The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Page 2

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the new case is, I guess you would call it serious.”

  And over on alt.dead.gerald, I learned that Gerald Moffitt was a well-known figure in the tech writing world. One post referred to him as a prominent “documentalist.” I liked that word so much, I began thinking of the people who burden the rest of us with instructions for computer programs as documentalists.

  “Can you elaborate on that?” Roger asked.

  “I get the feeling,” I said, “that conspiracy is in the air.”

  “Why do you say conspiracy is in the air, Mr. Face?”

  “I can feel it, Roger.”

  “How does it make you feel when you feel it?”

  “Anxious.”

  In the other window I scrolled through the nasty rumble-mumble of posts about how it was an open-and-shut case. Pablo Deerfield did it, of course. Jealousy. Money problems. Something to do with GP Ink. The damning fact being that Pablo was missing. There was a lot of talk about what might have been going on behind the scenes at GP Ink—drugs, prostitution, software pirating, bad grammar.

  Someone named COSMO pooh-poohed the talk as the ravings of conspiracy nuts. The weird thing about that post was the address: anon 157@4e4.com. I didn’t recognize 4e4.com, but I was pretty sure I’d seen it before, and I noticed that several of the posts in alt.dead.gerald came from there. It’s like once something lodges in your mind, you see it everywhere.

  “Tell me more about your anxiety, Mr. Face.”

  I thought about it, and as I pondered, I drifted away from the experience of Roger’s animated chat room and our multi-tasking and became aware of the computer screen and our conversation marching along above two animated characters, became aware of my fingers, my typing. I typed, “It’s not so well defined. I’m noticing, for example, that the fact there is an x in the word anxious is making me very nervous.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m getting the feeling,” I said, “that everything is connected.”

  A beep. An answer to my query about 4e4 had arrived. It turned out 4e4.com was an anonymous remailing service based in Russia. I sat back and took a couple of deep breaths. If there was a conspiracy afoot, who better to be involved than the Russians?

  “Do you see the fact that everything is connected as a bad thing?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You may be avoiding the main issue,” Roger said.

  Maybe he was right. “I think I may be losing myself in my disguises,” I said.

  “What would it mean if you lost yourself in your disguises?”

  “I sometimes have trouble telling who the real me is. And I’m having trouble remembering some things.”

  Hot on the heels of the Russians, I popped over to alt.anon. There I learned that 4e4 was a recently established company in the new Russia that provided absolute security on the Internet. They claimed they would never ever reveal the identity or location of any client. They didn’t come right out and say it, but the implication was that the Russian government supported and protected the enterprise. This looked like yet another creative answer to ham-handed attempts to restrict freedom of expression in cyberspace, but I had to wonder what the Russian Mob thought about it.

  “Can you give me an example?” Roger asked.

  “Well, I have the feeling I may have been a cop once,” I said. “On the other hand maybe I just read a lot about it. Or maybe I played one on TV.”

  “Go on.”

  “Lately, I’ve begun to suspect that the Sky disguise is the real me.”

  “Tell me more about being Sky.”

  “At first it was another level of misdirection,” I said. “Peel away the disguise and you find another disguise. A matter of protection. A tool.”

  A call came in, and I flipped on the speakerphone. “Skylight Howells,” I said.

  “This is Ms. Divey. Please hold for Lucas Betty.” I suppose it could have been Ms. “Davie” with an accent.

  “My other case,” I told Roger. “The embarrassing one.”

  “What’s the story on Dennis?” Lucas asked as soon as he came on the line.

  “I’m closing in,” I told him. I always told him I was closing in. Lucas Betty, who called himself BOUNCING_BETTY on-line, wanted to hook up with Dennis and start a software consulting firm. Dennis figured we could make a lot of money, and money was always nice, but that kind of business would cramp our style.

  “Tell me why you say your other case is the embarrassing one,” Roger said.

  And over on alt.dead.gerald, some guy called SOAPY told me to check out www.deadguys.com if I wanted to see a picture of Gerald’s dead body.

  “We’re not really cheating him,” I told Roger. “Sooner or later Sky will put Dennis in touch with him.”

  “Go on.”

  “You’re always closing in,” Lucas said. “Look, I need him. I’m up to my eyeballs. You’ve got to be more than one person to make it these days. If I could clone myself, I would. Come on, Howells, get with it. Maybe I should just put an ad in the paper telling Dennis he could make a lot of money. Maybe I don’t need you.”

  “We need the money,” I told Roger.

  “I’m getting close, Mr. Betty,” I said. “Real close. Any day now, I promise.”

  “Go on,” Roger said.

  “That’s about it,” I told Roger. Lucas Betty hung up.

  “Why do you say that’s about it?”

  “Maybe I should just put my hat back on.”

  “What would it mean if you put your hat back on?”

  I suddenly saw what Roger was getting at. “You’re right, Roger, as usual. I’ve got to quit feeling sorry for myself and get back to work.”

  “How would getting back to work make you feel?”

  “Better. In fact I feel all pumped up and ready to go right now. You’re a lifesaver, Roger. I’ll just sign off for now.” I closed Roger’s window and popped over to www.deadguys.com to see if there was really a picture of Gerald Moffitt. There wasn’t. I didn’t know what that meant. Had I expected SOAPY to be the killer and to have posted the evidence on a Web page?

  And the others hiding behind 4e4.com? You might expect that kind of secrecy on alt.sex.barnyard.animals or even alt.noises.sucking but why here? I scanned down the list of postings for other people with 4e4.com addresses. There were quite a few.

  I decided it was time to do some legwork.

  There was almost certainly something going on at GP Ink. Prudence Deerfield had as much as told me there was something to find there.

  I got out my cheap scotch and dirty glass from the bottom left desk drawer and poured myself a couple of fingers and leaned back in my chair and put my feet back up on the desk. Legwork. I could go as Dieter, and thinking of Dieter made me curious to see if anyone had picked up on the fact that a secret ingredient had been posted in alt.conpiracy. I wandered on over there and checked out the list of new posts. The original post was still there: “I laugh in your face, SSOMFC; the secret ingredient is…” Well, it didn’t say “dot dot dot,” but I’m certainly not going to compound someone’s error by writing the ingredient here.

  I saw there was a flurry of posts on the subject, and as soon as I opened a few I intuited what SSOMFC’s strategy was for this crisis. Every post offered a different ingredient as the secret ingredient. With so many claims and counter-claims no one would realize that someone had in fact really told the world the secret for really good Mexican food.

  I had been sparring (or more correctly my disguise Dieter, “the Mexican Food Chef,” had been sparring) with the Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks for years. They knew Dieter knew the secret ingredient. He made no bones about claiming that the reason it was so hard to get good Mexican food in Oregon was that most of the cooks didn’t know about the secret ingredient. He liked to say that most of the grandmothers of the cooks probably knew it, but they weren’t talking.

  The communication I’d had with the SSOMFC had led me to be
lieve that violence would be the preferred solution for any problem. But now this. I had to admire the way they were handling this crisis. I wondered who in the society was in charge of the operation.

  Then it hit me that this is where I’d first seen 4e4.com. I brought up the original post again. Yes, the person who had spilled the beans (so to speak) was anon77@4e4.com. That person’s handle was ESCOTILLA which some hasty research revealed meant “hatchway” (could that be “trapdoor”?) in Spanish. There was also a small town in the mountains of southwestern Arizona with the same name.

  So now I knew why 4e4.com had bothered me in the first place, but did that mean that the society was somehow mixed up in Gerald’s murder? Well, probably not, but I couldn’t discount the possibility altogether. Prudence Deerfield might think certain elementary mathematical skills were what detective work was all about, but I knew it was all about intuition. The wheels were always turning even if you couldn’t see them turning. You had to trust the process. The mind of the detective was always picking over the bones of the case, endlessly moving the pieces around. Never say never. Never ignore the little voices in your head.

  I tossed off my drink and got up. Legwork. Just do it. I would not go as Dieter; I would go as Scarface. I made that decision without consciously deciding to do so. Process.

  I walked into the washroom to become Scarface. People turn their eyes away from a really horrible facial scar. Makes it hard for them to see or remember the person behind the scar. Setting things up so people don’t look too closely is the key to a good disguise. It is incredibly difficult to change a face enough to be absolutely unrecognizable. There is always something to give you away. Recognizing faces is one thing the human brain is very good at (we are all the time concerned with faces—just look at the Man in the Moon or the Face on Mars), and fooling it usually demands misdirection.

  I applied the scar and put on a baseball cap with an attached ponytail. Checked myself out in the mirror. Grabbed an electric-blue fanny pack. Putting the man with the ponytail and the fanny pack in a tie-dyed tee shirt would make him altogether invisible in Eugene. And if you did look, well, there was that scar.

  I turned off my office lights and left by way of the stairs to avoid anyone on the elevator.

  GP Ink had its office in the Baltimore building downtown. There was a huge neon sign atop the building. The sign said TOFU. At night you could see the pink glow from the window of my office. It only took me a couple of minutes to walk around the corner and down the block to the Baltimore.

  I rode the elevator up to the third floor and walked down a dim hallway. I detected no activity behind the doors I passed on the way to 317. It was as if everyone had taken the afternoon off. I knew there were people behind all the doors but they were being very very quiet, almost like they knew I was out in the hall.

  When I found the right door, I looked both ways before pulling out my tools and dropping to one knee. The lock hadn’t been updated in twenty years and it took only a moment for the tumblers to fall into place. I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  Late afternoon sunlight slanted into the room from a high window above a reception desk. Three white plastic chairs for people waiting to see Gerald or Pablo. A filing cabinet. A phone and a computer monitor on the desk. A poster of people drinking red wine and laughing into a blue sky above a sidewalk café. There was a door behind and to one side of the desk, and under that door a line of daylight was suddenly broken by a shadow. Someone was in the inner office.

  I eased the hall door closed behind me and stepped around the receptionist’s desk. I stood very still and listened. Whoever was in there hadn’t heard me. If they’d heard me, they would have been holding still and listening, too. Instead, I heard movement and finally the clatter of fingers on computer keys.

  There was a chance that the person in there was with the police department. I had to take that possibility into account. On the other hand, maybe I’d gotten lucky. Maybe Pablo had been unable to resist sneaking back to his office and computer to catch up on some work.

  I decided to take the chance. I put my hand on the doorknob and took a breath to fortify myself for a sudden rush inside. I looked closely at the door to make sure which way it opened (away from me so I should push). It’s really embarrassing to telegraph your rush into a room by trying to open the door the wrong way.

  I turned the knob and pushed and rushed inside.

  A man jumped up from behind the desk and leaped at me. He looked like a whole wall of flesh coming my way. The best defense is a strong offense, I guess. He was over the desk and on top of me before I could even get a good look at him. A couple of expert judo jabs to the midsection and I went down. He scrambled over me and into the outer office. By the time I got to my feet, he’d dashed into the hall.

  My cap was on backwards and the ponytail was hanging in front of my face. I pulled it back in place and rubbed my abdomen and groaned. I didn’t think I’d catch him, but I took a deep breath and ran after him anyway. Maybe I could at least get a better look. By the time I got into the hall, it was empty, but I heard someone to the right, and I charged off in that direction.

  If I could get even a glance at him, I could confirm my impression (over six feet tall, beard stubble, cheap gray sports jacket, skinny black tie, foreign shoes) and maybe even add a few things to this list.

  I rounded the corner and ran headlong into two men coming the other way. The unreality of the situation threatened to freeze me as we all went down. One of the men I’d bowled over was Frank Wallace, my high school nemesis, the man I was watching on another case, the man whose wife (sweet Elsie) wanted me to find out who he was fooling around with. I would never have agreed to follow a lieutenant in the Eugene police department if there had been any chance whatever that I’d actually run into him.

  Okay, I was motivated by revenge, pure and simple. I fantasized about the day he’d get slaughtered in divorce court—the look on his face when he realized it was me who got the goods on him! Even so, watching Frank wasn’t supposed to be the kind of case where you bumped into the object of your observation. Just some subtle snooping, a few photos, and a report to the Mrs.

  Now I wondered who was following who.

  The other man was Frank’s sidekick Sergeant Zivon. It said something about how fast I must have been going that I’d managed to knock over the mountainous Marvin Zivon.

  I scrambled to my feet. I decided it would not be a good idea to stick around and explain myself to Frank and Marvin, so I took off down the hall before they could get up. Whole thing took seconds.

  “Stop! Police!” Frank yelled, but I didn’t even slow down.

  Down the stairs but not all the way down. It would be stupid to go all the way down and run right into the arms of whoever Frank would call on his walkie-talkie. I stopped in at the second floor men’s room. Ducked into a stall just in case someone was sharp and fast enough to be checking the cans already. Off with Scarface’s ponytail. Off with the scar. Tie-dye not so good now. Quick, strip it off and wad it up. Short sleeve wrinkle-free white shirt from the fanny pack. Fanny pack itself shifted to the side. New hair. I didn’t want to be Sky. Frank and Marvin knew Sky. I became Tag, “the Average Guy.” Tag was probably my most subtle disguise. He was a guy you’d look at and never notice. If I could join a crowd or even a small group of people, I would be virtually invisible.

  I stepped out of the stall and checked myself in the mirror. Looking good. Just the right touch. I’d get back to being Sky after I slipped away from the cops.

  I walked out of the men’s room and joined a small group of people standing around the door to the Downtown Realty office.

  “You hear what all the hubbub’s about?” I asked a pretty blond woman in a tan business suit and really big glasses. I love the way downtown businesswomen still wear dresses.

  “Who knows what wandered in off the mall,” she said.

  “I heard that,” I said.

  A couple of uniformed po
liceman came by on their way to the elevator. They gave us a glance but it was hard to tell if they’d even be able to report how big our little group was, much less that they’d seen me.

  After they’d gotten in the elevator, I looked at my watch and said, “Looks like quitting time to me.”

  Everyone else seemed to think so, too. The group broke up and went back inside. I considered following along but it turned out not to be necessary. A moment later, the woman and a man in a tie but no coat came out and walked toward the elevator. I followed along just close enough to seem to be with them if you weren’t looking too closely. We took the elevator to the lobby, then walked out of the building. We walked right past Sergeant Zivon and he glanced up, checked us out but didn’t make eye contact, turned away.

  I saw Frank at the corner of the building apparently scanning the downtown mall for Scarface. I was nearly overcome by the need to do a little victory dance right there on the spot, but fought it off and turned away before someone spotted the huge grin on my face and maybe put two and two together.

  A couple of blocks later I stopped in the men’s room on the mall with its metal urinals and sour smell. I looked in all the doorless stalls to make sure I was alone and then peeled off Tag and became Sky once again. Checked myself out in the metal mirror. Rubbed my hand over my blond crewcut. Not quite thirty-eight and looking okay, maybe better than okay, maybe good enough to do a little dancing.

  Push that thought out of your mind.

  Once the thought arrives in that devil-may-care who gives a flying rat’s ass let’s go dancing, dudes, there’s only one outcome, and it always comes even when it takes a few days. And I could tell this wasn’t going to be one of those days when it would take a few days.

  You can feel it inside like steam in a boiler. It’s got to get out, got to get out, click your heels and tap your toes. When I’m about to do something stupid, it’s like I’m watching myself from on high. There I go heading for the west side, not because I’ve got any business on the west side, but because there’s this place I know, draws me back, makes me homesick for spilled beer and smoke and that old gang of mine. The music. The open floor. It’s like anyone can get up on that stage and dance and anyone does, but when I do, I don’t stop. If I ever get trapped in there, it’ll be really really hard to get out again. I won’t go in. Simple. If you don’t go in, you won’t have to bust out.