The Face (40 page)

“Package delivered,” Mick said.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. The seeds have been planted in the phone-company, cable-company, and security-company computers. Later today, just when you want it to happen, everything will go down.”

“Without any more attention from you?”

Mick grinned. “Slick, huh?”

“Amazing,” Corky said.

Mick tipped his head back to take a long swallow of Coke, and Corky drew the Glock, and when Mick lowered his head again, Corky blew him away.

CHAPTER 67

T
HE PROFESSOR WHO HAD ORGANIZED THE ONE-DAY seminar on publicity and self-promotion was Dr. Robert Vebbler. He preferred to be called Dr. Bob, as he was known on the motivational-speaking circuit, where he promised to turn ordinary, self-doubting men and women into doubt-free dynamos of self-interest and superhuman achievement.

Ethan and Hazard found the professor on the mostly deserted campus, in his office, preparing for a January speaking tour. The walls of the two-room space were papered with portrait posters of Dr. Bob in a size popularized by Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

He had a shaved head, a handlebar mustache, a red-bronze tan that established his contempt for melanoma, and laser-whitened teeth brighter than irradiated piano keys. With the exception of his red snakeskin boots, everything he wore—as in the posters—was white, including his watch, which had a white band and a plain white face without any numbers or checks to indicate the hours.

Dr. Bob managed so successfully to turn the answer to every question into a mini-lecture on self-esteem and positive thinking that Ethan wanted Hazard to arrest him on charges of felony cliche and practicing philosophy without an idea.

He was just as quacky as Donald Duck, but he was no more a murderer than was that excitable mallard. He hungered to be famous, not infamous. Donald
had
on occasion attempted to kill Chip and Dale, that pair of pesky chipmunks, but Dr. Bob would instead motivate them to give up their rodent ways and become successful entrepreneurs.

He signed for Ethan and Hazard two paperback copies of his latest collection of motivational speeches and declared that he would be the first ever to pyramid a series of self-help books into a Nobel prize for literature.

By the time they escaped Dr. Bob’s office, located a trash can in which to ditch the paperbacks, and returned to the Expedition, the instrument-panel clock and Ethan’s watch showed a synchronized 3:41.

At five o’clock, the last of the household staff would leave for the day. Fric would be alone in Palazzo Rospo.

Ethan considered calling the guards in the security office at the back of the estate. One of them could go to the house and stay with the boy.

That would leave one man to monitor cameras and other detection systems, with no one to conduct the scheduled foot patrols. Ethan was reluctant to spread his resources thin in the current circumstances.

He continued to believe that Reynerd’s unknown partner, if still determined to act, would not do so until Thursday afternoon at the earliest, when the Face returned from the location shoot in Florida. Manheim’s whereabouts were public knowledge and much written about. Anyone sufficiently obsessed with the star to want to kill him would most likely know when he was expected to return to Bel Air.

Most likely…but not absolutely.

The element of doubt, and Hazard’s intuitive sense that they didn’t have until Thursday, troubled Ethan. He worried that someone would discover a way to penetrate the estate’s defenses, regardless of how tightly the grounds were sealed, and lie in wait undetected until Manheim’s return.

Even the most drum-tight security plan was a human enterprise, after all, and every human enterprise, due to the nature of the beast, was imperfect. A clever enough lunatic, driven by obsession and by a vicious homicidal impulse, could find a crack even in the wall of protection around a President of the United States.

From what Ethan knew of Reynerd, the man hadn’t been clever, but the person who had inspired the character of the professor in the screenplay might be a higher-caliber crackpot.

“You go home,” Hazard insisted as they drove off the university campus. “Drop me back at Our Lady of Angels so I can get my car, and I’ll check out the last two names myself.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“You’re not a real cop, anyway,” Hazard said. “You gave that all up for fortune and the chance to kiss celebrity ass. Remember?”

“You’re only in this on account of me.”

“Wrong. I’m in this because of these,” Hazard said, and rang the set of three silvery bells.

The sound resonated in the fluid of Ethan’s spine.

“Damn if I’m gonna have spooky shit like this in my life,” said Hazard, “or guys walking into mirrors. I’m gonna explain it somehow, blow all these hoodoo thoughts out of my head, and get back to being who I was, such as I was.”

The remaining two names were those of professors of American literature at yet another university. They had been put at the bottom of the list because Reynerd’s partial screenplay suggested that his co-conspirator would prove to be an acting teacher or an academic associated in some other way with the entertainment business. Stuffy professors of literature, lounging about in tweed coats with leather patches on the elbows, smoking pipes and discussing participles, did not seem likely to be celebrity stalkers or murderers.

“Anyway,” Hazard said, “I think maybe these two won’t pan out any better than the others.”

He read from notes made during phone calls that he had placed en route between Professor Fitzmartin at Cedars-Sinai and Dr. Bob.

The storm had somewhat relented. The wind that had cracked trees now merely worried them and made them shudder in expectation of a sudden resumption of the tempest.

Rain fell with a brisk measured efficiency but no longer with destructive force, as though a revolution in the heavens had turned out the ruling warriors in favor of businessmen.

“Maxwell Dalton,” Hazard continued after a moment. “Evidently he’s on leave or sabbatical from the university. The woman I spoke to was some holiday temp, not too clear, so I’m supposed to see Dalton’s wife. And the other is Vladimir Laputa.”

CHAPTER 68

C
ORKY REGRETTED WHAT HE HAD DONE TO Mick Sachatone’s face. A good friend deserved to be executed in a more dignified manner.

Because the Glock hadn’t been fitted with a sound suppressor, he had needed to make the first shot count. Maybe none of the nearest neighbors were home, and maybe if they were home, the rush of the rain would mask a single gunshot well enough to avoid piquing their interest. But a full barrage had been out of the question.

In Malibu, Corky had not wanted to suppress the fine voice of the pistol. The
bang
of each shot, punctuating the brittle chorus of the shattered porcelain figurines, had rattled Jack Trotter.

Although he had a silencer with him, the extended barrel did not permit the Glock to seat perfectly in his holster. Nor did the extra few inches allow for as smooth a draw as Corky preferred.

Besides, if poor Mick had seen the holstered Glock fitted with a sound suppressor, he might have been uneasy in spite of Corky’s nonchalance.

After holstering the pistol, Corky pulled on his black leather coat and withdrew a pair of latex surgical gloves from one pocket. He needed to avoid leaving fingerprints, of course, but in this shrine to the sinful hand, he was less concerned about the evidence that he might leave behind than about what he might pick up.

Elsewhere, shelving for videos overlaid windows, making a cave of the house, but in the work rooms, the dreary face of the fading day pressed against rain-dappled glass. Corky closed the drapes.

He needed time to search the house for Mick’s well-hidden cash reserves, which were most likely significant, as well as time to disconnect the computers and load them in the Land Rover to ensure that any information they contained about him would not fall into hostile hands. He would wrap the body in a tarp and haul it out of here, and then clean up the blood.

To avoid a homicide investigation that might, in spite of all his caution, lead back to him, Corky intended to make Mick disappear.

He could have instead saturated the place with gasoline and torched it to eliminate all evidence, as he had done at the narrow house of Brittina Dowd. The thousands of videocassettes would burn with intense heat, casting off great clouds of toxic smoke sufficient to foil firefighters. No clues would remain in the smoldering slag.

Yet he was loath to destroy the Sachatone archives of mindless lust, for this place was as great a monument to chaos as any that Corky had ever seen. This malignant mass sent forth vibrations with the power to spread dissolution and disorder as surely as a pile of plutonium issues deadly radiation against which, in time, no living thing can stand.

The search for Mick’s cash, the dismantling of his computers, and the removal of the pajamaed corpse would have to wait, however, until Aelfric Manheim had been snatched from the cozy lap of fame and imprisoned in the room currently occupied by Stinky Cheese Man. Corky would return here in twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile, he switched off the computers and the other active machines in the work rooms. Then he went through the house, top to bottom, to be sure that no electrical appliance would be left on that might overheat and start a small blaze, bringing the fire department to these rooms before the trove of money had been located and while the corpse still waited to be discovered.

In the living room again, Corky stood for a minute, watching the four-screen erotic contortions of the incomparable Janelle, before bringing darkness to the wall of writhing flesh. He wondered if Jack Trotter had taken advantage of her astonishing flexibility to fold her into a half-size grave and save himself some digging.

With Mick now gone, both the Romeo and Juliet of porn were dead. Sad.

Corky would have preferred not to kill Mick, but poor Mick had signed his own death warrant when he’d sold out Trotter. In a fever of jealousy, sick for revenge, he had revealed to Corky the numerous fake identities that he had over the years created for Trotter. If he would betray any client, he might have one day betrayed Corky, too.

Destroying the social order is lonely work.

Corky stepped onto the front porch and locked the door with Mick’s key, which he had taken from a pegboard in the kitchen.

The chill of the day had deepened.

For all the rinsing and wringing that it had undergone, the washrag sky was a dirtier gray than it had been this morning, and its light cast neither beam nor faintest shadow.

So much had happened since he had risen to face the day. But the best was yet to come.

CHAPTER 69

I
N THE KITCHEN, CONFERRING WITH MR. HACHETTE regarding dinner, Ethan found the chef barely communicative and stiff with anger that he flatly refused to explain. He would only say, “My statement on the matter is in the mail, Inspector Truman.” He would not describe the “matter” to which he referred. “It is in the mail, my passionate statement. I reject to be lowered into a brawl like a common cook. I am
chef,
and I announce my contempt like a gentleman by modern pen, not to your face but to your back.”

Hachette’s English was less fractured when he wasn’t angry or agitated, but you seldom had an opportunity to hear his more fluent speech.

In only ten months, Ethan had learned never to press the chef about any issue related to the kitchen. The quality of his food
did
justify his insistence on being given the latitude of a temperamental artist. His storms came and went, but they left no damage in their wake.

Responding to Mr. Hachette with a shrug, Ethan went in search of Fric.

Mrs. McBee disliked whole-house paging on the intercom. She considered it an offense against the stately atmosphere of the great house, an affront to the family, and a distraction to the staff. “We are not at work in an office building or a discount warehouse,” she had explained.

Senior staff members carried personal pagers on which they could be summoned from anywhere on the sprawling estate. Squawking at them through the intercom system was seldom necessary.

If you needed to track down a junior staff member or if your position included the authority to seek out a member of the family at your discretion—which among the household staff was true only of Mrs. McBee, Mr. McBee, and Ethan—then you must proceed on the intercom one room at a time. You began with the three places where you most expected to find the wanted individual.

As five o’clock approached, only a minimal staff remained on duty to be distracted, all of them scheduled to leave within minutes. Fric was the sole member of the Manheim family in residence. The McBees were in Santa Barbara. Nevertheless, Ethan felt obliged to follow standard procedures in respect of tradition, in deference to Mrs. McBee, and in the conviction that if he paged Fric in all rooms at once, the dear lady in Santa Barbara would instantly know what had transpired and would have her brief holiday diminished by unnecessary distress.

Using the intercom feature on one of the kitchen phones, Ethan first tried Fric’s rooms on the third floor. He sought the boy next in the train room—“Are you there, Fric? This is Mr. Truman”—in the theater, and then in the library. He received no reply.

Although Fric had never been sulky and certainly never rude, he might for whatever reason be choosing not to respond to the intercom even though he heard it.

Ethan elected to walk the house top to bottom, primarily to find the boy, but also to assure himself that, in general, all was as it should be.

He began on the third floor. He didn’t visit every room, but at least opened doors to peer into most chambers, and repeatedly called the child’s name.

The door to Fric’s suite stood open. After twice announcing himself and receiving no answer, Ethan decided that, this evening, security concerns took precedence over household etiquette and family privacy. He walked Fric’s rooms but found neither the boy nor anything amiss.

Returning through the east wing to the north hall, heading toward the main stairs, Ethan stopped three times to turn, to listen, halted by a crawling on the back of his neck, by a feeling that all was not as right as it appeared to be.

Quiet. Stillness.

Holding his breath, he heard only his heart.

Tuning out that inner rhythm, he could hear nothing real, only absurdities that he imagined: stealthy movement in the antique mirror above a nearby sideboard; a faint voice like that on the telephone the previous night, but fainter than before, crying out to him not from a third-floor room but from the far side of a blind turn on the highway to eternity.

The mirror revealed no reflection but his own, no blurred form, no boyhood friend.

When he began to breathe again, the distant voice that existed only in his imagination ceased to be heard even there.

He descended the main stairs to the second floor, where he found Fric in the library.

Reading a book, the boy sat in an armchair that he had moved from its intended position. The back of it was tight against the Christmas tree.

When Ethan opened the door and entered, Fric gave a start, which he tried to conceal by pretending that he had merely been adjusting his position in the armchair. Stark fear had widened his eyes and clenched his jaws for an instant, until he realized that Ethan was only Ethan.

“Hello, Fric. You okay? I paged you here on the intercom a few minutes ago.”

“Didn’t hear it, ummm, no, not the intercom,” said the boy, lying so ineptly that had he been hooked up to a polygraph, the machine might have exploded.

“You moved the chair.”

“Chair? Ummm, no, I found it like this, here like, you know, just like this.”

Ethan perched on the edge of another armchair. “Is something wrong, Fric?”

“Wrong?” the boy asked, as though the meaning of that word eluded him.

“Is there something you’d like to tell me? Are you worried about something? Because you don’t seem like yourself.”

The kid looked away from Ethan, to the book. He closed the book and lowered it to his lap.

As a cop, Ethan had long ago learned patience.

Making eye contact again, Fric leaned forward in his chair. He seemed about to whisper conspiratorially but hesitated and straightened up. Whatever he’d been about to reveal, he let slide. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m tense ’cause my dad’s coming home Thursday.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“Sure. But it’s pretty tense, too.”

“Why tense?”

“Well, he’ll have some of his buddies with him, you know. He always does.”

“You don’t care for his friends?”

“They’re okay. They’re all golfers and sports fanatics. Dad likes to talk golf and football and stuff. It’s how he unwinds. His buddies and him, they’re like a club.”

A club in which you’re not and never will be a member,
Ethan thought, surprised by a sympathy that tightened his throat.

He wanted to give the boy a hug, take him to a movie,
out
to a movie, not downstairs to the mini-Pantages here in Palazzo Rospo, but to some ordinary multiplex crawling with kids and their families, where the air was saturated with the fragrance of popcorn and with the greasiness of canola oil tricked up to smell half like butter, where you had to check the theater seat for gum and candy before sitting down, where during the funny parts of the movie, you could hear not just your own laugh but that of a
crowd
.

“And there’ll be a girl with him,” Fric continued. “There always is. He broke up with the last one before Florida. I don’t know who the new one is. Maybe she’ll be nice. Sometimes they are. But she’s new, and I’ll have to get to know her, which isn’t easy.”

They were in dangerous territory for conversation between a family member and one of the staff. In commiseration, Ethan could say nothing that revealed his true judgment of Channing Manheim as a father, or that suggested the movie star’s priorities were not in proper order.

“Fric, whoever your dad’s new girl is, getting to know her will be easy because she’ll like you. Everyone likes you, Fric,” he added, knowing that to this sweet and profoundly unassuming boy, these words would be a revelation and most likely disbelieved.

Fric sat with his mouth open, as though Ethan had just declared himself to be a monkey passing for human. A blush rose to his cheeks, and he looked down at the book in his lap, disconcerted.

Movement drew Ethan’s eye from the boy to the tree behind him. The dangling ornaments stirred: angels turning, angels nodding, angels dancing.

The air in the library was as still as the books on the shelves. If there had been a low-intensity earthquake sufficient to affect the ornaments, it had been too subtle to catch Ethan’s attention.

The movement of the angels subsided, as though they had been set in motion by a short-lived draft created by some passing presence.

A strange expectation overcame Ethan, a sense that a door of understanding might be about to open in his heart. He realized that he was holding his breath and that the fine hairs on the backs of his hands had risen as if to a baton of static electricity.

“Mr. Hachette,” said Fric.

The angels settled and the pregnant moment passed without the manifestation of…anything.

“Excuse me?” Ethan asked.

“Mr. Hachette doesn’t like me,” Fric said, by way of refuting the suggestion that he might be more highly regarded than he thought.

Ethan smiled. “Well, I’m not sure that Mr. Hachette likes anyone terribly much. But he’s a fine chef, isn’t he?”

“So is Hannibal Lecter.”

Although amusement at the expense of a fellow member of the senior staff was unquestionably bad form, Ethan laughed. “You may think differently, but I’m confident that if Mr. Hachette tells you it’s veal he’s put on the plate, it will be veal and nothing worse.” He rose from the edge of the armchair. “Well, I had two reasons to come looking for you. I wanted to warn you not to open any exterior doors for the rest of the evening. As soon as I’m sure the last of the staff has left, I’m going to set the house-perimeter alarm.”

Again Fric sat up straighter in his chair. Had he been a dog, he would have pricked his ears, so alert was he to the implications of this change in routine.

When Fric’s father was in residence, the house-perimeter alarm would be set when the owner chose to set it. In Manheim’s absence, Ethan usually activated the system when he retired for the night, between ten o’clock and midnight.

“Why so early?” Fric asked.

“I want to monitor it on the computer this evening. I think there’s a problem with fluctuations in the voltage flow at some of the window and door contacts. Not anything that’ll set off false alarms yet, but it needs repair.”

Although Ethan was a more confident liar than Fric, the dubious expression on the boy’s face most likely matched that with which he regarded Mr. Hachette’s veal.

Hurrying on, Ethan said, “But I also came looking for you to see if we shouldn’t have dinner together, being as it’s just the two of us bachelors rattling ’round the place this evening.”

Standards and Practices
contained no proscriptive against senior staff dining with the boy in the absence of his parents. Most of the time, Fric did, in fact, have dinner alone, either because he enjoyed privacy at mealtimes or, more likely, because he thought he would be intruding if he asked to join others. From time to time, Mrs. McBee induced the boy to have dinner with her and Mr. McBee, but this would be a first for Ethan and Fric.

“Really?” asked Fric. “You won’t be too busy monitoring the flow of voltage?”

Ethan recognized the sly jibe in that question, wanted to laugh, but pretended to believe that Fric had swallowed his lie about why he must turn the alarm on early. “No, Mr. Hachette prepared everything. All I have to do is warm it in the oven according to his notes. When would you like to eat?”

“Early’s better,” Fric said. “Six-thirty?”

“Six-thirty it is. And where should I set a table?”

Fric shrugged. “Where do you want?”

“If it’s my choice, it has to be the dayroom,” Ethan said. “The various other dining areas are strictly for family.”

“Then I’ll choose,” the boy said. He chewed on his lower lip a moment and then said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

“All right. I’ll be in my quarters for a little while, then in the kitchen.”

“I think we have wine this evening, don’t you?” Fric asked. “A good Merlot.”

“Oh, really? Should I also just pack my bags, arrange for a taxi, write myself a letter of dismissal in your father’s name, and be ready to leave as soon as you’ve passed out drunk?”

“He doesn’t need to know,” Fric said. “And if he knew, he’d just figure it was typical Hollywood-kid stuff, better booze than cocaine. He’d make me talk to Dr. Rudy to see maybe does the problem come from when I was the son of an emperor back in ancient Rome, when maybe I was traumatized by watching the stupid lions eat stupid people in the stupid Colosseum.”

This cheeky rap would have seemed funnier to Ethan if he hadn’t believed that the Face might, in fact, have reacted to his son’s drinking in pretty much that fashion.

“Maybe your father would never find out. But you’re forgetting about She Who Cannot Be Deceived.”

Fric whispered, “McBee.”

Ethan nodded. “McBee.”

Fric said, “I’ll have Pepsi.”

“With or without ice?”

“Without.”

“Good lad.”