Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

His troubled expression was a barrier, putting him beyond her reach. Temple began to panic like a swimmer suddenly out of her depth. Maybe she should call his hotline compadres; maybe he needed some emergency counseling.

She sighed, not knowing what to say for once. Then she bent to gather the splayed books, shutting splintered spines, smoothing crumpled pages. Unfamiliar names and titles slid under her fingertips. C.S. Lewis. G.K. Chesterton . The Seven Story Mountain , Ah. The Little Prince in the original French. Some philosophy books by a man named Rollo May. Novels by Romaine Roland, Iris Murdoch and Susan Howatch.

Matt sat on his pie-wacky sofa and stared at the floor, at her-moving among the ruins of the room.

Temple stacked some books knee-high. Without anywhere to put them, it seemed pointless.

''You have so little, why would anyone--? Unless. ..." Matt was barely watching her. She turned to him suddenly, as they say in the old plays, galvanized.

''Unless . . . Matt! My apartment is just below this one."

He looked up with lusterless brown eyes.

"Don't you see? This could have been a mistake. Someone might have been looking for my place. For me . Maybe those men who assaulted me are back. Of course. That makes sense. No one's been after you, no one would be. It's me. They're still looking for Max. Maybe they got mad when they thought I wasn't home. Maybe they just wanted to warn me. Oh, God, I was sitting downstairs with Louie, just watching 'Mystery'--!"

She cupped a hand over her mouth to stop it from saying any more scary things.

Matt straightened, responding to something she had said for the first time. He shook his head yet again. "No."

His voice was hoarse, as if someone had tried to strangle him. For a wild moment, she wondered if he had interrupted the intruders, and had been hurt.

She watched him intently, alarmed. "Matt. Are you all right?"

''No." His voice was stronger now, and even hoarser.

Temple blinked.'' 'No,' that whoever broke in was after me, or 'No,' you're not all right?"

He stood. "No, nobody was trying to get to you. Temple. I can't let you think that. No, it isn't you at all." His hands spread to encompass the mess. "It's me. Only me. Just me. Me. Me, me, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

She swallowed at the sudden violence of this confession, feeling dazed and half frozen herself. What had she said wrong?

Matt's hands spread wider. She noticed then that the knuckles were scraped raw, as if he'd been knock, knock, knocking at Heaven's door, and it was a lot harder mahogany than the Circle Ritz's. "You don't have to look high and low for the culprit. He's here. I did it."

'*You?" She gawked again at the destruction. "What happened?"

He stared at her face, her incomprehension, maybe her disappointment. Then he sat again, his fingers intertwined between his knees, his eyes on the book-strewn floor.

"Somebody died today," he said.

Oh. Death wasn't always a puzzle that happened to someone distant. Temple thought, like an unknown murder victim. Sometimes death singled out someone so close that it seared the lives around that person like heat lightning. His mother? But why such rage?

"I'm sorry. Matt."

"Don't be. It wasn't anyone . . . close."

"But..."

He glanced up and laughed. "You look like a little fox terrier I had for a while when I was a kid. Itchy. When that dog wasn't scratching, he was tilting his head and looking so puzzled. God knows he had a lot of reason."

"I'm trying to understand."

"It isn't anything you can understand. I don't." Matt gazed up at the ceiling light fixture as if trying to stare into the sun. "Irony isn't the kind of accident that offers easy answers."

"Can you tell me who died?"

He still stared at the shallow white frosted glass fixture as if examining a UFO glued to the ceiling. ''A man. My stepfather."

Oh. ''So you did find him, in a way."

''But not alive. He had just died, Temple. Now. Today. Just as I was about to find him."

Matt's right hand made a fist and kept it.

"So you'll never be able to confront him."

"I did once, long ago."

"And--"

"He left, and I stayed."

"So you won."

He shook his head. "He won. He always won by being what he was, and now he's won again.

He's escaped."

"Escaped what?"

"Me," Matt said again.

Me, me, me echoed in Temple's mind. "You know now why you wanted to, needed to, find him?"

He nodded. "Now that it's too late."

"And why did you?"

Matt eyed the leveled living room. "To beat the hell out of him. If I could, I'd pull him out of his coffin and beat the hell out of him as soon as he's buried."

Such violence from easy-going Matt Devine was as shocking as a fist in the stomach, and Temple had recent reason to know what that felt like.

"Why?" she whispered, feeling dumb as a dog, after all. Feeling mute and stupid and blind as a bat on top of everything. "Why are you so angry?"

"I didn't know I was. I hid under a bushel, under the sanctimonious secrecy of endless confessions and penances, even under the pious platitudes of psychotherapy. I had reached such a rational plateau that I couldn't see the mountain of buried rage crumbling under my feet.

Until he was dead."

"Why? Why any of it, all of it?"

Matt licked his lips, rubbed his nose, like a punch-drunk fighter getting up to take more. "He hit us, when we couldn't fight back. I thought I wanted to understand why, to hear his story, but I really just wanted to the write the end of my own. I wanted to beat the hell out of him, and he escaped. He cheated. He ran to death first."

Temple sat on the floor like a kid at a particularly grim story time. All she could do was ask her simplistic questions, and hope that his answers might answer something lost within himself.

How did you understand another person? You listened and you tried not to judge. Temple suspected that Matt's stepfather was not capable of understanding anybody else, and therefore would never be understood. But now Matt had lost even the chance to fail.

"Us?" she asked quietly.

"My mother, myself. It was the liquor, she said, but it was more. It was meanness, it was raw inarticulate envy. It was a lot of ugly, unnamed things. I knocked him down finally, one day. And he left. If he couldn't beat on us, he had to find someone he could. Once was not enough. I thought it was, I talked myself into thinking it was. I told myself that I wanted to know the past, not tear it into little tiny pieces. But then he played his last, mean trick on me. He died, and showed me just how shallow my motives were. I wanted to find him and kill him, Temple.

Somebody else got there first."

"He was . . . killed? Today?"

He nodded. "Yeah. I didn't find him dead, but the day after I learned where he was, he was dead. Just killed. I never even had a chance to be noble and not kill him, so he's won again--

forever."

"Matt." Temple felt an awful sense of foreboding leavened by poetic justice of a particularly ironic sort. "What was your stepfather's name?"

"I hate even saying it. At least I'll see it inscribed on a marker soon. Effinger. Cliff Effinger."

Chapter 17

The Fall Girl

"What are you doing here?"

Only someone with a stopwatch could have determined who had spoken these exact same words first: Temple or Lieutenant Molina.

It was no contest who was going to answer first. Molina stood like a cigar-store Indian, intimidatingly mum until she got her response.

Around them people streamed into the cool, elegantly lit lobby of the Crystal Phoenix, parting only to flow past the magnificent Lalique glass sculpture of a phoenix rising with frosted wings spread.