"I've seen him a couple of times," Temple said after a moment's hesitation.
"So he's planning to become a fixture on the Las Vegas scene."
Temple laughed. "Max as a landmark? I don't think so. He's only here to do his Invisible Man act."
Matt contemplated that. "Invisible? Or Invincible? Maybe not seen ... but also not forgotten.
That would suit a magician's ego."
"Listen, this time Max wants to be forgotten."
"Will he be?"
Temple shrugged. "Not by us, I suppose."
Matt sipped the imported ale. Bitter, like medicinal brews.
"You wanted to talk about Max?" she went on. "Or me and Max?"
"No!" Too strongly said to be quite true. "I'm ... avoiding the real issue, I suppose."
"Cliff Effinger? Have you decided what to do about sighting him, or his double?"
"That's not what I want to talk about, and no, I haven't decided what to do. What I want to talk about tonight is a man I've never met."
"What a relief! No stress, no problems, no hidden agendas, right? Strangers are such a comfort."
"Keep me laughing, Temple, and I just might spit out what I want to say." Matt heard his voice lower as he hunched over his glass mug of beer, closer to Temple. "He's a . . . client. Of ConTact. I may be violating a confidence to discuss him with someone else, but his problem is a world away from any I've dealt with, even before ConTact, in the church. He's become like a patient, a parishioner, a regular. Yesterday I learned he even calls me from out of town. I'm not supposed to be someone's private shrink."
Temple nodded soberly. "I can see the reason for that, but I'm surprised. Hotline counselors actually get repeat calls from the same people? I always figured a person called a hotline when they were drunk or drugged out or thinking about suicide. That doesn't seem the sort of thing that calls for repeat contact."
"A lot of people work their way up to doing something about critical problems. They try out their resolve on us, the strangers at the other end of the line, before they confront people they know. And some callers are chronic reformers, always talking about it, never doing it. Ill people use other people, and they'll use a hotline counselor as fast as they will a friend. As a counselor, I have to avoid being finessed into becoming an enabler. That's what's botheri ng me. I think this guy is feeding me the same manipulative line he reels out to everyone in his life: he needs help, he wants to change, only I can reach him."
"Professional crybaby, huh?"
Temple leaned away from the tabletop as Guido or Vito or Tony returned to push a mounded platter of hot food in front of each in turn, ladies first.
"He's a mystery." Matt ignored a pile of barbecued ribs as high as a small gopher mound. "A man with such a strong ego is usually impervious to self-inflicted wounds, but this one seems to wallow in his inner unworthiness, all the while perpetuating the behavior that makes him betray others, and himself."
"Wow. Even on my darkest, three-chocolate-sundae blue Mondays I have never, ever
'wallowed in my unworthiness.' You have to think a lot of yourself to have the chutzpah to feel that guilty."
"Exactly true, though rather circuitously put. He has a monumental ego. I confess I'm not used to dealing with that sort of person."
"No." Temple smiled gently as she dissected broiled baby quail. "So," she suggested in Brooklynese. "Maybe youse want a crack P.I. to give you the dope on this anonymous caller, all from long distance, sorta like Mycroft Holmes or Nero Wolfe."
"Like Temple Barr would do fine."
"Hmm. What sort of clues have you picked up so far?"
"For one thing, he is Somebody."
"Isn't everybody?"
"Not the way this guy sees it. He seems to think I'd know his name. Little does he realize how out of it I am."
"And he's called you long-distance?"
"He must be some sort of... entertainer. He says he's on the road a lot."
"So was Willie Loman, or so is any traveling salesman today, for that matter. You could be talking to an Astro Toilet Company sales rep with delusions of grandeur. Do you think he gambles?"
"Maybe. He doesn't mention it as one of his vices."
"Then if he isn't a celebrity who comes to Vegas to gamble, he's a celebrity who comes to Vegas to perform."
"Or golf."
"Does golf seem to be one of his vices?"
"No. He seems to favor night games."
"Oho. So that's a problem? Celebrities are surrounded by groupies. One who doesn't succumb is the exception."
"This guy is exceptional, and exceptionally sexually active, to hear him tell it."
"Not smart in this day and age of AIDS."
"He claims it's an addiction."
"And you don't believe in sexual addiction?"
"Oh, I know it's a way certain people have of dealing with past problems, like overeating. But I'm not sure that I believe anything this guy tells me. I think he's been lying to people around him so often, he now has to go farther afield to be believed."
"So he's addicted to lying?"
"Possibly. But not in a pathological way."
"Just a garden-variety liar."
"That's it! He's so casual about what he does, and about telling me. He's a garden-variety womanizer, adulterer, deceiver."
"He's married?"
"Recently. For the first time. Apparently he 'escaped' matrimony for years while being the playboy of the Western world, to hear him tell it. Now he can't stop playing around."
"So he calls you. Makes sense. You work at night. He would ordinarily play around at night.
While he's talking to you, he's not out playing around. Seems like he's found a likely solution."
"But I'm not supposed to spend all my time distracting a habitual fornicator."
"Fornicator! Ever wonder why there are so many long words to describe simple hanky-panky?"
"It's hard for me to empathize with his kind of problem."
"I bet!"
"Yet, in some crazy way, he seems to depend on me, like he knows I'm a kind of opposite to him."
"Maybe you aren't." Temple was looking particularly analytical as she stared over the tiny pile of bones on her plate at someplace above Matt's head.
He almost wanted to turn and crane his neck to see if something hadn't appeared there on the dark wood, another womanizer like Elvis, maybe, or maybe St. Maria Goretti, the martyred patron saint of chastity, as all saints of chastity seemed to have been. Or maybe a halo. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on Temple's.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
Her glance came back to his, a challenge. "I mean, here we have two men, anonymously connected by a phone line, who have led lives in the extreme --at opposite ends of the spectrum--but both at extremes nevertheless. You two actually have quite a lot in common.
Maybe that's why he calls you so much, and from so far away. Maybe he needs an anti-playboy to wean him from the course he's followed so long. Sort of an Angel's Advocate."
"Amusing and creative, but hardly helpful." Matt studied the piled-up ribs on his plate.
Smeared with carmine barbecue sauce, they did resemble mounded bodies. "St. Valentine was a priest, did you know that? He cured the blindness of his jailer's daughter. He had nothing to do with love or marriage. If love is blind, it's odd that a man who restored sight should become the patron saint of lovers."
"I'm sure the Al Capone gang wasn't even aware it was Valentine's Day when they set out to knock off the Bugs Moran crowd. Or . . . maybe love is murder."
"Love is singularly absent from my caller's vocabulary. The only real affection he expresses is for his baby daughter."
"Love embarrasses men who have a lot of sexual partners," Temple said thoughtfully. "It's almost as if they need to prove that all sex is separate from all love."
"Can it be?"
She really mulled over that one. "Supposedly it's women who insist on attaching emotion to what the male gender would prefer to regard as random acts of self-satisfaction, many random acts. Yet who writes all the lamenting love songs: I lost you, you left me, what we had was wonderful? Most human cultures reward men for suppressing all their emotions except anger, but I think most men need love with their sex like scrambled eggs need ketchup."