About Face

by James Calder

  “Why are you here?” I demanded.

  “Stay out of it!”

  He writhed to escape my grip, his hands grasping for my ankles. I kicked him as hard as I could in the ribs, twice. The pain rocketed up through my foot, but the effect on him was greater. He coughed, gasped for breath, and stopped his struggle.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said, gasping myself. “You’re Alissa’s boyfriend, aren’t you?”

  He glared at me, then a mocking smile crossed his face. “Yeah.” The words came out staccato, punctuated by hard breaths. “That’s it. I’m in love with her. That’s right.”

  “Tell me!” I said, shaking his legs. “I know who you are. You came to Rod’s house a few days before he was killed.”

  Voices sounded behind me. Hands grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to let go of Brendon. His feet hit the floor. “Watch out you’re not next,” he said.

  “Grab him,” I said to the security staff. “He attacked a customer.”

  But I was in their way and so were the boxes. They must have assumed he wouldn’t go out the alarmed door. Brendon got casually to his feet, appearing to have given up the chase. His smile still mocked me as he turned and, in one quick motion, pushed open the door. The alarm shrieked. He disappeared down the fire escape.

  15

  I had a strange moment when I woke up the next morning, Monday. Images of the garments from the store—the cuts and colors, the racks and hangers—and Erika, her golden hair, the way her mouth playfully formed words, the light streaming through the Rotunda’s glass dome, came back to me. And I thought to myself: Wait until Rod hears about this. He’ll have some amusing observation to offer.

  And then the memory of his death slammed back into me. So did the image of Brendon’s sneer and the scissors catapulting toward me. He’d escaped, leaving Erika and me to make explanations to the store security people. They’d apologized, then awarded me the black pants I was still wearing as a consolation prize. Erika left quickly after that, promising to tell more about Brendon by phone today.

  So I would have to relate the story instead to Mike Riley, my new boss. Algoplex had a brisk air this morning, the air of work to be done. I sensed a desperation under the briskness. When I found Mike in his office, I asked him how the sessions with Sylvain had gone over the weekend.

  “We’re in trouble, Bill,” he said. “It’s just as I thought. They were nice about the key-man at first, but now they’re lowering the boom.”

  I sat myself down in a leather chair. “They want to pull out?”

  “That’s not how they put it. They claim Algoplex still has promise, but it lost 30 percent of its value when Rod died. Not only do they want that 30 percent, they want to push our peformance targets forward. They could end up with outright control. Plus, in addition to installing their own CFO, they’re telling me we have to bring on a hotshot engineer they’ve found as CTO because we’ve got no one qualified to promote from within.”

  “And the key-man clause gives them the power to do all of this.”

  “The only surprise is they haven’t walked already. This hotshot claims he’s looked at our software and it’s not powerful enough to do the simulations we promised. I don’t see how he could have figured that out so fast.”

  “Unless Sylvain had it for longer than we think,” I said. “If Alissa stole files from Rod, then Rupert could have passed them to Sylvain weeks ago.”

  “Jesus. This is getting worse and worse. I’m not going to give in, Bill.”

  “You’re counting on Rod’s insurance money to pull you through if Sylvain dissolves the deal?”

  “I was.” Mike was marching back and forth in front of me. I wondered if he’d picked up the habit from Rod. But his pacing was springy and aggressive, while Rod’s had been nervous and preoccupied. “Sylvain tried to shoot that down, too. They said the insurance company will take a good long look at the circumstances of Rod’s death. Yeah, they’ve got me bent over, all right.”

  “What are your choices now?”

  Mike sat back down at his desk and bounced a pencil on its eraser. “I can accept their terms, which I won’t. I can hope for the insurance money, which may take too long. I can try to raise more from Rod’s private investors, but one of them is already making noises about cashing out—to Sylvain, of course.” He stopped and stared at me. “So I don’t know, Bill. My other option is to punt. The company goes bankrupt and Sylvain ends up with the lion’s share of the assets, anyway. I need you to find out what happened to Rod. Soon.”

  “They’re taking full advantage of Rod’s death. Almost like they knew it was coming.”

  Mike stopped and gave me a curious look. “You’re kidding, right?”

  I didn’t reply. I’d wanted to see how it sounded.

  “I can’t picture it. I know these guys, Bill, I know how they play. They’re tough, they’ll bite and kick in the scrum, but actual murder? No way.”

  “What about Trisha Evans? She’s in bed with Sylvain. In fact, it looked to me like she was the one holding the whip.”

  “Maybe Trisha’s got something on them. Something they’d rather their families not know about.”

  “Maybe. But exactly how wide are they going to open their checkbooks to her? Never mind—that’s for me to find out. Next time you meet with the Sylvain guys, I want you to bug them about SG. Tell me how they respond.”

  Mike nodded. “Will do. Did you get a chance to talk to Detective Coharie?”

  “No,” I said, and told him about my fruitless visit to the station on Saturday.

  “I guess they don’t want to have to answer every question and pursue every speculation from friends and relatives,” Mike said. “But hey, the detective told me something very strange this morning. He said that knife in Rod’s hand might not be the one that killed him. The blade didn’t match with the wound.”

  “That ought to take care of their suicide theory. Did you say that to Coharie?”

  “Yes, but not exactly in that tone. Don’t take this the wrong way, Bill, but it might not help for you to barge into places like you do. That Sylvain dinner Friday night, for instance. It may have contributed to their putting the screws to us. Keep your investigation low-key.”

  “Sure, Mike. I’d hate to offend Rod’s killers.”

  Mike rearranged the objects on his desk, as if trying to solve some kind of Rubik’s cube. “Come on, play fair. You know I want them as much as you do. Let’s kick their butts if Trisha or Sylvain are the ones. That reminds me, I forgot to mention something else. Sylvain wants Algoplex’s name changed. They want a more bio-oriented name. That kills me. Why not just spit on Rod’s grave?”

  “No need,” I answered. “They’re the ones who dug it.”

  » » » » »

  Upon further reflection, Mike had a point. As much as I wanted to throw an accusation in someone’s face, I didn’t know whose face to aim at. Nor did I have details to back up my conclusions. I’d have to go the polite route. It was usually a better way to get information if you lacked the leverage of search warrants and subpoenas.

  I assumed I’d get nothing from Trisha and Rupert Evans, so I went to Plush Biologics. It was close to noon. The receptionist was a little nicer to me this time, but said Ellen Quong wasn’t at her desk. I asked the receptionist to page her. Ellen was in the lab. I said it was urgent. A technician came to escort me inside.

  The one-story building was a maze of partitions and corridors. The labs were in the back, on the opposite side from Connie’s executive office. Ellen was in her lab coat and goggles. I was required to put on the same outfit before I could go in to the lab. She showed me some tissue in a shallow plastic container with wells. “It’s looking fresh, don’t you think?” she said.

  “Is that skin?” It looked like a thin sheet of pinkish-beige Swiss cheese.

  “Yes, we use it to test compounds we’re developing.”

  I wanted to ask her a lot of things, but right now the first question tha
t came to mind was, “Where do you get skin like that?”

  “A lot of it’s harvested from cadavers. Nice thigh and back pieces, undamaged by sun or cosmetics.” She pointed at a gray device that looked like an oversize razor with a thick electric cord and a single large blade. “You use a dermatome to peel it off.”

  I hefted it. It was heavy. “You get all your skin this way?”

  “We use a lot of pig skin, of course. And new sources for dermal cells are popping up. Researchers in Wisconsin came upon an immortal cell line, a population of keratinocytes in a petri dish that just keeps stratifying and multiplying into normal skin. It’s become quite a business for them. The line originated with a discarded foreskin. An especially happy one, I guess.”

  A crawly feeling came over my own skin. “Before or after it was cut off?”

  “I believe the mutation happened in the dish, so—after.”

  “Sorry, Ellen, but that’s weird.”

  She let out one of her booming laughs. “Lots of things like this are going on in the dermal-replacement field. Skin is being grown for burn and wound victims, as I’m sure you know. One company is using cadaver skin, another is growing artificial skin from bovine collagen. Growth factors are being engineered. Nipples are being made in the lab, too. They’re constructed from pig ear ligaments. Whole breasts are next, using the woman’s own fat cells. They can be grown right on site in the body.”

  “For women who’ve had mastectomies?”

  “Right. But of course, there’s also the cosmetic market. The company thinks they can sell two hundred fifty thousand a year. Don’t worry, you guys aren’t being left behind: Scientists at Harvard are growing rabbit penises in the lab. The skin’s the easy part, it’s the corpus cavernosum that’s hard. But they succeeded by growing the cells in a collagen matrix. Apparently the reconstructed thing’s fairly functional.”

  I watched her wrap the skin and put it back in the refrigerator. “It’s easy to forget that skin is an organ like any other,” I said. “You identify with it so much.”

  “We’d look kind of creepy without it. I suppose muscle tone would become even more important than it is now. You know, people are working on enhancements for IGF-1, the gene that regulates muscle growth. I don’t know how the Olympics are going to test for that.” She put her hands on her hips and looked around the lab. It was similar to other biotech labs I’d seen, with spectrophotometers, a gas chromatograph, and a clutter of beakers, tubes, autoclaves, balances, mixers, viscometers, and Rotovapors spread across the benches. “I’d love to sit around and chat with you, Bill, but I suppose I should ask what you’re here for.”

  “I have some questions. Can we go to your office?”

  We left our lab coats and goggles by the door and went into Ellen’s office. It was a practical place, taken up mostly with books, journals, and a few family photographs. I closed the door, then sat across from her at her desk. “It’s confidential.”

  She looked at the door in mock alarm and said, “Don’t tell me. You’ve got a crush on Mrs. Plush. Sorry, she’s taken.”

  I laughed. “Did she say anything about me to you?” When Ellen shook her head, I said, “I want to ask you about Sylvain Partners. What can you tell me?”

  She spread her hands. “They’ve got the bags of money and they give some of them to us. That’s the extent of my knowledge. Too much else on my plate.”

  “Have you heard of an outfit called Silicon Glamour? Trisha and Rupert Evans run it. They provide dates for executives. Alissa worked for them.”

  “Nope. I’ve got all the dates I need with my husband and daughter and dog.”

  “They’re connected to Sylvain somehow. You probably know that Rod had a key-man clause in the deal with Sylvain and Plush. With Rod gone, Sylvain is threatening to take the money-bags away.”

  “I apologize, I shouldn’t be joking around. I suppose you can’t blame them for worrying about the future without Rod. But it would be a mistake for us to pull out of the deal. I need that technology right now to develop the next Eternaderm, the one that will work on collagen. It could blow tretinoin away.”

  “Well, the whole deal with Sylvain may fall apart. They’re trying to use Rod’s death to take control of the company.”

  “I’m going to speak to Ronald and Connie,” Ellen said. “If we lose the deal, we’ll lose months in our development cycle. You know, it seems to me we had a similar battle with Sylvain here at Plush. During our last round of funding, come to think of it— a fight about equity ownership. I wish I could tell you the details. Like I said, I’m busy with my skin.”

  “Who did they battle with, Dr. Plush?”

  “Yes, Ronald was quite steamed, as I recall. His pate turned a brilliant red. Connie was the one on the front lines, though.”

  “Has there been any internal conflict here over the deal with Algoplex?”

  “Not that I recall. Connie was skeptical at first, but I think we won her over. There’s also been some grumbling about personnel lately: people let go, new people put in. My staff is intact, but Sylvain could be directing the changes.”

  “Anything else? Especially in the last five days?”

  Ellen touched her finger to her nose. “There was a big fuss about a woman who came in today. She had some kind of injury, she was pleading for help. Connie booted her out.”

  “Who was this woman?”

  “She was young, pretty, blond. Something happened to her face. I heard the name Erika.”

  Ellen was startled by the speed at which I was on my feet. “Is Connie in?”

  “I believe so. Unless she’s gone to—”

  “Thanks,” I called on my way out the door.

  » » » » »

  After a few minutes of backtracking through the Plush maze, asking for directions more than once, I found the array of desks in front of Connie’s office. She was giving instructions to an assistant. An expensive-looking couple, wearing their coats, waited nearby. They could have been social friends, stockholders, or potential clients, and probably were all three. They looked to be on their way to lunch.

  I stepped in and asked Connie why an injured woman asking for treatment had been sent away. Fury flared in her eyes, then she ordered, “In my office.”

  I waited by the door to make sure she didn’t attempt an escape. She excused herself to her friends and we went inside. “Don’t ever interrupt me like that again.”

  “Why did you send Erika away?” I watched her closely. There was no widening of the eyes at the name. “You knew her, didn’t you?”

  “I have tried to tell you, Bill. Get out of this business. Just get out and don’t look back.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “You happened to her. When are you going to learn? Everyone you touch gets hurt. You have no regard for their safety.”

  “So you’re part of it. You, Rupert, and Trisha did whatever was done to Erika.”

  “That is such an ignorant statement I can’t even respond to it.”

  She appeared truly offended, but I wasn’t buying it. “You all are too cowardly to come after me, is that it? Someone sent Brendon after Erika yesterday. Today they finished the job.”

  Connie folded her arms and looked away, as though fed up with an especially slow pupil. “What’s it going to take, Bill? Another death because you insist on intruding? Well, keep pushing. You’ll get it.”

  “You’re only convincing me there’s a lot more to find out. You’ve had your own battles with Sylvain. Tell me what they’re up to with Algoplex.”

  A small pool of moisture had gathered in the corners of Connie’s eyes. She turned abruptly so I couldn’t see her dab them. The emotion was so out of place, I regretted for a moment having discarded my politeness strategy. But as she opened the door for me to exit, the chill returned to her voice. “Don’t ruin my luncheon, Bill. Just leave quietly.”

  » » » » »

  Erika did not answer her cell phone, so I drove straight to the ap
artment building. She’d indicated she lived in the same one as Alissa, but I didn’t know which unit and I’d never heard her last name. The directory listed three tenants with E first names. I memorized their apartment numbers and waited for someone to approach the gate. That could have taken some time on a Monday afternoon, but only a minute later I heard the metal gate being unlocked from inside. I pretended I was just on my way to open it myself. I smiled at a middle-aged man in a hat and overcoat on my way into the courtyard. He turned to watch me. I hurried up the walk before he could object.

  The apartments were split into two wings. Two of the E’s were in the wing on the left, so I started there. The door to the building hadn’t closed all the way. The foyer was rather grand, with vaulted ceilings and a painting of a Casbah scene. I ran up the stairs to the second floor, then to the fourth floor. No one answered at either door, in spite of my banging and calls for Erika. No neighbors whom I could ask opened their doors or came down the hallway. The manager likely had ties to SG, so I avoided him.

  I was on my way down when I encountered the man I’d passed on the way in. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. I nodded to him, and as I squeezed by, he said, “Bill.”

  I turned. Before I had noticed only the short white hair and the crow’s feet around his eyes. Now I saw that his face lacked expression of any sort. So did his voice. I made for the door. It opened in front of me. Blocking it was a young man in a heavy jacket. They had me trapped.

  I allowed the older man to herd me outside and around the corner of the building. I’d stick around long enough to hear what he had to say. We stood on a patch of grass, the younger man blocking my route to the gate.

  “You must be a friend of Gary’s,” I said.

  The older man looked at the other one. “He’s Bill, all right.”

  The younger man didn’t react. His age and build were similar to Brendon’s, but he had a more fatalistic slouch. Brendon’s James Dean aura had been manufactured with a haircut, a leather jacket, and a sneer. This guy’s eyes were as flat as his partner’s voice.