The Face-Changers (14 page)

When Jane handed Dahlman me bottle of pills he looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

“Something wrong with it?”

“It’s exactly what I asked for.”

“That’s why I asked you to spell it.” He took a dose immediately, then went back to the bed.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

Jane said nothing. She opened her suitcase and brushed her hair.

“Don’t you want to hear what I was thinking?” Jane stared at him over the lid of the suitcase. “Not if it’s about me.”

“Interesting,” said Dahlman. “What I was thinking about was why a man like Dr. McKinnon would know the telephone number of a woman like you.”

“A woman like me?”

Dahlman went on. “He had it in his head, you know –

didn’t have to look it up. I was thinking it was something like this. He did you a favor – maybe operated on you or a friend of yours. You told him that if he ever needed anything in return, he should call. The number just stuck in his mind. He’s a brilliant man, with the sort of mind that things just stick to.

And last night I came looking for you. The police shot me before I could make it to your house. I told Carey your name, and out came your number.”

“You think he once took a thorn out of my paw?” Her face wore a mirthless little smile.

“Well?” He looked at her triumphantly. “Am I right?” Jane picked up a new set of clothes and walked toward the bathroom. “I’m going to shower and change. Then I’m going to sleep for a few hours. You can watch TV quietly, or read if the light’s not in my eyes. When I wake up it will be dark.

And then we’re going to check out and drive on.”

“You won’t tell me how he knows you?”

“He knew my number because I’m his wife.” She closed the door, and in a moment Dahlman heard the shower running.

Dahlman eased himself onto the bed. He had done it again.

He had met a person he liked, and had studied her for a time, and found her so intriguing that he had allowed his curiosity to explode into life and hungrily turn her into a specimen for study. His life seemed to him a long and distressing series of incidents like this – a Sequence of offenses that made him want to hide his face. He found himself wishing he could be back in the clinic in Chicago with the door closed and human beings kept far away, where he wouldn’t be tempted to do something that would make him ashamed. He felt a sudden twinge in his shoulder and shifted his weight to his right side.

“That’s another reason,” he thought. “If I were back there, I could make this thing go away.”

It was time for the morning flurry of activity around the airport, and Marshall waited for the deep roar of the latest airplane to fade before he spoke into the telephone again. Now and then he looked down at what he had written in the little leather notebook that he carried. “Here’s what I would like.

The Buffalo police will be sending prints from the hospital, along with prints on file of the members of the staff who were supposed to be in the area. Anything out of the ordinary goes to me, and to them. Okay?”

On the other end of the line, Albert Grapelli spoke in a preoccupied way, as though he were writing. “Okay.” Marshall looked down at his list again. “When Dahlman walked out of there, he didn’t take his medicine with him.

He’s supposed to have painkillers and an antibiotic. The painkillers we can’t do much about because there are so many kinds on the market, and we can’t even be sure he’ll take one.

But the antibiotic seems promising. The guy who operated on him was one of his old students, so let’s assume they both believe in the same antibiotic. Now that he’s on his own, he’ll prescribe the same stuff for himself. It’s called Cipro. If any pharmacist fills a prescription for it anywhere in the next few days, I’d like to have him interviewed.” Grapelli was silent for a moment. Marshall waited, then heard Grapelli take in a breath, so he knew what was coming.

“John,” said Grapelli. “Isn’t that a little…” He corrected himself. “No, scratch that. Let’s hear what else you want before I tell you what you can’t have.” Marshall said, “Problem?”

“You know what I’d like? I’d like to know what you think is going on.”

Marshall glanced around the little office that the airport people had lent him. The door was still closed, and under it he could see no shadow that would indicate someone was politely waiting for him to finish his call before they knocked. He said,

“I think there’s serious strangeness here.”

“What kind of strangeness?”

“A sedated sixty-seven-year-old man doesn’t hop out of bed with a gunshot wound and stroll past cops and newspeople wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a smile. I think even if all of the laws of the universe were temporarily suspended and he did, then you’d still have a wounded senior citizen walking barefoot and bare-assed down a well-lighted and well-traveled public street.”

“I thought he stole a police car and drove it someplace?”

“I don’t,” said Marshall. “It’s possible that it’s just one of those jokers who see a unit sitting there during an emergency, take it for a joy ride, and dump it. Unfortunately, the search for it took up maybe half the men and equipment the local police had for a couple of hours. They found it in the garage of an unoccupied house. That meant they had to surround the house and assault it as though he were barricaded in there.”

“Should I send a team to tactfully explain that a man is short and round, and a house is big and pointy?”

“Not necessary,” said Marshall. “They’ll look stupid in the morning papers, but they’re not. They had a wounded murder suspect and a patrol unit disappear at the same time. When they last saw the car it had a shotgun in the rack. When it turned up a mile away in a dark garage attached to an empty house, what were they going to do? No, they’re good.

Whoever took Dahlman out is better.”

“What?” Grapelli elongated it into a drawl.

“Just a theory, of course,” said Marshall.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Dahlman’s surgeon knew him, so there’s a connection that might make him want to help Dahlman. But the surgeon was accounted for during some of the time when the hard part had to happen – wheeling Dahlman out, bringing a getaway car, maybe stealing the police cruiser to create a diversion. The whole thing had to be cooked up in less than an hour, and executed in fifteen minutes. You can see the problem.”

“Yeah, I can see it, all right. Multiple perpetrators of unknown number.”

“If I say it out loud, then it’s crazy time: maybe a conspiracy involving half a dozen people who work in the hospital.”

“You mean doctors?”

Marshall said, “Whoever did it was smart. Doctors are smart. They also get to order everybody around in a hospital, have them wheel patients here and there with no questions asked. And maybe there was a cop who got talked into helping a prisoner escape, or maybe even one who got worried about the fact that he was unarmed when they shot him and took him out to finish him off. I’d say that for the moment, at least, we’ve got to let the Buffalo police take all the embarrassment while we quietly do everything we can to straighten this out.” Grapelli was silent.

Marshall waited, then asked, “New problem?” Grapelli sighed. “I was just wondering what you would consider ‘straightening this out.’”

Marshall said, “Getting Dahlman would be a start. I’d like to throw everything we can into his path and snap him up so he doesn’t hurt anybody else. Then there’s the surgeon. The Buffalo police are keeping an eye on him, but I’d like a wiretap on his phone.”

“All right,” said Grapelli. “We might as well solve the problem we know how to solve. Let’s get Dahlman, and hope the conspiracy turns out to be a product of your imagination.

What else do you need?”

“Printed circulars, news coverage, publicity. There should be lots of photographs of Dahlman in print. It’s hard to be invisible with a hole in you.”

“Done. What else?”

“I’d like to have a special agent assigned to take a close look at what happened in Illinois before he left: the evidence, the timetable, whatever else they have.”

“Sure. I’ll have somebody there tonight – ” He corrected himself. “Today.”

“I guess that’s it. I’ll let you know if anything else occurs to me.”

“I’m sure you will,” Grapelli said. “Where are you – at the Buffalo field office?”

“At the airport. I asked them to give me a little office near the security checkpoint for a few hours to watch for Dahlman.”

“What do they need you there for?”

“I said that was what I told them. If he was going to fly out he would already have done it, but it puts me about fifty steps from the ticket counter if he turns up somewhere.”

“You’re going to do this yourself?”

“If I’m lucky,” said Marshall. “Take care.” Grapelli stared at the dead telephone for a moment, put it back in the cradle, and then dialed Amery’s number. He knew he was dragging Amery out of bed, but after he told Amery that he was the best one to go to Illinois, Amery’s voice acquired that serious, professional manner that he cultivated, and Grapelli could hear the rustling of cloth while he got out of his pajamas or made his bed or something.

Grapelli was not exactly lying; if Marshall was doing something else, then Amery was the best special agent to go and make sense of a lot of evidence and interview the cops to find out where it came from. He hung up and sat at his desk for a moment, thinking about Marshall. On the day when the memo had been posted announcing that Grapelli had been selected to take over this job, Dan Phipps, who was retiring from it, had taken him out for a drink. Phipps had given him a brief summary of the hidden parts of this job – the problems his subordinates didn’t know about because he had seen no reason for them to be distracted by problems they weren’t paid to solve. He had said, “Listen to Marshall. He’ll keep you honest.”

“I like to think I can keep myself honest.” Grapelli often remembered those words with regret. He had not given himself time to consider them, just said them automatically without first asking himself whether they were the best words to induce Phipps to tell him things he didn’t know.

For a second, Phipps had let his face go blank and had stared at Grapelli. “We’ll see,” he’d said, and had returned to his drink.

Grapelli was sure it had taken him years to learn on his own what Phipps might have told him in the next thirty seconds. That was probably what Phipps had been leading up to when he had mentioned Marshall. It wasn’t about Marshall; he was simply the most obvious example. Another supervisor had once said that if he had five like Marshall he could rule the world. The truth was the opposite. Marshall didn’t think it was part of his job to help anybody rule anything. The complicated, intoxicating competition for budgets and the rising or falling in the chain of command that were played for keeps inside all government bureaucracies were not of any interest to him. Salvation was not in power, but in competence.

That was what Grapelli now believed Phipps meant that night when he said Marshall would keep him honest – not scheming and plotting, but spending the day ensuring public safety and then going home. As it was, Grapelli had been left to sort out for himself what was printed in the job description:

“acting as liaison” to the following groups, “reporting to” this set of remote superiors, “in consultation with” these competing supervisors meant more than it seemed. And even the part that seemed clear – being a supervisor – was not what it seemed.

How in hell anybody could consider himself to be

“supervising” a disparate set of men and women who were usually hundreds of miles apart in situations where they had to make decisions instantly was not something that he had yet deciphered.

Grapelli felt an acidic burning in the pit of his stomach, because his train of thought had led him to his second lesson.

The next morning, on his first official day as section chief, he had found an unlabeled audiocassette on his desk. Nobody seemed to know where it had come from. He played it, and heard his entire conversation with Phipps.

The microphone might have been planted under the table in the bar, but that would have required them to know what table Phipps would choose, and Phipps didn’t usually go to bars. It could also have been a remote directional microphone, but there had been brick walls on two sides and a crowd of talking people between their table and the windows. When Grapelli listened more carefully to the tape, he was sure it wasn’t made in either way. There was no sound of idle talk over it. His own voice was much louder, closer than Phipps’s. The bug had been hidden on Grapelli’s own body.

It had taken Grapelli an hour to go through all of the suspects and find that he could not eliminate a single one.

They all had the technical expertise, the experience, and the nerve to plant a bug to eavesdrop on their boss and then shove the recording in his face. At this hour of the morning he wasn’t in the mood to piece together the train of thought he had used, but he had reached a conclusion.

The one who had planted the bug was somebody who wanted to remind him that the ones who would judge him weren’t the directors and assistant directors up the line, or the endless parade of ignorant and venal politicians who passed by somewhere above the directors. The people he had to satisfy were much closer to him, the ones whose lives would depend on decisions Grapelli made. The one who had planted it was the one who knew what thought processes the tape would set off – that he would spend some hard hours thinking about each of the agents in his section and not be able to find one who couldn’t have done it, then appreciate the effectiveness of the tool that had been placed in his hands. It had to be Phipps.

It had taken him almost two years longer before he had learned enough to understand the rest of it. The suspect who was probably the most formidable, and the most capable of pulling a trick like that, was the one who would never have done it. That was what Phipps had been trying to tell him: that Marshall would keep him honest.