Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 27

Remembrance of Things Passed Up

The cab dropped Matt at his ten o'clock appointment at five to the hour.

Knowing he was the first customer of the day, he dawdled his way to the front door. The first and only time he had sought this woman's services, it had ended with him jumping to an awkward conclusion and bolting. He owed her an explanation, but what he thought had happened between them had been so unspoken that explaining himself was a sure road to embarrassing them both. Killing time allowed him to anticipate the worst, and the best.

When he rang, the bell was answered soon enough that he didn't feel too early.

"Hello again." Janice Flanders stood in the shadow of her entry hall, sounding like an old friend. Everything about her was easy and earth-toned, from her short ash-blond hair to whatever subtle makeup she wore, if any.

"Come in. I can't wait to get to work on this. You said the other sketch had 'borne fruit?'"

"Yes."

He followed her through shadow and sunlight from the sky-lights to the same completely cozy sunroom in which they had worked last time.

"Take your jacket off; I'll hang it up. You know the routine: get comfortable. Then we go to work."

He winced writhing out of the jacket. "Pulled a muscle working out."

"Oh. What do you do? Weights?"

"No. Tai chi. Other stuff like that."

She nodded. "I run, do free weights and yoga. The price of living in the physically fit nineties.

Would you like coffee? Decaf? I forget what I gave you last time."

"Ah, lemonade, I think. I don't remember either. Coffee's fine."

She vanished into the adjoining kitchen.

"Kids back in school?" he asked to make conversation. Then wished he hadn't. He might sound . . . hopeful.

"Yes! Time for me to play at my own work. So." She came back with the mugs and set them down on glass-topped metal tables near each of their chairs. "Tell me about your success with the first sketch."

He sipped the coffee first, aware of her relaxation and his stiffness. She was wearing tight-fitting leggings this time, not jeans, and an oversized knit top that emphasized her trim legs.

Earrings must be a signature with her. Today they were huge beaded iridescent circles that ricocheted the sunlight like stained glass.

Her sketch pad lay tilted against the corner of the sofa. Daybed, it was called, he thought.

Stacked with small pillows of all shapes, infinitely programmable.

"You seem . . . stiff today," she noted.

"A bad muscle pull. Every move I make reminds me."

"Tough. You want a back support?" She lifted an oblong pillow covered in some flowered purple fabric. Hyacinths? he wondered.

She tossed it to him and he stuck it behind his back. It did relieve the strain, actually.

"So. Mr. Effinger."

"Simple really. I reduced the sketch to wallet size copies and laminated a bunch to show around town. Then I had to trail him through a few sleazy bars." Her eyebrows lifted. "But I found him and reported him to the police, who questioned him and let him go."

"Got your man and they put him on the streets again. Typical." She shook her head. "Well, I'm glad my sketch worked. Maybe now he'll be nailed for something else."

"Oh, yes."

She picked up her sketch pad. "You had a lot of emotion toward the last subject. Who's the next one?"

"A woman. I've seen her only twice, but recently."

"Hmm." Janice was in her interviewing mode. Abstracted, impersonal, as acutely attuned to his unspoken testimony as a Geiger counter is to buried uranium.

Getting up the courage to see her again, letting her draw conclusions from his description was like going to confession, Matt decided. He expected another ordeal, but he was grateful she was as good as she was at it.

"A woman." Her mouth quirked into a tiny smile. He saw that she was curious about this

"wanted" woman, almost as curious about her as she was about him. "For an ordinary citizen, you require an extraordinary amount of police services."

"Yeah." He wanted to adjust his position, but realized it would dislodge the tapes, which itched constantly now, marking his skin more virulently than the healing gash. "She's hard to describe. I guess it's because she'd be considered beautiful, and that's so vague."

"You're absolutely right. Regular features have no character, but even the most perfect face has its quirks. Start with the shape of her face, her coloring."

"Her features were very sculpted, but pointed."

"Good bones."

"Her head was small, her neck rather long and thin. Snow White coloring, but not wide-eyed like Snow White."

"Not looking for a handsome prince, huh?"

"Not looking for anything predictable. Black hair. Thick, with a harsh sheen. Not pretty hair, not pliant."

Janice nodded, her fingers sweeping over the porous paper. Her pencil hissing soft as a serpent on each long stroke.

"Odd eyes. Blue-green. Could be contact lenses. The only other creature I've heard of with aqua eyes is a purebred cat. A shaded silver Persian."

" 'Creature.' An odd thing to call her."

Matt considered it a compliment, under the circumstances.

"Chin?"

"Small, like everything else about her. Nose, ears small. Tidy, neat. Even her teeth were unusually tiny. Made you realize why people used to compare them to pearls."

"Nose straight, or turned up?"

"I. . . didn't notice. Straight, I think."

"Lips?"

"She wore little makeup, or maybe little noticeable makeup. I'm not an expert, but I'd suspect she had on more than I thought. And her lipstick hadn't rubbed off when shed kissed him. He'd noticed that hours later in the bathroom mirror when he was changing his dressing for the first time.

"She made you distinctly uncomfortable."

Matt laughed, though it hurt. "That was her intention, but I think that's her intention with everyone. Every man, anyway."

"A femme fatale?"

He nodded slowly, pleased that she was putting his impressions into words as well as pencil strokes. "So focused. So .. . manipulative."

"Weight and height?"

He understood now that she needed to visualize the whole person before she could finish the face.

"I'd say she was about five-six. And about fifteen pounds more than a model would be at that height."

"But not plump or blowsy."

"Lord, no! Sleek as a carnivorous otter, if that makes sense."

"Aha! Now I can see her. Smug, too, I bet."

"Smug? Certainly . . . knowing."

"Feral. Tidy. Lovely to look at in a self-involved way. We girls have another name for her than femme fatale."

He merely looked puzzled.

"Bitch," Janice said sweetly.

Matt, serious, weighed the term. "Actually, in her case, I think that's too mild."

Janice lifted both eyebrows without comment. She was expertly drawing out his feelings about Kitty to imbue her image with his emotions.

"Perverse," he said suddenly. "She is the most perverse human being I've ever met."

"Do you mean sexually?"

"How could I? I've only seen her twice."

Then he realized that, yes, if he were a man with an ordinary background, he could very well have known her sexual inclinations in two meetings, especially in this town.

A blunder. He felt he ought to blush, and not too long ago could have. But not anymore. Not over such a minor faux pas. He wasn't trying to impress Janice with anything about himself, only to give her all she needed to work with.

"Scarlett O'Hara," she suggested again.

He had seen endless clips of the film's various TV "events" through the years. He thought of Vivien Leigh's pretty, pointed, feral face, and nodded.

"Not a double of Leigh, of course. But very like Scarlett her-self."

"Someone who lost something once, long ago, and has never forgotten it."

"Exactly! And she's Irish. Or at least she gave an Irish name."

"Black Irish."

Janice's pencil fairly flew now, her face a mask of satisfied intensity.

When she turned the pad to face him, he was stunned. "That's it. That's her."

Janice shook her head. "No, not yet. Maybe close. But look again. Examine each feature.

Eyelashes. What were they like? Thick, black, mascara-coated? Insignificant? That space between the upper lip and the nose. So crucial to good likenesses. The 'blind spot,' I call it, because so few people observe it. Should it be wider? Narrower?

Under her relentless interrogation, Matt found himself nagged into refining the image until, the last time Janice turned it around for his approval, he had to repress a shudder.

Janice noticed. "What did she do to you?"

"I can't go into it."

"You know--," Janice rested an elbow on her bent knee, then braced her face on her hand.

"You pay your money and you get the best sketch I can do, but I'm really curious about what you need them for and why these people mean something to you."

"You're too good at what you do."

"Thanks. That's the first time I've been accused of being an artistic overachiever." She smiled until he caught the virus and smiled back.

"I really appreciate your art skills and interviewing technique. Gosh!" He took refuge in his watchface. "It's after eleven-thirty!"

"And you have to be going."

The wry assumption in her voice made him bristle. She was so good at summing up people; he resented being one of her easy reads.

"I was going to say, it's almost lunchtime. Could I treat you?" Then he realized he was in no position to offer anything. "But... my motorcycle is out of commission and I don't know any restaurants in this neighborhood--"

"How did you get here then?"

"Cab."

"Say no more. You buy lunch, I'll drive, and I'll drop you wherever you want to go. Fair enough?"

He nodded, pulling out his checkbook and wishing she took credit cards. His account was getting decidedly flat and would deflate a little bit more with lunch. Having a social life was expensive.

"Give me five minutes to freshen up," she said as she took the check. "Just look around. I'm an artist. Mi casa es su museo."

He was too strictly reared to wander her house at will, but he did some minor exploring.

More photos of two carefree-looking preteen kids, always a dangerous assumption with kids.

Conch shells and other seaside salvages that looked found, rather than bought. Everything bright and somehow California. He wondered suddenly if she would appreciate his Vladimir Kagan sofa . . .

"Ready." She'd switched to one of those long, pleated dark velvet skirts so popular nowadays, topped by a patchwork bomber jacket in brocade and velvet and denim. "We won't go any place too chi-chi. Good southwestern chow. If that's all right."

"Sounds wonderful. I haven't been in Las Vegas that long. I can always learn about a new restaurant."

The red Jeep Cherokee he remembered took them to a strip shopping center about a mile away and a small unpretentious place with lacquered tabletops and pottery napkin rings.

Water glasses came with lime slices, the lunch menu didn't offer an item above ten dollars, and the blackboard listed an awesome number of Mexican and foreign beers. The joint was jump-ing with a decibel-level so high that it gave you the false sense of a privacy bubble around your own table.

After they'd ordered tasty melanges of salsa, black beans and pico de gallo over the dish of their choice, Janice folded her arms on the tabletop and leaned closer to be heard.

"That woman I just sketched is a piece of work, in the worst sense. What does she have to do with you?"

"You know . . . Effinger was my stepfather."

"Was?"

"You're very quick." Matt sipped the Bohemian beer he had ordered. "I didn't want to tell you. He was found dead early Tuesday morning. The police are proceeding as if it was an unnatural death."

"You're saying he was murdered?" She whistled between her teeth when he nodded. "And the woman?"

"She's the one who told me where to find Effinger. Where to start seriously looking anyway."

"Wow." Janice sat back, away from him, unaware of her withdrawal. "I've sketched the faces of a serial killer or two. But this is the first time that someone has died after I've drawn him.

Usually my portrait subjects get put away for crimes against other persons."

"Effinger was guilty of that, believe it."

"But you're not a cop, you're not a private detective, right? So why are you hanging out with these unusual suspects? I can't place you. My work has brought me into contact with lots of people in police work and associated professionals. You just don't track. You could be a social worker, or a shrink, or maybe a bounty hunter. I don't know. I'm at a loss, I admit it. If I sketched you again today, you'd be a different man, and that was just--what?--a month or so ago?"

Their food arrived, but Matt didn't feel like eating. He was remembering the awkwardness of their first meeting and last parting, at the door to her bedroom, when he'd sensed he'd be welcome there and had found himself hesitating on the brink of a very fine moral line for the first time in his life.

He'd always owed her an explanation for bolting like that.

"Sure, I strike you as a mystery," he said. "How many ex-priests do you know?"

That floored her. Her plate was going to go home in a Styro-foam box, too. The kids would love it.

"I'm Episcopal," she answered. "Closest thing to Catholic around. But our priests marry and have a families, so there aren't too many exes. You're . . . you were the other kind, right?"

"Right. Roman Catholic."

"How long? Or, I should say, how long have you been out?"

"Lord, it must be . . . ten months."

"So a month ago, you were just coming full term, as it were, newborn at nine months."

Matt looked down at his utterly unappetizing plate, through no fault of its own. "Yeah.

Pretty raw."

She nodded, getting the message. "Thanks. You didn't have to tell me. But I... need to understand. I must have scared the hell out of you. Oops."

"Hey, priests talk too. Yeah. You did."

"But you came back."

"I needed to."

"I've been good this time, haven't I?"

"Like gold."

"So, do you date?"

"Well, I took my neighbor out for New Year's Eve."

"An eligible young lady, I take it."

"Oh, yeah. I'm beginning to think: aren't they all?"

"Umhmm, I bet you're a real drawing card. Women must be real torn between not knowing whether to mother you or seduce you. Well, if you ever want some company without the pressure--"

"I could do with less pressure."

"Me too."

Suddenly, his hand was pushing the fork around his plate again. "Not too many people know about me. It's not the kind of thing you lay on new acquaintances. Nobody talks about religion much, except born-again Christians, so you don't know who will know what, or even care."

Janice was nibbling at her corn-and-pimiento side dish again. She paused to lean her face into her palm.

"Now I know why I liked you so much. Just think of it! You've never taken out an awkward girl and denied it all around school the next day. You never slept with a woman on the first date and then told everybody what a slut she was. You never had sex with-out a condom."

He was seriously in danger of blushing again, just when he thought he was permanently cured.

"I've never had a chance to commit any of those social sins," he reminded her. "But I've committed others. And I'm so anxious not to make a mistake in the ... area you mention, that I'm practically paralyzed. Inaction is not a virtue. You can't resist temptation if you don't expose yourself to it."

"Well," she said, suddenly ploughing into her entree like a lumberjack, "you're just going to have to put yourself in harm's way to find out if you're as good as you look, aren't you, Matt?"

She winked at him over her frosted beer mug.