The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Read Free Page B

chair and put my feet back up on the desk. Legwork. I could go as Dieter, and thinking of Dieter made me curious to see if anyone had picked up on the fact that a secret ingredient had been posted in alt.conpiracy. I wandered on over there and checked out the list of new posts. The original post was still there: “I laugh in your face, SSOMFC; the secret ingredient is…” Well, it didn’t say “dot dot dot,” but I’m certainly not going to compound someone’s error by writing the ingredient here.
    I saw there was a flurry of posts on the subject, and as soon as I opened a few I intuited what SSOMFC’s strategy was for this crisis. Every post offered a different ingredient as the secret ingredient. With so many claims and counter-claims no one would realize that someone had in fact really told the world the secret for really good Mexican food.
    I had been sparring (or more correctly my disguise Dieter, “the Mexican Food Chef,” had been sparring) with the Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks for years. They knew Dieter knew the secret ingredient. He made no bones about claiming that the reason it was so hard to get good Mexican food in Oregon was that most of the cooks didn’t know about the secret ingredient. He liked to say that most of the grandmothers of the cooks probably knew it, but they weren’t talking.
    The communication I’d had with the SSOMFC had led me to believe that violence would be the preferred solution for any problem. But now this. I had to admire the way they were handling this crisis. I wondered who in the society was in charge of the operation.
    Then it hit me that this is where I’d first seen 4e4.com. I brought up the original post again. Yes, the person who had spilled the beans (so to speak) was [email protected]. That person’s handle was ESCOTILLA which some hasty research revealed meant “hatchway” (could that be “trapdoor”?) in Spanish. There was also a small town in the mountains of southwestern Arizona with the same name.
    So now I knew why 4e4.com had bothered me in the first place, but did that mean that the society was somehow mixed up in Gerald’s murder? Well, probably not, but I couldn’t discount the possibility altogether. Prudence Deerfield might think certain elementary mathematical skills were what detective work was all about, but I knew it was all about intuition. The wheels were always turning even if you couldn’t see them turning. You had to trust the process. The mind of the detective was always picking over the bones of the case, endlessly moving the pieces around. Never say never. Never ignore the little voices in your head.
    I tossed off my drink and got up. Legwork. Just do it. I would not go as Dieter; I would go as Scarface. I made that decision without consciously deciding to do so. Process.
    I walked into the washroom to become Scarface. People turn their eyes away from a really horrible facial scar. Makes it hard for them to see or remember the person behind the scar. Setting things up so people don’t look too closely is the key to a good disguise. It is incredibly difficult to change a face enough to be absolutely unrecognizable. There is always something to give you away. Recognizing faces is one thing the human brain is very good at (we are all the time concerned with faces—just look at the Man in the Moon or the Face on Mars), and fooling it usually demands misdirection.
    I applied the scar and put on a baseball cap with an attached ponytail. Checked myself out in the mirror. Grabbed an electric-blue fanny pack. Putting the man with the ponytail and the fanny pack in a tie-dyed tee shirt would make him altogether invisible in Eugene. And if you did look, well, there was that scar.
    I turned off my office lights and left by way of the stairs to avoid anyone on the elevator.
    GP Ink had its office in the Baltimore building downtown. There was a huge neon sign atop