The Face (7 page)

Two meat haulers from the medical examiner’s office pushed open the double doors and entered the garden-room reception area.

The first guy was tall, in his fifties, and obviously proud about having kept all his hair. He wore it in a pompadour elaborate enough that it should have been finished with bows.

Ethan knew Pomp’s partner. Jose Ramirez was a stocky Mexican-American with myopic eyes and with the sweet dreamy smile of a koala bear.

Jose lived for his wife and four children. While Pomp dealt with the paperwork supplied by the attendant, Ethan asked Jose to see the latest wallet photographs of Maria and the kids.

Once formalities were completed, Toledano led them through an inner door, into the garden room. Instead of a vinyl-tile floor as in the reception area, this chamber featured white ceramic tile with only sixteenth-inch grout joints: an easy surface to sterilize in the event that it became contaminated with bodily fluids.

Although continually cycled through sophisticated filters, the cold air carried a faint but unpleasant scent. Most people didn’t die smelling of shampoo, soap, and cologne.

Four standard stainless-steel morgue drawers might have held bodies, but two cadavers on gurneys made an immediate impression. Both were draped with sheets.

A third gurney stood empty, trailing a tangled shroud, and to this one Toledano proceeded with a stupefied expression. “This was him. Right here.”

Frowning with confusion, Toledano peeled the sheets back from the heads of the other two cadavers. Neither was Dunny Whistler.

One at a time, he pulled open the four stainless-steel drawers. They were empty.

Because the hospital sent the vast majority of its patients home rather than to funeral services, this garden room was small by the standards of the city morgue. All possible hiding places had already been explored.

CHAPTER 7

I
N THIS WINDOWLESS CHAMBER THREE STORIES underground, the four living and the two dead were for a moment so silent that Ethan imagined he could hear rain falling in the streets far above.

Then the meat hauler with the pompadour said, “You mean you released Whistler to the wrong people?”

The attendant, Toledano, shook his head adamantly. “No way. Never did in fourteen years, not startin’ today.”

A wide door allowed bodies on gurneys to be conveyed directly from the garden room into the ambulance garage. Two deadbolts should have secured it. Both were disengaged.

“I left them locked,” Toledano insisted. “They’re always locked,
always
, ’cept when I’m overseeing a dispatch, and then I’m always here, right here, watching.”

“Who’d want to steal a stiff?” Pomp asked.

“Even some perv wanted to steal one, he couldn’t,” Vin Toledano said, pulling open the door to the garage to reveal that it lacked keyholes on the outside. “Two blind locks. No keys ever made for it. Can’t unlock this door unless you’re already here in this room, then you use the thumb-turns.”

The attendant’s voice had been quickly worn thin by worry. Ethan figured that Toledano saw his job going down the drain as surely as blood was drawn by gravity down the gutters of an inclined autopsy table.

Jose Ramirez said, “Maybe he wasn’t dead, you know, so he walked out himself.”

“He’s deader than dead,” Toledano said. “Total damn dead.”

With a slump-shouldered shrug and a koala smile, Jose said, “Mistakes happen.”

“Not in this hospital, they don’t,” the attendant insisted. “Not since once fifteen years ago, when this old lady was in cold holding almost an hour, certified dead, and then she sits up and screams.”

“Hey, I remember hearing about that,” said Pomp. “Some nun had herself a heart attack over it.”

“Who had the heart attack was the guy in this job before me, and it was the nun chewin’ him out that gave it to him.”

Stooping, Ethan extracted a white plastic bag from under the gurney that had held Dunny’s body. The bag featured drawstrings, to one of which had been tied a tag that bore the name D
UNCAN
E
UGENE
W
HISTLER,
his date of birth, and his social-security number.

With a wheeze of panic in his voice, Toledano said, “That held the clothes he was wearing when he was admitted to the hospital.”

Now the bag proved empty. Ethan put it on top of the gurney. “Ever since the old lady woke up fifteen years ago, you double-check the doctors?”

“Triple-check, quadruple-check,” Toledano declared. “First thing a deader comes in here, I stethoscope him, listen for heart and lung action. Use the diaphragm side to hear high-pitched sounds, bell side for low-pitched.” He nodded continually, as though while he talked he were mentally reviewing a checklist of steps he’d taken on receipt of Dunny’s body. “Do a mirror test for breath. Then establish internal body temp, take it again a half-hour later, then a half-hour after that, to see is it dropping like it should if what you’ve got is really a deader.”

Pomp found this amusing. “Internal temperature? You mean you spend your time shovin’ thermometers up dead people’s butts?”

Unamused, Jose said, “Have some respect,” and crossed himself.

Ethan’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his shirt. “Well, if nobody could get in here to take him, and if he was dead—where is he now?”

“Probably one of the sisters jerking your chain,” Pomp told the morgue attendant. “Those nuns are jokers.”

Cold air, snow-white ceramic tile, stainless-steel drawer fronts glistening like ice: None of it accounted for the depth of Ethan’s chill.

He suspected that the subtle scent of death had saturated his clothing.

Places like this had never in the past disturbed him. He was disturbed now.

In the space labeled N
EXT OF
K
IN OR
R
ESPONSIBLE
P
ARTY,
the hospital paperwork listed Ethan’s name and telephone numbers; nevertheless, he gave the harried attendant a card with the same information.

Ascending in the elevator, he half listened to one of Barenaked Ladies’ best songs reduced to nap music.

He went all the way up to the seventh floor, where Dunny had died. When the elevator doors opened, he realized that he had needed to go only as high as the garage on the first subterranean level, where he’d parked the Expedition, just two floors above the garden room.

After pressing the button for the main garage level, he rode up to the fifteenth floor before the cab started down again. People got on the elevator, got off, but Ethan hardly noticed them.

His racing mind took him elsewhere. The incident at Reynerd’s apartment. Dead Dunny’s disappearance.

Badgeless, Ethan nonetheless retained a cop’s intuition. He understood that two such extraordinary events, occurring in the same morning, could not be coincidental.

The power of intuition alone, however, wasn’t sufficient to suggest the nature of the link between these uncanny occurrences. He might as well try to perform brain surgery by intuition.

Logic didn’t offer immediate answers, either. In this case, even Sherlock Holmes might have despaired at the odds of discovering the truth through deductive reasoning.

In the garage, an arriving car traveled the rows in search of a parking space, turned a corner onto a down ramp, and another car came up out of the concrete abyss, behind headlights, like a deep-salvage submersible ascending from an ocean trench, and drove toward the exit, but Ethan alone was on foot.

Mottled by years of sooty exhaust fumes that formed enigmatic and taunting Rorschach blots, the low gray ceiling appeared to press lower, lower, as he walked farther into the garage. Like the hull of a submarine, the walls seemed barely able to hold back a devastating weight of sea, a crushing pressure.

Step by step, Ethan expected to discover that he wasn’t after all alone on foot. Beyond each SUV, behind every concrete column, an old friend might wait, his condition mysterious and his purpose unknowable.

Ethan reached the Expedition without incident.

No one waited for him in the vehicle.

Behind the steering wheel, even before he started the engine, he locked the doors.

CHAPTER 8

T
HE ARMENIAN RESTAURANT ON PICO BOULEVARD had the atmosphere of a Jewish delicatessen, a menu featuring food so delicious that it would inspire a condemned man to smile through his last meal, and more plainclothes cops and film-industry types together in one place than you would find anywhere outside of the courtroom devoted to the trial of the latest spouse-murdering celebrity.

When Ethan arrived, Hazard Yancy waited in a booth by a window. Even seated, he loomed so large that he would have been well advised to audition for the title role in
The Incredible Hulk
if Hollywood ever made a black version.

Hazard had already been served a double order of the kibby appetizer with cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickled turnip on the side.

As Ethan sat across the table from the big detective, Hazard said, “Somebody told me they saw in the news your boss got twenty-seven million bucks for his last two movies.”

“Twenty-seven million
each
. He’s the first to break through the twenty-five-million ceiling.”

“Up from poverty,” Hazard said.

“Plus he’s got a piece of the back end.”

“That kind of money, he can get a piece of anybody’s back end he wants.”

“It’s an industry phrase. Means if the picture is a big hit, he gets a share of the profits, sometimes even a percentage of gross.”

“How much might that amount to?”

“According to
Daily Variety,
he’s had worldwide hits so big he sometimes walks away with fifty million, thereabouts.”

“You read the show-biz press now?” Hazard asked.

“Helps me stay aware of how big a target he’s making himself.”

“You got your work cut out for you, all right. How many movies does the man do a year?”

“Never fewer than two. Sometimes three.”

“I was planning to chow down so much on his dime, Mr. Channing Manheim himself would notice, and you’d get fired for abusing your credit-card privileges.”

“Even you can’t eat a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of kibby.”

Hazard shook his head. “Chan the Man. Maybe I’m not hip anymore, but I don’t see him being fifty million cool.”

“He also owns a TV-production company with three shows currently on major networks, four on cable. He pulls in a few million a year from Japan, doing TV commercials for their top-selling beer. He has a line of sports clothes. Lots more. His agents call the nonacting income ‘additional revenue streams.’”

“People just pissing money on him, huh?”

“He’ll never need to shop for bargains.”

When the waitress came to the table, Ethan ordered Moroccan salmon with couscous, and iced tea.

Taking Hazard’s order, she wore the point off her pencil: lebne with string cheese and extra cucumbers, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, lahmajoon flatbread, seafood tagine…. “Plus give me two of those little bottles of Orangina.”

“Only person I ever saw eat that much,” Ethan said, “was this bulimic ballerina. She went to the john to puke after every course.”

“I’m just sampling, and I never wear a tutu.” Hazard cut his last kibby in two. “So how big an asshole is Chan the Man?”

The masking roar of other lunchtime conversations provided Ethan and Hazard with privacy nearly equal to that on a remote Mojave hill.

“It’s impossible to hate him,” Ethan said.

“That’s your best compliment?”

“It’s just that in person he doesn’t have the impact he does on the screen. He doesn’t stir your emotions one way or the other.”

Hazard forked half a kibby into his mouth and made a small sound of pleasure. “So he’s all image, no substance.”

“That’s not quite it. He’s so…bland. Generous to employees. Not arrogant. But there’s this…this weightlessness about him. He’s sort of careless how he treats people, even his own son, but it’s a
benign
indifference. He’s not an actively bad guy.”

“That money, that much adoration, you expect a monster.”

“With him, you don’t get it. You get…”

Ethan paused to think. In the months he’d worked for Manheim, he had not spoken this much or this frankly about the man to anyone.

He and Hazard had been shot at together, and each had trusted his life to the other. He could speak his mind and know that nothing he said would be repeated.

With such a confidential sounding board, he wanted to describe the Face not only as honestly as possible but as perceptively. In explaining Manheim to Hazard, he also might be able more fully to explain the actor to himself.

After the waitress brought iced tea and the Oranginas, Ethan at last said, “He’s self-absorbed but not in the usual movie-star way, not in any way that makes him appear egotistical. He cares about the money, I guess, but I don’t think he cares what anyone thinks of him or that he’s famous. He’s self-absorbed, all right, totally self-absorbed, but it’s like this…this Zen state of self-absorption.”

“Zen state?”

“Yeah. Like life is about him and nature, him and the cosmos, not him and other people. He always seems to be half in a meditative state, not entirely here with you, like some con-man yogi pretending to be otherworldly, except he’s sincere. If he’s always contemplating the universe, then he’s also confident the universe is contemplating him, that their fascination is mutual.”

Having finished the last of his kibby, Hazard said, “Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Bogart—were they all airheads, and nobody knew it, or in those days were movie stars real men with their feet on the ground?”

“Some real people are still in the business. I met Jodie Foster, Sandra Bullock. They seem real.”

“They seem like they could kick ass, too,” Hazard said.

Two waitresses were required to bring all the food to the table.

Hazard grinned and nodded as each dish was placed before him: “Nice. Nice. That’s nice. Real nice. Oh, very nice.”

The memory of being shot in the gut spoiled Ethan’s appetite. As he picked at his Moroccan salmon and couscous, he delayed bringing up the issue of Rolf Reynerd. “So you said you’ve got one foot on some snot-wad’s neck. What’s the case?”

“Twenty-two-year-old blond cutie strangled, dumped in a sewage-treatment slough. We call it Blonde in the Pond.”

Any cop who works homicides is changed forever by his job. The victims haunt him with the quiet insistence of spirochetes spinning poison in the blood.

Humor is your best and often only defense against the horror. Early in the investigation, every killing is given a droll name, which is thereafter used within the Homicide Division.

Your ranking officer would never ask,
Are you making progress on the Ermitrude Pottlesby murder?
It would always be,
Anything new with Blonde in the Pond?

When Ethan and Hazard worked the brutal murders of two lesbians of Middle Eastern descent, the case had been called Lezzes in Fezzes. Another young woman, tied to a kitchen table, had choked to death on steel-wool pads and Pine-Sol-soaked sponges that her killer had forced into her mouth and down her throat; her case was Scrub Lady.

Outsiders would probably be offended to hear the unofficial case names. Civilians didn’t realize that detectives often dreamed about the dead for whom they sought justice, or that a detective could occasionally become so attached to a victim that the loss felt personal. No disrespect was ever intended by these case names—and sometimes they expressed a strange, melancholy affection.

“Strangled,” Ethan said, referring to Blonde in the Pond. “Which suggests passion, a good chance it was someone romantically involved with her.”

“Ah. So you haven’t gone entirely soft in your expensive leather jackets and your Gucci loafers.”

“I’m wearing Rockports, not loafers. Dumping her in a sewage slough probably means he caught her screwing around, so he considers her filthy, a worthless piece of crap.”

“Plus maybe he had knowledge of the treatment plant, knew an easy way to get the body in there. Is that a cashmere sweater?”

“Cotton. So your perp works at the plant?”

Hazard shook his head. “He’s a member of the city council.”

At once losing his appetite altogether, Ethan put down his fork. “A politician? Why don’t you just find a cliff and jump?”

Shoving a stuffed grape leaf in his maw, Hazard managed to grin while he chewed, without once opening his mouth. After swallowing, he said, “I’ve already got a cliff, and I’m pushing
him
off.”

“Anybody winds up broken on the rocks, it’ll be you.”

“You’ve just taken the cliff metaphor one step too far,” said Hazard, spooning hummus into a pita wedge.

After a half-century of squeaky-clean public officials and honest administration, California itself had lately become a deep sewage slough not seen since the 1930s and ’40s when Raymond Chandler had written about its dark side. Here in the early years of the new millennium, on a state level and in too many local jurisdictions, corruption had attained a degree of rot seldom seen outside a banana republic, though in this case a banana republic without bananas and with pretensions to glamour.

A significant percentage of the politicians here operated like thugs. If the thugs saw you going after one of their own, they would assume you’d come after them next, and they would use their power to ruin you one way or another.

In another gangster-ridden era, in a crusade against corruption, Eliot Ness had led a force of law-enforcement agents so beyond reach by bribery and so undeterred by bullets that they became known as the Untouchables. In contemporary California, even Ness and his exemplary crew would be destroyed not by bribes or bullets, but by bureaucracy wielded as ruthlessly as an ax and by slander eagerly converted to libel by a feeding-frenzy media with a sentimental affection for the thugs, both the elected and unelected varieties, upon whom they daily reported.

“If you were still doing real work like me,” Hazard said, “you’d handle this no different than I’m handling it.”

“Yeah. But I sure wouldn’t sit there grinning about it.”

Indicating Ethan’s sweater, Hazard said, “Cotton—like Rodeo Drive cotton?”

“Cotton like Macy’s on-sale cotton.”

“How much you pay for a pair of socks these days?”

Ethan said, “Ten thousand dollars.”

He’d been hesitant to bring up the Rolf Reynerd situation. Now he figured he could do nothing better for Hazard than distract him from this suicidal mission to nail a city councilman for murder.

“Take a look at these.” He opened a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, withdrew the contents, and passed them across the table.

As Hazard reviewed what he’d been given, Ethan told him about the five black boxes delivered by Federal Express and the sixth thrown over the gate.

“They came by Federal Express, so you know who sent them.”

“No. The return addresses were fake. They were dropped off at different mom-and-pop mailbox shops that collect for FedEx and UPS. The sender paid cash.”

“How much mail does Channing get a week?”

“Maybe five thousand pieces. But almost all of it is sent to the studio where it’s known he has offices. A publicity firm reviews it and responds. His home address isn’t a secret, but it’s not widely known, either.”

In the envelope were high-resolution computer printouts of six digital photographs taken in Ethan’s study, the first of which showed a small jar standing on a white cloth. Beside the jar lay the lid. Spread across the cloth were what had been the contents of the jar: twenty-two beetles with black-spotted orange shells.

“Ladybugs?” Hazard asked.

“The entomological name is
Hippodamia convergens,
of the family Coccinellidae. Not that I think it matters, but I looked it up.”

Hazard’s shrewd expression spoke clearly enough without words, but he said, “You’re stumped worse than a quadruple amputee.”

“This guy thinks I’m Batman, he’s the Riddler.”

“Why twenty-two bugs? Is the number significant?”

“I don’t know.”

“They alive when you received them?” Hazard asked.

“All dead. Whether they were alive when he sent them, I don’t know, but they looked like they’d been dead for a while. The shells were intact, but the more delicate bug parts were withered, crumbly.”

In the second photo, a collection of different, spirally coiled, light brown shells were canted at angles in a gray pile of sludge that had been emptied from a black box onto a sheet of waxed paper.

“Ten dead snails,” Ethan said. “Well, actually, two were alive but feeble when I opened the box.”

“That’s a fragrance Chanel won’t be bottling.”

Hazard paused to fork up some seafood tagine.

The third photo was of a small, clear-glass, screw-top jar. The label had been removed, but the lid indicated that the container had once held pickle relish.

Because the photograph wasn’t clear enough to reveal the murky contents of the jar, Ethan said, “Floating in formaldehyde were these ten pieces of translucent tissue with a pale pinkish tint. Tubelike structures. Hard to describe. Like tiny exotic jellyfish.”

“You took ’em to a lab?”

“Yeah. When they gave me the analysis, they also gave me a weird look. What I had in the jar were foreskins.”

Hazard’s jaws locked in midchew, as if the seafood tagine had hardened like a dental mold.

“Ten foreskins from grown men, not infants,” Ethan amplified.

After chewing mechanically, not with his former relish, and after swallowing with a grimace, Hazard said, “Ouch. How many grown men get themselves circumcised?”

“They’re not standing in line for it,” Ethan agreed.