The third was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 36
Madder Music and Stronger Wine
They left the funeral home with the addition of the guest book, thanks to another rescue mission by the assistant. The lined pages were empty except for the names of the pair of nuns and a couple of strangers.
"It looks like a wedding photo album," Matt observed, tucking the padded cover embossed with designs of doves, crosses and lilies under his arm.
Temple used both hands to carry the heavy cardboard box of offering envelopes, the ones stuffed with silver dollars that shifted with every motion, clinking dully through the muffling paper.
`Matt was glad that Temple usually let him drive the Storm. He needed to go through the motions right now; any motions. Driving back to the Circle Ritz, going to her place. It had been easier to see Cliff Effinger's bare body in the morgue than tricked out at a funeral visitation.
The mockery and mystery of the event had put him into the numb withdrawal the shell-shocked must feel after a long battle.
Matt also felt the underlying weight of death, and the death of his old life. So, he imagined, a long-term penitentiary inmate would feel to know the hated place had been razed at last: a numbing sense of triumph, freedom and resentment at this loss of an institutionalized object of fear and loathing. And, perhaps, the loss of a negative motivation toward seeking a better life.
"You're quiet," Temple commented in the car, the shimmying box of envelopes chiming on her knees like a tambourine.
Matt only nodded, lost in thoughts that shifted like a kaleidoscopic image.
He finally glanced at her. Not surprisingly, she wore the black cat necklace he had given her as a late Christmas present. For the perennially thoughtful, wearing someone's gift in their presence as a sign of appreciation is second nature. And the necklace, subdued enough to befit a visitation, complemented her long black-knit dress; also sober enough for funeral duty.
Temple seldom wore black, he realized. He had found himself watching her sober silhouette against the funeral parlor's determined pastel palette. The dress hung like a ballerina's costume in a fifties musical fantasy, graceful and girlish. The round neckline didn't crowd the throat, but circled two or three inches below, a perfect setting for the necklace.
The simple black dress reminded him of an old-time nun's habit. It reduced Temple's normally busy appearance to a James Whistler study in chalk-white, black and rusty red.
He wondered if the black dress, or unplumbed emotions in the face of Effinger's death, made her look so pale today. Who could blame her for rejoicing in the elimination of a tormenter? Yet Matt doubted that Effinger's attack on Temple had stirred any strong personal feelings against him. His blows had been a lightning bolt from a virtual stranger. To her, Effinger was first-cousin to a random mugger, a bad experience to be forgotten.
The silence between them was contented, rather than awkward. They knew where they were going, although not what they were going to say or do when they got there, but that didn't bother them by now.
Temple's rooms held a tranquilizing familiarity for Matt. He felt relief, even sanctuary, here when Temple admitted them.
She put the box on the coffee table. "Drink?"
"It's only--," wearing the watch his mother had given him made her a silent witness to Effinger's end, even if by proxy "-- one o'clock."
"Feels like five," Temple said, coming back. Two glasses of red wine shimmered against her servant-black bodice with its fussy row of tiny, shiny, round black buttons from collar bone to hemline.
She sat down and kicked off her black pumps.
Matt's tense muscles welcomed the wine, but he could have wished for a drink less reminiscent of his ceremonial priestly past than red wine. No funeral mass for Cliff Effinger. Not with Matt officiating. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes quite truly. The ashes in their tasteful receptacle suitable for any location would be mailed to him, he had been told, though the funeral home would have preferred to present them in person with appropriate ceremony. Matt thought not; mailing would do fine.
What the hell he would do with them was his business.
Temple shuffled through the odd collection of envelopes. "I suppose we should turn these over to Lieutenant Molina, along with the news of the expensive outpouring of hyacinth plants and the mystery woman who paid for the whole thing."
"I'll contact her." Matt's head lolled against the cushy sofa pillow while he stared at the snowy arched ceiling dappled with light like not-quite-still water.
He felt Temple settle into the adjoining cushions.
"Visitations are exhausting, even when hardly anybody comes," she said. "I haven't figured out yet what all this means. Hyacinths and silver dollars."
"Somebody's playing with us. Or Effinger."
"After he's dead? That's such a ... carnivorous thing to do. Like a cat with a mouse or a bird."
"Or a catnip toy," he reminded her. "Louie's not around?"
"He's in a wandering mode. In and out. I noticed the topping on the Free-to-be-Feline went down since we left."
"Why do you bother to set that stuff out for him? He'll never eat it."
"It's good for him, and maybe he accidentally gets some when he goes for the gold on top."
"I doubt it." Matt laughed softly. "You're such an optimist." He turned his head without lifting it; mental lassitude now made his entire body leaden.
Temple slouched on the sofa cushions too, her face only inches from his own, he realized with a shock. As if they sat with their backs to the same tree someplace peaceful, near a running brook.
The moment was a million miles away from everyday Las Vegas and the regular rituals of their relationship.
"I was wondering," Matt said, "at the visitation, if your face still hurt from Effinger's attack. If you still felt the aftereffects. If he went to his grave with someone, somewhere, still hurting from his violence."
She shrugged and smiled. "I'm almost as good as ever. Pain doesn't have a half-life unless it's chronic."
He sipped wine, feeling a floodgate of blood loosening in his shoulders and arms, tension dissipating through dilated vessels.
"It's over. Thank God it's over." He bestirred himself to set the glass on the table before he lethargically let it spill onto the paper-pale cushions.
Temple looked equally exhausted--white, black and red against the ivory cushions, her mouth glossed by a deep burgundy lipstick, a mere brush stroke on the white-linen canvas of her face. No bruises shadowed her features. Even her freckles seemed to have paled and winked out, like twilight stars. They dusted her cheeks and just-visible collarbones, but not one touched her bare neck.
"I'm sorry I ruined New Year's for you," he found himself blurting. "You did it all for me, and I was an ass about it."
"Women hiding hurts pushes your buttons. I should have known you can't protect anyone from the truth, least of all yourself."
"I was so ... up about everything that night, and it seems to have evaporated. Why? It's more than Effinger striking back. It's like something between us turned into smoke and blew away. You remember how high I was when I called you from Chicago a couple days after Christmas? It was like I'd solved the family mysteries. I'd confessed my nonpriestly state. I knew who the villains were and I could finally start forgiving them. I was ready to look into a new life, a new job, ready to--"
Temple was listening, as she always did, attentively, intelligently. Somehow that calm, accepting presence irritated him, frightened him.
"Temple. What happened?"
"You were on a holiday high," she suggested, "and then the post-holiday reality hit."
"No, it's more than that. It goes back farther than that. What happened? We were . . .
getting together, you were taking me through all the high-school hoops I missed. That . . .