Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 21

Viewing Time

Matt was collapsed on his single bed, in his mostly empty bedroom, the small portable television blaring some impossible talk show featuring sluts, cross-dressing motorcyclists and other American family stereotypes. All it needed was a Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol surprise appearance.

The wound throbbed and burned. The tape around his ribs itched and pulled. His head felt spacey. When the phone rang he jumped as if they'd just pumped the juice into him in some prison execution chamber.

Getting up took a while. He knew the phone would stop ringing just as the greatest effort had been expended. But it didn't stop. He got it on the seventh ring.

"Yes?"

"Lieutenant Molina. I need you downtown right away."

"What? Listen. I can't possibly come."

"Why not?"

"The, uh, motorcycle's on the blink. I don't have transportation."

"How were you going to get to work tonight?"

"Cab, I guess."

"Then take a cab downtown. Or I can send a car to pick you up."

"That. . . urgent?"

"More than urgent."

"It'll take me forty-five minutes to an hour."

"Fine."

His heart was pounding as if considering arrest. Arrest. You never would have known from her tone of voice, or conversation, that they knew each other.

Clipped and to the point.

Just when he didn't need this. Just when he had some guilty knowledge to conceal. Matt considered several unpriestly expletives and settled on one.

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

An hour and fifteen minutes later he was deposited before the blond curved slab that passed for Las Vegas' entry into the Stonehenge sweepstakes.

The cab driver sped away to other fares; no hop was long in Las Vegas, so cabbies had to settle for quantity rather than quality. And the occasional winner's tip.

Matt walked across the street and into the concrete courtyard. The glass-fronted reception area reflected him and he studied the image like an egoist.

The jacket had brushed clean. He had shaved, combed and slapped some color into his face.

He was walking almost normally.

Halfway through the door, he wondered why he needed to keep Kitty and her bizarre attack such a secret. Matt stopped in mid-step. He couldn't explain his instinctive reticence, but he suddenly knew it was the same motive that made Temple try to go through a gala evening out with a half-smashed face.

Matt blew out a regretful breath, and regretted the gesture as his rib cage contracted, stretching tape and taped skin.

He signed in at the front desk. Molina was called, and an officer came down to escort him up in the cramped elevator.

Molina sat at her desk in her tunnel of an office. When she invited him to sit on one of the meagerly upholstered side chairs he eased down slowly, as if thinking the move over, as if puzzled by her summons and moving in four-four time.

Which he was.

She looked up, her extraordinary blue eyes flat and cold. "Effinger's dead."

"Dead?"

She watched him.

He didn't have to feign slow motion now. "Recently?"

"Last night."

"Killed?"

"Where were you, say, around eleven-thirty?

Matt's head reeled. "At my job. At ConTact. You don't think--?"

"At this stage in an investigation, you're right. I don't think. I gather. And, from what you say, what you ask, I gather that your stepfather's death is a surprise."

"Hell, yes!"

She smiled at his expletive. That's when he knew that everything he'd done so far had played into her police officer's scenario.

"How did he die?"

Molina's face was surveying her desktop and its accumulation of papers and photographs.

"You have any idea of where Miss Temple Barr was at that time?"

"Eleven-thirty last night?" He cringed to remember them meeting in the Circle Ritz lobby this late morning, both of them looking like they had been for a long time somewhere they oughtn't admit to.

Molina didn't bother nodding, just looked up and regarded him like a schoolteacher waiting for the right answer.

"No. I can't say where Temple was." Why was Molina so interested in Temple's whereabouts, Matt wondered. She couldn't know about Effinger's attack, could she? How?

Lying, he was finding, made him sound as stiff as any bad actor. "I assume she was ... safe at home."

"You have witnesses for your own whereabouts?"

"Witness." Defending his own partial truths gave him second wind. "There were only two of us on last night," he answered with brisk candor.

"Despite the holiday rush?"

"New Year's is an upbeat holiday. People begin again. They usually don't end it, although I did get one despondent caller."

"I assume the calls are recorded."

He shook his head. "Privacy violation in our business. The callers' identities are sacrosanct."

"Seal of the confessional, huh? So all you have to put you in the clear is one witness?"

He nodded. He was in the clear until three a.m. and the encounter with Kitty. Apparently that was enough. Matt's relieved exhalation seared his ribs again.

He tried not to let his breath catch as he gave her Bennie's name and the name of the ConTact supervisor who would have Bennie's home phone number and address.

Molina wrote it all down with the precision of a secretarial school graduate. Then she swerved into a totally unforeseen subject like a Mack truck into a bridge abutment.

"I would suppose the only witness to Miss Barr's nighttime whereabouts ordinarily would be Midnight Louie."

Matt suffered a mental stuttering fit. Did Molina mean to imply he would know about Temple's nocturnal habits? Did she know where Temple had been coming from this morning when he and she had crossed paths in the Circle Ritz lobby? Was that knowledge incriminating?

To him? To Temple? Matt managed to shrug. Even that hurt, but he tried not to show it. "Cats can't testify."

"They can, actually. Midnight Louie was not with Miss Temple last night," Molina went on crisply, shuffling autopsy photos.

Matt guessed that she had wanted him to glimpse them, especially the sawn-off cranium.

"How do you know where he was last night?" he asked, playing straight man to her crookedly devious cop.

"Because Mr. Midnight Louie was at the crime scene."

"Temple's cat? Come on!"

"I've seen that big bozo often enough. He was accompanied by a smaller black cat. I recall being present at the Crystal Phoenix last fall when she was renamed 'Midnight Louise.' Now what would a pair of cats from two such different locations be doing at midnight, at the Oasis?"

"The Oasis?" Matt clung to the one fact she had given him, besides the falderal about the cats.

"Never mind. You up to a visit to the ME's?

"ME's? Oh. Medical Examiner's office."

"Righty-ho." Molina stood. She was wearing navy today, like a good Catholic schoolgirl, if said schoolgirl stood almost six feet tall and packed a rod. "Let's go over and eyeball the dear departed."

"Do I have to?"

She cocked a Mr. Spock eyebrow.

Matt remembered a distracting detail, that Temple always fussed about Molina needing to pluck her strong dark eyebrows. He decided that she was more effective unplucked.

"Don't you want to know for sure?" she prodded him.

"I guess I'd take your word on it. You saw him alive for yourself. But I'll. . . identify the body, if you want." He rose slowly, trying not to wince.

"Perhaps condolences are in order; he was your stepfather."

Matt smiled. "Not quite condolences. Sorry I'm a little slow in reacting. It is a shock, and ... I pulled a muscle a couple days ago working out."

"Those martial arts will tear you up every time."

"Not every time, thank God. Just now and again."

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

Driving to the morgue had a feeling of arrest to it that Matt suspected as being deliberate.

He rode in the back of the capacious Crown Vic, Molina in the passenger's seat with a uniformed officer driving.

Her attitude was brisk, ultra-professional and bored. Routine, it implied, when he knew damn well it wasn't. But he was grateful for the Crown Vic; a big car with a marshmallow ride, it saved him a lot of pain in transit. Physical pain, anyway.

He was glad the ME's facility was familiar. By the time they ar-rived he had managed to ape Molina's attitude inside and out. Only a small twitching nerve near his left lower eyelid told him this was the real thing: he would gaze upon Cliff Effinger dead. The man would hurt no living thing again.

In the viewing room he and Molina stood side by side, like a bizarre honor guard, silent, at attention, stiff. He was quiet because he hurt; she was stiff because she was on duty.

The curtain jerked back in increments. Matt gazed down at Effinger's closed-eyed face. Pale, gray still.

"No identity doubts this time?" Molina asked.

"No doubts. And you?"

"I always knew the answer. I just wanted to watch your reaction to the actual corpse."

"And?"

"You're too guarded. You're not telling me squat, except what I know, that the dead guv is Effinger. Now I'll tell you something. He had something in his pocket. A reference to Temple Barr. Think about it. And does the word 'Hyacinth' mean anything to you?"

Matt shook his head. "Hyacinth? No. But Temple . . . what kind of reference?"

"Do you know of any reason why Temple Barr would have motive to kill Cliff Effinger, or to know it was done?"

"No!"

"Well, I know of a reason a straight-John citizen might have grabbed Effinger a week ago and turned him over to the law. It's called precedening. You could have alibied yourself by being a restrained citizen, then gone back and offed the asshole. He was an asshole, wasn't he Matt met her eyes, on a level with his own. "Maybe. Maybe not always. Lite isn't only black and white, Lieutenant. Effinger wasn't the Ogre of All Ogre-

"Really? And how long have you felt with charity toward all, malice toward none, Mr.

Lincoln?"

"Since I went to Chicago for Christmas, and found villains other than Effinger."

She read the truth in his eyes, and didn't like it. She made her living looking for lies.

"Outta here, choir boy. And do tell Miss Temple I plan on talking with her."