“It’s nowhere near that simple,” she cut in impatiently. “In the first place, any police officer could write a book on the general unreliability of descriptions. And secondly, if you’ve had acting experience, you should know what I m driving at. You’re not merely trying to look like Harris Chapman—you’re assuming the whole character of Harris Chapman. And further, this same character projected quite logically into a strange and finally shattering experience—which is going to be what the witnesses will remember, and not the color of his hair. Incidentally, he wears a hat anyway. You’re simply going to make them remember the wrong things.”
“Such as?”
“Let me give you a brief sketch for a start. He’s quite vain about his appearance, uses a sun lamp in winter to keep his tan intact, and wears a thin, pencil-line mustache because he thinks his upper hp is too long. He has a tendency toward hypochondria and carries round a miniature drugstore with him, and worries constantly and probably needlessly about two things—cancer and mental illness, the latter because he has an older brother who cracked up in his late teens. When that smoking and lung cancer thing first started several years ago, he not only switched over to filter cigarettes, but smoked them in a filter holder.
“He wears glasses—horn-rims—and is somewhat hard of hearing in his left ear, the result of a diving accident when he was sixteen, though he refuses to admit it and claims his hearing is perfect in both ears. I’m perhaps making him sound doddering and fatuous, which he isn’t at all; he’s a hellishly attractive man with a lot of drive, but I’m stressing these quirks and idiosyncrasies for a reason—”
“Sure,” I said impatiently. “They’re character tags, and props. But, look—so I do wear horn-rimmed glasses, grow a mustache, use a long cigarette holder, and go round tossing pills into my face, what does it buy? I still won’t look like him, and I wouldn’t fool anybody who’s seen him since he was fifteen.”
“You won’t have to, obviously. None of the people you’ll be in contact will ever have seen him at all. And they never will.”
“But you’re forgetting something. As soon as he disappears, they’re sure as hell going to see photographs of him.”
“No,” she said. “That’ll be taken care of.”
“How?” I asked.
To be of any value in tracing him they’d have to be good likenesses and taken within the past ten years. There aren’t too many. I have most of them, and I know where the others are. He had one made for that saccharine little bitch about two months ago, but we can forget it. It’s one of those gooey and dramatic things with a ton of glamor and no resemblance.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell me the rest of it.”
She told me. She talked for twenty minutes, and when she was through I was glad she didn’t hate me. Chapman didn’t have a chance. It was brilliant, and it was deadly, and I couldn’t see a flaw in it anywhere.
* * *
I awoke early the next morning, before seven o’clock, but she was already up. She stood in the doorway in blue lounging pajamas, sipping a glass of orange juice.
“The coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” she said.
I lit a cigarette and propped myself on an elbow to look at her. “If I were a sculptor, I’d capture that head or go crazy and kill myself.”
She glanced coolly at her watch. “Never mind capturing my head; you’re supposed to assimilate what’s in it, and we start in ten minutes. When you shave, don’t forget the mustache.”
She sounded crisp and efficient, and I found out before the day was over I didn’t know the half of it. She had a genius for organizing material, and she was a slave-driver. By the time I’d showered and put on light slacks and a T-shirt, she had my coffee and orange juice ready on the coffee table in the living room and was seated with hers on one of the hassocks at the other end of it. Between us was the tape recorder. The microphone was mounted on a little stand, facing her, and beside it were some boxes of tape and two stenographer’s notebooks.
“I’ll be working from shorthand notes,” she said, “so there’ll be no lost motion, and when we come to a stop we’ll stop the tape. But before we start, we’d better break the job down and analyze it.”
”Right,” I said. “How many people do I have to talk to, and how often?”
“Two,” she said. “Chris Lundgren at the broker’s office in New Orleans, nearly every day. And to her, every day. Her name, incidentally, is Coral Blaine.”
I drank some of the coffee, and thought about it. “It’s rough. Look at it—I’ve got to know everything about Chapman that these people know, and everything about these people that Chapman knows, plus a thousand business details and dozens of other people. It’s damn near impossible.”
She interrupted. “Of course it’s impossible; no mind could absorb all that in eight days. But you don’t have to.”
“No?”
“Of course not.” She waved a slim hand. “You don’t have to pass an examination in all this stuff; all you have to do is carry on two or three short telephone conversations each day without making a really dangerous mistake. analyze it; what does it take, actually? A quick mind—which you have—some ability in bluffing and improvising, a grasp of most of the salient and obvious facts and a few of the ones that only Harris Chapman could possibly know, and there you are—the illusion is complete. And don’t forget, you’re always in control of the conversation; you’re the boss. When you see you’re about to get in over your head, change the subject. And in the end, there’s nothing connecting you but a piece of wire. Break it. And call back later with the right information. You’ll have a prompter.”
“You mean the tapes?”
She nodded. “They’ll be numbered, and you’ll know what’s covered in each one.”
“Good,” I said.
She smiled. “And don’t forget, it’s only the first week you have to be careful. After that, it doesn’t matter.”
I looked at her. I’d forgotten that, and it was one of the really brilliant angles of the whole thing. This girl was clever. And all she wanted out of life was to kill a man. It seemed a senseless waste. The thought startled me, and I shrugged it off. It was her life, wasn’t it?
“All right,” I said. “Roll One.”
* * *
“Harris Chapman was born in Thomaston April fourteen, nineteen-eighteen. Father’s name: John W. Chapman. Owned the Ford agency, and was one of the largest stockholders in the Thomaston State Bank. His mother’s maiden name was Mary Burke, and she was the only child of a Thomaston attorney. John W. sold out and retired in nineteen-forty, and moved to California. Both still living, in La Jolla.
“Only two children. Keith is two years older than Harris. The summer he was nineteen, after his freshman year at Tulane, he hit a twelve-year-old girl with his car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but shortly afterwards he began to go to pieces. He quit sleeping, or if he did sleep nobody could figure out when, and lost weight and became withdrawn. It was the onset of schizophrenia, of course, and probably the accident had little or nothing to do with it. At any rate, his condition became hopeless, and he’s spent more than half the past twenty-two years in one mental institution or another.
“Harris has always been haunted by this, as I told you, particularly because there had been a prior case of mental illness in the family, a great uncle or something. Fear of an hereditary taint, you see. Foolish, of course, but I told you he has a tendency toward hypochondria.
“He finished high school in nineteen-thirty-six. His mother wanted him to go to a Catholic school, so he went to Notre Dame. He graduated in nineteen-forty-one, and Pearl Harbor caught him in his first year at Tulane Law School.”