A blunder. He felt he ought to blush, and not too long ago could have. But not anymore. Not over such a minor faux pas. He wasn't trying to impress Janice with anything about himself, only to give her all she needed to work with.
"Scarlett O'Hara," she suggested again.
He had seen endless clips of the film's various TV "events" through the years. He thought of Vivien Leigh's pretty, pointed, feral face, and nodded.
"Not a double of Leigh, of course. But very like Scarlett her-self."
"Someone who lost something once, long ago, and has never forgotten it."
"Exactly! And she's Irish. Or at least she gave an Irish name."
"Black Irish."
Janice's pencil fairly flew now, her face a mask of satisfied intensity.
When she turned the pad to face him, he was stunned. "That's it. That's her."
Janice shook her head. "No, not yet. Maybe close. But look again. Examine each feature.
Eyelashes. What were they like? Thick, black, mascara-coated? Insignificant? That space between the upper lip and the nose. So crucial to good likenesses. The 'blind spot,' I call it, because so few people observe it. Should it be wider? Narrower?
Under her relentless interrogation, Matt found himself nagged into refining the image until, the last time Janice turned it around for his approval, he had to repress a shudder.
Janice noticed. "What did she do to you?"
"I can't go into it."
"You know--," Janice rested an elbow on her bent knee, then braced her face on her hand.
"You pay your money and you get the best sketch I can do, but I'm really curious about what you need them for and why these people mean something to you."
"You're too good at what you do."
"Thanks. That's the first time I've been accused of being an artistic overachiever." She smiled until he caught the virus and smiled back.
"I really appreciate your art skills and interviewing technique. Gosh!" He took refuge in his watchface. "It's after eleven-thirty!"
"And you have to be going."
The wry assumption in her voice made him bristle. She was so good at summing up people; he resented being one of her easy reads.
"I was going to say, it's almost lunchtime. Could I treat you?" Then he realized he was in no position to offer anything. "But... my motorcycle is out of commission and I don't know any restaurants in this neighborhood--"
"How did you get here then?"
"Cab."
"Say no more. You buy lunch, I'll drive, and I'll drop you wherever you want to go. Fair enough?"
He nodded, pulling out his checkbook and wishing she took credit cards. His account was getting decidedly flat and would deflate a little bit more with lunch. Having a social life was expensive.
"Give me five minutes to freshen up," she said as she took the check. "Just look around. I'm an artist. Mi casa es su museo."
He was too strictly reared to wander her house at will, but he did some minor exploring.
More photos of two carefree-looking preteen kids, always a dangerous assumption with kids.
Conch shells and other seaside salvages that looked found, rather than bought. Everything bright and somehow California. He wondered suddenly if she would appreciate his Vladimir Kagan sofa . . .
"Ready." She'd switched to one of those long, pleated dark velvet skirts so popular nowadays, topped by a patchwork bomber jacket in brocade and velvet and denim. "We won't go any place too chi-chi. Good southwestern chow. If that's all right."
"Sounds wonderful. I haven't been in Las Vegas that long. I can always learn about a new restaurant."
The red Jeep Cherokee he remembered took them to a strip shopping center about a mile away and a small unpretentious place with lacquered tabletops and pottery napkin rings.
Water glasses came with lime slices, the lunch menu didn't offer an item above ten dollars, and the blackboard listed an awesome number of Mexican and foreign beers. The joint was jump-ing with a decibel-level so high that it gave you the false sense of a privacy bubble around your own table.
After they'd ordered tasty melanges of salsa, black beans and pico de gallo over the dish of their choice, Janice folded her arms on the tabletop and leaned closer to be heard.
"That woman I just sketched is a piece of work, in the worst sense. What does she have to do with you?"
"You know . . . Effinger was my stepfather."
"Was?"
"You're very quick." Matt sipped the Bohemian beer he had ordered. "I didn't want to tell you. He was found dead early Tuesday morning. The police are proceeding as if it was an unnatural death."
"You're saying he was murdered?" She whistled between her teeth when he nodded. "And the woman?"
"She's the one who told me where to find Effinger. Where to start seriously looking anyway."
"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 arou
nd 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.
So I baby-crawl my way up the mortar, and find my naked fangs can work out the cheesy aluminum vent that was installed up here a few years after the Flood. Then it is a dark, dusty crawl through a horizontal tunnel that abruptly turns vertical. Luckily, I am well padded and soon am butting one of those lightweight ceiling panels off its metal gridwork. I hop down atop a bookshelf and then down into the artistically cluttered interior of the bookstore.
Unfortunately, Ingram is part of the clutter.
"I hope you did not dislodge any spiders," is his greeting.
"Only a few snakes and lizards," I answer, just to watch his back twitch.
"I like to get a solid twelve hours shut-eye," he adds. "So tell me what you want now, and I will do my best to satisfy you and get back to my beauty sleep."
Twelve hours. What a nonlife!
"I need to know about anything called hyacinth."
"I did not know you were interested in horticulture, Louie. Are you perhaps developing some refined interests in view of your upcoming retirement years?"
"Gumshoes do not retire, especially for twelve hours at a stretch. No, I need this dope for a case I am working on."
Ingram shakes his head until his rabies tag chimes; then he leaps atop a desk, following it to another section of the store. I follow the leader, such as he is.
"Hyacinth is a flower, Louie, a lovely fragrant growth with massed blossoms of curling petals.
I always think of them as pale blue-purple, but they can be white or yellow as well. They are also of the interesting family of plants that develop from bulbs."
"They need light bulbs to bloom, like shrinking violets or something?"
"Your botanical knowledge is sadly primitive. No, they grow from bulbs, underground self-contained food-storage systems. Remarkable, really."
"What I am looking to find out about hyacinths is how they would figure in a murder."
"I cannot imagine that they would. A more delightful, benign flower cannot be found. But here is the plant section. Look for yourself."
I scan the shelves, seeing a lot of titles mentioning roses and violets. Only one title reads
"Bulbs," so I leap right for it and soon have it spread open on the floor.
First I run across a mug shot of the perp I am tracing: a closeup of a field of purple hyacinths on the loose in a garden. A handy rap sheet in the book's back lists the breed's salient characteristics: short (under one foot), partial to hanging out around gardens and rock gardens, sun worshipers, but can also be found in a potted state in ordinary homes. Blossoms from one-to-two inches, but some run over two inches, so these can be swell-headed types. Cocky, you might say. Known for a distinctive body odor.
By now I figure I would recognize one if I found it, but I am still in the dark.
"Other than a tendency to hang out in dark nightspots at certain times of the year, what would these bulb-type characters have to do with a murder? Are they toxic?"
"Not that I have heard, Louie. Your oleander is, of course, and all sorts of common yard and house plants. But I have never heard the hyacinth so described."
"Well, you got a poison how-to book in this place? I thought mystery readers went for that sort of thing."
"Mystery writers certainly do."
"So there are some local ones?"
"Some would-be local ones."
"
Hmm. Maybe I could find a partner to write my memoirs with.
My roomie would ordinarily be right for the job, but she is lavishing her talents in another direction at the moment."
Ingram is uninterested in my domestic wrinkles. I secretly suspect that he does not approve of me living with an unmarried woman. He leads me back to the mystery section, but to a series of shelves weighed down with nonfiction. I peruse such titles as Deadly Doses, Preferred Poisons, Planted Evidence, Murderous Mushrooms, and the elegantly titled Spiders and Spitting Toads and Snakes, Oh, My!
Although I knock off several of these venomous guides, and although I learn that many innocuous plants are thoroughly poisonous, the hyacinth is not among them, although the hydrangea and the heliotrope are. Close, but no cigarette.
When I express my frustration, Ingram sniffs before replying.
"You certainly are a bloodthirsty fellow, Louie. I am afraid that your line of work leads you to look for the worst in everything and everybody. I for one am glad that the fragrant hyacinth has been cleared of wrongdoing despite your best efforts."
This sanctimonious speech is highly irritating. I desperately peruse the shelves one more time until the initials "AMA" leap out at me. We will see what the croakers have to say about this in their guide to "injurious" plants.
I hit pay dirt in the index at the rear. Several citations for hyacinth all lead to a startling conclusion: the hyacinth is not only poisonous, but every cell of it is lethal, and this occurs in a species called "Hyacinth-of-Peru." (To confuse matters, it seems that hyacinth is also referred to as jacinth in some places.) My roomie would ordinarily be right for the job, but she is lavishing her talents in another direction at the moment."
Ingram is uninterested in my domestic wrinkles. I secretly suspect that he does not approve of me living with an unmarried woman. He leads me back to the mystery section, but to a series of shelves weighed down with nonfiction. I peruse such titles as Deadly Doses, Preferred Poisons, Planted Evidence, Murderous Mushrooms, and the elegantly titled Spiders and Spitting Toads and Snakes, Oh, My!
Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt Page 17