The Face

compacted his testicles with a knee. Not accidentally, he broke the guy’s arm.
        Later, for a few months during the divorce proceedings, he dated the shooter’s wife. She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d just gotten mixed up with bad men.
        Now, Hazard climbed to the second floor of the apartment house, not entirely comfortable with the confining nature of the stairwell.
        At Apartment 2B, he rang the bell without hesitation.
        When Rolf Reynerd opened the door, he proved to be a perfect match for Ethan’s description, down to the methamphetamine shine in his cold blue eyes and to the tiny flecks of foamy spittle in the corners of. his mouth, which suggested that he was so routinely amped that he might, in a moment of toxic psychosis, spin wildly around his apartment under the misapprehension that he was Spiderman squirting silky filaments from his wrists.
        Hazard flashed his ID, spread a garden-growing load of crap about Jerry Nemo being a suspect in the death of Carter Cook, and got into the apartment so fast that rain still dripped from his earlobes.
        A product of weight training and protein powders, Reynerd looked as if he would have to eat a dozen raw eggs every morning merely to sustain the muscle mass in his right triceps.
        Of the two of them, Hazard Yancy was the bigger and no doubt the smarter, but he cautioned himself to remain wary, alert.
        [141] Reynerd closed the apartment door and escorted Hazard into the living room, expressing a sincere desire to cooperate, as well as a sincere conviction that his good friend Jerry Nemo was incapable of harming a fly.
        Regardless of how fly-loving Nemo might or might not be, Reynerd troweled on the sincerity as thickly as he might have done had he been wearing a purple-dinosaur costume, teaching little life lessons to preschoolers on an early-morning TV program.
        If his acting had been this dreadful when he’d appeared on those soap operas, the writers must have been frantic to script Reynerd into a deadly car accident or a lightning-quick terminal brain tumor. The audience might have preferred a bloody end for him, by shotgun in an elevator.
        Furniture, carpet, blinds, photographs of birds: Everything in the apartment was black-and-white. On the TV, in an old black-and-white movie, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert showed Reynerd how it ought to be done.
        In black slacks and a black-and-white sport shirt, the sincere friend of Jerry Nemo had coordinated his wardrobe with the decor.
        At the suggestion of his host, Hazard settled in an armchair. He perched on the edge, the better to get up fast.
        Reynerd plucked the remote control off the coffee table, pausing Gable in midspeech and Colbert in reaction. He sat on the sofa.
        The only color in the room was provided by Reynerd’s blue eyes and by the bright designs that enlivened the two bags of potato chips that flanked him on the sofa.
        The bag to his left offered Hawaiian-style chips. The bag to his right held a sour-cream-and-chive variety. Mr. Gourmet.
        Hazard had not forgotten Ethan’s enigmatic but intense warning about snack-food containers.
        Both bags were open, standing upright, plump enough to be full. Hazard detected the faint oily aroma of the chips.
        If the bags contained handguns as well as chips, Hazard wasn’t able [142] to smell the weapons. He couldn’t see them, either, because the bags, made of foil, were not transparent.
        Reynerd sat with his hands palms-down on his thighs, licking his lips, as though he might reach for a salty treat at any moment.
        With a nod to indicate the frozen image on the TV, the actor said, “That’s the perfect medium for me. I was born too late. I should have lived back then.”
        “When’s that?” Hazard asked, for he knew that suspects often revealed the most when they seemed to be rambling.
        “The 1930s and ’40s. When all films were black-and-white. I’d have been a star in those days.”
        “Is that right?”
        “I’m too strong a personality for color films. I explode off the screen. I overwhelm the medium, the audience.”
        “I can see where that would be a problem.”
        “In the color era, the most successful stars have all been flat personalities, shallow. They’re an inch wide, half an inch deep.”
        “And why is that?”
        “The color, the depth of field