The Face[脸]
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DR. JONATHAN SPETZ-MOGG LIVED IN A PRICEY Westwood neighborhood, in a fine Nantucket-style house with cedar-shingle siding so silvered by time that not even the rain could darken it, which suggested that the silvering might be an applied patina.
Spetz-Mogg’s British accent was eccentric enough to be captivating, inconsistent enough to have been acquired during a long visit to those shores rather than by birth and upbringing.
The professor welcomed Ethan and Hazard into his Home, but less graciously than obsequiously. He answered their questions not in a spirit of thoughtful cooperation, but in a nervous, wordy gush.
He wore a roomy FUBU shirt and baggy low-rider pants with snap pockets on the legs, looking as ridiculous as any white man trying to dress like a Homey from the hood, twice as ridiculous because he was forty-eight. Every time he crossed his legs, which he did frequently, the baggy pants rustled loudly enough to interrupt conversation.
Perhaps he affected sunglasses indoors more often than not. He wore them on this occasion.
Spetz-Mogg removed the shades and put them on again nearly as often as he recrossed his legs, though these two nervous tells were [432] not synchronized. He seemed unable to decide whether he had a better chance of surviving interrogation by presenting an open and guileless image or by hiding behind tinted lenses.
Although the professor clearly believed that every cop was a brutal fascist, he’d never be one to climb a barricade to shout the accusation. He wasn’t incensed that two agents of the repressive police state were in his Home; he was simply, quietly terrified.
In answer to every question, he vomited up a mess of information with the hope that garrulous responses would wash Ethan and Hazard out of his door before they produced brass knuckles and truncheons.
This was not the professor for whom they were searching. Spetz-Mogg might encourage others to commit crimes in the name of one ideal or another, but he was too gutless to do so himself.
Besides, he didn’t have time for crime. He had written ten works of nonfiction and eight novels. In addition to teaching his classes, he organized conferences, workshops, and seminars. He wrote plays.
In Ethan’s experience, industrious people, regardless of the quality of what their labor produced, rarely committed violent crimes. Only in movies did successful Businessmen routinely indulge in murder and mayhem in addition to corporate responsibilities.
Criminals were likely to be failures in the workplace or just lazy. Or their material possessions had come through inheritance or by other easy means. Idleness gave them time to scheme.
Dr. Spetz-Mogg had no memory of Rolf Reynerd. On average, three hundred struggling actors attended one of his weekend conferences. Not many of them left a lasting impression.
When Ethan and Hazard rose to leave without suggesting that they torture the professor with electric wires to his genitals, Spetz-Mogg accompanied them to the door with visible relief. When he closed the door behind them, he no doubt bolted for the bathroom, his pretense of British equanimity belied by shuddering bowels.
In the Expedition, Hazard said, “I should have punched the son of a bitch on general principles.”
[433] “You’re getting cranky in midcareer,” Ethan said.
“What was that accent?”
“Adam Sandier playing James Bond.”
“Yeah. With a twist of Schwarzenegger.”
From Spetz-Mogg’s house in Westwood, they wasted far too much time tracking down Dr. Gerald Fitzmartin, who had organized the screenwriting conference attended by Reynerd.
According to the university at which he taught, Fitzmartin was Home for the holidays, not traveling. When Hazard called, all he got was an answering machine.
Fitzmartin lived in Pacific Palisades. They traveled surface streets, which seemed less well suited for SUVs than for gondolas.
No one answered the bell at the Fitzmartin place. Maybe he was Christmas shopping. Maybe he was too busy to come to the door because he was wrapping a hate gift in a black box for Channing Manheim.
The neighbor told a different story: Fitzmartin had been rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday morning. He wasn’t sure why.
When Hazard called Cedars-Sinai, he found that patient privacy was more important to the hospital than were police relations.
Under a sky as bruised as the battered body of a boxer, Ethan drove back toward the city. The wind fought with trees, and sometimes trees lost, dropping branches into the streets, hampering traffic.
The traffic matched the turbulence of the heavens. At one intersection, car had punched car, and both had gone down for the count. Five blocks farther, a truck had broadsided a paneled van.
He drove with caution that grew into an inhibiting wariness. He couldn’t help thinking that if he had been run down and killed in traffic once, he might die again on another street. This time, maybe he would not get up again from death.
En route, Hazard worked the phone, tracking down the name of the professor, at yet another institution, who had organized the one-day seminar on publicity and self-promotion.
[434] Taking neither hand off the wheel, Ethan glanced at his watch. The day was draining away faster than rain into storm culverts.
He had to be back at Palazzo Rospo before 5:00. Fric could not be left alone in the great house, especially not on this strange day.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was on Beverly Boulevard in a part of Los Angeles that wanted to be Beverly Hills. They arrived at 2:18.
They located Dr. Gerald Fitzmartin in the ICU, but they weren’t permitted to see him. In the waiting room, the professor’s son was pleased to have a distraction, though he couldn’t imagine why police officers would want to talk to his father.
Professor Fitzmartin was sixty-eight years old. After a life of honest living, older men rarely turned to crime in their retirement. It interfered with gardening and with passing kidney stones.
Besides, just this morning, Fitzmartin had undergone quadruple heart-bypass surgery. If he was Rolf Reynerd’s conspirator, he would not be killing movie stars in the immediate future.
Ethan checked his watch. 2:34. Tick, tick, tick.
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