Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 19

Double-talk

"You look surprisingly chipper," Matt said, meaning it and trying not to stare at the gauzy grass-green robe that underlined Temple's rusty coloring. "After hearing Electra's harrowing version of your Halloween seance in the laundry room, I thought I'd better rush up to see if you required spiritual counseling."

I'm fine." Temple stepped back to admit him. "I'm just hung over from a reversed sleep pattern. Just got up. You know how that is."

"And Midnight Louie was there too?" Matt eyed the lounging cat with respect, but then, he always had.

"In the fur. He was the least of our apparitions."

Matt sat in the only spot on the sofa Louie left him, the corner opposite Temple. She regarded him a bit edgily, as if she saw a ghost of someone else sitting there.

"I was on my way to ConTact," he added, feeling a sudden need to justify his presence.

"Do you have time for coffee?" She lifted her own mug. Matt's glance fixed on the steaming, full mug on the coffee table right in front of his place.

"Oh!" Temple looked flustered. "I had my cup in the bedroom when you rang. I must have been so dopey I'd made another one, set it down out here and forgot about it. You like it? Its yours."

"Thanks."

He picked up the pottery handle. Still too hot to hold for long. Temple, he noticed, had quickly set down her own mug for the same reason, obviously. Why would an abandoned and forgotten extra mug still be so piping hot? Matt dismissed that line of thought. He was starting to think like a detective.

Or a jealous lover.

"Want to tell me about the seance?" he asked.

"Where to begin?"

She actually paused to gather her impressions, unlikely behavior in rush-ahead Temple. The green gown madly complemented her raucous red hair, an attractive collision of curls. Even without the light makeup she used, Temple would never give morning a bad name.

"You must be on my hours today," he remarked.

She nodded. "Without being used to them. But, back to the skullduggery at the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead."

"I still can't believe they named the place that."

"Indeed. In a nutshell, the woman next to me--who was really a man, but who, I'm told on good authority, was not normally a cross-dresser, or abnormally a cross-dresser--fainted after the last apparition. No one thought anything of it until we noticed her picture hat had slipped and he had a bald head."

Matt laughed at Temple's patented rat-a-tat delivery of the facts, which always sounded jumbled but also always added up to exactly what had happened. He could see why the methodical Carmen Molina had no patience with Temple's communication style.

"Still, death next door is traumatic," he said sympathetically.

"It was more traumatic to find out the motherly woman who'd been squeezing my hand all night was really a man."

"Why the disguise, if not for dysfunctional reasons?"

"Well, not everyone is sure transvestites are dysfunctional. Most are otherwise straight-arrow heterosexuals. I have found a hint, however. The dead man is ... was ... a retired stage magician named Gandolph."

Matt nodded.

"You don't find that name strange? Don't tell me you've read The Lord of the Rings! "

"Several times, why?"

"I haven't. Am I way out of the loop! Can you loan it to me?"

"Sure, in paperback. But it's really three books, three long books." I'm up for it. Anyway, the dead man was not named after that Gandalf, at least overtly. He spelled it G-a-n-d-o-l-p-h, as in Rudolph et cetera, and his hobby was exposing false mediums."

"Uh-oh. Then any false medium present would have motive to kill him."

"Don't you mean 'every false medium present'?"

"I'm trying to keep an open mind, but you keep slamming the door shut on me. So the night's special effects were disappointing."

"More like puzzling, I'd say. The fellow who turned up before we actually saw an image of Houdini was more interesting. At least he went though some ghostly metamorphoses."

"Such as?"

"We first saw him as a boy, maybe six years old. Then he popped up in different windows, which were actually glass walls with wall-paper patterns etched into them, but he was older each time. Bigger. Way bigger. At the end, he was this sad, massive old man with a raging face, but we couldn't hear any of the words. Kind of reminded me of a pantomime King Lear, actually."

"The play?"

"No, the part. This guy would have been a natural, in his last incarnation, that is. Seeing him made me feel so ... sorry. That was the only spooky part of the seance, these visions of this sad man from virtually boyhood to old-coothood. He wanted to communicate so much, but something was holding him back."

"What about Houdini?"

"Gross! Grotesque. The others say the image duplicated a photograph of him nearly naked and chained into a crouch. It gave me the creeps!"

"Better drink some hot coffee; your arms are growing a record batch of goosebumps."

She shot him a glance that was both flustered and flattered before he realized that he had been observing her too closely again, like a detective. Or like a jealous lover.

He finished the coffee and set it down. Temple nervously noticed his action, rubbing her chilled forearms, then glanced behind him. To her bedroom. She looked nervous.

In the silence, the uncertainty was catching. He became acutely aware of the bedroom. He'd been in it briefly once, to help her put on some pierced earrings before the Gridiron show. Now it loomed at the back of her mind for some reason, which he could either interpret as embarrassing or flattering.

Would-be detective or would-be lover, which part was he playing today? No matter, he was what Temple would call a "bloody amateur" in both roles. Matt stood.

I'd better go."

She didn't argue. She didn't rush him, but she stood also. "Thanks for stopping by. When I find out more, I'll let you know."

"Not 'if?"

"Nooo ... I'll be stuck reading or listening to the news like everybody else. No dropped clues from Molina this time. She's not on the case."

Matt felt surprise. He'd come to think of Lieutenant Molina as the conduit through which all matters of murder in Las Vegas flowed. For some reason, he felt disappointment.

"I did have an 'in' with her," Temple went on, "by virtue of her suspicion of me, if nothing else. Watts and Sacker are perfectly professional, and they don't suspect me of being anything more than an innocent bystander, but that means they're not intrigued enough to spend time chitchatting with me."

"Poor Temple, on the outside looking in, like the spectral fat man."

They were at the door now, and she was opening it to show him out.

"That's just it, Matt." Her voice grew low, confessional-confidential. "He looked so solid for a ghost. Nobody would fake something like that so straightforwardly. That's the only thing in the evening that truly gives me the chills. I think he was-- Oh, Lord, I sound like Tommy Rettig on old Lassie reruns--'trying to tell us something,"

Matt recognized a troubled mind when he heard it. Impulsively, he put a hand on her icy forearm, reassured her.

"Don't blame yourself, Temple. You do, you know. You assume that if you had known that the person next to you was who he really was, you might have been able to prevent whatever happened. I haven't seen anything on the TV news or in the paper that the police are calling it murder. Why are you so sure that it was?"

Her gray-blue eyes softened with unspoken appeal. "I--I can't tell you why, Matt. I just suspect that it was on the usual groundless instincts. Thanks for listening."

She went on her toes to kiss his cheek. He caught her other arm before her stretch reversed itself and kissed her mouth, tasting strong coffee, surprise, response and reservation.

"Don't worry, Temple," he told her, not knowing why. He managed to retreat without trying to gauge her reaction.

In the hall, he felt a wave of self-disgust. He didn't need anything else to obsess about, but he was tired of her always making the first moves.

Maybe he also had a nagging feeling that he ought to stake his claim.

He went down the stairs to the rhythm of his footsteps, and headed for the shed to confront his trusty steed.

The Hesketh Vampire gave him the willies, kind of like Stephen King's murderous vintage car, Christine.

Only the fact that Electra rode it had lured him into practice sessions and ultimately a license. Only that, and the bottom line that he needed transportation and couldn't afford it.

While he might lecture Temple during martial-arts sessions that tackling new skills is vital, when it came to himself he had discovered that Matt Devine was remarkably conservative.

He unlocked the padlock shed door and stared at the Vampire, standing sleek-flanked and shining in the bar of daylight he had ad-mitted.

He hoped it wasn't the fact that the motorcycle had been Max Kinsella's toy, his pride and joy, that bothered him, although living up to his imagined persona of Max Kinsella did.

Matt walked around the massive machine, now so startlingly passive.

His entire religious life as a priest had been disciplined and dedicated to withdrawing from the material, to not needing what most other people require as a right: good salaries, good clothes, a nice place to live, money for luxuries, for status merchandise, for marriage, kids, mortgages, speed in the sense of velocity, sex in the sense of appetite.

So, though he tried to regard the Vampire as merely the best and the cheapest available, practical transportation, considering his situation, he couldn't fool himself.

all that power unnerved him. The machine's great worth as a classic 'cycle (hey, he had used the right, hip term almost naturally) made him edgy. Its implied silver sexiness made him feel like an imposter.

It was such... flagrantly conspicuous consumption. It was so... inescapably macho. And just in running operation terms, it was so much machine that Matt sometimes thought it would fly.

And it was menacing, he knew, when he rode it wearing the anonymous, shaded-visor helmet the law required.

People on the street expected something of the man who rode such a machine, and it wasn't him.

Matt opened the shed's double wooden doors that opened on the back of the Circle Ritz's parking lot. All that late-day light made the 'cycle shine like a nova star. The Vampire screamed its presence just by sitting still, its powerful engine not making a single, pulsing, impatient vroom-vroom.

He mounted it, turned the key, eased it as slowly as it would go out the doors, turned it to idle, pushed the kickstand down, the one he never trusted to hold up half a ton of steel and chrome.

After he shut the shed tight and locked it, he came around to the waiting Vampire.

He rode it competently, he knew, but not with ease or style. Sometimes, when in traffic, he appreciated the machine's liquid slipping past stalled cars, in and around obstacles. Sometimes he almost felt the slipstream smoothness of it, the tilt of his weight as it wove this way or that, so they were one, footloose entity.

Those moments were rare. Mostly he was worried sick about it. Worried that someone would steal it from outside ConTact despite the lock. Worried that the throttle on the handle would take on a will and life of its own and run away with him. Worried that someone might think he thought he was somebody for having such a monster. Worried. Worried. Worried.

That's what he had studied to do for all his life: worry about right and wrong, all his actions and pretensions, other people's good regard, his grades, his state of grace, the afterlife, today's small sins.

Matt detached the helmet from the rear. Electra's "Speed Queen" helmet hung on a hook inside the shed. Matt's helmet was his only investment in his motorcycle-riding career, and he didn't want anything written on it.

He smiled as he booted the kickstand aside and revved the engine simultaneously.

A Hesketh Vampire's corporate symbol was a chicken, royally crowned and prominently displayed. Only the British could get away with that kind of underplaying. Still, Matt didn't think a "Chicken" emblazoned helmet would do his health any good.

With the one thousand cc engine growling out fair warning to any small-cylinder vehicles foolish enough to be out there, Matt revved and roared his incongruous way onto the side street.

He still caught the lurid comet tail of the Strip's evening rush hour when he headed to ConTact at six-thirty. Tonight the wind was chilly, and his nylon windbreaker offered as much protection against it as waxed paper.

Potential speed demon or not, he got caught, along with about three hundred cars, by the long red light at Sahara Avenue.

While their conjoined engines idled, growling like sleeping tigers, a stream of pedestrians filled the crosswalks. Matt shivered as he kept the big bike balanced. It was colder sitting still than pushing into the wind, oddly enough. The lined leather gloves he wore on rare visits home to Chicago were welcome. He saw why leather had become a hallmark of the biker crowd: practicality. The menace had come afterward.

Maybe it was because his mind was on idle, and growling with impatience like the surrounding cars. Or because his thoughts had hopscotched to Chicago, knee-deep snows and bitter, biting wind. Bitter, biting memories.

Or because the day was in that twilight zone, when traffic lights are just beginning to brighten in contrast to the waning natural light, when shadows seem to stretch over Las Vegas all the way from the western mountains. As if a giant hand were reaching out to squeeze the light out of life like wringing lemon juice from a rind.

Or maybe it was Temple's talk of seances and death and ghosts.

But Matt recognized a certain shamble as it moved past his day, dreaming vision. A man in the crowd: aviator sunglasses, though the daylight had given up the ghost for today; cowboy hat; jeans jacket; hunched shoulders. Sideburns.

Matt blinked.

The man was already three quarters of the way through the lengthy crosswalk, swallowed to all but the high-crowned, dingy Western hat by the people who had followed and passed him.

Still. Matt studied his position. Far right lane. Guy heading away from him to the left.

Couldn't be worse, couldn't be more impossible. About as impossible as that walk, that hesitating lope that never seemed in a hurry to get anywhere, but always got there faster than you thought. The icy wind Matt felt was not external. Cold was not a consideration anymore.

How could he ... ?

The semaphore light changed to green. Surrounding cars sprang forward, fog lights straining into the creeping shadow of night. Matt found himself making a split-second decision. Maybe the Hesketh Vampire was making it: leaning left, slipping into a slot between a dawdling Volvo and a sprinting Camaro, nipping across the path of a lumbering limo as long as the buffet line at the Goliath. Dodging front and rear fenders, coasting between the massive metal walls of Chevrolet Suburbans, only inches to spare. He felt like Charlton Heston in the chariot-race scene from The Ten Commandments. Only Matt's rival was not Messala with a whip wanting to win at any cost, but the invisible whip of memory, which al-ways drove to lose....

By the next traffic light, Charleston Boulevard, Matt was first in line in the left turn lane, waiting, waiting for time to make the red light green. Don't it make, don't it make, don't it make your red eyes green? When the light finally blinked, the Hesketh Vampire whipped around the concrete island in a U-turn so tight that Matt felt momentarily horizontal to the street.

Now he was veering across lanes to the right. God, if he so much as scraped Electra's--

Kinsella's--precious scooter! That Geo wasn't moving, so... in and out. The machine was a born accomplice to recklessness, Matt was discovering. It seemed to exult in his insane stampede across lines of traffic. Where would the walker be now? Turning left or right along the Strip?

Heading straight on Sahara? Anywhere in the crowd. Matt's only edge was that battered hat.

Back at the same intersection as before, only facing south, with the light having withdrawn another three shades pale and the whole flat valley looking drenched in dusk, with darkness soon to clench its angry, hidden fist until the evening sky was squeezed of everything but stars....

Which way?

No choice.

The light ahead had gone green. A pulsing, pausing metal wall leaped forward, the Vampire first again. Matt scanned the groups of people dribbling into Circus-Circus, the ones walking down the sidewalk to the Stardust or the Frontier, the Treasure Island and Mirage, or even the Luxor's far faint obelisk and pyramid.

No cowboy hats, no hats at all.

A driveway. Had to turn around, go back.

No driveway, not for a long time. The Strip was like that, long segments of hotel frontage uninterrupted by anything but panhandlers.

Where? Vanishing where, even now? Back there.

Matt was sweating despite the chill wind. Rivulets ran down the sides of his face behind the Plexiglas visor. Had to turn back.

The Vampire jumped the curb like a steeplechase steed, cruised across the sidewalk and bumped down into the next driveway, not even noticing what it led to, intersecting the long semicircle almost at the halfway point.

Matt followed it around until it hit a parking-lot road heading west. He streaked along the straightaway, swerving when a car poked its headlights out of an aisle between parked vehicles.

A horn screamed annoyance, but he and the Vampire were ducking into another aisle, hunting for an exit.

They paused together at the deserted entrance to Sahara, hearts beating in concert. The engine's rumble was louder. A few people ambled along the sidewalk on either side, but the cold was too off-putting to encourage much foot traffic on this dead side of the hotel.

Matt looked right and left. Saw no cowboy hat. He lifted the amber-smoke visor to study the street again, Nothing. No one worth anything.

Finally he checked his watch, its pale green face night time bright now in the deepening dusk.

Ten to seven. Time to get to ConTact.

Matt waited anyway. Maybe the man had stopped to buy a newspaper from the corner machines. Maybe he would come by, if he hadn't ducked into Circus Circus or Slots-A-Fun.

Maybe he was still walking east on Sahara.

Maybe he was, but Matt had to get to work on time. He was needed there. Here, he was chasing his imagination. The wind dried the liquid on his skin into pinpricks of sleet. He gave the Vampire its head, like a horse. And it took it. It rolled out onto the asphalt of the street, purring.

At the light he watched the steady red while scanning the intersection crowds for the right cowboy hat, for any cowboy hat.

There was none. Green blossomed in the dark as he and the Vampire started forward like automatons. A LVMPD police car passed in the opposite direction. Matt held the 'cycle to a decorous speed and pattern now: stayed in place, kept to the right lane. He looked right and left, but saw nothing.

Still, he was certain of something. The man who had crossed the Strip while he waited stalled at a red light had walked like only one man he had ever known. Cliff Effinger. The stepfather from Hell who was supposed to be dead.

Matt knew that rolling walk, as surely as he had been uncertain of the corpse lying still and chill in the coroner's viewing booth. Matt looked down again from a distance on the earthly remains of the reputed Cliff Effinger. He couldn't identify him for sure, as Lieutenant Molina had wanted. Yet the man-in-a-crosswalk's name had screamed out with every step he took.

So, was Effinger the mysterious corpse who had fallen to the Crystal Phoenix craps table a few weeks ago? Or was a dead man walking? Was he anonymously patronizing the same casinos that had drawn him to Las Vegas so many years ago? How would Matt find him, if his instinct was right?

What would he do if he did find him?

His hand twisted on the Vampire's throttle. The bike plunged forward into the valley of the green light. Matt hadn't noticed that it had changed, but somehow the motorcycle was always one heartbeat ahead of him.