The Face

him. Vladimir Laputa.”
        As sadness did not diminish Rachel’s loveliness, neither did anger. “Among all those hyenas, he’s the worst. Max despised… despises him. Six weeks ago, Mr. Laputa paid me a visit, to express his sympathy and concern that there’d been no news of Max. I swear… the weasel was feeling me out to see if I’d grown lonely in my bed.”
        “Good Lord,” Hazard said.
        [462] “Ruthlessness, Detective Yancy, is no less a quality of the average university academic than of the average member of a street gang. It’s just expressed differently. The day of the genteel scholar in his ivory tower, interested only in art and truth, is long gone.”
        “Recently I’ve begun to suspect as much,” he told her, though he would never reveal that, for want of a better candidate, her husband had risen to the top of his list of suspects in the matter of the threat to Channing Manheim.
        He found it difficult to believe that a woman like Rachel and a girl like Emily could love a man who was not exactly-and all-that he appeared to be.
        Nevertheless, Maxwell Dalton’s disappearance might, in fact, mean that he had started a new life, a demented one that included making threats against celebrities either with the intent to do harm or in the naive hope that intimidation could serve extortion.
        Even setting aside bells out of dreams and men into mirrors, Hazard Yancy had seen stranger things in his career than a once-honest professor, a man of reason, gone bad, made mad by envy, by greed.
        The Daltons lived in a good neighborhood, but Laputa lived in a better one, less than fifteen minutes from their door.
        The early winter twilight had crept in behind the storm while Hazard had been having coffee with Rachel Dalton. Dusk drained all light from the day as he drove to Professor Laputa’s place, until the low clouds were no longer gray and backlit, but sour yellow and underlit by the rising radiance of the city.
        He parked across the street from the home of the reputed worst of all academic hyenas, switched off the headlights and windshield wipers, but left the engine running to keep the heater in action. Local kids wouldn’t be building snow forts; but with the coming of night, the air had grown wintry by southern-California standards.
        He’d been unable to reach the professor by phone. Now, although the Laputa house was dark, he tried again.
        [463] As he let the number ring, Hazard noticed a pedestrian turn the corner at the end of the block, on thé far side of the street, coming in the direction of the Laputa residence.
        Something was wrong about the guy. He had neither an umbrella nor a raincoat. The downpour had diminished to a steady, businesslike drenching, but it was not weather in which anyone went for a stroll. And that was another thing: The guy didn’t hurry.
        Attitude, however, was what really cranked up the Hazard Yancy suspicion machine. If the guy had been a sponge, he’d have been so saturated with attitude that he couldn’t have made room for one drop of rain.
        He swaggered under the streetlamps, not like genuine tough guys sometimes swaggered, but as movie stars swaggered when they thought they were getting the tough-guy thing just right. His gray pants, black turtleneck, and black leather coat were soaked, but he seemed to defy the rain.
        Theatrical. In this weather no other pedestrians were in sight, and at the moment no traffic moved on this quiet residential street, yet the guy appeared to be performing without an audience, for his own amusement.
        Tired of listening to Laputa’s phone ring, Hazard pressed END on his cell keypad.
        The pedestrian appeared to be talking to himself, although from across the street Hazard could not be certain of this.
        When he rolled down his window and cocked his head to listen, he was defeated by the drumming of the rain. He caught a few snatches of the voice and thought the guy might be singing, though he couldn’t recognize either tune or lyrics.
        To Hazard’s surprise, the swaggering man left the sidewalk and followed the driveway at the Laputa house. He must have been carrying a remote control, because the segmented garage door rolled up to admit him, and then at once closed.
        [464] Hazard put up the car window. He watched the house.
        After two minutes, a single soft light appeared toward the