About Face

by James Calder

  That was interesting. “They were down there a week ago?”

  “Yeah. Definitely.”

  “What happened with you and SG?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t get with the program. I was, like, over it.” He stopped and looked at the bedroom door. His ears were more attuned to it than mine. The door opened and Wendy made her entrance.

  She flicked glances at us like a queen surveying her subjects. She wore a big-sleeved, billowy blouse, cinched at the waist with an oversized belt. Above a pair of slip-on white pumps were cream-colored silk pants. Her hair was piled high, a few strands loose on her face. Lanternlike earrings swung from her earlobes. A touch or two of Alissa remained: the necklace and the color of her hair. Even so, Wendy was her own glamorous self.

  Her lipstick curved into a big, sloppy smile for me. “Bill, it’s so nice of you to come.”

  I took her hand. It was still damp with moisturizer. Conflicting scents battled for primacy in the air around her. She glanced disapprovingly at the occupied space on the sofa. Brendon rushed to the center of the room with an armchair.

  “Do you want to sit here?” he said. “Or should I move my blankets?”

  She made a show of placing her rear into the chair. “This is fine, dear.”

  I put mine back in the sofa and said, “I was sorry not to see you at the memorial service, Wendy. But I guess you’re not sad to see Rod go.”

  “Of course I’m sad, Bill. It was a terrible thing that happened to him. And then they tried to make it look like he did it to himself. Poor man. He was a little bit pathetic to begin with—no offense, you understand. Then he became delusional about my daughter. And then he was killed in that horrible way. It’s too much.”

  “I see you know all the details.”

  She smiled again. “Oh, I keep track of things. I’m sure Rod told you all kinds of silly stories about me. It came out of his delusion. He blamed me for keeping Alissa from him. Of course, I had nothing to do with her feelings. A man like that . . .” She made a gesture of fruitlessness. “He was not a bad man. I thought he and I would be friends one day, once we understood each other.”

  “He wasn’t delusional. Alissa did love him.” Even if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of that, I wanted to see the reaction.

  Brendon stood abruptly and whipped his tie from his collar. He’d been perched on the sofa arm and had already removed his jacket and laid it neatly on top of the bedding. Wendy halted him with a small motion with her hand. “Dear?”

  He stared blankly, then got it. “Oh, right.” He folded his tie and said, “The usual?”

  “That’ll be fine, thank you.” She watched him walk to the kitchen with pleasure. “Don’t be rude. Aren’t you going to offer our guest something?”

  “Bill, do you want some wine?” came Brendon’s voice.

  I said I already had my water, then studied Wendy as she waited for Brendon to return. Her face in the daylight looked pale and puffy, the lips and eyes a little too full, the edges of the face-lift beginning to pucker. I had the impression she was weary, not from overwork but from striving so hard to have the life she thought she should have. Brendon appeared to be providing a much reduced version of it.

  She accepted a glass of white wine from him and took a sip, leaving a bruised-claret half moon on the glass, its counterpart a small smear above her lip. Only then did she return to my last comment. “You want to defend your friend, Bill, and that’s very nice. I suppose it doesn’t matter now how Alissa felt about him.” She smiled in a way that was meant to be charming, but her mouth reminded me of a wilted rose. “You and I want the same things: to find Alissa and to get the people who did what they did to Rod.”

  “What did you find out in Arizona?”

  “There’s no wrecked car and no body. The editor of the paper claims to know nothing about the story. The reporters, the sheriff, the medical examiner: ignorant as logs. I found a copy of that day’s edition and the story wasn’t in it.”

  “So the clipping was faked. Who would gain by having everyone believe Alissa is dead? I suppose Rupert could have pulled it off so that we’d stop looking for her. Which might mean she’s dead, anyway.”

  Brendon jumped up again, as if to attack my words. Wendy pursed her lips, quieting him with a look. She reached into her purse and extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  “Wendy . . .” Brendon entreated.

  “Please,” she said in a peremptory tone, “this is no time for rules.” She waited with the cigarette between two fingers. Brendon heaved a sigh and fired up the lighter. Wendy took a long drag.

  “I don’t think she is,” she said to me. Her tone was brazen, ready to deal. “I think she’s out there and I think you know how to find her.”

  “Let’s say I do—”

  “Where is she?” Brendon demanded.

  “This is hypothetical, Brendon. Let’s say I can find her. What do you have to offer?” I omitted that if I did find Alissa, I’d ask her first if she wanted to talk to Wendy.

  “You can’t just—”

  “Quiet, Brendon.” Wendy shifted sideways, throwing her feet over the chair. She let the pumps drop, one at a time, to the floor. “I can’t live on maybes. If you find Alissa, we’ll talk about that. But let’s say I have evidence of SG doing the bad stuff we know they do. What can you offer me?”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  She let her head hang back over the edge of the chair and blew a pillow of smoke at the ceiling. “I want a chance, Bill.” She’d turned suddenly wistful. “You know, I was never given a leg up on life. Not even a toe. Everything I’ve gotten, I had to fight for. When I was nineteen, Alissa’s father left. Nineteen, Bill: I never had a chance. But that’s not when it started, really. No one wanted me from the moment I was born into the world. I was given nothing. You can’t imagine. Now, I wanted Alissa never to have to feel the way I did. And I vowed she wouldn’t. It’s too bad it’s taken me so long to keep my promise. But I will. Every time I’ve been as close as I am now, something has screwed it up. Fate has turned against me. But I’ve been locked out long enough. It can’t happen this time, Bill.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not following you.”

  “Of course not. How would a college boy like you understand?” She leveled a look of injured scorn at me, then let her head hang back again. “You’re young and handsome. Not like Brendon, but still you’ve got plenty to look forward to. By the time this starts happening to you, your life will be set. You’ll have your car, your house, your wife. . . . When your skin starts to shrivel, when it sags and loses its shine, it’ll just be part of your stupidly contented old age. The world won’t see you as a crumpled-up sack.”

  “You can’t be talking about yourself, Wendy. You look very good.” And she did, in spite of her airs: It was only in comparison to Alissa that she had the look of the “before” picture.

  Wendy came upright again. “I work at it. There’s a man who’s very much in love with me, Bill. A wonderful man, a true gentleman, generous and respectful. He lives in the hills outside of Reno. It’s a beautiful spread. I’ve been everything he wanted and things he didn’t know he wanted. But he’s looking at me differently now. Do you know why? Someone said something to him, put an idea in his head that I’m a different age than he thinks. Now he inspects the back of my legs . . . my knuckles . . . my neck. He notices things. He thinks I don’t know it, but I do. He was about to pop the question, Bill, and now I see the doubt creeping in. But I’m not going to let life screw me again. I’m going to take this into my own hands.”

  “All right,” I said. “But I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  “You have access, Bill. There’s a treatment called Eternaderm. I know you know about it.” Wendy tapped at the edges of her face where I’d noticed the puckers. “I could get rid of these forever! But I’m locked out of it, Bill, unjustly and for no good reason. This is what has to do with you. You need to get it
for me. I don’t care how you get it: officially, unofficially, whatever. Just get it.”

  “Have you talked to Connie?”

  “Connie is the problem. Connie and Trisha. Trisha’s nothing but a showgirl from Las Vegas trying to go respectable. Connie’s stuck up. They scheme together—you wouldn’t believe what I know about them. And I will tell it to you, if you do your job.” Wendy exhaled another cloud of smoke and said, “There’s always someone, Bill, always someone out to ruin me. You’ll say I’m paranoid, but you haven’t lived my life. I frighten them.”

  “And they frighten me,” I said. “But why Eternaderm? There are a lot of treatments available, from what I hear: lasers, peels, retinoids. . . .”

  Wendy dismissed them with a wave. “I’m tired of subtracting little bits of time, Bill. It always slides back on you. I want this because it goes below the surface. It fixes the problem at its origin.”

  “Yeah.” I began to see the confluence between Wendy’s interests and mine. “What are Connie and Trisha up to together? Trisha’s the money behind Sylvain, isn’t she?”

  Wendy wagged her finger. “Uh-uh. Not until I see some product.”

  “Who’s going to administer it? How do we make sure it’s safe? And what makes you so sure I have access to it?”

  She finished the last of her wine. “Those are the problems. Now they’re yours.”

  “I need to know more about what you’ve got, Wendy. I won’t go off on some detour to get you your Eternaderm.”

  “I’ve already told you about Trisha and Connie. The rest is juicy stuff, Bill. You’ll get to avenge your friend. But I need to see progress first.” She tossed the butt into her empty glass, suddenly nonchalant. “It’s up to you. There’s no rush, right? I mean, Rod’s not going to get any deader than he is.”

  I stared out the window. Drops of rain spattered on the glass. I’d have to at least pretend to help in order to get more from her. I didn’t say anything right away, though. My silence apparently worried Brendon.

  “Aren’t we going to tell him about the party?” he blurted.

  Wendy gave him a glare, then said, “The Wings of Silicon Charity Ball will be held Friday night. Your friends from Sylvain and Silicon Glamour will be there. You can’t afford it yourself, but if you come through for me, we’ll get you in.”

  “All right, Wendy,” I said. It was finally sounding worth the trouble. “I’ll be back here tomorrow. But I still want you to answer one question before I leave. Why did you show up at the Sylvain dinner pretending to be Alissa?”

  A look of horror crossed Brendon’s face. Wendy stayed it by holding out the ash-speckled wine glass for him to bus. “I have a very good reason for that, Bill,” she said, “and I will explain it to you when the time comes.”

  Brendon took the glass. I stood up. After getting their phone numbers, I said I’d go to work on the Eternaderm. I privately hoped that would amount to nothing more than a chat with Ellen while I pried more information from Wendy. Meanwhile, I could entertain myself trying to figure out how a spoiled brat like Brendon ended up playing yo-yo on the end of Wendy’s string.

  19

  A light rain pattered on my windshield as I drove to Algoplex. It was after five and a few people still were left at the reception following the service for Rod. Tables with food and drink were set up in a common space at one end of the second floor. The furniture had been moved against a wall to open up the space. The windows looked out over the Frisbee field.

  I might have predicted that Wes would stick around to try to enhance his social life. He tore himself away from a conversation to slouch with me in a pair of beanbag chairs along the wall. I described my visit with Wendy and Brendon and asked if he’d seen Ellen Quong.

  “No,” he answered, “but you should check out this woman I saw lurking around Mike Riley’s office. She’s not my type at all— kind of a fallen-blond look—but I think she’s got a thing for Mike.”

  It sounded like Kim. “You’re sure it’s mutual—it’s not just him after her?”

  “She was the one lurking. Hold on, don’t go anywhere yet. I’ve got more research to tell you about.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “Silicon Glamour is virtually invisible on the net. I didn’t get a single hit and I was using my best spyware. You don’t cloak yourself like that without some know-how. I did learn a little about Sylvain. They’ve tracked every point along the tech arc and they changed their name at each stage. First they brokered stocks, then did IPO’s. They backed a couple of small success stories, then were accessories in one of those nineties IPO Ponzi schemes. Their CEO got probation and disappeared. The rest reconstituted themselves as Sylvain and dipped into a few dot-bombs. Everything turned around two years ago when they rescued a router company. They suddenly got respectable and went on to do set top boxes, net auctions, Plush, and now Algoplex. Their role’s hard to pin down, though. They present themselves as a venture firm, but they also do some M&A and some investment banking. One way or another they wind up with a major stake in each company. More so than you’d expect from a small concern like Sylvain. Myself, I’d want to deal with a firm that hasn’t spread itself so thin. Yet they make it work. Their results are solid now.”

  “And no visible tie to Rupert or Trisha Evans?”

  “Totally stealth. Unless you’ve got some new leads for me to follow.”

  “Brendon gave me the names of those guys who hit me: Larsen and Terry. Terry sounded like the younger one, Larsen the older.”

  Wes shook his head. “I need full names. An image file would help, too.”

  “I’ll ask them to pose for a snapshot next time. Brendon said they were in Las Vegas when Rod was murdered. So they might have an alibi there, but Wendy mentioned that Trisha was from Vegas. That could help us connect them.”

  “And it’s just a short hop from Vegas to Arizona.”

  “I guess you didn’t check out that clipping. It was a fake. Alissa’s still alive, as far as we know.”

  Wes made a small whistling sound. “That’s good news, huh?”

  “Let’s hope so. Thanks for the research, Wes. It helps.”

  We pushed ourselves out of the beanbag chairs. Wes returned to his socializing and I crossed to the other end of the building. The door to Mike’s office was slightly ajar. Voices came from inside. But the female voice was not Kim’s, and it was not happy. I knocked and went in.

  Connie Plush stopped in midsentence and gave me a not-you-again glare. She was on the opposite side of the office, pacing, toying with the glasses at the end of her silver necklace. A black cashmere sweater was draped over her shoulders. Mike was leaning back in his chair, bouncing the eraser end of a pencil off his knee. “What’s new, Bill?” he said.

  “Nothing much.” I considered for a moment, then decided to go right at Connie. “Why won’t you let Wendy test Eternaderm for you, Connie? She worked for you just like Alissa did. Are you afraid it only works on skin under thirty?”

  Mike looked puzzled. “Was Wendy here?”

  Connie crossed her arms in a ready posture. “Eternaderm works on all kinds of skin. Whether or not I let that woman use it is my business.”

  “What’s your beef with her?”

  “Don’t trust anything she says, Bill. How did you find her?”

  “She found me. She was full of interesting tidbits. So was her friend Brendon.”

  “He’s the young guy from SG, right?” Mike said. “What’s he doing with Wendy?”

  “He quit Silicon Glamour. He’s got it bad for Alissa.”

  “He quit?” Connie’s exclamation came out before she could stop it. “Oh, Trisha must be steamed. He was her little pet.”

  “Well, now he’s licking Wendy’s hand,” I said.

  “You’ve got it backwards: Brendon’s the one who holds the leash. He’s worthless, but Trisha turned to jelly around him.” Connie could barely suppress her glee. Talking about Trisha brought out a whole new side of her. She picked u
p a wine glass from a nearby shelf. The wine seemed to be putting her in an expansive mood.

  “What kind of hold did he have over Trisha?” I asked.

  “You saw him. She’s not a deep woman.”

  The tightness around her mouth had relaxed and her eyes had a silvery sparkle. I wanted to take advantage of it. “I’d been under the impression you and Trisha were pals,” I said. “I guess I was wrong.”

  “I hope none of us have any illusions about Silicon Glamour,” she replied. “Or Sylvain. If—”

  “How does the connection work?” I interrupted. “Does Trisha run both of them?”

  One corner of Connie’s mouth turned up. “That’s our best guess. But we’ve never been able to pin her down.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Mike said. “Trisha’s in charge?”

  Connie’s small grin turned into a smirk. “Wake up, Mikey-boy. You’re in the women’s world now.” She must have liked Mike. I hadn’t heard her tease like that before. “Listen, guys,” she went on, “if you can get Brendon on your side, you can strike at Trisha’s heel. Wendy’s, too.”

  “Trisha, yes,” I said. “But Wendy’s got some hold over Brendon. I figure it’s because she’s dangling Alissa in front of him. He claims to be over her, but he’s lying.”

  “Dangling a dead woman?” Connie objected.

  “Alissa’s not dead. The clipping was a fake.”

  Mike sat up. “That’s great news, Bill!”

  But Connie’s face had tightened again. She took a sip from the glass, put it down, and murmured, “Let’s hope you’re right. I have my doubts.”

  I sat down in a chair across from Mike, wondering why Connie preferred Alissa dead. “You said Sylvain couldn’t be trusted, Connie. Why?”

  Her eyes and Mike’s met across the desk. She made a slight shake of the head, but Mike said, “It’s okay. I want Bill to hear it from me.”

  Mike turned to me. “Sylvain has made me an offer,” he said. “A pretty nice parachute if I bow out and let them have their way with Algoplex. Hell, what am I saying, it’s a silk parachute with gold trimmings and a full bar.”