Or maybe instead of making love, the offending tenants had been making war. With these thick old walls, it was often hard to tell the difference. Someone could have clobbered someone else. And she had heard it. Another murder? Right overhead?
Now she was afraid to pound on a door, any door. Her life was full up with dead bodies at the moment.
Maybe a TV had been turned on too loud . . . and it was tuned to a retrospective on the L.A.
earthquake, sure.
While she dithered, she moved down the carpeted hall. Her cooling ire still fanned a few bright embers of indignation. She was beginning to believe that it was her civic duty to find out what had happened.
She faced the short cul-de-sac leading to a door exactly like hers. All was quieter than Sunday morning at the moment. Too quiet. If whatever had produced the noise was a normal activity, it wouldn't have just . . . shut off like this. Would it?
She tiptoed down the narrow hall. The faint lamp beside the coffered wood door illuminated a number: eleven.
The heel of Temple's hand smacked her forehead. Now she knew where she was! Eleven was directly over her place. And it was Matt Devine's unlucky number, at the moment.
Oh, boy, she was going to look nosy, but what if something had happened to him? She glanced at her wristwatch, then thought. Use your brain, she told herself. Thursday night.
''Mystery" comes on at 10 p.m. Matt couldn't be at home. He would have been working at ConTact since seven. Temple bit her lip. Okay. So, what if something had happened to his apartment while he was gone? Had happened in his apartment?
She had a duty to investigate. How? She didn't have a key. She supposed she should. ...
Temple eyed the doorbell, then shrank from setting those mellow, old-fashioned chimes ringing. That seemed silly in an empty apartment, and Matt's place appeared empty even when he was there, so meager were its furnishings. So how was all that noise possible?
Temple's lifted fist rapped briskly on the door.
Ow! Forty-year-old mahogany was hard and thick. She had to rough up her knuckles to make a decent knock.
No sound. No answer. But then, she had expected none.
Rap again, longer and louder. Temple shook her stinging knuckles, waiting for the answer that she knew wouldn't come.
''Hello?" she tried. "Is anybody there?"
Should she call Electra? What if she was wrong? What if the sound had been caused by something perfectly normal--like Caviar bouncing off the furniture in a game of feline ping-pong (petite little Caviar?), or garbage collectors emptying the Dumpster out back. On Thursday night at ten p.m.? Still, she hated looking like a nosy neighbor, particularly with Matt's place.
Maybe she'd just forget it.
Temple edged a few steps back down the hall.
And if something were really wrong? She hated being indecisive worse than she hated being nosy.
While she stood there, ambivalent, she realized that she hadn't tried the obvious. The door itself.
Refusing to let any objections enter her head, she marched back to the door, grabbed the big brass knob, turned it and . . . walked into the unlocked apartment.
Dumb move. Fatally dumb move. If it wasn't locked . . .
No light was on, but a faint streetlamp glow shone through the glass panes of the naked French doors. The lurid, orange-pink aura reflected like spilled mercurochrome from the few things present in the room, outlining the figure standing directly in front of her.
A man's silhouette stood statue still a few feet farther into the room, as if he had walked in, stopped and frozen into a monochromatic image of himself.
Scared to death, Temple reached for the hall light switch--at the exact location as in her place. She pressed it, hoping that it would work.
It functioned so well that she blinked at the sudden brightness, which half blinded her just when she might need to turn and run.
Her eyes adjusted to an impression of Chaos Central. Matt Devine was standing in front of her, only his back visible, surveying the shattered ruins of his orange-crate bookshelves. His books had been scattered to the living room's oddly angled corners as if hurled by a demon censor.
"Matt. Why aren't you at work?"
He turned at her voice, but looked right through her . . . and she wasn't the one acting like a mute ghost of herself.
He shook his head, his eyes squinting in the brightness as he turned again to survey the damage. "Let go," he finally said, without glancing back to Temple. ''Not fired." At least he had anticipated her surprise. 'They didn't need me tonight."
"So you came home early to find . . . this?"
He just shook his head. Temple edged farther into the room. He was okay, she was okay.
Whatever had happened made a... mess, but she was an expert at cleaning up other people's messes.
"Doesn't look like any substantial damage to the apartment itself." Little Miss Optimist. "No windows or doors seem broken. And you didn't have a lot of fancy Memphis modern for anyone to trash."
She checked his face as she came alongside, but her smart remark hadn't thawed the frozen expression that deadened his eyes. Shock. Temple considered what it would be like to return home to find her place ruined, and winced. Violation. That was the only way to describe the sensation, no matter the motive.
"If they were looking for anything to steal, they were out of luck here," she said. "Maybe that's why they got mad and turned to vandalism. Have you checked the bedroom yet?*'
Matt shook his head again, his face still expressionless.
She clattered across the bare wood floors, then paused on the threshold to what was her bedroom a floor below. "This it?"
He nodded as she reached for the light switch. Dumb again, Temple lectured herself. What if an intruder had retreated at their entrance, but not left? Who would help her? At the moment, Matt looked about as useful as the statue of David at Caesars Palace.
Her finger had already flicked the switch upward. The room's central ceiling fixture spread wan light on a landscape as bare as the living room, but in apple-pie order.
Nodding satisfaction. Temple turned off the light and clicked back into the outer room, feeling like an interior decorator on a mercy mission.
"Okay in there. Where's Caviar?"
''She, ah, hasn't been around. Much. Lately."
He was still talking in jerky phrases, like someone whose brain was only partly plugged in. He frowned, struggling to recall a trying detail.
''She was here, though. But I think she must have . . . left. Again."
Temple decided to focus on the future.
"Look, Matt, this could be a blessing in disguise. We can get you some new stuff. I know a great unpainted furniture place and about six dozen thrift shops filled with kicky little furniture items at a low price--vintage Fifties Yuck, you name it. We'll redecorate."
He finally moved. Bent to pick a book from the floor, un-bend its pages, shut it.
"I'm sorry," Temple said, sinking under a sudden helpless feeling. Sometimes a stiff upper lip was not enough; sometimes it was an insult.
He sat on the arm of his overturned sofa. The cushions lay on the floor like giant playing cards,
"Who would have done this?" Temple's ever-ready indignation was rising again, this time in a serious cause. "Kids looking for electronic equipment to sell for drugs? Frustrated punks can be destructive, just for the hell of it. And how did they get in? Did you check the French door locks? We are three stories high here."
His troubled expression was a barrier, putting him beyond her reach. Temple began to panic like a swimmer suddenly out of her depth. Maybe she should call his hotline compadres; maybe he needed some emergency counseling.
She sighed, not knowing what to say for once. Then she bent to gather the splayed books, shutting splintered spines, smoothing crumpled pages. Unfamiliar names and titles slid under her fingertips. C.S. Lewis. G.K. Chesterton . The Seven Story Mountain, Ah. The Little Prince in the original French. S
ome philosophy books by a man named Rollo May. Novels by Romaine Roland, Iris Murdoch and Susan Howatch.
Matt sat on his pie-wacky sofa and stared at the floor, at her-moving among the ruins of the room.
Temple stacked some books knee-high. Without anywhere to put them, it seemed pointless.
''You have so little, why would anyone--? Unless. ..." Matt was barely watching her. She turned to him suddenly, as they say in the old plays, galvanized.
''Unless . . . Matt! My apartment is just below this one."
He looked up with lusterless brown eyes.
"Don't you see? This could have been a mistake. Someone might have been looking for my place. For me. Maybe those men who assaulted me are back. Of course. That makes sense. No one's been after you, no one would be. It's me. They're still looking for Max. Maybe they got mad when they thought I wasn't home. Maybe they just wanted to warn me. Oh, God, I was sitting downstairs with Louie, just watching 'Mystery'--!"
She cupped a hand over her mouth to stop it from saying any more scary things.
Matt straightened, responding to something she had said for the first time. He shook his head yet again. "No."
His voice was hoarse, as if someone had tried to strangle him. For a wild moment, she wondered if he had interrupted the intruders, and had been hurt.
She watched him intently, alarmed. "Matt. Are you all right?"
''No." His voice was stronger now, and even hoarser.
Temple blinked.'' 'No,' that whoever broke in was after me, or 'No,' you're not all right?"
He stood. "No, nobody was trying to get to you. Temple. I can't let you think that. No, it isn't you at all." His hands spread to encompass the mess. "It's me. Only me. Just me. Me. Me, me, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."
She swallowed at the sudden violence of this confession, feeling dazed and half frozen herself. What had she said wrong?
Matt's hands spread wider. She noticed then that the knuckles were scraped raw, as if he'd been knock, knock, knocking at Heaven's door, and it was a lot harder mahogany than the Circle Ritz's. "You don't have to look high and low for the culprit. He's here. I did it."
'*You?" She gawked again at the destruction. "What happened?"
He stared at her face, her incomprehension, maybe her disappointment. Then he sat again, his fingers intertwined between his knees, his eyes on the book-strewn floor.
"Somebody died today," he said.
Oh. Death wasn't always a puzzle that happened to someone distant. Temple thought, like an unknown murder victim. Sometimes death singled out someone so close that it seared the lives around that person like heat lightning. His mother? But why such rage?
"I'm sorry. Matt."
"Don't be. It wasn't anyone . . . close."
"But..."
He glanced up and laughed. "You look like a little fox terrier I had for a while when I was a kid. Itchy. When that dog wasn't scratching, he was tilting his head and looking so puzzled. God knows he had a lot of reason."
"I'm trying to understand."
"It isn't anything you can understand. I don't." Matt gazed up at the ceiling light fixture as if trying to stare into the sun. "Irony isn't the kind of accident that offers easy answers."
"Can you tell me who died?"
He still stared at the shallow white frosted glass fixture as if examining a UFO glued to the ceiling. ''A man. My stepfather."
Oh. ''So you did find him, in a way."
''But not alive. He had just died, Temple. Now. Today. Just as I was about to find him."
Matt's right hand made a fist and kept it.
"So you'll never be able to confront him."
"I did once, long ago."
"And--"
"He left, and I stayed."
"So you won."
He shook his head. "He won. He always won by being what he was, and now he's won again.
He's escaped."
"Escaped what?"
"Me," Matt said again.
Me, me, me echoed in Temple's mind. "You know now why you wanted to, needed to, find him?"
He nodded. "Now that it's too late."
"And why did you?"
Matt eyed the leveled living room. "To beat the hell out of him. If I could, I'd pull him out of his coffin and beat the hell out of him as soon as he's buried."
Such violence from easy-going Matt Devine was as shocking as a fist in the stomach, and Temple had recent reason to know what that felt like.
"Why?" she whispered, feeling dumb as a dog, after all. Feeling mute and stupid and blind as a bat on top of everything. "Why are you so angry?"
"I didn't know I was. I hid under a bushel, under the sanctimonious secrecy of endless confessions and penances, even under the pious platitudes of psychotherapy. I had reached such a rational plateau that I couldn't see the mountain of buried rage crumbling under my feet.
Until he was dead."
"Why? Why any of it, all of it?"
Matt licked his lips, rubbed his nose, like a punch-drunk fighter getting up to take more. "He hit us, when we couldn't fight back. I thought I wanted to understand why, to hear his story, but I really just wanted to the write the end of my own. I wanted to beat the hell out of him, and he escaped. He cheated. He ran to death first."
Temple sat on the floor like a kid at a particularly grim story time. All she could do was ask her simplistic questions, and hope that his answers might answer something lost within himself.
How did you understand another person? You listened and you tried not to judge. Temple suspected that Matt's stepfather was not capable of understanding anybody else, and therefore would never be understood. But now Matt had lost even the chance to fail.
"Us?" she asked quietly.
"My mother, myself. It was the liquor, she said, but it was more. It was meanness, it was raw inarticulate envy. It was a lot of ugly, unnamed things. I knocked him down finally, one day. And he left. If he couldn't beat on us, he had to find someone he could. Once was not enough. I thought it was, I talked myself into thinking it was. I told myself that I wanted to know the past, not tear it into little tiny pieces. But then he played his last, mean trick on me. He died, and showed me just how shallow my motives were. I wanted to find him and kill him, Temple.
Somebody else got there first."
"He was . . . killed? Today?"
He nodded. "Yeah. I didn't find him dead, but the day after I learned where he was, he was dead. Just killed. I never even had a chance to be noble and not kill him, so he's won again--
forever."
"Matt." Temple felt an awful sense of foreboding leavened by poetic justice of a particularly ironic sort. "What was your stepfather's name?"
"I hate even saying it. At least I'll see it inscribed on a marker soon. Effinger. Cliff Effinger."
Chapter 17
The Fall Girl
"What are you doing here?"
Only someone with a stopwatch could have determined who had spoken these exact same words first: Temple or Lieutenant Molina.
It was no contest who was going to answer first. Molina stood like a cigar-store Indian, intimidatingly mum until she got her response.
Around them people streamed into the cool, elegantly lit lobby of the Crystal Phoenix, parting only to flow past the magnificent Lalique glass sculpture of a phoenix rising with frosted wings spread.
Temple and Molina had arrived at the Plexiglas plinth that housed the artwork as if by pre-arrangement, but the confluence was purely accidental,
"I work here," Temple said in a casually perky tone she knew would irk Molina. "Plus, I'm writing for the Gridiron, which is rehearsing here. And you, Lieutenant?"
"You know why," Molina answered in a deep-voiced mono-tone that Temple would describe as dark. ''I suppose it's the dead man."
"Why would I be interested in a live man?" Molina asked laconically. ''How did you happen to witness this latest murder?"
"I didn't. I witnessed the revelation of the murder." Molina's hand w
ave indicated that fine points were irrelevant. Temple had one she brought up anyway. ''Isn't Lieutenant Ferraro handling this case?" "He is. However, it can't have escaped your notice that the location of the body bears a certain resemblance to an unsolved case of mine."
"Temple nodded, then reversed course and shook her head. "Yes. That is . . . no, it didn't not occur to me. Oh, okay. So what does this mean?"
Molina shook her head, not at all confused. Her hair was pulled back as usual and her eyebrows were as untamed. Temple wondered if she left them natural because they suited the forties aura of her singing persona. Carmen.
"You tell me," the lieutenant said. "Did you know the victim?"
"I never saw him before in my life, or his," Temple answered honestly, mentally crossing her fingers to cancel her implicit lie. She knew someone who knew Cliff Effinger, but Molina had not asked her that yet. Hopefully, Molina never would. "Believe it or not, I don't know much about the man who died at the Goliath. Was the method similar?" "If you call the same caliber of bullet 'similar,' yes." Temple winced. "Does that mean the same gun?" "It could, if we found it. Same puzzle, though. Why would a man hide himself in a custom-tailored nook over the gaming tables? And who would wiggle in there to kill him? Then, too, both victims had taken a beating before they were shot. I doubt that occurred in a casino crawl space."
"Beating?" Temple recalled Matt's wrecked apartment and raw hands. Could he have lied?
Had he found Cliff Effinger before he died? Was he afraid to admit that he had assaulted a man who had so quickly become a corpse?
Molina nodded. ''I believe you have first-person experience with that kind of attack."
"You think that the men who accosted me--?"
''We never did find the hoods you fingered in the mug book. We don't even know if you identified the right ones.''
cat in a crimson haze Page 14
