"Wow." Janice sat back, away from him, unaware of her withdrawal. "I've sketched the faces of a serial killer or two. But this is the first time that someone has died after I've drawn him.
Usually my portrait subjects get put away for crimes against other persons."
"Effinger was guilty of that, believe it."
"But you're not a cop, you're not a private detective, right? So why are you hanging out with these unusual suspects? I can't place you. My work has brought me into contact with lots of people in police work and associated professionals. You just don't track. You could be a social worker, or a shrink, or maybe a bounty hunter. I don't know. I'm at a loss, I admit it. If I sketched you again today, you'd be a different man, and that was just--what?--a month or so ago?"
Their food arrived, but Matt didn't feel like eating. He was remembering the awkwardness of their first meeting and last parting, at the door to her bedroom, when he'd sensed he'd be welcome there and had found himself hesitating on the brink of a very fine moral line for the first time in his life.
He'd always owed her an explanation for bolting like that.
"Sure, I strike you as a mystery," he said. "How many ex-priests do you know?"
That floored her. Her plate was going to go home in a Styro-foam box, too. The kids would love it.
"I'm Episcopal," she answered. "Closest thing to Catholic around. But our priests marry and have a families, so there aren't too many exes. You're . . . you were the other kind, right?"
"Right. Roman Catholic."
"How long? Or, I should say, how long have you been out?"
"Lord, it must be . . . ten months."
"So a month ago, you were just coming full term, as it were, newborn at nine months."
Matt looked down at his utterly unappetizing plate, through no fault of its own. "Yeah.
Pretty raw."
She nodded, getting the message. "Thanks. You didn't have to tell me. But I... need to understand. I must have scared the hell out of you. Oops."
"Hey, priests talk too. Yeah. You did."
"But you came back."
"I needed to."
"I've been good this time, haven't I?"
"Like gold."
"So, do you date?"
"Well, I took my neighbor out for New Year's Eve."
"An eligible young lady, I take it."
"Oh, yeah. I'm beginning to think: aren't they all?"
"Umhmm, I bet you're a real drawing card. Women must be real torn between not knowing whether to mother you or seduce you. Well, if you ever want some company without the pressure--"
"I could do with less pressure."
"Me too."
Suddenly, his hand was pushing the fork around his plate again. "Not too many people know about me. It's not the kind of thing you lay on new acquaintances. Nobody talks about religion much, except born-again Christians, so you don't know who will know what, or even care."
Janice was nibbling at her corn-and-pimiento side dish again. She paused to lean her face into her palm.
"Now I know why I liked you so much. Just think of it! You've never taken out an awkward girl and denied it all around school the next day. You never slept with a woman on the first date and then told everybody what a slut she was. You never had sex with-out a condom."
He was seriously in danger of blushing again, just when he thought he was permanently cured.
"I've never had a chance to commit any of those social sins," he reminded her. "But I've committed others. And I'm so anxious not to make a mistake in the ... area you mention, that I'm practically paralyzed. Inaction is not a virtue. You can't resist temptation if you don't expose yourself to it."
"Well," she said, suddenly ploughing into her entree like a lumberjack, "you're just going to have to put yourself in harm's way to find out if you're as good as you look, aren't you, Matt?"
She winked at him over her frosted beer mug.
Chapter 28
A Forced Bulb
A lone security forty-watt lightbulb beams inside the Thrill 'n' Quill, Las Vegas' only bookshop devoted to the mystery and thriller novel, which also has an extensive section of used books on a variety of subjects.
Despite the tepid illumination, I can still spot the familiar but contemptible forms of the stuffed versions of Baker and Taylor, the eponymouse Scottish fold cats who represent a major book distributor also known as B & T. There is little Scottish about these so-called cats, though their tightly folded and crimped ears show a certain characteristic stinginess, like that of a pursed-mouth purse.
I am looking for another and more animated stuffed shirt, this one reputedly among the living: Ingram, the bookstore cat. This dude is one of my regular sources, to both of our regrets.
But the Danger Game makes for strange bedfellows. Ingram is of the domestic feline stripe, and far too domestic for my taste. He would not touch a tootsie to the mean streets to save Bastet herself from a mugging. Yet I must that admit that Ingram's bookish habits (he sleeps on them incessantly) come in handy at times, for he has absorbed much arcane knowledge.
I have never tried to roust him after hours, however, and am not sure he has the basic street smarts to open a locked door or to find another means of communication with a visiting client.
I scratch the display window glass, my sharp nails making the high-pitched screeching sound that humans associate with blackboards rubbed the wrong way. There is no way of rousing Miss Maeveleen Pearl, owner of the Thrill 'n' Quill. Unlike her official layabout Ingram, she never sleeps on the premises.
Pretty soon Ingram's tweedy little form is tiptoeing through the tomes. I study some of the mystery titles through which he must thread his circuitous way. One grouping requires mirror shades to take in: it is a neon-covered oasis of books in the new Florida noir genre, each cover boasting various shades of hot pink, slime green and Caribbean turquoise. Then there are the usual darkly dingy covers whose titles begin with "Death in" and "Murder at." And there is, I am happy to note, an attractive assemblage of four-footed sleuths: a rapidly spawning pile of books featuring furry friends from armadillo to zebra, no doubt, although I approve the predominance of my own species among them. Someday I will have to write a book, like Miss Kit and Mr. Max and Miss Temple.
Once he has navigated the window display's bookish obstacle course--and Ingram does not disturb a whisker or dislodge a book during his prissy pussyfooting approach--he sits opposite me and makes with the silent meow. The effect is like watching pheasant under glass yammer at you before you eat it.
So I go into my charade routine: walking to the front door, stalking back; leaping up at the door's glass inset; even disappearing around the corner as if visiting the back of the building.
Have you ever noticed that the most overeducated individuals are often the slowest on the uptake when it comes to deciphering real life? Ingram is one of these fogbound fellows, so wrapped up in his good opinion of himself that he would not wake up and smell the espresso if the entire supply of beans in Columbia erupted like a volcano right on top of the Thrill 'n' Quill.
But finally he manages, with an extremely complicated crick of his neck, to indicate that I might do well to go back and see about scaling the building's north face.
When I get back there, I am not enamored of his suggested entry route. I will have to go straight up a brick wall to get to a ventilation grille, which I will have to work off while clinging to the aforesaid sheer brick.
Well, what the hell. I have not had a good hangnail in weeks.
One would think that Ingram, being the visitee, could at least manage to kick the door open for the visitor, but I do not have much faith in Ingram's ingenuity quotient. That is what you get for being confined to quarters most of your natural life: stunted imagination.