The Face-Changers

33

Jane placed the video camera on her car’s dashboard in front of the steering wheel, zoomed in on C. Langer’s doorway, and tossed a sweater over it so it wouldn’t be visible from a distance. She came back to the car two hours later, when the tape would be used up, and drove off with it.

When she reviewed the tape in her hotel room, she had shots of C. Langer leaving the house, then an hour later coming back. But someone had taught him well. He always wore the dark glasses, always moved as though he were in a hurry. When he approached the door he already had the right key in his hand, and his body was close to the door and his head down when he opened it. When he left, he moved out of frame just as quickly. She was beginning to understand why police surveillance tapes were always so appallingly bad.

Jane recharged the battery in her hotel room and went out to buy more blank tapes at the big drugstore on State Street. It occurred to her that the people watching Carey at home must know how to get a clear picture of a man’s face. But then she remembered that they were doing pretty much what she had—parked in front of the house and started the camera.

She had to get closer, and to do it at a time when the light was good. The next day, she studied his movements from a distance. There seemed to be no way to get close to him with a camera. If she followed him during his trips away from the house, it was hard to imagine a way to take a tape of him without being seen. When he had disappeared into the house for what Jane judged would be the last time, Jane went back to her car and drove up the street.

That evening she studied the tapes she had taken of C. Langer, running them over and over. But this time she was not looking at the male figure flashing across the camera’s field of view. She looked at the shapes that did not move. She held her eyes on C. Langer’s car, on the windows of the neighbors’ houses, on the shrubbery in C. Langer’s front yard.

As she watched, each object caused her to formulate a plan and dismiss it. The light fixture just above Langer’s door was in the perfect position, but it wasn’t quite big enough, and the glass globe was not transparent. No windows in the nearby houses were at the ideal angle and distance to afford the right view, even if she could have gotten inside. The shrubs that were thick enough to hide a video camera were too far from the door. The only plants near the door were the potted ones on the porch, and they were too sparse. She studied the pots. The biggest one, with a ficus in it, looked as though it might be plastic. She could enlarge the drainage hole in the bottom, bury the camera so the lens was pressed against the hole, and tip the plant so it looked as though the wind had blown it over. He would see it, squat or kneel close enough to the pot to tip the plant back up, and go inside. No, it was unlikely that he could see the hole and not see the lens.

She evolved a plan for C. Langer’s car. She could create a minor problem in the engine that would stimulate him to open the hood. The camera could be attached to the engine compartment low and just in front of the firewall, disguised to look like one of the electronic boxes that belonged there. He would fix the problem—replace the radiator cap, or re-attach the hose—then shut the hood, and drive off. She could open the hood and retrieve the camera the next time he parked the car. But Jane didn’t know anything about C. Langer. He might be one of those men who knew every nut and bolt in a car and would see the camera instantly, or he might be the other kind, who wouldn’t even open the hood. He’d call a mechanic to come and do it for him.

She watched the tapes again. The porch was where he was most visible, but there was nothing on it that she could use. It was a few minutes later when she realized that she had been staring at the solution all evening and failing to see it. She reminded herself that this was its most appealing quality, because C. Langer would look at it and not see it either.

Jane watched her tapes one more time to be sure. There was a small wooden square on the side of the porch that had to be an access hatch. Wooden porches felt solid and looked solid, but they were just platforms with boards laid over them and the sides enclosed. They were very dark inside. She prepared her video camera, then drove toward C. Langer’s house. On the way, she stopped at a drugstore and bought a copy of The New York Times.

It was four o’clock in the morning when Jane emerged from under C. Langer’s porch and replaced the hatch. Without stepping on the porch, she reached through the railing and placed the copy of the newspaper in exactly the right spot near the door, half on the doormat and half off. Then she went back to her hotel and went to sleep.

Jane waited until the next night to find out how her plan had worked. When she was sure the whole neighborhood was asleep, she drove back to C. Langer’s house. She parked on the next street, slipped between Langer’s house and the one beside it, crawled under the porch, and retrieved her camera.

When Jane returned to her hotel, she held her breath and played her tape on fast forward. There was a long pause, when the image was total darkness. It gradually lightened, until she could make out dim, blurred shapes of black letters between the sides of the hole she had widened in the porch floor. That was the newspaper. After thirty seconds, she stopped the tape and ran it at normal speed because she was afraid of missing something. Now she could hear the sounds the camera’s microphone had picked up. Birds were singing in the trees near the house, cars started, and doors slammed.

At last, she heard a footstep. Then she heard a door closing. There were more footsteps. Suddenly, the screen was filled with glaring light, and then the automatic light meter adjusted: C. Langer had lifted the newspaper off the hole in the porch. Jane clenched her teeth. Langer was holding the paper between the camera and his face, reading the headlines. She could see his legs, his hands and chest, and then the newspaper. “Come on,” she whispered. He turned a few pages, then folded the paper. He straightened, so all she could see was a clear image of the underside of his jaw, his nostrils, and his sunglasses.

He reached into his pocket, then produced a set of keys, but when he pulled them out, a couple of coins came out with them, clinked, and rolled. As he bent over to pick one of them up, she could see his face descend close to the camera. Jane stared at the screen and grinned.

But C. Langer frowned. He had noticed something that didn’t look familiar. One of his hands came down and touched the crack Jane had widened between the porch floorboards. Then the hand came up and took off his sunglasses. He stared at the hole for three breaths. Then he gave a little sigh, stood up, and stepped out of frame. Jane heard him unlock his front door again, and heard the whispery sound of the newspaper being tossed inside, then landing with a flap. The door closed, the key turned. Then C. Langer reappeared long enough so that Jane could see him use the toe of his shoe to push the doormat an inch to cover the hole.

That night at 11:15 the guard at the front gate of Senior Rancho in Carlsbad recorded the entry of Julia Kieler to visit her father, Alan Weems. She had called him from Los Angeles, and when she pulled into the parking space assigned to his unit, he was standing at the door.

Jane walked immediately up to him and gave him a hug so she could place her body in front of his while she pulled him inside and locked the door. “I know this is probably as safe a place as any, but standing in lighted doorways is not a great habit for you.”

“I know, I know,” Dahlman muttered. “It’s the first occasion when I’ve felt the impulse, and it’ll probably be the last.”

“How have you been?”

He scowled. “If you have something to tell me, then out with it. If you don’t, we can go back to inquiring about each other’s health.”

“I have something I want you to look at.” She held up the videocassette. “Do you have a VCR?”

“No,” said Dahlman. “There’s one in the rec room, but the old ladies are probably in there now watching some old movie that they can recite by heart.”

“It’s okay,” said Jane. “It’ll just take a few minutes to hook up the camera to the television set and play it back. You do have one of those?”

“Over here,” said Dahlman. He pointed into the living room. “I don’t use it much.”

“No?” She plugged the line into the camera, then unplugged the lamp to plug in the camera’s AC adapter.

“No. The first couple of weeks I watched all the news, waiting for them to talk about me. Once or twice, they did. After that, it was pretty much what you said would happen. I’m old news.”

“You sound disappointed.”

Dahlman shook his head. “I was working up to thanking you, so I guess I should just grit my teeth and say it. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The television set was crackling with snow and emitting an annoying buzz.

“Now what?”

Jane switched the channel. “Nothing. You just have to put it on an empty channel.” The buzzing stopped, then started again. “I’m rewinding it.”

He scowled. “I knew that.”

“Now be quiet and come closer and look.”

He stood where he was and watched. The picture flipped once, then settled to reveal the interior of C. Langer’s house: the bathroom, the living room, then closer and closer to the piano. “Somebody’s house?” said Dahlman. “Am I supposed to have been there or something?”

“Just watch.” Jane kept her eyes on Dahlman’s face.

The camera moved close to the first of the framed photographs on the piano. The sight of the woman and two children on the ski slope meant nothing. The picture of the man on the sailboat went by, and Dahlman’s arm shot out at it. “Stop!” he said. “Can’t you stop this thing?”

“We’ll go back to it,” said Jane. “Watch the rest.”

The camera moved into the kitchen. She watched Dahlman out of the corner of her eye when the camera zoomed in on the false driver’s license she had taken from the milk carton and laid on the counter. He straightened, then knelt on the rug to get closer. “How did you find him?” he murmured.

“So this is the one?”

Dahlman’s head turned sharply and the little gray eyes glared at her. “Of course it’s him. It’s the man who called himself James Hardiston. I operated on him.”

“Let me ask you this,” Jane began.

“But—”

“Wait. Could the man you operated on have graduated from college in 1965?”

“1965?” Dahlman was distracted by the image on the screen. “That would make him—”

“Mid-fifties.”

Dahlman squinted, then nodded. “Yes. He could easily be in his fifties. Go back to the beginning.”

Jane stopped the tape, rewound it, and started it again.

“Get ready to stop it.”

When the tape reached the figure of the man in the sailboat, Dahlman snapped, “Now.”

Jane stopped the tape. The image quivered and lines of static rolled upward across the man’s face like passing shadows.

“That’s him too,” said Dahlman. He was so excited that he stood and sidestepped back and forth. “You thought it was someone else, didn’t you?”

Jane let the tape run again. “I thought it was supposed to be his father,” said Jane. “I thought Sid Freeman cooked it up.”

“What’s that?” asked Dahlman as the image of the first pistol zoomed upward into focus.

“His gun. I wanted the serial number, and it’s better than writing it down.”

The second gun came on, and the tape reverted to snow and static. Dahlman looked disappointed, but Jane said, “Keep watching.”

The camera was on the front of the house. The door opened and C. Langer walked out to his car. Dahlman frowned. “It’s so hard to see from that picture.”

Dahlman clenched his jaw and watched. Each time the man with the dark glasses would come in or go out, there seemed to be less of him to see. He looked at Jane in confusion. “I think that’s the man, but he’s moving so fast, and he turns away, and those glasses—”

“Keep your eyes on the screen.”

There were a few seconds of darkness, then the printed letters of the newspaper, so close to the lens that they were difficult to make out. “What in the world is that?”

Jane had no time to answer. There was the flash of light, and then the man standing up holding the newspaper.

Dahlman waited impatiently until the moment when C. Langer bent over to pick up the coin and took off his sunglasses. “There!” Dahlman shouted. “That’s him!”

Jane stopped the tape and pressed the rewind button. Dahlman grinned at her expectantly. “Where is he?”

“At the moment he’s living in Santa Barbara. That may not be where he intends to end up, but it looked to me as though he was planning to stay put for a while. The house is pretty well chosen, and he’s put a lot into making it right. I don’t mean it’s expensive, although it is. I mean everything is consistent. He’s building an identity, a personality.”

“Fine,” he said impatiently. “So how do we do this—give the tape to the police?”

Jane looked at him apologetically. “I know you would like this to end. But I think that even if we could get the Santa Barbara police to hold this man and run his fingerprints—something I can’t imagine them doing—it probably wouldn’t solve your problem.”

“It proves I told the truth. I said I performed surgery on a man claiming to be James Hardiston. Any physician could examine this man and verify the plastic surgery. They might not be able to accurately describe every procedure we used, but there would be no argument about the fact of surgery. And I think the fellow’s fingerprints will prove he’s some kind of criminal living under a false name.”

“Yes,” said Jane. “But what kind?”

“That’s the job of the police—finding that out.”

Jane sighed. “He’s a runner. He spent a lot of money to get a new face and a solid identity and a lot of first-class treatment. Maybe his fingerprints will show that he’s done terrible things. Will they show he killed Sarah Hoffman?”

“Of course they don’t prove he did it personally. When she was killed he was still recovering from his last surgery.”

“Then what good are they to us?”

Dahlman slumped into a chair by the wall and closed his eyes. “I see.”

Jane stood and disconnected the cords from the television set and the wall and coiled them, then put the video camera back into her bag. She stood in silence for a few more seconds, then said gently, “We’ve come this far. Maybe we can make it the rest of the way.”

Dahlman shook his head. “At the moment I can’t conceive of how to do that.”

“The first step is to find out who he is,” she said. “Maybe after that we’ll know the second step.”