The Face-Changers (7 page)

“Sure. You could get caught.”

He turned his head to focus his sharp gray eyes on her.

“Suppose those men had seen your face – figured out that the police car was stolen? That you weren’t a police officer?” Jane shrugged. “They were still on foot in a parking lot.

They could see I had a very big car, and suspect that there was a very big shotgun inside it.”

“But suppose they had guessed that those were just part of the bluff?”

Jane looked at him with quiet sincerity in her eyes. “If they had guessed that, then one of them would have tire tracks on his chest, and the other would have a five-inch hole in his.

This isn’t a game.”

Jake Reinert hung up the telephone, put on his jacket with slow deliberation, lowered his weight carefully down each of the front steps, and walked to his car. He had been Jane Whitefield’s neighbor for her first thirty-one years, and had lived beside her parents and grandparents for the forty years before that. Since she had married Carey McKinnon he had found himself living beside an empty house. He had watched the lights going on to illuminate unoccupied furniture in the evening, then going off at bedtime, heard radios talking to themselves during the day, and sometimes heard the telephone ring four times before the answering machine cut in. Burglars might not be fooled by all that, but if they came in they certainly would not be lonely.

Jane’s unexpected telephone call had disturbed Jake, but he was making an effort to hold his anxiety in abeyance. He started his car and drove down the street toward Delaware Avenue.

The night air was chilly, and Jake began to feel better as the engine warmed enough to permit him to engage the heater.

If Henry Whitefield’s daughter had called him at any hour of the day or night in any of her thirty-three years and said,

“Jake, I’m having trouble. Can you fly down here to Peru and pick me up?” he would certainly have been on his way to the airport. Tonight she was just asking for a ride home from a movie.

Jake began to feel impatient to see her face and verify that this was all she was asking. He glanced at his speedometer and saw that his foot had begun to get impatient too. Thirty-seven in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone wasn’t exactly madness, but it wasn’t especially smart, either. A man in his seventies could easily fail to discern some pedestrian in the dark, and then react too slowly to do anything but stop and back up over the body.

After about twenty minutes, Jake saw the bright lights of the marquee over the theater and began to search for an acceptable place to pull over. He failed to find one until he was abreast of the place, so he stopped in front.

There was a startling thump on the roof, and he looked over the back seat to see Jane standing there yanking the right rear door open. “Hi, Jake,” she said. “Wow, it’s hot. Is the heater on?”

“Evening,” said Jake. He turned off the heater while she helped a man about his age slide into the back, then slammed the door and got into the front seat beside Jake.

“This is Dr. Dahlman,” said Jane, “and this is my friend Jake.”

The two men nodded, but Jake had already said “Good evening,” and a second greeting seemed to him like taking a hat off twice. Besides, he was sure he had heard that name before, and might be able to think of something original to say if he could just drag out of his memory why the name was familiar. He pulled the car out into traffic.

The man was quicker. “I hope we’re not getting you into trouble. Mr. Reinert,” he said, and then Jake remembered. It was the name that they had kept interrupting the baseball game to repeat.

The confirmation of Jake’s ability to sense trouble was not a sufficient recompense for the obliteration of his peace of mind. He turned to Jane and watched her face as he said,

“Finding married life a little quiet, are we, Janie?”

“No,” she said. “I like it.” She looked strained, as though she were concentrating on biting something that she had between her teeth. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry to get you involved, Jake. I had no time to prepare anything sensible, so I had to improvise.”

“It’s flattering to be the first name that came to mind, I guess,” Jake sighed. “What can I do?” She turned her face to him. “Thanks, Jake.”

“What can I do?” he repeated.

“Not much more than this. We’ve got to stop at my old house, so it’s best if you just pull into your own garage. Dr.

Dahlman, you may have heard, had a nine-millimeter bullet pass through him a couple of hours ago, so he’s not at the top of his game, but we can bring him in my kitchen door. We’ll only stay long enough to pick up some things I left there, and make arrangements for a car.”

Jake nodded, then drove the rest of the way home. He pulled his car all the way into his garage, then got out to help Dahlman to the driveway of the Whitefield house and up the back steps. Jane closed the door behind them and then turned on more lights.

As he helped Dahlman into the living room to sit on the couch, Jake said, “Don’t lean back just yet. There’s blood showing through your coat.”

He went into the bathroom, found a towel, folded it, and placed it between Dahlman and the throw pillow, then helped him lie down. He watched Dahlman’s eyes rise upward toward the staircase, so he knew Jane was climbing the stairs behind him.

Dahlman whispered, “She said you were just a family friend. Why are you doing this?”

Jake shook his head. “Lie still. Gather your strength.”

“Why are you helping me?” Dahlman insisted.

“They said on the news that you were a big doctor somewhere. Why did you kill somebody?”

“I didn’t.”

“Good,” said Jake. “Then from now on, that can be the reason.” He watched Dahlman close his eyes. In a few moments he seemed to be asleep. Jake heard the sound of a television set above his head, so he climbed the stairs. As he reached the top, he saw Jane moving up the hallway. “He seems to have dozed off.”

“Good,” she said. “He’s going to need some strength.” She walked into the master bedroom and Jake followed. As he watched her throwing things into the suitcase, it occurred to him that she had left an awful lot of Jane Whitefield in this house when she had become Mrs. McKinnon. She hesitated, took off her wedding ring, and quickly slipped it into a drawer.

Jane kept walking to closets, to dressers, to the suitcase on the bed, then turning to glance at the television set. She caught him watching her. “It’s the only way I have to keep an eye on the opposition. Sometimes at the beginning, before the police know much, the newspeople will put it all on the air. There’s a good chance this time, because they’re all at the hospital trying to scoop each other.”

Jake stared at the television set, but they had returned to their regular programming. Until the newspeople thought of something else to say, the Blue Jays were back to getting beaten in New York. He went to the window and pushed the curtain aside an inch.

“Not from there,” said Jane. “If you want to watch the street for me, do it from the room at the end of the hall, where it’s dark. What you’re looking for will be a car with too many lights or too few. It will pass once, then come back. Don’t move the curtain. You can see that much through it.” Jake walked off down the hall to the empty bedroom and did as he was told. He had been skeptical of Jane’s instructions, but now he found he could see much better than he had expected. Through the curtain he could not only make out the sixty-watt lamp in Mrs. Oshinski’s front window across the street, but even the dim patch of light it threw on her front lawn. He could still hear Jane hurrying around in her room, and he felt he could almost see her.

On the day when he had first realized what it was that she had really been doing for a living from the time she was in college until a good ten years later, he had experienced something that had never before happened to him – he had been struck speechless.

Nothing that had come to his lips had been worthy of a thinking man. “Cut it out” had seemed closest, but it was too paltry to meet the scale of the situation. Here was the quiet, pretty, and studious young woman he had known since birth, occupying the house where he had come just about every day until he and her father had both gone off to war, and – no, it was more man that. This was the only house that Jake had ever been welcome to enter without knocking. And when he did, he was expected to smile and sit at the table while the older Mrs.

Whitefield, Jane’s grandmother it was in those days, set something in front of him to eat. And here was this little girl, the product of all of those Whitefields, living under this roof while she engaged in the business of taking future murder victims – some of them with legal difficulties of their own –

away from their troubles and making them disappear.

When Jane had finally agreed to marry Dr. Carey McKinnon, to Jake’s immense relief, she had appeared to consider herself me last of her fugitives to be taken out of the world. She had not needed to spend time thinking of a new name, because her new husband had a perfectly good one that had been around western New York for a couple of hundred years. She had not needed to do much of anything except start being Mrs. McKinnon instead of Jane Whitefield and let time do the rest. It had seemed to him that she had even begun to look different – the thick black hair hanging long and soft most of the time like a frame around her face, with just a subtle hint of an inward curl at the ends that hadn’t been there before. Even the face itself had begun to seem different to him.

Maybe it was just that she considered that a married woman could afford to devote more time to makeup, but he had attributed it to a change in what was behind the face. It had actually struck him that she had lost mat sharp, watchful look that had disconcerted him a few times over the years.

But now, after only a year of that, here she was back in this house packing a bag while a wounded murderer rested up on the couch downstairs. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

He knew for a fact that she had made a promise to Carey, and he could not imagine Jane breaking her word to her husband.

That had been part of the new identity she had invented for herself – a woman who didn’t do things like that.

But Jake had spent enough time in this part of the country and enough time in this very house to know that there were deeper issues involved. The Whitefields had always been very old-fashioned people.

And although the Whitefields and all of the Senecas Jake had ever met were scrupulously law-abiding, they made no secret that the impulse had not come from anything as recent as what a bunch of immigrants in Albany or Washington had voted. The laws simply happened to coincide pretty well with how the Senecas believed a person should behave anyway.

The White-fields were not shy in their judgments of human behavior, but they were traditionalists, and the founders of Seneca culture had not felt die need to include institutions like jails. The old-time Senecas had been in favor of revenge –

famous for it. But they didn’t feel mat it was society’s place to punish people: not mat a person might not deserve it, but that, whoever you were, punishing somebody else simply wasn’t in your job description.

Punishment was a matter that would be taken care of later –

not by God, exactly, but close enough. The Senecas believed that the universe wasn’t governed by one benevolent deity.

There were twin brothers, grandsons of the first human being, a woman who had fallen from the sky. One twin was good, and when he was referred to in English he was called the Creator. The other was perverse, and one of his names was the Punisher. The European innovation of building jails and using manacles to restrain people seemed to them to be an unwise decision to redundantly build a small and rather amateurish Hell on earth.

As of tonight, Jake was beginning to suspect mat he was seeing a new phase of things. He had always felt – no, hoped –

that what Jane had done with the first part of her life was an instance of youthful optimism and high spirits taken to an extreme. But what if it was more than that? What if it was an expression not only of what she thought was right, but of who she was and had reason to believe her female ancestors had been, going back to Sky Woman? Jake was familiar with the idea that marriage reformed people – more in second-hand testimony than with his own eyes. But those stories were always that some guy stuck to his promise to stop doing something he knew damned well from the beginning was wrong. Jake couldn’t think of an instance where a woman had saved her marriage by sticking to a promise to stop doing what she believed was right – not consistently and in a sustained way.

“What do you see?” Her voice startled him, and he turned to see her in the doorway.

“Nothing I couldn’t have seen a week ago, if I had looked.”

“Good.”

“Why are you doing this?”

She stood absolutely still. He could see the silhouette of her thin, too small body, her long black hair combed back and tied in a tight pony tail, and it occurred to him that he had not seen her wear it that way since she had gotten married. She spoke quietly. “Carey asked me to.”

Jake’s mind seemed to him to choke for a second, then to start again, like an engine that needed to be taken out and run at high speed to burn off the deposits. “Why?” he said.

“Because if I hide him for a while, then we think the police will find that he’s innocent. If we let him wait in jail, we think the police will find him dead in his cell.” She looked at him as though she were waiting in case something else needed to be said, but Jake couldn’t imagine what it could be. She turned and disappeared in the direction of the staircase. Jake stared out at the empty street he had been staring at for seventy years. Carey was an educated man and a skilled surgeon, and that was why the whole world had agreed to put “Doctor” in front of his name. But he seemed to have taken a look at this situation and missed the important part.

Carey McKinnon had – by a series of circumstances that, when you analyzed them, came down to luck – been given a beautiful young woman who had the intellect, the courage, and the determination to do virtually anything, but who for reasons that were probably more biological than logical had decided to be his wife. What Dr. Carey McKinnon had seen fit to ask her for was that she go back on the promise he had extracted from her to stop putting herself in danger. Whoever this Dr.