The Face

“This one has a shitload of magic in it,” Fric said, displaying a paperback with dragons and wizards on the cover.

“Is that advisable language for a wise and clever person?” Ethan asked.

“Heck, all my old man’s friends in the biz talk worse stuff than shitload. So does my old man.”

“Not when he knows you’re around.”

Fric cocked his head. “Are you calling my dad a hypocrite?”

“If I ever call your dad such a thing, I’ll cut my tongue out.”

“The evil wizard in this book would use it in a potion. One of his most difficult tasks is to find the tongue of an honest man.”

“What makes you think I’m honest?”

“Get real. You’ve got a triple shitload of honesty.”

“What’re you going to do if Mrs. McBee hears you using words like that?”

“She’s somewhere else.”

“Oh, she is?” Ethan asked, suggesting that he knew something regarding Mrs. McBee’s current whereabouts that would make the boy wish he’d been more discreet.

Unable to repress a guilty expression, Fric sat up straight and surveyed the library.

The boy was small for his age, and thin. At times, glimpsed from a distance as he walked along one of the vast halls or across a room scaled for kings and their entourages, he seemed almost wispy.

“I think she has secret passages,” Fric whispered. “You know, pathways in the walls.”

“Mrs. McBee?”

The boy nodded. “We’ve lived here six years, but she’s been here forever.”

Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee—both in their middle fifties—had been employed by the previous owner of the property and had stayed on at the request of the Face.

“It’s hard to picture Mrs. McBee skulking about in the walls,” said Ethan. “She’s not exactly a dastardly sort.”

“But if she was dastardly,” Fric said hopefully, “things would be more interesting around here.”

Unlike his father’s golden locks, which with a shake of the head always fell perfectly into place, Fric’s brown mop achieved perpetual disarray. Here was hair that foiled brushes and broke good combs.

Fric might grow into his looks and prove equal to his pedigree, but currently he appeared to be an average ten-year-old boy.

“Why aren’t you in class?” Ethan wondered.

“You an atheist or something? Don’t you know it’s the week before Christmas? Even home-schooled Hollywood brats get a break.”

A cadre of tutors visited five days a week. The private school that Fric attended for a while had not proved to be a suitable environment for him.

With the famous Channing Manheim for a father, with the famous and notorious Freddie Nielander for a mother, Fric became an object of envy and ridicule even among the children of other celebrities. Being the skinny son of a buffed star adored for heroic roles also made him a figure of fun to crueler kids. The severity of his asthma further argued for schooling at home, in a controlled environment.

“Have any idea what you’ll get Christmas morning?” Ethan asked.

“Yeah. I had to submit my list to Mrs. McBee by December fifth. I told her not to bother wrapping the stuff, but she will. She always does. She says it’s not Christmas morning without some mystery.”

“I’d have to agree with that.”

The boy shrugged, and slumped in his chair again.

Although the Face was currently on location for a film, he would return from Florida the day before Christmas.

“It’ll be good to have your dad home for the holidays. You guys have any special plans once he gets back?”

The boy shrugged again, attempting to convey lack of knowledge or indifference, but instead—and unwittingly— revealing a misery that made Ethan feel uncharacteristically helpless.

Fric had inherited luminous green eyes to match his mother’s. In the singular depths of those eyes, enough could be read about the boy’s loneliness to fill a library shelf or two.

“Well,” Ethan said, “maybe Christmas morning this year you’ll have a couple surprises.”

Sitting forward in his chair, eager for the sense of mystery that he had so recently dismissed as unimportant, Fric said, “What—you heard something?”

“If I heard something, which I’m not saying I did or didn’t, I couldn’t tell you what I heard, assuming I heard anything at all, and still keep the surprise a surprise, by which I don’t mean to imply that there is a surprise or that there isn’t one.”

The boy stared in silence for a moment. “Now you don’t sound cop honest, you sound like the head of a studio.”

“You know what heads of studios sound like, huh?”

“They come around here sometimes,” the boy said in a tone of worldly wisdom. “I recognize their rap.”

Ethan parked across the street from the apartment house in West Hollywood, switched off the windshield wipers, but left the engine running to power the heater. He sat in the Ford Expedition awhile, watching the place, deciding upon the best approach to Rolf Reynerd.

The Expedition was one of a collection of vehicles available for both job-related and personal use by the eight live-in members of the twenty-five-person estate staff. Among other wheels, a Mercedes ML500 SUV had been in the lower garage, but that might have drawn too much attention during a stakeout if the day required surveillance work.

The three-story apartment house appeared to be in good but not excellent repair. The cream-colored stucco wasn’t pocked or cracked, but the place looked to be at least a year overdue for painting. One of the address numbers above the front door hung askew.

Camellia bushes laden with heavy red blooms, a variety of ferns, and phoenix palms with enormous crowns provided the lushness of high-end landscaping; but everything had needed a trim months ago. The shaggy grass suggested that it was mown not weekly but twice a month.

The landlord shaved his costs, but the building nevertheless looked like a nice place to live.

No one rented here on a welfare check. Reynerd must have a job, but the fact that he’d been delivering death threats at three-thirty in the morning suggested that he didn’t have to get up early to go to work. He might be home now.

When Ethan tracked down his suspect’s place of employment and began to make inquiries about him with fellow workers and neighbors, Reynerd almost certainly would be alerted by someone. Thereafter, he would grow too wary to be approached directly.

Ethan preferred to start with the man himself and work outward from that initial contact.

He closed his eyes, tipped his head back against the headrest, and brooded about how to proceed.

The engine roar of an approaching car grew so loud that Ethan opened his eyes, half expecting to hear a sudden siren and to see a police chase in progress. Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, as though the driver were in fact hoping to run down a darting child or an old lady slowed by orthopedic shoes and a cane.