The Face (21 page)

CHAPTER 34

E
THAN DRANK SCOTCH WITHOUT EFFECT FOR his metabolism seemed to have been dramatically accelerated by the experience of his own death twice in one day.

This hotel bar, with its crowd of self-polished glitterati, was a favorite of Channing Manheim’s, a haunt from the early days of his career. In ordinary circumstances, however, Ethan would have chosen a joint without this flash, and with a comforting soaked-in-beer smell.

The few other bars familiar to him were frequented by off-duty cops. The prospect of running into an old friend from the force, on this evening of all evenings, daunted him.

During just one minute of conversation with any brother in the badge, regardless of how artfully Ethan tried to wear a happy face, he’d reveal himself to be deeply troubled. Then no self-respecting cop would be able to resist working him, either subtly or obviously, for the source of his worry.

Right now he didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him. He wanted to
think
about it.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He would have preferred denial to thought. Just forget it had happened. Turn away from it. Block the memory and get drunk.

Denial wasn’t an option, however, not with the three silvery bells from the ambulance glimmering on the bar beside his glass of Scotch. He might as well try to deny the existence of Big Foot with a Sasquatch sitting on his face.

So he had no choice but to dwell on what had happened, which led him immediately into an intellectual dead end. He not only didn’t know what to think about these weird events, he also didn’t know
how
to think about them.

Obviously he had not been shot in the gut by Rolf Reynerd. Yet he intuitively knew the lab report would confirm that the blood under his fingernails was his own.

The experience of being run down in traffic and broken beyond repair remained so vivid, his memory of paralysis so horrifically detailed, that he could not believe he had merely imagined all of it under the influence of a drug administered without his knowledge.

Ethan asked the bartender for another round, and as the Scotch splashed over fresh ice into a clean glass, he pointed to the bells and said, “You see these?”

“I love that old song,” the bartender said.

“What song?”

“‘Silver Bells.’”

“So you see them?”

The bartender cocked one eyebrow. “Yeah. A set of three little bells. How many sets do you see?”

Ethan’s mouth cracked into a smile that he hoped looked less demented than it felt. “Just one. Don’t worry. I’m not going to be a danger on the highway.”

“Really? Then you’re unique.”

Yeah,
Ethan thought,
I’m nothing if not unique. I’ve died twice today, but I’m still able to handle my booze,
and he wondered how quickly the bartender would snatch the drink from him if he spoke those words aloud.

He sipped the Scotch, seeking clarity from inebriation, since he couldn’t find any clarity in sobriety.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, still cold sober, he caught sight of Dunny Whistler in the back-bar mirror.

Ethan spun on his stool, slopping Scotch from his glass.

Threading his way among the tables, Dunny had almost reached the door. He was not a ghost: A waitress paused to let him pass.

Ethan got to his feet, remembered the bells, snatched them off the bar, and hurried toward the exit.

Some patrons were visiting from table to table, standing in the aisles. Ethan had to resist the urge to shove them aside. His “Excuse me” had such a sharp edge that people bristled, but the expression on his face at once made them choke on their unvoiced reprimands.

By the time Ethan stepped out of the bar, Dunny had vanished.

Hurrying into the adjacent lobby, Ethan saw guests standing at the registration desk, others at the concierge desk, people walking toward the elevator alcove. Dunny wasn’t among them.

To Ethan’s left, the marble-clad lobby opened to an enormous drawing room furnished with sofas and armchairs. There, guests could attend high tea every afternoon; and at this later hour, drinks were being served to those who preferred an atmosphere gentler than that in the bar.

At a glance, Dunny Whistler couldn’t be seen among the crowd in the drawing room.

Nearer, to Ethan’s right, the revolving door at the hotel’s main entrance was slowly turning to a stop, as though someone had recently gone in or out, but its quadrants were deserted now.

He pushed through the door, into the night chill under the roof of the porte-cochere.

Sheltering their charges with umbrellas, the doorman and a busy squad of parking valets escorted visitors to and from arriving and departing vehicles. Cars, SUVs, and limousines jostled for position in the crowded hotel-service lanes.

Dunny wasn’t standing with those who were waiting for their cars. Nor did he appear to be hurrying through the downpour in the company of any of the escorts.

Several Mercedes in various dark colors idled among the other vehicles, but Ethan was pretty sure none of them was Dunny’s wheels.

The ring of his cell phone might not have been audible above the chatter of the people under the porte-cochere, the car engines, and the hiss and sizzle of the drizzling night. Set for a silent signal, however, it vibrated in a jacket pocket.

Still surveying the night for Dunny, he answered the phone.

Hazard Yancy said, “I’ve got to see you right now, man, and it’s got to be somewhere the elite don’t meet.”

CHAPTER 35

D
UNNY TAKES THE HOTEL ELEVATOR UP TO THE fourth floor in the company of an elderly couple. They hold hands as though they are young lovers.

Overhearing the word “anniversary,” Dunny asks how long they have been married.

“Fifty years,” the husband says, aglow with pride that his bride has chosen to spend most of her life with him.

They are from Scranton, Pennsylvania, here in Los Angeles to celebrate their anniversary with their daughter and her family. The daughter has paid for the hotel honeymoon suite, which is, according to the wife, “so fancy we’re afraid to sit on the furniture.”

From L.A., they’ll fly to Hawaii, just the two of them, for a romantic week-long idyll in the sun.

They are unaffected, sweet, clearly in love. They have built a life of the kind that Dunny for so long disdained, even mocked.

In recent years, he’s come to want their brand of happiness more than anything else. Their devotion and commitment to each other, the family they have built, the life of mutual striving, the memories of shared challenges and hard-won triumphs: Here is what matters, in the end, not the things that he has pursued with single-minded strategy and brutal tactics. Not power, not money, not thrills, not control.

He has tried to change, but he’s gone too far along a solitary road to be able to turn back and find the companionship for which he yearns. Hannah is five years gone. Only when she had been on her deathbed had he realized that she’d been the best chance he’d ever had of finding his way from the wrong road to the right one. As a young hothead, he had rejected her counsel, had believed that power and money were more important to him than she was. The shock of her early death forced him to face the hard truth that he’d been wrong.

Only on this strange, rainy day has he come to understand that she was also his
last
chance.

For a man who once believed that the world was clay from which he could make what he wished, Dunny has arrived at a difficult place. He has lost all power, for nothing he does now can change his life.

Of the money he withdrew from the wall safe in his study, he still has twenty thousand dollars. He could give ten of it to this elderly couple from Scranton, tell them to stay a full month in blue Hawaii, to dine well and drink well, with his blessings.

Or he could stop the elevator and kill them.

Neither act would change his future in any meaningful way.

He bitterly envies their happiness. There would be a certain savage satisfaction in robbing them of their remaining years.

Whatever else may be wrong with him—the list of his faults and corruptions is long—he can’t kill solely out of envy. Pride alone prevents him, more than mercy.

On the fourth floor, their accommodations are at the opposite end of the hotel from his. He wishes them well and watches them walk away, hand-in-hand.

Dunny is using the presidential suite. This grand space has been booked on a twelve-month basis by Typhon, who will not be needing it for the next few days, as business will take him elsewhere.

Presidential
implies an understated democratic grandeur. These large rooms are so rich and so sensual, however, that they are less suitable for a steward of democracy than for royalty or demigods.

Inlaid marble floors, Oushak rugs in tones of gold and red and apricot and indigo, bubinga paneling soaring sixteen feet to coffered ceilings…

Dunny wanders room to room, moved by humanity’s desire to make beautiful its habitat and thereby bravely to deny that the roughness of the world must be endured. Every palace and every work of art is only dust as yet unrealized, and time is the patient wind that will wither it away. Nevertheless, men and women have given great thought, effort, and care to making these rooms appealing, because they hope, against all evidence, that their lives have meaning and that in their talents lies a purpose larger than themselves.

Until two years ago, Dunny never knew this hope. Three years of anguish over her loss, ironically, made him
want
to believe in God.

Gradually, during the years following her funeral, an unexpected hope grew in him, desperate and fragile but enduring. Yet he remains too much the old Dunny, mired in old habits of thought and action.

Hope is a cloudy radiance. He has not learned how to distill it into something pure, clear, more powerful.

And now he never will.

In the master bedroom, he stands at a rain-washed window, gazing northwest. Beyond the storm-blurred city lights, beyond the lushly landscaped and mansioned slopes of Beverly Hills, lies Bel Air and Palazzo Rospo, that foolish yet nonetheless brave monument to hope. All who ever owned it have died—or will.

He turns from the window and stares at the bed. The maid has removed the spread, turned down the sheets, and left a tiny gold box on one of the pillows.

The box holds four bonbons. Elegantly formed and decorated, they appear to be delicious, but he doesn’t sample them.

He could call any of several beautiful women to share the bed with him. Some would expect money; others would not. Among them are women for whom sex is an act of love and grace, but also women who revel in their own debasement. The choice is his, any tenderness or any thrill that he desires.

He cannot recall the taste of the oysters or the bouquet of the Pinot Grigio. The memory has no savor, offers less stimulation to his senses than might a photograph of oysters and wine.

None of the women he could call would leave a greater impression than the food and drink that, still settling in him, seems to be a meal imagined. The silken texture of their skin, the smell of their hair would not linger with him past the moment when, in leaving, they closed the door behind them.

He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.

CHAPTER 36

E
THAN AND HAZARD MET IN A CHURCH, FOR at this hour on a Monday night, the pews were empty, and no chance whatsoever existed that they would be seen here together by politicians, by members of the Officer Involved Shooting team, or by other authorities.

In the otherwise deserted nave, they sat side by side in a pew, near a side aisle where neither the overhead nor the footpath lights were aglow, veiled in shadows. The stale but pleasant spice of long-extinguished incense perfumed air as still as that in a sealed jar.

They spoke less in conspiratorial whispers than in the hushed voices of men humbled by awesome experience.

“So I told the OIS team I went to see Reynerd to ask about his friend Jerry Nemo, who happens to be a suspect in the murder of this coke peddler name of Carter Cook.”

“They believe you?” Ethan asked.

“They seem like they want to. But suppose tomorrow I get a lab report that superglues Blonde in the Pond to that city councilman I told you about.”

“That girl dumped in the sewage plant.”

“Yeah. So the bastard councilman will start looking for a way to get at me. If any guys on the OIS team can be bought or blackmailed, they’ll turn that homey hit man with the coke-spoon earring into a crippled choirboy who got shot in the back, and my mug will be on the front pages under the nine-letter headline.”

Ethan knew what the nine-letter headline would be—KILLER COP—because they had talked about the power of anti-cop prejudice over the years. When a dirty politician and the sensation-hungry press discovered a shared agenda in any case, truth was stretched tighter than the skin of any Hollywood dowager with four face-lifts, and the blindfold over Lady Justice’s eyes was ripped away and shoved into her mouth to shut her up.

Hazard hunched forward, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped almost as if in prayer, staring at the altar. “The media love this councilman. His rep is he’s a reformer, got all the right sympathies and positions on the issues. They ought to love me, too, ’cause I’m so lovable, but that crowd would rather cut off their lips than kiss a cop. If they see a chance to save him by crucifying me, every hardware store in the city will be sold out of nails.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“You couldn’t know some fool would whack Reynerd.” Hazard turned his gaze from the altar, and his eyes met Ethan’s as though searching for the Judas taint: “Could you?”

“Some ways this looks bad for me.”

“Some ways,” Hazard agreed. “But even you aren’t dumb enough to work for some movie-star asshole who settles business like he’s a rap-music mogul.”

“Manheim doesn’t know about Reynerd or the black boxes. And if he did know, he’d figure all Reynerd needed to improve his psychology was a little aromatherapy.”

“But there
is
something you’re not telling me,” Hazard pressed.

Ethan shook his head, but not in denial. “Oh, man, this has been one long day in a monkey barrel.”

“For one thing, Reynerd was sitting on his sofa between two bags of potato chips. Turns out he kept a loaded piece in each bag.”

“Yet when the shooter rang the bell, Reynerd answered the door unarmed.”

“Maybe ’cause he figured I was the true threat, and already through the door. My point is you were right about the potato chips.”

“Like I told you, a neighbor said he was paranoid, kept a pistol close to him, stashed it in odd places like that.”

“The talky neighbor—that’s bullshit,” Hazard said. “There was no talky neighbor. You knew some other way.”

They were at a crossroads of trust and suspicion. Unless Ethan spilled more than he had revealed thus far, Hazard wasn’t going to follow him one step farther. Their friendship would not be finished, but without greater disclosure, it would never be the same.

“You’re gonna think I’m mental,” Ethan said.

“Already do.”

Ethan inhaled more incense, exhaled inhibition, and told Hazard about being shot in the gut by Reynerd, opening his eyes to discover he wasn’t shot after all, and in the absence of a wound, nevertheless finding blood under his fingernails.

Throughout all this, Hazard’s eyes neither swam out of focus nor shifted toward some far point of the church, as they would have done if he’d decided that Ethan was either jiving or psychotic. Only when Ethan finished did Hazard look down at his folded hands again.

Eventually the big man said, “Well, for sure I’m not sitting here beside a ghost.”

“When you choose an institution for me,” Ethan said, “I’d prefer one with a good arts-and-crafts program.”

“Other than having your blood tested for drugs, you cooked up any theories about this?”

“You mean, besides I’m in the Twilight Zone? Or I really did die from that gut shot, and this is Hell?”

Hazard took the point. “Aren’t a whole lot of theories come to mind, are there?”

“Not the kind you can explore with what the suits at the police academy call ‘conventional investigative techniques.’”

“You don’t seem nuts to me,” Hazard said.

“I don’t seem nuts to me, either. But then the nut is always the last to know.”

“Besides, you were right about the pistol in the potato chips. So it was at least like…a psychic experience.”

“Clairvoyance, yeah. Except that doesn’t explain the blood under my nails.”

Hazard had absorbed this bizarre revelation with quiet trust and remarkable equanimity.

Nevertheless, Ethan had no intention of telling him about being run down by the PT Cruiser and the truck. Or about dying in the ambulance.

If you reported having seen a ghost, you were a regular guy who’d had an uncanny experience. If you reported seeing
another
ghost at another place and time, you were at best an eccentric whose every statement would thereafter be taken with enough salt to crust the rims of a million margarita glasses.

“The shooter who killed Reynerd,” Hazard said, “was a gangbanger called himself Hector X. Real name was Calvin Roosevelt. He’s a high cuzz in the Crips, so you figure his accomplice must’ve been driving a set of wheels they boosted right before the hit.”

“Standard,” Ethan agreed.

“But there’s no stolen-car report on the Benz they used. I got the number on the tags, and you won’t believe who it belongs to.”

Hazard looked up from his folded hands. He met Ethan’s eyes.

Although Ethan didn’t know what was coming, he knew it couldn’t be good. “Who?”

“Your boyhood pal. The notorious Dunny Whistler.”

Ethan didn’t look away. He didn’t dare. “You know what happened to him a few months ago.”

“Some guys drowned him in a toilet, but he didn’t quite die.”

“Few days after that, his lawyer contacted me, told me Dunny’s will named me executor, and his
living
will gives me the right to make medical decisions for him.”

“You never mentioned this.”

“Didn’t see any reason. You know what he was. You understand why I didn’t want him in my life. But I accepted the situation out of…I don’t know…because of what he meant to me when we were kids.”

Hazard nodded. He withdrew a roll of hard caramels from a coat pocket, peeled back the wrapping, and offered to share.

Ethan shook his head. “Dunny died this morning at Our Lady of Angels.”

Hazard pried a caramel from the roll, popped it in his mouth.

“They can’t find his body,” Ethan said, for suddenly he sensed that Hazard already knew all this.

Carefully folding the loose end of the wrapper over the exposed candy, Hazard said nothing.

“They swear he was dead,” Ethan continued, “but considering how things work at the hospital morgue, he couldn’t have gotten out of there any way but on his own two feet.”

Hazard returned the roll to his coat pocket. He sucked on the caramel, moving it around his mouth.

“I’m sure he’s alive,” Ethan said.

Finally Hazard looked at him again. “All this happened before we had lunch.”

“Yeah. Listen, man, I didn’t mention it because I didn’t see how Dunny could be connected to Reynerd. I
still
don’t see how. Do you?”

“You were one self-possessed dude at lunch, considering all this was churning through your head.”

“I thought I was going crazy, but I didn’t see how you’d be more likely to help me if I virtually
told
you I was losing my mind.”

“So what happened
after
lunch?”

Ethan recounted his visit to Dunny’s apartment, leaving nothing out except the strange elusive shape in the steam-clouded mirror.

“Why’d he keep a photo of Hannah on his desk?” Hazard asked.

“He’d never gotten over her. Still hasn’t. I guess that’s why he ripped it out of the frame today and took it with him.”

“So he drives out of the garage in his Mercedes—”

“I assumed it was him. I couldn’t get a look at the driver.”

“And then what?”

“I had to think about it. Then I visited Hannah’s grave.”

“Why?”

“Gut feeling. Thought I might find something there.”

“And what did you find?”

“Roses.” He told Hazard about the two dozen Broadways and his subsequent visit to Forever Roses. “The florist described Dunny as good as I could’ve. That’s when I was sure he was alive.”

“What’d he mean when he told her that you thought he was dead—and you were right?”

“I don’t know.”

Hazard crunched the half-finished caramel.

“You can break a tooth that way,” Ethan warned.

“Like that’s my biggest problem.”

“Just friendly advice.”

“Whistler wakes up in a morgue, realizes he’s been mistaken for dead, so then he puts his clothes on, goes home without saying boo to anyone, takes a shower. That make sense to you?”

“No. But I thought he might be brain-damaged.”

“He drives to a florist, buys some roses, visits a grave, hires a hit man…. For a guy who comes out of a coma with brain damage, he seems to get around pretty well.”

“I’ve given up the brain-damage theory.”

“Good for you. So what happened after you left the florist?”

Operating on the two-ghost theory of credibility, Ethan didn’t tell him about the PT Cruiser, but said, “I went to a bar.”

“You’re not a guy who looks for answers in a glass of gin.”

“This was Scotch. Didn’t find any answers there either. Might try vodka next.”

“So that’s everything? You’ve come clean with me now?”

With all the conviction that he could muster, Ethan said, “What—this whole mess isn’t
X-Files
enough already? You want there should be some aliens in it, vampires, werewolves?”

“What’re you—dodging the question?”

“I’m not dodging anything,” Ethan said, regretting that he was going to be forced to lie boldly rather than by indirection. “Yeah, that was everything, through the flower shop. I was drinking Scotch when I got your call.”

“Truth?”

“Yeah. I was drinking Scotch, I got your call.”

“Remember, you’re in a church here.”

“The whole world’s a church if you’re a believer.”

“Are you a believer?”

“I used to be.”

“Not since Hannah died, huh?”

Ethan shrugged. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. It’s a day-to-day thing.”

After giving him a look that could have peeled an onion layer by layer to the pearl at the core, Hazard said, “Okay. I believe you.”

Feeling low enough to slide under a snake, Ethan said, “Thanks.”

Hazard turned in the pew to survey the nave, to be sure that a lost soul had not entered in need of a God fix. “You’ve come clean, so I’ll tell you something, but you’ve got to forget you heard it.”

“Already I don’t even remember being here.”

“Not much of interest in Reynerd’s apartment. Spare furnishings, everything black-and-white.”

“He seemed to live like a monk, but a monk with style.”

“And drugs. He had a big stash of coke packaged for resale and a notebook of names and numbers that’s probably a customer list.”

“Famous names?”

“Not really. Some actors. Nobody big. The thing you need to know about is the screenplay he was writing.”

“In this town,” Ethan said, “guys writing screenplays outnumber those cheating on their wives.”

“He had twenty-six pages in a pile beside his computer.”

“That’s not even enough for a first act.”

“You know about screenplays, huh? You writing one?”

“No. I’ve still got some self-respect.”

Hazard said, “Reynerd was writing about this young actor goes to a special acting class, makes what he calls ‘a deep intellectual connection’ with his professor. They both hate this character named Cameron Mansfield, who happens to be the biggest movie star in the world, so they decide to kill him.”

Under a weight of weariness, Ethan had slouched in the corner of the pew. Now he sat up straight. “What’s their motivation?”

“That’s not clear. Reynerd has lots of handwritten notes in the margin, trying to figure that out. Anyway, sort of to prove to each other that they’ve got the guts to do this, each agrees to give the other guy the name of someone to kill
before
they do the movie star together. The actor wants the professor to kill his mother.”

“Why’s this sound so Hitchcock?” Ethan wondered.

“It’s sort of like his old film,
Strangers on a Train
. The idea is by swapping killings, each guy can have a perfect alibi for the murder he might otherwise be convicted of.”

“Let me guess. Reynerd’s mother was actually murdered.”

“Four months ago,” Hazard confirmed. “On a night when her son had an alibi more airtight than a space-shuttle window.”

The church seemed to turn at a lazy six or eight revolutions per minute, as if the Scotch might be having a delayed effect on Ethan, but he knew this vertigo was caused less by the Scotch than by these latest weird revelations. “What kind of idiot does these things, then writes them up in a screenplay?”

“An arrogant idiot actor. Don’t tell me you think he’s unique.”

“And who did the professor want Reynerd to kill?”

“A colleague at the university. But Reynerd hadn’t written that part yet. He’d just completed the scene featuring the murder of his mother. In real life, her name was Mina, and she was shot once in the right foot and then beaten to death with a marble-and-bronze lamp. In the script, her name’s Rena, and she’s stabbed repeatedly, beheaded, dismembered, and incinerated in a furnace.”