The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (28 page)

I hated the cat posters, but I restrained myself from pulling them down. I continued the circuit of the room, and when I got back to the desk I sat down again.

I tapped my fingers on the desk until I noticed all three of them watching me do it.

“Can't you sit still for a minute?” Frank asked.

“Always on the move, Frank,” I said. “I'm a go-getter.”

“You're a fruitcake,” he said.

“Something really does stink in here,” Marvin said.

The elevator dinged out in the hallway. That could be useful. You could tell when someone might be moving up on the office. But how come it hadn't dinged when Prudence arrived? Well, maybe it had and I hadn't noticed. But why hadn't it dinged when Marvin sneaked up on us? Okay, Marvin must have used the service elevator or the stairs. The point was I was noticing the dinging elevator now, and I would keep noticing it.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Pizza guy, I'll bet.” I got up to answer the door.

Marvin had gotten up and was messing with the latch of the trunk.

Frank hadn't even turned to look to see who was knocking, but Prudence had.

The pizza guy handed me the box. Since I'd already paid for the pie and included the tip with my card on the Web, there was nothing else to say but thank-you.

“Oh, my god,” Marvin said.

I turned back with the pizza in my hand. Marvin was standing over the open trunk. Frank was on his feet and in motion, Prudence was half out of her chair. The pizza guy moved up close behind me and stood up on his toes to peek over my shoulder. I stepped to one side and handed the pizza back to him and walked up beside Marvin and Frank.

Inside the trunk was a naked man.

It was easy to see he was dead. The body was crouched with the knees pulled up close to the shoulders, but the head had been twisted around to look straight up out of the trunk. A printer cable was twisted around the neck, the two business ends over the left shoulder as if the body were sporting one of those goofy western ties and had gotten caught in a big windstorm. The man's red ponytail was tangled around one of the cable connectors. There were circled words like small bruises all over the parts of the body I could see. The circles were connected with black lines.

“Leo Unger,” I said.

twenty-two

Frank got totally official on us. Cleared the room except for Marvin. In less than twenty minutes the place was crawling with cops of all kinds. Marvin came out and told Prudence and me to wait in the hall. There would be questions.

Our trap had been a total bust. The killer had seen right through it. He could have even been one of the guys delivering furniture when Frank and I walked up. I could have spoken to him! I tried to remember the faces of the furniture guys, but I couldn't get anything definite. Frank would remember the movers; he probably already had someone looking into Volga Office Supply.

“Can we do anything else wrong?” I asked Prudence. We were standing at the end of the hall, by the stairwell. All kinds of cops hurried up and down the elevators—cops in suits, cops in uniform, and finally guys in white for Leo's body.

“You can take Leo Unger off your list of suspects,” Prudence said. She didn't mean the comment as a dark joke. She just meant I could take Leo off my list of suspects.

“I think we're finished,” I said.

She put her hand on my arm. “You'll think of something else.”

“No,” I said. “I think we're finished. At least things can't get any worse. Why did we think we could figure this out anyway?”

“Maybe you're right,” she said.

That's not what I wanted to hear. I didn't want her agreeing that I'd totally screwed things up and hadn't a clue about what to do next.

I sat down on the floor and leaned my back against the wall and sighed. I looked up and up at Prudence. She stood looking down the hall, her head turned a little to the side. I sighed again, and she glanced down at me. It looked like she might sit down beside me, but she must have realized it wouldn't be easy in that skirt. She leaned against the wall, and I got up again.

We waited there for a long time.

They took the body away.

Most of the cops left.

Finally Marvin poked his head out of the office and looked around then saw us and walked over.

“So, is it our killer?” I asked.

“Yes,” Marvin said. “Leo's been dead for a while. Words on the body as usual. But there's a note, too. Two notes actually. The one taped to the trunk and the one inside.”

“What do they say?” I asked.

“The one on the outside reads, ‘A housewarming gift.' It's not signed.”

“And the one inside?”

Marvin looked down at his notebook. “‘I already did hypertext you idiots.'”

“Well, how were we supposed to know that?” I asked, realizing it was a stupid reaction even as I said it, but since I had some momentum going in that direction, I just kept going. “And what about the parable? He hadn't done a parable already, and if he'd left the body in a more obvious place it would have been found before we set up our trap and we would have tried something else!”

“You think that would have worked?” Marvin asked.

“Of course not, Marvin. I'm ranting. Can't you see that? I'm raving. I'm saying the first dumb thing that comes into my mind!”

“The note's signed,” Marvin said. “It's scrawled, but it looks like ‘José'”

“José?”

“That's what it looks like to me,” Marvin said.

I thought about Leo. Leo would always be special. Of the five dead documentalists (so far!), he was the only one I had actually met, but more important, he was the only one I'd seen dead. There is a world of difference between a body as part of a puzzle and a body bent and stuffed into a trunk. I wouldn't soon get Leo's dead eyes out of my mind. Leo, the hypertext guy. He probably thought he was safe since the documentation he put together was never printed. You used it right along with the software itself. The killer hadn't said anything about that. Well, Leo was his statement now.

“Maybe you'd better take a couple of deep breaths, Brian,” Marvin said.

“Sorry. You're right.” I did take a couple of medium deep breaths. “So, what were the words on the body and what were all those lines about?”

“Maybe you can tell me,” Marvin said. He opened his notebook again. “I'll read you the words.”

“Wait,” I said. I took out my own notebook so I could write them down. “Go ahead.”

He read me the words, and I copied them into my notebook. The list looked like this when we were done.

THERE

MATTER

YOU

NO

ARE

GET

FROM

HARD

WHAT

WHO

HERE

TRY

KNOW

CAN'T

OR

HOW

“Every word is circled,” Marvin said, “and there are lines from just about ever word to every other word.”

“Arrows?” Prudence asked.

Marvin gave her a hard look. “There is a little directional arrowhead on every line, sometimes in both directions. Do you know something about this, Ms. Deerfield?”

“I'm just trying to figure it out,” she said. “What else?”

“There is one word with no arrows,” he said. “The word ‘there' is just circled. It seems set off by itself because no lines lead to it or away from it.”

“It's nonlinear,” Prudence said. “It's like a map of nodes. It's what you'd use if you were setting up the links in a hypertext document. Each arrow tells you where you can go next. I'll bet if you look closely every node or word doesn't have an arrow pointing at every other word.”

Marvin didn't look like he understood any of this.

“You know,” Prudence said. “Like when you're reading a hypertext document on the screen and you can click on a word and it will take you to other information usually about that word. When you get there, you might find other words that you could click on to take you other places.”

“Actually that idea pushed to an absurd extreme was one of the irritating things about the documentation we hoped would trap this guy,” I said.

“But like he said, he already did hypertext,” Prudence said.

“So what does it say?” Marvin asked.

“Let's do some rearranging,” I said.

“Maybe we should wait for a map of the arrows,” Prudence said. “A picture would make it a lot easier.”

“I'll bet just about every sentence that makes sense will match one you could get if you followed the arrows. Let's just try a few.” I ripped a page out of my notebook and gave it to her. “Do you have something to write with?”

She dug in her purse and found a pen.

“You, too, Marvin,” I said. “Rearrange the words. Try to form sentences.”

I gave my list to Prudence and she copied it and handed it back.

We got to work.

“I've got one,” I said. “No matter how you try you can't get there from here.”

“Hey, but that doesn't use all the words,” Marvin said.

“You're right,” I said. “I think I'm on the right track, though.”

We went back to work. A few minutes later, Prudence had another sentence.

“No matter who you are or how hard you try or what you know you can't get there from here.”

Marvin had a variation on the same idea.

“Is it fair to use ‘there'?” Prudence asked. “I mean there are no arrows leading to or from that word.”

I suddenly saw what the killer was up to. “It's an extra level to the message! If you follow the arrows, you really can't get to ‘there.' I'll bet if we looked at all of Leo's hypertext documentation we'd find an irritating example like that.”

Marvin flipped his notebook closed. “Thanks,” he said. “We'll look into that angle. I'd better get back.”

“Can we go now?” I asked.

“You'd better wait a little longer,” Marvin said. “Frank will probably want to ask some questions.”

Marvin turned away. There was a commotion behind me, maybe the stairwell door opening, echoing footsteps, a happy conversation cut short.

Prudence stood in front of me where she could look over my shoulder at whatever was happening, and I saw a whole parade of emotions move across her face. Surprise, sudden anger. Guilt? Sadness? Finally maybe resignation.

I twisted around to look. Two guys, one maybe a foot taller than the other. The bigger one was leaning down so they could chuckle and whisper. They'd frozen in that position when they'd come through the door and noticed the crowd waiting for them. Kids, I thought.

Then the tall one straightened up, and the world shifted. One of them, the shorter one, really was a kid, a teenager.

The other one was Pablo Deerfield.

I looked at Pablo. Pablo looked at me. Then he spotted his sister behind me.

He burst into tears.

Prudence pushed past me and gathered him into a big hug. His buddy patted him on the shoulder and gave me a murderous glare.

I shrugged and tried to look apologetic, for what, I didn't know.

Prudence made soothing noises, and Pablo got himself under control. He rubbed his eyes with a fist and pulled away from her.

“So he's real,” I said.

“Of course, he's real,” Prudence said.

“Of course, I'm real.” Pablo grinned and I could see that maybe he wasn't entirely grown up yet.

“I meant real in the sense that he can come out of cyberland and shake your hand.” I put out my hand.

Pablo just looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at Prudence. She nodded at him, and he reached out and took my hand. I had half expected him to be made of pixels, had thought maybe he would blow away like pastel dust when I touched him.

“So, where have you been, Pablo?” I heard the condescension in my voice. At least I didn't call him ‘kiddo.'

He glanced up at Prudence again, and again she gave him the nod, and he grinned again and said, “Staying with my friend Bernie. In the dungeon!”

I looked at the kid. I'd pictured him differently, but maybe my idea of a young propeller head has been too much influenced by TV (and Bill Gates). When I'd looked at Bernie's yearbook picture I'd filled in a lot of details that simply weren't there in real life.

“So, you're Bernie Watkins,” I said.

He was short, maybe five-six or so, but he looked like he had a lot of upper body strength, like maybe he spent as much time in the gym as in front of his computer. His hair was shiny black and short on the sides and top, but in the back he had a long braid.

“What are you guys doing here?” Prudence sounded like she was already trying to figure out how to salvage something.

“We didn't think it was fair that you guys would leave us out of the trap!” Bernie said.

“Yeah!” Pablo said. “No fair!”

“Did you catch him?” Bernie looked past me at the last of the cops coming and going. Marvin had disappeared, and it occurred to me that now might be a good time for Bernie Watkins and Pablo Deerfield to turn around and go back down the way they came up.

“No, it didn't work,” Prudence said.

“So, what is all of this?” Bernie looked suddenly worried. I think he was smart enough to see that maybe he'd made a big mistake. He was looking down the hall, and I turned to see what was spooking him.

I should have just shut everyone up and told them to beat it as soon as I recognized Pablo. Too late. Marvin must have slipped away when he realized what he had here. Now he was on his way back, and Frank was with him.

“Pablo Deerfield,” Frank said just as soon as he joined our little group at the end of the hall. “You have the right to remain silent.”

twenty-three

You'd expect me to be in some smoky dive lost in a terpsichorean haze, but that wouldn't be low enough. If I'd been snatched back into that world, say doing a routine at Gotta Dance or wowing them at Twinkle Toes or flipping out at the Lite Fantastic, I would be at a place from which I could reasonably return someday. Instead I was home alone and in danger of dancing, and when you dance alone there's a good chance you'll never come back.