The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces by Ray Vukcevich Read Free Book Online Page B

hardy cop lunch anyway.
    Maybe Lulu’s confidence was low. When she passed the big front windows of Maxwell’s and saw Frank bent over his plate forking noodles into his mouth, she didn’t go in and take a table where she could keep an eye on him. Instead, she just kept on walking. He didn’t look up as she passed.
    Once downtown Eugene had been a pedestrian mall that ran unbroken for blocks. Now the mall was crossed by reopened streets, but there were still long quiet patches. A little to the east of Maxwell’s, there were two wood and iron benches and a couple of trees. Just down the block was an espresso booth. It had rusted wheels and looked like someone had knocked it together with old plywood and bent nails. The red paint screaming ESPRESSO ! was chipped and you could see that the sign had once said something else, but you couldn’t tell just what. Lulu got a double raspberry latte and sat down on one of the benches where she could watch Frank Wallace eat his lunch.
    A man walking by gave her a head-to-toe full body scan. Then he did a double take, and his eyes went cold. He put on his attack smile, his in-your-face grin, his what-the-hell-is-this and would-you-get-a-load-of-that look. Lulu turned her face away, ignoring him, and found herself looking right into Frank’s eyes. She glanced away, but not before she’d read his face, and what she read made us reassess, at least for the moment, our attitude toward Frank Wallace. The look he had beamed at Lulu said you need some help you just holler. Our hero? That was not a feeling any of us were comfortable with.
    The man muttered something nasty and moved on, and when Lulu looked back at Frank, he was eating noodles again. This was pretty much what it had been like all along watching Frank. He didn’t do anything exciting. He didn’t spend much time away from the office, and when he did go out, he mostly had business downtown and he mostly walked everywhere. His main task seemed to be moving papers from one building to another. We’d only lost him once when he hopped into an official car at the corner of Oak and Eighth and zoomed away before we could get to our own wheels.
    Because he was so predictable, Lulu was surprised when she saw him signal his server for the check. That meant he’d been at Maxwell’s for some time. He’d taken an early lunch. She gathered her bag and got up quickly and walked to the waste barrel and tossed the rest of her latte. What if he stopped and spoke to her? We just didn’t feel that secure in our identity. He would see right through us. Lulu walked up the block and stopped to stare through a store window.
    Frank came out of the lunch room. Lulu glanced at him then went back to window-shopping, then glanced at him again. He looked both ways up and down the mall. He gave her a puzzled look, and for a moment she was sure he was going to walk up to her, but then he pulled up his sleeve to see his watch and turned and walked the other way.
    What would she have said to him? Something about whatever she’d been looking at in the window? She let her eyes focus on the merchandise in the window. She gasped and took a step back. Through the window she saw many people at desks all looking back at her.
    She took another step back so she could look up at the sign— SPLASHDOWN SOFTWARE . They’d taken over the old dime store that had closed several years ago. She knew that. Frank knew that, too. Her staring into this particular window was what had puzzled him. His cop instincts.
    Lulu still assumed she was being watched; she always assumed that, so she waved at the people inside as if that’s what she’d been up to all along.
    And she did see someone we at least recognized—Arthur Snow, the head guy at SplashDown. He had a handful of printouts, and he stopped to say something to a woman at one of the desks. We knew the woman, too, but couldn’t retrieve her name. She