About Face (31 page)

Kim took yet another step back, coming down from the platform. Her expression had turned to one of wounded and betrayed contempt.

Wendy saw it clearly. Before Kim could speak, Wendy struck first. “You hypocrite!” she cried, standing above Kim on the platform, snapping her arm out at her daughter. “After all I did for you. The sacrifice. You'd have just run off with him and left me in the dust. You should have taken care of your own mother first. But no, you had to grab for it all—the life I was supposed to have.”

“And you had to take it away from me.”

“What about
me
? You thought you could shed me like an old skin, didn't you? Well, I've got news, girlie. You don't belong in that world. You're no better than me.”

The cops had arrived by now. They parted the crowd, but when they got to the stage, they could see the drama had been spent. Kim turned away and began to sob quietly. Rupert led her back in the direction of the bar. I stayed near Brendon and the knife.

Wendy looked wildly for an exit, then rushed to the balustrade. Gary grabbed her as she tried to climb it. An officer cuffed her. Brendon pushed himself to his feet and went quietly.
Paramedics tended to Mike. A police sergeant got up on the platform and asked everyone to remain in the area. Statements would be taken.

I picked my way through the crowd to join Rupert and Kim. She managed a smile for me. “Are you all right?” I said.

“I'll make it,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder.

Connie approached and took Kim gently by the elbow. “Come with me. I'll help you talk to the police, then take you home.”

Trisha had her eye on them. She aimed a red fingernail at Kim and said, “You're under contract, young lady!”

“Leave her be!” Rupert commanded.

For once, Trisha seemed to listen. She spun and went to have her say with the sergeant.

Rupert extended a hand to me. “Congratulations,” he said. “I had a feeling about Brendon, but you followed through.”

I gave his hand a quick, reluctant shake. “We have unsettled business, Rupert. The Algoplex takeover. The way you use your associates to spy.”

He waved it off. “It will be settled, Bill. Trisha is the one you want for that sort of thing. I myself would be happy to go back to running Silicon Glamour just as it was—before her ambitions got out of hand.”

“So that means you'll cooperate,” I said. “Especially when it comes to Algoplex.”

He chuckled and looked down at my chest. I wondered what was funny. He reached over and removed a bit of pink mush from my vest.

“Salmon pâté,” he said, sniffing his finger. “A man of taste.”

Most of the consequences
had shaken out a few weeks later. Brendon was offered, and accepted, a manslaughter plea in exchange for testifying. The sample of the red streak the police lab had taken from Rod's arm matched Wendy's lipstick. Traces of his blood were found in her car. Using a good set of Wendy's fingerprints for comparison, the lab was able to match them with the fragmentary ones on the knife. She insisted on going to trial, anyway. The prosecutor was confident it would end in a second-degree murder conviction.

Wendy doggedly blamed Brendon and denied putting the knife in Alissa's bed. In truth, it was hard to figure why she should have framed her own daughter. One of the first people to call after the arrests and invite me to lunch was Connie Plush. She'd heard from Kim about my lunch with Erika, and offered to take me back to the Rotunda Room. I couldn't think of a reason to say no. I'd been in touch with Erika and had made the same offer to her, but she wanted to wait until the white streaks were purged from her skin. They were gradually disappearing, as Rupert and Connie had promised they would.

I asked Connie if she could explain Wendy's motives. What made her such a princess in the first place?

Connie tried to restrain a smirk, then said, “If the crown fits . . . No, seriously, that's how she thinks. Wendy is a cauldron of emotions. So are we all, but hers stay at full boil. She resented Alissa for so many things. Alissa was making her own way, starting at entry level. Wendy had never had the patience to do that. She was jealous of Alissa for taking a different path and for succeeding at it. She also despised Rod for the life he would provide Alissa.”

“I think what drove Wendy over the edge was the way he shut her out,” I said.

“I agree. With Alissa distancing herself, Wendy wanted desperately to draw her close. She planted the knife to make Alissa need her mother again. Wendy hoped it would draw Alissa out of hiding, and had good reason to believe a murder charge wouldn't stick to Alissa. In the meantime she'd be Alissa's best friend when her daughter was most in need.”

“That's twisted enough to make sense.”

“Wendy lives in a perpetual desperation of her own making,” Connie said. “She suffers from the ‘I Should Have That' disease. It's endemic. Restless people spending criminally excessive amounts of money on toys and luxuries to fill a hole in themselves and create envy in others. Wendy shouldn't live in a place like Silicon Valley. She should be somewhere quiet.”

“She is now, if you count prison as quiet.”

“Just watch, she'll have more cigarettes than any inmate on her cell block.”

“She was dying to get Eternaderm,” I said. “You kind of make your money on people like Wendy, don't you?”

Connie looked stern for a minute. “Don't forget who's paying for lunch, Bill.” She smiled. “No, you're right. But we'll use a chunk of that money to develop treatments for rare diseases that
most drug companies ignore. I've promised that to Ellen. And I live in a reasonable manner. Ronald doesn't care for luxury, either; all he wants is the spotlight. I told you from the beginning, Bill, I know who I am. People like Wendy have no personal core. Aging is a part of nature, it's a part of life. We age and then we die. We can do it gracefully or with a lot of whining and complaining.”

I nodded. “Trisha bears some responsibility for Rod's murder, too,” I said. “She egged Wendy on by putting the idea that Rod was all to blame in her head. Not to mention the fact that she ran that whole racket of selling romance and intimacy for business purposes.”

“She was a genius at using male desires against themselves, I have to admit,” Connie replied. “You're right, she won't get the blame she deserves for Rod's death. But she got in over her head when it came to Sylvain and real business. Now that we know what we know about Sylvain and SG, Mike will be able to save Algoplex. I'm also confident I'll be able to pry Sylvain's tentacles off of my company. And as an added bonus, Trisha won't dare show her face at the next big social event.”

» » » » »

I visited Mike Riley in his office the next day. His convalescence was going well. He enjoyed describing his stab wound to me and detailing the gory aftermath. It beat all his rugby injuries put together. I declined an invitation to view the wound.

Mike marveled at how thoroughly he'd been taken in by Kim's magic act. He hadn't had a clue she was Alissa transformed. “But that's why we love 'em, right, Bill? They're always keeping us off balance.”

“Right. Have you got Sylvain where you want them now?”

“You bet I do. We've got enough on them and SG's spy techniques to force Sylvain to restructure the deal. In the long run, Connie and I will push Sylvain out altogether and line up new backers. It won't be hard once Eternaderm makes its big splash.”

Mike also told me, in a sensible tone this time, to send him an invoice. I did.

Rupert Evans called me a couple of weeks later. He reported that Trisha saw the clouds of investigation gathering and was about to order a pre-emptive disbanding of Sylvain and Silicon Glamour. This would give Plush and Algoplex even more leverage in dictating the terms of the exit. Trisha's energies were now directed toward scheming how to keep hold of her fortune, the one Sylvain had been created to enlarge. That would be a full-time job, Rupert said. As for himself, he was content to supervise the shutdown of Silicon Glamour and eventually resume the business—without the spying—under a new name. He was also going to sell his house to put some distance between himself and his sister.

I saw Kim a couple of times in the month before she left. She was moving to Oregon to start over. She'd have to come back for Wendy's trial, but she was eager to get out of the Valley. Just before her departure, we met again at Stanford. After we'd walked and talked for a while, she said good-bye with a kiss as warm and real as any I'd ever received. At last I caught a glimpse, if only fleeting, of the smile I'd seen in the photograph. She turned and I watched her leave, her long black raincoat swinging from side to side, on her way to a place where no one knew her and she could re-create herself from the ground up.

As I walked slowly back to the Scout, I stopped to watch some students play Ultimate Frisbee on a green field. The dirt under the grass was soft from winter rains; the longer I stood
still, the more the mud sucked at my feet. I thought back to Rod on that warm day, his pacing and his nervous hands. Alissa had been an apparition then, a ghostly figure who had never materialized. She remained an apparition and, I now knew, had always been. Just as the persona of “Erika” had been, just as Brendon's James Dean flair had been. Just as their clients used SG associates to make themselves look like studs.

I also understood now that the apparitions were not mere illusion, but magic. I'd been forced to reconsider my own binary code, the opposition between surface and depth. I'd always assumed depth was superior, the real thing. But what if it amounted to only one layer of skin after another? The idea was disorienting: I'd been taught it was a law of life that pretending didn't make it so. And yet I'd chosen a profession, filmmaking, that was all about faking it. Even in documentaries made to look “gritty,” the camera angle, composition, lighting, editing, and sound told you how to feel about the people on the screen.

In recent weeks I'd seen how people could cast a spell over others and, more important, over themselves. Alissa pretended to be enamored of Rod and then found that she was. Sylvain pretended to be a venture firm and found itself with controlling interest in several companies. Rod's code simulated how molecules interacted with real skin, and that's how they did. It seemed that if you pretended thoroughly enough, it might not matter whether your illusion was false: If it was powerful enough, it became reality.

I had talked about some of this to Kim. She'd replied that it was baloney. She'd reached a point where knowing the difference between glamour and actual beauty was essential. Wendy had pretended that life was obliged to give her what she wanted, and look where it got her. Alissa was buried, Kim told
me, and Cindy was a husk of the past. She was Kim now, starting from scratch. Yes, the identity was an adopted one, but after all she was pretty much an orphan now. She would hone the skills she possessed in Oregon and learn new ones. Take classes. Find a job. Build a life from the few materials she had at hand. Meet someone, if she was lucky, for whom she cared as much as she had Rod. Get married, buy a house, have children. But it would start with a single brick, as real and solid as she could make it.