About Face (10 page)

He's very possessive and hates it when I talk about the loved ones in my life. He wants the full-on Girlfriend Experience. Somehow he knows when I talk to you, so I have to go “underground” for a little while and you may not hear from me. He's my best client and I'm afraid to tell him to get lost. Let him live out his fantasy. I am hoping he is harmless. Don't worry about me. I'll send letters whenever I can
.

It was signed with a giant loop—either an A or a C—a dot, and a heart.

Rupert spoke before I could. “You may say we invented this letter. But we had a graphologist analyze it. The police labs will confirm Alissa wrote it.”

I hid my dismay and said, “Wendy must be on your payroll, too—or did you steal the letter?”

“This letter is evidence of Rod's intention to have Alissa for himself,” Rupert said, ignoring my question. “She says in a hopeful manner that he's harmless, but we can hear her fear underneath. She was terrified even to call her own mother.”

I had to admit—though only to myself—that the letter put a new spin on Rod's insistence that Alissa break with her mother. For the first time it occurred to me that Wendy may have had reason for her charade. She may have been on a rescue mission.

Rupert handed me another photograph with a grunt of satisfaction. It showed Alissa trying to get out of a red Cabriolet whose top was down. The man behind the windshield had hold of her wrist and was pulling her back in. Though the reflection of the glass partially blocked his face, I could tell it was Rod.

“That's Alissa's car,” Rupert said. “Look at the date stamp. Ten days ago. It's the last time we saw her or the car. He pulled her back inside and we lost them. No one—her mother, her friends, our office—has seen or heard from her since.”

I sat back and stared at the documents spread on the table. I needed more time to think. “I'll check out this information and get back to you,” I said.

Rupert tucked his chin under and gave me a disappointed-father look. “Bill, we have the information. What we want to know is if you're going to join the right side and cooperate with us in getting Rod to come clean. A trip to the police station would be messy for everyone, but especially for Rod. We'd like to spare him. Return Alissa and all is forgiven. Of course, he can never see her again.”

I shook my head. “I've kept you informed, Rupert. We honestly expected Alissa to show up last night. You had your own
man there; he saw the reality. You know Rod. How can you think he would contrive something like that?”

Rupert stroked the corner of his lip. “Perhaps he didn't, Bill. Perhaps you did. It doesn't matter. You may not have known the truth about Rod. Now you do. Now you have a chance to put everything right.”

“Give me the photos and Alissa's letter. I'll get to the bottom of it.” I wondered if he knew about the Cheshire Cat rendezvous scheduled for tomorrow night.

“That's your offer?”

I rolled my eyes. “It's not an offer.”

Rupert sank back into the couch. “If we must go to the police, we must.”

“I can't stop you.” I stood up. “Thanks for having me over. After we find out where Alissa's really been, we'll deal with the fact that you've been spying on Rod.”

“Bill?”

I turned at the door. Rupert hurried after me. He thrust the photos and a copy of the letter into my hand. His voice was as earnest as it could be. “When you find out I'm right, you'll let me know, won't you?”

I couldn't give him the satisfaction of a nod. The truth was, he'd sown plenty of doubts about Rod in my mind. I said, “I'll be in touch.”

» » » » »

Rod was in meetings the rest of the day at Algoplex. A workstation had been improvised for me near his office. I tried to do my job, which at the moment meant searching for Wendy. But I couldn't concentrate. I kept wondering if Rod really had forced himself on Alissa. It didn't fit with what I knew of him.

The pictures told a different story, though. The only times I'd seen the same unbridled emotion were the day he yelled at Rita for blowing the lights and the moment on Monday night when he found out Wendy's true identity. Both incidents involved Alissa.

Five o'clock came and I asked Rod's assistant to let me into Rod's office. Rod kept a recliner in the corner where, he said, his best ideas came to him. I told the assistant I wanted to take a nap while I waited for Rod to return. Naps were an approved part of Silicon Valley culture. The assistant let me in.

There were plenty of reasons Silicon Glamour would want to frame Rod: To cover up their own crimes in relation to Alissa and to get back at him for “cheating” with her were two that came to mind. I tilted the chair back and looked carefully at the photographs. They hadn't been doctored. The letter had the scent of authenticity, too.

The kiss was forceful, passionate. It was hard to read Alissa's response—most of her body was hidden by Rod's. Tentative fingers touched his shoulder blade. I thought about Rod's secret urges and how he might be overcome by a wave of longing for Alissa. Touching her hair, smelling her skin, after so many years in his wilderness of code: Silicon Valley was a cauldron of pent-up desire, the lid clamped tight by disciplines of command language and deliverables. If Alissa gave Rod a glimmer of hope, he may have seized on it and seized on her.

His laptop sat mute near his desk. A fractal screensaver displayed ever-new self-recursive patterns. I considered getting up to snoop into what dreams lurked on his hard drive. Most likely I'd find the same kind of thing as on ninety-five percent of single engineers' drives in the Valley. It would tell me nothing. He was careful about exposing his desires; unauthorized access would leave me feeling dirty.

I was dozing when he came back. He said his head was pounding and he wanted to get out of the office. I suggested we go for a beer: I wanted him to be relaxed when I showed him Rupert's pictures.

“Isn't that what they call the hair of the dog?” he said. “It's like curing anemia with arsenic.”

We ended up at a Chinese restaurant with semiprivate booths for an early dinner. Rod ordered a Coke and sweet-and-sour pork. I told him sugar worked as a temporary treatment for his hangover. He asked me what Rupert had wanted.

I slid the photographs across the mint-green Formica to him. The look on his face was not quite guilt; regret pulled down the corners of his mouth and eyes, and there was a small twitch of longing at the sight of Alissa. He threw them back at me and said, “Those
bastards
.”

“Rupert's got a story that goes with them. Did you have sex with Alissa, Rod?”

“God damn Rupert and Trisha. I swear to you, Bill, if I knew anything about how to get someone killed, I'd do it. They're worse than pimps.”

“Who's Trisha—the woman we saw at the end of the hall when we visited Rupert?”

“Yes. She's Rupert's sister. She's the boss at SG.”

I tapped the kiss photo. “Did Alissa enjoy this?”

Rod stared at me, his jaw slack, before he exploded. “What kind of question is that, Bill?”

The waiter, arriving with a steaming plate of pork, jumped back to avoid Rod's waving arms. I said, “Just tell me straight, Rod, what you and Alissa have done together.”

Rod momentarily lost his ability to speak. The food was slipped under our noses. I had Szechuan beef. Rod stared at his sweet-and-sour. His mouth quivered.

“We did make love. She—I couldn't stop myself. She said she was in love with me. That kiss—I don't know, it was a moment when I let myself go. We both did.”

It was my turn to be speechless. A chili pepper stung my mouth. Rod dabbed the moisture from his eyes and said, “I know it seems implausible that she was in love with me. That's why I didn't mention it before. It was too . . . ridiculous.”

“She said it in a way that wasn't convincing?”

He speared a pineapple. “No, it was very convincing. She said she'd finally found a man she could trust. She herself was surprised, but it was true. I can show you little notes and drawings, if you don't believe me. It still seemed improbable. She's a woman who could have any man in the world. Why me?”

“Women aren't as shallow as men. They're better at seeing beneath the surface.”

“I don't know, Bill. Maybe I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

“You have absolutely no idea where she is?”

Rod's eyes opened like saucers. “Are you some kind of idiot? What did I hire you for?”

“A program for which you never revealed all the initial conditions. Garbage in, garbage out.”

Rod's head sunk. “This is not easy for me. I thought you'd laugh if I told you what she said. She claimed she wanted a life with me but SG wouldn't allow it.”

I showed him the picture in which he was pulling her back into her car. “Did you two have some kind of fight?”

He inspected the picture, then played with his food. “I don't know what got into her. We were on a drive in the country. She picked a fight with me and demanded I pull over. She tried to get out and walk home. It was ridiculous. We were all the way up on Skyline Drive.”

I showed him the letter last. As he read it, his features curdled and the blood drained from his face. It was as if a plug had been pulled. His shoulders shook, and after a long pause, he said in a small voice, “I guess that seals it. She was—what was the word?—diddling me. That's what it divides down to. I
paid
her to
use
me to steal my technology.”

“We have no direct evidence she pilfered files.”

“Deduce it, Bill. Why else would she go beyond the requirements of her job? Why add the ‘Girlfriend Experience'? I've thought about how accommodating they were to us at the signing dinner, letting you stay. They wanted to lock me into the deal. Now they'll lower the boom, using whatever they got from Alissa.”

I couldn't say he was wrong; his theory was too plausible. He halfheartedly ate a few bites of food, then put down the fork. “I'm not going to the club tomorrow night,” Rod said. “Even if Alissa herself is there—especially if she is. I don't want to be humiliated again.”

“I can't make you go, Rod. But it'd help us nail her—or whomever.”

He conjured up a twisted grin. “I make good bait, don't I?” The grin disappeared. “Let's just drop it, Bill. Let's admit that I'm a sucker. Focus on controlling the damage instead.”

I let him sit with his emotions. It was not a time to talk him into anything. He pushed his plate aside and jammed his chin down into his palms. The faraway look that so often glazed his features returned. When he looked back at me, his face was vacant. It was the look of a man who'd lost hope.

“Beauty,” he said. “What a trick. I presumed it impossible that someone as beautiful as Alissa—not just her exterior features, but the intelligence behind her eyes, the glow inside—could not
be good all the way through. She spoke of children and pets. What she wanted more than anything, she said, was to get off the treadmill and have a quiet life in a snug house with a few trees and a hammock in the back yard. She spoke of me as being the one with her in that house.”

He shook his head. This man who'd been such a believer in the power of the mind now trusted nothing and no one. “All of it was conjured from her grimoire. An algorithm coded to produce an utterly predictable effect in simple-minded organisms like me. I'd presumed there was a law of physics that made her incapable of double-speaking. Even with the ‘Girlfriend Experience,' I thought she was doing it as a favor, to make me feel good. All right, so she's no different than the other operators and schemers in the Valley. And I guess beauty's like any other code: It can be put to whatever application the owner chooses. It's as opaque to me as any nonlinear system.”

We sat in silence. There was no point in confirming his naïveté by asking if he'd never seen Barbara Stanwyck in a noir role. The fluorescent lights buzzed. A busboy took our plates. The waiter hovered, then left. I thought back to my conversation with Rupert, to my own suspicions about Rod and how I'd put them to him, how hurt he'd looked. It seemed he was speaking truly to me now.

And yet I thought back to the times I'd felt equally certain of someone and had been ambushed all over again. A shred of skepticism remained; it refused to dissolve now and perhaps it never would. How sad, I thought, I couldn't give my whole trust to this devastated man. Melancholy as it was, I could not shake the notion that no one in this mess was innocent. It would not be the first time in Silicon Valley.

The Cheshire Cat club
was not what I had pictured. If it was Alissa's choice, to match her enigmatic smile I figured she'd summon Rod to a mod place done in minimalist black and white, or else to a cozy English-style pub. Instead we got burgundy velvet curtains, Tiffany lamps, Naugahyde banquettes, and corseted cocktail waitresses.

“Yeah, this joint sure has class,” Wes said as we tucked ourselves into a corner at the end of the bar. It did seem more like Wendy's style than Alissa's—unless Alissa was the predator Rod feared she might be.

Rod had not arrived yet, but he had changed his mind about coming. He admitted he couldn't stay away. A part of him still wanted to believe in Alissa: to believe she would come and that there'd be a good reason for everything that had happened. “I know it's a long shot,” he'd said to me this afternoon. “But hope plays its tricks on everyone. If there's one thing I've learned, Bill, it's that I'm not immune to human emotions. It was an illusion that I could
think
my way around them.”

I'd spent most of the day trying to get more on Wendy, and failed. I couldn't get past the front desk at Plush Biologics. Connie must have posted my mug shot or something. Rupert continued to claim ignorance. That left me to snoop on the net
for Wendy Bevins, of whom there are plenty in the United States. None of them was our woman. She and Alissa might not share the same last name, anyhow.