The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (2 page)

“I can see you're up to your ears,” she said.

I could understand how she might not be overwhelmed by feelings of frantic activity.

But everything depends on how you look at it.

“As it happens,” I said, “I'm right in the middle of a very juicy divorce investigation. I can't wait to nail this one. You wouldn't want me to lose my focus.”

“You can do this, too.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Why don't you get out your checkbook?”

So she got out her checkbook. I mentioned a figure and she didn't even haggle, which made me kick myself for not mentioning a higher figure.

“You know,” I said, “I'll probably have to run Pablo down in the course of this investigation.” I noticed the address on her check was a post office box, and she hadn't included a phone number.

“Just be careful,” she said. “If he's hiding I don't want you finding him for the police.”

“You know where he is,” I said, and looked her right in the eye. What the hell, it was worth a shot.

“I do not!”

“Okay, but there is the possibility that he did kill Gerald Moffitt.”

“He didn't.”

“I have to consider it,” I said.

I turned my eyes down before she could crisp my face with the glare she was beaming at me across the desk. I pulled the ASP*+ book across the desk and opened it.

“What's Asp … this?” I asked without looking up. “A book about snakes?”

“A computer language,” she said. “A net navigation language actually. You say each letter: A and then S and then P and then Star and then Plus—ASP*+. Stands for ‘A Special Protocol.' Geeks tell me it makes it a breeze to wiggle around on the Internet.”

“Geeks?”

“I say that affectionately and with respect.”

“I can hear the affection and respect in your voice,” I said.

“So, when can I expect you to actually do something?”

I put my finger on my place in the book and looked up at her. “Why don't you go somewhere where I can get ahold of you,” I had to take a couple of deep breaths to get past the thought of getting ahold of her, “and cool your heels until you hear from me? You got a phone?”

“I'll call you,” she said.

“Or you'll just drop back in?” I said maybe with too much naked hope in my voice.

“One more thing,” she said. “The police have locked everyone out of the GP Ink office. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“You figure the place is full of clues?”

“Wouldn't you think?”

“I'll check it out,” I told her.

She got to her feet and I watched her leave. After she'd shut the door, I sighed and bent back to the book. I turned to the index to see where I might find some talk about “exceptions,” but the word didn't appear in the index. Nothing is ever straightforward.

two

I never go off half-cocked on a new case until I've run it by my therapist. Here, in Eugene, you can go out on the street and pick a pedestrian, any pedestrian, and chances are good you'll get a therapist of some kind. From photo therapy (ever notice how people change when you point a camera at them?) to guided origami and everything in between. And if you don't get a therapist, it's a good bet you can at least get a fancy massage, but I didn't do local therapy. I had trouble being myself in person. My man Roger was on-line.

Earlier someone had been covering up covert action with a phony hacking cough out in the hall, but whoever it was had moved on or at least slipped out of sight by the time I looked. I locked the door, settled back down behind my desk, peeled off my mustache and touched the tender place under my nose and winced. I tossed my hat onto the desk and pulled the keyboard over in front of me and logged on to the net. My standard browser windows divided the screen into neat squares. An e-mail window, the call-waiting alert, in case anyone had anything to say to me on the phone, and a couple of portals. Dennis called this doing many things at once “multi-tasking,” and we were pretty good at it.

My animated persona for therapy looked a little like one of those
Mad
magazine spies, but with more colors available. I was blue when I popped into existence outside Roger's office. I had to wait a few minutes, and as I stood there twiddling my cyberthumbs, whistling tunes and looking right and left and up and down into cyberspace (not to mention among and through—directions not ordinarily encountered on the outside), I got sprayed in the face with purple varmint gas, and the nasties I hadn't noticed I was carrying made a dash for the hills, yapping like newspapered puppies.

Roger's door pulsed and a sign flashed on saying
PLEASE COME IN
, so I clicked on it. Roger sat in a simple wooden chair. He had a beard, of course, and an old-fashioned suit, and a nice smile. When he spoke his words appeared above his head: “Hello, Mr. Face (my therapeutic code name). Please sit down. How can I help you today?”

I walked my spy guy across the chat room and sat him down on the chair in front of Roger. Typing, I said, “A murder case has just been dumped in my lap.”

Meanwhile, in another window, I popped on over to alt.dicks to see if maybe one of my colleagues had posted anything on the murder. It didn't take me long to discover that the case had generated enough interest to spin off a new group of its own. The new group was called alt.dead.gerald. I popped over there to see what was what.

Roger said, “And how does a murder case in your lap make you feel?”

“I'm not sure I'm up to it, Roger.”

“What makes you say you're not sure you're up to it?”

“I mean, one of my other cases, for instance, is following that bozo Frank Wallace for his wife.”

“Go on,” Roger said.

“Well, the payoff for that one will be the look on Frank's face when he finds out it was me who made his divorce so tasty.”

“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 [email protected]. 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 believe 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.