The Face (44 page)

CHAPTER 74

T
WO BULLETS IN THE BRAIN.

Wearing his Kevlar chest protector and conscious of what an easy target his lionesque head would make, Hazard closed the car door and crossed the street.

The house of the mother-killer seemed to attract the incoming fog, which moved not in a monolithic bank but in curious eddies and lithe plumes: one quick-footed vaporous slinkiness after another, tail following tail of Angora mist, as though here were a thousand cats drawn home by the scent of tuna fresh from the can.

The aura of the house so entranced Hazard that he had crossed the street and followed the private walkway while remaining oblivious of the rain. Only when he reached the foot of the front-porch steps did he realize that he had approached with such deliberation that he had gotten wet to the skin.

Ascending the porch steps, he felt something in his hand—and discovered the cell phone on which he had spoken to Dunny Whistler.

I’m dead
and
alive,
Dunny had said, and Hazard at the moment was of much that same sentiment.

At the top of the steps, instead of proceeding straight to the door and ringing the bell, he paused, realizing that he had neglected to do a standard bit of follow-up to Dunny’s call that he would have done had he received a menacing message from anyone else who should not have had his mobile number. He pressed *69.

The call was answered on the second ring, but the person at the far end of the line said nothing.

“Somebody there?” Hazard asked.

A hard voice came back at him: “Oh, somebody here. Somebody here, sure enough, you hook nigger.”

Gang talk:
hook
meaning phony, imitation.

“I be here, got lit up by you, punched twice, and still taste pencil.”

Pencil
meaning lead, meaning bullets.

Hazard had never heard this voice before, but he knew to whom it might belong. He could not speak.

“When you come across after me, you wannabe ofay, better get ready for a million nightmares of eastlies. You know eastly, man?”

“Yeah. An ugly person,” Hazard said, surprised that he had spoken, sensing at once that responding was a bad idea, that it was an
invitation
.

“Worse than ugly, man. Extreme butt-ugly. This crib ain’t got nothin’
but
eastlies. I be here when you come across, ofay. I be first in line.”

Hazard wanted to press
END
, clip the phone to his belt, but grim fascination held it to his ear.

He was standing ten feet from Vladimir Laputa’s front door. This wasn’t a wise place to engage in a phone chat with one of the restless dead.

“Ofay, you know that four-five I shoulda capped you with last night?”

In his mind’s eye, Hazard saw Calvin Roosevelt, alias Hector X, on the lawn outside Reynerd’s apartment house, both hands around a .45, squeezing off a shot, the muzzle spitting fire in the rain.

“Check this out, queerboy. You get here, I have me somethin’ bigger than my four-five I’ll shove up your ass, and then all the eastlies can jam you, too. Gonna see you soon.”

Hazard pressed
END
, and at once the phone rang in his hand. No need to answer it, no
way
to answer it, knowing who it would be.

He was wet. Cold. Scared.

The phone continued to ring.

He needed either to think hard about this or to think about it never again, and he couldn’t make up his mind which way to go while he stood here, on the mother-killer’s porch.

He shoved the ringing phone into a jacket pocket, turned his back to the door, and descended the steps, into the rain once more.

CHAPTER 75

T
HE GENTLY CIRCULATING WATER IN THE POOL stirred the light that rose through it, causing shimmering auroras and shadows to quiver ceaselessly across the limestone walls and barrel-vaulted ceiling.

Fric brought a linen tablecloth to one of the poolside tables and arranged place settings of good china and silverware.

He almost added candles, but figured that two guys wouldn’t have dinner by candlelight. Maybe by the glow of a firepit or Polynesian party torches, maybe beside a campfire in a forest full of prowling wolves, but not by candlelight.

With a dimming switch, he adjusted the sconces on the limestone columns until they produced a soft golden glow.

In good weather, Fric enjoyed eating by the outdoor pool, when he was the sole member of the family in residence and when Ghost Dad’s girlfriends weren’t lying around in bikini bottoms, thickly slathered in number-fifty sunblock, like plucked ducks in a marinade.

The indoor pool didn’t measure up to the one outdoors: only eighty feet long and fifty-two feet wide, not quite large enough if you wanted to hold powerboat races. The room was warm in winter, however, and a double shitload of palm trees in huge pots gave it a pleasant tropical feeling.

Three walls of the pool room featured big windows framing the parklike grounds. The windows in the third wall were shared with the conservatory, offering a view into its jungly realms.

A poolside dinner appealed to Fric because in the adjacent conservatory he had carefully prepared his deep and special secret place. Given the slightest reason to believe that Moloch was coming, he could bolt for cover and be out of sight as quick as a rabbit.

Weirdly, he suspected that Mr. Truman, too, expected Moloch. The voltage-flow-testing story was crap. Something must be up.

He hoped that Mr. Truman wouldn’t page him by intercom, as he had earlier paged him in the library. Not even under duress would Fric press the
RESPOND
button, because he was afraid that like *69, it might connect him with that place from which something had tried to squirm through the handset cord and into his ear.

Finishing the table preparation sooner than expected, he checked his wristwatch. Mr. Truman would not arrive with the food for perhaps ten minutes.

The rain-soaked, fog-swaddled grounds beyond the windows were revealed by many landscape lights, but the theme was enchantment and romance, which meant that shadows ruled. If Moloch had scaled the estate wall without being detected by the security system, he might be out there, shrouded in the murk, watching.

Fric considered hurrying to the kitchen under the pretense of lending a hand with dinner, but he didn’t want to appear to be needy, nerdy, geeky.

If he actually might run away and join the Marine Corps someday, instead of hiding out in Goose Crotch, Montana, he ought to start thinking like a Marine and behaving like one, sooner rather than later. A Marine wouldn’t be spooked by the darkness beyond a window. A Marine would sneer at that darkness and boldly piss on it. He’d open the window first, of course, so as not to mess up the glass.

Fric wasn’t up to that level of Marine confidence just yet. Instead, he sat at the table, wishing the minutes would speed past.

He withdrew the photograph from a back pocket, unfolded it, and stared at the pretty lady with the special smile, distracting himself from the watching night. His make-believe mom.

As yet he had not done as Mysterious Caller had suggested, had not asked anyone if they knew who this woman might be.

For one thing, he hadn’t been able to concoct a convincing story to explain either the origin of her photo or why he was so interested in knowing her identity. He was a lousy liar.

Besides, the longer he didn’t ask anyone about her, the longer she would be his, and his alone. As soon as he found out who she was, she could no longer be his make-believe mom.

Something rapped against a window.

Fric sprang from the chair, dropping the photo.

The face at the window was hooded and hideous, but the hood was rain gear, and the face belonged to one of the security guards, Mr. Roma. Because he had a long upper lip and a small nose, Mr. Roma could pull his lip over his nose, and it would stay that way, so his face looked deformed and his teeth appeared to be huge. Held at his chin and aimed upward, the beam of a flashlight enhanced this effect.

“Ooga-ooga,” said Mr. Roma, because without the use of his upper lip, he couldn’t pronounce the
b
in
booga
.

When Fric went to the window, Mr. Roma allowed his face to pop back into shape. The guard said, “How you doin’, Fric?”

“I’m fine now,” Fric replied, raising his voice to be heard through the glass. “For a second there, I thought you were Ming.”

“Ming’s in Florida with your dad.”

“He came back early,” Fric said. “He’s out there walking in the rain somewhere.”

Mr. Roma’s smile froze.

“He wanted me to walk with him,” Fric said, “so he could teach me all about how rain washes the planet’s spirit or something.”

The frozen smile cracked, crumbled. Mr. Roma lowered the light from his face and turned his back to Fric, sweeping the night with the beam.

“You’ll probably run into him,” Fric said.

Realizing that the flashlight pinpointed his position, Mr. Roma switched it off. “See you, Fric,” he said, and dashed away into the foggy gloom.

Although Fric was a lousy liar and had not sounded convincing even to himself, Mr. Roma didn’t dare call his bluff if there was a one in a thousand chance that Ming, in a talkative mood and in full guru mode, might be in the vicinity.

CHAPTER 76

I
N THE CAR, OUT OF THE RAIN, SHIVERING IN THE warm blast from the heater, still sought by the dead Hector X, Hazard listened to the ring, ring, ring until he wanted to roll down the window and throw the cell phone into the street.

The ringing stopped just as he noticed activity at the Laputa residence. A man came out of the house, paused to lock the front door, and descended the porch steps.

Even in the rain and steadily clotting fog, Hazard recognized the guy who had earlier entered the house by way of the garage. All but certainly, this was Vladimir Laputa.

At the junction of private walkway and public sidewalk, Laputa turned right and retraced the route by which he had arrived. He still swaggered, but he didn’t seem to be either talking to himself or singing.

He had changed into an entirely black outfit that appeared to be weatherproof, as if he would soon be driving north to Mammoth or to some other ski resort in the Sierras.

Like a premonition of snow, white masses of fog drifted around him, nearly obscuring him, before he turned right at the corner and moved out of sight.

Having already released the hand brake and put the car in gear, Hazard switched on the headlights and drove to the corner, where traffic splashed past on the cross street. He looked to the right and saw Laputa walking northward. When the professor was almost out of sight, Hazard turned the corner and followed him.

Whenever he drew within half a block of Laputa, he pulled to the curb and waited, letting his quarry proceed toward the limits of fog-diminished visibility. Then he drove after him again.

In these fits and starts, Hazard tracked the professor two and a half blocks. There, never having glanced back, Laputa got into a black Land Rover.

Remaining too far behind to read the license plate, letting other traffic intervene from time to time to mask his continuous presence, Hazard shadowed the Land Rover along a direct route to the Beverly Center, at Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega. Although somewhat oddly dressed for a trip to the mall, Laputa apparently intended to go shopping.

Conducting on-the-roll surveillance in a parking garage was a lot trickier than doing the same thing on public streets. Hazard followed the Land Rover up ramp after ramp, floor by floor, past ranks of parked vehicles, until Laputa found an empty space.

Near the end of that aisle, a slot waited for Hazard’s sedan. He parked, switched off the engine, got out, and watched his man over the roofs of the parked cars.

He expected the professor to follow the signs to the nearest mall entrance. Instead, Laputa returned on foot to the ramp up which he had just driven.

Although other shoppers were walking through the garage, and although numerous vehicles roamed in search of parking spaces and exit routes, Hazard hung back from his quarry as far as he dared. He worried that the professor would spot him, and would know him at once for what he was.

Laputa descended one long ramp, then another. Two floors below the level on which he’d left the Land Rover, he walked up to a parked Acura coupe, which chirruped as he unlocked the doors with a remote.

Frozen by surprise, Hazard halted as the professor got into the driver’s seat.

The guy had not come here to go shopping. He was picking up new wheels.

The Land Rover or the Acura almost certainly was a Kleenex car, meant to be used in the commission of a crime, and then tossed away. Maybe both vehicles were Kleenex.

Hazard considered making an arrest on the basis of suspicious behavior.

No. He couldn’t risk it. Not with a respectable university professor. Not with Blonde in the Pond about to break wide open and a powerful city councilman about to become his mortal enemy. He was already the subject of an OIS investigation for shooting Hector X. In these circumstances, every mistake he made would be woven into the rope with which they would hang him.

He had no legitimate reason to be following Laputa. The murder of Mina Reynerd wasn’t his case. All day he had been using his city-paid time and his police authority to help a friend in a personal matter. He had put his pecker in a vise and had tightened the handle himself; now he couldn’t make a sudden move against the professor without big-time grief.

In the Acura, unaware that he was under surveillance, Laputa pulled shut the driver’s door. He started the engine. He seemed to be fiddling with the radio.

Hazard sprinted back the way that he’d come, up two ramps, to the department sedan.

By the time he drove pell-mell down to the garage exit, hoping to fall in behind the Acura, Laputa had gone.

CHAPTER 77

Y
OU KNOW THAT CHOCOLATE POP CALLED Yoo-hoo?” Fric asked.

“I’ve had it a few times,” Mr. Truman said.

“It’s cool stuff. Did you know you can keep Yoo-hoo just about forever and it won’t go sour?”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“They use a special steam-sterilization process,” Fric revealed. “As long as it’s unopened, it’s as sterile as like, say, a bottle of contact-lens solution.”

“I’ve never drunk any contact-lens solution,” said Mr. Truman.

“Did you know that civet is used in a lot of perfumes?”

“I don’t even know what civet is.”

Fric brightened at this admission. “Well, it’s a thick yellow secretion that’s squeezed from the anal glands of civet cats.”

“They sound like remarkably cooperative cats.”

“They aren’t really members of the cat family. They’re mammals in Asia and Africa. They produce more civet when they’re agitated.”

“Under the circumstances, they must be agitated all the time.”

“Civet stinks terrible,” Fric said, “in full strength. But when you dilute it with the right stuff, then it smells really good. Did you know when you sneeze, all bodily functions stop for an instant?”

“Even the heart?”

“Even the brain. It’s like a temporary little death.”

“That’s it then—no more pepper on my salads.”

“A sneeze puts humongous stress on the body,” Fric explained, “especially on the eyes.”

“We always do sneeze with our eyes shut, don’t we?”

“Yeah. If you sneezed violently enough with your eyes open, you could pop one out of the socket.”

“Fric, I never realized you were such an encyclopedia of unusual facts.”

Smiling, pleased with himself, Fric said, “I like knowing things other people don’t.”

Dinner had progressed immeasurably better than Fric had feared that it might. The chicken breasts in lemon-butter sauce, the rice with wild mushrooms, and the asparagus spears were delicious, and neither he nor Mr. Truman had yet died of food poisoning, though Mr. Hachette might be saving murder for dessert.

At first, conversation had been stiff because they started with the subject of films, which inevitably led to Manheim movies. They weren’t comfortable talking about Ghost Dad. Even if they said only nice things, they seemed to be gossiping behind his back.

Fric asked what it was like to be a homicide detective, and sought especially to hear about the most grotesque murders, hideously mangled bodies, and bugshit-crazy killers that Mr. Truman had ever encountered. Mr. Truman said much of that stuff wasn’t suitable for table talk and that some of it wasn’t fit for the ears of a ten-year-old kid. He did tell cop stories, however, most of them funny; a few were gross, although not so gross that you wanted to puke up your lemon-butter chicken, but gross enough to make this by far the best dinner chat that Fric had ever experienced.

When Mr. Truman noted that Mr. Hachette had prepared a coconut-cherry cake for dessert, Fric tapped his knowledge about the island nation of Tuvalu, exporter of coconuts, to make a contribution to their conversation.

Tuvalu led him to lots of other things he knew about, like the biggest pair of shoes ever made. They were size forty-two, cobbled for a Florida giant by the name of Harley Davidson, who had nothing to do with the motorcycle company. Size forty-two shoes are twenty-two inches long! Mr. Truman was properly amazed.

Giant shoes led eventually to Yoo-hoo, civet, and sneezing, and as they were finishing dessert—as yet showing no signs of arsenic ingestion—Fric said, “Did you know my mother was in a booby hatch?”

“Oh, don’t pay attention to ugly stuff like that, Fric. It’s an unfair exaggeration.”

“Well, my mother didn’t sue anyone who said that stuff.”

“In this country, celebrities can’t sue for slander or libel just because people tell lies about them. They have to prove the lies were told with malice. Which is hard. Your mom just didn’t want to spend years in a courtroom. You understand?”

“I guess so. But you know what people might think.”

“I’m not sure I follow you. What might people think?”

“Like mother, like son.”

Mr. Truman appeared to be amused. “Fric, no one who knows you could believe you’ve ever been in a booby hatch or ever will be.”

Pushing aside his empty cake plate, Fric said, “Well, say like someday I see a flying saucer. I mean,
really
see one, and a bunch of big greasy extraterrestrials. You know?”

“Big and greasy,” Mr. Truman said, nodding and attentive.

“So then if I tell anyone, the first thing they’ll think is
Oh, yeah, his mother was in a booby hatch
.”

“Well, whether or not they remembered those stories about your mom, some people in this world wouldn’t believe you if you had one of those big greasy extraterrestrials on a leash.”

“I wish I did,” Fric murmured.

“They wouldn’t believe me, either, if I had one on a leash.”

“But you were a
cop
.”

“Lots of people are unable to see all kinds of truths right in front of their eyes. You can’t worry about them for a minute. They’re hopeless.”

“Hopeless,” Fric agreed, but he was thinking less about other people than about his own circumstances.

“If you came to me or Mrs. McBee, however, we’d drop anything we were doing to run and see those big greasy freaks because we know you can be taken at your word.”

This statement immensely heartened Fric, and he sat up straight in his chair. Into his mind crowded all the things about which he wanted to tell Mr. Truman—Mysterious Caller stepping out of a mirror and flying through the attic rafters, spirits trying to come through the telephone cord and into your ear when you pressed *69, guardian angels with strange rules, child-eating Moloch, the
Los Angeles Times
with the story of his kidnapping—but he hesitated too long, trying to put all this stuff in order, so it wouldn’t gush out of him in one hysterical torrent.

Mr. Truman spoke first: “Fric, until I can troubleshoot it and figure out what needs to be repaired, this voltage-flow problem in the alarm system has me concerned.”

The security chief’s words might as well have been the three-pronged hook on a fisherman’s well-cast fly, so firmly did they snare Fric’s full attention. The phony voltage-flow story again.

“Nothing’s going to happen, but I’m a worrier. Your dad pays me to worry, after all. So until this is fixed, I’d rather you didn’t sleep alone on the third floor.”

An edgy quality in Mr. Truman’s eyes suggested that he himself had seen big greasy ETs, or expected to see them shortly.

“I’d like to set up camp for the night in the living room of your suite,” he continued. “Or you could come down to my apartment, sleep in my bed, and I’d move to the sofa in my study. What do you think of that?”

“Or I could sleep on your sofa, and you wouldn’t have to give up your bed.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, Fric. But I’ve already changed the sheets on my bed in case that was the option you chose. Now if it turns out I changed them for no reason and used up an unscheduled set of linens, I’ll have to answer to Mrs. McBee. Don’t put me in that position, I beg of you.”

Fric knew that Mr. Truman wanted the sofa for one reason and one only: He intended to be stationed between the entrance door to his apartment and the bedroom in which Fric would be sleeping, not because Fric might fall down a set of stairs while sleepwalking, but because maybe some thugs would break down the apartment door and try to get to Fric, in which case they’d have to go through Mr. Truman.

Something was going on, for sure.

“All right,” Fric said, worried but also pleasantly excited. “I’ll come to your place, and you can have the sofa. This’ll be great. I’ve never stayed overnight away from home.”

“Well, you’re not exactly going to be away from home.”

“No, sir, but I’ve never been in your apartment,” Fric said. “Not even before you came here. It’s unknown territory, like the dark side of the moon—you know?—so this is like a totally real sleepover.”

While he should have been brooding about how to avoid being kidnapped and killed, Fric instead found himself thinking that if they stayed up late, maybe they could make s’mores and sit on the floor by candlelight and tell ghost stories. He knew that this was a stupid idea, everything from the stupid s’mores to the stupid ghost stories, but the thought delighted him, anyway.

Consulting his wristwatch, Mr. Truman said, “It’s almost eight o’clock.” He got to his feet and began transferring dishes from the table to the stainless-steel cart on which he’d brought them. “I’ll haul these to the kitchen, then we’ll get you set up at my place.”

“I’d like to go up to the library and get a book,” Fric said, though he actually wanted to pee in the potted palm.

Even in the security chief’s apartment, with a former cop standing armed guard, Fric wasn’t too keen on the idea of using the bathroom, where there would be mirrors. You were seriously vulnerable when you were peeing.

Mr. Truman hesitated, glancing toward the windows, at the night, the rain, the fog.

“I always fall asleep reading,” Fric pressed.

“All right. But don’t take too long, okay? And once you’ve got the book you want, come straight to my apartment.”

“Yes, sir.” He headed toward the exit from the pool room, but halted after two steps. “Maybe later we can tell ghost stories.”

Frowning as if Fric had suggested that they blow up the west wing, maybe even turning just a little pale, Mr. Truman said, “Ghost stories? Why would you say that?”

“Well, ummm, because that’s, you know, what people do, like, at sleepovers. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
Stupid.
But he couldn’t stop talking. “They sit on the floor, ummm, by candlelight, you know, and they tell real scary stories, and then they, ummm, like sometimes they make s’mores.”
Stupid, stupid.
“Or you can make, ummm, popcorn instead, and you can tell secrets.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Mr. Truman’s frown phased into a smile. “Are you telling me that after all we ate for dinner, you could chow down on s’mores, too?”

“Not right now, sir, no, but maybe in an hour.”

“And you have some deep dark secrets to reveal, do you?”

“Ummm, I’ve got some stuff, yeah, some experiences I’ve had.”

“Experiences. Do they involve big greasy extraterrestrials?”

“No, sir. Nothing that simple.”

“Then when I take these dishes to the kitchen, I’ll pick up the ingredients for a pile of s’mores. You’ve got me curious.”

Relieved in one sense, needing relief in a different sense, Fric went to the library to deal another blow to the dying palm tree.