The Face

everything? You’ve come clean with me now?”
        With all the conviction that he could muster, Ethan said, “What-this whole mess isn’t X-Files enough already? You want there should be some aliens in it, vampires, werewolves?”
        “What’re you-dodging the question?”
        “I’m not dodging anything,” Ethan said, regretting that he was going to be forced to lie boldly rather than by indirection. “Yeah, that was everything, through the flower shop. I was drinking Scotch when I got your call.”
        “Truth?”
        “Yeah. I was drinking Scotch, I got your call.”
        “Remember, you’re in a church here.”
        “The whole world’s a church if you’re a believer.”
        “Are you a believer?”
        “I used to be.”
        “Not since Hannah died, huh?”
        Ethan shrugged. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. It’s a day-to-day thing.”
        After giving him a look that could have peeled an onion layer by layer to the pearl at the core, Hazard said, “Okay. I believe you.”
        Feeling low enough to slide under a snake, Ethan said, “Thanks.”
        Hazard turned in the pew to survey the nave, to be sure that a lost soul had not entered in need of a God fix. “You’ve come clean, so I’ll tell you something, but you’ve got to forget you heard it.”
        “Already I don’t even remember being here.”
        “Not much of interest in Reynerd’s apartment. Spare furnishings, everything black-and-white.”
        [242] “He seemed to live like a monk, but a monk with style.”
        “And drugs. He had a big stash of coke packaged for resale and a notebook of names and numbers that’s probably a customer list.”
        “Famous names?”
        “Not really. Some actors. Nobody big. The thing you need to know about is the screenplay he was writing.”
        “In this town,” Ethan said, “guys writing screenplays outnumber those cheating on their wives.”
        “He had twenty-six pages in a pile beside his computer.”
        “That’s not even enough for a first act.”
        “You know about screenplays, huh? You writing one?”
        “No. I’ve still got some self-respect.”
        Hazard said, “Reynerd was writing about this young actor goes to a special acting class, makes what he calls ‘a deep intellectual connection’ with his professor. They both hate this character named Cameron Mansfield, who happens to be the biggest movie star in the world, so they decide to kill him.”
        Under a weight of weariness, Ethan had slouched in the corner of the pew. Now he sat up straight. “What’s their motivation?”
        “That’s not clear. Reynerd has lots of handwritten notes in the margin, trying to figure that out. Anyway, sort of to prove to each other that they’ve got the guts to do this, each agrees to give the other guy the name of someone to kill before they do the movie star together. The actor wants the professor to kill his mother.”
        “Why’s this sound so Hitchcock?” Ethan wondered.
        “It’s sort of like his old film, Strangers on a Train . The idea is by swapping killings, each guy can have a perfect alibi for the murder he might otherwise be convicted of.”
        “Let me guess. Reynerd’s mother was actually murdered.”
        “Four months ago,” Hazard confirmed. “On a night when her son had an alibi more airtight than a space-shuttle window.”
        The church seemed to turn at a lazy six or eight revolutions per minute, as if the Scotch might be having a delayed effect on Ethan, [243] but he knew this vertigo was caused less by the Scotch than by these latest weird revelations. “What kind of idiot does these things, then writes them up in a screenplay?”
        “An arrogant idiot actor. Don’t tell me you think he’s unique.”
        “And who did the professor want Reynerd to kill?”
        “A colleague at the university. But Reynerd hadn’t written that part yet. He’d just completed the scene featuring the murder of his mother. In real life, her name was Mina, and she was shot once in the right foot and then beaten to death with a marble-and-bronze lamp. In the script, her name’s Rena, and she’s stabbed repeatedly, beheaded, dismembered, and incinerated in a furnace.”
        Ethan winced. “Sounds like his mom’s days were numbered whether or not Reynerd ever met the professor.”
        They were silent. The well-insulated church roof lay so far overhead that the