The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (27 page)

“You know I have a jeep?”

“I've been following you, remember? It was easy. You were totally oblivious.”

“I don't get oblivious,” I said, but even I knew it was a lie.

We got into my jeep and I drove us back downtown. I parked in the street up the block from my building. I didn't want him to know where I usually parked the jeep. I got out and put some money in the meter.

“Why are you parking here?” he asked. So he already knew where I usually parked.

“Why not?” I walked away. A moment later he fell in beside me. We didn't speak again as we entered my building, waited for the elevator, rode it up to the third floor, got to my door, and went inside.

“Have a seat, Frank,” I said.

I sat down behind my desk and pushed the button on my phone answering machine.

“Brian?” Elsie Wallace. I jerked up my hand to hit the button to make it skip to the next message.

“Too late,” Frank said. He got up, but before he could stalk over and loom over me, I hit the rewind and then the play and Elsie said, “Brian? Frank knows I hired you to follow him. And I don't care! You just keep following him! If he'd just talk to me I wouldn't have to do this. You know? If he'd just talk to me. Don't let him scare you off, Brian. Oh, I don't know. Call me. I may just leave him. Who cares what he's up to?”

“It sounds to me like you should go home and talk to her, Frank,” I said.

He made a noncommittal sound and looked away.

I played my other message. “Yuri here. I forgot it's Sunday on the outside. We won't be ready at GP Ink until at least noon tomorrow. We already posted an announcement about the delay.”

Frank was on his feet when I looked back up at him.

“You guys are amazing,” he said. “You think the killer's going to play by your rules? Your trap isn't ready, so you say, hey, wait until we get things set up.” He turned and walked toward the door.

“So, help us out, Frank,” I said.

He opened the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” he said.

twenty-one

Monday morning was cool and gray, the kind of morning you'd like to stay in and watch the rain run down the windowpanes. I puttered around the office gathering disguise supplies—hair and noses, scars and bruises, the glasses Dennis always wore, a versatile outfit for Lulu. With careful packing, all of us fit into a small overnight bag. Who knew how long it would take to catch the Documentalist Killer? Days? Weeks? I didn't want to be caught short waiting for him to show up.

I grabbed my hat and locked up the office. Outside the lazy drizzle wasn't serious enough to make it worth the trouble to open my umbrella. I noticed the pink
TOFU
sign atop the Baltimore building looked especially bright and cheerful against the gray sky. Maybe that was a good omen.

Last time I'd been at the Baltimore, I'd been Dennis in a janitor disguise and I'd slipped in through the service entrance. Today, someone else was using that side entrance in the alley. A big truck was parked in there, and men were moving furniture and boxes up and down the ramp in back. It looked like some of the men were moving stuff in and others were moving stuff out.

I walked into the alley. The sign on the side of the truck said
VOLGA OFFICE SUPPLY
. I ducked into the building and got on the service elevator with one of the movers, a young guy in a clean white overall and a Bud cap. The name “Jim” was stitched in red above his top pocket. He glanced at my overnight bag then looked away.

“Three seventeen?” I asked.

“Right,” he said. Was that an accent in disguise? Did Jim look entirely comfortable in his clothes? What about that suspicious bulge under his left arm?

“Me too,” I said.

He didn't have anything to say to that, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.

There was a lot of activity in the GP Ink offices. It was hard to tell what was going out and what was coming in. The desks in the back office were already gone, replaced by a couple of folding cots. A square of four TV monitors had been set up along one wall.

Men carried boxes in and stacked them in the back office. A couple of guys carried a dull green trunk in. After conferring with someone else and puzzling over the paper taped to the trunk, they just pushed it up against the wall in the front office.

There was a guy on his knees pushing wires through the wall in the back office and another guy out in front pulling them through.

I was mostly ignored. Didn't anyone worry I might be the killer casing the joint? Maybe they knew who I was. Sure they did. I stood around pretending it mattered how I thought the work was proceeding, like someone might ask, “Hey, do you think this would look better here or over there?”

After a few minutes of stepping out of the way, I concluded it would be better to come back later.

On the mall again, I decided that since I was no longer addicted, I might as well have a cup of coffee and got a medium house from an espresso cart. I sat down on a bench where I could keep an eye on the movers. The coffee was very good. I'd forgotten how a cup of coffee seems to wake up all the muscles in your face. Makes you want to get up and stretch. I could see how a guy might want to have more than one cup of the stuff.

I was working on a refill when Frank sat down beside me.

“Thought you'd already be up there hiding in a closet or something,” he said.

“How's Elsie?”

“None of your business,” he said.

“We're still getting stuff set up in there,” I said. “It looks to me like you're getting into the spirit of our little trap.”

“I may still zap it,” he said. “Or maybe I'll just put our people on it.”

“Lots of luck. Any of your people know squat about documentalists?”

“I think you're the only one in the whole world who even uses the word ‘documentalist,'” he said. “People looked at me like I was an idiot when I used it.”

“So, there you go,” I said.

“Why are you out here, Brian?”

“I went up,” I said. “They're not done. I just felt like I was in the way.”

“That's the difference between us.” He stood up. I looked up at him. “I won't be in the way.”

I crushed my coffee cup and tossed it in the recycle barrel and stood up. “This way.”

I led Frank through the alley to the service entrance. We rode the elevator in silence—him looking up to the right, me looking up to the left. No whistling.

The men coming and going seemed to be mostly going now. In fact, by the time we got to room 317, there were only a couple of guys still fooling with the surveillance equipment.

“Who's paying for all this?” Frank wanted to know.

“GP Ink would be my guess,” I said.

The electronics guys finished up and left. Frank and I stood around looking like we didn't know what to do next. A cleaning crew rescued us from that situation, gave us someone to watch. Their shirts said
OFFICE COORDINATORS
. Two men and a woman. The men got busy dusting and mopping. The woman sat down at the desk and went to work on the computer.

“The new phone line seems to be working,” she said, as if we would know why we needed another phone line. She got up so one of us could check it out.

I sat down behind the desk. Frank moved to the window and stood at parade rest gazing down at the street below.

I logged on. Using the password Prudence had given me, I looked for e-mail at her BOD address. She'd given me the password so I could keep tabs on how BOD members were dealing with “Alice and Umberto.” My first thought had been, “Wow, I could learn a lot about Prudence Deerfield, maybe everything I'd always wanted to know, now that I had access to her e-mail.” My second thought was that she probably did her real business through an anonymous 4e4 account.

“Alice and Umberto” had generated quite a few responses already. Prudence and I would have to sit down and go through them together. When we replied, we'd be smug and condescending. We'd be insufferable. The idea was to piss the killer off. If the documentation itself didn't do it, maybe Prudence and her new customer Dennis could do it with attitude. No doubt there would be a war. No doubt it would get ugly. The degree of nastiness you can achieve during a flame war on-line is truly monumental.

The guys finished sprucing up. The woman hung a couple of cute cat posters. Then they left, too.

I was getting hungry. Maybe we could order a pizza.

“I guess you skipped lunch for this,” I said.

“The place has a funny smell,” Frank said without turning away from the window.

“Yeah, well, you know these old buildings,” I said. “What are you looking at out there?”

“Just now I watched Prudence Deerfield get out of the front seat of a Lexus,” he said. “The driver got out and spoke to her over the top of the car. A guy with dark hair, a little too long, wearing one of those goofy caps so popular with middle-aged bald guys.”

I didn't see any reason to tell Frank he'd probably been looking at Yuri Kost of Evil Empire Software.

“Ms. Deerfield stood looking up at this very window for a few moments, then she spoke to the driver and hurried across the street. The Lexus pulled off toward Seventh Avenue. She should be arriving any time now.”

He turned away from the window.

I wished I could warn Prudence that he was here. She seemed to be able to handle him a lot better in virtual reality. Frank probably had the upper hand out here. The good news was that she seemed to know that. Once she saw him, she'd play it cool.

“Somehow she's wrapped up in just about everything I do these days,” Frank said.

He didn't know the half of it, but I couldn't tell him the rest, so I didn't say anything. I got up, walked to the door, and slipped into the hall to meet Prudence.

A moment later the elevator arrived and she stepped out. I raised a hand and gave her a little wave. She smiled at me and walked briskly in my direction. She'd dressed up for this first day of business. She always looked good, but today I could see she was trying to look good. I couldn't say exactly how I knew that. This was your standard understated yellow miniskirt in that weird material you want to call plastic or vinyl. Open orange raincoat of the same material. Medium heels, a string of pearls.

“How does it look?” she asked.

“The outfit?”

“The office.”

I took her arm and slowed her down long enough to say, “Frank Wallace is here.” We entered the office together.

“Ms. Deerfield,” Frank said.

“Lieutenant Wallace.”

“Now that we're all identified,” I said, “what do you say we use the new phone line to order a pizza? I'm starved.”

“Anchovies,” Prudence said.

Frank made a face.

“Yetch,” I said.

“Okay, maybe tell them to put the anchovies on every third piece,” Prudence said.

“They'll love that,” I said. “What do you like, Frank?”

“I don't care,” he said. “No pineapple.”

“It sounds like you folks are conspiring to clog your arteries with junk food,” Marvin said from the doorway. For a big guy he sure could move quietly.

He came on in. He smiled at Prudence. He looked at Frank and then looked at me and then looked back at Frank. “So what do we have going?”

“Probably nonsense,” Frank said. He came away from the window and pulled up a chair and sat down.

I sat down behind the desk and poked around in the drawers for a phone book. No luck. I pulled the keyboard over and did a quick Web search and found a couple of local pizza places with home pages. One of them let me design my pizza graphically. It didn't let me put anchovies on every other slice, however, so I grouped the fish on about a quarter of the pie. Added a bunch of other stuff. Too much stuff. Started over. Finally came up with what I thought might please everyone. Typed in my credit card number.

“Pizza ordered,” I said.

Prudence had sat down in the other customer chair while I'd been building the pizza. Marvin stood looking around like he might just have to squat on the floor. Then he spotted the green trunk pushed up against the wall and sat down on that. It must have been strong. It didn't even sag under his considerable weight.

“So the idea is we're sitting here eating pizza,” Frank said, “and the killer comes in to kill Ms. Deerfield and we grab him. Have I got it right?”

“We don't really expect him today,” I said.

“You guys should have had this place cleaned up first,” Marvin said. “It stinks.”

“We did have it cleaned up,” I said.

Prudence turned to Frank. “All Sky needs to find out is the identity of the killer. Once he tells you that, I'll bet you can find physical evidence if you know where to look.”

“She's right, Frank,” I said. “All he has to do is tip his hand.”

Frank twisted around to look at Marvin on the trunk. “They want me to assign you to be the guy who jumps out of the closet and grabs the killer, Marvin.”

“I've heard worse ideas,” Marvin said.

Feeling restless, I got up and looked out the window. Traffic went by on the street below. The church way over on Oak rang its bells. I walked over to the two big filing cabinets and opened all the drawers one by one. They were all empty. I knew they would be. I'd gone through them the last time I'd been here. They'd still been in the inner office then. The movers had pushed them out here to make way for the surveillance equipment.

I stepped past Marvin and opened a door. It was a closet. I already knew it was a closet. I was just restless. I couldn't sit still.

“Hey,” I said, “the closet really is big enough for Marvin to hide in.”

“Very funny,” he said.

“Restrooms must be down the hall.” I closed the closet door.