Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"We first saw him as a boy, maybe six years old. Then he popped up in different windows, which were actually glass walls with wall-paper patterns etched into them, but he was older each time. Bigger. Way bigger. At the end, he was this sad, massive old man with a raging face, but we couldn't hear any of the words. Kind of reminded me of a pantomime King Lear, actually."

"The play?"

"No, the part. This guy would have been a natural, in his last incarnation, that is. Seeing him made me feel so ... sorry. That was the only spooky part of the seance, these visions of this sad man from virtually boyhood to old-coothood. He wanted to communicate so much, but something was holding him back."

"What about Houdini?"

"Gross! Grotesque. The others say the image duplicated a photograph of him nearly naked and chained into a crouch. It gave me the creeps!"

"Better drink some hot coffee; your arms are growing a record batch of goosebumps."

She shot him a glance that was both flustered and flattered before he realized that he had been observing her too closely again, like a detective. Or like a jealous lover.

He finished the coffee and set it down. Temple nervously noticed his action, rubbing her chilled forearms, then glanced behind him. To her bedroom. She looked nervous.

In the silence, the uncertainty was catching. He became acutely aware of the bedroom. He'd been in it briefly once, to help her put on some pierced earrings before the Gridiron show. Now it loomed at the back of her mind for some reason, which he could either interpret as embarrassing or flattering.

Would-be detective or would-be lover, which part was he playing today? No matter, he was what Temple would call a "bloody amateur" in both roles. Matt stood.

I'd better go."

She didn't argue. She didn't rush him, but she stood also. "Thanks for stopping by. When I find out more, I'll let you know."

"Not 'if?"

"Nooo ... I'll be stuck reading or listening to the news like everybody else. No dropped clues from Molina this time. She's not on the case."

Matt felt surprise. He'd come to think of Lieutenant Molina as the conduit through which all matters of murder in Las Vegas flowed. For some reason, he felt disappointment.

"I did have an 'in' with her," Temple went on, "by virtue of her suspicion of me, if nothing else. Watts and Sacker are perfectly professional, and they don't suspect me of being anything more than an innocent bystander, but that means they're not intrigued enough to spend time chitchatting with me."

"Poor Temple, on the outside looking in, like the spectral fat man."

They were at the door now, and she was opening it to show him out.

"That's just it, Matt." Her voice grew low, confessional-confidential. "He looked so solid for a ghost. Nobody would fake something like that so straightforwardly. That's the only thing in the evening that truly gives me the chills. I think he was-- Oh, Lord, I sound like Tommy Rettig on old Lassie reruns--'trying to tell us something,"

Matt recognized a troubled mind when he heard it. Impulsively, he put a hand on her icy forearm, reassured her.

"Don't blame yourself, Temple. You do, you know. You assume that if you had known that the person next to you was who he really was, you might have been able to prevent whatever happened. I haven't seen anything on the TV news or in the paper that the police are calling it murder. Why are you so sure that it was?"

Her gray-blue eyes softened with unspoken appeal. "I--I can't tell you why, Matt. I just suspect that it was on the usual groundless instincts. Thanks for listening."

She went on her toes to kiss his cheek. He caught her other arm before her stretch reversed itself and kissed her mouth, tasting strong coffee, surprise, response and reservation.

"Don't worry, Temple," he told her, not knowing why. He managed to retreat without trying to gauge her reaction.

In the hall, he felt a wave of self-disgust. He didn't need anything else to obsess about, but he was tired of her always making the first moves.

Maybe he also had a nagging feeling that he ought to stake his claim.

He went down the stairs to the rhythm of his footsteps, and headed for the shed to confront his trusty steed.

The Hesketh Vampire gave him the willies, kind of like Stephen King's murderous vintage car, Christine.

Only the fact that Electra rode it had lured him into practice sessions and ultimately a license. Only that, and the bottom line that he needed transportation and couldn't afford it.

While he might lecture Temple during martial-arts sessions that tackling new skills is vital, when it came to himself he had discovered that Matt Devine was remarkably conservative.

He unlocked the padlock shed door and stared at the Vampire, standing sleek-flanked and shining in the bar of daylight he had ad-mitted.

He hoped it wasn't the fact that the motorcycle had been Max Kinsella's toy, his pride and joy, that bothered him, although living up to his imagined persona of Max Kinsella did.

Matt walked around the massive machine, now so startlingly passive.

His entire religious life as a priest had been disciplined and dedicated to withdrawing from the material, to not needing what most other people require as a right: good salaries, good clothes, a nice place to live, money for luxuries, for status merchandise, for marriage, kids, mortgages, speed in the sense of velocity, sex in the sense of appetite.

So, though he tried to regard the Vampire as merely the best and the cheapest available, practical transportation, considering his situation, he couldn't fool himself.

all that power unnerved him. The machine's great worth as a classic 'cycle (hey, he had used the right, hip term almost naturally) made him edgy. Its implied silver sexiness made him feel like an imposter.

It was such... flagrantly conspicuous consumption. It was so... inescapably macho. And just in running operation terms, it was so much machine that Matt sometimes thought it would fly.

And it was menacing, he knew, when he rode it wearing the anonymous, shaded-visor helmet the law required.

People on the street expected something of the man who rode such a machine, and it wasn't him.

Matt opened the shed's double wooden doors that opened on the back of the Circle Ritz's parking lot. All that late-day light made the 'cycle shine like a nova star. The Vampire screamed its presence just by sitting still, its powerful engine not making a single, pulsing, impatient vroom-vroom.

He mounted it, turned the key, eased it as slowly as it would go out the doors, turned it to idle, pushed the kickstand down, the one he never trusted to hold up half a ton of steel and chrome.

After he shut the shed tight and locked it, he came around to the waiting Vampire.

He rode it competently, he knew, but not with ease or style. Sometimes, when in traffic, he appreciated the machine's liquid slipping past stalled cars, in and around obstacles. Sometimes he almost felt the slipstream smoothness of it, the tilt of his weight as it wove this way or that, so they were one, footloose entity.

Those moments were rare. Mostly he was worried sick about it. Worried that someone would steal it from outside ConTact despite the lock. Worried that the throttle on the handle would take on a will and life of its own and run away with him. Worried that someone might think he thought he was somebody for having such a monster. Worried. Worried. Worried.

That's what he had studied to do for all his life: worry about right and wrong, all his actions and pretensions, other people's good regard, his grades, his state of grace, the afterlife, today's small sins.

Matt detached the helmet from the rear. Electra's "Speed Queen" helmet hung on a hook inside the shed. Matt's helmet was his only investment in his motorcycle-riding career, and he didn't want anything written on it.