The Face (9 page)

CHAPTER 11

S
LICKERED AND BOOTED, WEARING THE SAME jeans and wool sweater as before, sitting behind the wheel of his silver BMW, Corky Laputa felt stifled by a frustration as heavy and suffocating as a fur coat.

Although his shirt wasn’t buttoned to the top, anger pinched his throat as tight as if he’d squeezed his sixteen-inch neck into a fifteen-inch collar.

He wanted to drive to West Hollywood and kill Reynerd.

Such impulses must be resisted, of course, for though he dreamed of a societal collapse into complete lawlessness, from which a new order would arise, the laws against murder remained in effect. They were still enforced.

Corky was a revolutionary, but not a martyr.

He understood the need to balance radical action with patience.

He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.

To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.

Contrary to the claims of organized medicine, both the greed-corrupted Western variety and the spiritually smug Eastern brand, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed him.

Very old people, nerves rubbed to an excruciating sensitivity by life and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey’s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.

In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.

She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a network of arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.

Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.

Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.

Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother’s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.

If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn’t greedy.

She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and she cared not at all about his comfort or his needs. He’d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.

In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.

She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.

Corky didn’t hate his mother. He didn’t hate anyone.

He didn’t envy anyone, either.

Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.

Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.

Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he’d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.

The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.

Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.

His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.

Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.

He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.

When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.

Noticing that the yellow slicker had shed a lot of water on the seat, he sighed but did nothing. Corky was too committed an anarchist to care about the upholstery.

Besides, he had Reynerd to brood about. A perpetual adolescent inside a dour exterior, Rolf had been unable to resist the temptation to deliver the sixth box in person. Looking for a thrill.

The fool had thought that perimeter security cameras did not exist solely because he himself could not spot them.

Are there no other planets in the solar system,
Corky had asked him,
just because you can’t locate them in the sky?

When Ethan Truman, Manheim’s security chief, came calling, Reynerd had been stunned. By his admission, he behaved suspiciously.

As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.

Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.

He didn’t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd’s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.

Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground garage.

He got out of the BMW, stripped off his slicker and his droopy rain hat, which he tossed onto the floor of the car. He shrugged into a tweed sports coat that complemented his sweater and jeans.

An elevator carried him from subterranean realms to the highest of two floors of shops, restaurants, and attractions. The arcade was on this top level.

With school out, kids crowded around the arcade games. Most were in their early teens.

The machines beeped, rang, tolled, chimed, bleated, tweedled, whistled, rattattooed, boomed, shrieked, squealed, ululated, roared like gunning engines, emitted scraps of bombastic music, the screams of virtual victims, twinkled, flashed, strobed, and scintillated in all known colors, and swallowed quarters, dollars, more voraciously even than the iconic Pac-Man had once gobbled cookies off a million arcade screens in an era now quaint if not unknown to the current crowd.

Wandering among the machines, Corky distributed free drugs to the kids.

These small plastic bags each contained eight doses of Ecstasy—or Extasy, if you’d gone to a public school—with a block-lettered label that promised FREE X, and then suggested, JUST REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIEND IS.

He was pretending to be a dealer drumming up business. He never expected to see any of these brats again.

Some kids accepted the packets, thought it was cool.

Others showed no interest. Of those who declined, none made an effort to report him to anyone; nobody liked a rat.

In a few instances, Corky slipped the bags into kids’ jacket pockets without their knowledge. Let them find it later, be amazed.

Some would take the stuff. Some would throw it away or give it away. In the end, he would have succeeded in contaminating a few more brains.

Truth: He wasn’t interested in creating addicts. He would have given away heroin or even crack cocaine if that had been his goal.

Scientific studies of Ecstasy revealed that five years after taking just a single dose, the user continued to exhibit lingering changes in brain chemistry. After regular use, permanent brain damage could ensue.

Some oncologists and neurologists suggested that in the decades to come, the current high incidence of Ecstasy use would produce a dramatic increase in early-onset cancerous brain tumors, as well as a decrease in the cognitive abilities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens.

Eight-dose giveaways like this would not facilitate the collapse of civilization overnight. Corky was committed to long-term effect.

He never carried more than fifteen bags, and once he started to hand them out, he made a point of ridding himself of them quickly. Too clever to get caught holding, he was in and out of the arcade in three minutes.

Because he didn’t need to pause to make a sale, the staff didn’t have an opportunity to notice him. By the time he left the arcade, he was just another shopper: nothing incriminating in his pockets.

At a Starbucks, he bought a double latte, and sipped it at one of their tables on the promenade, watching the parade of humanity in all its absurdity.

After finishing the coffee, he went to a department store. He needed socks.

CHAPTER 12

T
HE TREES, A GROVE OF EIGHT, ROSE ON beautifully gnarled trunks, lifted high their exquisitely twisted branches, shook their graceful gray-green tresses in the wet wind, seeming both to defy the storm and to celebrate it. Fruitless in this season, they cast off no olives, only leaves, upon the cobbled walkway.

Twining through the branches, Christmas lights were unlit at this hour, bulbs of dull color waiting to brighten in the night.

This five-story Westwood condominium, less than one block from Wilshire Boulevard, was neither as grand as some in the neighborhood nor large enough to require a doorman. Nevertheless, the purchase price of an apartment here would gag a sword swallower.

Ethan trod the leaves of peace, passed under the extinguished lights of Christmas, and entered a marble-floored and marble-paneled public foyer. He used a key to let himself through the inner security door.

Past the foyer, the secure lobby was small but cozy, with an area rug to soften the marble, two Art Deco armchairs, and a table with a faux Tiffany lamp in red, amber, and green stained glass.

Although stairs served the five-story building, Ethan took the slow-moving elevator. Dunny Whistler lived—had lived—on the fifth floor.

Each of the first four floors held four large apartments, but the highest was divided into only two penthouse units.

A faint unpleasant odor lingered in the elevator from a recent passenger. Complex and subtle, the scent teased memory, but Ethan could not quite identify it.

As he ascended past the second floor, the elevator cab suddenly impressed him as being smaller than he remembered from previous visits. The ceiling loomed low, like a lid on a cook pot.

Passing the third floor, he realized that he was breathing faster than he should be, as though he were a man on a brisk walk. The air seemed to have grown thin, inadequate.

By the time he reached the fourth floor, he became convinced that he detected a
wrongness
in the sound of the elevator motor, in the hum of cables drawn through guide wheels. This creak, that tick, this squeak might be the sound of a linchpin pulling loose in the heart of the machinery.

The air grew thinner still, the walls closer, the ceiling lower, the machinery more suspect.

Perhaps the doors wouldn’t open. The emergency phone might be out of order. His cell phone might not work in here.

In an earthquake, the shaft might collapse, crushing the cab to the dimensions of a coffin.

Nearing the fifth floor, he realized that these symptoms of claustrophobia, which he had never previously experienced, were a mask that concealed another fear, to which he, being a rational man, was loath to admit.

He half expected Rolf Reynerd to be waiting on the fifth floor.

How Reynerd would have known about Dunny or where Dunny lived, how he would have known when Ethan intended to come here—these were questions unanswerable without extensive investigation and perhaps without the abandonment of logic.

Nevertheless, Ethan stepped to the side of the cab, to make a smaller target of himself. He drew his pistol.

The elevator doors opened on a ten-by-twelve foyer paneled in honey-toned, figured anigre. Deserted.

Ethan didn’t holster his weapon. Identical doors served two penthouse units, and he went directly to the Whistler apartment.

With the key provided by Dunny’s attorney, he unlocked the door, eased it open, and entered cautiously.

The security alarm was not engaged. On his most recent visit, eight days ago, Ethan had set the alarm when he’d left.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Hernandez, had visited in the interim. Before Dunny landed in a hospital, in a coma, she had worked here three days a week; but now she came only on Wednesday.

In all likelihood, Mrs. Hernandez had forgotten to enter the alarm code when she’d departed last week. Yet as likely as this explanation might be, Ethan didn’t believe it. Juanita Hernandez was a responsible woman, methodically attentive to detail.

Just inside the threshold, he stood listening. He left the door open at his back.

Rain drummed on the roof, a distant rumble like the marching feet of legions gone to war in some far, hollow kingdom.

Otherwise, only silence rewarded his keen attention. Maybe instinct warned him or maybe imagination misled him, but he sensed that this was not a slack silence, that it was instead a coiled quiet as full of potential energy as a cobra, rattler, or black mamba.

Because he preferred not to draw the attention of a neighbor and didn’t want to facilitate any exit but his own, he closed the door. Locked it.

From scams, from drugs, from worse, Duncan Whistler had made himself rich. Criminals routinely grab big money, but few keep it or keep the freedom to spend it. Dunny had been clever enough to avoid arrest, to launder his money, and to pay his taxes.

Consequently, his apartment was enormous, with two connecting hallways, rooms leading into rooms, rooms that ordinarily did not spiral as they seemed to spiral now like nautilus shell into nautilus shell.

Searching in a hostile situation of the usual kind, Ethan would have proceeded with both hands on the gun, with arms out straight, maintaining a measured pressure on the trigger. He would have cleared doorways quick and low.

Instead, he gripped the pistol in his right hand, aimed at the ceiling. He proceeded cautiously but not with the full drama inherent in police-academy style.

To keep his back always to a wall, to avoid turning his back to a doorway, to move fast while scanning left-right-left, to be ever aware of his footing, of the need to stay sufficiently well balanced to assume, in an instant, a shooting stance: Doing all that, he would have had to admit that he was afraid of a dead man.

And there was the truth. Evaded, now acknowledged.

The claustrophobia in the elevator and the expectation that he would find Rolf Reynerd on the fifth floor had been nothing but attempts to deflect himself from consideration of his true fear, from the even less rational conviction that dead Dunny had risen from the morgue gurney and had wandered home with unknowable intent.

Ethan didn’t believe that dead men could walk.

He doubted that Dunny, dead or alive, would harm him.

His anxiety arose from the possibility that Duncan Whistler, if indeed he’d left the hospital garden room under his own power, might be Dunny in name only. Having nearly drowned, having spent three months in a coma, he might be suffering brain damage that made him dangerous.

Although Dunny had his good qualities, not least of all the sense to recognize in Hannah a woman of exceptional virtues, he had been capable of ruthless violence. His success in the criminal life had not resulted from polished people skills and a nice smile.

He could break heads when he needed to break them. And sometimes he’d broken them when skull cracking wasn’t necessary.

If Dunny were half the man that he’d once been, and the
wrong
half, Ethan preferred not to come face to face with him. Over the years, their relationship had taken peculiar turns; one final and still darker twist in the road could not be ruled out.

The huge living room featured high-end contemporary sofas and chairs, upholstered in wheat-colored silk. Tables, cabinets, and decorative objects were all Chinese antiques.

Either Dunny had discovered a genie-stuffed lamp and had wished himself exquisite taste, or he’d employed a pricey interior designer.

Here high above the olive trees, the big windows revealed the buildings across the street and a sky that looked like the soggy char and ashes of a vast, extinguished fire.

Outside: a car horn in the distance, the low somber grumble of traffic up on Wilshire Boulevard.

The June-bug jitter, scarab click, tumblebug tap of the beetle-voiced rain spoke at the window,
click-click-click.

In the living room, stillness distilled. Only his breathing. His heart.

Ethan went into the study to seek the source of a soft light.

On the chinoiserie desk stood a bronze lamp with an alabaster shade. The buttery-yellow glow struck iridescent colors from the border of mother-of-pearl inlays.

Previously a framed photograph of Hannah had been displayed on the desk. It was missing.

Ethan recalled his surprise on discovering the photo during his first visit to the apartment, eleven weeks ago, after he had learned that he held authority over Dunny’s affairs.

Surprise had been matched by dismay. Although Hannah had been gone for five years, the presence of the picture seemed to be an act of emotional aggression, and somehow an insult to her memory that she should be an object of affection—and once an object of desire—to a man steeped in a life of crime and violence.

Ethan had left the photograph untouched, for even with a power of attorney covering all of Dunny’s affairs, he had felt that the picture in the handsome silver frame hadn’t been his property either to dispose of or to claim.

At the hospital on the night of Hannah’s death, again at the funeral, following twelve years of estrangement, Ethan and Dunny had spoken. Their mutual grief had not, however, brought them together otherwise. They had not exchanged a word for three years.

On the third anniversary of Hannah’s passing, Dunny had phoned to say that over those thirty-six months, he had brooded long and hard on her untimely death at thirty-two. Gradually but profoundly, the loss of her—just knowing that she was no longer out there somewhere in the world—had affected him, had changed him forever.

Dunny claimed that he was going to go straight, extract himself from all his criminal enterprises. Ethan had not believed him, but had wished him luck. They had never spoken again.

Later, he heard through third parties that Dunny had gotten out of the life, that old friends and associates never saw him anymore, that he had become something of a hermit, bookish and withdrawn.

With those rumors, Ethan had taken enough salt to work up a thirst for truth. He remained certain that eventually he would learn Duncan Whistler had fallen back into old habits—or had never truly forsaken them.

Later still, he heard that Dunny had returned to the Church, attended Mass each week, and carried himself with a humility that had never before characterized him.

Whether this was true or not, the fact remained that Dunny had held fast to the fortune that he amassed through fraud, theft, and dealing drugs. Living in luxury paid for with such dirty money, any genuinely reformed man might have been racked with guilt until at last he put his riches to a cleansing use.

More than the photograph of Hannah had been taken from the study. An atmosphere of bookish innocence was gone, as well.

A double score of hardcover volumes were stacked on the floor, in a corner. They had been removed from two shelves of the wall-to-wall bookcase.

One of the shelves, which had seemed to be fixed like all the others, had been removed. A section of the bookcase backing, which also had appeared fixed, had been slid aside, revealing a wall safe.

The twelve-inch diameter door of the safe stood open. Ethan felt inside. The spacious box proved empty.

He hadn’t known that the study contained a safe. Logic suggested that no one but Dunny—and the installer—would have been aware of its existence.

Brain-damaged man dresses himself. Finds his way home. Remembers the combination to his safe.

Or…dead man comes home. In a mood to party, he picks up some spending money.

Dunny dead made nearly as much sense as Dunny with severe brain damage.