Matt had been so concentrated, body and soul, that he couldn't tell momentarily if he had heard a real voice. Wasn't that how those beautifully dangerous Old Testament angels had appeared to the poor humans chosen by God to marry a certain woman to sire a certain son, or later to sacrifice that son on a mountain top? Or to send their daughters into the streets to be raped.
He turned slowly, knees bent to spring in any direction, at any enemy, even an invisible one such as delusion.
He saw an angel, maybe, but no Old Testament emigre. Matt straightened, feeling a stranger had caught him enacting one of his fierce internal fantasies.
"Do you teach?" She approached him with harsh, measured steps like a flamenco dancer just warming up.
He shook his head.
"The woman inside--housekeeper, I think--said I could find you here."
"You were looking for me?"
"You sound like no one ever does."
"I guess I more often do the looking."
He was looking now. He had seen women more beautiful, but none more arresting. Beauty's remote perfection repelled him, if anything. She didn't need it. The only thing medium about her was her height. Her Snow White coloring invited fairy-tale comparison: coal-black hair with a hard sheen that seemed lacquered, but wasn't. Skin white as department-store-window snow. Lips black-red, like a cherry split by its own ripeness, and not nearly as natural. Her eyes were the only compromised feature in her face, a changeable blue-green color that recalled the "aqua" eyes Temple raved about in Midnight Louie's lady friend, the Persian cat Yvette.
This visitor obviously expected all action to stop while her bold palette of features was assessed. Her cool eyes returned the favor, but revealed no conclusions, or even presumptions.
What she wore was a frame, no more. Matt was learning Temple's character-reading through accessories. A simple, expensive pantsuit in an exquisite shade of jade green underlined her unusual eyes. He was aware of pointy-toed, low-heeled boots or oxfords that gleamed with a halo of excessive cost. And though Lieutenant Molina might wear this rigorously gender-neutral suit, in this case Matt saw/sensed that it only added intrigue to a men's-magazine figure. She might be ten or fifteen pounds heavier than the ideal woman her height, but that was only another unfair advantage she had over her sex; an inescapable lushness lurked beneath the suit's severe lines.
She didn't speak until she was close enough to extend her left hand, but not for an introduction. Something was in it.
He reached for the expected business card, then froze. She held out one of the laminated sketches of his stepfather he had been plastering all over Las Vegas casinos for the past month. On the back he'd typed estimated height, weight and whereabouts, as well as his own name and phone number. But not his Circle Ritz address.
"Friend of yours?" she asked.
"Not exactly, Friend of yours?"
Not exactly. But he's bought me a drink or two when he's won for a while, or just wants to feel like a winner. He doesn't stay a winner very long, because he never stops playing. I work at one of the Strip casinos." She had seen and answered the question that was forming in his mind, and maybe his mouth and eyes.
"It's true." She laughed, as if the questions and reactions were always the same, and always in the same order. "I don't talk or dress like one of the sleazy sisterhood men expect to find working in a casino."
"I have no expectations," he said abruptly.
She studied him, her smile something she put on easily, like a jade-green pantsuit. "I guess you don't. You're not what I expected. And do you even expect to find him?"
"Not really."
"Still, you look."
He shrugged. " 'A man's reach . . .' "
She laughed, extending her right hand. "Kitty O'Connor."
A heavy square ring impressed his fingers. He stared at the culprit, a huge emerald-cut aquamarine embedded in a rope-of-gold setting, as her pale hand withdrew.
Ambidextrous, he thought, with the attention to detail a counselor brought to bear on all new personalities. Unusual in a woman. Wonder which hand she writes with.
She considered the homemade wanted poster again. "I've seen him, should see him again."
"And?"
"And what?"
"I didn't mention a reward."
"I didn't ask for one, did I?"
"I thought you might expect one."
"You don't expect anything, why should I?"
"Maybe you're more optimistic than I am."
"Don't bet on it."
Kitty's cool smile turned unexpectedly mischievous. He found himself grinning back, and resented the manipulation. "If you don't want anything," he suggested, "you might as well tell me where he's turned up."
"Oh, darlin'. I just said I didn't want a reward. I didn't say I didn't want anything."
She took a slow turn around the five exercise mats, a tour that would have honored sensitively placed sculptures in a Japanese garden.
The "oh, darlin' " had that sleazy saloon sound Matt would expect from a woman who worked at a casino, but her speaking voice implied a foreign tinge. Maybe something as incongruous as finishing school, maybe just the theater.
He realized late that her tour of the mats had become a turn around Matt, singular. He turned to confront her, meeting a gaze of such candid calculation that the sun-warmed afternoon blanched as if now aware it had come out without a coat in the dead of winter.
"I'm not an Iscariot," she said, her smile and eyes as chill as blue aquavit, that thin Nordic firewater so strong it's served in tiny narrow glasses like test tubes.
A Finnish-descent monsignor had held a New Year's gala: innocent rounds of northland hors d'oeuvres alternating with blue aftershave bursts of potent aquavit. Certainly helped the oily sardine sandwiches go down.
"Iscariot," he repeated. "An odd expression. Most people just call him Judas."
"I don't turn anybody--even a deluded old drunk--over to parties unknown until I'm satisfied as to why he's wanted."
"He isn't wanted, that's the irony. Only I want him, and I hate his guts."
Matt was beginning to find secular overstatement as effective as sudden anger on the exercise mats. It wasn't how he'd been taught to fight, but he'd never been taught to fight anyone but himself. He sensed that she required struggle, this furiously self-contained woman. She needed to regard him as a possible opponent for some reason, and he had to reassure her that he was up to her mettle, whatever that was.
She could be a professional seductress. The lurid thought almost made Matt flush, not a good thing in this game of hidden moves.
"What a great little hideaway." Now she was studying the apartment building as avidly as she had gauged him. "Nouveau Trendy."
"Electra, the lady you took for housekeeper, owns it, by the way."
"And the tacky wedding chapel out front?'"
"And the wedding chapel out front."
"Oh, come now. You're not going to defend pink and blue neon bows. Really."
"You have no idea what I'd defend. I'm standing on royal-blue oversize place mats."
"Yes. Dreadful color, for that material, at least. But I bet it keeps your feet warm."
He nodded, tempted to bring her back to the subject, but resisting it. Women liked to shop. To see everything, and test-drive most of it. She hadn't pinched the produce yet.
"If I'm going to turn a man over to you, I've got to know your . . . credentials. I can't have something . . . unjust on my conscience."
"I can understand that."
"Can you really?"
"You sound incredulous, but I do understand."
"Why are you looking for this Effinger man? You're not a policeman--"