The Face

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.
        [23] 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.
        A tire-thrown plume spewed up from the puddled street, drenching the Expedition. The glass in the driver’s door briefly clouded with ripples of dirty water.
        Across the street, the apartment house appeared to shimmer as if it were a place in a dream. Some aspect of that transient distortion seemed to trigger a vague memory of a long-forgotten nightmare, and the sight of the building in this warped condition caused the hairs to rise inexplicably on the back of Ethan’s neck.
        Then the last gouts of the plume drained off the window. Falling rain quickly cleared the murky residue from the glass. The apartment house was nothing more than what it had been when he’d first seen it: a nice place to live.
        After judging that the rain was falling only hard enough to make [24] an umbrella more trouble than it was worth, he got out of the SUV and dashed across the street.
        In southern California during the late autumn and early winter, Mother Nature suffered unpredictable mood swings. From one year to the next, and even from day to day in the same year, the week before Christmas could vary from balmy to bone-chilling. This air was cool, the rain colder than the air, and the sky as dead gray as it might have been in any truly wintry clime much farther north.
        The main door of the building featured no buzz-through security lock. The neighborhood remained safe enough that apartment lobbies did not absolutely require fortification.
        Dripping, he entered a small space, less a lobby than a foyer, with a Mexican-tile floor. An elevator and a set of stairs served the upper stories.
        The foyer air curdled with the lingering meaty scent of Canadian bacon, cooked hours ago, and the musty smell of stale pot