It was now or never. The Man with One Thousand Faces deliberately walked up the two flights of stairs to avoid meeting anyone in the corridor. He stepped slowly into his suite and began to put his plan into action.
The first order of business was to completely change his appearance. Although he was almost certain that no one had seen him the nights he had broken into Lady Em’s and Brenda’s rooms, he would use a different disguise. It began with his eyes. Taking dark brown contact lenses out of a box, he slipped them in. That’s the easy part, he thought; the next part takes time and skill. He opened his makeup kit, glanced in the mirror and began practicing an art that had started when he volunteered to work on theatrical productions during his high school days.
A face cream turned his complexion sallow. Eyebrow pencil turned his thin brows into a dark, belligerent midnight-brown. Slashes of deep lines totally altered his face. He pasted into place a medium-length graying beard. Satisfied that it was on straight, he took a brown wig, stretched it over his head and patted it into place. Experience had taught him that a potential witness would be more likely to focus on the contrast between the dark hair and the graying beard, and spend less time looking at the face.
He took a long slow look at himself in the mirror, turning his head from side to side. Excellent, he thought with satisfaction. He reached into his suitcase for the shoes. The lifts on them would add three inches to his height.
He pulled on the butler’s jacket he had stolen from the kitchen on his floor. It was a reasonably good fit, with some extra room in the shoulders and waist. He took masking tape from a compartment in his suitcase and slipped it in the jacket’s side pocket. A pair of wire cutters was carefully placed in the opposite pocket.
For the next fifteen minutes he practiced limping slightly to the left and dragging his foot on the ground.