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"Cliff Effinger? Have you decided what to do about sighting him, or his double?"

  "That's not what I want to talk about, and no, I haven't decided what to do. What I want to talk about tonight is a man I've never met."

  "What a relief! No stress, no problems, no hidden agendas, right? Strangers are such a comfort."

  "Keep me laughing, Temple, and I just might spit out what I want to say." Matt heard his voice lower as he hunched over his glass mug of beer, closer to Temple. "He's a . . . client. Of ConTact. I may be violating a confidence to discuss him with someone else, but his problem is a world away from any I've dealt with, even before ConTact, in the church. He's become like a patient, a parishioner, a regular. Yesterday I learned he even calls me from out of town. I'm not supposed to be someone's private shrink."

  Temple nodded soberly. "I can see the reason for that, but I'm surprised. Hotline counselors actually get repeat calls from the same people? I always figured a person called a hotline when they were drunk or drugged out or thinking about suicide. That doesn't seem the sort of thing that calls for repeat contact."

  "A lot of people work their way up to doing something about critical problems. They try out their resolve on us, the strangers at the other end of the line, before they confront people they know. And some callers are chronic reformers, always talking about it, never doing it. Ill people use other people, and they'll use a hotline counselor as fast as they will a friend. As a counselor, I have to avoid being finessed into becoming an enabler. That's what's botheri ng me. I think this guy is feeding me the same manipulative line he reels out to everyone in his life: he needs help, he wants to change, only I can reach him."

  "Professional crybaby, huh?"

  Temple leaned away from the tabletop as Guido or Vito or Tony returned to push a mounded platter of hot food in front of each in turn, ladies first.

  "He's a mystery." Matt ignored a pile of barbecued ribs as high as a small gopher mound. "A man with such a strong ego is usually impervious to self-inflicted wounds, but this one seems to wallow in his inner unworthiness, all the while perpetuating the behavior that makes him betray others, and himself."

  "Wow. Even on my darkest, three-chocolate-sundae blue Mondays I have never, ever

  'wallowed in my unworthiness.' You have to think a lot of yourself to have the chutzpah to feel that guilty."

  "Exactly true, though rather circuitously put. He has a monumental ego. I confess I'm not used to dealing with that sort of person."

  "No." Temple smiled gently as she dissected broiled baby quail. "So," she suggested in Brooklynese. "Maybe youse want a crack P.I. to give you the dope on this anonymous caller, all from long distance, sorta like Mycroft Holmes or Nero Wolfe."

  "Like Temple Barr would do fine."

  "Hmm. What sort of clues have you picked up so far?"

  "For one thing, he is Somebody."

  "Isn't everybody?"

  "Not the way this guy sees it. He seems to think I'd know his name. Little does he realize how out of it I am."

  "And he's called you long-distance?"

  "He must be some sort of... entertainer. He says he's on the road a lot."

  "So was Willie Loman, or so is any traveling salesman today, for that matter. You could be talking to an Astro Toilet Company sales rep with delusions of grandeur. Do you think he gambles?"

  "Maybe. He doesn't mention it as one of his vices."

  "Then if he isn't a celebrity who comes to Vegas to gamble, he's a celebrity who comes to Vegas to perform."

  "Or golf."

  "Does golf seem to be one of his vices?"

  "No. He seems to favor night games."

  "Oho. So that's a problem? Celebrities are surrounded by groupies. One who doesn't succumb is the exception."

  "This guy is exceptional, and exceptionally sexually active, to hear him tell it."

  "Not smart in this day and age of AIDS."

  "He claims it's an addiction."

  "And you don't believe in sexual addiction?"

  "Oh, I know it's a way certain people have of dealing with past problems, like overeating. But I'm not sure that I believe anything this guy tells me. I think he's been lying to people around him so often, he now has to go farther afield to be believed."

  "So he's addicted to lying?"

  "Possibly. But not in a pathological way."

  "Just a garden-variety liar."

  "That's it! He's so casual about what he does, and about telling me. He's a garden-variety womanizer, adulterer, deceiver."

  "He's married?"

  "Recently. For the first time. Apparently he 'escaped' matrimony for years while being the playboy of the Western world, to hear him tell it. Now he can't stop playing around."

  "So he calls you. Makes sense. You work at night. He would ordinarily play around at night.

  While he's talking to you, he's not out playing around. Seems like he's found a likely solution."

  "But I'm not supposed to spend all my time distracting a habitual fornicator."

  "Fornicator! Ever wonder why there are so many long words to describe simple hanky-panky?"

  "It's hard for me to empathize with his kind of problem."

  "I bet!"

  "Yet, in some crazy way, he seems to depend on me, like he knows I'm a kind of opposite to him."

  "Maybe you aren't." Temple was looking particularly analytical as she stared over the tiny pile of bones on her plate at someplace above Matt's head.

  He almost wanted to turn and crane his neck to see if something hadn't appeared there on the dark wood, another womanizer like Elvis, maybe, or maybe St. Maria Goretti, the martyred patron saint of chastity, as all saints of chastity seemed to have been. Or maybe a halo. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on Temple's.

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  Her glance came back to his, a challenge. "I mean, here we have two men, anonymously connected by a phone line, who have led lives in the extreme --at opposite ends of the spectrum--but both at extremes nevertheless. You two actually have quite a lot in common.

  Maybe that's why he calls you so much, and from so far away. Maybe he needs an anti-playboy to wean him from the course he's followed so long. Sort of an Angel's Advocate."

  "Amusing and creative, but hardly helpful." Matt studied the piled-up ribs on his plate.

  Smeared with carmine barbecue sauce, they did resemble mounded bodies. "St. Valentine was a priest, did you know that? He cured the blindness of his jailer's daughter. He had nothing to do with love or marriage. If love is blind, it's odd that a man who restored sight should become the patron saint of lovers."

  "I'm sure the Al Capone gang wasn't even aware it was Valentine's Day when they set out to knock off the Bugs Moran crowd. Or . . . maybe love is murder."

  "Love is singularly absent from my caller's vocabulary. The only real affection he expresses is for his baby daughter."

  "Love embarrasses men who have a lot of sexual partners," Temple said thoughtfully. "It's almost as if they need to prove that all sex is separate from all love."

  "Can it be?"

  She really mulled over that one. "Supposedly it's women who insist on attaching emotion to what the male gender would prefer to regard as random acts of self-satisfaction, many random acts. Yet who writes all the lamenting love songs: I lost you, you left me, what we had was wonderful? Most human cultures reward men for suppressing all their emotions except anger, but I think most men need love with their sex like scrambled eggs need ketchup."

  "Is love always such a bloody ingredient?"

  "Okay. Like English muffins need honey. That's something warm and gooey."

  "Why food comparisons?"

  " 'Cause we're eating? Or were." She grinned at their empty plates. "Seriously, what makes you think this guy is a celebrity?"

  "He keeps talking about what everybody expects of him. Even mentioned that his wife's body is famous!"

  "Before or after the baby?"

  "Apparently both."

 
"Galloping galoshes! Do you suppose he could be--wow--Bruce Willis? In Vegas to open another Planet Hollywood or whatever?"

  Temple was truly excited, but Matt knew he looked blank.

  "You do know who Bruce Willis is?" she asked.

  "Yeah . . . some sweaty actor in action movies. Die Hard Sixteen"

  "But you don't know he's married to Demi Moore?"

  "Who?"

  Temple shook her head. " Vanity Fair magazine cover girl, nude and ninety-nine months pregnant. Starred in Striptease postbaby."

  Matt shook his head. "Never heard of her; never seen her, and not sorry."

  "Good God, man! Don't you watch Hot Heads?"

  "Not before ... or since your pal Crawford Buchanan became a stringer for it. When would I watch it? Not at six-thirty, when I'm on my way to work. When it's rerun at ten-thirty, I'm on-line, so to speak."

  "But you do know what time it's broadcast! I call that a serious slip into popular culture, Padre."

  Matt found himself smiling a bit sheepishly. "When Buchanan was bugging us at the Hell-oween Haunted Homestead, I had Electra tape the show for a few nights to see if anything ran."

  "And did it?"

  "No. I think Buchanan was more interested in heckling you than getting footage. Midnight Louie was to be seen slinking out of camera range during the vermin-activists' segment. That did run."

  "Too bad. Wouldn't you know it? You look like a movie star and I sassed Crawford back, and he wouldn't use either one of us."

  "I wish you wouldn't say that."

  "What?"

  "My looks."

  "It's true. Pretty people get on television more, and move up in jobs faster and get paid more."

  "Talk to ConTact about that."

  "You must have some fancy advanced degree after all those years in seminary. I bet you haven't even tried finding a position in keeping with your background."

  "I thought we were here to talk about my mysterious promiscuous caller."

  "That's why you're here. I might want to talk about something else. Conversation is a two-way street, you know. I must admit an anonymous promiscuous caller with claims to celebrity status is a lot more interesting than finding lucrative employment for an ex-priest."

  Matt finished his beer. "Look. I want to settle this question of my past, of whether my stepfather's dead or not. That was the reason I came to Las Vegas: to find Cliff Effinger.

  Everything else, including my so-called career path, will have to wait until that's settled."

  Temple nodded seriously. "Meanwhile, the hold-body-and-soul-together, easy-to-get low-paying job is eating at your ethical soul."

  "Just this one caller. I could blow the whistle on him; refuse to take his calls. Then, every time I pick up the paper and some male celebrity has committed suicide --granted that doesn't happen a lot--I can blame myself."

  "Is he the only one of your clients who's been such a pain in the principles?"

  "Oh, some are heartbreakers. The abused women who never walk away, the unwanted old who call mostly for company. Some are pains, especially the compulsives. I can handle them. But it's hard to be sympathetic to an obviously privileged guy whose problem is getting too much sex when--"

  "You've never gotten any."

  "I was going to say, when so many needy people are stuck in horrifying situations because they haven't the money to escape them. There's nothing personal in this."

  "Then why are you blushing?"

  "I'm . . . not judging the man's sins, only his sincerity."

  "There you go, turning big vague concepts like sin into word games and turning your 'client'

  into 'the man.' Methinks he's getting under your skin. You did call me here to get my opinion, didn't you?"

  Matt tried to keep from squirming on the hard wooden seat. Right now Temple was making him feel ten years old and under the thumb of Sister Linus John. And all because she had mentioned the unmentionable . .. sex. As in: his lack of it.

  "I just don't understand where he's coming from. Confession is not even called the same thing it was when I was a child, and fewer people use the Sacrament of Reconciliation now that it's face-to-face and so . .. unblaming.

  "Maybe you don't understand where I'm coming from. Literally. St. Stanislaus in Chicago is an old-country parish so far behind the times masses were said in Polish once Latin was abolished, but a Latin mass is still said there every Sunday to this day. They even imported a Polish priest so none of this 'modernization' would infect the parish. I may have grown up there in the sixties and seventies, but it was as if I were in the forties and fifties.

  "So I take sin seriously, and especially sexual sin. It's different in Western Europe, France, Italy, or even in the rest of the Americas, where priestly chastity is an often-flouted convention, not a conviction. But Eastern European Catholics--and the Irish too--are fanatically nineteenth-century Catholic, with zero tolerance for sexual immorality."

  "Is that why Pope John Paul the Second is Polish? Isn't he the first non-Italian in decades?"

  "In centuries," Matt said. "The church grinds even more exceedingly slow than justice. That's why an Iron Curtain cardinal became the first non-Italian pope; he was stoutly out of touch with modern times and mores; he was more nineteenth-century than twentieth because of his isolation and having had to fight for the right to practice religion in a godless state. The Curia will never let a loose cannon like Pope John the Twenty-third slip through again."

  Matt could see that his reference to Pope John meant nothing to Temple. She hadn't been born during the brief "open window" tenure of the late, lamented pope of ecumenism. Religion could still be as deep a dividing chasm as race or gender.

  Temple was thoughtfully sipping her wine, which was almost untouched.

  "You know, someone like your caller, the Don Juan type, usually is afraid of real intimacy."

  "After all those ... conquests?" Matt couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voice.

  "If you can believe him." Temple smiled wryly. "That's another thing about Don Juan types.

  And you said it: conquests. That's what it is for these guys, like winning at poker, or getting a hole in one or ... oh my, listen to me! I'm knee-deep in double entendres despite myself."

  Matt frowned. He hadn't been listening that hard and had evidently missed some subtlety.

  "What do you mean that 'conquests' are the key to it?"

  "From his point of view, proof of virility. From the woman's point of view, proof of attractiveness. He may win the one-night stand, but even a professional party girl likes to think that there's something special about her, that the union was more than just a scorecard. Unless she's a competitive player too, of course. And then you have the duel of titanic egos."

  "If that's the case, what's sex got to do with it?"

  "Aha! By Jove--a very promiscuous god, by the way, the great-granddaddy of promiscuous gods--he's got it! I don't think that sexual record-setting has anything really to do with sex. See, that's your hang-up. You're thinking this guy's having all this lurid fun. And he isn't. Every conquest is a failure, because there are more women out there he hasn't converted. Everyone has to adore him, and prove it. His charisma has to triumph over and over. Woman after woman."

  " 'Converted.' You make his quest-and-conquest routine sound like a perverted vocation."

  "Exactly! He's a high priest of his own Godhood. Which is his Manhood. That's why insecurity has to be at the bottom of it. He doesn't love women. He's a man who simply can't resist a lovely, or a willing or a resistant woman. He's got to prove himself over and over, every day, every night. He's a little boy who's never believed in himself, no matter what worldly success he has achieved. He needs trophies: golf trophies, award trophies, automotive trophies, female-flesh trophies."

  "You do make him sound pathetic. And what you say about charisma . . . Did you know that's a religious word? That we talk of Charism as a favor especially granted by God. A grace, a talent.

  A
vocation. And chrism is the oil-balm that is used for anointing; that's why the sacrament for the dying used to be called extreme unction."

  " 'Unction' as in 'oil.' I never would have thought of that! That's what I saw you ... applying to Blandina Tyler's wrists and forehead."

  "The anointing." He nodded, trying not to let the aftertaste of the beer, the memory, twist his lips with bitterness. His last priestly act had been performed when he was not a priest any longer, in a situation of extreme need, of extreme unction, for Blandina Tyler certainly. And perhaps for himself.

  Matt sighed. This wasn't going as he had expected. He did a hasty examination of conscience on his expectations: sympathy, agreement, shared distaste for the man he had to talk to on the telephone. He had not expected: question, challenge and compassion. Temple Barr was much better at matters of conscience than she knew or than he wanted to admit.

  Chapter 6

  The Other Side of Paradise

  Although armed with any number of esoteric facts about Domingo's lifestyle, artworks and former projects, Temple was a bundle of nerves at the thought of their first meeting.

  She could tell from the magazine pieces that Domingo himself was as much of a performance artist as his projects were what used to be called "happenings" back when she was busy being born in the sixties.

  Besides, as at home as she was with set designers, choreographers, actors, singers, dancers and the occasional freak-show attraction, real artists, fine artists, art artists, scared the flesh tones right out of her already pallid coloring.

  They tended to be an egocentric, tyrannical lot, from what she had read of the great ones.

  The less-great, from what little she had seen, were even more egocentric and tyrannical. So many of them were people -eaters, plain and simple, from Picasso to Warhol. Temple had a real distaste for being eaten, particularly since she was small enough to serve as an hors d'oeuvre for some Monster of Monomania.

  She was even more nonplussed to be meeting said unknown ego at a most unusual hostelry.

  The Blue Mermaid Motel downtown, once an avant-garde motor inn in the thirties, was now, quite simply, a dump.