Read Online Dead Anyway by Chris Knopf - Free Book Online Page B

said.
    “A minor part, but yes.”
    I couldn’t help but agree. With Florencia gone, the agency meant nothing to me, but what was wrong with preserving a scrap of her legacy?
    “Okay, sure. What do we do?” I asked.
    “Give Brandt’s people the right to due diligence. Open the books and come up with a valuation. Bruce will keep an eye on things. He bought about a zillion dollars’ worth of companies for his old firm. This is not a problem for him. With all the crap that’s happened to us, can’t we just take a second and enjoy this one good thing?”
    She was right.
    “Let’s,” I said. “It can’t be that hard.”
    We talked for a while more, Evelyn pushing me on how I was taking care of myself, me evading and countering with questions about the police investigation.
    “It’s nowhere,” she said. “Maddox has his theories: It was a professional hit. Florencia had unknowingly exposed herself. Or maybe it was one of your missing person projects. I think the kid is trying, but the odds are long.”
    “But we’re not giving up,” I said.
    “No, Arthur, we’re not giving up.”
    I T’S NOT in my nature to enjoy dress-up. As a kid, I loathed Halloween. My only costume was a jacket and tie and a mask my father wore when he was a kid. This served the purpose from the first wearing at age ten straight through to college, after which I avoided Halloween parties altogether.
    This distaste extended to my daily wardrobe, which never varied beyond khakis, or jeans, T-shirts or Oxford cloth button-down collar shirts.
    So it was no joy for me to concoct a costume for my visit to Francine de la Croix. Even the logic of it was a hard sell to myself, but my better mind prevailed. This was the first genuine penetration into enemy territory. Risking identification, however unlikely, made no sense if it could be avoided by a simple precaution.
    I’d already used up the sunglasses, wig, hat and raised collar on Henry Eichenbach. I stood at the bathroom sink at my rented house looking at my face and thought, now what.
    The scar on my forehead was more than a pinky slick of nearly transparent skin, it was an indentation, a slight hollow that you don’t normally see on a person’s forehead. I could cover the deformity with a hat, as long as it stayed put. But that would do nothing to disguise my features, which still looked like a version of me, gaunt and haunted though I’d become. My heart fell as I accepted the inevitable. I needed a disguise.
    I started by studying theatrical makeup on the web. Not surprisingly, there were multiple sites offering every possible means for transforming your face, including prosthetic noses, chins and cheekbones. I girded myself and ordered anything that looked possible for an untrained makeup artist. The items would be delivered the following day.
    In the meantime, I tracked down Francine’s location, a storefront in Stamford, which I cased from a donut shop directly across the street. The crudely hand-painted sign above the blacked-out window read “Francine’s Prognostications—Fortunes Told, For the Curious and Bold.” The door to the place was also once black, now more a muddy dark grey. There was a huge brass buzzer in the middle of the door that was the only bright spot on the facade, though not from continual use. During the week I spent casing the place and giving myself the shakes from too much coffee, only half a dozen of the curious and bold sought out Francine’s services.
    I did note the arrival at ten each morning of a white Cadillac DeVille, an early vintage with gold trim and a plush vinyl roof. It left again at about seven in the evening. This I took to be Francine’s car. The windows were tinted, so all I could make out was a huge ball of blond hair, but no features.
    The next day my packages from the makeup suppliers arrived. The most important thing I’d learned from years of research was that almost nothing you thought in advance turns out to be the case. This