The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Read Online Free PDF Page A

tired after a long day on the job. The traffic was making heading-home sounds—altogether different from going-to-work sounds. I had my cheek on my desk, giving me a bug’s eye view of a rainbow stain my coffee cup had left in some earlier geological era. I pushed up and my pretzel back snapped. I groaned.
    I made the long painful climb to my feet. I had danced the night away. That much I could tell from the way my legs felt. One knee was torn from my pants. My wallet was in the wrong pocket.
    My mustache was missing.
    Meaning, I supposed, I wasn’t Skylight Howells today.
    Still wearing my dancing shoes, I punctuated my way to the can with guilty little heel-toe heel-toe taps. My talking shoes whispered, you’ll be coming back (never again), oh, yes, you’ll be coming back for more. It’s just a matter of time.
    I splashed water in my face. Used the electric razor. Showered. Since I was back in the office I guess it made some sense to be Sky again. I got another mustache from the top drawer of my disguise cabinet (a Goodwill chest of drawers, once blue, now mostly chipped white—the thing always made me think of an egg except that it was rectangular).
    I walked back into the office and got the coffeepot and rinsed it out in the washroom. Once the coffee started dripping, the happy sound and smell made me feel a little better.
    The feeling didn’t last. I’d no sooner poured myself a cup and settled back down behind my desk when the door banged open and Lieutenant Frank Wallace and his burly sidekick Marvin Zivon walked right in.
    These bozos made the perfect cop couple. A smoldering little guy and his muscle man. Wired and short and quick, Frank Wallace always made me think of a weasel. He wore his blond hair combed up like some kind of teen idol from an old beach movie. He’d worn it that way even as a little boy, and I figured maybe he was born with it already styled. Marvin, on the other hand, looked like a big dumb guy trying really hard not to look so dumb. Big boyish face with a scattering of freckles across his nose. Sandy hair cut short emphasizing a slight point to his head. Oddly, Marvin wasn’t dumb at all. In fact, in a mental wrestling match with Frank, Marvin would probably come out on top, but that wouldn’t matter. Frank had the power of will and would always win.
    My first thought was that Elsie had let the cat out of the bag and told Frank she’d hired me to follow him. Since I hadn’t seen him doing anything, I hoped that was not the case. One of my major goals in life was to slap one big incriminating eight-by-ten glossy after another down on a desk under his nose. I wanted to see his eyes go wide, see the horrible realization of doom blossom on his face when he figured out what the pictures meant. Unfortunately there were no photos yet. And if Elsie had confessed and Frank was in my office to hassle me, why had he brought Marvin Zivon?
    This was more likely an official visit and, in their official capacity, I doubted they would rough me up, but I couldn’t help thinking of all the times back in school when I’d taken the long way home to avoid them and all the times taking the long way home hadn’t worked. The word around town was these former high school bad guys had become pretty good cops. Who would have believed it?
    Back in school, everyone assumed Frank would end up in prison or maybe the army. Marvin would be bailed out by his mother who owned the Whisper Café on the downtown mall. The Whisper Café was the place to be seen after a concert at the Hult, for example, the place for dangerously complicated coffee drinks and fancy cakes, little dishes of spiced shrimp, quail eggs, stuff like that. No one expected Marvin to follow Frank onto the police force. Some people expected me to follow Frank onto the police force, but that’s another story.
    â€œMarvin,” I said, “Francis. What’s up?”
    â€œCut the