The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (29 page)

Things were at an all-time low.

Our trap had worked just fine if you looked at it from Frank's angle. We netted Pablo in the flesh. He probably wouldn't be able to hold Pablo long, but any time at all would be too long for Pablo. The killer would strike again. Maybe he already had. Yuri and Prudence seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet again. The documentation community was paralyzed. “Do something,” they demanded. “Do something!” I couldn't think of anything I could personally do about any of it, so I went home to my mother's house—just locked up the office and left.

I considered driving out to the care center to see Mom, but I had an urgent need to get away from everyone. Maybe it hadn't been more than a week since our last visit, anyway. I couldn't remember. Maybe I should start taking that ginkgo stuff to get more blood flowing to my brain.

I drove south on Dobson Road up and over the hills and into a world where in another season you might see barefoot boys with fishing poles. I didn't get out to the Dobson family house much, but I still had a room there. People came regularly to dust and such, and several times a year historic tours were conducted. I should sell the place. Mom wouldn't be coming back. Maybe someday I would sell it.

I parked the jeep out front and walked along the winding flagstone path to the front door. The house had been built in the late 1800s. Two floors of big rooms and a porch that wrapped all the way around. Gables. Dormers. Flanked by huge trees, the house had been big when I was a boy and strangely it didn't get smaller as I got older.

I spent a lot of my childhood tapping on the walls and listening and looking for secret passages. The place had lots of dark corners and surprising spaces, but I never did find my way into the secret passages.

These days the house was full of empty echoes. I tossed my hat and coat on the table in the entry hall and walked on to the kitchen. I knew what I was up to, but I wasn't admitting it yet.

I put water on for tea. I wandered around downstairs checking windows and turning lights on and off. In the room Mom called the den, I turned on the TV and surfed through every single channel twice, three times, once more. I might still be doing that if the teakettle hadn't whistled at me. I switched off the TV. I made a cup of chamomile tea. I sat down and blew steam from my cup, tasted the tea. It didn't calm me down. I stood up again and walked into one of the downstairs bathrooms and peed sitting down with my head in my hands. Got up, wandered back into the den and turned on the TV, turned off the TV.

Finally I just gave up and climbed the stairs to my room.

Nothing had changed.

I made one more attempt to delay. I sat down in front of the computer. Reached out to turn it on, stopped my hand, got up, paced the floor.

I knelt and opened the double doors of my mahogany stereo cabinet. Inside was my old but very expensive record player. I knew there would come the day when it would quit working and I wouldn't be able to get it fixed. It was a thought too sad to think, so I always put it out of my mind right away. CDs? You must be joking. There were a few albums on the side—things you'd own if you had good taste. Some 45s for eccentricity. The real stuff was locked in a fireproof box under the record player. I got out my keys and opened the box.

In front were several albums in old dust jackets, and behind the albums the rare 78s in cellophane jackets. I knew what I wanted first, and it was right in front. An album called
The Astaire Story.
This was the great one himself with “the Stars of Jazz at the Philharmonic” (BOM Records). I turned the album over and over in my hands. There was a time when I could get this close and then pull back, but those days were long gone. My head was already in the clouds, my body as light as a feather, my toes tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing in my stiff street shoes.

I set the turntable in motion and slipped the first record of the Astaire set out of its jacket. The cover of this treasure was so old it was rubbed raw and flaking, but the pictures of Fred and friends inside were sharp and clear, and the records themselves were in good shape. I carefully dusted the one I'd removed and put it on the turntable.

I scooted back by my bed and dug out the dancing shoes I knew would be under there and got a sudden flash face close-up of an ex-wife I never talk about screaming at me, “You've got shoes hidden in every room of the house!” I was on autopilot and shook that ghost out of my head and crawled back to the record player. I was way past the point of no return.

I lifted the needle and then put it down precisely where I intended.

“Steppin' Out with My Baby.”

Long cool waves of music lifted me, and my knees popped like the sound of two hands clapping once. Shuffle, hop, flap. Heel, heel, lunge. Getting into it. Moving with it. Flying high. Flying higher. Every part of my body working together. The secret is teamwork. Floating up, up, and away. The walls move in, the walls move out.

It should have been a homecoming; part the curtains and step out onto the stage of another world where you could do what you do and do it right every time. Used to be you weren't snatched from the wings to stumble onstage, used to be you danced the dance. These days the dance danced you, puppet man.

I was powerless to do much about it. I still thought that someday I'd dance back to that old place of clarity and joy and certainty, but I never did. These days I always came to a place where you dance as hard as you can dance just to keep from disappearing.

Maybe I had used up dancing. Some people can do that—use things until they're gone or have become other things entirely.

There had been a time when I'd be seeing the patterns about now. Mysteries would unravel. The puzzle pieces would click into place. No dice these days, and you'll be crawling toward the wall looking for a place to bang your head next, the only thing to do when you fall this far is to dance harder, and faster, doesn't matter that you're no longer dancing along with Fred. The secret is to dance a multiple. That is, it's okay to go twice as fast as Fred, even three or four times as fast. It's when you're going one and a half or two and a quarter or three and an eighth times as fast as Fred that you're in big trouble.

The song ended and the next one started. I danced to the end of the record, and when the last song of the side ended, despair swooped in on black wings and slapped me down flat onto the floor.

In the old days, the record would end and I'd be filled with new insight. My body would be toned and humming and my mind buzzing and banging down new avenues.

I took the record off and replaced it in its jacket. I pulled the first of my 78s out and put it on. Got up.

Andrews Sisters, I think.

So far gone, I could hear the boats whistling as the boys came home from the big one.

Then there was a period in which I'm convinced I simply didn't exist. My body truly danced alone.

Who knows how long that lasted?

Then there was a big noise.

The comedy team Laurel & Hardy entered stage left singing. Listen. Listen. I recognized Bing singing “Mairzy Doats.” Laurel & Hardy exited dancing stage right. My mother lounged in a lawn chair drinking something long and cool. She told me to look it up in my
Big Book of Clues!
Roger wandered up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. It was blurry blue and green where flesh and pixels met. “Pay attention to your mother,” he said.

Bing singing “Mairzy Doats.” Hey, that isn't Bing. What happened to Bing? It was Billy Cotton, and he wasn't singing the real words of the song. Instead he sang, “Marcy Dotes and Josey Dotes and little Pamsy Divey!”

A pothole opened up under my left foot and I stumbled and fell.

The song was in its final verse and the words were back to normal by the time I rolled over and lifted the arm off the record. I hugged my knees and trembled, teeth rattling down to sudden silence.

So, that's where the killer had gotten his name. Not José. Josey. Josey Dotes. Discovering that much might have been significant but it paled in light of what I now realized.

I knew a Ms. Divey.

Ms. Divey answered the phone for Lucas Betty who must surely be Josey Dotes!

I tried to get up and then sat back down on the floor with a groan. How long had I been gone? I could see it was dark outside, so maybe it was the same night. It would be good if it were the same night.

I crawled into the bathroom and did a bunch of business. I drew a bath and crawled over the side of the tub like an alligator slipping into a river and soaked until the water got cold. Afterwards I got in bed for a quick nap.

The sun was up when next I opened my eyes. I got dressed and went down to the kitchen and ate stuff out of cans. I really wanted a big glass of juice, and that desire told me I was back in the game.

I puttered around the house until I figured pretty much anyone's business day would be in full swing. I dialed Lucas Betty's number at the university.

“Experimental Support Services. Ms. Divey speaking.”

“Ms. Divey,” I said. “I need to know if your first name is maybe Pamsy?”

“No, it's Margaret. Who is this?”

“But you're small, right? Tell me you're small.”

She hung up on me. Maybe I should have been more subtle.

Okay, the fact that her name was Margaret was a setback, but I was still convinced I was right.

Lucas Betty was the Documentalist Killer.

He was the right age to be humming “Mairzy Doats” (if he'd learned it on his mother's knee) as he pondered an alias, and then maybe Ms. Divey came in with some papers and he'd said, “Thank-you, Ms. Divey,” but in his mind he'd said “little Miss Divey” or “Little Pamsy Divey” and it hit him and he sang Marcy Dotes and Josey Dotes and little Pamsy Divey. Wouldn't use Marcy, he'd use Josey instead. Wouldn't you?

How could I be sure?

I was sure! In fact, from now on this would be my Method. My subconscious solved cases. All the time I was running around doing things, my subconscious had been working on the case. The trick was just getting out of my own way! For my next case I might never leave the office. Instead I could enter a meditative state and drink juice and wait while my subconscious sifted over the known facts and figured out who did what and when and to whom. I'd go into a kind of Zen detecting trance and the answers would come to me. As they had this time.

But what if I were wrong?

I thought again of my mother and the
Big Book of Clues.
What had she meant? Everything had to fit in somewhere. Everything had to mean something. How many big books did we have? I walked into the library and scanned the shelves. Well, we had lots of big books if you meant fat books. Mom had gone through a Russian novel stage, and there were all the fat Russian novels she'd read.

There were also tall books, mostly filled with pictures.

Eureka!

Here was a big and tall book.

The dictionary.

I remembered what Greta, my Psychic Sidekick, said.

“Can't you just look that up?”

Even Frank had told me I needed a dictionary. When the universe gives you hints, you should pay attention.

So, I looked up “Dotes” (slid past “Dotage”), and I looked up “Josey” (nothing) and “Lucas” (nothing, but “lucent” was nearby and that was encouraging) and “Betty” (zip).

I looked up “Soapy.” There were some key words like “smeared” and “smooth” and “slippery” that certainly fit, but nothing spectacular, and I'd nearly turned the page when the word above “soapy” caught my eye—“soapwort”: BOUNCING BET.

That nailed it down. Lucas Betty's handle was BOUNCING_BETTY. I flipped over to look that up thinking I'd find screaming bombs and flying shrapnel. “Bouncing Betty” wasn't in my dictionary, but, of course, “bouncing bet” was. It was a perennial herb with pink and white flowers. Another name for it was “soapwort” which sounded like a skin condition, so you'd call yourself SOAPY instead.

Lucas was SOAPY posting on alt.dead.docs using the anonymous 4e4 account he'd opened under the name J. Dotes. He was BOUNCING_BETTY on the BOD list.

That was enough for me, but I was pretty sure the police wouldn't agree.

I called Marvin anyway.

When he said, “Sergeant Zivon,” I decided not to share my new insight directly. Seeing is believing. Maybe if Marvin could look into Betty's eyes when I presented my new information, he would see something that would convince him that I was right. Maybe Lucas would break down and confess.

Given modern police methods, I bet Marvin could find some physical evidence on or around Betty once he knew that that was the place to look.

So I lied. I told Marvin I had figured out why Frank had been acting so strangely, but I couldn't talk about it on the phone. Could we meet? Say by the Memorial Union at the university in an hour?

“Why the university?”

“Trust me, Marvin,” I said.

twenty-four

I'd forgotten how hard it was to find a parking space in or around the university. Marvin would use an official police parking place, which meant he'd probably get to our meeting place first. Even so, I took the time to stop by Oregon Hall and find out where the offices of Experimental Support Services actually were. Once I hooked up with Marvin, I didn't want to bumble around looking for it. I wanted to zero in on the killer.

It was still maybe an hour before lunchtime. Students hurried in all directions. The University of Oregon is a beautiful place—a park with old and new buildings looming up over trees from around the world—broad lawns and streets where no cars are allowed, bicycles everywhere. Lots of squirrels.

I walked all the way around the Erb Memorial Union building, sometimes on a sidewalk, sometimes on a sloping lawn, and finally down into a sunken courtyard where I found Marvin sitting on a bench watching the students go by. He saw me and stood up.