About Face

by James Calder

  “He sure was. How well—Were you, uh . . . Well, it’s really none of my business.”

  Kim turned her smile on again. It had a beguiling quality, a way of lighting up her face. Her skin was a golden copper that, on its own, would have been lustrous. But it clashed somehow with her hair, a kind of streaked, shaggy blond that had seen too many colors. The patches of erupted skin over her cheeks and temples added to an impression of her having fallen from grace. So did her throaty growl of a voice and the mixed scents of perfume and cigarette smoke, whiffs of a lost glamour.

  Kim seemed to be searching for words. Mike leaned forward. “Honest, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Can I get you something—a drink?”

  A newspaper clipping was clutched in his hand. I said, “What have you got there, Mike?” For some reason I didn’t want him raiding Rod’s refrigerator.

  He held it out and exhaled another big sigh, flapping his lips. “It came in the mail today. No note or anything. I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”

  I got up and took the clipping. It was from a small newspaper in Arizona. A head shot was included in a story about an out-of-town woman killed in a fiery car crash. Her name was Alissa Bevins. The photo confirmed it.

  I sank back into the couch, numb. “I guess that’s it. Both of them are gone now.”

  Kim gently pulled the clipping from my fingers. Her gloves were a tight-woven black mesh. She took one look at the story and burst into tears.

  Mike rushed to her side, putting an arm across her shoulder. “What is it? Did you know Alissa?”

  “No,” she sobbed. The back of a glove wiped her nose and she quickly brought the tears under control. “It’s just . . . all this death. Was she important to Rod?”

  Mike and I looked at each other. “Yes,” I said.

  Kim drew in a sharp breath. Mike squeezed her shoulder a little more tightly. “They weren’t engaged, though. In fact—”

  “Did you know Alissa, Kim?” I cut in. She’d answered the question, but I posed it more firmly this time.

  She covered her eyes and shook her head. Mike shot me a look that said to lay off. Kim said, “Do you know who killed Rod?”

  “We’re working on it,” Mike said consolingly. “We’ll get them.”

  “We have a good idea,” I said. I waited for her to look up at me. I was going to reel off some names and I wanted to observe her reaction. “It’s a company called Silicon Glamour Associates. Trisha and Rupert Evans. In collaboration with Sylvain Partners. Possibly in collaboration with Connie Plush and Wendy Bevins. How well do you know these people?”

  “I don’t,” she said, in spite of the visible quivers of recognition. “But I really hope you get them if they did it.” Her eyes, still shiny with tears, zeroed in on me. “I really want you to. I’ll help. Just tell me what I can do.”

  “That’s good of you,” Mike said, condescension slipping into his voice. “It’s dangerous, though, as you can see from Bill’s jaw. I’ve had some close calls myself. Here, take my card. Do you have a number where we can reach you?”

  She recited a number with a 650 area code, which meant it was local. Mike jotted it down. She put Mike’s card in a small purse. I noticed, as she stood, that her shoes were scuffed.

  Mike’s arm hovered near her shoulder. “I’ll take you to the door,” he said. “Be sure to keep in touch with us.”

  Kim stopped and shook my hand. She turned to look back at the room. A shudder came over her. “It’s so strange to be here. I can feel him. It’s like he could walk back in any minute.”

  Mike squeezed her and took her down the hall. I followed as far as the living room. There was a chill in the house. My skin had goosebumps and I wanted to warm up by lighting the fireplace. I found the switch on the side of the hearth and gave it a twist. It broke off in my hand. A gust blew down the chimney and I shivered. I was starting to think the house was cursed.

  17

  “We need to talk,” I said to Mike.

  “I’ll say,” Mike answered, coming back down the hall from Rod’s front door. He flapped his hand. “Boy, I underestimated Rod. He sure knows how to pick ’em.”

  I’d dropped into the brown leather sofa. A lamp with a green shade cast a lugubrious glow. Unreality was all around me— the report of Alissa’s death, the apparition of Kim, the brain-muffling effects of the medication.

  “I saw the box with the videotapes,” Mike went on, taking a seat. “Thanks for bringing them. I gave one to Kim.”

  “The master’s on the bottom. Make sure you don’t give that away.”

  Mike shook his head. “Whew. What a day.”

  “Alissa’s dead.” I was still trying to absorb the news. “That’s bizarre, isn’t it? How many more things can go wrong around here?”

  “I don’t believe it was an accident. They’re eliminating everyone who could tell us the truth about Rod and Silicon Glamour.”

  “But if Alissa was spying for SG—”

  “Maybe she wasn’t. Erika’s intuition was that she really was in love with Rod. If that’s true, Alissa may have learned something that made her flee. They caught up with her in Arizona.”

  “But Bill, these escort people—do they really have that kind of reach?”

  “The clipping is probably two or three days old. Plenty of time for those two guys to do the job and come back and give me a purple jaw.”

  Mike frowned and stared at the cold fireplace. “Maybe we should throw in the towel, Bill. I wouldn’t blame you one bit. It’s getting too dangerous.”

  “You’re in as much danger as me, Mike. More, if you don’t cave in to Sylvain’s plan.”

  Mike chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t have many plays left, with Carlisle pulling out. If I had the funds to buy up his shares, I’d do it.”

  “Borrow money. Do whatever you need to hold them off.”

  “I’m trying, Bill. But think about this, too: Maybe Sylvain getting controlling interest won’t be the worse thing in the world. We keep assuming their intentions are bad, but they might let me run the company as before. At least Algoplex will survive.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “It might be Rod’s patents they’re after. As it stands right now, we’ve got no chance against these people. The company is the one bit of leverage we have left, the one thing they really want. If you cave in now, then what you said before is true—we might as well give up the fight. Save both our skins.”

  Mike thrust his chin forward. “I’m not afraid of them.”

  “You told Kim you had some close calls. What happened?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, you know—the general atmosphere. How’s your jaw doing? Man, that reminds me of the time I nearly bit through my whole tongue in a rugby match. Hurt like hell to stitch it—”

  “My jaw’s going to be fine,” I interrupted. Like Wes, Mike needed an injury to compare to mine. I didn’t know whether it was to compete or to offer sympathy. “Look, Mike, I have no right to ask you to do this. It’s not worth your life or mine. But holding off Sylvain is the best hope we have to force them to make a bad move. It’ll also give me time to dig at the connection between them and SG. That could save Algoplex in the end.”

  “Okay. I’ll buy us that time,” Mike said, his finger jabbing decisively at me. “For Rod, for what he built. But I have to warn you, there will come a point when I have to punt.”

  “Thanks, Mike.” I sat back and closed my eyes for a moment. “Let me get Kim’s number from you, too.”

  His voice turned upbeat. “Yeah, so, what did you think of her?”

  I opened my eyes. His hand hadn’t moved to the pocket where he’d put the number. “A lot of things. She’s not telling us why she’s really here. I’d like to know how she got in.”

  “Yeah . . .” Mike was in charge of the house and didn’t like the idea that he might have left the door unlocked, although such a slip was unlike him.

  “She looked like a Silicon Glamour type,” I added. “My theo
ry is that she worked for SG and was getting an early version of Eternaderm from Plush. You saw the blemishes on her face. Something went wrong and she lost her job.”

  “Her skin is a little rough, but you can’t tell me she’s not a babe. I’ll liaise with her, Bill. Let me know what questions you want me to ask.”

  “Mike, I have no interest in her other than what she can tell us about Rod.”

  “Good. Then leave it to me.”

  Momentarily stupefied by the fact that he was worried about getting a date when so much more was at stake, I didn’t mention the slips she’d made. “I need to watch her face when she answers, Mike. These people are trained to put on a persona.”

  Mike squared his shoulders. “Whatever you think is best, Bill.” He didn’t mean a word of it. But he did take Kim’s number from his pocket and let me copy it.

  » » » » »

  Wes, ever loyal—or was he just nosy?—had my laptop open in the kitchen when I returned. He’d been making himself useful by searching far and wide on the Internet for Rupert, Trisha, and Silicon Glamour Associates.

  “I found nothing, Bill, not a trace. They’re either off the grid or they know how to cover their tracks,” he said. “I’ll run a scan on the Sylvain execs—it’s acceptable these days to investigate someone you want to hire. I’ll pretend we’re looking for a new CFO.”

  “Don’t forget Wendy,” I said. “And could you check out this clipping from Arizona, too? I’m tempted to go down there myself, but I’ve got the memorial service tomorrow.”

  “Right. I’d like to come to the service with you.”

  I gave Wes the particulars—the service would be at three— and then excused him from duty. The pain in my mouth had settled into a manageable throb and I’d made friends with the hole in my teeth. I sat in the kitchen for a while after he left, staring out a darkened window. A distinct sense of being in over my head caught up with me. I’d been blindsided by everything Silicon Glamour had done. I had no way to assess my chances against them because I couldn’t tell how big, how fast, or how smart they were. All I knew was that SG and Sylvain worked together to get inside information on target companies like Algoplex. Connie could be their point person at Plush. She used SG associates as test subjects for Eternaderm, and they also moonlighted as models. The treatment kept the associates looking young and fresh. Sylvain, SG, and Plush must have schemed the invasion of Rod’s company together. Alissa was given the job of luring Rod in, though it’s possible she changed her mind about it in the end. Brendon kept an eye on Rod and had the added motivation of being in love with Alissa. Rod’s murder may have been planned from the beginning. Or an unexpected wrinkle had forced Trisha and Rupert into it. The gentlemen who’d ambushed me did the dirtiest of the dirty work.

  But this was all presumption. Detective Coharie wouldn’t listen to me until I had evidence that forced him to: Rupert had gotten his ear first. I was starting to wonder about Mike, too. Not that I suspected him of collaboration, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was starting to perceive his own interests as separate from Algoplex and Rod. The news about Alissa might have been the most depressing of all. What a terrible way for her to die. Any chance I had of finding out the truth about her and Rod may have gone up in flames with her car.

  » » » » »

  A night of sleep gave me slightly more hope. Wes’s research might provide new threads to pull, and there were some wild cards I could turn over myself: Erika, Wendy, Kim. Suddenly, as my eyes sprang open Wednesday morning, it seemed crucial to get to Kim first.

  A call to the number I’d gotten from Mike gave me a digitized voice that repeated the number and then beeped. It was a mobile account. I left a message reminding Kim that she’d promised to do anything to help, gave her my cell number, and said I was on my way down the Peninsula.

  I stopped in at one of my favorite greasy spoons for breakfast. Silicon Valley didn’t have a lot of cultural advantages over San Francisco, but this was one. Most of the everyday diners in the city had been replaced by Starbucks or bagel shops. I was still recuperating and felt the need for a big breakfast: bacon, eggs, and hash browns. Kim called back while I was eating. I said I would come to her place. She said no, she’d meet me. I suggested the coffee shop. She countered with Hoover Tower on the Stanford campus.

  The tech boom of the nineties had been good to Stanford. The tower, once visible from everywhere, was hard to find now. I lost my way for a while in the labyrinth of new construction named for figures from the digital age—the Gates Computer Science building, the David Packard Electrical Engineering building, and the huge, still-incomplete James Clark biomedical engineering center.

  When finally I found the tower, Kim was nowhere in sight. I waited on the plaza. She arrived wearing a long, shiny black raincoat. It was a gray day, threatening rain later, but still the light seemed harsh on her face. The topography of her cheeks was more rugged than I’d seen last night. A dark wool cap covered her head. The drawn look on her face before she saw me gave her the appearance of a refugee.

  She switched on a smile when I approached and repeated that she meant what she said about helping.

  “So why Stanford?” I asked. “Did you go here?”

  “No.” She looked across the plaza, teeming with its bright-eyed crop of students, half of them on wheels, the other half on wireless. “I just like it here. It has a hopeful feeling.”

  “Shall we sit down?”

  “Let’s walk,” she said. “It’s chilly.”

  I allowed her to quiz me about my connection to Rod as we wandered through the campus. I gave out only innocuous details. It was a way to let her get comfortable with me. She pretended to know nothing of Plush, Sylvain, or Silicon Glamour.

  “You haven’t asked me about Mike yet,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, he’s being very nice. We had breakfast.”

  “He moves fast. What did he say?”

  “He thinks you’re doing a great job.”

  “Hmm. We’re getting nowhere on catching Rod’s killers, Alissa is dead, and the company is about to be pillaged. Yeah, we’re doing just fine.”

  Kim didn’t reply. She walked with a measured step, as if gauging each word she would say. We’d come to the engineering quad. The character of the students changed. There were more holstered devices here, more buttoned shirts, more people with the kind of preoccupied expression Rod used to wear.

  Kim said, “I really do want to know who did it. I want them put away.”

  “I think I know who did it, I just can’t prove it. If I could, I’d probably be dead.”

  “Who? Tell me. Tell me.”

  I stopped and looked at her. Her face revealed only contradictions: She was at once guarded and pleading, urgent and remote, beautiful and desolate. “Talk to your friends at Silicon Glamour,” I said. “Talk to Rupert and Trisha. Tell me what they say.”

  She resumed walking. A few silent steps went by. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  I stopped again. “You can’t help by lying to me. Lie to whomever else you want, since that seems to be the norm in this bunch, but not to me. When was the last time you saw Rod?”

  She gave me an offended frown, then counted silently. “I don’t know, maybe five years ago. Or three.”

  “He never mentioned you.”

  Her lips pressed together. Her voice was hoarse and bittersweet. “He wouldn’t.”

  “Were you a couple?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  People were staring at us. We’d reached a small shaded grotto with a fountain and a few benches. I moved us to one of the benches and pressed ahead. “How did you know Mike was CEO of the company? You’d just met him last night, yet you knew his role at Algoplex.”

  “I kept track of it.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I—I don’t have a job right now.” She looked at her folded hands. The skin was cracked, the nails chipped. Again I noticed the odor of smoke.<
br />
  “Why did you lie on top of Rod’s bed before I found you?”

  “It just—” She pressed a palm to her forehead. “It brought back memories.”

  “You see, this is the problem. You said that last night, too, yet Rod only moved into that house two years ago.”

  She glanced at me. It was a flash of a look, lasting less than a second, but in that flash was pure, furious anger. Then the tears came. “Please—you’re thinking the wrong thing. I can’t remember all the details. Maybe it was the same bed. There are so many things in that house. . . .” She hid her eyes.

  “You never told me how you got in.”

  “The door was open,” she said in her weary voice.

  I looked at the top of her head for a moment, at the brown roots under the blond hair, feeling simultaneously sorry for her tears and annoyed that she wouldn’t tell me the truth. “Tell me about your life. Just the past few years. Not everything, but how you made a living, who’s important to you. You’ve got a ring on your wedding finger.”

  She twisted the ring, then yanked it off. “It’s just for protection. I can’t talk about these things, Bill. Please just accept that. I can’t talk about them. All right?”

  I sat, waiting. She remained bent, her elbows on her knees. When she looked up, her face showed resolve. I’d get no further. “At least tell me where the condition on your skin comes from,” I said. “Have you used Eternaderm?”

  “It’s just . . . a disease.” Her head bent again. “Like my whole life. Leave me alone, please. I don’t want to talk anymore. This was a bad idea.”

  I wanted to reach over, to comfort her in some way and tell her that I really didn’t mean to be so hard on her, especially if she wasn’t running a scam on me. What came out was, “Did you hear about Erika?”

  A small shake of the head meant either she hadn’t heard or didn’t know Erika.

  “Someone threw a chemical at her,” I said. “Disfigured her face. It may be permanent.”

  The head shake became stronger. “That’s terrible.”

  Again her horror seemed real. But still she didn’t look up.