The Face-Changers (40 page)

But C. Langer frowned. He had noticed something that didn’t look familiar. One of his hands came down and touched the crack Jane had widened between the porch floorboards.

Then the hand came up and took off his sunglasses. He stared at the hole for three breaths. Then he gave a little sigh, stood up, and stepped out of frame. Jane heard him unlock his front door again, and heard the whispery sound of the newspaper being tossed inside, then landing with a flap. The door closed, the key turned. Then C. Langer reappeared long enough so that Jane could see him use the toe of his shoe to push the doormat an inch to cover the hole.

That night at 11:15 the guard at the front gate of Senior Rancho in Carlsbad recorded the entry of Julia Kieler to visit her father, Alan Weems. She had called him from Los Angeles, and when she pulled into the parking space assigned to his unit, he was standing at the door.

Jane walked immediately up to him and gave him a hug so she could place her body in front of his while she pulled him inside and locked the door. “I know this is probably as safe a place as any, but standing in lighted doorways is not a great habit for you.”

“I know, I know,” Dahlman muttered. “It’s the first occasion when I’ve felt the impulse, and it’ll probably be the last.”

“How have you been?”

He scowled. “If you have something to tell me, then out with it. If you don’t, we can go back to inquiring about each other’s health.”

“I have something I want you to look at.” She held up the videocassette. “Do you have a VCR?”

“No,” said Dahlman. “There’s one in the rec room, but the old ladies are probably in there now watching some old movie that they can recite by heart.”

“It’s okay,” said Jane. “It’ll just take a few minutes to hook up the camera to the television set and play it back. You do have one of those?”

“Over here,” said Dahlman. He pointed into the living room. “I don’t use it much.”

“No?” She plugged the line into the camera, then unplugged the lamp to plug in the camera’s AC adapter.

“No. The first couple of weeks I watched all the news, waiting for them to talk about me. Once or twice, they did.

After that, it was pretty much what you said would happen.

I’m old news.”

“You sound disappointed.”

Dahlman shook his head. “I was working up to thanking you, so I guess I should just grit my teeth and say it. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The television set was crackling with snow and emitting an annoying buzz.

“Now what?”

Jane switched the channel. “Nothing. You just have to put it on an empty channel.” The buzzing stopped, then started again. “I’m rewinding it.”

He scowled. “I knew that.”

“Now be quiet and come closer and look.” He stood where he was and watched. The picture flipped once, then settled to reveal the interior of C. Langer’s house: the bathroom, the living room, then closer and closer to the piano. “Somebody’s house?” said Dahlman. “Am I supposed to have been there or something?”

“Just watch.” Jane kept her eyes on Dahlman’s face.

The camera moved close to the first of the framed photographs on the piano. The sight of the woman and two children on the ski slope meant nothing. The picture of the man on the sailboat went by, and Dahlman’s arm shot out at it.

“Stop!” he said. “Can’t you stop this thing?”

“We’ll go back to it,” said Jane. “Watch the rest.” The camera moved into the kitchen. She watched Dahlman out of the corner of her eye when the camera zoomed in on the false driver’s license she had taken from the milk carton and laid on the counter. He straightened, then knelt on the rug to get closer. “How did you find him?” he murmured.

“So this is the one?”

Dahlman’s head turned sharply and the little gray eyes glared at her. “Of course it’s him. It’s the man who called himself James Hardiston. I operated on him.”

“Let me ask you this,” Jane began.

“But – ”

“Wait. Could the man you operated on have graduated from college in 1965?”

“1965?” Dahlman was distracted by the image on the screen. “That would make him – ”

“Mid-fifties.”

Dahlman squinted, then nodded. “Yes. He could easily be in his fifties. Go back to the beginning.” Jane stopped the tape, rewound it, and started it again.

“Get ready to stop it.”

When the tape reached the figure of the man in the sailboat, Dahlman snapped, “Now.”

Jane stopped the tape. The image quivered and lines of static rolled upward across the man’s face like passing shadows.

“That’s him too,” said Dahlman. He was so excited that he stood and sidestepped back and forth. “You thought it was someone else, didn’t you?”

Jane let the tape run again. “I thought it was supposed to be his father,” said Jane. “I thought Sid Freeman cooked it up.”

“What’s that?” asked Dahlman as the image of the first pistol zoomed upward into focus.

“His gun. I wanted the serial number, and it’s better than writing it down.”

The second gun came on, and the tape reverted to snow and static. Dahlman looked disappointed, but Jane said, “Keep watching.”

The camera was on the front of the house. The door opened and C. Langer walked out to his car. Dahlman frowned. “It’s so hard to see from that picture.”

Dahlman clenched his jaw and watched. Each time the man with the dark glasses would come in or go out, there seemed to be less of him to see. He looked at Jane in confusion. “I think that’s the man, but he’s moving so fast, and he turns away, and those glasses – ”

“Keep your eyes on the screen.”

There were a few seconds of darkness, then die printed letters of the newspaper, so close to the lens that they were difficult to make out. “What in the world is mat?” Jane had no time to answer. There was me flash of light, and then die man standing up holding the newspaper.

Dahlman waited impatiently until me moment when C.

Langer bent over to pick up the coin and took off his sunglasses. “There!” Dahlman shouted. “That’s him!” Jane stopped the tape and pressed the rewind button.

Dahlman grinned at her expectantly. “Where is he?”

“At the moment he’s living in Santa Barbara. That may not be where he intends to end up, but it looked to me as though he was planning to stay put for a while. The house is pretty well chosen, and he’s put a lot into making it right. I don’t mean it’s expensive, although it is. I mean everything is consistent. He’s building an identity, a personality.”

“Fine,” he said impatiently. “So how do we do this – give the tape to the police?”

Jane looked at him apologetically. “I know you would like this to end. But I think that even if we could get the Santa Barbara police to hold this man and run his fingerprints –

something I can’t imagine them doing – it probably wouldn’t solve your problem.”

“It proves I told the truth. I said I performed surgery on a man claiming to be James Hardiston. Any physician could examine this man and verify the plastic surgery. They might not be able to accurately describe every procedure we used, but mere would be no argument about the fact of surgery. And I think the fellow’s fingerprints will prove he’s some kind of criminal living under a false name.”

“Yes,” said Jane. “But what kind?”

“That’s the job of the police – finding that out.” Jane sighed. “He’s a runner. He spent a lot of money to get a new face and a solid identity and a lot of first-class treatment. Maybe his fingerprints will show that he’s done terrible things. Will they show he killed Sarah Hoffman?”

“Of course they don’t prove he did it personally. When she was killed he was still recovering from his last surgery.”

“Then what good are they to us?” Dahlman slumped into a chair by the wall and closed his eyes. “I see.”

Jane stood and disconnected the cords from the television set and the wall and coiled them, then put the video camera back into her bag. She stood in silence for a few more seconds, then said gently, “We’ve come this far. Maybe we can make it the rest of the way.”

Dahlman shook his head. “At the moment I can’t conceive of how to do that.”

“The first step is to find out who he is,” she said. “Maybe after that we’ll know the second step.”

While Jane drove through the darkness up the coast toward Santa Barbara the optimism she had feigned for Dahlman faded. When she thought of Dahlman, her memory kept conjuring images of Carey, and she had to fight the urge to cry. He had labored at becoming a doctor, and then at being one, with a kind of intensity that was heartbreaking. The work had changed him, and changed the world he lived in. For any human being, seeing was not the eye receiving pictures of what was really there, but the brain reaching out to grasp what it needed. When Carey looked at a person he saw a biological entity, a marvelously intricate and interesting creature that was doing its best with what it had. He wanted to learn from the creature’s experience and impressions, and he wanted to help it. If he could no longer do that, he would be lost.

Jane had trained herself over the years never to let her mind go down this path. Thinking about the consequences of failure was like thinking about falling from a high place: it would distract her, weaken her, and make her afraid. For weeks she had concentrated on what she had to do, and not what would happen if she made a mistake. But tonight her tired mind could not fight off the fear she felt for Carey.

If she failed, it was almost certain that Carey was going to be convicted of a felony. She was not positive that this meant the state would revoke his license to practice medicine.

Almost certainly it did, but the wording of some law wasn’t what mattered. It was hard to imagine a hospital that would grant surgical privileges to someone with a criminal record, or a company that would approve him for malpractice insurance.

Surgery wasn’t something he could do by himself at home. He would be like Dahlman, sitting in a room somewhere with nothing to do. Or it could be much worse than that. If the police found enough evidence for the wrong kind of charge, and Carey drew the wrong kind of judge, he would go to jail for a very long time.

Jane felt the tears beginning to come. She gritted her teeth and shook herself, then stared hard at the dark highway ahead.

She wasn’t going to keep those things from happening by crying. If she could prove that the man Carey had helped to escape was innocent, then Carey would be saved too.

As she wrestled her mind back to what she had to do, old methods and tricks began to occur to her. It was a few minutes later that she decided it was time to resurrect the Furnace Company. The Furnace Company was a genuine entity that had been incorporated in Illinois ten years ago. Its assets consisted of a post office box in a strip mall in Chicago and ten computer-printed receipts showing that it had paid its annual five-dollar fee for retaining its tenuous hold on existence. The only one of its officers who had ever breathed air was a woman named Mary Sullivan, and that wasn’t the name she had breathed it under.

Jane arrived at her hotel in Santa Barbara in the early morning. She checked her watch and dialed an 800 number she had used a few dozen times over the years.

A man’s voice answered, “Memory Publications, Manny.” Jane said, “Manny, it’s Mary Sullivan at the Furnace Company.”

“Well, hello,” said Manny. “I haven’t heard from you lately. Tell you the truth, I thought you’d gone under, like half the country.”

“Gone under?”

“Yeah, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eleven, whatever. The business climate in this country is poisonous right now.

You’ve got to be a big player, or you’re squashed under the weight of mailing costs and government regulations. You know anybody that’s making any money this year?”

“A few.”

“Then you know a better class of people than I do.”

“Maybe worse,” said Jane.

Manny chuckled. “I just remembered why I missed you, honey. What can I get for you today?”

“This is a bit out of your usual line. Did you ever publish a directory of alumni for Yale University?” Manny’s voice turned sad. “No, honey. High school class reunion lists we do. Colleges, they don’t need Memory Pubs.

They’ve got better printing facilities, and they got people keeping track of their graduates to hound them for money.”

“Too bad,” said Jane. “I could have used it.”

“What exactly do you need? Maybe I can find a different way there.”

“Yale, classes in the 1960s. It’s for a special direct-mail campaign. We want to sell nostalgia for New Haven in the sixties: sell them back their youth. When they’re twenty-two they’re inundated with souvenirs – class rings, yearbooks. But they’re in their fifties now.”

“Not bad,” said Manny. “This is when they’ve got the most money. Have you tried the college?”

“No help there,” said Jane. “They charge for the use of their name and logo. You ask, and they smell money. That’s what I hate about nonprofit institutions. They feel no guilt.”

“I hear you. What exactly will you offer?”

“What I’d really like to try is something with then-and-now portraits of each alumnus on it. You know, play straight for the ego.”

“Sounds depressing. Where does the ‘then’ come from?”

“Yearbooks.”

“That I might be able to get, but you’ll have to find out for yourself what the copyright situation is.”

“How can you get them?”

“That’s proprietary information.”

“Everything I’ve just told you is proprietary information.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Manny. “I’m just like your gynecologist. I see yours but only for your own good, and there’s no reason to show you mine. I’ve got a supplier who buys up yearbooks for me.”

“Old ones?”

“Sure,” said Manny. “He picks them up at garage sales, estate sales, and from printers if there’s an overrun. He pays just about nothing, and charges people like me like they were antiques. I only use the high school ones, but he gets thousands of them. He might have Yale. I’ 11 call him now.” An hour later the 1965 Yale yearbook was in an express-mail pouch on its way to the Furnace Company’s post office box, and Jane was on the way to catch a flight to Chicago.