The Face

construction, deadly spiders quiver to the same secret seductive [504] music, and do the same dark work, each in its own way. If you don’t resist this sticky web when you feel it plucking at you, as often it does, then you will become one of the twisted eight-legged souls that dance upon it. And if the poisonous spiders are not crushed at every opportunity, there will sooner than later be spiders uncountable, but no humanity at all.
        Hazard keyed in the number.
        Sam Kesselman himself answered, first with a cough and a sneeze and a curse, but then in a voice so cracked and rough that he sounded like the product of a genetic-engineering lab working on human-frog crossbreeds.
        “Man, you sound bad. You seen a doctor?”
        “Yeah. Flu’s a virus. Antibiotics don’t work. Doctor gave me some cough medicine. Said get lots of rest, drink lots of fluid. Been drinkin’ ten beers a day, but I think I’m gonna die anyway.”
        “Go to twelve.”
        Kesselman knew about Rolf Reynerd’s murder by Hector X, and he knew that Hazard had in turn shot the shooter. “How are you with the OIS team?”
        “I’ll come through with a clean report. Sounds like they’re ready to give it to me now. Listen, Sam, there’s a connection with the murder of Reynerd’s mother, and that’s your case.”
        “You’re gonna tell me Reynerd was involved with it.”
        “You’ve smelled something wrong with him all along, huh?”
        “His alibi was just too airtight.”
        “There’s a lot of that going around.”
        Hazard told Kesselman about the partial screenplay, but he edited the story line. He recounted the part about the swap of a killing for a killing, as in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, but not the part about the scheme to murder a movie star.
        “So you think… Reynerd had… a kill buddy,” Kesselman said between explosive coughs.
        “I know he did. I’m pretty sure it’s this guy named Vladimir Laputa. [505] I know Vamp and the Lamp is your case, Sam, but I’d like to develop this further, nail this Laputa if I can.”
        Maybe Kesselman really did need to hack up a Guinness-record weight of phlegm, or maybe all the throat clearing was a delaying tactic to give him time to think. Finally he said, “Why? I mean, you have your own caseload.”
        “Well, I think this one is on both our desks as of last night.” He hadn’t directly lied to Kesselman yet. Now he started: “Because I think Laputa didn’t just murder Mina Reynerd, he also hired the hit man, Hector X, who dropped Rolf.”
        “Then even though the file’s on my desk, it’s de facto your case, too. The way I feel now, I’m gonna have to stay at all times less than twenty steps from a bathroom until at least next week, so you might as well go for it.”
        “Thanks, Sam. Just one more thing. If you’re ever asked about you and me and this, could I have stopped by your house instead of phoning you, and could we have had this conversation earlier today, like twelve hours ago?”
        Kesselman was silent. Then he said, “What kind of hellacious destruction are you bringing down on us?”
        “When I’m done,” Hazard said, “they’ll kick your ass out of the department, strip away your pension, and clean a public toilet with your reputation, but they’ll probably let you go on being a Jew.”
        Kesselman laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, but when the coughing finally ended, he finished the laugh. “As long as we wind up in the same gutter, at least it’ll be entertaining.”
        After he concluded the call, Hazard sat in the car for a while, staring at the Laputa house, thinking through his approach. He was committed to bold action, but he didn’t want to act rashly.
        Getting into the place was the easy-even if not legal-part. He still had the Lockaid lock-release gun that he had used to spring the deadbolt at Reynerd’s apartment.
        Conducting a search without leaving evidence that he had been [506] there, then getting out again, all as smooth as an apparition first manifesting and then fading back to the spirit world: that was the hard part.
        Throughout his career, he’d largely gone by the book, no matter how incoherent the text sometimes might be. Now he had to convince himself that the justification for rogue action was overwhelming.
        From a jacket pocket, he removed the set of silvery bells. He turned them over