The Face

some kind of half-assed guardian angel, he was really alone.
        Every time he passed a window, he was reminded also that the stormy day was melting away rapidly and that Moloch would most likely come in the night.
        Short for his age, thin for his age, a bad liar, alone, tick-tick-tick: He had nothing going for him.
        “Pandwiches,” he muttered to himself. “Just some jellybutter-and-seanut pandwiches.”
        He was doomed.

CHAPTER 60
        
        QUEEN PALMS, KING PALMS, ROYAL PALMS, Phoenix palms shook their feathery fronds like the storm-tossed trees in Key Largo . Buses and cars and trucks and SUVs clogged the streets, their wipers not quite as persistent as the beating rain, side windows half fogged, horns bleating, brakes barking, jockeying for position, idling and spurting forward and idling again, the drivers exuding a palpable frustration reminiscent of the opening scene of Falling Down, minus the summer heat of that movie, minus Michael Douglas, although Ethan supposed that Michael Douglas might be in this mess, too, quietly going as mad as had his character. In front of a bookstore, under an awning, stood a group of spike-haired, eyebrow-pierced, nose-pierced, tongue-pierced, painted punk rockers or just plain punks, dressed in black, one of them wearing a bowler hat, which made him think of the droogs in A Clockwork Orange . And here came a group of teenage schoolgirls, all beautiful, enjoying their seasonal freedom, walking without umbrellas, their hair plastered to their heads, all laughing, each of them playing the part of a fey party girl, all trying to be Holly Golightly in a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s shot this time three thousand miles from the original [407] location, this time on the nation’s wild coast. The storm gloom transformed midday to dusk, as if some director were shooting day-for-night. The shop lights, the neon, the cold-cathode tubes, the bright festoons of colorful and vaguely Asian lanterns that decorated streets in a politically correct nonreligious holiday spirit, the headlights and taillights-all rippled and flared off the storefront windows, off the walls of the glass buildings that rose in lunatic defiance of the earthquakes to come, across the wet pavement, sparkled like sequins in scintillant quicksilver plumes of vehicle exhaust, reminding Ethan of atmospheric shots in Blade Runner.
        The day was simultaneously too real and a fantasy, the dreams of Hollywood having brightened the city in a few places, darkened it in many more, changed it in every corner, until nothing seemed as solid as it ought to be.
        They were in Ethan’s Expedition, having left Hazard’s plain-wrap department sedan at Our Lady of Angels. Since Ethan had no police authority, he couldn’t arm-twist information out of anyone, but his partner couldn’t both arm-twist and drive.
        To check out their six leads, they would enter jurisdictions other than those strictly within the authority of the LAPD. Without preparing the way through proper channels, even Hazard would not have entirely legitimate authority. They didn’t have time for protocol.
        Hazard rode shotgun, making phone calls. His voice rose from a polite and almost romantic murmur to a demanding thunder, but most often settled into an easy folksiness, while relentlessly he used his status as homicide detective to coax-pinch-push-pull-wrench cooperation from a series of higher-education bureaucrats.
        Every college and university in the greater Los Angeles area had closed for the last two or three weeks of the year. Something less than a skeleton staff remained on duty to serve those students who had not gone home for the holidays.
        At each institution that he phoned, he employed charm, appeals to [408] good citizenship, threats, and persistence to get from one know-nothing to another, but always eventually to a know-something who could further their investigation.
        Already they had learned that the drama professor-Dr. Jonathan Spetz-Mogg-had organized both of the weekend conferences on acting for which Rolf Reynerd had written checks. They had been granted an appointment with Spetz-Mogg at his home in Westwood, to which they were en route without benefit of emergency flashers or siren.
        In the process of tracking down Dr. Gerald Fitzmartin, who had organized the three-day weekend conference on screenwriting, Hazard became so infuriated with the