The Face

9:00 and 11:00 P.M. She’d been struck with such brutal [138] force that patterns of the bronze ormolu had been deeply imprinted on her flesh, even crushed into the bone of her forehead.
        Rolf had been partying with his current girlfriend and four other couples from seven o’clock that evening until two o’clock in the morning. They had been a flashy, noisy, memorable group at the two trendy nightclubs between which they had divided their time.
        Anyway, even though Mina’s murder remained unsolved, and even if Rolf’s alibi had been only that he’d stayed home alone, playing with himself, Hazard would have had no excuse to give the man a once-over. The case belonged to another detective.
        By happy chance, one of Reynerd’s party pals that night-Jerry Nemo-was known to Hazard from another case, which opened a door.
        Two months ago, a drug dealer named Carter Cook had been shot in the head. Apparently the murder had been incidental to robbery; Cook had been loaded with merchandise and cash.
        Reynerd’s buddy, Jerry Nemo, had placed a call to Cook’s cell phone an hour before the murder. Nemo was a customer, a cokehead. He set up a meet with Cook to score some blow.
        Nemo was no longer under suspicion. No one in Los Angeles or anywhere on Planet Earth was still under suspicion. The Cook murder qualified as classic shitcan, a case unlikely ever to be solved.
        Nevertheless, by pretending that Nemo remained a suspect, Hazard had an excuse to approach Reynerd and scope him out for Ethan.
        He didn’t need an excuse for the purpose of satisfying Reynerd. Using just badge and bluster, Hazard could spin a hundred stories convincing enough to persuade the party boy to open the door and answer questions.
        Should Reynerd directly or indirectly disclose his obsession with Channing Manheim, however, or in the unlikely event that Reynerd revealed an intent to harm the movie star, Hazard would have to [139] refer the situation outside the Homicide Division for investigation. Then he would need a credible intradepartmental explanation as to why he had been interviewing Reynerd in the first place, when information regarding Manheim had fallen into his lap.
        By pretending that Reynerd’s snow-blowing buddy, Nemo, remained a suspect in the Carter Cook murder, Hazard could cover his ass.
        After licking powdered sugar and mamoul crumbs from his fingers, he got out of the car.
        He didn’t bother with an umbrella. Considering that he presented nearly two linebackers’ worth of surface area to the rain, he would have needed a bumbershoot the size of a beach umbrella to shelter himself completely.
        Approaching the apartment house, he proceeded briskly but did not run through the downpour. The building didn’t set far back from the street.
        Besides, Hazard seldom accommodated himself to the world, for the world usually moved out of his way. He hardly noticed the rain.
        Inside, he ignored the elevator and climbed the stairs.
        He’d once been shot at in an elevator. He’d ridden up to the sixth floor, the doors had slid aside, and the perp had been waiting.
        Targeted in an elevator, you don’t have much room to dodge: As a place in which to be shot at, only a telephone booth and a parked car offered worse circumstances.
        Hazard had been shot at while sitting in a parked car, but never while standing in a telephone booth. He expected that it was only a matter of time.
        Waiting outside the elevator, the shooter had been packing a 9-mm pistol. And he’d been pants-wetting nervous.
        If the freak had been either calm or armed with a shotgun, the outcome for Hazard would have been much bleaker than what happened.
        [140] The first round had slammed into the cabin ceiling. The second blew a hole in the back wall. The third winged the stranger who had shared the elevator with Hazard.
        As it turned out, the stranger, an IRS agent, was the intended target. Hazard had just been in the wrong place at an inconvenient time, marked for death only because he was a witness.
        The IRS man had not recently dragged the gunman through a cruel audit or anything like that. He’d been jumping the shooter’s wife.
        Instead of returning fire, Hazard had gone in under the pistol. He wrenched it away from the assailant, drove him across the hallway, hammered him into the wall, and