The Face

Broadway had been her favorite.
        Ethan turned slowly in a full circle, studying the cemetery. No figure moved anywhere on those gently sloped green acres.
        He peered with special suspicion at every cedar, every oak. As best he could tell, those trunks didn’t shelter a lurking observer.
        No traffic moved on the narrow winding road that served the cemetery. Ethan’s Expedition-white as winter, glimmering like ice-was the only vehicle parked along the lane.
        Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery, urban vistas loomed in veils of rain and fog, less like a real city than like a metropolis in a dream. No rumble of traffic, no bleat of horn penetrated from its maze of streets, as though all its citizens had long ago gone horizontal in these silent grassy acres surrounding Ethan.
        He looked down at the bouquet once more. In addition to bright color, the Broadway rose offers a fine fragrance. It flourishes in any sun-drenched garden and is more resistant to mildew than are many other varieties.
        Two dozen roses found on a grave would not be admitted as evidence in a court of law. Yet Ethan regarded these colorful blooms as proof enough of a strange courtship of the dead, by the dead.

CHAPTER 20
        
        EATING A MAMOUL, WASHING IT DOWN WITH coffee from a thermos, Hazard Yancy sat in an unmarked sedan directly in front of Rolf Reynerd’s apartment house in West Hollywood.
        The early winter twilight would not descend for another thirty minutes, but under the pall of the storm, the city had an hour ago settled into a prolonged dusk. Activated by photoelectric sensors, street-lamps glowed, painting a steely sheen on the needles of rain that stitched the gauzy gray sky ever closer to the earth.
        Although it might appear that Hazard lingered over cookies on the city’s time, he was considering his approach to Reynerd.
        After lunch with Ethan, he had returned to his desk in Homicide. In a couple hours, on the Internet and off, working both the keyboard and the phone, he had learned more than a little about his subject.
        Rolf Reynerd was an actor who only intermittently made a living at his craft. Between occasional multi-episode supporting roles as a bad boy on one cheesy soap opera or another, he endured long periods of unemployment.
        In an episode of The X-Files, he’d played a federal agent driven psychotic by an alien brain leech. In an episode of Law & Order, he had [137] been a psychotic personal trainer who killed himself and his wife near the end of the first act. In a TV commercial for a deodorant, he had been cast as a psychotic guard in a Soviet gulag; the spot had never gone national, and he’d made only a little money from it.
        An actor unlucky enough to be typecast usually didn’t fall into that career trap until he’d experienced great success in a memorable role. Thereafter, the public had difficulty accepting him as any character type other than the one that had made him famous.
        In Reynerd’s case, however, he seemed to have been typecast even in failure. This suggested to Hazard that certain qualities of the man’s personality and demeanor allowed him to portray only mentally unbalanced characters, that he played screw-loose well because several of his own screws had stripped threads.
        Despite an unreliable flow of income, Rolf Reynerd lived in a spacious apartment in a handsome building, in a good neighborhood. He dressed well, frequented the hottest nightclubs with young actresses who had a taste for Dom Perignon, and drove a new Jaguar.
        According to former friends of Reynerd’s widowed mother, Mina, she doted on her son, believed that one day he would be a star, and subsidized him with a fat monthly check.
        They were her former friends because Mina Reynerd had died four months ago. She’d first been shot in the foot, then beaten to death with a marble lamp encrusted with ornate ormolu mountings.
        Her killer remained unknown. Detectives had turned up no leads in her case.
        Not surprisingly, the sole heir to her estate had been her only child, poor typecast Rolf.
        The actor had a dead-solid perfect alibi for the evening of his mother’s murder.
        This didn’t either surprise Hazard or convince him of Reynerd’s innocence. Sole heirs usually had airtight alibis.
        According to the medical examiner, Mina had been bludgeoned to death between