The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (15 page)

Officer Hamilton's police face was still new. He had some trouble maintaining the regulation deadpan look. He kept slipping into regular guy mode and catching himself and wiping the smile off his face.

Once back at the office, he looked around. He made some notes.

“How do we know you didn't just bust up the office yourself before you climbed out on the ledge?”

Good question. The problem was no one had broken through the door. It would have been a piece of cake to pick the lock, but I had some trouble convincing Hamilton that anyone actually had. The scratches around the lock were not easy to see. Worse, nothing seemed to be missing.

“But like I've explained,” I said, “I surprised him in the act. He didn't have time to steal anything.”

Officer Hamilton wandered into the washroom. I heard a grunt of surprise, and I looked in after him. He took a couple of steps back into the main office. My disguise supplies were scattered everywhere. It looked like an explosion of faces. I stooped down and picked up a nose.

“Makeup,” I said. I squeezed the nose between a first finger and thumb in front of his face. “Not real.”

He recovered his cool and asked me if anything of value was missing from the washroom. I told him I couldn't tell for sure but everything looked like it was there. The one thing I was concerned about (the disk I'd taped underneath the disguise cabinet) would have to wait until after he'd left.

“I don't know,” he said. “No break in. Nothing missing. I don't know.”

“Give me a break,” I said. “Why would I have made up something like this?”

“I don't know.”

“And, hey, look at this!” I showed him a couple of brown spots that must have been the bad guy's blood. Too bad more hadn't gotten spread around.

“You cut yourself?” Hamilton asked.

“Look,” I said. “They must pretty much believe me downtown or they wouldn't have sent only you to get the burglary report. What say we just call this vandalism and call it a day?”

“Well, I don't know,” he said.

I wore him down, talked him into it. Once he was convinced, it took him only minutes to get all he needed for his report and leave.

When I was sure he wasn't coming back, I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the disguise cabinet.

The disk with SOAPY's warning and the DATAPANTS file was gone. Dennis wouldn't get the chance to crack the encryption after all. Too bad. I decided to pick up the mess and move on.

Gathering papers and folders to be sorted and filed later, I imagined I was one of those guys cleaning the park with a sharp stick. I wondered if that might not be just the line of work I needed. Outdoors. Low pressure.

Yuri's juicer was on the floor, but it was still plugged in. I put it back on my desk and flipped the switch. It worked. So all the news wasn't bad.

I picked up my new Thermos bottle and shook it and heard the broken glass inside. I tossed it in the trash can, but when I heard it hit, it occurred to me that the bottle had saved my life. If I hadn't been carrying it, I couldn't have hit the thug in the face with it, and if I hadn't surprised him with that move, things might have turned out very differently. I fished the Thermos out of the trash and put it on the shelf with my tap trophy.

Next I turned my attention to the washroom. Who knew when I might need a disguise? I sorted and stored my noses and ears and bald spots. I picked up tubes and jars and put wigs back on their white foam heads and the foam heads in the bottom drawer of the disguise cabinet.

Back in the office, I gathered coats and shirts, Lulu's dresses, Tag's slacks, made a pile, found hangers, and put everything in the cardboard wardrobe.

The only consoling fact I could think of while cleaning up my disguise materials was that no one could put the personalities together from the pieces. Whoever had trashed the room would have no way of knowing who my disguises were.

The afternoon was gone. My schedule was screwed. Dennis had stood up Lucas Betty. If Lucas knew something about the case, we wouldn't find out about it today. He would be on my ass about Dennis, too. And there was still Ramona Simmons. At this rate, I might never get around to finding out just how mean she really was.

I scooped up stuff from the floor behind my desk and dumped it into the drawers, and as I did so, I realized the new random arrangement in the drawers wasn't much different from the old arrangement.

If the bad guy had had enough time to actually look at my stuff rather than just tossing it around the office, he might have discovered quite a bit about my operation, but it seemed to me he was looking for what he found—the disk I'd taped to the bottom of the disguise cabinet. That was all that was gone. He might have seen my post with the word DATAPANTS. Maybe that's what he'd been looking for at GP Ink. Maybe my post had just told him he should come to me. Well, I wanted to shake someone up, and I had. I didn't see that it had done me any good.

I picked up the client chair and put it back in its place in front of my desk. My own chair and been shoved up against the wall under the window and I moved it back, too.

It got dim and then it got dark before I was satisfied that everything had either been put back in its place or had been thrown out. I'd dumped the trash four times. Spring cleaning in the fall.

By the time I sat down behind my desk, the pink neon
TOFU
sign on the Baltimore building was blinking and reminding me that it was time to think about getting something to eat. Maybe Italian. I'd have to shop before I could make more juice. I'd tossed the last of the fruit and vegetables. There were limits on how long you could leave produce on your desk.

eleven

I spent the next few days on the edge of just drifting off and getting lost. Years later I might jerk my head up off the bar of some dance joint and the barkeep might say, “Welcome back. Hey, aren't you the guy who was supposed to catch the Documentalist Killer but never did? The guy who for very personal reasons agreed to shadow a policeman for his wife? Whatever became of that case? Nothing? And did you ever wrap up that Dennis scam you had going? No? You don't say.”

I opted not to drift away. At least not yet. I bought a new bunch of fruit to juice. I couldn't find any of the weird bumpy yellow things with black spots, and the produce kid I'd asked gave me a funny look, so I didn't push it. I worried that the rejuvenating jolt might depend on the precise mixture of fruits I'd stumbled on before, but that turned out not to be the case. All of the wild combinations I came up with made me feel pretty good.

I'd eaten most of the vitamins Yuri had left with the juicer, so I bought a book on vitamins and minerals, read it, and then dropped $143 at a health food store. Beta-carotene, E, C, zinc, selenium, coenzyme Q-10, you name it.

I followed Frank Wallace on two occasions back to the Quack Inn and the very same room. He must have booked the room on a long-term basis. I never saw anyone else there with him. The last time I waited a long time for his lover to come out and she never did. Frank was either doing something alone in that room or his monkey business buddy lived there.

Call me goofy, but I spent one day playing eighteen holes of golf and then celebrating my score in the clubhouse. Sure, people wondered what someone like me was doing at the country club, but then someone else remembered who my mother was and said, “Oh, yes, that explains everything.” I didn't care.

The flame war I'd started over bad documentation still raged on alt.dead.docs. SOAPY had disappeared altogether.

One startling development was that a lot of people on alt.dead.docs thought that maybe knocking off the clowns who committed documentation wasn't such a bad idea.

Such people make you wonder what kind of world we're living in, and they make you feel pretty uneasy when you catch yourself nodding in agreement.

Lulu spent an afternoon sorting clothes into piles to wash and piles to dry-clean, grumbling the whole time about the way when we finally let our feminine side loose, we set her to work doing the laundry.

We told her, okay, so next time Dennis would do the laundry. She didn't buy it.

Scarface spent some time looking at tropical fish and talking with the guy at the store about setting up a tank in my office. He was wearing the rest of us down on the matter of fish.

I called the number I had for Ramona Simmons hoping to alert her to the danger of being a known local on the BOD list, but all I got was a snippy phone message. She never called me back.

Dennis brooded over the fact that he probably never would get into the DATAPANTS file.

Dieter made a plate of enchiladas.

I spent another special “Sunday” afternoon with Mom. This time it really was Sunday. It's spooky when the real and the somewhat less than real correspond. The staff treated me like a nutcase who might explode at any moment. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.

I did spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder. Being forced out on a ledge by a gunman will do that to a person.

We were all waiting for Prudence Deerfield to show up again.

No Prudence.

Elsie Wallace called, and I agreed to meet her for lunch. I was pretty sure I knew where Frank would be for lunch. He'd be eating at Maxwell's Lunch Room. After that he'd either go back to work or he'd go to the Quack Inn. If he ate alone, he'd go on to the motel. If someone joined him for lunch, Marvin for example, he'd skip the motel. Frank was becoming predictable, which was making my job easier, but I really didn't have anything to tell Elsie.

We agreed to meet at the Garden Party, a restaurant on the other side of the river. I was a little late, and I spent a few minutes in the entrance alcove scanning the shrubbery. She must have seen me come in, because she was already looking at me when I spotted her sitting at a table tucked in among the ferns and vines. She smiled at me, and I shrugged at a young man approaching me with a menu and walked into the foliage.

I hadn't been this close to Elsie Wallace in years. That unfortunate shooting accident that made Frank so adamant about me not packing heat also made it unlikely I'd be a houseguest at the three-bedroom two-bath Wallace estate. Elsie still looked pretty good to me. She wore her pale blond hair very short these days, and that made her face look a little fuller, and maybe she'd put on a few pounds, but they looked good on her. Her lipstick was a lot redder than I remembered. She wore a tailored skirt and matching blouse of a strange brown and white streaked color combination that reminded me of peeling cottonwood bark. And a scarf. Had she picked those clothes so she'd blend in with the greenery of the Garden Party?

I gave her a peck on the cheek and had a momentary flash of sadness at the old woman smell of her powder; we were no longer in high school, and it really was too late to take her away from Frank. I put all of that out of my mind and sat down opposite her. There was a vine hanging down in front of my face and I pushed it aside. “Hello, Elsie,” I said.

The vine slowly crept back in front of my face. I pushed it away.

“Brian,” she said. “Will you have a drink?” She looked around for the server.

“No hurry.” I reached across the table and lightly touched her hand.

She smiled at me again and took a sip of her wine. She glanced away and then looked back at me. “You're looking good. I couldn't tell those times on the phone.”

“It's not like it's been all that long since we've seen each other, Elsie.”

“It's been a long time,” she said, “since I've seen you up this close.”

“Yes, I guess you're right.”

“It's like old times.”

The vine was in my face again. “What is with this vine?” I pushed it away.

“Have you found out what Frank's up to yet?”

So we were getting down to business already. I was tempted to make something up. My Psychic Sidekick said Frank wasn't guilty, but my goal in taking the case in the first place was just to get back at him. Bring a little misery into his rotten life.

I couldn't do it. Elsie sounded so angry and looked so bewildered when she said his name. Something had gone wrong. She didn't know what it was, and she didn't know how to fix it.

“You may be wrong about him fooling around,” I said.

“May be?”

“I haven't seen him do anything with anyone,” I said. “If he is, I don't see where he's finding the time.”

“But there is something,” she said. “I can tell from the way you said that. Something is going on.”

Our server came by. I asked him about the available fruit and vegetable juices. The selection was surprisingly small—or maybe I was becoming a juice snob. I asked him to put a shot of vodka in a glass of pear nectar. He didn't bat an eye. Elsie ordered a fruit plate. I decided to go with the spinach quiche.

“So what is it?” she asked when we were alone again.

That pesky vine was in front of my face again. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me. No one seemed to be, so I took hold of the vine and gave it a good yank.

It didn't break loose. Instead, somewhere back in the foliage I heard a heavy crunching crash. Anyone who could see us was now looking at us. I tossed the vine over the side of the table.

“Is this your way of avoiding the question?” Elsie asked.

I parted the shrubbery to my left and peered in. The vine had been attached to a plant in a terra-cotta pot on a shelf. The broken pot was now on the floor.

The server brought my pear nectar and vodka. If he noticed the modified arrangement of plants, he pretended that he didn't.

“So back to Frank,” Elsie said when he'd gone. “You think he's up to no good.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I can't just report my feelings and hunches, and then ask you to pay for them, Elsie. Give it some time. When I know something definite, I'll tell you.”