The Face

splashed past on the cross street. He looked to the right and saw Laputa walking northward. When the professor was almost out of sight, Hazard turned the corner and followed him.
        Whenever he drew within half a block of Laputa, he pulled to the curb and waited, letting his quarry proceed toward the limits of fog-diminished visibility. Then he drove after him again.
        In these fits and starts, Hazard tracked the professor two and a half blocks. There, never having glanced back, Laputa got into a black Land Rover.
        Remaining too far behind to read the license plate, letting other traffic intervene from time to time to mask his continuous presence, Hazard shadowed the Land Rover along a direct route to the Beverly Center, at Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega. Although somewhat oddly dressed for a trip to the mall, Laputa apparently intended to go shopping.
        Conducting on-the-roll surveillance in a parking garage was a lot trickier than doing the same thing on public streets. Hazard followed the Land Rover up ramp after ramp, floor by floor, past ranks of parked vehicles, until Laputa found an empty space.
        Near the end of that aisle, a slot waited for Hazard’s sedan. He parked, switched off the engine, got out, and watched his man over the roofs of the parked cars.
        He expected the professor to follow the signs to the nearest mall entrance. Instead, Laputa returned on foot to the ramp up which he had just driven.
        Although other shoppers were walking through the garage, and although numerous vehicles roamed in search of parking spaces and exit routes, Hazard hung back from his quarry as far as he dared. He worried that the professor would spot him, and would know him at once for what he was.
        Laputa descended one long ramp, then another. Two floors below [494] the level on which he’d left the Land Rover, he walked up to a parked Acura coupe, which chirruped as he unlocked the doors with a remote.
        Frozen by surprise, Hazard halted as the professor got into the driver’s seat.
        The guy had not come here to go shopping. He was picking up new wheels.
        The Land Rover or the Acura almost certainly was a Kleenex car, meant to be used in the commission of a crime, and then tossed away. Maybe both vehicles were Kleenex.
        Hazard considered making an arrest on the basis of suspicious behavior.
        No. He couldn’t risk it. Not with a respectable university professor. Not with Blonde in the Pond about to break wide open and a powerful city councilman about to become his mortal enemy. He was already the subject of an OIS investigation for shooting Hector X. In these circumstances, every mistake he made would be woven into the rope with which they would hang him.
        He had no legitimate reason to be following Laputa. The murder of Mina Reynerd wasn’t his case. All day he had been using his city-paid time and his police authority to help a friend in a personal matter. He had put his pecker in a vise and had tightened the handle himself; now he couldn’t make a sudden move against the professor without big-time grief.
        In the Acura, unaware that he was under surveillance, Laputa pulled shut the driver’s door. He started the engine. He seemed to be fiddling with the radio.
        Hazard sprinted back the way that he’d come, up two ramps, to the department sedan.
        By the time he drove pell-mell down to the garage exit, hoping to fall in behind the Acura, Laputa had gone.

CHAPTER 77
        
        YOU KNOW THAT CHOCOLATE POP CALLED Yoo-hoo?” Fric asked.
        “I’ve had it a few times,” Mr. Truman said.
        “It’s cool stuff. Did you know you can keep Yoo-hoo just about forever and it won’t go sour?”
        “I wasn’t aware of that.”
        “They use a special steam-sterilization process,” Fric revealed. “As long as it’s unopened, it’s as sterile as like, say, a bottle of contact-lens solution.”
        “I’ve never drunk any contact-lens solution,” said Mr. Truman.
        “Did you know that civet is used in a lot of perfumes?”
        “I don’t even know what civet is.”
        Fric brightened at this admission. “Well, it’s a thick yellow secretion that’s squeezed from the anal glands of civet cats.”
        “They sound like remarkably cooperative cats.”
        “They aren’t really members of the cat family. They’re mammals in Asia and Africa. They produce