Cat In A Golden Garland

"He was lying about the two photos you showed him."

"Of course."

"Were they the hoods who assaulted Temple?"

"What do you think?"

"Are they really missing?"

She nodded.

"He knew them, Effinger did."

She nodded.

"Then--" Matt realized where he was going, and stopped.

"Say it." Molina smiled grimly. "You're not protecting anyone or anything but your own shadow-sense of honor. Effinger lied about knowing those two thugs, who are--?"

Somehow he had become the one being interrogated. Seeing Molina's cleverness in using one to prod the other, he understood-- almost sympathized with--Effinger's weary reluctance to speak. But there was no escape for anyone who still pretended to honesty.

Matt opened the folder to pull the two photos into the light. "If this is the pair who assaulted Temple, that means that--"

"That means that their intense interest in Max Kinsella's whereabouts, and their unadmitted recognition by Cliff Effinger, ties Kinsella into the recent casino killings."

"You're not saying Kinsella killed these absent creeps? If they're dead."

"I'm saying that he's one of the few people in Las Vegas I can think of who could, and would. If you have any idea where he's gone to ground--"

"I don't."

"If you have any idea that Miss Temple knows where he's gone to ground--"

"I don't, I hope she doesn't and I wouldn't say even if she did."

Molina swept the photos back into the folder "But you do see what--and who--Effinger knows? You know anybody in Chicago who might provide an alibi for him?"

"I'll ask the next time I get there," Matt said, as blankly as she.

"Do that. And don't forget to tell me what you find out." Molina pushed herself free of the table's hard-edged support. "You can go now. The coffee isn't that good here."

Matt left, aware that Molina had always hoped to get more out of him than Effinger during this double-edged interrogation.

He began to wish he had throttled Effinger before the man could destroy Matt's present life as thoroughly as he had his past one.

Chapter 22

Santa Who?

Temple awoke feeling she should be someplace else.

But this was Sunday, her muzzy brain finally figured out as it took in the tall windows covered with drawn white miniblinds.

She wasn't scheduled to return to the advertising agency offices until Monday, even without the intervention of a death.

She patted the bedcovers, in search of either Midnight Louie's big furry body annexing the comforter, or her glasses, which weren't on the bedside table. The glasses materialized under her hand. She'd fallen asleep reading the Colby, Janos and Renaldi promotional booklet she had shown Kit.

Her dreams came back, a jumbled "Christmas Carol" production with Colby, Janos and Renaldi as the three ghosts and old Ebenezer Scrooge the cadaverous figure that had ridden up on the elevator with her that first day. Or did Scrooge symbolize the Old Year, the bent, paper-thin, robed figure with the scythe . . . Death himself?

Heavy. Temple donned her glasses and let her toes do the walking along the bedside as they felt for the fat, fuzzy bedroom slippers Kit had lent her. Knit wool slippers packed easily, but they were no protection against bear wood floors in a cold climate.

When she was properly shod in her borrowed mukluks, she skated over the polished oak to the windows to slit open the blinds. A white overcast sky blazed in, shaking down powdered sugar against the window glass.

A great day to stay in, curl up by the coffeemaker and attack the New York Times's hugely nasty Sunday crossword puzzle ... or the more relevant puzzle of a death by hanging from a golden chain.

Kit was in the living room, already immersed in the four-inch-thick paper, a mug of coffee on the sofa table in front of her, and Midnight Louie sprawled on the classified ads section, carefully cleaning his fingernails, i.e., claws. He reminded Temple of Victor Janos in Colby junior's office last night. A strange, compulsive reaction to a sudden death in the area.

" 'Morning, Temple." Kit barely looked up from the paper. "Coffee's on in the kitchen. Box of bagels, box of sticky buns, box of croissants. Grab a mug, a thousand calories, and come back in."

Temple shuffled off to the triangle of kitchen around the corner. The coffee smelled of cinnamon and nuts. She kept it black instead of adding her usual whitewash of skim milk and joined her aunt on the couch.

"There it is." Kit slapped a fat section of newsprint onto Temple's flannel lap. "That looks like a Minnesota nightgown, granny. How did you come by it?"

"Honestly. I brought it with me when I moved to Vegas. For when I had a cold."

Kit nodded. "Nothing like floor-length flannel to soothe the savaged respiratory system. I thought I detected a faint perfume of Vick's VapoRub. Good thing we're both single at the moment. Check out page thirty-eight."

Temple paged through the ink-laden sheets, trying to contain a sneeze. How long would messy, heavy, tree-slaying newsprint last, she wondered, now that cyberspace was here?

"I don't see anything, Kit."

"Lower right. Two inches."

"murder must advertise. Cute. That New York Times staff certainly has a wide background."

"Dorothy Sayers title, isn't it?"

"Did you read her too?"

"Ages ago. Probably when she was still alive. Too bad they never found anybody to play the part who could live up to the Wimsey in her mind, the way that Jeremy Brett went over the top to reinvent Holmes."

"Some characters are meant to live only on the page. I can't believe this. An item in the morning paper. How--?"

"New York may look inefficient to outlanders, but we do just fine here. Get a lot done, well done."

"This is odd. It says the street clothes of the 'slain Santa' carried no identification."

"What's odd? The 'slain Santa' or the no ID bit?"

"Both, as a matter of fact. Lieutenant Katrina must have told a reporter that the death was not an accident. Kind of soon to make that judgment."

"I told you. We don't waste time here. Besides, how many golden chains end up in a booby trap at the top of a pressed-wood chimney?"

"At Christmastime a lot of golden bric-a-brac ends up lying around. Maybe Marley's ghost was set to make a later appearance."

"That's interesting." Kit looked up through the mottled-indigo metallic of her eyeglass frames. "Marley was a business partner, wasn't he? Maybe the chain was sending a message."

Temple stopped considering the fact that she'd probably look just like Kit in thirty years; in fact, she looked a lot like her now--maybe she should try contact lenses again soon.

"You mean that the means of death, the golden chain, was symbolic, not just handy?"

"How many golden chains you got hanging around your place?" Kit's skeptical eyebrows overshot her eyeglass frames. "Of course, I may be discounting any leftover props--personal or professional-- from your erstwhile boyfriend the magician."

"Just handcuffs and silk scarves," Temple rushed to assure her aunt, then realized that she had done nothing of the kind.

"What I can't figure out," Kit said after a truly pregnant pause and a sip of coffee, "is why the dead man was taken for this Brent Colby, Junior, for so long, even by his own daughter, not to mention partners and employees."

"Any homicide cop would tell you that strangulation does not produce a pretty corpse, and I can testify to the fact. Talk about a dark red and swollen face. Besides, he was still wearing the Santa getup, and all that shows is eyes and nostrils."

Temple sipped her coffee, then squinted at the gray canyons of Manhattan out the windows. "After the death, when I was thinking everything over, I realized that when I blundered into the wrong conference room, I'd swear that the Santa guy looked startled and then guilty to see me. I figured I'd caught the dignified Colby lurking with intent to surprise. But he seemed more surprised by my presence than vice versa. Anyway, that's the kicker. A face full of permanent-waved cotton batting totally distorts the features underneath. I keep trying to imagine what the Santa I saw would look like without the whiskers and mustache and fur-trimmed cap down to his frosty eyebrows, but it's impossible."

Kit nodded dolefully. "Now I get the picture. If I were a crook trying to pass as somebody else, a Santa suit disguise would be my number one choice. It distorts face and figure, yet it's so familiar to people from their earliest childhood that we never try to look beneath it; that ruins the whole point of Santa."

"Then the likeliest scenario is that the golden chain was meant for the custom-shirted neck of Brent Colby, Junior, but only Colby knew he was using a substitute this year. That opens up oodles of motives, especially among Colby's closest associates."

"And family."

Temple frowned. "I'd hate to think Kendall did it."

"Why?"

"Well, she's his only daughter, and she's been nice to me."

"Temple. Judas was 'nice' to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Those who will betray you with a kiss are the most dangerous of all. What about Mrs. Colby?"

"A long-gone ex, I'd assume. Nobody even brought her up. Guess I should. I'll delicately ask Kendall about her family background first thing Monday."

"Don't you imagine the police are doing plenty of that today? Maybe they'll crack the case by Monday."

Temple shook her head and tapped the tiny article at the back of the huge newspaper section. "Not if the dead Santa had no ID. Someone doesn't want him identified, and that makes it look like he was the target."

"You did say that Colby had learned about him from an agency?"

Temple nodded her head.

"I know some agency people. I could call around this afternoon, see if they remember Colby calling."

"On Sunday?"

"The Naked City never sleeps," Kit intoned as flatly as a true-crime television-show announcer. "And inquiring New Yorkers want to know who's been killing Santa Claus."

"I can't believe I traveled three thousand miles to run into another murder. I wonder if the lady lieutenant here called the lady lieutenant in Las Vegas about me yet."

"Don't look so glum. It never hurts to have people talking about you."

"Not homicide detectives. Molina might tell Katrina who-knows-what. She's not fond of amateur anythings."

Kit leaned against the couch back, forgetting about Midnight Louie, who growled.

"Goodness! We are grouchy this morning." She sighed. "You think you saw Santa's eyes before. I'd bet you did. You've had theatrical experience. Actors never forget eyes. Did he seem uneasy to recognize you?"

"No. More surprised. You don't suppose it was suicide?"

"Now there's a notion. This is intriguing. What if this poor nameless soul wanted to cause a little stir as he left the world, perhaps more than he merited while alive? A public hanging at a Christmas party would do the trick. Sad what some people will do for attention."

"Or ..." Temple sat up. "What if the golden chain wasn't making a statement, but the dead man was? What if he blamed someone at Colby, Janos and Renaldi for something, and wanted to embarrass the firm? Bad publicity like this is poison to an advertising firm. It upsets clients."

"Corporate revenge. I like it. All we have to do is find out who he ... was . . . and what he might have against a big advertising agency like CJR."

All? Kit, he could be someone who ... lost a loved one to a faulty product for which CJR handled an advertising Campaign. He could have no overt connection whatsoever and still could have that kind of motive. What do you really think 'we' can do about it?"

"We can start with what we know, and I know those agency people who hand out most of the Santa assignments around this town. And Rudy might have some ideas." Her fading red hair trembled as her head nodded firmly. " 'Every journey to a thousand parts always starts with a single phone call.' Article One of the Actor's Creed."

Chapter 23

Moby Couch

The evening of the morning after the day before.

Matt stood in the glare of his apartment lights, sweating like a stevedore and gazing at a white elephant. At a bloody Moby Dick of the landlubbing world.

A long, sinuous S of red suede sofa snaked diagonally across the parquet floor in an otherwise almost-empty room.

"Temple--" he threatened the emptiness, or the sofa, aloud.

His wallet was lighter by another hundred and fifty dollars. Movers that could muscle an eight-foot-long sofa up three floors of a building built in the fifties with narrow- everything didn't come cheap. Getting it out would probably be best accomplished by wrestling it to the patio railing and dumping it overboard, after shouting suitable warning, like "Timmmmmm-ber!"

He walked around it, hands on hips, shaking his head. "Temmmple," he repeated softly.

He had to admit that in nighttime lighting the behemoth looked pretty good The flagrant red had a holiday dash. But his brick-and-board bookshelves looked like- escapees from a prison tor makeshift furniture now. What did he need a living room for, anyway? He had no visitors, and wasn't likely to have any, not with the transient company he kept at the hot line.

Matt decided to give himself a talking-to, since Temple wasn't here to do it for him. All right, Devine. This is a pretty cool sofa, after all. And you paid enough for it. Could have had some nondescript yuppie cotton-duck-covered love seat for the price, and a floor lamp.

He sat down smack in the sofa's middle and stared at the brandy-colored wood floor. Well, he supposed he could get one of those white, hairy goat rugs like Temple had, and stick it in the sofa's front curve. Only it wouldn't be genuine. Nothing living would die (or decorate) for his sins. Synthetic. Come to think of it, Temple had said "suede."

Matt stroked the smooth fabric. Not as soft as velvet, but not as harsh as cotton duck either. Except for one stain on the back, the sofa was in perfect condition. Someone must have taken good care of it for a long time.

Suede, though. At least the suede-bearers had probably served humankind in a dozen different ways. Matt leaned his elbows on his knees to study his empty white walls. One of Rouault's Christ-figure paintings would look nice on that wall, and crucifixion scenes always have a dash of red in them, especially Rouault's deceptively prettified stained-glass style ...

Christ! He wasn't furnishing a convent. This was a bachelor pad. Why did everything he thought of come up churchy? What other artists' work had he seen? Van Gogh. Not much red there, except in his self-portrait sans ear. Aha! Renoir. He nodded. Plump bourgeois women and children in quaint late-nineteenth-century dress. Lots of reds.

Didn't exactly go with a sofa that was just two long curves: shorter back support, and long, long seat. 0f suede. How many suedes had died so his rear could cushion itself on this soft surface?

Georgia O'Keefe, maybe. Modern. Innocuous subjects, flowers. Big like the sofa, lots of lush reds. All pretty erotic, of course. He had heard. Didn't want to send that message any more than the one behind Rouault's jewel-tone meditations on sin, suffering and death.

Oh, Jesus. He meant it as a prayer, not an epithet. Is this my forty days in the desert? My temptation? A long red suede sofa?

Matt put his face in his hands. How could he know who he could love, when he didn't even know what he could like?

So it came back to Temple. He missed her. And he was actually glad the ridiculous sofa had arrived today and distracted him from the encounter with Cliff Effinger last night.

He hadn't slept all night, but then he was used to being up, working, those hours. That wasn't it. The triumph was rolling around inside of him, bumping into all his tender spots. And he'd discovered what Molina probably already knew. He had banged himself up right royally with Effinger, and vice versa. Funny, he'd hadn't felt a thing at the time. Adrenaline?

So he was aching all over today, and of course he had to help the two beefy guys with beer guts that would choke a horse manhandle the sofa upstairs. Couldn't take the elevator. Too small. Why would such a little woman like Temple fall in love with such a big sofa? Uh-oh, Matt's inner voice warned. She fell in love with Max Kinsella, and he ain't exactly small. Opposites attract, dummy. Rule number one of the secular, coeducational world.

He'd had a headache all day too. Probably from those partially tasted cheap drinks. Impersonating a gumshoe of the old school was hazardous to clean nineties lifestyles.

He glanced around, surprised at being encompassed by a curving palette of pure red. This sofa certainly didn't let you forget about it.

The phone sat on its shaky-legged table. He should . . . call Temple. Tell her the unsinkable thrift-shop sofa had arrived safely. Tell her--

She had left the number, and he had left it right by the phone.

Matt slid about six feet down his new sofa to the end and punched numbers. About 2 P.M. in New York, his wristwatch told him. Might be home between meetings and eatings out.

The phone rang exactly twice before it was answered.

"Hello." Perky. Familiar. Like smelling fresh espresso.

"Temple?"

"No, her aunt. Kit."

"Oh. I'm calling from Las Vegas--"

She cut him off before he could give a reason. "Which one are you--the blond or the brunet?"

He didn't like being reminded of that "The blond." He said it coolly, like a natural blond should.

"Good." Her lightly raspy voice lowered to conspirator-level. "I liked you best."

"I'm sorry, Miss Carlson, but we've never met. I heard about you, of course--"

"Same here. And ... I glimpsed you both in the casino. Temple really shouldn't reduce the man pool by two, given the male-female ratio among the aging population."

"Temple shouldn't do a lot of things she does, but I do think she should talk to me, if she's there, and if you don't mind."

"I do, but I am a good, if heartbroken, hostess. Nice talking to you, Matt."

He rolled his eyes. Now what was Temple saying? About him, about Kinsella?

"Matt!"

Her voice was so vibrant, so nearby, despite the long-distance line that he forgot his list of annoyances. "Hi. Glad I caught you in."

"How goes everything?"

"The sofa came."

"Really?"

"It was pretty difficult, and expensive, to get up all these stairs. The movers said a baby grand would be easier."

"Stairs? Why not the elevator ... oh, too big. Too bad. Listen, my aunt's place is down in the Village, where they have a lot of upscale vintage stores and I think, I think your sofa is a Vladimir Kagan."

Suddenly it really was his sofa. "A Vladimir Kagan? No wonder it's red."

"Fun-ny. Kagan is German. I spotted his stuff when Kit and I window-shopped the pricey vintage places. Kagan is a fabulous custom designer who was avant-hot in the fifties; now his pieces are undergoing a huge revival. You need to tip up your--what did the brochure call it?--'extravagantly biomorphic' sofa and check the bottom for any signatures or labels."

"Temple. Three men could barely get this thing here upright. How am I going to tip it over solo, and look for labels?"

"I'll do the label part when I get back."

"Thanks."

"You sound kind of terse. Everything okay? If it's a Kagan it's worth four thousand dollars, easy, in New York or LA."

"Yeah, but it'd take five thousand dollars to get it there. Besides, I kind of like it here, I decided."

"You do? I'm so glad. I worried during the whole plane flight that I'd buffaloed you into something you'd hate. I get carried away sometimes."

"I noticed. I like it. The sofa, I mean. Not you getting carried away. But I like that too. I doubt I'd have the nerve not to like something you liked."

"Awww."

"How are things going there?"

"All right, but it's New York and it's noisy all night, sirens and garbage trucks from Hades, and crowded all day, and they have split elevator banks and don't tell you, but Louie is being a lamb. Isn't it a little early for you to be up?"

"I had last night off."

"And--"

"What do you mean, And--'?"

"Matt. I can hear the strain in your voice. I heard it from the first. It can't be just from hustling collectible sofas up three flights of stairs."

"You're scary sometimes."

"Thanks."

"Temple." He gathered himself to hurl headfirst into a topic that was a lot more volatile than a flaming red sofa, or a flaming redhead. "I found him."

Her words stalled for the first time. "Effinger?" she said finally.

"Effinger."

"How?"

"One of the little sketches you suggested. A ... woman contacted me and said he was hanging out at an off-Strip casino."

"Well, what happened?"

"A lot. But it's not suitable for long distance. I'll tell you when you get back. I'm working New Year's Eve, but maybe we can have New Year's Day dinner."

"You never take the rough nights off, do you?"

"I don't have a family, and the others do."

"Maybe you do too, and you just don't know it yet."

He found another dead silence growing. "I have the sofa now for quite a clan."

"Hey, you can't let just anybody sit on an extravagantly biomorphic collector's item like a Kagan couch."

"Just you, then. And me."

"That sounds pretty good."

"Did you have that in mind when you made me get it?"

"Maybe. But what happened to Effinger? Surely you can give me a hint."

"I found him at his motel, which you know well."

"Yes, Nostradamus. Which one?"

"Did I rhyme the last sentence? Must have been the boilermaker I didn't have while bribing half the bartenders in town."

"You, hitting the streets and the bottle like Sam Spade? Wish I'd been there. You were going to tell me where 'there' was."

"The Blue Mermaid Motel. No, you wouldn't really have wanted to be there."

"Ooh, sleazy. What did you do when you caught up with him?"

"I didn't kill him. I just collared him. Called Molina and handed him over later. She was peeved I hadn't forewarned her, but I didn't exactly know that was gonna be the night."

"So. You okay with it?"

"Better than okay. I didn't kill him."

"I didn't think you would."

"How come I wasn't so sure of that?"

"Because you're the Hamlet of the Circle Ritz. You're so busy debating the right thing to do, and if you'll do it, that you sometimes miss the obvious."

"So what was so obvious?"

"You're not like him, Matt. Never were, never will be. You'd never kill him."

"But I hate him."

"You're entitled, and besides, you make yourself so guilty about that, that killing him would ruin your fun."

"Temple, if you ever die, you'll go to heaven, or--if there's a form of sanctioned reincarnation--you're going to come back as a very long red sofa and bedevil the life out of somebody for forty more years."

"I hope so," she said. "You can sit on me anytime you like."

He didn't answer that one, especially with weird fragments of porno film dancing in his head along with the usual seasonal snowflakes and sugarplums. She went on without pause, anyway.

"What are you doing for Christmas? Working?"

"No. Not this year. I called the supervisor today. I'm going to take a few days off. Go up to Chicago."

"Sounds like a good idea." She spoke so cautiously that he could almost see the red light in her mind.

"Maybe, maybe not. I think you were right, though. There are more issues than Effinger."

"I am? I said that? When?"

"In one of your usual glancing moments of brilliant insight too dazzling for you to see yourself."

"You mock me, Hamlet."

"You need it."

"I don t like men with too many secrets."

"Oh, I think you know that mine are pretty pedestrian. But you are having a good time there, despite urban blight, and Louie's fine?"

"In his element! Speaking of ham. And--"

Now she hesitated. Saving the worst till last, Matt thought. What could have gone wrong?

"There's been a murder. At the advertising agency. But don't worry. Louie and Kit and I are on the case. Gotta go now; Kit and I are having brunch at the Russian Tea Room, and if you don't get there on time they send you to Siberia or something. Have a Merry Christmas despite yourself, Matt, please! I miss you."

And she hung up.

Sometimes he thought that Kinsella should have her. Would serve him right.

Chapter 24

Rudy the Red-nosed Pothead

Kit hung up from calling a string of names in her personal phone directory, a volume so fat and crammed with odd bits of paper that it was held together by a rubber band.

"I'd much rather have chatted on the phone half the morning with the darling Mister Devine in Las Vegas, than do this."

"He called; not me. Besides, our conversation didn't last that long. You still exhausted your list, didn't you?"

Kit nodded, then took off her jazzy metallic-framed glasses to rub her eyes.

"Don't you do this," she warned Temple. "Rubbing is bound to give you premature bags under the eyes. Will knock you right out of parts you're too old for. But I am burnt out. All those tiny little numbers to read and dial, and not a bit of useful information."

"You still think like a professional actress, Auntie. You can always have your author photo digitally retouched, so who cares how many bags you have?"

"I do," her aunt said so sharply that the dozing Louie beside Temple growled.

Kit growled right back, then redonned her glasses to scan the disorganized book's contents.

"I might have to take up the stage again," she added. "What with the publishing fallout."

"There's a publishing fallout?"

"Yes. Kind of like the Age of Aquarius for book people. Major realignment of all the communication media to see what form of word and picture will survive the millennium. Why? You plan on breaking into publishing anytime soon?"

"No . . . but I have a friend who might have a book to market soon."

"Fiction?"

"No. Expose, I guess."

"Of anybody famous?"

"No. Only slightly notorious."

"Notorious is almost as good as famous these days. A notorious former Vegas mobster, perhaps? I'm available to ghostwrite the right project."

"No gangsters. Just. . . international terrorism."

"Wow." Kit took off her glasses again to rest her eyes, which looked only reasonably baggy for her age. "Any chance you'll name names? Subject? Writer?"

Temple shook her head. "I shouldn't have mentioned it."

"Probably not. Get my hopes up, will you? I'd hate being a detective! This is so boring and it got us nowhere."

"You say you know every employment agency in New York that would handle holiday Santas?"

"Well, the ones worth knowing about. There may be some outfit down in the Bowery . . ."

Temple stroked Louie's satin ears. "Then we know something. The dead Santa wasn't hired through a legitimate agency."

"Colby, Janos and Renaldi wouldn't know of any other kind of agency. They are big time, Temple. A major agency in this town, and that is something to crow from the chimney tops."

"Chimney. A fatal chimney. A fake, fatal chimney. What a bizarre way to kill somebody! Why that way?"

"It's dramatic."

"Life is not a cabaret, Kit, contrary to the song. Most killers don't look for an innovative way out that would thrill the heart of the Bard of Avon, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber. The last thing a killer wants is a murder that calls attention to itself."

"Why not? Maybe that was the point. I certainly wouldn't push someone I wanted to kill in front of a cab. So ... shoddy and unimaginative. Nobody would ever suspect anything, especially with the traffic in New York. And look at this scenario. It's perfect. A roomful of witnesses, nobody near the body, the whole thing concealed behind painted bricks. It's like a magic show. Except that at the end of an act, the corpse would jump up and we'd all shout, 'It's alive!' "

Temple sat forward, causing Louie to slide into the space at her back. "But he did jump up, didn't he? The supposed corpse, I mean? He wasn't dead. He made a dramatic resurrection in front of everybody."

"Colby, you mean."

Temple nodded. "I'm beginning to wonder about Louie's behavior too."

"You should." Kit's narrowed eyes drilled through the sleeping cat's Rubenesque form.

"He's so perceptive," Temple said. "When I think about it, he was remarkably friendly to the Santa Claus we found in the empty conference room. I thought he had dashed in there on some quirky feline mission, but now I wonder."

"You think Louie knew someone was in there?"

"Probably. I sensed some movement, and he's a cat. Cats survive by sensing movement. But I think it was more than that."

"More than cat and mouse?"

"I think that Louie knew the guy in the Santa suit too."

"Louie knew him! Right. Our chief witness is a cat. An out-of-town cat, whose chief experience of Manhattan is being toted to and fro in a purple parachute. Who would Louie know in the Big Apple?"

Temple was stumped. "Only you."

"On-ly youuuuu," Kit crooned back, trouper that she was. "Only . . . rouuuuuu."

"Rouuu? Oh. Rouuuu-dy! Your friend who answered the door. No!"

"Maybe he saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus."

"You mean, at the advertising agency. He . . . saw something he shouldn't have when he came early for the gig, and got killed for it?"

Kit was paging through her address book, her agile fingers scattering slips of paper right and left like huge snowflakes. "Shiii-shi-ite. Rudy doesn't have a phone listing. Can't afford a phone."

"Can't afford a phone, in New York? That's like being deaf and blind in Macy's."

Kit nodded solemnly. "Poor Rudy. That's why we all helped him. He had some dump farther down in the East Village, where it hasn't become fashionable yet. A rent-controlled place he qualified for years ago." Kit shut her book, like a Bible she had suddenly realized was a bad translation. "A lot of people live like that in New York. On the verge. The edge. You never notice them, until they die."

"Rudy is not dead, Kit! He was a Macy's Santa just a couple nights ago. High-profile Santas like that don't go jelly-belly up. They come back to ho-ho-ho again. Have you got a street address on him?"

"Yeah, but it's no place you and I would care to go after dark."

"We'll bring Louie. People seem to give me a wide berth when I'm loaded with Louie." Temple held out a hand. "The book, please."

The cab driver kept wanting to take them to Houston--not pro-nounced Hue-ston, like the very big city in Texas, but House-ton, like the very bad street in New York City.

Temple knew enough to quail at the street name, but Kit was implacable. She repeated the address, and ended up directing the cabby.

The street the cab stopped on was narrow, shadowed, empty, lined with tall trucks and scary as hell.

The cab driver managed to convey that he was loath to leave the ladies off here, even though he did not speak English.

Temple worried when a New York City cab driver had an attack of conscience about letting a passenger off.

They exited the vehicle, the driver begging and pleading with them until they broached the building's iron-railed door.

No security system was in place to make entrance difficult.

Kit breezed in ahead of Temple, her long faux-fur coat brushing the peeling woodwork.

"Sixth floor," she said with brio, marching over a carpet of smashed trash to a paint-pocked metal elevator door scratched with incomprehensible obscenities.

"Kit--"

"Hush. In New York, attitude is everything."

The lobby felt as icy as the outside air. Temple clutched Louie to her bosom in his carrier, glad to have some concealed weapons nearby even if they were only claws.

When the elevator creaked open the scarred outer doors, an odor of cat box nearly knocked them off their feet. Actually, the odor was not cat box, but--Louie forgive her!--it was better to think of it as an animal odor rather than human.

Kit swept onto the putrid car like a czarina in sable and pushed the button for the sixth floor with the tip of her leather glove.

Her head was high.

"Think of England, dear," she advised.

"Why the Hades should I think of England when I'm in the heart of Hell's Kitchen or someplace? I will think of. . . Boys' Town."

"Spencer Tracy," Kit said soothingly. "In a Roman collar."

"A blond Spencer Tracy in a Roman collar," Temple corrected as the rickety elevator lurched upward with suspicious fits and starts.

"Spencer Tracy was silver-haired in that movie," Kit corrected.

"You have your Sthpen-ther Tra-thy, and I'll have mine," Temple said between gritted teeth. It was hard to speak clearly while breathing through your mouth.

Midnight Louie cried in protest, but then, he had no holy figures to invoke for protection.

Then Louie hissed. It sounded remarkably like "Baaasst!"

"I think that Louie's saying that Spencer Tracy was a bastard," Temple said.

"Louie knows nothing about it," Kit replied. "Tracy couldn't divorce his wife to marry Katharine Hepburn because he was a devout Catholic. One of Hollywood's few off-screen tragedies."

"Devout Catholics are the pits," Temple said.

"I happen to admire Spencer Tracy. He was a fabulous actor."

"But I bet he wouldn't be caught dead in this dump."

"That was Bette Davis. Now, please, constrain yourself. We're almost there."

Kit was right. The elevator soon stopped. The ruined doors took their time about deciding to open.

Temple streaked out, Louie in her arms. Kit followed, glasses perched on her nose.

"We should have brought a flashlight," she noted.

The hall lay before them, more smelled than seen, a stew of hotplate cookery, unclean corridors and bathrooms too far from rooms.

"I suppose you don't have vintage buildings of this age in Las Vegas," Kit said.

"Only the Blue Mermaid Motel."

"The Blue Mermaid. What an evocative name. It should be used in a play."

"Where are we going?"

"To Rudy's flat."

"How will we find it?"

Kit sighed. Her faux fur brushed Temple's wrist. "I have a number, which I cannot see. Perhaps we will meet a kindly guide on the way."

"Perhaps we will meet a housing inspector."

"Not in New York City! Onward."

Finally, finding no sense to the numbering system, by dint of approaching innumerable doors and by process of elimination and the curt direction of disturbed residents, Kit and Temple stood before one narrow door.

"What if he's home?" Temple asked. "Won't he be mortified that we hunted him down?"

"He may be, but we will not be." Kit was still doing her Empress of all the Russias impersonation. "We are merely visiting an old friend for the holidays. We'll take him out for cheese blintzes or something. Look, Temple. If rent control ever phases out, this place will be snapped up, rehabbed like my building and become one of the finest addresses in lower Manhattan. Consider our visit. . . premature."

"Consider poor Rudy the renter an endangered species."

"Rent control has allowed a fringe person like him to have a home all these years. At least he'll have a couple years to look for new accommodations."

"If he isn't dead already."

"Temple, please! I've been trying not to think of that. I guess we have to knock. There's no doorbell."

"You're wearing the leather gloves."

Kit lifted her chin again, and her fist, and rapped three times.

Knock three times . . . no answer

Several more attempts were answered only by silence.

Louie had, by then, had it. He meowed in an angry tone, then wriggled his head and forelegs free of the bag. Two black cat paws pushed on the door.

And it opened.

"What a natural!" Kit slipped past Louie into the dark beyond. "Remember to say the cat did it, if anyone should ask."

Inside they were accosted by a pair of assertive odors: ancient, brittle newsprint and mildew. Temple and Louie sneezed in tandem. Somewhere in the dark, Kit scrabbled for a light switch.

"This reminds me of the conference room." Temple whispered, rather than whistled, in the dark. "And look what happened there."

Her answer was a soft click. A wan puddle of light spread on the ceiling like a stain.

Kit was a huge, humped figure vanishing into her own shadow down a dim hallway. "Wait here, Temple. Rudy! It's Kit Carlson. Merry Christmas! Are you home?"

Temple waited. "Louie, it's so cold in here. Don't they have heat?"

Midnight Louie wriggled in his carrier, but he didn't try to leap to the floor. Temple figured his nose told him what had been on that floor, and he wasn't going to follow an act like that!

"Temple!" Kit's voice from far down the hall sounded clogged. "I've found a flashlight."

Temple ventured down the dark hallway, cheered by a wavering comet of light at the end of the tunnel. The odor of stale Oriental food grew. She figured a tiny kitchenette lurked behind an ajar door. Another open door floated by; beyond it, she glimpsed piles of papers and books.

Kit's flashlight took wild stabs at illuminating parts of a tiny room at the hall's very end.

"This place is laid out like a classic railroad flat," Kit said. "Narrow and cubbyholed and homely. I don't suppose you're old enough to remember the Box-car Kids books?"

Temple couldn't respond before Kit answered herself. "No, of course not. Too young. Railroad flats. A boon from an indifferent housing authority and time itself. A rent-controlled throwback, a hidden refuse heap, but its residents' own. Rudy lived here. Smell the stale pot."

"Lived?"

"He's not here now, and I haven't seen any sign of a Santa suit about the place. I know he had his own outfit. Look at those baskets." Her flashlight sketched a mattress on the floor surrounded by wicker laundry baskets full of papers. "You wonder if he collected them for warmth, or content. We had no idea how he lived, we old actors lending him the occasional hand. We remembered him tall and slender and as limber as a weeping willow. He had a fantastic talent for mime. That made him a great street beggar later. Looked so pathetic. When we got him cleaned up a few years ago, and lined up regular jobs, he always showed up. And always came back to here, the place he'd gotten years ago. Do you think he's really dead, Temple? Or just... out on the town in his Santa suit doing another gig?"

"I don't know. Maybe we should come back by daylight to find out if he's come back here. Or maybe we should call the precinct and ask to see the body, sans everything."

Kit snapped off the flashlight. "I was afraid of that."

For a long moment, in the utter dark, she thought of Rudy.

Chapter 25

A Very Bad Joint

I have not been in a down-at-the-heels dive like this in ages.

I am sorry to report that people live in places across this great land in which I would not kennel a dog . . . and my opinion of dogs is well known. I am also sorry to report that there were times in my not-so-recent past when I would have been happy to have such a joint to cut the wind.

Speaking of joints, I am surprised that my two lady friends have not commented on the roaches around this place. I refer both to the six-legged variety, which skitter away from the flashlight beam as if it were a laser-sword from Star Wars and they were Darth Vader (given some people's belief in reincarnation, they could be), and the shriveled brown butt-ends of marijuana cigarettes. I would think that Miss Kit Carlson, given her vaunted flower-child lifestyle in the decade of the sixties, would have more than a passing acquaintance with such storied leftovers of the era.

In fact, I pat one atop a dresser so it rolls on the floor. Miss Temple gives the object the distracted frown of one who is concentrating so hard on holding her breath so as to avoid noxious odors that all her other senses are on vacation. Miss Kit favors me with a dirty look, and casually kicks the roach out of sight under the dresser.

Maybe she does not wish to further scandalize her niece, or is worried about Rudy's reputation, which is like locking the barn door after Native Dancer is out and has gone cantering on to greater glory. So while the ersatz Snoop Sisters debate the state of the missing resident's health, I am pretty convinced that he was the dead guy in the sky at the advertising agency's Christmas party.

What a way to go! Strung up like a stocking and cut down like a lump of coal. At least the condemned man had a last cigarette, from the odor my nose detected going up the chimney. He had a lot of previous ones in this place here, although the butts are cold and dead as a smoked mackerel.

Of course, if I now know for sure who met his Maker in a chimney, I do not know why. A guy from this side of Skid Row would hardly be worth killing for love or money. So it comes down to the current theory among the amateur set: Rudy was an unintended victim. Brent Colby, Jr., had been so successfully mum about using a shill in a Santa suit this year that this poor dude swung in his stead.

I wonder how the perpetrator feels about slaying the wrong Santa, but mostly I am not too interested in the state of his--or her--conscience.

The question is, will the murderer make another attempt on Colby before Christmas Day rolls around?

Chapter 26

Home for the Holidays

"Your cousin Bo will meet you at the airport."

His mother's voice had been expressionless when he had called her back with his flight times. He found himself mirroring her apparent indifference.

"That's fine, if I can recognize him. He hasn't gone bald and grown a goatee, has he?"

"Bo, oh no. He'll be at the gate."

Matt nodded, though she couldn't see him.

"I don't like to drive in traffic like that," she added. "At night. And the airport is so big and busy."

"That's fine, Mom. I don't expect you to chauffeur the ex-priest home in triumph."

A pause as flat as their dialogue. "I didn't tell them yet."

"Yet? It's been almost eight months."

"Yes. Well. An opportunity didn't come up."

"Great. That leaves it to come up at the holidays."

"I didn't think you were coming back."

Not "home." Back. Not "this year." Ever.

"It's true I didn't get home much from the seminary, or later, when I was changing assignments. A priest's life is pretty demanding."

"I know that. It's quiet here at Christmas." He could picture her looking around the small, boxy rooms with their pillared forest of dark, unpainted woodwork between main rooms, a legacy of the twenties. "I haven't gotten a tree in years."

"I don't need a Christmas tree."

"We--the family--usually celebrate at Wanda and Stach's place Christmas Eve and then come back into town for midnight mass at St. Stan's."

"I know that, Mom. I used to live there, remember?"

"Not for a long time. I don't understand what you're doing in Las Vegas."

"You know why."

"No I don't, Matt. I know what you think you're doing there, but ... it doesn't matter. It was so long ago. I've forgotten about it, and I'm glad that I have."

"I haven't forgotten. Maybe I couldn't until now."

"Until now?

He grasped the speaker end of the telephone receiver, hard, and stared at the immensity of red sofa slashing across the shiny wooden floor.

"I found him."

"Oh, dear God! No, Matt."

"I know you don't want to be reminded. I don't blame you. But I was just a kid then. I need to understand."

"To understand what, at this late date? To drag out my disgrace before the family like a Christmas present? Again? And now you're not ever--"

His mother's emotions rarely stirred. Now she was angry. Not at the past, not at the man who'd beat and deserted her. But at him, her son, the only one who'd stood up for her.

"I discovered that it's not Effinger I don't understand," he told her, matching her agitation, as if she had summoned it. "I tracked him down, grabbed him, handed him over to the authorities. Then I realized what I really wanted to know was the other side of it. In Chicago."

"Cousin Bo will pick you up." She repeated in her deadest voice, the voice that he had heard for most of his three decades and counting.

He thanked her, wished her good night and hung up.

The closer he got to the center of the family web, the more he stood to lose. His mother disowned his quest, and his cousin Bo was a hearty Polish chauvinist who'd never left Sandburg's Chicago of hog-butchering, meat-packing plants that produced a lot of balogna to feed its teeming immigrant-spawn yearning to breathe free at ice-hockey games, over hot-dog vendors' fat-laden, steaming franks. And beer. Don't leave out the inalienable right to casks of beer for the boys, with the kitchen and coffeepot reserved for the girls and gossip.

It suddenly occurred to Matt that he was glad the hunt for Effinger had drawn him to Las Vegas, where almost everyone he passed on the Strip was a transient, where Milady Sleaze dressed up in denim and diamonds, where even the Statue of Liberty boogied at the ersatz concrete canyon of New York-New York--the theme hotel and casino, that is.

He looked at the red sofa, which might be a Kagan, and nodded his head. Nobody in the old neighborhood would have a wild and foxy sofa like that.

Matt carried his duffel bag up the connecting ramp to the gate at O'Hare International Airport. His left cheek was still icy, as if numbed by a dentist, from leaning against the window for the entire three-hour flight, watching the land change underneath him.

First sand and the rugged red-rock canyons of the West. A spilled sunset on the earth's dirt floor. The Rockies, magnificent in mobcaps of snow, skiers' delight. Then farmers' fields, flat and rolling, scribed as if by a giant compass into concentric circles of dirt and drifted snow. 'Twas not the season to grow even holly. Or mistletoe. There was never mistletoe at family Christmases; too pagan a custom.

He'd had a drink on the plane, despite being stunned by the four-dollar price tag for the dollhouse bottle of scotch whisky. His hands still shook a little. Facing the old folks at home would be worse than sparring with Cliff Effinger at a tacky motel.

He blundered into the mirage of faces looking toward the connecting tunnel like an audience in search of a star, blue eyes and blond hair in natural profusion. What did cousin Bo look like now? Six years older than Matt, almost forty, and never left Chicago in his life. Dutiful to family errands, even for his aunt Mira, who didn't exactly sit at the center of family affairs. But then a Pole will do almost anything for a priest; the Polish Spring had really begun when one became Pope one day.

The faces were expectant, but not for him. As soon as the press of departing passengers behind him eased, Matt stepped out of the flow and looked around. Maybe he had changed too.

The circle of waiting faces lit up in turn, and looked beyond him. People rushed together like colliding atoms, combined, and formed a new unit that walked as one down the long, echoing concourse toward the baggage-claim area.

He'd wait ten minutes, then head for the ground transportation area, though he'd hate to pay for a cab all the way to St. Stan's. He was couch-poor now, thanks to Temple.

"Matthi--" The voice began a greeting, then edited itself to a rule laid down by a firm teenager years before. " Matt. Over here."

Matt watched a form bob through a ring of waiting people. He tried to fit the lanky, cherub-cheeked teenager he had always thought so tall to the Santa-size roly-poly guy crashing through the circle of waiting people.

"You haven't changed a bit," Cousin Bo said as he pulled off a sheepskin-lined glove to shake Matt's bare hand. "Say, that sissy sheepskin jacket is okay for a Chicago autumn, but it won't cut no ice now. It's the dead of winter here. Got any bags I can carry?"

Matt was mesmerized by Bo's bulky, quilted yellow nylon jacket and massive boots. His girth had expanded, but his flaxen hair had dwindled to a few slick strands across a baby-pink scalp. His cheeks were still plump and rosy, and the cold had singed his ears scarlet. A knitted cap peeked out of a jacket pocket like an elf's cap.

No bag's," Matt said, slinging his carry-on strap over a shoulder. "I can handle this."

"I don't know what you were thinking of, Father Matt." Bo swung into step beside him, reverting to the familiar form of address. Becoming a priest had made even indifferent older cousins respectful. "This is Chicago, you know. We have a reputation to keep up as the biggest, the baddest, the coldest, the windiest city west of Lake Erie."

"I've got gloves in my carry-on. I almost didn't recognize you, Bo."

"Put on a little lakefront property in the last few years." His glove-less hand circled on the quilted stomach, while his other hand touched the top of his head.

Matt almost expected Bo to start patting his pate in the children's game where the left hand can't differentiate from what the right hand is doing. Matt felt a little guilty about letting Bo stay behind the times on the state of Matt's vocation, but he wasn't about to enlighten him. Why blow the only respect you've had in your life from a bigger, burlier older cousin? The only time Matt had really felt a part of the extended family of Belofskis, Zabinskis and Geniuszes that surrounded his mother and himself in their isolation like the Pacific Ocean an atoll, was when he had announced he was leaving their transplanted Polish island for the seminary.

"How is everybody?"

"Yeah, you haven't been up here in a while, and not for Christmas for . . . well, I don't think you ever celebrated Christmas here since seminary."

"I don't think I celebrated it much before then either."

Bo cleared his throat and started stuffing fat pink fingers into the stiff glove. "You sure look good, though. Sis always said it was one of God's incomprehensible wonders that you . . . well, you know what women say, a lot of ado about nothing. She called you the Incomprehensible Wonder all the time you were off in seminary, but she got over that when you took final vows, or whatever."

Matt smiled to himself. Incomprehensible Wonder almost competed with the Mystifying Max. "Sis," he recalled, had been a placid, brown-haired girl with a wicked tongue that belied her buxom self-satisfaction.

Overhead signs warned of upcoming rest rooms, newsstands, cocktails and food.

"They sure make you walk for your supper around here," Bo complained, as if his dinner had been slow in coming. "I got a parking spot close in, at least."

"Close" proved to be another long hike. The vehicle was a perfect icon for the Windy City, a pumped-up, four-wheel-drive machine rimed with snow and salt around the wheel wells.

"This'll do it," Matt commented as he swung his bag and himself aboard.

"Darn right. You got to give this climate something to fight with."

The vehicle lurched down the exit, while the passengers bounced on the upholstered captain's chairs covered in stiff vinyl. Matt wondered what a thing like this cost. More, he thought, than a red sofa.

Pustules of yellow light pocked the dark streets. Simple street lamps and headlights seemed sinister. Matt didn't bother to anticipate the route: he dug his lined gloves from the duffel bag and donned them, his fingers already stiff with cold. Despite having been run within the half hour, the Isuzu was cold, inside and out, on every surface: seat, window, dashboard. A heat-blower puffed chill air like the North Wind personified, while their white breath broke on the windshield like surf.

"You forget," Matt said.

"Especially in sunny Nevada." Bo grinned, knowing exactly what he meant, and glanced at him. "You got a new church there?"

"It's an old parish. Our Lady of Guadalupe. Hispanic, predominantly."

Matt judged his carefully evasive half-truths with the contempt of a disgruntled critic. He was beginning to realize that there were worse things than confronting Effinger. There was always that anchor of American life until now, that holy trinity of Mother Church, the family . . .

"How's my mother?"

"You know her, pretty unexcitable, not boisterous like the rest of us Polacks." Bo's eyes slid to Matt's face. "Of course, you're not a total Polack."

Matt looked at Bo's profile, at his blue eyes slightly bulging from their sockets, as if the fragile light blue were too delicate to see through without great strain.

Matt's brown eyes were unusual with blond hair, but he knew that blue is the recessive trait. Perhaps his father had not been pure Polish, or possibly Polish at all. He wondered which aunts and uncles knew the true story. They used to speak Polish in front of the kids, and would never reveal what they had been saying. Among the children of immigrants, adults had the secret language, not the kids.

Matt knew even less of the language now than he had then. Sounds and syllables were familiar, but white noise. He had never felt Polish in the naively chauvinistic way they had. He had always felt different. Maybe he was half Hispanic. Maybe that was the secret that kept his father a mystery. Or maybe the son of an Italian or a Greek. Immigrants, even unto the third or fourth generation, remained clannish and close-minded, determined to keep their heritage undiluted. The Old Country lived on in the new, even as ancient peasant genes thrived in them all as they all strived to escape their humble heritage.

"Too bad more of the kids aren't home this Christmas."

Bo's comment reminded Matt to ask after them.

"How old now?" Bo was a happy man, on solid ice. "Stan, the oldest boy, is off at the University of Syracuse on a hockey scholarship. Big fella, you can bet. Stefania went to secretary school, only it's computers and word processors and such these days. She's got a job in Florida, of all places. And a boyfriend. She's visiting his folks in Nebraska for Christmas, and they'll be comin' here for Easter. Name is Torrence, her boyfriend. Good Catholic boy, though. No ecumenical wedding needed there."

"There might be one in the family someday. How old are the rest?"

"Krystyna, she's, uh, seventeen. And Colette's thirteen, gettin' tall. Scott's almost twelve, and little Heather is, gollee, eight now. Time goes by."

Matt nodded, trying not to smile at how the children's given names became more yuppie the younger the offspring. Old Father Slowik wouldn't have liked those more recent baptisms.

"Slowik still pastor?"

"No, Father Matt. He got a little . . . confused. Oh, he's still assigned here, but he doesn't do much but lead the rosary at funeral visitations. I hear they're going to send him somewhere warm pretty soon. Sad. We got a young guy now for pastor. Younger than you even. From Krakow. Says mass in Polish. One each Sunday, for the old folks. Gotta admit even I don't remember it like I used to."

"I think I'll avoid the Polish mass myself," Matt said, laughing.

"You should ask Father Czerwonka to let you celebrate a mass while you're in town. Be a treat for the family."

Matt only nodded, not wanting to make momentous revelations here and now. Not when they were heading to a bigger confrontation on the old battlegrounds, the house on Sofia Street.

"Man," he remarked, "that's a lot of snow. Funny how you forget about the realities of places you leave."

"Got a whole winter's worth by Thanksgiving. Five feet. Remember shoveling all that shit? I mean, stuff."

"No you don't. I bet old Father Slowik lets out some earthy strings every now and again."

"Well, yeah. How'd you know?"

"Priests are as likely to blow off steam in small bad habits as anyone. Now that his mind is playing tricks on him, he won't be as careful not to scandalize the parishioners, that's all."

"Really? Priests cuss?"

"Really. And Father O'Reilly in Tucson was in the habit of cheating at golf."

Bo laughed. "Yeah. But I don't remember you getting into jams when you were a kid. Mr. A Plus all through school. Mr. Clean."

Matt nodded. "Kinda abnormal, when you think about it, isn't it?" He kept his eyes--and smile--on Bo's profile until he got a return look.

His cousin's face went slack with confusion, uncertainty, a brief glimmer of something. His thick gloves lifted from the wheel as he flexed his fingers.

"I guess you learn things about human nature in the religious life. I dunno. We working stiffs with families, we kinda rush through life, wondering where the time and the money went."

"I never had much of either," Matt said, wondering if that were a blessing or a handicap.

He looked out the window at the huge, pale mounds of snow by the roadside, lit intermittently by streetlights so they seemed to be an endless exhibit of snow dunes, dimpled with brown sprays of slush.

"How long you staying?" Bo asked.

"Just past Christmas. I decided I owed myself a holiday vacation for once."

"Yeah, being the celebrant doesn't allow much time for celebrating. I hope you can tilt a stein or two while you're here."

"I hope I can do more than just tilt it."

Bo's blue eyes crinkled with humor. He laughed like a bear, hearty as all outdoors, and punched Matt lightly on the knee. "That's a good one. Caught me there. You know, having a relative that's a priest makes you kinda step careful."

"I know. You shouldn't do that, not with any priest. It's an isolated life in many ways. Let them be a little human now and again."

"Bo nodded, serious."Yeah. There aren't that many priests left any more. That's why we had to go all the way to Poland." He frowned. " 'Course, they're a little old-fashioned there. Want to put the foot down on earrings on schoolgirls, and you know the howl you'll raise if the girls can't visit the Piercing Pagoda in the mall, even little Heather-- Heck, I seen babies in earrings. And the boys are startin' in, like they're not men unless they got a pearl stud in one ear." He glanced apologetically at Matt. "Didn't mean to complain; we're lucky to have Father Czerwonka."

"I doubt the state of people's ears has much to do with their state of grace. Seventy years ago the taboo was see-through stockings on flappers' legs."

"Now they have see-through swimsuits! Honest to God. Not that I seen-through one, or even seen one, but you read about these things in the paper."

"You should see Las Vegas."

"Yeah, Father Matt. I wonder about you being there. Pretty eye-opening, ain't it?"

"It's a city, like anywhere. Most of the people there live ordinary lives."

"What about living off gambling? Used to be we could all point at Las Vegas and shake our fingers, but now the lottery and the Indian casinos and bingo games are everywhere. My very own mother visits the bingo hall once a month."

"I don't know, Bo. I'm younger than you. I don't have to worry about anybody's taste in earrings but my own, I--"

"Father Matt--you don't ... I mean--Jesus!" Bo wrenched his eyes from the freeway, trying to glimpse the other side of Matt's face.

"No, no. Not me. Don't worry. Some inconsequential things hold. I shall not wear my trousers rolled." The reference was lost on Bo, but Matt smiled to hear an imagined Temple twitting him: "another Nostradamus line, Divine."

Back to Bo. "I promise you I'll go to my grave without an earring. Remember that later."

"Whew. Everything's changing, you know. Hardly can figure out what to think or do any more. Unless you go to one of young Father Czerwonka's sermons. It's inspiring, to hear someone that sure."

He's younger than I am, you say."

Bo nodded.

"Give him a few more years in America. He won't be so irritatingly sure any more."

"Yeah. It is irritating. I mean, what does he know about Mary Margaret and me never hearing anything at home but the kids squabbling and the dogs barking, and we're supposed to-- Oh, God, that crazy fool Buttinsky! Did you see how he cut in front of me? And nothing but ice slick right here. Look at him, tooling along like he's in the right."

Bo's vehicle swept by the offending minivan, his fist punching a horn blast. "Damn asshole ... By God, it's a woman!" His invective sputtered out from sheer shock.

Matt had tuned out the plaint of the middle-aged blue-collar-guy-who-meant-well, but-the-world-was-making-it-hard-for-him-to-understand-it.

Places had an attitude their people reflected, Matt thought. Bo's was pure Chicago Sandburg, brash and decent and worried he might not be. He would never have trousers to wear rolled or unrolled, only jeans or pants. He would never have a red suede vintage sofa. He would never have any rest until he died, confused but hopeful that it was all true, the bit about heavenly reward and what ye sow ye shall reap, and what he had mostly sown had been kids, and he was mostly pretty damn proud of how they had turned out, earrings or not.

Matt kept his face to the window and the dark. He was beginning to half recognize intersections and storefronts. He was getting closer. He was coming home.

Chapter 27

"Cold and White and Even..."

"You're making a big mistake," Temple told Kit when they were back at Cornelia Street, safe and warm and tired from hiking six blocks for a cab.

"Nonsense. I'm reporting possible evidence to the police."

"I'm telling you, you'll be sorry."

"I'm doing my duty as a citizen. I will have no regrets."

Tossing her head and assuming a Sidney Carton-going-to-the-guillotine pose, Kit dialed the precinct station number on the card that Lieutenant Hansen had handed around generously.

No one on the case was available, but, Kit said later, "A very nice desk sergeant took down my name and number and the fact that I might know who the dead man is."

Temple shook her head and went to gaze out the living room's glassy prow. What a view! If only New York had a touch more neon, like Las Vegas, that would be a show! Every building here was so . . . gray and staid. Not a neon flamingo in sight. And if some backstreet storefront windows offered a clutter of sleaze, you had to be passing by to notice it.

True, the city glittered in a starry sprinkle of little yellow light bulbs, the ones Temple called fairy lights. But the buildings were so high, the main avenues so wide and the other streets so narrow, that this modest dusting of glitz paled against the cold, wet-asphalt-gray of a December day in the Big Apple.

If so many yellow cabs didn't populate the streets, New York would be positively gloomy. She wondered if Matt would have a good Christmas in Chicago, where it might be colder, but at least it would be a white Christmas.

"Aren't you changing for bed?" Kit asked as she breezed by, lowering the blinds on the windows. "We don't have to retire right away, but we can at least get into our comfy jammies."

"Auntie, that is a loathsome scenario. Here I stand in the most sophisticated city in the world, and I am being urged to get into my jammies at only three-something p.m. by a female aunt. Couldn't we at least go listen to Bobby Short at the Carlyle Hotel?"

"One does not just crash that kind of venue. But why don't you want to change out of your street clothes?"

"Because we're going to need our street clothes very soon."

"I just told you; we're not going out this evening."

The phone wheedled for attention.

"Yes we are," Temple said dourly, "and it won't be a hot spot like the Carlyle Hotel."

"Yes?" Kit crooned to the phone. She always answered it as if she were in a play, and Noel Coward might be on the line's other end. "Yes, Lieutenant."

Kit turned and nodded significantly to Temple, one of those "You see?" nods that Hardy was so expert at bestowing on Laurel.

Hardy's smugness, of course, always meant a great fall.

"This afternoon?" Kit's limber voice stretched the three syllables into an incredulous four.

"Now? But--I see. Yes, I am very certain that I know the Santa Claus victim. He was a poor soul with no living family that we know of. A few of us looked after him, and he was at my place just four days ago. Well, I don't know. I've never seen a corpse before that wasn't still alive. I mean, my previous corpses have all been onstage. Yes, I've been to a funeral home or two, but those corpses are made up to look like someone else much better looking than the deceased. All right."

Kit hung up. "What a rude man. Can you imagine hauling us out on instant notice like this to the city morgue?"

Temple nodded. "I was trying to tell you. You can't call a police station saying you think you know who an unidentified corpse is. They get very interested, even if it is Sunday afternoon. And I think most morgues are called medical examiner's offices nowadays."

"Blast!" Kit began to look worried. "I don't really want to see Rudy in . . . that condition."

"Dead?"

"Dead and not prettied up. Have you ever seen a corpse on a police slab?"

"I doubt the process is that crude. Matt saw his corpse in a special viewing room."

"Matt Devine saw his own corpse?"

"No. His stepfather's corpse. The one he was looking for."

"The stepfather ... or the corpse?"

"The stepfather. The stepfather just happened to be a corpse by the time Matt found him. Supposedly. Anyway, the morgue had a viewing room, so Matt was standing somewhat above it--"

"Like in a theater balcony?"

"Not that high, and not nearly that distant. He described a picture window with a curtain. When the curtain was drawn, he looked down on the body of his supposed stepfather, lying on a gurney."

"Euuuh. Not much showmanship there. Yank and gawk."

"Matt couldn't make a positive identification."

"Whoa! You just said the corpse was his stepfather."

"I said maybe. Matt said that death had . . . changed everything. The muscles relax, you know."

"Well, of course I know! I'm an ex-actress, we are used to visualizing. How relaxed? Jaw agape and all? Or bandaged shut like Mar-ley's ghost?"

"I don't know. I guess you'll just have to find out."

"We'll just have to find out."

"I don't know what Rudy looks like."

"Of course you know what Rudy looks like. You met him right here at the front door."

"In Santa guise, remember? You're the only one who can identify the unadorned body."

"If I can . . . identify the body. Temple! Why did you let me call the stupid precinct?"

"I tried to warn you."

Kit gazed at her half-closed blinds. "It's so cold and damp out, and we've already been tramping through a substandard housing arrangement."

"You mean the romance of a railroad flat?"

"Oh, do shut up. I know this bossy lady lieutenant you talk about is going to be some savage, six-foot-tall Amazon from Brooklyn, whose father was a pipe fitter or a stevedore or something."

Temple kept mum. Lady cops weren't all cut from the same mold, that was for sure.

"You will go with me, won't you, dear? I mean, you're the expert in these matters."

"Lieutenant Hansen would not be happy to hear that. I'll go, but you had better keep your mouth shut about my brushes with homicide in Las Vegas. I suspect that Hansen got enough dirt from Molina without your chiming in."

Kit nodded meekly. Even her hair seemed paler in the lamplight. Going to see your first body was never a great pre-Christmas experience.

For once Temple blessed New York City's native attributes. The continuous rush of traffic through the overcast afternoon was like a mountain stream that is heard but not seen, distracting and even refreshing.

She and Kit arrived at an anonymously blockish sixties-built building at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue right off the East River. Tall, anorexic aluminum letters announced this as the "Office of the Chief Medical Examiner." Up the few steps they glided, under an entrance accented with blue tile work. In other words, they would hardly know they were entering a morgue, if they hadn't known it.

The reception area was empty due to the imminent closing. A man in a dark green-brown all-weather coat was hunched over the reception desk, arguing about them with someone they couldn't see, Kit and Temple retreated quietly to some chairs to wait.

They're not relatives, but they saw the guy only three days ago. They say he has no known family. Listen. I know it's almost closing time. I'm on OT myself. But it's worth a shot. If the photo isn't a positive, I'll have to take them downstairs. Lieutenant Hansen is very anxious for a break in this case. It involves some highly placed citizens. You know the neighborhood; it isn't exactly the Bronx."

Apparently, the petitioner won, for the man turned and looked toward the entrance.

"Here we are!" Kit could never stand not being the center of attention. She waved and scooted over to him. Temple, mortified, followed.

"You're Miss Carlson?"

The man sounded surprised, but he couldn't have been more surprised than they were. Standing straight, he loomed well over six feet, making Temple and her aunt feel like pygmies.

"Detective Ciampi." He eyed them with equal dismay. His dark eyes hesitated on Temple. "And this is--?"

"My visiting niece, Temple Barr."

"She saw the deceased as well?"

"Oh, yes." Kit's eyes were disingenuous behind her enlarging lenses. She wanted an escort into the heart of darkness that she knew better than this looming, gloomy detective who had the face of a kindly bloodhound.

Temple could feel Kit's tightening fingernails through the ribbed cuff of her jacket. Kit was worse than toting Louie around!

"Better fill these out." He handed them clipboards with a form. "Since you're not relatives, you won't need two pieces of ID, but I'll want to see one from each. You can sit down, if you like."

He looked at his watch and then at the thin-lipped woman he had persuaded to admit them.

"Golly, Temple," Kit said as they hurried to the chairs. "I don't need to see Rudy's body that bad."

Temple checked her wristwatch. "Twenty-five to four. Plenty of time to do our civic duty."

Detective Ciampi tried not to hover, but he was too big to avoid it. He collected their forms and Temple's driver's license. Kit was humiliated to discover that she had no photo ID but her AARP credit card.

"I don't like to flash that," she confided to Temple when he had left them.

"But you can get one of those when you turn fifty. You're much older than that."

"Shhhh! Even the dead have ears."

"Having ears doesn't mean hearing anything."

The detective returned their IDs and something else: a Polaroid photo of the deceased.

He handed it to Kit. "This do it for you?"

"Is it good enough for identification, you mean?" She stared at the small, ruddy face. "It looks like him, but I usually saw him standing up."

"That's no longer possible, ma'am."

Kit cast Temple a pleading glance.

"You'll have to decide for yourself if that's enough to go on."

"No. No, it isn't possibly. I'm sorry."

Ciampi smiled sadly. Temple had a feeling New York cops had a lot of reason for that. "Don't be sorry, but you will have to see the body in person. She necessary for a second opinion?"

His eyebrows indicated Temple.

"No." Kit clutched Temple's wrist harder. "For moral support. She's done this before."

"Oh, she has." Ciampi sounded like he was humoring a four-year-old. "All right, ladies, let's get this show on the road."

He headed for the admissions desk, Temple and Kit following like orphans of the storm.

'That's interesting," Temple said. "I assumed visitor's badges would be required, but apparently not."

"We're not really visiting anyone," Kit complained, her voice low but vehement. "Not anyone who can talk back, anyway."

"No, but it is a restricted facility. This will be a new experience."

"I thought you'd done it before?"

"No, I've heard about it, from Matt."

Kit dropped her arm. "What kind of moral support are you, then.'"

For answer, Temple thrust a tube of lip balm at her aunt.

"I don't want a breath mint."

"It's not a breath mint. It's a medicinal lip balm."

"I don't need a lip balm. My knee may be shaking, but my lips aren't aren't chapped."

"Put some on your nose."

"Why should I put smelly Vaseline on my nose? I may be seeing the dead, but I don't wish to look like a kook while doing it."

"The medicinal smell will deaden the . . . dead smell."

"You think we'll be close enough to smell a dead smell?"

"I think it's pretty pervasive around these places, even if they have a viewing room."

"Oh. Is there a ladies' room--?"

"I don't think you want to linger here."

"But I can't sniff anything here."

"Good. Keep up the good work when we go inside and 'downstairs.' "

Kit only had time to give her niece a horrified look before Ciampi came to escort them past the reception room and into the bowels of the ME's office.

Everything was businesslike and sterile. Temple had a feeling their route avoided such areas of prurient interest as autopsy rooms.

The elevator to the basement was nondescript and silent.

Detective Ciampi took the lead as they left it.

"I still don't smell anything," Kit whispered to Temple, having commandeered her wrist again.

"Good. Try not to detect any undertones."

"Undertones. Like with perfume?" Kit defied all advice and sniffed madly, bunny-rabbit-style, until her nose twitched. "Oh!" She reached for the lip balm in Temple's hand and jammed the open tube into her nostrils like an addict sniffing cocaine. "Sorry. Want some?"

"I used it in the cab."

"My. You do know a trick or two. I'm sure the corpse won't care that I reek of Mentholatum, and I don't have a significant other at the moment. . . nor am I likely to if the odor lingers as you say."

The room to which they were led at last was not empty. A stiff figure was waiting for them, but it was upright and reasonably alive.

"You're on duty? I've got an identification to make." Detective Ciampi pulled out a notebook to give the figure clad in the gruesome green baggies of an operating room some numbers.

The trio were led to a row of huge metal file drawers.

"Just like on TV," Kit whispered.

"Open the locker," Ciampi said.

And just like on TV, the attendant pulled one out. The unveiling was an eerie, silent process, revealing a body inch by inch.

Kit knew her role in all this and edged in front of Detective Ciampi's great bulk to see better. Temple did too. The skin was still highly colored; at least they were spared a ghastly pallor. Temple looked carefully. With the beard and accouterments removed, Santa had lost all his inflated good cheer. He was a thin, red-faced man, and the body beneath the fabric was slight.

"Oh, yes," Kit said. "I knew him."

Temple kept waiting for the "Horatio" that should end that line from Hamlet, but for once Kit was unaware of the theatrical antecedents of her words.

Her head tilted to a different angle, as if by altering her perspective, she might alter the inescapable fact. "Rudy Lasko. He was at my apartment only . . . three? . . . nights ago. He was doing Macy's."

"You're sure?" Ciampi's voice was an official monotone.

Kit nodded as bravely as any widow. In the overbearing light, her nostrils gleamed.

"Yes. Oh, yes. I don't know if the redness is from his Santa makeup or . . . what happened, but other than that, it looks just like Rudy."

"You have an address?"

She gave it in a firm, clear voice, adding, "I can refer you to several other people around town who dealt with Rudy recently. He was sort of our cause. We tried to look out for him. I guess we didn't do a good job."

Ciampi nodded at the attendant. The drawer slid shut with the ball-bearing efficiency of a greatly burdened file drawer, gave a final click and stayed shut; the man on the unseen tray stayed dead.

Detective Ciampi took Kit's arm to guide her from the room. "You ladies did all right. The reason most IDs are handled by Polaroid from the reception desk is that we had too many relatives screaming and fainting and the ME's office doesn't have the staff or space to tend to them." He glanced at Temple as they reached the door to the entry area. "Good trick with the VapoRub, or whatever. Tried it myself the first time."

Temple felt a certain undergraduate glow, but Kit was silent as they left She even let Temple--Temple!--hail a cab.

They got the B-movie-variety driver, the veteran Brooklynite who not only spoke English, but spoke it continuously.

"Downtown.' You sure you wanta go downtown? Lucky it's Sunday. And youse ladies know where you were standin' in front of?

City morgue. Back up a few steps and you woulda been right in there with all the stiffs. Not a good place to end up on a Sunday afternoon, huh? All the way down in the Village, you want to go? O-kay. Open a window if this cigar bothers you. Drivin' a hack is a heart-attack special, I get what relaxation I can. You been to any good places in town? The Met? Guggenheim's pretty interestin'. What about the Statue-a-Liberty?"

And so it went. Temple was beginning to regard Cornelia Street as Home, Safe Home. She and Kit sighed in unison when they were back inside her condominium.

Kit spoke first. "I could use ... a better grade of perfume. Quick! Where are the tissues?"

"On the kitchen counter where you keep them."

"Golly, Temple, you look silly with your nose all shiny." Kit slumped against the countertop. "I hate to admit it, but I've never been inside a morgue before. It's a trip."

"This is my first time too, and we barely penetrated the facility."

"You, a newbie? Can't believe it. Where'd you get that lip-balm trick?"

"I read somewhere that police officers use it when they have to visit the morgue."

"Yeah. Even those big, burly pros like Ciampi. I don't feel like such a wimp."

" Those big, burly pros' include Lieutenant Hansen. I wish you could have met her."

"Why should I want to? From what you've said she's Sonja Henie on acid-etching skates."

"You should see Lieutenant C. R. Molina of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. She's almost six feet tall."

"No! I guess women go to all lengths nowadays when it comes to career choices."

Temple giggled, and leaned against the counter alongside her aunt. "It wasn't as totally horrible as I feared. When Matt did it, he seemed really torn up."

"Men! They can't take the realities of life, like death. We women are tougher. Men don't have menstrual cramps. Speaking of which, I feel a figurative siege coming on. You want some brandy before bedtime?"

Temple nodded, now ready for an early retirement. "So that was Rudy?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Why do you think I need the brandy?" Kit kicked off her ankle boots and hopped atop the counter, and then she stood on it to open the highest cupboard.

Temple babied the bottle of Courvoisier Kit handed down until her aunt jumped to the floor again.

"Damn!" Kit hopped from one stinging sole to the other. "I wish they wouldn't design kitchens for giants, or men. Yup. It was Rudy, all right."

Temple nodded, accepting the juice glass of brandy her aunt poured without comment. Kit was really shaken up if she was serving brandy in juice glasses.

"I think I recognized him too."

"You? How?"

"The eyes. Not that the corpse's had any expression, but they were the right color. He recognized me from your place the earlier night, and wanted to say hello, but didn't want to blow his act. That's why he seemed surprised to see me. Why should your niece be at the site of his next job? Wild coincidence, huh?"

"Happens all the time in New York City. You get this many millions of people together, and the coincidences will knock your socks off. It's uncanny. I noticed it when I first moved here. In fact, not noticing any coincidences is the exception to the rule."

They repaired to the living room, where Midnight Louie had beat them to the prow-facing leather couch. He was sprawled full-length, slantwise, so no human could sit comfortably on either side of him.

"Greedy guts," Temple said.

"Oh, but he's tired out. All those hard hours of work at the advertising agency, and then we drag him out to the seamier side of the city. Let him rest."

"Louie has dragged himself to the seamier side of the city many a time, believe me." Temple shook her head.

Before she could rearrange the big oaf, Kit had sat happily on the area rug and leaned her head against the couch seat.

"Let the big guy rest, Temple. I don't feel like sitting up straight right now anyway"

"I suppose sitting on the floor with a juice glass full of brandy reminds you of those wild parties you went to when you first came to New York."

Temple imitated her aunt in stretching out her legs and leaning against the couch seat. Between them, on the couch itself, Louie stirred. A big black tail slapped across Temple's face, then was still.

"There's somebody who's feeling no pain," Kit said.

Temple brushed his tail aside. Of course it didn't stay swept aside, but swung back to tickle her cheek.

"I don't know how cats can relax so completely," Temple said, moving away. "When it's people who could use a break. Especially after this afternoon."

"Indeed. Between visiting Rudy's flat and seeing Rudy himself flat at the medical examiner's, I feel like I've got apple jelly for joints."

"You do sound tired. It must be awful to see someone you knew pretty well laid out like that."

"That's the rub. I saw Rudy fairly often, but I didn't really know him well. None of us did. In fact, none of us knew him at all after he came back from Vietnam in . . . oh, must have been sixty-five."

"I wasn't even in preschool yet."

"Preschool! How baby boomer of you, Temple. We didn't have such decadences in my youth."

"Apparently you made up for it later."

Kit frowned. "What everybody remembers from my salad days is Hair, the musical, and hair, shoulder-length or more, on guys, and psychedelic Volkswagen vans. That's the funny, freaky stuff. The rest of it was pretty bad. Race riots and war protests. I guess we were a wild bunch because we really thought it was 'eat, drink and be hairy, for tomorrow we die.' "

"So how was Rudy different when he came back from Vietnam?"

"Addicted to everything in sight, for one thing. Cigarettes, booze, pot, whatever they were smoking or sniffing or injecting in Alice's Restaurant, or is it Alice's Wonderland magical-mushroom medicine cabinet?"

"But wasn't everybody into changing consciousness then?"

"No! I never used drugs. Didn't like what I saw it did to people. I had plenty of imagination on my own. All the Vietnam vets were pretty wasted. It made you feel guilty for not having been there, even if you were a girl and couldn't get drafted. So you provided a shoulder for some sad war stories. Most of the vets stabilized and disappeared into real life, but Rudy never made the transition."

"So he leaned on you and your friends for thirty years?"

Kit nodded. "You had to have been there. We were all in the sixties together, no matter what role we played. They were violent, unsettling times that turned our values upside down. There hasn't been a watershed generation like ours since the Depression. We're all vets, in a way."

"But . . . here you are, perched in your cozy condominium, and there was Rudy, down in that rat hole."

"I didn't know. We knew he had a 'place,' and that's comfort enough in New York City. So the guys bailed him out when he got picked up for drinking and I found him jobs. He didn't strike you as an unhappy man, did he?"

"No. Quite the contrary. When I ran into him in the conference room, he seemed quite cheerful, like it was our little secret. Of course, to him the secret was bigger than finding Santa in the wings before his 'surprise' appearance. He knew who I was, and that made it even funnier."

"Rudy was great at getting into character, as long as he didn't have to keep it up too long. And he was so good with kids."

"I saw that."

"Maybe that's not such a bad way to die, playing Santa Claus."

"I've seen worse. A lot worse."

For a moment Temple saw Darren Cooke, a gun poised at his temple, and a forefinger laid over his on the trigger.

Louie lashed out with his tail, striking her face again, and she jumped as if shot.

This was it. No more messing with murder. It was invariably messier than it looked.

Chapter 28

Mother and Child Reunion

Strings of exterior Christmas bulbs outlined the eaves and many doors and windows on the street in southeast Chicago where Matt had lived as a boy.

The thousand points of lights emphasized the gridwork sameness of these nineteen-twenties remnants, four-square two- and three story flats with basements, the upper stories for rental residents. The interiors would offer cramped bedrooms with odd angles, inconvenient doors and windows that broke up any wail space that had a prayer of hosting a couch or a bed, furniture jammed against long ranks of radiators painted in an attempt to disguise their homeliness. Dry heat would bake nosebleeds, split ends, static hair and cracked fingernails into your very DNA.

And outside during the winter, wet cold creeping up your sleeves and down your jacket neck.

Matt sat in the idling truck, reluctant to leave Bo's rough warmth. His kids were lucky.

"Thanks for the ride," Matt said.

"See you at my house Christmas Eve." Bo ripped off a glove in the

now-heated interior, seized Matt's hand in his hot pink fingers, shook it. "Nice seeing you again. Shoulda been sooner. Can't wait for you to see those little hellions of mine. You're looking to be the only priest in this and the next generation of the family."

Bo's last words helped spur Matt to depress the door latch and tumble into the subzero chill. Wind whipped a few flakes of snow into a pseudostorm around him.

"Thanks," he muttered into the frigid north wind, feeling his nostrils pinch shut on every icy inhalation. He slammed the door quickly to preserve the truck's hard-won interior heat.

"Say hi to Aunt Mira--!" Bo shouted in farewell.

The closing door cut off her name. Matt stuffed his right hand back into its inadequate glove. Acrylic-lined leather didn't cut it in this climate.

He stared at the two-story house, dark among its brighter brethren, lightless, only a faintly perceived glow warming the first-floor windows behind the drawn curtains. Still shuttered, still secret in a hushed, unspoken way.

"Holy Mother, be with us now ..."

For some reason, he pictured a blue mermaid.

". . . and at the hour of our death."

The shoveled walk made a crooked, narrow, slovenly path, fit for playing a kid's game like "Pie," not for walking on. Snow pressed past the feeble mod-acrylic barrier of J. C. Penney pants and thin Sun Belt socks into the sides of Matt's suede shoes, encasing his feet in ice packs. Motorcycle boots. That was the way to come home to Chicago in winter. Ready to kick aspirations in the behind.

Matt mounted the five steps to the porch door. Screens had been exchanged for glass storm windows, and fine, dry snow had drifted against their corners, erecting lattices of frost.

Matt tried the aluminum storm door. Locked, as he had expected. Security was important to Chicagoans, worth a trek through the Small porch's icy air to inspect the caller. Matt punched the old button-model doorbell, wondering if it still worked, or if he'd have to bang on the glass and metal door like a tramp.

Near the front door on the left (a second door led to the upstairs tenants' quarters), a light switched on, pouring through the square porthole of glass.

The brass lock and knob shook, then turned as the front door opened. Someone stood silhouetted by the warm interior light, eyeing his snow-swirled figure, deciding.

She minced across the indoor-outdoor carpet like an old lady in her heavy, lined slippers.

Matt felt panic attack. Why had he come? Who was this stranger? He had found Effinger, hadn't he? Who else mattered?

Rose of Memory, Mother of Forgetfulness . . . now and at the hour of our birth . . .

Now!

She unlocked the door, told him to watch the last, high step up (as if his muscles hadn't memorized it decades ago), led him into the light and the warmth, suggested he take his shoes off and leave them by the radiator.

Matt didn't want his shoes off in this house. Not yet. He did wrestle off the gloves and the sheepskin jacket. A Midwestern winter made sure that when you weren't fighting the weather outside, you were fighting free of your outerwear inside.

"What do you think this is, the Riviera?" she was asking, lecturing. "Those things wouldn't keep a polar bear warm. Here. Put your gloves and jacket on the radiator. They'll be warm when you leave, remember?"

"I've just gotten here and you're already thinking of when I'll be leaving?" he joked. Maybe.

"No! I thought you'd forgotten, that's all. Haven't been anywhere with a decent wind-chill factor for years."

"That's true. My assignments since the seminary have all been below the Sun Belt."

"Somebody up there must like you. In the seminary in Indiana, I mean."

He smiled at his mother's conciliatory joke and sat in the first nearby chair. It had always been there by the door, the sprawling, square forties maroon-mohair model.

"Coffee?" his mother asked.

"Not this late."

"You? Getting older? Cocoa, then."

Cocoa. That cup of chocolate haven/heaven in a cruelly cold world. Matt nodded, relaxing suddenly. Mothers made things, tended things, made people comfortable. Sometimes even their own children.

She came back from putting on the makings and sat opposite him on the slightly sagging cocoa-brown sofa he remembered. His mother wore no makeup but a little lipstick. In winter it was colorless lip balm. Her monotone skin deadened the delicate color of her blue eyes and turned her hair, a compromise between blond and silver, into dingy yellow-gray. She wore it straight back from her face, in a clip at the nape, as she always had. It was just long enough to flare into pale barbed tufts, like porcupine bristles.

"Plain" would be the word to describe her, yet it was that untouchable plainness of Wyeth's Helga paintings. Frankly middle-aged and Old World, and still a girl hidden there somewhere.

Matt wondered how scandalous anyone would consider it if a senile painter from the Chicago School of Art painted his mother nude, in all her pleated, fading plainness. Compared to the glimpses of the pornographic film in Cliff Effinger's room, the Helga paintings were Madonnas of the Old School. He'd never looked at his mother as simply a woman before.

"Your ears and nose are as red as when you were in fifth grade," she noted, pleased. Something about him had not changed, some autonomic reflexes even he could not control.

"Fair Polish skin," Matt said. "But I got a little tan in Las Vegas."

"That'll be bad for you."

Eternal policewoman, Our Lady of Perpetual Health and Hygiene . . .

"Not too bad."

Something tinged in the kitchen.

Matt let her go for it. He wasn't ready to see how little the kitchen had changed. But he studied the room when she was gone, as he had studied her when she was present.

First he saw the usual picture of the Black Madonna, that Polish icon, that iron doll in gilt and lace, in inadvertent blackface. A Valentine Barbie with a soul of steel.

The same brown and yellow floral wallpaper climbed the little wall space nor covered by wide oak woodwork. Yuppie couples would kill for this unspoiled house, he suspected, as they flocked to old Catholic neighborhoods to rehab two- and three-flats into spacious single-family homes and enroll their precious few children in the few remaining Catholic grade schools. Safer, you know. Fewer drugs and gangs. An ethical commitment. Not perfect, but better. Not as good as prep schools, of course, and still dear, but perhaps more democratic for the twenty-first century . . .

"Here." His mother wafted the mug of cocoa before him like a domestic magician. Miniature marshmallows floated, pure-sugar icebergs, in a cinnamon-brown sea. Soon the heat would melt them into a super sweet, gooey cream that would coat his wind-chapped lips.

Food was the eternal panacea in dysfunctional families. Eat. Swallow whatever must be. Say nothing. Eat.

Matt sipped the hot chocolate.

"Divine," he said.

And she stiffened.

They were sparring partners, trapped in a ring from long ago, never daring to reveal weaknesses or strengths, fated only to keep dancing, dancing away from one another . . .

"Why did you come back, Matt? This year in particular?"

"Maybe I wanted a pat on the head. A 'thanks' for bringing Effinger to some kind of justice."

"He's been out of our lives for years, thanks to you. Maybe I didn't pat you on the head for that." Her hands were empty. She had made nothing for herself. That was the problem. "It scared me. The violence in you."

"Violence? Mine? All those years absorbing his violence ..."

She waved a hand, dismissing the past. "I was glad to have the house to myself again. To ourselves again. In a couple years you were off to seminary, and I was alone. You won, and then you left me alone."

"You can't mean that Effinger was better than loneliness?"

"Not at the end. But, in the beginning ... why do you think I married him?"

"I can't imagine why. Is loneliness why you put up with . . . that for so long?"

"No." She folded plain hands, no rings, undecorated by anything but the more prominent veins of middle age. "You're why I put up with it."

"Me!"

She refolded her hands, to keep them warm. "I didn't like your pursuing Effinger at this late date because he was the effect, not the cause. But I didn't want to go into all the old whys."

"Why not?"

She smiled. "Still asking like a child. Because some of them are inexplicable, even to me now, and will be inexplicable to you now as well. A mother doesn't like looking like a fool to her child. She's supposed to know everything. I knew nothing. You've always known Effinger wasn't your father, Matt. I don't understand why he was so important to you."

"Because he was the only father I knew. Because he was this stranger who had appeared out of nowhere when I had lived quite contentedly without a father, because he brought noise and fear and pain to you and us and to this house." Matt looked around, sure the walls and floors would creak in agreement with him. "I never knew why one day he wasn't there, and the next he was."

"He was not your father. He never acted as a father to you, certainly not a good one. He was my husband, that's all. He was a necessary evil."

"Why? Why on earth was a lazy, ill-tempered, ultimately violent man who wasn't worth the bones in your little finger necessary to us? To you?"

"Because he would marry me."

"That's it? Everyone knew about us. It's not like we weren't news. I was about to enter kindergarten. We were stable, until he came."

She shook her head. "We were not. You thought we were, but we were not. We were nothing. We were a blot on the parish, a stain on the family, an embarrassment, and as you went through school, fatherless, the shame would have been rubbed in worse and worse.

"I was nineteen when you were born. In age. I was . . . fifteen, the way Polish girls are raised, kept away from the boys, hearing stories of Saint Maria Goretti, the patroness of virginity, the little Italian girl who was raped and stabbed but lived long enough to forgive her attacker. That's what made her a saint, not her pain, not her death, bur her forgiveness of her despoiler."

"We agree. That kind of standard lessens women. It implies that they'd be better off dead than to be tainted forever by rape. It makes them property, not people."

"You think that? A priest.'"

"An ex-priest. But I've always thought that. The seminar was strict; it was doctrinaire, but ten percent of the seminarians were women in my day, and more are enrolled now that so few men are joining the priesthood. The instructors didn't quite dare hold the double standard as high as they might have, and they were never as Old World as we were at St. Stan's. Actually, the seminary was very liberating for me."

His mother sat back, underneath the Black Madonna, an expression on her face he'd never seen before.

"Perhaps this will not be so difficult," she muttered. "Or perhaps it will be even more difficult, to make you see how it was then."

"I want to see," Matt said. "You don't have to make me. Just let me in." He set the empty cup of cocoa on the low table next to the chair, with its cheap, ring proof, baked-on finish.

"There's no point getting into your real father. I was eighteen with the mind and heart of a child. We met only once. I can't say what happened. I was too ignorant to know. There was chemistry. It felt like a miracle. He was very handsome. I can't say I loved him, or he loved me, but we were both dazzled for the moment. I never saw him again."

Matt absorbed the story, vague as it was. "Once, and I--?"

She nodded. "As if the angels were laughing at me. I'd heard the tougher girls in school, the ones who rolled their uniform skirts higher than the rest and who smoked cigarettes and worse in the rest room. They were . . . taking chances all the time, and trusting to shaken bottles of Coca-Cola to protect them. Apparently it worked, for I was the only one who didn't graduate."

"You didn't graduate? Not even . . . privately?"

She shook her head. "No. Everything changed. I was sent away to a very cold, hard place for girls like me to wait. We worked like drudges, cleaned up the delivery room even when the morning sickness made us vomit. Twice a week we were walked into 'town' for 'recreation.' The recreation was the townspeople's. They gawked and pointed at us. When our times came it was like torture. Comfort seemed to be too good for us. Most were persuaded to give up their children to couples who could have none. I was stubborn."

"My God, Mother, that was only ... thirty-some years ago. What you're describing is some medieval penitentiary for fallen women."

"It was only thirty-some years ago, but it was like that. In far northern Wisconsin. I think the place is a hospice for the terminally ill now."

"Why did you keep me?"

"Are you complaining?"

"No, I just want to know. It would have been easier the other way."

Again she shook her head. "No. I've seen some of those girls since. They've had easier lives, but they're haunted harder. I can look at you now. Despite the past, you are healthy, well educated, you have spent most of your life serving others. I only mourn your priesthood because I saw it as a sanctuary for you. If now you want to live another life, go ahead. I just. . . don't like the past. Look forward, not back."

He nodded. "Then you don't disapprove?"

"No, never that. But I'm fearful. I don't want you feeling what I've felt for so long. An outcast in your own family. Your priesthood redeemed us, and especially you, as my marriage to that man redeemed us. In the family, in the church."

"But... he was worthless."

"He was a husband, and he was willing to marry in the church. As bad as things became in this house later, beyond it they were much, much better. I was able to go out and get work--"

"And needed to, with that lout around."

"Matt!"

He shrugged. She felt she had made the right choice, the only choice. She would never admit otherwise, but he wondered if she understood the effect of that unhappy domestic life on him, or the fears of himself it had raised.

"What about my real father?"

She straightened nonexistent folds in her gray wool skirt. His mother had never worn pants; in her youth, the fifties, Polish girls wore skirts and were not allowed to don trousers. Much less blue jeans . . . ! Surely, those rules were long gone now?

"I never heard from him again." When Matt would have spoken, she went on, raising a hand. "This you must never tell anyone. When you were just past two, a man came from the City. Downtown Chicago. A man in a very fine suit. He said he was a lawyer, and that . . . the family had learned of our existence because their son had died. In Vietnam. I was to have a settlement. A one-time settlement, and then I would have nothing more to do with them. It could be child support, paid on a Certain schedule, or something else I wanted."

She smiled and looked around. "I asked for a house, just a two-flat. With a house I would have the security of rental income from upstairs, and whatever small wages I earned would be sufficient. The lawyer agreed, and handled everything."

"But you bought it here, in the old neighborhood, that was going the way of all old neighborhoods, into decay. No new start. No escape."

"There was no escape for me anywhere. And you were better off knowing the family. Bo and Mary Margaret hadn't moved out to the suburbs yet. The house was why Cliff married me. He had big plans in those days. I think he was sincere in his way. Only when his big ideas didn't work out, he drank and then he gambled, hoping to win a fortune, and finally he became . . . But he left. You left. The Latinos moved in, some of them, but the yuppies want to move in more. Real-estate values have escalated. You'd be surprised. I have the house."

She was the daughter of people who had been through the Depression. The house was everything. And it had given them stability, even as it had attracted the worst element in their life together. Matt nodded. He couldn't argue with her choice of so long ago.

"Was Devine really my father's name?"

She shook her head. "I never knew his last name, and the lawyer wasn't about to tell me. Devine is a name I got from my favorite Christmas hymn, not spelled that way, but I changed it."

"Christmas hymn?" Matt's memory pulled up no phrase containing the word "divine."

" 'O Holy Night. O night divine.' "She was smiling.

Matt, knee-jerk shrink that he had become, wondered if she realized she had named him for a night, a single night, on which another infant was born, if not conceived. Or was Matt conceived on that night? His birthday was in September . . . ?

"What was his first name?"

"Who?"

"My father."

She hesitated. "If you don't mind, I'd rather not say. I... can't say it. He was from a well-educated, well-to-do family. It's not only the settlement that makes me think that. It's how I met him. In church, lighting two full rows of candles before the Virgin. I guess he came to St. Stan's because it was old-fashioned enough to have the plaster statues with the tiers of candles before them, and the poor box. He was going to war. He didn't have to, he said, but he thought it was the right thing to do, even though he had an easy out. I suppose that was college."

"And that was the night when . . . ?"

She looked down, to the bare, entwined hands on her lap. "I've said enough. I was another person then. You see why that man in Las Vegas doesn't matter at all anymore?"

Matt nodded again. She would never understand that while she could suffer Effinger's abuse for the long-term good, a male child in that household could never be reconciled with it.

The blood feud went on, not over Matt's mother any more, but between Matt and Cliff Effinger. Over what had happened between them. Some wars you can't opt out of, as Matt's real father had apparently known before him. Those are the wars you fight with yourself before and after you fight them with--or for--someone else. Maybe turning Effinger over to the authorities would end this conflict. Matt would see how he felt when he got back.

"What are you going to do when you get back?" his mother asked, eerily echoing his thoughts.

"I don't know. I've got some major decisions to make. About my job. About other things."

"Have you made friends in Las Vegas?"

"Yes. Yes, I have. The volunteers at the hot line are quite interesting, quite admirable. And I have the wildest landlady; she's loaned me her motorcycle to get around on."

"Motorcycle!"

"Don't worry. Electra's in her sixties. Yeah, she rode that motorcycle before she lent it to me. And . . . I'm sort of friends with a police lieutenant."

"Any girlfriends'"

"Well, the police lieutenant's a woman, but I wouldn't exactly call her a girlfriend. My neighbor, Temple, is pretty incredible, though."

His mother nodded, smiling, politely inquiring, trying. "Temple." The name probably struck her as odd, if not blasphemous. "Is she a nice girl?"

Matt doubted that Temple would object to the term "girl" under the circumstances. "A very nice girl."

"Catholic?"

"Not. . . quite."

His mother nodded cautiously, smiling, but said nothing.

Chapter 29

"Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire..."

Temple returned to Colby, Janos and Renaldi Monday morning fully loaded for Louie (CatAboard, Allpetco cat food, cat minilitterbox) wondering what they would do today after the disaster Saturday night. Would it be business as usual?

Not if Kendall Colby Renaldi was involved.

While Temple had spent her time off tracking the sad life and sadder dead body of Rudy Lasko, Kendall had been doing something very different.

She met Temple and Louie as soon as the receptionist announced them. Her face was pale and her eye makeup merged with the dark circles around her eyes, but a bundle of manila folders lay in the crook of one arm, and her voice was brisk.

"Temple. I'm so glad you're early. We need to talk."

Temple trudged after her clicking heels to the tiny office. Kendall didn't even offer to help her unfasten Louie's carrier or take her coat. She shut the door as soon as Temple was inside the cubicle and began speaking.

"It's incredible that I didn't think of you sooner. Daddy has been playing the stoic, trying to dismiss what happened He insists that the victim, whoever he was, was really the intended victim, or else the victim of some outre accident. But who would want to kill some nameless Santa Claus nobody knew was going to be there, except for Daddy and the man himself?"

"Well, the Santa substitute could have mentioned the assignment to a friend. But I happen to know he didn't have many. So, really? Your father believes the actor was the target?"

"He's just trying to reassure me. He knows what a shock this has been. First, my divorce. Now this." Kendall sat at her desk and tapped her pile of folders. "Daddy is simply too confident a man for his own good. If someone tried to kill him once, and missed, that someone will try again. We've got to find the killer."

"We've?"

Temple was feeling overheated and slightly sick in her outdoor clothes, so she unlatched straps and began to struggle out of Louie, Inc.

"It's so obvious!" Kendall was oblivious to surrounding distractions. "Who's right here, with plenty of experience with murder? You!"

"Don't forget Louie."

Kendall glanced at the cat, now struggling out of the unfastened bag. How symbolic, Temple thought.

"I don't know what the cat can do here, or what he did anywhere else. Certainly, he was impressive in alerting us to the . . . hanging. Daddy keeps saying, who would want to kill him, but he isn't looking at things as I am."

"And what are you looking at?" Temple was interested despite herself.

Even Louie leaped atop Kendall's desk and began pawing the file folders in an eerily purposeful manner.

"I'll tell you soon enough." Kendall clapped a hand over the folders and gave Louie a narrow look. Then she leaned closer to Temple and lowered her voice. "Daddy may not know it, but when Carl and I were discussing divorce, it came out that Carl can't count on his daddy to tide him over in the manner to which he has become accustomed, because poor old Tony's private investments have taken a fatal turn for the worse."

"How would that motivate the elder Renaldi to want your father dead?"

"Daddy is the head and heart of this agency. With him gone, the remaining two partners could sell it for a bundle and divide the spoils. Of course I would get Daddy's portion--if they don't kill me too--but each surviving partner's share would be plenty. This is a report on the agency's worth."

"What makes you think that Victor Janos would give up the business without a fight?"

Kendall clenched the fat file she was about to hand to Temple. "Because Victor Janos commissioned this report on the state of the agency on today's market. I got it out of the personal files in his office."

"Why would he want to bow out?"

"I'm not sure, but both these guys are in their fifties. Maybe they crave an early retirement. Daddy will work until he drops. Or is dropped."

"Wouldn't it be simpler for your father to buy out his partners if they wanted to retire early?"

"Both of them? At his age, it'd hardly be feasible for him to continue on solo, and solid new partners are hard to find. Besides, the name means something. Colby, Wilcox and Whatzit would be meaningless. Unfortunately, the partners are like the Three Musketeers. They've always been in lockstep."

"Why would Victor Janos want to sell?"

"I don't know. But I've never trusted the man, not since I was a tiny child. I always wondered why Daddy associated with someone so . . . rough. You can see his edges still need filing down; he's not adapted as Tony Renaldi has."

"What about the grand sixties experiment? Men from different levels of society united by an ugly war into a friendship that overleaped social barriers. You know: the sixties, everybody get together and love one another. Sometimes literally, from what I hear."

"Listen. The partners have been inseparable, but it's always been business underneath the socializing." Kendall's eyes narrowed again. She looked older and harder. "I was awake all Saturday and Sunday nights, thinking. That was a clever, difficult way to murder someone? Whoever did it had to know how traps and snares work. Weren't there tunnels and traps in Vietnam?"

"I'm only a few yean older than you, Kendall don't look at me. I don't know." This time Temple narrowed her eyes. Narrowing one's eyes felt so Humphrey Bogart. "I do know that the victim was also a Vietnam vet."

"There! You see?"

"What do I see?"

"That it can't be just a coincidence. Maybe . . . maybe the dead Santa was hired to do in Daddy and somehow got caught in his own trap."

Now Temple understood how Lieutenant C. R. Molina felt about amateurs.

"That doesn't make sense. Your father was not going to be anywhere near that chimney Saturday night, and no one knew that better than the guy who played Santa Claus in his stead."

"The actor could have feigned being sick, then asked Father to do the chimney routine for him."

"Great idea. But he didn't. He went up the chimney and hung himself."

"Maybe he had a change of conscience. Maybe he had war flashbacks or something and decided to commit suicide."

"Thirty years later in somebody else's chimney?"

Kendall shrugged. Her haggard desperation both tugged at Temple's sympathies and exasperated her. Kendall had seen her father "die" before her eyes. The fact that the victim wasn't really him didn't lessen the emotional damage. A man had died by another's hand. Now Kendall sat shuffling files and papers, hunting for a motive and a killer and suspecting everyone around her.

"Could it be someone from the younger generation?" Temple asked.

Kendall looked up from pawing through the papers, and froze. "You mean . . . someone like Carl, my ex-husband?"

Temple nodded.

"No. Oh, we've all lived our lives under the umbrella of the firm, and I'll work here as long as Daddy's at the helm, but none of my peers really are that interested in taking on the agency once their fathers retire. I guess advertising was exciting back in the sixties. Television was still pretty new and there were a lot more daily newspapers. But everybody's into the Internet now. I can't think who else would want something, something about the firm, badly enough to kill my father. Except one of his partners. They were in a war, weren't they? They killed people then. Why not now?"

"What's on for me and Louie today?"

The abrupt change of subject startled Kendall into answering. "More mock interviews, lunch here with The Client. Nobody's heart is much in it, but Daddy won't let this account slide away because someone went nuts."

"I suppose I could get better acquainted with Victor and Tony. Anything you can think of to get me some private moments with them?"

"Oh, thank you!" Kendall grinned. "I can think up something." She pulled another file from a drawer. Temple glimpsed her own name on it.

"Improvisation is the name of the game in advertising." Kendall flipped through Temple's vitae as blithely as if it were wrapping paper. "Aha. Says here you're consulting with a major Las Vegas hotel on a new multimedia attraction."

"The Crystal Phoenix."

"Huh?"

"That's the hotel's name."

"Oh. Too bad it isn't something big like Caesars Palace or the MGM Grand. Anyway, new attraction equals promotional campaign. Who better than Colby, Janos and Renaldi for the job? We'll both look good if I bring you in as a potential client."

Temple shook her head, meaning agreement, but also conveying a certain skepticism. "Okay. I'm undercover for now. Bring on the murdering partners."

Temple learned a lot just from the way Kendall approached each man.

She began with Tony Renaldi, which indicated she suspected him less and liked him better. At his office door, she poked her head through, smiled and asked, "Got some espresso for a couple of weary survivors?"

"Kendall! Of course. And Miss Barr is the other customer?"

As smooth as extra virgin olive oil. Women in, coffee prepared, cushy guest chairs drawn up to the massive desk and Tony himself installed in the white leather chair that Brent Colby had commandeered Friday night.

The only snag in the Scenario was Midnight Louie, who marched in on quiet cat feet and leaped atop Renaldi's black Lucite desktop.

"Why would he want to be here?" Renaldi asked in jest. "Black on black is no advantage to either." He stroked Louie from head to tail-tip, earning a thrum of purr and a further exploration of his desk.

There was nothing like a toddler or animal for bringing out the true temper of a man or woman. Temple settled into her chair to watch Louie put Tony Renaldi through his paces. But first she studied their common prey.

Tony Renaldi, with his commanding stature and silver-edged dark hair, fit the slightly effete chair much better than Brent Colby, the graying blond Yale graduate, who would show to better advantage against clubby hunter-green or burgundy leather. The tufted pale chair provided a theatrical frame for Renaldi's feline masculinity. Temple tried to picture him as a young man, a private in Vietnam. She could do it best by casting him in some theatrical part she knew, say a gang member of the Jets in West Side Story. A twenty-year-old Tony Renaldi would have the lean and hungry look of "yon Cassius," who lusted after Caesar's power. His edges would be sharper, rawer, the immigrant heritage more obvious and more truculent. He might get into barroom brawls with fellow soldiers, debate whose hometown was better, or who got the bar girl. . .

The Tony Renaldi of today steepled his manicured hands and smiled at Temple. "I assume you wanted more than coffee, Miss Barr, or Kendall wouldn't have brought you here. Some questions about the cat-food promotion?"

Temple could be a velvet glove too. "Not at all. As a matter of fact, Kendall suggested I see you about an upcoming project I'm involved with. I'm consulting for a Las Vegas hotel that's planning an update. We'll introduce a theme park and interactive ride. Does your firm ever handle that kind of showbiz thing?"

Midnight Louie leaped from the desk to the long narrow table crowded with memorabilia along the window. He threaded through the costly office art objects and framed photographs like a wire-walker, disturbing nothing but the dust, and there was probably damn little of that.

"Handle Las Vegas hoopla? Not yet," Renaldi answered Temple, "but we'd like to. Rather, I would. Kendall brought you to precisely the right office. Las Vegas has become very sophisticated about marketing its unique attractions in the past decade. A major New York agency like CJR could position your hotel project to shine in the international focus needed today. We have a strong Internet section as well as top staff in such traditional arenas as television and print media. I thought your field was public relations as well.

"Yes, but I'm a solo act. A mere freelancer. I'm functioning as idea person for the project, but new approaches are always welcome."

"Good. CJR likes to get in on a project from the bottom up. Who are your principals?"

"The owners of the hotel, the Crystal Phoenix."

"Ah. The classiest hotel in Vegas.' Clever positioning for a smaller hotel. Snob appeal amidst a blizzard of hype. Am I guessing wrong to say that the Crystal Phoenix will be upping the hype ante, all in the best of taste, of course?"

"Exactly. We want to keep our reputation, but expand to a new clientele."

Renaldi nodded. "First, we'll settle this cat-account question. Then we can investigate other matters. You wouldn't count us out if the client chooses a representative other than yourself... or your impressive cat?"

"Business is business. The two matters are entirely separate."

Renaldi nodded. "A mature attitude. But I don't think you have anything to worry about."

Temple truly hoped so as she rose to shake hands with him and follow Kendall out of the office.

"That was good!" Kendall whispered as they went down the hallway. "You're a real con woman. Where's Louie?"

"He stayed behind to investigate," Temple said airily.

Victor Janos, feet on his cluttered desktop, was hurling darts at a board on the back of his office door when Kendall knocked. He stopped when they entered.

"Come in!"

They did, and faced a man with a raised dart in one hand, ready to arc it right toward one or the other of their eyes.

Janos was not a needlessly cordial man.

"What is it?"

"Urn. I brought Miss Barr to see you. About a possible Las Vegas commission for the firm."

"Las Vegas. Surface without substance. The perfect product for CJR show her in, Kendall, and then get thee to a nunnery, or wherever it is that young Carlo Renaldi would prefer you were, other than here."

Janos's crooked grin tried to be self-deprecating, but the attitude wasn't in him. Temple was suddenly aware that this was a man who had killed, and who could kill again, no matter how many decades had passed since Vietnam.

Kendall retreated without a farewell glance to Temple. She thought Janos was the murderer. She was leaving Temple to confront him alone.

Janos looked Temple up and down as if she were a commodity. "Sit."

Temple sat. "I was wondering," she began.

"Yes?" He expected a schoolgirl subject.

"Why you're number two in the firm name, and Tony Renaldi isn't."

He sailed a dart past her head. She heard it sink into the soft cork of the target.

"Good question." Victor Janos grabbed a fistful of shelled peanuts from a chrome bowl on his desk and began crunching. "Ever hear of a 'point man'?"

Temple shook her head. Damn Kendall! What had she gotten Temple into? Janos was a different man since the Santa Claus death: abstracted, bitter, mean.

"Point man. Guy who sticks his neck out. Goes first into a booby-trapped tunnel, a field of buried bombs. It takes guts. It takes stupidity. Sometimes, it takes a hero. But most of the time, it takes a shmuck. You know what they're gonna do?"

Temple shook her head.

"They're gonna leave me on point, and fade out. They forget where we came from. They forget where we were gonna get to. They forget everything but me, the guy on point. Perpetually on point."

"I guess I do know what a point man is," Temple said.

Janos's molasses-dark eyes dared her to be worthy of his time and attention.

"I guess I was on point when those two thugs jumped me in a parking garage, or when the guy who wanted to bring a whole neighborhood down had me trapped on the second floor of a burning house. Or when Savannah Ashleigh tried to have my cat falsely accused of impregnating her precious Persian."

"Come on." But the dart he held was poised, drawn back behind his head.

"I guess there are a lot of ways of being 'on point,' for a lot of different people," Temple said. "We all take risks. Maybe it's cigarettes. Or drugs. Or drink. Or AIDS. But you have the medals to prove it."

She nodded at the small wooden frames pocking his wall, each centered by a small metal object.

He swung his chair to face them. A regiment of medals from a war that many considered shameful and that was hardly dignified by the term.

"You know," Temple said, "when they keep referring to what happens in a war as an 'engagement,' you can hardly tell if it's a battle or a social event."

"Or a business arrangement." Janos spoke past the back of his chair, as the dart zinged home to a target halfway between two framed medals.

The chair spun around, and Janos dived into a desk drawer.

Temple stiffened, expecting to be confronted by a pearl-handled revolver at least, shades of Patton and World War II.

Janos pulled a bottle from the bottom drawer, and slammed it to the desktop.

"You don't know nothin' about war or medals or Vietnam, but I guess you got guts or you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be talking to me like you think you know me." His eyes blurred. "All the women we saw in Vietnam were whores or grandmas with grenades in their hands or little tiny kids with strategic parts missing. Which one are you?"

"I'm not in Vietnam. I'm in Manhattan, and it's Christmas and Santa is dead."

"God is dead. So what?"

"Mr. Janos." He glanced at her with those tormented eyes so capable of dishing out what they had gotten, and given, thirty years ago. "Why are you second on the company logo?"

"Because I always did the grunt work, and the worst work, the dirtiest and the deadliest work. I wasn't smooth, not like Mr. CIA Colby. I didn't have the imported-oil potential of Mr. Renaldi. I'm not any good at the advertising game, because it's a crooked game, and it takes a crooked man. I was a lot of things, but I was never that."

"I believe you."

"Why? Why does it matter? Too bad Colby didn't swing."

"Do you know anything about the man who died?"

Janos shook his head, tilting the bottle into a glass he pulled from behind a fake set of gilded leather-bound books.

"Rudy was a Vietnam veteran too," Temple said. "Not a very successful one. He couldn't even pass as a success, like you. I hear he was in and out of a lot of VA hospitals, and was a panhandler for a while. Friends from before the war got together and tried to keep him together, but they couldn't do much."

"Rudy?" Janos leaned forward as if he were deaf. "Did you say Rudy?" For the first time he was really listening to her.

"Yes. Does the name mean something to you?"

Janos was looking beyond her, maybe at the dart board, maybe at the ghost of Christmas past. He shrugged, taciturn again. All is calm, all is bright.

"Kinda ironic, I guess. With Christ mas so near. The dead man being named Rudy, like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Funny, huh?"

But Temple didn't believe for one jingle-bell moment that Victor Janos would know irony from an ironing board.

Her mind modified the carol's words to fit her suspicions as she left his office. All is calm, all is dark.

Chapter: Letter to Louise, Part 2

Bring the Meditations of Midnight Louie in New York City

"Well, here I am again, maybe-daughter-dearest, watching the snowflakes fizzle against the window glass while my mitts hit the old keyboard like it was a bottle of the best, heaviest cream eggnog, fresh from Elsie the cow herself and her good bovine buddy of clan Glenlivet

"Perhaps you would cut me a little slack if you could see how I have been wined, dined, and whisked around the Big Apple recently I have had so many uniformed chauffeurs in the past few days, many of foreign extraction, that I am inclined to salute rather than make condescending small talk with them.

"Miss Temple Barr will not let me out of her vicinity, perhaps acting under the mistaken impression that this mother of all cities might intimidate me. Anyway she keeps me in tender custody so I do not dirty my pads on any dog droppings that have been uncollected by rude parties when I pass from the curbed limousine to the solid gold revolving doors that lead to Madison Avenue office buildings. Miss Temple Barr is so impressed by what she calls the 'Art Deco ambience ' of the gilt elevator doors here that she pauses every time we enter to offer contemplation and worship. Did I mention that the streets are paved with solid granite?

"Despite the unrelentingly posh surroundings we enjoy, the only place these privileged tootsies of mine are allowed to land are atop the high-gloss mahogany conference table at the high-powered advertising firm of Colby, Janos and Renaldi, CJR to the cognoscenti.

"Even in this haven of affluence befitting a media spokescat, murder will out.

"Yes, your old man --I mean, your possible near-kin -- is once again the first on the scene of a crime. In fact, I saw the murder weapon before it was sprung, but of course no one would listen to me. Somehow the taint of those street days will not wear off, and I am still regarded as an unreliable witness.

"This was a bizarre death by hanging, from a golden chain, no less. Although one can concoct a likely scenario for a freak accident, I lean toward the freak murder. I not only suspected something of this nature, I served as town crier in this case, scaling a steep roof to halloo the horrible news from the chimney tops.

"Those present, being human and naturally obtuse, mistook my alarm for a cute cat trick.

"I actually heard mention of the David Letterman Show as I stood there in full cry, my coat fluffed to emergency fullness.

"Needless to say, the imbeciles present soon discovered the error of their assumptions, led by Miss Temple Barr. (I do not mean to include Miss Temple Barr among the imbeciles present, which the previous sentence structure might imply, but I am not about to strain my mitts by backwards-deleting my entire previous sentence.) I am not to the keyboard born, you know, even if I am swaddled in royal-purple velvet to keep the cruel northern wind and snow from my precious hide when borne outdoors.

"Anyway, my investigations have taken me from the cushy seats of power and influence in midtown Manhattan to the Lower Depths of the Village, where the sad domicile of a wasted life offered insight and a bad smell.

"So I am quite the celebrity on both the advertising and crime fronts. I cannot say that the female lieutenant in charge of the case is giving my opinions the proper hearing. But my Miss Temple is there, and I can usually make her see reason eventually

"As for the competition for the top spokescat position, I have had an edge over the 'other'candidate all along, even though the loathsome Maurice has had a fully effective politically correct operation since his indiscretion with the Divine Yvette.

"I have been gently twitting him by calling him 'one-ball'and more recently 'none-ball' in street patois. Oh, he snarls and hisses and growls, but he only undermines his chances at being selected as the most civilized, suave and sophisticated spokescat in the country. He is so predictable.

"I will not go into the new blonde in town. I realize that as a working woman you spurn females whose pulchritude is their ladder to luxury, fame and lazy days. But the Sublime Solange is a sweet, modest individual, and so shy she hardly seems aware of her stunning beauty. The Divine Yvette, Maurice's cast-off, is sadly disillusioned, but she is a wonderful mother to her scraggly quartet of yellow-bellied kits. I fear her unwed pregnancy will result in the loss of her fat television contract, but her heartless mistress, Miss Savannah Ashleigh, the same vicious bitch -- that is purely a scientific term for a female dog, so I am not using bad language here, only comparing the hussy to the species she most resembles, which is certainly not thine nor mine -- who hoped to end my masculine career, has forsaken Yvette for the rising star of her unsullied sister Solange.

"I assume that among humans the word 'unsullied' equates with 'cannot be proved, 'so am doing my politically correct best to see that Solange becomes a wiser but still winsome pussycat.

'Thus I prepare myself for an exotic Manhattan Yuletide, one brimming over with merriment, money and murder. If I have a minute, I will try to round up a trinket to bring home for you. We are, after all, possibly related, though such things are always difficult to prove, especially when there are residuals in question.

"Yours in mice, vice and lice on the run,

Midnight Louie, Esq

Chapter 30

Christmas Spree

"Should I call you 'Father Matt' or 'Cousin Matt?' "

Matt eyed his driver, who was wheeling the lumbering minivan in and out of freeway traffic as if it were a bumper car in an arcade.

"Just Matt will do."

"Okay." She flashed him a nervous, yet fascinated look. "I'm not sure if your cousin's kid is a second cousin or a first cousin once removed, but I gotta admit I wasn't too happy about getting assigned chauffeur duty during Christmas break. At least you aren't the usual outta-town-relative type. You know, the fidgety spinster aunt who tries to tell you how short your skirts are, and how to drive."

She swerved the wallowing vehicle across two lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars to avoid slowing down behind an old Volkswagen bug that was only doing the speed limit.

Matt had to clench his teeth to keep his mouth shut. Now was the moment to distract himself with an ejaculation to a favorite saint, such as Blessed Saint Christopher, keep us alive for the next ten minutes!

"I must admit," Matt said, vainly feeling for a handhold on the van door, "that when I asked Bo if anyone could be spared to take me around, I didn't expect a teenage chauffeur."

"Teenage, how gross. I'm almost out of high school, for God's sake. I can't wait to turn twenty, then nobody can refer to me by that disgusting term."

"Sorry."

"Oh, I didn't mean you! You've been off with all those priests in the rectory. It's not your fault you don't know what drives people my age nuts."

Seventeen, Matt thought. This was going to be a long afternoon.

"What do I call you?" he said.

"Thanks for asking. Not Krystyna with all the y 's! Too groady! Krys is fine. Some people think it's short for Krystal, which is cool. So what do you want to do at the mall?" she asked, switching lanes to beat a huge black pickup truck to the exit lane. "Dumb redneck!" Her eyes flashed venom into the rearview mirror. "These Southerners can't drive on ice and snow worth spit. What do you drive at home? And where is home?"

"Las Vegas."

"Really? Cool. Do they have churches there?"

"More than most cities. And a whole flock of wedding chapels."

"They hardly count as churches."

"They do for the couples who get married there."

The mall, a Monopoly-block array of massive beige rectangles, loomed like bunkers on the minivan's right. Matt didn't know why anyone called these motorized behemoths "minivans"; they were roomy enough to host camping parties of Cub Scout packs.

"So you drive a Civic or something in Las Vegas?" Krys asked as she turned into the parking lot.

"No. A motorcycle."

"A motorcycle?" She jerked her head to see if he was kidding.

"Watch out for that Blazer!"

"Oh. Yeah."

Ignoring the blare of an angry horn, she scooted the van down an aisle lined with parked cars, then suddenly swerved into an empty space that had been hidden by a massive custom van until they were practically past it.

"Do you really drive . . . ride a motorcycle?" she asked.

Matt nodded, pulling his gloves out of his jacket pockets, and amused by what it took to impress the almost-post-teenager these days. "It's on loan from a friend"

"What kind? A Harley? Hardly."

"It's a British make you wouldn't know. Hesketh."

She shook her head. "What color is it?"

"Silver."

"Cool." Krys tossed the van keys into the tiny purse she wore slung slantwise over her bulky jacket and hopped out of the vehicle.

Matt climbed out in his own good time, beginning to appreciate the ease of getting onto a motorcycle versus entering and exiting one of these sliding-door rolling warehouses.

"Does it go fast?" she asked over the van rooftop.

"The motorcycle? Sure, if I let it."

"Oh, that's too cool. You're the only priest I know who rides a motorcycle."

Matt had come around to the driver's side. Bo's daughter was a deceptive five feet eight inches tall, a big girl with a mature look way beyond her behavior. Her easy energy and naive enthusiasms were going to wear him out in an hour, but he couldn't spend the entire afternoon lying to her by omission.

"Listen, Krys. Nobody else knows this yet, but I left the priesthood several months ago. And although I'm sure some priests do ride motorcycles, I'm not one of them and they don't ride Hesketh Vampires."

"Vampires? Your bike is called a Vampire? Why?"

"It, um, howls when the engine gets up to speed."

"Oh, I want one! Too cool. So."

She clicked the control to lock the van's many doors, then slid him a wary glance. In it, Matt could read speculation about the stir his news would cause in their thoroughly Catholic family.

"I never heard much about you when I was growing up," she said, turning and maneuvering over the ice-rutted parking lot with mountain-goat delicacy. Matt fell into the same surefooted step with her. "Just that you were a priest, the only priest the whole darn family has produced. They kept looking at my brothers and sisters and me like one of us should be a sacrificial virgin or something." Krys glanced down, then the toe of her flimsy ankle boot stamped flat a ruffled rut of snow. "I'm getting read the riot act just for thinking I might not want to go to a Catholic college."

At the mall entrance, Matt opened one of a rank of glass doors for her. "That's not exactly written into the Council of Trent. There are other good schools. Still, you can't beat the quality of education."

He had forgotten about store vestibules in the north. Here, out of the wind, everyone paused to stamp snow clods off their boots, and stuff their pockets with the gloves and scarfs that would soon become suffocatingly hot inside the mall, then advance through a second barrier of glass doors.

"What exactly do you want here?" Krys asked as he ushered her through a second door.

For a moment, Matt paused, interpreting her question in the global sense. What did he want here in Chicago, among this family of strangers? Then he realized that her world was the here and now, and at this moment, that was the mall.

"Presents for my mother. I brought the usual boxes of candy, but I wanted to get her something more personal. It's been a long time since I was home for Christmas." He smiled at Krys. "Actually, I'm kind of glad you're my escort today. I could use a personal shopper."

"You got it! I adore shopping, especially when it isn't with my money, which there's darn little of." She studied him again. "I thought the minute I saw you that you didn't look like a priest. You don't even look like the rest of the family."

He wasn't going to touch that one. "I look like my mom, don't I?'

"A little, maybe, but she's so--" Krys visibly reined in her tongue.

They paused in front of a huge, two-sided display of the mall's layout of stores.

"I know what you mean about Mom. That's what struck me," Matt said. "The old house is so plain and dreary, all the colors faded to the same nothing tone. I'd forgotten how it looked here in winter, not like the Christmas cards with fresh snow mounding over everything. Old snow gets packed with dirt and cinders and turns into ice, like a comet."

"All the houses in our old neighborhood are like that. They're old and everything in them is old-fashioned. But I just don't like the winter, period. That's why I'd like to go to school someplace on the West Coast."

"That kind of atmosphere can get old in its own way," he warned her. 'Anyway, I was thinking about getting Mom something pretty to wear, but you know her better than I do, and you know what women would like way better than I would."

"Yeah." She eyed him, laughed, blushed, then met his glance again. "I can do it. Personal shopping, I mean. But your mom's a tough case. Aunt Mira doesn't seem to have any preferences, for anything."

"Well, I know what we can't get her: nothing ... too radical. Too bright, or what she'd consider too young. With a restaurant hostess job I'd think clothes would be more of a concern, but--"

"Look at where she's a hostess! A neighborhood family-style place that's been there for years. Nobody under forty goes in there," Krys added with intense disdain.

"Well, then take me to where people under forty go to buy nice things for people over forty."

"Gee, I don't know that territory either. Matt." Obviously, using the first name of an older cousin, and older ex-priest cousin, was a kick. Krys (maybe short for Krystal) frowned at the colorful blocks representing various stores. "I guess I'll just take you where I never go! What's your budget?"

"I have no idea. But I do have a credit card."

"I love credit cards!"

"With a very modest credit limit. You don't build up an impressive financial history in my former line of work."

"No, I guess not."

They joined the streaming aggregates of people cruising the mall's brightly lit but still vast and institutional corridors, despite the plastic fir boughs and Christmas lights frosting shop fronts, escalators and the high glass atrium ceilings.

A medley of Christmas music filled the air above them, and overpowering bursts of scented candles exhaled from shop entrances.

"Crazy, huh?" Krys obviously didn't expect an answer. "Okay. Here's Chessey's. Let me do the talking. I'm sure these witchy old bats will jump on us the minute we enter, they're so anxious to make a sale."

Krys angled toward a shop whose windows featured mannequins in expensive dressy suits, quite different from the merchandise-crowded, glitzy shops bristling with holographic accessories and lots of imitation black leather that drew her like a magnet.

In her taut black tights--leggings, Matt had seen them called now--and the short bronze vinyl anorak, Krys resembled a gilded pumpkin on stilts, a kind of Cinderella's coach before the fairy godmother had gotten to it.

The middle-aged saleswoman who headed toward them with lacquered hair and heavy gold jewelry clanking like Marley's chains would probably have glowered Krys out of the shop, had she not been accompanied by that moving target in any mall: a man who needed to buy something for a woman for Christmas. In other words, a man who had money and needed help spending it.

"May I assist you?" the saleswoman crooned in the impeccable grammar that always seemed so phony.

Matt wasn't used to such catering, but Krys acted as if she'd been thirsting for it all of her life.

"Yes, please. We need something for an older lady. Nothing too frilly, too glitzy or too impractical, but pretty."

"A relative?" the saleswoman asked.

"My mother," Matt put in.

"Oh, good. Is her coloring similar?"

He nodded.

"And she can't be much over forty-five--" The woman's permanently smiling face was turned to Matt but her eyes wandered to Krys with a certain admonishment. "Older lady" was hardly the phrase for one of her and Matt's mother's age, the tone implied. "Had you any idea what you wanted? A dinner suit? A good blazer?"

Krys had been looking around like a kid in a whirligig factory. "A blouse!" she said triumphantly to Matt, lifting her eyebrows in search of approval.

He nodded. "Great idea."

"But nothing polyester," Krys declared sternly.

"We don't carry any polyester," the woman said. "This way."

They wove through racks and glass cases, Matt catching glimpses of foreign glitters. He felt like he was plunging deeper into a jungle of feminine snares, alien and intimidating.

"Her size?"

Matt and Krys exchanged a helpless glance. "Medium," he suggested.

Medium would never do for a salesperson at a finer store. "How tall is she?"

Matt nodded at Krys.

"And the same size?"

He was forced to consider his cousin's daughter as a womanly form. Given her sturdy frame, she probably played ice hockey as well as lusted after motorcycles and the mock-leather bustiers he'd seen highlighted in the teen-punk shop windows.

"Slighter build," he said.

The saleswoman eyed Krys significantly.

"I'm an eleven. Or sometimes a thirteen," she confessed as if forced to.

"Ten, then. For your mother, sir."

They were led to a rack of silky garments, and then the saleswoman left them to the private misery of selection and price comparison.

"Anything too fancy will turn her off," Matt said.

Krys nodded. "I'll try not to swoon over the cut velvet and laces, or the absolutely dishy snakeskin metallic print over there."

Matt eyed the reptilian blouse in question. "Thank you. Well, we know what not to get her now."

"I guess I'm useful as a warning sign: bad taste posted here."

"Not true. But you're younger and can get away with it. Besides, Mom seems too subdued. I want something that'll make her want to wear it."

Krys pulled out an ivory satin blouse dripping old-fashioned crocheted lace. She ran her fingers down the silky sleeve to the frilled cuff, then lifted a small white tag and wordlessly showed it to him. Ninety dollars.

Matt nodded. "For the right blouse." But secretly, he was shocked.

They made a round of the circular stand. "No prints," Matt said. He had read somewhere once, long ago, that Jackie Kennedy only wore solid colors. His mother, he figured, shared the same rigorous taste.

They debated at last between the ivory blouse and a gray one with white satin ribbon detailing. Still muted, neutral, recessive colors, Matt thought with dissatisfaction. She needed ... he wanted ... something that would lure her into the light of the present day. Something for rebirth, something she couldn't resist even as she suspected it was a trap.

His eyes paged through the fifty-some blouses circled like fashion soldiers with their backs to the wall. And then he spotted it ... a swell of color like an ocean wave.

He reached in, drew the hanger off the rod.

"It's . . . pretty." Krys sounded surprised.

He held it up to the light. A modest, feminine article that no woman he knew would wear--not Temple, or Electra, or Sheila at work, or Carmen Molina ... or especially the woman who called herself Kitty. Full sleeves, a tailored softness and yet a sense of feminine frill here and there, more felt than seen.

Krys held it up against herself, a question on her intent, girlish face. Then she frowned. "You have brown eyes. Your mother's are blue."

He nodded, took the blouse from her and smiled like a saint who had found salvation. For the particular blue of this blouse vaguely alternated between aqua and powder-blue, like pictures he'd seen of Caribbean waters. It was a rather indescribable blue, except that he had defined it long ago, and knew it was the one color his mother could not resist liking, from years of preconditioning.

Chessey's had surprised him, and itself, by carrying one blouse, size ten, in true Virgin Mary Blue. His mother was lost.

Krys had been impressed. "A hundred and ten dollars," she whispered loud enough for every passerby to hear when they rejoined the mall traffic, a fancy paper shopping bag lined with colored tissue dangling from Matt's hand like a door prize. "You are a big spender for a religious guy."

"Where do you think all the bingo money went for all those years?"

Krys giggled, reveling in irreverence. The favorite priest was always the least priestly.

"Matt, this is wild, and I don't know if you can afford it, but I know something that would be a knockout on your mother, with this blouse and just plain anytime. I'd ... forgotten somehow that she has those gorgeous pale-blue eyes." Krys pulled his free hand, as if he were a reluctant parent, to lead him into a fine jewelry chain store that occupied an entire corner space. "Can we go in here, huh?"

He nodded. It was fun to edge someone else, and himself, into the light. To be edged into the light, even if it was only the commercial spotlight of Christmas. He began to understand Temple's self-appointed mission.

His mother had been like this before he had loomed on her horizon like a nightmare, he realized. Every woman had. Temple had, and still kept a bit of it as a shield against the disappointments of time. Carmen Molina had been here, or had hoped to be, once when she was very young, but now she was busy interring that memory behind the perimeters of her profession. How would she deal with a growing daughter if she denied her inner sprite? Maybe he should write a self-help book: Finding Your Inner Sprite. Or was that just a secular pseudonym for the Holy Ghost? he wondered.

But inside the promising store, goods lay in dishearteningly similar ranks within their well-lit cases. Same designs, different strokes. Red stones in one, green in another, royal blue in yet another.

Krys skipped the precious rubies, emeralds and sapphires whether genuine or "man-made," leading him to a case displaying jewelry set with purple, amber and blue stones.

"I can help you? Sir. Miss?"

The clerk here was male and from the Indian continent, but his smile was as genuine as the man-made diamonds' glitter was false.

Krys nodded, pointing to the blue side of the display case. "Can we see some earrings, clip style?" Her hazel eyes rapidly consulted Matt, then she continued. "Something elegant."

The salesman didn't hesitate, but pulled out velvet case after velvet case, until six were lined up on the glass countertop.

"The finest blue topaz, in vermeil." His hand presented them as one would introduce a visiting dignitary to a head of state. The clerk ebbed away to a decent distance, so they could discuss prices in private.

"Ver-meal?" Matt asked.

"Gold wash over silver," Krys replied with expert intensity. "Great look, cheaper price. See! Only seventy-eight dollars."

Matt loved the way she threw the word "only" around at a shopping mall. He was feeling like a weird cross between a harried father and a sugar daddy. But he had the credit card, and the clerks were only too happy to press it between the carbon-backed pages of a sales slip as if it were a memento from the high school prom.

Krys tried on each earring, describing merits and flaws. "Pinches." "Too overbearing." "I'd adore these, but your mother--?" "Very classy." "Too matronly." Whether for herself or his mother she never said.

The earrings they selected were large blue topaz teardrops surrounded by silver with gold accents.

As they-- he was paying for it, or rather, the card was, Matt noticed a Plexiglas stand by the register displaying cards of sterling silver earrings and pins. He glanced at Krys's ears with their discreet, for nowadays, earrings in triplicate.

He turned the display piece until an amethyst-set ornate cross came to the fore. "You want a souvenir?"

Her eyes widened, then emptied in wonder. "Souvenir?"

Matt took down the cross and put it on the counter. "Add this in," he told the clerk. It was only twenty-eight dollars. His sense of proportion had magnified.

Krys was all eyes. "For me, really?"

"I appreciate your help today. Besides, you can tell your friends you got the cross from an ex-priest who rides a Vampire motorcycle."

"Oh, cool. Oh, way, way, way too cool. Can I wear it now?"

Since no one disagreed, she left the shop with the amethyst cross swinging in her right ear.

"Does it bother you," she asked breathlessly, "crosses being such popular jewelry now? Are we being too shallow?"

"Those 'Y-shaped' necklaces in the Sunday-paper department-store ads are nothing but rosaries. Maybe it's a religious renaissance, huh?"

"I don't know. They're just. . . cool." She fingered the small box in the tiny bag she carried, with the blue topaz earrings. "She can wear these with gold or silver," Krys explained as they melded with the still-milling shoppers. "Did you see how the Indian guy at the shop thought these were for me when I tried them on? He took us for a couple, can you believe it?"

"No. I'm too old for you."

"Hey. You can't be over . . . twenty-seven, right?"

"Wrong."

"What are we, anyway? We never did decide. First cousins or what?"

"In any case, it doesn't matter."

She stopped to pout.

"Stop flirting with m

"I am not'"

"Catholic girls always want to flirt with a priest, or an ex-priest. It's a stage."

"A stage! You act like I'm a teenager, or something. Hey, it's almost three o'clock. Can we eat? I'm beat and I'm starving!"

"Me too. Sure."

She ordered a chili burger, jumbo fries and fried jalapeno cheese sticks. Matt almost got indigestion from watching her shovel every bit of it down.

The fast-food restaurant rang with the noise of raised voices, the cash register, transitory dishes and silverware, and the passing bustle in the mall traffic lanes alongside it.

Matt nursed a beer after nibbling on a club sandwich and watched her eat.

"This has been fun, after all!" Krys said, chewing happily. "You're way cooler than I thought you'd be. And I know your mother will love her stuff."

She knew more than he did, but he smiled anyway.

"My family's so stuffy! We don't even put up a mistletoe sprig for Christmas at our house."

"I remember. But I also remember your family having a beautifully carved, old-country creche scene."

She made a disparaging face. "I'm going to get a mistletoe sprig this year and nail it up and then I'm gonna catch you under it." She had a glob of ketchup on her chin.

"I don't think so."

"Can I have a sip of your beer?"

"No."

"Come on. It's not like I've never drunk it before."

"I'm sure you have, and I'm sure you will again, but it's illegal here."

She finished her fries and finally wiped her mouth, inadvertently fixing the ketchup chin. "I want to find something for a friend of mine. Have we got time?"

"Sure. You're the one who's giving up her Christmas break."

She shrugged modestly and looked pleased.

This time they wandered into the anchor department stores' menswear sections. Matt, used to shopping discount chains for the cheapest of everything, was amazed again by the profusion of unusual and costly things. Suede silk flight jackets, leather vests and dusters, designer suits.

"I know ten guys who would wear this," he noted, indicating an iridescent sharkskin suit that retailed for close to a thousand dollars.

"How do you know guys like that?"

"They're brothers, sharp dressers, and good Italian Roman Catholics except at confession time, and they live in Las Vegas."

"Wow. What are you going to wear for Christmas at my house?"

"What I brought." He glanced around the crowded area. "Maybe I could use a heavier sweater. It's colder here than I remembered, and I didn't have much notice that I was coming up."

But the sweaters were close to two hundred dollars a pop, and all had pictures woven into their patterns, ski chalets or St. Bernards or something Matt didn't care for.

Krys appeared from behind a rack of London Fog raincoats, apparently a perennial gift item.

"Look at this!"

She held up a brown velvet blazer.

"Depends who you're getting it for."

"You!"

"I'd never wear a thing like that. And you don't have the money."

"But you do. And I'm a personal shopper, right? You're giving your mother all that fancy stuff. She might go for it more if you were dressed for the occasion."

"A velvet coat? I'm not a . . . huntsman or whatever."

"Listen. Brown is the new neutral and velvet is very In. And it's on special. Only one forty-eight. What's your size?"

"Not one forty-eight. Put it back."

"Oh, please. I think it'd look divine on you."

"Where would I wear a thing like that?"

"Las Vegas? Use your imagination."

A salesman had overheard the classic male/female fashion debate and had scuttled over faster than a sharkskin leech.

"Marvelous new fabric, sir. Stain-resistant. The young lady is correct; brown is the must-have neutral of the year for both genders. A forty regular, I see. It also comes in eggplant, navy and moss green."

All versions were produced and before Matt knew it he was forced before a full-length mirror in the brown one, eggplant having turned out to be purple, navy too "harsh" and moss green too "decadent," by which Matt thought the salesman meant it reminded him of a fungus.

The brandy-colored brown velvet one, however, had subtle golden highlights, and even Matt could see it was sinfully flattering. First a red suede sofa, then a brandy velvet coat. These women were exactly as the church had represented them for centuries: seductive, frivolous creatures who knew the meaning of self-acceptance and emotional expression, not repression. He liked them very much.

And he had a cream turtleneck sweater that would go nicely underneath.

"Done," he said, producing the credit card again. The jacket didn't even need alteration.

"We're through here," Krys said as they moved briskly through the mall.

"What about your present for a friend?"

"He already got it for himself." Her eyelashes batted flirtatiously at Matt. "But I am definitely still in the market for mistletoe."

"Dream on. Where's the . . . vehicle."

"In the Wooki lot, why?"

"You've had your way. Now I have mine. I drive on the return trip."

"You don't like my driving?"

"It stinks. But your shopping is A-plus."

Chapter 31

CATNYP for Literary Lions

What is the sleuth out of water, the investigator out of time, the snoop out of suppositions to do when she, or he, hits a brick wall?