The Face

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