"This part of the house is below the peak of the roof, facing north, isn't it? So you get indirect light, anyway."
"You have an artist's eye. This assignment should be easy."
"Not an artist's eye. Maybe a sense of direction. I grew up in the frozen north, where we're always trying to face things south. Here, the opposite applies."
"Amen. Have a seat."
The seat was white vintage wicker, with a floral-covered pad and a round, framing back.
"This is charming," Matt couldn't help commenting, his eyes finally adjusting to the lavish spill of daylight.
He could have said as much of his hostess. Janice Flanders sounded like an accountant, someone plain and no-nonsense who did people's taxes. This woman was not particularly frilly, but much more feminine than her name. She wore fashionably faded jeans that looked as if they'd gotten that way through wear rather than manipulation. Her shirt was loose and vaguely Native American in its soft, desert colors.
Long supple beaded earrings in iridescent earth tones undulated like small, personal serpents from her ears. Her ash-blond hair was anchored at her nape in a silver clip. And a slim belt of conchos circled her narrow waist.
He remembered to look at her feet last, shame on him! Temple would definitely find nothing there to envy: soft chamois moccasins, also beaded and probably Native American work.
"It's kind of you to see me so quickly," he said.
"Kind, nothing." Her earrings shimmied like a sandstorm around her lightly tanned skin. "I can use the commission. I do a lot of family portraits now. Mall caricatures now and then.
Mostly evening and weekend work. I enjoy consulting during the weekday hours."
"What will this involve?"
"Me asking questions, you answering, describing. Who do you want me to sketch?"
"A man I knew years ago, and thought I saw a few evenings ago. It may be impossible--"
"Don't even think that." She laughingly leaned forward, fanned a hand with long, thin tanned fingers. Her left hand. Ringless.
"All right. But I don't know what this... project will cost... Miss Flanders."
Her hands fanned and gestured again. Rings circled the forefinger and fourth finger of her right hand. Amethyst, amber. "I usually get two hundred. It takes, maybe an hour. I draw as you talk. Is that okay?"
"Fine. If a check's all right--?"
"Sure. You were referred by the police, weren't you?"
"By a particular police lieutenant."
"A woman." She sounded impressed. "Would you like something to drink before we begin?
It helps to have something to worry at while you're trying to remember. Lemonade? Iced tea?"
He requested the iced tea. Sipping it might disguise any bitter twist of the lips as he described Cliff Effinger to this sunny, sophisticated woman a world away from harsh Chicago winters and harsher domestic realities.
She vanished through a doorway he hadn't noticed, one that connected to the kitchen and family room he had theorized. Neither were as sun-infused as this room, but when he stood to see the vista, they were as clean, cleverly accoutered and inviting.
"Decorating must be a hobby of yours," he called into the kitchen, seeing no one, but hearing the pleasant clatter and clink of glassware.
"I'm a compulsively visual person," she caroled back. "My fellow students at RISD would blanch at the western mode of design, but I've grown to love it."
"Risdee?"
"Rhode Island School of Design."
She came back into the room on that explanation, bearing a Coca-Cola tray topped off with tall glasses of amber tea.
Matt took the tray from her to place it on the low table before the sofa/daybed before resuming his seat. He nodded at the empty easel in the room's far corner.
"You paint as well as sketch, then?"
"Does a duck waddle? I'll show you some of my work after our session." She sipped some tea, curled her long legs under her on the muslin-covered daybed and picked up a large sketching pad leaning against the daybed leg.
The sketching pencil was one of many fanned in a tall ceramic vase, like an arrangement of dried leaves.
Before Matt knew it, he was launched on his artistic inquisition.
"A man. Does he have a criminal record?"
"A . . . petty one."
"And you saw him at twilight."
Matt nodded, then realized that she was already slashing in lines and curves and watching him only intermittently. "Yeah, that dusky time when you don't know whether the semaphore lights are on or off."
"I know just the moment you mean! One of my favorites--if you're off in the desert looking at the horizon, instead of in Las Vegas waiting on a traffic light."
Her laughter was infectious. Matt found himself relaxing, even though he was reliving one of the more traumatic moments of his current life.
"So why were you at that particular traffic light?"
"I was on my way to work."
"Right. You work nights. What kind of work?"
"I'm a hot-line counselor."
Her eyes, hazelnut-golden, flicked up with approval. "Great! But you're used to hearing people, not seeing them."
"True. Very true. I had only a glimpse, that's the problem--"
"There are no problems when you're working with a sketch artist. We thrive on reconstruction. Where was he?"
"Crossing the street in front of me."
"How old is he?"
Matt had figured this out long ago, and contemplated it every birthday. "Sixty-three."
"Tall man? Short? Walk with a stoop?"
"I thought you .. . that the idea was to get a face."
"Face it is, but it helps to know context."
"Medium height. Except he had that loping, rangy, sort of swaggering walk."
"Sweeney among the nightingales?"
Matt was dumbfounded. "You know Eliot?"
"Not personally." She looked up to grin. "A wonderful image, though, isn't it? Neanderthal man swinging those calf-dusting fingertips among the fragile-throated birds fit only for an emperor. Eliot is so visual."
"I thought. . . cerebral."
Janice shrugged, her sketching hand never still.
What could she be sketching already, Matt wondered. Her eyes darted up, to him, for only a moment, as swift as the fan of butterfly wings. Her eyes were hard and concentrated, and her smile looked fixed. Still, her face was a pleasant mask that he couldn't read, as if a god had inhabited her.
"Sixty-three. And still vigorous."
"I suppose. He was walking fast. The Strip is wide but he kept up with--was ahead of--the crowd. And he wore a hat."
"Hat. Hard hat? Baseball cap?"
"Western hat."
"Stetson?"
"I don't know. Uh, pale, but dirty pale. Dented crown."
"And the brim?"
"A hat brim. Average. For a cowboy hat, I guess." Matt felt as if he were failing elementary spelling.
Janice smiled and tilted her sketchpad toward him. He could see the apt, rough lines of a Western hat above an empty oval of face. "That it?"
"No. The crown was lower. There were some . . . gewgaws on a hatband."
She tilted the pad back to her, left hand working rhythmically. Left-handed women were rare, especially left-handed women artists, he would bet.
He became aware of a click-click- click noise somewhere in the house, and lifted up his head to hear better. She didn't look up.
"Nothing to worry about, Matt. The kids are off at computer camp for two weeks."
"I hear ... clicking."
"Or ticking?" She smiled, still not looking up. Her earrings trembled with the slashing movements of her cocked left arm.
"A clock?"
"I collect old clocks. I like that sound of time tsking away."
"I didn't hear it before."
"Time's like that. Sneaks up on you. Like this Cliff Efftnger. What kind of nose?"
Nose. How often do you study another person's nose? Maybe once, after you've punched him in the face and he's lying on the floor, groggy, not quite focusing on you ...