Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 23

End of the Line

Matt almost hung up the phone three times, at each unanswered ring on the line's other end.

The irony of a phone counselor freezing when making his own critical calls struck home.

Behind his cubicle, the buzz of other voices lulled him. Of course the party he sought wouldn't be there at this time of night, but he had to try now, while the impulse was too intense to ignore.

At last he heard a voice, a woman's voice. Though he was calling for a woman, this wouldn't be her.

"I'm trying to reach Lieutenant Molina."

"Is this an emergency?"

"No. I have some information."

"Can you call back during working hours tomorrow?

"Not until after noon."

"Just a minute." , She was gone, and Matt wondered if they were tracing the call.

He knew it was being recorded.

"Your name."

He gave it. Gave the address, the work phone number, home phone number. When it came to what the call was about, he simply said, "Cliff Effinger."

After he hung up, he felt wrung out. He shared sudden empathy with the people who called ConTact. People pitched to the breaking point. People uncertain. People hoping for help. People lost.

His hands were clammy as he rubbed them on each other. How critical a phone call could be only a veteran of ConTact--or of calling the police department--could testify to.

"It's cold out," a voice noted over his shoulder. "Like some coffee?"

He turned. Sheila was hanging over him, looking helpful, looking hopeful. Steam rose from the mug in her hand in separate puffs like messages from an Indian blanket.

"Something's bothering you," she said, quite accurately. She was a hot-line counselor too, after all.

He recalled all the brusque denial that kind of accuracy merited over the ConTact lines . No.

I don't need anything! I just happened to call. You can't help me ... so help me!

"Yeah." Matt wrapped icy fingers around the hot ceramic mug. "Unseasonably cold."

"That's the trouble. It is seasonal. Even Las Vegas has to go through a touch of fall and winter." Her smile didn't do much for that face, that voice, and he never used to notice such disparities. Why did feminine wiles in such an unfeminine face irritate so? "It's Halloween. This time of year the temperature can drop nights."

He nodded, then jumped as the phone rang.

"You're still on break, want me to get it?"

"No. I will." Though why he thought that Lieutenant C. R. Molina was anywhere out there on her time off, just waiting to take a call from him ... "Hello."

"Molina."

She sounded as official as if she'd just alighted from a squad car. Matt wondered where she was, what she was wearing, if her daughter was anywhere nearby.

"What about Cliff Effinger?"

He could afford to speculate at leisure; she couldn't. She zeroed in. The call, the name, the need to know. Matt could jerk her chain anytime, with just that one magical name. A dead man linked to another dead man, and both linked to a missing magician, now back from the dead.

Only one dead man was linked, as yet, to an ex-Chicago -boy, ex-priest with his own need to know.

No hello, no frosting, just need to know. He could understand that, but in Molina's case, he didn't understand why.

"I think I saw him."

"At the morgue? You're convinced now it was him?"

"No. I'm less convinced than ever. I think I saw him on the street, just now."

"Now? Where?"

"Tonight. Three hours ago, crossing the Strip at Sahara."

An accusing silence. "Why did you wait so long to call?"

"I... wasn't sure. He looks different. But the walk. I've never seen anybody walk quite that way."

"The walk."

"I know it sounds--"

"It sounds ... like this man, whoever he was, is long gone from the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara. What are you calling me now for?"

"Now" was rife with accusation: I'm a single mother, it said; I'm off duty. I don't need to be given false hopes any more than one of your pathetic callers does.

"I want to know what you'd want to know, what you'd need if he were alive, and in Las Vegas."

She laughed, not a very humorous sound. Not a sound that someone who loved to sing the old blues classics would make if she'd been listening to anything with swing.

"Fingerprints. Chase the guy down and wrap his fingers around a nice clean water glass, like they do on Murder, She Wrote. Or fly back to Chicago and dig up some extant examples, 'cause the Motor Vehicles Department here and there don't have any, the schools don't have any, the military doesn't have any, and right now, Mr. Devine, I'm not having any. Walks don't cut it in a court of law. Happy Halloween, but I'm even out of pennies."

She hung up.

He stared at the cup cooling between his hands. He was warm now, all over. With embarrassment, and something else. With anger. God damn it, and he meant the words as few do, he knew what---who--he had seen. He had hoped someone else, this detective, cared as much as he did, for her own reasons and in her own way. But she didn't. , He would have to track down this ghost on his own.