explanation, bearing a Coca-Cola tray topped off with tall glasses of amber tea.

Matt took the tray from her to place it on the low table before the sofa/daybed before resuming his seat. He nodded at the empty easel in the room's far corner.

"You paint as well as sketch, then?"

"Does a duck waddle? I'll show you some of my work after our session." She sipped some tea, curled her long legs under her on the muslin-covered daybed and picked up a large sketching pad leaning against the daybed leg.

The sketching pencil was one of many fanned in a tall ceramic vase, like an arrangement of dried leaves.

Before Matt knew it, he was launched on his artistic inquisition.

"A man. Does he have a criminal record?"

"A . . . petty one."

"And you saw him at twilight."

Matt nodded, then realized that she was already slashing in lines and curves and watching him only intermittently. "Yeah, that dusky time when you don't know whether the semaphore lights are on or off."

"I know just the moment you mean! One of my favorites--if you're off in the desert looking at the horizon, instead of in Las Vegas waiting on a traffic light."

Her laughter was infectious. Matt found himself relaxing, even though he was reliving one of the more traumatic moments of his current life.

"So why were you at that particular traffic light?"

"I was on my way to work."

"Right. You work nights. What kind of work?"

"I'm a hot-line counselor."

Her eyes, hazelnut-golden, flicked up with approval. "Great! But you're used to hearing people, not seeing them."

"True. Very true. I had only a glimpse, that's the problem--"

"There are no problems when you're working with a sketch artist. We thrive on reconstruction. Where was he?"

"Crossing the street in front of me."

"How old is he?"

Matt had figured this out long ago, and contemplated it every birthday. "Sixty-three."

"Tall man? Short? Walk with a stoop?"

"I thought you .. . that the idea was to get a face."

"Face it is, but it helps to know context."

"Medium height. Except he had that loping, rangy, sort of swaggering walk."

"Sweeney among the nightingales?"

Matt was dumbfounded. "You know Eliot?"

"Not personally." She looked up to grin. "A wonderful image, though, isn't it? Neanderthal man swinging those calf-dusting fingertips among the fragile-throated birds fit only for an emperor. Eliot is so visual."

"I thought. . . cerebral."

Janice shrugged, her sketching hand never still.

What could she be sketching already, Matt wondered. Her eyes darted up, to him, for only a moment, as swift as the fan of butterfly wings. Her eyes were hard and concentrated, and her smile looked fixed. Still, her face was a pleasant mask that he couldn't read, as if a god had inhabited her.

"Sixty-three. And still vigorous."

"I suppose. He was walking fast. The Strip is wide but he kept up with--was ahead of--the crowd. And he wore a hat."

"Hat. Hard hat? Baseball cap?"

"Western hat."

"Stetson?"

"I don't know. Uh, pale, but dirty pale. Dented crown."

"And the brim?"

"A hat brim. Average. For a cowboy hat, I guess." Matt felt as if he were failing elementary spelling.

Janice smiled and tilted her sketchpad toward him. He could see the apt, rough lines of a Western hat above an empty oval of face. "That it?"

"No. The crown was lower. There were some . . . gewgaws on a hatband."

She tilted the pad back to her, left hand working rhythmically. Left-handed women were rare, especially left-handed women artists, he would bet.

He became aware of a click-click- click noise somewhere in the house, and lifted up his head to hear better. She didn't look up.

"Nothing to worry about, Matt. The kids are off at computer camp for two weeks."

"I hear ... clicking."

"Or ticking?" She smiled, still not looking up. Her earrings trembled with the slashing movements of her cocked left arm.

"A clock?"

"I collect old clocks. I like that sound of time tsking away."

"I didn't hear it before."

"Time's like that. Sneaks up on you. Like this Cliff Efftnger. What kind of nose?"

Nose. How often do you study another person's nose? Maybe once, after you've punched him in the face and he's lying on the floor, groggy, not quite focusing on you ...

"Ah, average nose. A little crooked in the middle."

"Fighter?"

"Loser," Matt said before he could stop himself. Calling what Cliff Effinger did with his fists

"fighting" was like saying a rooster sang Mozart opera.

Janice nodded. "Face showed it?"

"Yeah. It had . . . battered edges, some partly age and drink, some . . . abuse. Maybe self-abuse, maybe not."

"Drunks fall on their faces a lot. They get a certain look. Kinda ... smashed." She grinned at her double entendre.

"How do you know these things?"

Level, sharp eyes looked up. "I watch. That's my job. I like sketching criminals. Their faces are living rap sheets. They are types, you know. How you live shows in your face. Not everyone can see it. That's why I'm asked to do criminal reconstruction sketches."

"Does it bother you ever? Seeing so much in faces."

Janice seamed her lips shut as she shook her head, making the bead-snakes in her ears shimmy. "I rarely have to confront the faces I draw from descriptions. I only see their damage in the people I interview."

He nodded. He had dealt with the aftermath of other people's acts too. Always the real perpetrators were faint and far away, lurking somewhere beyond the victim's taut vocal chords and shuddering breaths and shrouded eyes. You weren't supposed to call them v ictims, but

"survivors." Yet they were both, and always would be, just as he was.

Matt hadn't realized he had sighed until he heard it between the ticks of the hidden clock.

"Eyes," she said, demanding each fragment of face in piecemeal order.

Eyes. Color? Like roiled water, maybe, half mud, half some viscous venom. "Hazel," he suggested, trying to remember if Molina had ever mentioned Effinger's rap-sheet statistics. He thought not. "I should have asked the lieutenant for those details."

"Doesn't matter." Janice kept her expression pleasant, peaceful. "I don't sketch in color. I meant their shape, size, expression."

"Small eyes. Lost in himself. Squinting all the time, angling, maneuvering, sizing up the situation."

"Shifty? Like in the old detective stories."

"Yeah, shifty. You coming up with a cartoon?"

"Not quite." She hummed as she sketched. "Any identifying marks?"

"Nothing, unless you'd consider sideburns that."

"Sideburns? Shades of Elvis. Did he wear sunglasses, by the way?"

"Yeah. I forgot that. Aviator-style, like a million other guys in Las Vegas."

"Maybe three million," she suggested gently. "I'll do a small inset with the sunglasses on."

"Thanks. Guess he only wears them outside. He was duded up in Western; that's how I saw him."

"A new look for him?"

"Very." But then Matt's memory had fixed this man in the amber flypaper of the past.

Janice turned the pad toward him again. The oval was no longer blank. Matt was ambushed by a resemblance he recognized. "That's amazing."

"Not done yet. What needs changing?"

He studied it hopelessly. That there was even a ghost of a resemblance to Cliff Effinger struck him as a miracle. That it could be better struck him as impossible. How could he remember details of a face that had aged sixteen years since he'd last seen it up close and personal?

"Teeth," he remembered suddenly. "A gold one at the left upper rear. And his lips disappeared when he smiled."

"Bet he didn't smile often."

"You'd win. But the upper lip was longer, or the space between the nose and the upper lip, kinda horsey. And his chin wasn't that strong. It sloped down into his neck."

"Ah, Mr. Sweeney's really coming along now. Get those nightingales into their cages."

She flashed him a smile as warm as the iced tea had become in its glass. Melted ice had thinned the drink to the washed-out color of river-water.

She finally turned the sketchpad toward him again. She had taken each feature and seamed it sixty-three years' worth. Finally they came together. An old man now, Matt thought with some wonder, some resentment at the unswerving tick of time. He's an old man now. He shut his eyes to picture the body in the morgue viewing chamber. Right age, right build, vaguely right face. But this ... Matt blinked at the pad, then took it as she relinquished custody. This was a nightmare come to two-dimensional life. If his mother saw it--

"Great," he said, meaning it. "I can't believe you did this so quickly."

The clock promptly bonged the quarter hour. She glanced at the turquoise-and-coral-banded watch on her right wrist. "Quickly? You've been here just under two hours."

"Really? It seemed like minutes." Then he stopped, because her smile had softened and become . . . what? Conspiratorial? Knowing? What had he said? What had he said wrong?

"Time flies when I'm sketching," she said. "It's my form of therapy." She flipped the top sheet over Cliff Effinger, wiping away his sneering (how did she know that?), seamed face with the previous page, with .. . Matt's own likeness.

"When . . . how did you do that?"

"To warm up when we were first talking." She tilted her head to study her work, his face.

"Usually good-looking people are a bore to draw. Everything is surface, and the kind of charm that goes with good looks freezes into a kind of mask early on."

"It doesn't look like me," Matt said, almost to himself, then caught the implication. "I mean, it does, but I don't see myself that way."

"Good. I feel most successful when my subjects see themselves in a different way. You can have this one too."

"I'll pay extra," he began, plumbing the windbreaker pockets trying to remember where he'd put the checkbook.

Her be-ringed right hand waved away his offer. "I only take money for sketching the absent on these assignments. Come on, I promised to show you my paintings."

He reluctantly left the studio to follow her, left behind the naked sketchpad with its incriminating likenesses, of Cliff Effinger, of himself.

In the hall she pushed a button. Track fixtures all along the ceiling splashed slashes of light on the huge canvases lining the walls. It was like touring a Byzantine gallery--formal figures, almost totemic, men and women touched with barbarian flashes of gold leaf. He couldn't tell if they were shamans or saints, often if they were male or female, but all shared the trait of great personal power, of a brooding bitter spirituality that was quite the opposite of the sunny studio with the flower patterns splattered against white wicker.

He followed her into the main rooms to find the painting sequence commanding the wood-paneled walls there like Easter Island colossi flattened into pigment and then pressed onto canvas, like relatives who came to call and were impaled onto the walls.

"These are such inhuman figures," he commented.

She stopped, and smiled over her shoulder. "Funny, I used to know them all. I think maybe they were even more inhuman then."

"Do you have a theme? A--" He couldn't think of anything else to ask ... a reason, he meant. An explanation for such a strong and bitter vision.

She shook her head and led him into another, smaller room. They were in the opposite wing, a bedroom wing, and this was a child's room. A little girl's, to judge by the row of stuffed-animal figures on the single bed.

"That's the kind of family portrait work I do." Janice pointed to a pair of pictures at the bed's head.

He went closer to see. Full-faced children, the boy about eight, the girl younger. Their noses, chins, cheeks were plastic yet round and damp and undefined. Grave black eyes occupied almost all of their sockets as if their adult selves were imprisoned behind the mushy facades, peering out from peepholes a size too small.

"Lovely," he said, "but sad."

"Of course they're sad. They have to grow up."

Beyond the window Matt could see a corner of the yard, bright and pale in the autumn sunlight. Inside, the house was shadowed, secretive somehow.

Down the hall, the clock ticked.

Janice leaned against the pale lavender wall, hands behind her so she looked like a prisoner too. "I love them dearly, but sometimes-- these computer and summer-camp times--I appreciate the freedom."

"You're . . . alone with them?"

"Divorced, yes." Her look was direct. "Single parent is the proper oxymoronic expression, I believe. No Sweeney on site."

Until then he hadn't seen it, guessed it. He felt cornered, although she was the one who had her back to the wall.

He felt the immaculately kept, charmingly decorated, empty house all around him, holding its breath. This was a child's bedroom, there would be others, another, all empty, charming, waiting.

The clock ticked, measuring moments, and this one was trembling on the brink far too long.

His fault, of course, for being so stunned, for wondering if he were imagining things, for t hinking what he was thinking . . .

Which was that she was even more charming than her house, an artist full of energy and compassion, a quite-attractive woman who probably had far too few occasions to prove it. . .

Which was that no one was expected here for some time, maybe hours, maybe days . ..

Which was that adults did these things, acted on impulse, forgot that the clock always ticked and that one was supposed to be someplace else ...

Which was what harm would it do if care were exercised and both were certain to keep it tunelessly exciting and distant, and if loneliness got lost in the shuffle and no one would know and no one would be hurt, least of all the parties involved who were strangers and therefore risked less even as they risked more . ..

And he almost could see it, could see safety in a stranger, could see disguise in nakedness, could see just getting it over with, suddenly, for once and for all, in circumstances that could be called a dozen different things, not one of them premeditated ...

And he could see how nothing could be said and everything, and how no one could be to blame and everyone, and how people could do it all the time, maybe not the same people, but the same thing happening everywhere all the time . ..

And why not to him?

"Thank you," he said, and left the room.