The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (11 page)

They were moving around as carefully as they could, which meant they were making a lot of noise. I could smell barbecue sauce. Suddenly hungry, I thought about sitting up and rubbing my eyes and saying, “Hey, you guys brought ribs.” But then I thought that if they thought I was really out, they might say things they wouldn't ordinarily say around me.

“I may need to unplug something else,” Yuri whispered.

“Later,” Prudence whispered.

I heard the client chair being dragged across the floor closer to the couch. And then a puzzling squeak that I soon figured out was from my desk chair being pushed across the floor on its rollers. They were pulling up chairs around the couch. Would they put the tub of ribs on my chest? What were they up to?

I almost sat up when Yuri said, “More sleep learning?”

“Yes,” Prudence said.

“He may be a lot further out than you think,” Yuri said. “Post-dance. I know what this is like.”

“I wonder if he found the next to last warning to Gerald?”

“You said he went back in,” Yuri said.

“Sure, but maybe all he found was EES stuff.”

“Tell him about the warning to Randy,” Yuri said.

I heard the chair scrape and scoot a little closer to me, and then I felt Prudence's breath on my cheek. She whispered, “SOAPY sent Randy Casey an e-mail message just before he killed him. The message was like the one he sent to Gerald. It said, ‘You're running out of time!'”

“Maybe you'd better tell him where to find it,” Yuri said.

“He is a detective,” Prudence said. “If he suspects a warning exists, he'll find it.”

“Sure, but do you want him wasting his time looking?” Yuri said. “Also right now I don't think he could find his own butt with a flashlight, a detailed map, and slowly spoken directions.”

Hey, watch it! I thought.

“Too bad we can't just jack his head into the net,” Prudence said.

It was clear I was being played for a fool, a sucker. These two knew a lot more about the case than they'd been telling. They were stringing me along, and for all I knew they had killed Gerald Moffitt and Randy Casey. Maybe they were setting me up to pin the blame on this SOAPY character. You drop clues like bread crumbs along the garden path and Skylight Howells just follows along picking them up.

“Should I tell him about Sadie?” I could tell from the sound of her voice she had sat back up. So were they through feeding me information after just one piece? And who was Sadie?

“No,” Yuri said. “We don't want him to start imagining he's got paranormal powers. Let him pick it up on the TV news.”

“So what's with the vegetables?”

“He doesn't eat right,” Yuri said. “One of the things you've got to watch when you're fighting the Dance is that you eat right.”

He walked back to the desk. There was a sound like seeds rattling in a gourd. “Vitamin C.” More rattling. “Beta carotene.” He went on rattling and cataloging vitamins and minerals for some time. If you took that many, when would you have time to do anything else?

“Meanwhile let's eat the ribs,” Prudence said.

“Good idea.”

The barbecue smell got a lot stronger once they opened the tub. I listened to them eat for a couple of minutes, and then I groaned. It sounded pretty fake to me, so I didn't try it again. I rubbed my eyes and sat up.

Prudence sat on the edge of my desk with a dripping rib held between thumb and finger. A smear of sauce on her cheek. She still wore the sheer purple dress and black boots. Yuri had been poking around in the ribs when I came awake and he was still bending over the tub. He looked over at me and smiled.

Who would guess Yuri was a Russian working for a company called Evil Empire Software? These days he even wore American sneakers. Did he even care about the workers who made those shoes? He was maybe five-foot-nine or -ten and slender with black hair and brown eyes, the kind of guy who could easily get lost in a crowd. Until I met Yuri, I didn't know they tap-danced in Russia, much less that it would be a problem. I suppose, though, that it being a problem pretty much follows from the fact of them having it. You provide the opportunity to dance, some people are going to abuse it. Yuri once told me the Russian word for tap dancing was “chechyotka.”

“You look like hell,” he said. “You want some ribs?”

I sat up, then stood up and grabbed the back of my desk chair. “Why not?”

I pushed the chair back behind my desk like I was straightening things up. Actually I used the chair to support myself because I wasn't feeling all that steady on my feet.

Once behind the desk I grabbed a rib. It took me a few minutes of messy gnawing before I noticed the machine on my desk. White plastic and gleaming stainless steel. I reached over and turned the machine my way. SuperJuicer III. When I moved the machine I saw Yuri's line of vitamin bottles.

“What's all this?” I asked. What I wanted to ask was why the two of them were holding out on me, but the machine and the vitamins distracted me. Not to mention the ribs, which were warming my stomach and making me think that maybe all was not lost after all.

“Healthy body, healthy mind,” Yuri said. “You know the drill. I'll bet these ribs are the most healthy things you've eaten in weeks.”

Actually that wasn't true, but I didn't correct him. He dipped down below my sight and then came back up with a grocery sack. He put the sack down on the desk by the SuperJuicer III.

Prudence reached over and pulled a carrot out of the sack. “What's up, Spoc?”

Yuri rolled his eyes at her. He took the carrot out of her hand and put it back in the sack. He picked up the sack and put it in her hands. “Can you wash the fruit and vegetables, Pru? I'll plug in the machine.”

Prudence hopped off the desk and took the sack of produce into the washroom. Yuri poked around beside my desk looking for the powerstrip. I had another rib.

“So,” Yuri said. He was still down on the floor beside my desk and I couldn't see his face. “Prudence tells me you got into GP Ink.”

“That's right.” I needed time to figure out what these two were up to.

When I didn't say anything more, Yuri went back to moving around and looking for a place to plug in the juicer. A moment later he stood up again. “Got it. So what did you find?” He flipped a switch on the juicer and a little red light came on.

I decided to let him squirm. “So, why do you call your company Evil Empire Software?”

“Our little joke,” Yuri said. “In the new Russia we have a sense of humor.” Then his smile disappeared and he half closed his eyes and leaned across the desk invading my space, getting in my face. “Also it's part of our evil plan. Soon every child in America will have one of our computer games which display devilish messages if you play them backwards.” He laughed an evil laugh.

I was in no mood to smile, so it hurt a little when I did.

“So, you found me out when you searched GP Ink,” Yuri said. It was easy to see he wanted me to pick up that line of conversation and fill him in on everything I'd learned. Since he and Prudence apparently already knew all that there was to know from GP Ink, he was just trying to make sure I had found what they wanted me to find. That seemed to be the warning to Gerald from SOAPY, so they wanted me to think SOAPY was the killer. Next they wanted me to track down a warning from SOAPY to Randy Casey. I wouldn't bother, of course. The fact that the warning existed was all I needed.

I wondered if this solved my puzzle over Frank and Marvin not making noise over SOAPY's warning. Maybe they hadn't seen it! Maybe Prudence and Yuri planted it for my eyes only.

And what about the DATAPANTS file?

Prudence returned carrying wet fruit and vegetables. Someone should have painted her—Grinning Woman with Dripping Fruit and Vegetables.

Yuri pushed papers off my desk. “Put them here by the machine,” he said. “Parsley. The secret is parsley.”

He gathered a big bunch of parsley and poked it into the hopper at the top of the machine.

Prudence stooped and grabbed something Yuri had swept off my desk. “Here's the manual,” she said.

Yuri looked at her like she'd lost her mind. I'll bet my look was pretty much the same. Yuri hadn't even tried the machine yet. This was no time for manuals.

“What?” Prudence looked from Yuri to me and then back again. “Well, I'm going to take a look.” She opened the manual.

“Give me a glass,” Yuri said to me.

I opened the bottom drawer and grabbed my scotch glass and handed it to him. He smelled it but didn't comment. He put the glass under the spout at one end of the machine. “We push with a carrot,” he said. “I saw a guy do this on TV.” He switched on the machine and pushed the parsley into the hopper with a carrot. The machine made a lot of noise. Green juice dribbled into my glass.

“Boy, that sure looks good,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Green juice is in the index,” Prudence said.

“More,” Yuri said, “we need more.” He pushed more parsley into the hopper and tamped it down with his carrot. He did that a couple more times until my scotch tumbler was about half filled with green juice.

“Page twenty-seven,” Prudence said.

“Here you go.” Yuri handed me the glass.

“You expect me to drink this?”

“All in one go,” Yuri said. “That way it doesn't matter how it tastes. You get the pure essence of green zapped directly into your system.”

“Hey, it smells pretty good,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” Prudence said.

I raised the glass of good smelling green stuff and chugged it down.

It was as if I'd swallowed a small, angry woodland creature—maybe a raccoon.

“It says here,” Prudence said, “you should never drink straight green juice.”

“Yack!” I said.

“Why not?” Yuri asked.

“It's just too strong,” Prudence said.

“Too strong for a dude like Skylight? I don't believe it!”

“Youch,” I said.

“His face is pretty red,” Prudence said.

“So how are you supposed to serve parsley juice?”

Prudence flipped through the pages of the manual. The raccoon in my stomach had died and now its spirit was moving through my bloodstream. I felt dizzy; I felt high; I felt like maybe I should bolt for the toilet.

“You're supposed to mix it,” she said. “Here's a recipe with carrots and apples.”

“Okay,” Yuri said, “we mix it. How much difference could it make if you mix it before or after you drink it?” He grabbed the glass and put it back under the spout and fed one carrot after another to the machine. When the glass was about half full, he handed it to me. “Drink this.”

I chugged the carrot juice. Didn't help.

“He still doesn't look so good,” Prudence said.

“Maybe the apples are necessary.” Yuri snatched the glass from my hand and put it back under the spout. “Give me your knife.”

Prudence dug into her purse and came up with a long folding knife of the kind you'd expect to see affixed to the belt of a guy in camouflage fatigues. Yuri opened the knife and cut up an apple.

“Maybe the key word was mix,” Prudence said. “Maybe we should get him to jump around some.”

“Good idea!” Yuri fed the machine another apple then gave me the glass.

What did I have to lose? I drank the apple juice. Yuri took one of my arms and Prudence took the other, and they guided me around the desk to the middle of the room.

“Jump,” Yuri said and he and Prudence jumped. I sort of stood up on my toes.

“We need to go higher,” Prudence said, and they jumped again and this time I jumped with them.

“Deep knee bends,” Yuri shouted and we did a couple of those.

“Let's try some butt rotations,” Prudence said.

“Can I watch?” I asked.

“No, you do it, too.”

So we did some butt rotations.

“More jumping!” Yuri cried.

As we jumped around, I could feel the electric juice zinging and zapping though my system. My fingers tingled, my vision narrowed into a tunnel with sparkling light for walls. Energy flowed to my toes.

And I did a couple of steps.

“Hey! None of that!” Yuri said. “Get him back to his chair before this gets out of hand.”

They guided me back to my chair and dumped me into it. I tried to uncross my eyes. I needed to focus on something, on anything but the building bundle of energy threatening to explode from me in dance.

“So what's up with Sadie?” I asked.

Yuri didn't miss a beat. “Sadie Campbell,” he said, “of SplashDown Software. She was found murdered yesterday in her apartment.”

“Why didn't you tell me before?”

“We just found out,” Prudence said. She dug into her purse and then slapped a green book down onto my desk. I could tell from the annoying size of the thing that it was a software manual. Prudence turned it my way so I could read the title. SplashDown NodeHoofer II: Installation and Interaction Guide. Boy, it looked like it was getting harder to find new names for Internet browsers.

“Sounds exciting,” I said. “Sadie Campbell?”

“Yes,” Prudence said. “She gets a credit on the inside cover. Did you know her?”

“Dennis did,” I said.

They exchanged looks.

“Hey, don't expect me to make sense,” I said. “You just poisoned me with parsley juice.”

“He must be feeling better,” Yuri said.

“He looks better,” Prudence said. “His face is not so red.”

“That's not the way it looks from where I'm sitting,” I said. “So what were the words on the body this time?”

“The words weren't on the body this time,” Yuri said.

“No?”

“The killer left a note,” Prudence said.

“Rolled up and stuck in her left ear,” Yuri said.