Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

"I thought. . . cerebral."

Janice shrugged, her sketching hand never still.

What could she be sketching already, Matt wondered. Her eyes darted up, to him, for only a moment, as swift as the fan of butterfly wings. Her eyes were hard and concentrated, and her smile looked fixed. Still, her face was a pleasant mask that he couldn't read, as if a god had inhabited her.

"Sixty-three. And still vigorous."

"I suppose. He was walking fast. The Strip is wide but he kept up with--was ahead of--the crowd. And he wore a hat."

"Hat. Hard hat? Baseball cap?"

"Western hat."

"Stetson?"

"I don't know. Uh, pale, but dirty pale. Dented crown."

"And the brim?"

"A hat brim. Average. For a cowboy hat, I guess." Matt felt as if he were failing elementary spelling.

Janice smiled and tilted her sketchpad toward him. He could see the apt, rough lines of a Western hat above an empty oval of face. "That it?"

"No. The crown was lower. There were some . . . gewgaws on a hatband."

She tilted the pad back to her, left hand working rhythmically. Left-handed women were rare, especially left-handed women artists, he would bet.

He became aware of a click-click- click noise somewhere in the house, and lifted up his head to hear better. She didn't look up.

"Nothing to worry about, Matt. The kids are off at computer camp for two weeks."

"I hear ... clicking."

"Or ticking?" She smiled, still not looking up. Her earrings trembled with the slashing movements of her cocked left arm.

"A clock?"

"I collect old clocks. I like that sound of time tsking away."

"I didn't hear it before."

"Time's like that. Sneaks up on you. Like this Cliff Efftnger. What kind of nose?"

Nose. How often do you study another person's nose? Maybe once, after you've punched him in the face and he's lying on the floor, groggy, not quite focusing on you ...

"Ah, average nose. A little crooked in the middle."

"Fighter?"

"Loser," Matt said before he could stop himself. Calling what Cliff Effinger did with his fists

"fighting" was like saying a rooster sang Mozart opera.

Janice nodded. "Face showed it?"

"Yeah. It had . . . battered edges, some partly age and drink, some . . . abuse. Maybe self-abuse, maybe not."

"Drunks fall on their faces a lot. They get a certain look. Kinda ... smashed." She grinned at her double entendre.

"How do you know these things?"

Level, sharp eyes looked up. "I watch. That's my job. I like sketching criminals. Their faces are living rap sheets. They are types, you know. How you live shows in your face. Not everyone can see it. That's why I'm asked to do criminal reconstruction sketches."

"Does it bother you ever? Seeing so much in faces."

Janice seamed her lips shut as she shook her head, making the bead-snakes in her ears shimmy. "I rarely have to confront the faces I draw from descriptions. I only see their damage in the people I interview."

He nodded. He had dealt with the aftermath of other people's acts too. Always the real perpetrators were faint and far away, lurking somewhere beyond the victim's taut vocal chords and shuddering breaths and shrouded eyes. You weren't supposed to call them v ictims, but

"survivors." Yet they were both, and always would be, just as he was.

Matt hadn't realized he had sighed until he heard it between the ticks of the hidden clock.

"Eyes," she said, demanding each fragment of face in piecemeal order.

Eyes. Color? Like roiled water, maybe, half mud, half some viscous venom. "Hazel," he suggested, trying to remember if Molina had ever mentioned Effinger's rap-sheet statistics. He thought not. "I should have asked the lieutenant for those details."

"Doesn't matter." Janice kept her expression pleasant, peaceful. "I don't sketch in color. I meant their shape, size, expression."

"Small eyes. Lost in himself. Squinting all the time, angling, maneuvering, sizing up the situation."

"Shifty? Like in the old detective stories."

"Yeah, shifty. You coming up with a cartoon?"

"Not quite." She hummed as she sketched. "Any identifying marks?"

"Nothing, unless you'd consider sideburns that."

"Sideburns? Shades of Elvis. Did he wear sunglasses, by the way?"

"Yeah. I forgot that. Aviator-style, like a million other guys in Las Vegas."

"Maybe three million," she suggested gently. "I'll do a small inset with the sunglasses on."

"Thanks. Guess he only wears them outside. He was duded up in Western; that's how I saw him."

"A new look for him?"

"Very." But then Matt's memory had fixed this man in the amber flypaper of the past.

Janice turned the pad toward him again. The oval was no longer blank. Matt was ambushed by a resemblance he recognized. "That's amazing."

"Not done yet. What needs changing?"

He studied it hopelessly. That there was even a ghost of a resemblance to Cliff Effinger struck him as a miracle. That it could be better struck him as impossible. How could he remember details of a face that had aged sixteen years since he'd last seen it up close and personal?

"Teeth," he remembered suddenly. "A gold one at the left upper rear. And his lips disappeared when he smiled."

"Bet he didn't smile often."

"You'd win. But the upper lip was longer, or the space between the nose and the upper lip, kinda horsey. And his chin wasn't that strong. It sloped down into his neck."

"Ah, Mr. Sweeney's really coming along now. Get those nightingales into their cages."

She flashed him a smile as warm as the iced tea had become in its glass. Melted ice had thinned the drink to the washed-out color of river-water.

She finally turned the sketchpad toward him again. She had taken each feature and seamed it sixty-three years' worth. Finally they came together. An old man now, Matt thought with some wonder, some resentment at the unswerving tick of time. He's an old man now. He shut his eyes to picture the body in the morgue viewing chamber. Right age, right build, vaguely right face. But this ... Matt blinked at the pad, then took it as she relinquished custody. This was a nightmare come to two-dimensional life. If his mother saw it--

"Great," he said, meaning it. "I can't believe you did this so quickly."

The clock promptly bonged the quarter hour. She glanced at the turquoise-and-coral-banded watch on her right wrist. "Quickly? You've been here just under two hours."

"Really? It seemed like minutes." Then he stopped, because her smile had softened and become . . . what? Conspiratorial? Knowing? What had he said? What had he said wrong?

"Time flies when I'm sketching," she said. "It's my form of therapy." She flipped the top sheet over Cliff Effinger, wiping away his sneering (how did she know that?), seamed face with the previous page, with .. . Matt's own likeness.

"When . . . how did you do that?"

"To warm up when we were first talking." She tilted her head to study her work, his face.

"Usually good-looking people are a bore to draw. Everything is surface, and the kind of charm that goes with good looks freezes into a kind of mask early on."

"It doesn't look like me," Matt said, almost to himself, then caught the implication. "I mean, it does, but I don't see myself that way."

"Good. I feel most successful when my subjects see themselves in a different way. You can have this one too."

"I'll pay extra," he began, plumbing the windbreaker pockets trying to remember where he'd put the checkbook.

Her be-ringed right hand waved away his offer. "I only take money for sketching the absent on these assignments. Come on, I promised to show you my paintings."

He reluctantly left the studio to follow her, left behind the naked sketchpad with its incriminating likenesses, of Cliff Effinger, of himself.