Temple babied the bottle of Courvoisier Kit handed down until her aunt jumped to the floor again.
"Damn!" Kit hopped from one stinging sole to the other. "I wish they wouldn't design kitchens for giants, or men. Yup. It was Rudy, all right."
Temple nodded, accepting the juice glass of brandy her aunt poured without comment. Kit was really shaken up if she was serving brandy in juice glasses.
"I think I recognized him too."
"You? How?"
"The eyes. Not that the corpse's had any expression, but they were the right color. He recognized me from your place the earlier night, and wanted to say hello, but didn't want to blow his act. That's why he seemed surprised to see me. Why should your niece be at the site of his next job? Wild coincidence, huh?"
"Happens all the time in New York City. You get this many millions of people together, and the coincidences will knock your socks off. It's uncanny. I noticed it when I first moved here. In fact, not noticing any coincidences is the exception to the rule."
They repaired to the living room, where Midnight Louie had beat them to the prow-facing leather couch. He was sprawled full-length, slantwise, so no human could sit comfortably on either side of him.
"Greedy guts," Temple said.
"Oh, but he's tired out. All those hard hours of work at the advertising agency, and then we drag him out to the seamier side of the city. Let him rest."
"Louie has dragged himself to the seamier side of the city many a time, believe me." Temple shook her head.
Before she could rearrange the big oaf, Kit had sat happily on the area rug and leaned her head against the couch seat.
"Let the big guy rest, Temple. I don't feel like sitting up straight right now anyway"
"I suppose sitting on the floor with a juice glass full of brandy reminds you of those wild parties you went to when you first came to New York."
Temple imitated her aunt in stretching out her legs and leaning against the couch seat. Between them, on the couch itself, Louie stirred. A big black tail slapped across Temple's face, then was still.
"There's somebody who's feeling no pain," Kit said.
Temple brushed his tail aside. Of course it didn't stay swept aside, but swung back to tickle her cheek.
"I don't know how cats can relax so completely," Temple said, moving away. "When it's people who could use a break. Especially after this afternoon."
"Indeed. Between visiting Rudy's flat and seeing Rudy himself flat at the medical examiner's, I feel like I've got apple jelly for joints."
"You do sound tired. It must be awful to see someone you knew pretty well laid out like that."
"That's the rub. I saw Rudy fairly often, but I didn't really know him well. None of us did. In fact, none of us knew him at all after he came back from Vietnam in . . . oh, must have been sixty-five."
"I wasn't even in preschool yet."
"Preschool! How baby boomer of you, Temple. We didn't have such decadences in my youth."
"Apparently you made up for it later."
Kit frowned. "What everybody remembers from my salad days is Hair, the musical, and hair, shoulder-length or more, on guys, and psychedelic Volkswagen vans. That's the funny, freaky stuff. The rest of it was pretty bad. Race riots and war protests. I guess we were a wild bunch because we really thought it was 'eat, drink and be hairy, for tomorrow we die.' "
"So how was Rudy different when he came back from Vietnam?"
"Addicted to everything in sight, for one thing. Cigarettes, booze, pot, whatever they were smoking or sniffing or injecting in Alice's Restaurant, or is it Alice's Wonderland magical-mushroom medicine cabinet?"
"But wasn't everybody into changing consciousness then?"
"No! I never used drugs. Didn't like what I saw it did to people. I had plenty of imagination on my own. All the Vietnam vets were pretty wasted. It made you feel guilty for not having been there, even if you were a girl and couldn't get drafted. So you provided a shoulder for some sad war stories. Most of the vets stabilized and disappeared into real life, but Rudy never made the transition."
"So he leaned on you and your friends for thirty years?"
Kit nodded. "You had to have been there. We were all in the sixties together, no matter what role we played. They were violent, unsettling times that turned our values upside down. There hasn't been a watershed generation like ours since the Depression. We're all vets, in a way."
"But . . . here you are, perched in your cozy condominium, and there was Rudy, down in that rat hole."
"I didn't know. We knew he had a 'place,' and that's comfort enough in New York City. So the guys bailed him out when he got picked up for drinking and I found him jobs. He didn't strike you as an unhappy man, did he?"
"No. Quite the contrary. When I ran into him in the conference room, he seemed quite cheerful, like it was our little secret. Of course, to him the secret was bigger than finding Santa in the wings before his 'surprise' appearance. He knew who I was, and that made it even funnier."
"Rudy was great at getting into character, as long as he didn't have to keep it up too long. And he was so good with kids."
"I saw that."
"Maybe that's not such a bad way to die, playing Santa Claus."
"I've seen worse. A lot worse."
For a moment Temple saw Darren Cooke, a gun poised at his temple, and a forefinger laid over his on the trigger.
Louie lashed out with his tail, striking her face again, and she jumped as if shot.
This was it. No more messing with murder. It was invariably messier than it looked.
Chapter 28
Mother and Child Reunion
Strings of exterior Christmas bulbs outlined the eaves and many doors and windows on the street in southeast Chicago where Matt had lived as a boy.
The thousand points of lights emphasized the gridwork sameness of these nineteen-twenties remnants, four-square two- and three story flats with basements, the upper stories for rental residents. The interiors would offer cramped bedrooms with odd angles, inconvenient doors and windows that broke up any wail space that had a prayer of hosting a couch or a bed, furniture jammed against long ranks of radiators painted in an attempt to disguise their homeliness. Dry heat would bake nosebleeds, split ends, static hair and cracked fingernails into your very DNA.
And outside during the winter, wet cold creeping up your sleeves and down your jacket neck.
Matt sat in the idling truck, reluctant to leave Bo's rough warmth. His kids were lucky.
"Thanks for the ride," Matt said.
"See you at my house Christmas Eve." Bo ripped off a glove in the
now-heated interior, seized Matt's hand in his hot pink fingers, shook it. "Nice seeing you again. Shoulda been sooner. Can't wait for you to see those little hellions of mine. You're looking to be the only priest in this and the next generation of the family."
Bo's last words helped spur Matt to depress the door latch and tumble into the subzero chill. Wind whipped a few flakes of snow into a pseudostorm around him.
"Thanks," he muttered into the frigid north wind, feeling his nostrils pinch shut on every icy inhalation. He slammed the door quickly to preserve the truck's hard-won interior heat.
"Say hi to Aunt Mira--!" Bo shouted in farewell.
The closing door cut off her name. Matt stuffed his right hand back into its inadequate glove. Acrylic-lined leather didn't cut it in this climate.
He stared at the two-story house, dark among its brighter brethren, lightless, only a faintly perceived glow warming the first-floor windows behind the drawn curtains. Still shuttered, still secret in a hushed, unspoken way.