Kinsella unbent with a dancer's fluidity. Matt couldn't hear a knee creak, but hastened to rise with him, as if to keep them on the same level, despite the considerable height difference. His usual self-consciousness in situations like this had another, nastier overtone. With Temple it took the form of sexual shyness. Now, Matt felt insufficient in another way, in strength and size. He was eight years old again, and helpless against a man's height and anger. At almost six feet, he had pretty much shaken that inner shrinking sensation, but Kinsella was unusually tall.
"You're quite an athlete," Kinsella commented as he turned a gaudy back on Matt to walk to the table and chairs Electra kept by the pool.
"Not really. I swim some." Matt grimaced at his automatic self-deprecation, grabbed his towel from the foot of an ancient lounge chair and followed. "I don't consider the martial arts work athletics."
"Discipline, then."
Matt shrugged, not bothering to mention his favorite term, meditation.
"I don't see that we have much to talk about," he said. Then he sat, dripping and dabbing at the rivulets sprinting down his face, wishing he could don his clothes.
Kinsella's dubious look seemed practiced. A magician was an actor as much as anything.
"We have something in common," Kinsella said. "Not," he added speedily as Matt maintained a cool so effective he could feel his face freezing, "Temple."
"I wasn't thinking of Temple," Matt answered just as quickly.
"Shame on you," Kinsella suggested smoothly. "She's worth thinking about. Even when she's on retreat."
"Is she on retreat, or in retreat?"
"Probably both. Not that I blame her. Look. You don't know me ... or, rather, you don't know anything about me that isn't misleading. But we have more than Temple in common."
"Such as?"
Matt suspected that he was watching a master of deception at work--on him. Kinsella must thrive on putting other people off balance and keeping them that way. Why had Temple taken off, leaving them--him--alone to confront each other? Matt suspected that she and Electra had skedaddled together, and knew he shouldn't begrudge her a temporary escape. But the last thing on earth he wanted to discuss with Max Kinsella was Temple, especially with their most recent and most intimate evening still lingering on his mind like an uncertain sin.
"So what is our common bond?" Matt inquired, assuming his most nonjudgmental confessional tone but bracing for more surprises.
"Dead men," Kinsella reported with gusto and a flash of cat-green eyes.
"Dead men in general?" Matt asked, still wearing his parish priest mask, though Kinsella had no reason to know of its existence. "Or special dead men?"
"How many dead men do you know?" Kinsella shot back.
"A few. And I guess all dead men are special."
"Hmm. You've heard about mine, I suppose."
"I don't think so."
"Temple didn't tell you about the man that was found dead in a custom cubby-hole in the ceiling above the Goliath gambling tables? Found dead the very night I vanished, never to be seen again ...
until now?"
"You may find your own disappearance astounding, but some of us don't."
"I bore you. Pity. I'm out of practice, I see."
"What did you do while you were missing in action?"
"None of your business." With a charismatically mischievous grin.
"Neither are my dead men."
"There's where you may be wrong, boyo. I think our late unlamented' deaths may be connected."
"How do you even know about the one that was related to me?"
"Would the name Molina mean anything to you?"
" She's talking to you?"
"She?" Kinsella sounded startled.
"She," Matt confirmed. "She wants to interrogate you in the worst way; you haven't obliged her?"
"Not yet, but if she is a viable conduit of information, I'm back now. Shall we say that proximity is everything."
"In that case, I can see why you're a suspect in the Goliath death."
"Not that kind of proximity," Kinsella said. "Dead men." He tilted back until the white plastic chair balanced at a gravity-defying angle. "Think about it. Mine at the Goliath five months ago; yours at the Crystal Phoenix last week."
"Mine? Yours? Death doesn't recognize the possessive."
Kinsella let the chair's front legs snap to the concrete. "Figures of speech are relative. Your dead man is more yours than mine is mine. Yours was a relative."
"How did you--?"
"Temple dropped an allusion; I picked it up and followed it to the morgue."
"Not technically a relative."
"A lot of people we have to live with aren't technically relatives."
"A ... stepfather."
"Close enough to count. Stepparents can be sore points."
"He wasn't a parent to anything but his own indulgences."
Kinsella's quicksilver features hardened with some emotion. Perhaps it was chagrin. "Sorry. I didn't know the connection was that close."
"It wasn't. I hadn't seen him in years."
Kinsella nodded, no doubt calculating the unspoken facts and weighing whether to bring them up or not.
"You never will see him again, as it turned out," he mused a bit morosely.
"But I did. After his death. Maybe."
Kinsella perked up like an Irish setter at the mention of quail. "Why 'maybe'?"
"I hadn't seen the man in seventeen years. In fact, I couldn't really identify him. Time had been hard at work, and death finished the job. He seemed a ... stranger. Death had changed him, his face.
Standing there in the morgue, in that ludicrously Spartan viewing room, I couldn't be sure who it was. "shed the job. He seemed a . . . stranger. Death had changed him, his face. Standing there in the morgue, in that ludicrously Spartan viewing room, I couldn't be sure who it was."
Kinsella mulled that, his long fingers flexing on the shaded plastic table, as if miming a magic trick.
"To be or not to be . . . Cliff Effinger. At least yours has a name and face."
"You didn't know the dead man at the Goliath?"
Kinsella shook his head.
"You still could have killed him."
A pause, then a nod.
"Did you?"
"No." With a slow, sad, sweet smile that acknowledged what such denials were worth on the open market. "Did you kill your stepfather?"
"Unfortunately, no. I don't think so. And no one else is asking, anyway."
Kinsella didn't pursue Matt's odd uncertainty. "What about this Lieutenant Molina?"
"She doesn't give up. She'll still be looking for you."
"Maybe."
"What does that mean?"
"Why did she ask you to identify the body?"
"Because I finally confessed my . . . relationship to Effinger."
"So?"
"She had a dead man in the morgue and she needed someone to confirm his identity."
"No, she didn't."
"What do you mean?"
"This stepfather of yours did the usual bad stepfather things, didn't he?"
Matt felt his muscles stiffen even as he maintained his relaxed posture. Had Temple told Max--?
Kinsella went on as if unaware of Matt's hesitation. "At least he did if he was Cliff Effinger. I asked around. Effinger left his happy hometown for Vegas, drank, gambled, got arrested for all sorts of lowlife offenses that don't add up to much jail time, but do comprise a long, documented trail. Look, Devine. Cliff Effinger left his fingerprints all over this town. Why did this Ms. Molina need you to schlepp on down to the morgue and stare at the copper pennies on his eyes?"
Kinsella's eyes--disconcertingly Midnight-Louie green-- focused on Matt like quizzical laser beams. Confused, Matt clutched at any nearby floating assumptions.
"I'm sure Lieutenant Molina had a reason--"
"So am I," Kinsella put in, with feeling. He leaned forward on the little chair, propping his forearms on his thighs. "Think about it. There was no reason to put you through that charade."