Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 16

Fly on the Wall

Eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, and the ConTact help lines were still.

Matt sat facing the three white sides of his cubicle. He watched a fly crawl over the hole -

studded soundproof tiles, adding a random element to the perfect pattern of perforations. Matt kept waiting for the fly to crawl into one of the round black holes, and disappear.

But it didn't. Its splay-footed legs moved delicately over the aisles of white between the perforations and never made a misstep. If only people had the discriminating instincts of a common fly!

But they didn't, and that's what made his job interesting, even on tedious nights like this.

"Want me to call you up and pour out my troubles?"

Matt leaned back in his stenographic chair to eye the only other counselor on duty right then: Bennie Cordova.

Bennie was grinning over the plastic frames of his glasses, highly magnifying half lenses that made the bags under his sixtyish eyes look like they were packed for an around-the -world cruise.

"You have troubles?" Matt joked back.

No doubt Bennie--whose baptismal name was Bienvenido, "Welcome"--had been a cool guy during his sixties heyday, probably thumbing his nose at authority when it wasn't busy inhaling pot. If anyone had told Bennie then that his dark hair would gray and retreat screaming from his forehead with the inevitability of an ebbing tide, that he'd someday wear grandpa glasses and cardigan sweaters to work on a chilly Las Vegas night, Bennie probably would have beat him up. Now, time had beaten up Bennie, and his knees and neck were stiff, but he s till had his sixties insouciance. No sweat, man. Stuff happens, even growing old instead of up.

"Everybody has troubles, man. What about yours?"

"Minuscule."

"Min-a-school. Where'd you get words like that?"

"In a school."

"Very funny, man. Say, when dullness walks in the door around here, it doesn't fool around."

Bennie sipped from the mug of coffee constantly at his right hand. The mug's design commemorated Earth Day 1983. "Sheila still trying to get you to dial her line? I miss all the good stuff, being a substitute. It's like missing a week in a soap-opera plot; everything's different."

Matt shook his head. "Not here. Sheila's still working here, but that's about it."

"Still working on you, I bet. Man, when I was young, chicks were prettier and people knew how to groove."

"It was safer then too."

"Naw. We just thought it was. The power of positive thinking kept us from bad trips and ugly consequences, that's all. We were just lucky."

Matt nodded. Ignorance was bliss, he understood that more every day, as his ignorance inched away as subtly and irrevocably as Bennie's hairline had retreated. Growing old but not up. Bennie would snort to hear that Matt felt that way at thirty-three, but every generation had its twisted time frame and its own values.

"You still live at that far-out Circle place?" Bennie asked.

Matt nodded.

"Man, that must give you willies. Every room ends in a curve, the halls are curved ... I suppose the elevators go up in a curve too, huh?"

"Not that we notice. You seem to know the building pretty well."

"Did some work on it back in the seventies. The outside marble facing needed some spit and polish; that was when I still did construction work. Now I'm ree-tired."

"So you volunteer to come in here nights and listen to sad stories."

"Right. Doan wants miss what's happenin' out there. Besides, I'm a pretty good drug counselor." Bennie winked over the Santa Claus glasses. "Oughta be."

Matt noticed that the fly had settled on a spot dead center of four holes to clean its face.

Maybe he'd get some more coffee and--

And answer the phone. His line. He pulled the earpad on his headset into place and let his focus on the fly fuzz out.

"ConTact. Brother John."

The idea behind pseudonyms was to guard the counselors' privacy. The use of "handles" also gave a stressed caller something to focus on, and personalized the counselors while still letting them keep the necessary distance. Matt's handle got a lot of initial reaction. It was more than a name, it implied a relationship. "Brother John" sounded like family.

The caller must have thought so too.

"Brother, can you spare a dime?" he began.

Matt tensed as he recognized the strong, confident voice. He was used to hesitaters, or nervous "spillers," not to a man who sounded like he should be giving advice instead of taking it.

"I thought you were through with us," Matt said.

"With you, buddy, not the organization. But... I'm feelin' blue and like doing something foolish on a Sunday evening and I thought I'd better call my buddy at ConTact. Great name, ConTact. I have its card right here before me. See, you can take the name two ways: 'Contact,' as in connection . . . phone connection, personal connection, and 'Con' as in the Spanish 'with' and

'Tact' as in knowing what to say, or maybe just knowing what people want to hear. Same difference, right? I do it all the time myself. Tell people what they want to hear. That makes us peas in a pod, I guess. So, you make up that name? 'ConTact.' "

"I had nothing to do with it. Whatever thought went into it, happened before I got here."

"Now, that's hard to imagine. I think of you always sitting there, eavesdropping on us lower Slobovians, like God."

"You're feeling a lot of hostility tonight."

"Yeah, I'm hostile. People think I'm joking all the time, and most of the time I am. They think that I'm all pose and no sincerity. They never ask themselves if that's not exactly the way they want me to be."

"How do you want to be?"

In the pause, Matt heard angry ice cubes rattle, as if they were being slammed into an empty glass.

"The way I am, without everybody coming at me complaining."

"What do they complain about?"

"What I say and do, who I see. What they think I'm thinking."

The ice-cube, feisty-castanet chatter softened to muted clinks, probably sinking under a potent sea of hard liquor. Since he began his phone nightlife, Matt had become adept at inventing faces and settings for his callers. He might be totally wrong, but it helped him sense their hidden messages, the heartbreaks they weren't mentioning.

Only, with this caller, this frequent phoner, the imaging trick had backfired. The caller had used it on Matt, assigning him attitudes and a posture Matt didn't possess. People who had lost touch with their own inner burns and dodges often misinterpreted other people, usually those they were most closely involved with. That this particular caller would play this game with

"Brother John" meant that Matt was perhaps closer to him than the man's intimate family, or at least knew more about his worries and weaknesses, even if he didn't particularly understand them.

"What's the problem tonight?"

"Tonight. Making it sound like I have problems every night. Well, I don't, Brother John. I don't need to call you like a whining puppy trying not to pee-pee on the rug. You're lucky I justify your job. First some little nobody treats me like I was the worst turd on the eighteenth floor.

Then this old squeeze of mine gets huffy. Then my wife calls wondering why she couldn't reach me last night. Listen, I didn't have a wife longer than she's been alive! I don't answer to nobody!

Especially not you."

"No, you don't." Matt kept his voice calm, his manner cool in reverse proportion to his caller's heat. His own heart was racing with recognition. If "some little nobody" was quite literally Temple, the caller must be Darren Cooke, the man she had rejected earlier today. Matt wasn't supposed to know who he was talking to. That broke the rules, changed the balance, and maybe bothered him more than it betrayed the caller. He needed distance, to fight fire with its opposite element, ice.

"Is there anything I can do for you? You could call one of those three psychiatrists'

answering services, leave a message."

"I don't want to leave a message! I don't want to be passed on like a dirty shirt. You sound high and mighty tonight. Tired of talking to me, are you, Brother John? Some brother! Haven't you ever had it up to here with women? You can't satisfy them, and when you do, they all come around wanting to be the only one. Even your own little kid. I wish I had a son. I'd teach him how to avoid the bad raps and the traps. We'd be buddies."

Matt hesitated. He could hear the grind of escalating anger and depression, which always made a dangerous triumvirate with alcohol. Yet to suggest that Cooke ... his caller stop drinking would only infuriate him more.

"I thought I was your buddy," Matt said soothingly, mirroring the man's own insecurity.

"Hey, you are! Don't think for a minute because I bad-mouth you a little we're not pals. I'm just an ordinary guy like you. Except... I'm famous. So I have to act famous, act like some big wheel. I stop the act--and I crash, career and all. The act is all part of my act now, get it? I just had a rotten day, is all. And--"

The line was suddenly silent. Matt sucked in his breath. Something was happening on the other end that he couldn't visualize. He didn't like it. The man was in a dangerous mood, to himself, and maybe to somebody else.

Then he heard sounds again. A glass set down hard on a tabletop, the last brittle slosh of melting ice cubes. Motion. A man in motion ... using a portable phone, that was it.

"Somebody's here," he sang out in a tone of slightly drunken playfulness. "Eleven-thirty.

Must be the maid coming to get laid. Let's look through the peephole, huh, Brother John?"

The phone sounded like it was underwater as the caller disengaged to view his visitor.

"Say, this could turn out okay. Sorry, BJ, but I'm gonna have to hang up now. I don't go for threesomes. Thanks for the listen. Talk to you sometime . . . Hel-lo, baby! Just what the doctor ordered. Come on in--"

Matt heard a bolt click, heard the warm, strong voice at full, confident power.

The line choked off right there, as if the lights had gone out on a play in midscene. Matt knew that, somewhere in the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, a woman was walking into a man's room for what used to be called "immoral purposes" an eon ago.

Was she a friend? A former lover? The woman who'd spurned him earlier coming back? A call girl some buddy of his had sent to cheer up his friend? Any or all of those scenarios were perfectly possible in Las Vegas, and in this man's busy, empty life.

Matt felt cheated again, like an alcoholic's AA call-buddy who has to hear him fall off the wagon. He felt used, more used than that unseen woman would feel probably. Presumably she knew, or knew of, this guy. Knew what to expect. He had never claimed to be a one-woman man, not even to Matt.

They were just one of hundreds of couples. It was a terribly common interaction, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun, rarely ever for love.

Matt shook his head as he disconnected.

"Lose him?" Bennie wanted to know from the adjacent booth.

"Yeah. Lost him."