The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  She drove to the supermarket and bought a cookie sheet, then bought a pair of tin snips at a hardware store nearby, and went to a big drugstore on State Street for a box of thin, disposable latex gloves, a small flashlight, and a roll of adhesive tape. She cut a thin strip from the middle of the cookie sheet, wrapped one end of it with adhesive tape to make a handle, and she was ready.

  Jane had predicted that the bathroom window and the kitchen windows would be the least troublesome, and she had been right. The bathroom window had no screen, so she could simply insert the thin strip of metal upward between the wooden frames of the two panes of glass. When it was in, she pushed forward to bend it slightly so it slipped behind the latch. She had made it long enough so she was able to use it as a lever to pry the latch around and unlock the window.

  The architect had probably assured somebody that the window was too narrow for a man, but it was wide enough for Jane to slither halfway in. It wasn’t until she reached her hips that she had to turn onto her side, put her right hand on the sink, and pull her legs in.

  She closed the window behind her before she went out into the living room. She paused at the doorway. This wasn’t the way runners’ abodes usually looked. They almost always took furnished lodgings first, and kept them until they grew more confident. Even then, they tended to own things that they wouldn’t mind walking away from.

  C. Langer had an antique sideboard. He had a dining room table inlaid with squares of bird’s-eye maple. He had a television set with a screen so big that it had gone beyond being obtrusive to just being a black wall. And C. Langer had a grand piano covered with framed photographs.

  She moved closer. There was a picture of a man who looked as though he might be related to C. Langer standing on the deck of a sailboat. There was another of two children on a ski slope with a blond woman who looked like a model. The pictures were impressive. They looked old. She wondered whether Sid had made this man a few relatives. Of course, there were no pictures of C. Langer himself. A runner had to be able to walk away without leaving a fresh portrait of himself in the middle of the living room.

  She moved into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. C. Langer’s kitchen didn’t look as though he did much cooking, so she began with the one beside the stove where the pots and pans were. It took her only a moment to find the pistol. She pulled it out of the pot gingerly because she could tell by the weight that it had a loaded magazine. She held it up. It was a Glock 19 nine millimeter. She put it back and looked in the refrigerator.

  There was a milk carton that was too far back, and didn’t slosh when she lifted it. Inside were a driver’s license and credit cards in the name Frederick Henry Waldman, and underneath them were about fifty hundred-dollar bills in a plastic bag. The Waldman cards had no scratches from being swiped through magnetic readers, so they had to be a second set of forgeries he kept in case somebody saw through C. Langer. The milk carton was his escape kit.

  Jane moved into the bedroom. Maybe the face-changers had taught him so well that Jane would not find what she was looking for. Maybe they had searched his belongings, cut the tags out of his clothes, removed anything that related to his old life, packed the boxes in Chicago themselves, and sent them on only when they were sure they were clean. But she had met few runners who had willingly taken that last step. Usually they tried to keep something—an old driver’s license, a birth certificate, some piece of paper—that would let them go back if some miracle happened and home suddenly became a safe place.

  Jane took the top drawer out of the nightstand, held it up, and looked to see if anything was taped under it. As she moved to put it back, she saw the second pistol in the bottom drawer. This one was a Walther P99. She slid the drawer in over it. This was a man who didn’t waste money on cheap, unreliable firearms. She slid the drawer out and felt under it and behind it, but there was nothing taped there either.

  Jane moved to the dresser and began removing the drawers, beginning at the top. It wasn’t until she tried the bottom drawer that she found the wooden box. She opened it and looked at each item carefully. There were two watches—a Patek Philippe and a Cartier, but neither had anything engraved on it. There were a couple of tie tacks and some cuff links. Then she picked up the ring, almost unbelieving. It was a Yale class ring that said 1965 on it. C. Langer wasn’t nearly old enough to have graduated in 1965. Was his father young enough to have? Just barely, if he had married young.

  She tried to see it as a prop. Maybe he had bought it in a pawnshop to help with C. Langer’s identity. But if he’d done that, he must have expected to alter the year somehow. She looked at the side and made out the initials B.R.V. He would have to do something about those, too. But there was something bigger than that wrong with the idea. If a runner wanted to hide and develop a safe identity, pretending to be a Yale alumnus was a rotten idea, and wearing a Yale ring was a worse idea. If a college was necessary, it should be something like the University of California, which had nine campuses, each as big as Yale, and must be so familiar to people around here that nobody would think about it. Apparently the face-changers hadn’t bothered to teach this runner the first rule: don’t answer any questions until somebody asks.

  Jane looked around the room to be sure that she was leaving it undisturbed, then picked up the pistol in the nightstand and went to the living room to wait.

  Just as she sat down she heard the Miata drive up and stop in front of the house. She heard the car door slam, and suddenly the sights she had seen began to come together into a suspicion. The Yale ring, the money he had spent on the furniture and the guns and the two cars, the photographs that looked a little bit like him were all wrong. Everything in this house was wrong. C. Langer wasn’t an ordinary runner.

  Jane stood up and moved silently into the bedroom, replaced the gun, slipped into the bathroom, and opened the window. She heard the key in the front-door lock as she was slithering out the narrow opening, then heard the door swing open. Jane lowered herself to the ground and slid the window closed, then crouched beneath it. She heard his footsteps approach. She heard him urinate, then flush the toilet. She knew he was directly above her, his face inches from the window as he washed his hands at the sink.

  After what seemed like a long time, she heard his footsteps receding. Jane found a spot for her home-made latch opener behind a low bush near the window and left it there, then slipped along the back fence and across two yards to her car.

  The next morning Jane waited until C. Langer had gotten into the Miata and driven off before she climbed in the bathroom window with her video camera. She turned it on as soon as the window was closed, then walked through the rooms, one by one. She made images of the furniture, recorded the serial numbers of the two guns, made close-ups of the photographs on the piano, the jewelry, the class ring, then laid out the Frederick Waldman identification cards and recorded close-up shots of those too. Before she left, she made sure that nothing was out of place. Then she closed and latched the bathroom window from the inside and left by the front door. When C. Langer came home, he would put his key into the dead bolt and turn it. Unless he was very astute, he would not be sure that the key moved too easily for the dead bolt to have been locked.

  As soon as Jane was outside, she felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to escape from this place. She wanted to get into the car and drive as fast as she could, away from Santa Barbara. She promised herself that she would do it, but not yet. There was still one thing she didn’t have on tape.

  33

  Jane placed the video camera on her car’s dashboard in front of the steering wheel, zoomed in on C. Langer’s doorway, and tossed a sweater over it so it wouldn’t be visible from a distance. She came back to the car two hours later, when the tape would be used up, and drove off with it.

  When she reviewed the tape in her hotel room, she had shots of C. Langer leaving the house, then an hour later coming back. But someone had taught him well. He always wore the dark glasses, always moved as though he
were in a hurry. When he approached the door he already had the right key in his hand, and his body was close to the door and his head down when he opened it. When he left, he moved out of frame just as quickly. She was beginning to understand why police surveillance tapes were always so appallingly bad.

  Jane recharged the battery in her hotel room and went out to buy more blank tapes at the big drugstore on State Street. It occurred to her that the people watching Carey at home must know how to get a clear picture of a man’s face. But then she remembered that they were doing pretty much what she had—parked in front of the house and started the camera.

  She had to get closer, and to do it at a time when the light was good. The next day, she studied his movements from a distance. There seemed to be no way to get close to him with a camera. If she followed him during his trips away from the house, it was hard to imagine a way to take a tape of him without being seen. When he had disappeared into the house for what Jane judged would be the last time, Jane went back to her car and drove up the street.

  That evening she studied the tapes she had taken of C. Langer, running them over and over. But this time she was not looking at the male figure flashing across the camera’s field of view. She looked at the shapes that did not move. She held her eyes on C. Langer’s car, on the windows of the neighbors’ houses, on the shrubbery in C. Langer’s front yard.

  As she watched, each object caused her to formulate a plan and dismiss it. The light fixture just above Langer’s door was in the perfect position, but it wasn’t quite big enough, and the glass globe was not transparent. No windows in the nearby houses were at the ideal angle and distance to afford the right view, even if she could have gotten inside. The shrubs that were thick enough to hide a video camera were too far from the door. The only plants near the door were the potted ones on the porch, and they were too sparse. She studied the pots. The biggest one, with a ficus in it, looked as though it might be plastic. She could enlarge the drainage hole in the bottom, bury the camera so the lens was pressed against the hole, and tip the plant so it looked as though the wind had blown it over. He would see it, squat or kneel close enough to the pot to tip the plant back up, and go inside. No, it was unlikely that he could see the hole and not see the lens.

  She evolved a plan for C. Langer’s car. She could create a minor problem in the engine that would stimulate him to open the hood. The camera could be attached to the engine compartment low and just in front of the firewall, disguised to look like one of the electronic boxes that belonged there. He would fix the problem—replace the radiator cap, or re-attach the hose—then shut the hood, and drive off. She could open the hood and retrieve the camera the next time he parked the car. But Jane didn’t know anything about C. Langer. He might be one of those men who knew every nut and bolt in a car and would see the camera instantly, or he might be the other kind, who wouldn’t even open the hood. He’d call a mechanic to come and do it for him.

  She watched the tapes again. The porch was where he was most visible, but there was nothing on it that she could use. It was a few minutes later when she realized that she had been staring at the solution all evening and failing to see it. She reminded herself that this was its most appealing quality, because C. Langer would look at it and not see it either.

  Jane watched her tapes one more time to be sure. There was a small wooden square on the side of the porch that had to be an access hatch. Wooden porches felt solid and looked solid, but they were just platforms with boards laid over them and the sides enclosed. They were very dark inside. She prepared her video camera, then drove toward C. Langer’s house. On the way, she stopped at a drugstore and bought a copy of The New York Times.

  It was four o’clock in the morning when Jane emerged from under C. Langer’s porch and replaced the hatch. Without stepping on the porch, she reached through the railing and placed the copy of the newspaper in exactly the right spot near the door, half on the doormat and half off. Then she went back to her hotel and went to sleep.

  Jane waited until the next night to find out how her plan had worked. When she was sure the whole neighborhood was asleep, she drove back to C. Langer’s house. She parked on the next street, slipped between Langer’s house and the one beside it, crawled under the porch, and retrieved her camera.

  When Jane returned to her hotel, she held her breath and played her tape on fast forward. There was a long pause, when the image was total darkness. It gradually lightened, until she could make out dim, blurred shapes of black letters between the sides of the hole she had widened in the porch floor. That was the newspaper. After thirty seconds, she stopped the tape and ran it at normal speed because she was afraid of missing something. Now she could hear the sounds the camera’s microphone had picked up. Birds were singing in the trees near the house, cars started, and doors slammed.

  At last, she heard a footstep. Then she heard a door closing. There were more footsteps. Suddenly, the screen was filled with glaring light, and then the automatic light meter adjusted: C. Langer had lifted the newspaper off the hole in the porch. Jane clenched her teeth. Langer was holding the paper between the camera and his face, reading the headlines. She could see his legs, his hands and chest, and then the newspaper. “Come on,” she whispered. He turned a few pages, then folded the paper. He straightened, so all she could see was a clear image of the underside of his jaw, his nostrils, and his sunglasses.

  He reached into his pocket, then produced a set of keys, but when he pulled them out, a couple of coins came out with them, clinked, and rolled. As he bent over to pick one of them up, she could see his face descend close to the camera. Jane stared at the screen and grinned.

  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 workin
g 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—”