It was a nondescript name, which matched the unimposing corpse she had glimpsed. She reviewed her mental picture of the man: a loser in a short-sleeved shirt and corny polyester tie; middle-aged, slack-stomached, thin-haired. A time-tuckered face loosened by booze and late hours, maybe even by a recent fist fight. Some petty crook. Temple guessed. Possibly a smalltime loser who had lost too much. Who at the Circle Ritz was hunting such a man?
She was suddenly intensely curious about the identity of the man found dead above the Goliath casino floor. No one had ever breathed a name or an occupation to her. Drat. She almost wished Molina had this case so she could ask her, although Molina probably wouldn't reveal anything. Not until Temple had fed Molina some tidbit about Max, and Temple: was running on empty when it came to Max.
Temple stared at the craps table. People, mostly men, again leaned low over its depressed surface. They pleaded and cajoled the dice that rolled over the navy Ultrasuede cryptically marked in red. They begged for naturals and cursed "snake eyes."
Temple had viewed another kind of "snake eye" on that soft, seductive gaming surface. A bullet hole. She wondered if it had exited the other side, or lay imbedded in the dead tissue of a formerly live human brain.
Maybe the tacky man had possessed a good heart. Maybe he had a mother who had adored his every baby step; a toddler who had once called him ''Daddy;'' or just a dog who had come when called. Maybe he had once been a dapper, upright member of society who had lost it all long ago in Las Vegas.
Maybe.
Maybe Cliff Effinger was somebody someone would miss.
Maybe even Eightball's client.
Temple recalled her instant image of the man, and rather seriously doubted it. Fairy tales don't come true, and--if they do--they don't happen to you. Or to men who look like that.
Chapter 16
Homewrecker
Temple was working her way through an Ethel M vanilla cream, sucking the thick chocolate shell to the sweet dissolution of sugary memory, then letting the smooth filling melt on her tongue.
Yum. She seldom indulged her sweet tooth, poor deprived thing. The only time it got something other than complex carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables and nonfat yogurt was when she watched "Mystery" on PBS.
Tonight's installment featured Inspector Morse, a series that met her high dramatic standards, but mystified her in one way the script writers had never intended. She'd never seen a man so chronically attracted to women and so chronically incapable of doing anything productive about it. One would think that a sharp sleuth like Morse would know better by now than to bother.
Temple reached for the remote control peeking out from under Midnight Louie's front paw.
He liked to lounge atop the television schedule and hog the remote control, his claws moving in and out with contentment and possession.
Temple lifted the paw, avoided the claws and retrieved the device. Three presses of the proper button lifted the sound level to barely understandable. Why did Brit films always sound like they were recorded in a rain barrel during a thunderstorm? And the actors mumbled as if they were all chewing pinto-bean cuds. . . .
A noise elsewhere in the building obscured one of Morse's dour observations. Drat.
Morse's dour observations were generally important clues. Temple returned a second Ethel M
morsel to the box and leaned forward. She aimed the device at the television screen two-handed, as if holding a firearm, and shot the sound up two more rounds.
'Still garbled. "Dic-tion," she sternly ordered the TV screen, *'You British screen actors are too bloody porridge-mouthed--!"
Another loud thump erupted above. What was somebody doing? Moving furniture?
Hopefully, just moving out.
She frowned in concentration, but . . . oh, no! Morse and Lewis were doing a scene in Morse's bloody red Rolls Royce. Now the over amplified auto noise was drowning out the dialogue.
Crash.
Not on the screen. Above. Honestly. Temple stood up and aimed her remote control one last time, zapping Morse, Lewis and the vintage road hog to Airwave Heaven.
"This is just too much," she told Louie, who blinked in solemn agreement. "On a Thursday night, too. What are they doing up there? Working out on a punching bag? Skipping rope?
Bowling? I'm going to express my displeasure in clear, articulate Guthrie Theatre diction, and in person."
She glared once more at the now dead-gray television screen, nodded to Louie, snatched her key ring from her tote bag and headed for the door.
Righteous indignation is an excellent propellant. It pushed Temple to the stairwell and up one floor, still seething. It compelled her halfway down the circular hall--if there is any halfway point to an eternal ring-around-the-rosy. Her indignation fizzled only when she realized that she had no way to tell which unit was the noise polluter.
She stood alone in the dim-lit hall, infuriated,-struggling to take a logical approach to her illogical business.
''It sounded like the Second Coming right over my head,'* she muttered. Oops. Maybe what sounded like godawful chaos to her was just good fun to the offenders. How embarrassing to storm up to someone's door and discover that' she had interrupted a romantic moment in a rumpus room! Still, there , was no need to do anything with such gusto that it upset the other occupants.
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.