"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 wave 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.''
''I thought the mob was dead in this town."
"That doesn't stop wannabes and cheap imitations. The death of Elvis didn't."
Temple had no snappy retort for that grisly comparison, except that the hoods who attacked her certainly hadn't looked as if they could sing.
She didn't want to remind Molina of where they had last met, and of who had accompanied Temple. She had to keep Matt out of this as long as possible while he repaired his shocked psyche. Listen to her! She admonished herself. Now she was protecting Matt. Who would protect her? Not Molina.