The Face

not permit the Glock to seat perfectly in his holster. Nor did the extra few inches allow for as smooth a draw as Corky preferred.
        Besides, if poor Mick had seen the bolstered Glock fitted with a sound suppressor, he might have been uneasy in spite of Corky’s nonchalance.
        After holstering the pistol, Corky pulled on his black leather coat and withdrew a pair of latex surgical gloves from one pocket. He needed to avoid leaving fingerprints, of course, but in this shrine to [449] the sinful hand, he was less concerned about the evidence that he might leave behind than about what he might pick up.
        Elsewhere, shelving for videos overlaid windows, making a cave of the house, but in the work rooms, the dreary face of the fading day pressed against rain-dappled glass. Corky closed the drapes.
        He needed time to search the house for Mick’s well-hidden cash reserves, which were most likely significant, as well as time to disconnect the computers and load them in the Land Rover to ensure that any information they contained about him would not fall into hostile hands. He would wrap the body in a tarp and haul it out of here, and then clean up the blood.
        To avoid a homicide investigation that might, in spite of all his caution, lead back to him, Corky intended to make Mick disappear.
        He could have instead saturated the place with gasoline and torched it to eliminate all evidence, as he had done at the narrow house of Brittina Dowd. The thousands of videocassettes would burn with intense heat, casting off great clouds of toxic smoke sufficient to foil firefighters. No clues would remain in the smoldering slag.
        Yet he was loath to destroy the Sachatone archives of mindless lust, for this place was as great a monument to chaos as any that Corky had ever seen. This malignant mass sent forth vibrations with the power to spread dissolution and disorder as surely as a pile of plutonium issues deadly radiation against which, in time, no living thing can stand.
        The search for Mick’s cash, the dismantling of his computers, and the removal of the pajamaed corpse would have to wait, however, until Aelfric Manheim had been snatched from the cozy lap of fame and imprisoned in the room currently occupied by Stinky Cheese Man. Corky would return here in twenty-four hours.
        Meanwhile, he switched off the computers and the other active machines in the work rooms. Then he went through the house, top to bottom, to be sure that no electrical appliance would be left on that might overheat and start a small blaze, bringing the fire [450] department to these rooms before the trove of money had been located and while the corpse still waited to be discovered.
        In the living room again, Corky stood for a minute, watching the four-screen erotic contortions of the incomparable Janelle, before bringing darkness to the wall of writhing flesh. He wondered if Jack Trotter had taken advantage of her astonishing flexibility to fold her into a half-size grave and save himself some digging.
        With Mick now gone, both the Romeo and Juliet of porn were dead. Sad.
        Corky would have preferred not to kill Mick, but poor Mick had signed his own death warrant when he’d sold out Trotter. In a fever of jealousy, sick for revenge, he had revealed to Corky the numerous fake identities that he had over the years created for Trotter. If he would betray any client, he might have one day betrayed Corky, too.
        Destroying the social order is lonely work.
        Corky stepped onto the front porch and locked the door with Mick’s key, which he had taken from a pegboard in the kitchen.
        The chill of the day had deepened.
        For all the rinsing and wringing that it had undergone, the washrag sky was a dirtier gray than it had been this morning, and its light cast neither beam nor faintest shadow.
        So much had happened since he had risen to face the day. But the best was yet to come.

CHAPTER 69
        
        IN THE KITCHEN, CONFERRING WITH MR. Hachette regarding dinner, Ethan found the chef barely communicative and stiff with anger that he flatly refused to explain. He would only say, “My statement on the matter is in the mail, Inspector Truman.” He would not describe the “matter” to which he referred. “It is in the mail, my passionate statement. I reject to be lowered into a brawl like a common cook. I am chef, and I announce my contempt