Double

by Bill Pronzini

  Wild-goose chase, I thought. I moved over to a side window that had grayish chintz curtains pulled together on the inside. By standing on my toes and chinning myself a little on the sill, I could look past the curtains and inside. There wasn’t much to see. The interior of the trailer was a mess: dirty dishes, clothing strewn around, a dozen or so empty and crushed beer cans, an overflowing garbage pail. Lauterbach was a slob—but then so was I. You can’t condemn a man for sloppy housekeeping habits.

  I went back to the door, looked at the latch, remembered all my preaching to McCone, and tried it anyway. Locked. Well, that made it easy to walk away. I never had been any good at picking locks or jimmying windows.

  I turned and came out from under the awning, and a bulky guy in a T-shirt that said “Charger Power” on it was standing in front of the next trailer, watching me. He said suspiciously, “You looking for somebody?”

  “Jim Lauterbach. You wouldn’t happen to know when he’ll be back?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or where I might find him?”

  “Nope. You a friend of that peckerhead’s?”

  “Not exactly. Why is he a peckerhead?”

  “He’s a private cop. All cops are peckerheads.”

  “I’m a cop,” I said.

  We looked at each other for about five seconds. Then he spat on his brown grass, turned around, and went inside his trailer and slammed the door. Score one for the peckerheads.

  When I got back to my car I drove around until I located a 7—11 Store that had a pay telephone in its parking lot. The directory hanging under the phone yielded the number of the Owens Detective Agency, plus an address on Sixth Avenue in San Diego. I found a couple of nickels in my pocket and dialed the number and let it ring a dozen times. Nobody answered.

  So maybe he’s back at the hotel, I thought. The convention’s still going on; he could still be hanging around.

  I drove back across the bridge, paid a dollar and twenty cents to get through the toll plaza, and battled the Sunday traffic on Coronado to the Casa del Rey. People were gathered on the mezzanine, waiting for the last panel to start, but Lauterbach wasn’t among them. I spotted Charley Valdene, again minus the stock private-eye getup, lurking outside the meeting room, and took him aside and asked him if he’d seen the drunk we’d ministered to on Friday night.

  “Not today, no,” he said. “And I’ve been here since ten o’clock. How come you’re looking for him?”

  “Personal business.”

  “Nothing I can help you with, I guess?”

  “No.”

  “You’re still coming out this afternoon, aren’t you?” he asked. “For Sleepers West?”

  “I don’t know, Charley. Some things have come up; I’ll have to see how they develop.”

  He looked a little hangdog, but he nodded and let it go at that. He’d be here at the hotel until about three, he said. I told him I’d let him know by then.

  Upstairs in my room, I called Eberhardt’s home number and this time he was in. I said, “You’re a hard man to get hold of. I called last night and Friday night both.”

  “Yeah, well, I been busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Making time.”

  “What?”

  “Making time,” he said, and there was something that sounded like a smirk in his voice. “I met a lady Friday night.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  “Grocery store near here. We were both buying some cut-up chickens and I dropped my package on her foot.”

  “How romantic,” I said.

  “Yeah. Her name’s Wanda.”

  “What does she do?”

  “You mean for a living?”

  “What else would I mean?”

  “She’s a clerk at Macy’s downtown. Women’s footwear.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We been together all weekend,” he said, with some more smirk. “Getting to know each other.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “She’s here right now. Out in the kitchen.”

  “Cooking up the chicken you dropped on her foot, no doubt.”

  “... How’d you know that?”

  “I’ve got mystic powers,” I said.

  “She’s a looker, paisan,” he said. “Wait’ll you meet her. Knock your eye out. We’ll all have dinner when you get back—you and Kerry, me and Wanda. Maybe tomorrow night.”

  “Not tomorrow night. I don’t know if I’ll be back tomorrow. I may stay over here a day or two.”

  “Ah? Don’t tell me you met somebody too?”

  “No.”

  “So why stay over? You having a good time at the convention in spite of all your grumbling?”

  “I’m having a lousy time,” I said. “There’re some things going on around this hotel that I don’t like.”

  “Oh, Christ, don’t tell me you’re working?”

  “More or less.”

  “What does that mean? You got a client?”

  “No client. I’m sort of hooked up with Sharon McCone.”

  “The female P.I. from here? So that’s it. A looker like Wanda, as I remember. Only Wanda’s a blonde.”

  “Don’t go getting ideas. It’s strictly business.”

  “What business? What’s going on there that you don’t like?”

  I told him: Elaine Picard’s death, the disappearance of Nancy and Timmy Clark, the cover-up. He groaned a little. “Leave it to you. You go off to a convention and in two days you get yourself ass deep in trouble.”

  “I’m not in trouble. I’m just poking around a little.”

  “You and McCone. What a pair.”

  “Eb, do me a favor. Call up one of your pals at the Hall of Justice and run a check on some people for me.”

  He sighed. “I might have known. All right, who are they?”

  “Private detective named Jim Lauterbach, for starters. That’s L-a-u-t-e-r-b-a-c-h. Originally from Detroit, came to San Diego a while back to take over the Owens Agency here. I need to know if he’s got a clean record or if he might be an angle player.”

  “Who else?”

  “Lloyd Beddoes and Victor Ibarcena, manager and assistant manager of the Casa del Rey.” I spelled both those names for him too. “Any felony record on either man. Same for Rich Woodall—works in P.R. for the San Diego Zoo.”

  “The zoo, huh? That figures.”

  “How long you figure it’ll take?”

  “Depends on who’s working at the Hall today. Few hours, probably. You want me to call you back?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be here. Why don’t I call you. Or are you and Wanda going to get to know each other some more?”

  “You’re jealous,” he said, “that’s what you are. Wait’ll you see her. Man, is she something!”

  “Can I call you or not?”

  “Sure, call. If there’s no answer, just try back a little later.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You old dog, you.”

  I rang off. All right, now what? Well, maybe Lauterbach had come home. I called his number, and the line buzzed and nobody answered. I tried his office number again; no one there, either.

  I sat down on the bed and shuffled through the directory and found a listing for Victor Ibarcena in Ocean Beach. Same thing: nobody home.

  Sundays, I thought. McCone’s got things to do; everybody’s got things to do except me.

  I put in a long-distance call to Kerry’s number in San Francisco. And she wasn’t home. That damn dog-food commercial must be taking more time than she’d thought. Bowzer Bits. For Christ’s sake, who would buy a product called Bowzer Bits? They could film a hundred commercials and the lousy stuff would still sit there on grocers’ shelves gathering mold.

  Maybe I ought to try to hunt up Henry Nyland. But McCone had said she was planning to see him. There wasn’t anything to be gained in the two of us stumbling over each other, double-talking to people.

  What else, then? Nancy and Timmy Clark—where had Ibarcena taken them yesterda
y afternoon? If he’d put them on a plane, where to? Mexico? Possible. What was it Timmy had said about the place where his father lived? “A town on the water with monkeys in it.” Well, maybe there was a lead in that.

  I went down to the gift shop off the lobby and bought the most comprehensive map of Mexico they had. A rack of travel and guide books stood against one wall, and I rummaged through those and found one on Mexico and Baja California and bought that too. I took the map and the guide into the Cantina Sin Nombre, got a Lite beer, and sat at one of the tables to familiarize myself with the geography south of the border.

  Twenty minutes later I knew exactly the same as when I’d started, which was nothing. I concentrated on Baja and on the mainland coast of the Sea of Cortez, because there was plenty of jungle along there and where you had jungle you had monkeys, but that brilliant deduction got me nowhere. There were a lot of towns large and small along both coasts, towns with names like La Paz, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlán, Culiacán, Los Mochis, Los Monos, Topolobampo—but none of them seemed to have anything worth mentioning to do with simians. Ditto any of the inland towns that were on lakes and rivers.

  So much for that idea.

  I looked at my watch. Two o’clock—the whole empty afternoon still lay ahead of me. I couldn’t just sit around here doing nothing all day; I’d be a Valium case by sunset.

  Charley Valdene, I thought.

  Well, why not? It wouldn’t be working, but then I had no work to do. A few hours at Valdene’s house would appease him, relax me, and maybe kill enough time for Lauterbach to show up at his trailer or office or here at the hotel, and for Eberhardt to come up with the background information I’d requested.

  Valdene was still lurking on the mezzanine, standing with an ear cocked near the partially open door to one of the meeting rooms. The last of the panels was going on inside, the jazzy one called “Seidenbaum’s Method of Directive Interrogation: A Creative Debate”; somebody was taking Seidenbaum’s name in vain, whoever the hell Seidenbaum was, as I approached. Valdene seemed happy to see me, and happier still when I told him the movie date was still on and suggested we get to it right away. He offered to drive me out and back, but I said no, I’d better take my rental. That way I could come back early.

  I followed him out to his house in Pacific Beach. He got beers for us and set up his projector and put on his video tape of Sleepers West It took me a few minutes to get into it, through no fault of the film, but then it held my interest. Lloyd Nolan was an underrated actor and made a pretty good detective. Most of the action took place on a train; I’m a sucker for trains. And the story was based on a novel called Sleepers East—leave it to Hollywood to turn things ass backward—by Frederick Nebel, one of my favorite pulp writers.

  It helped to relax me, all right. So did the beer: I accepted Valdene’s offer of a final one before I headed back to the Casa del Rey. He got it for me, and when he sat down again he said, making conversation, “You find that fellow Lauterbach?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, he’ll probably be at the banquet tonight.”

  “Maybe. I’ll look for him.”

  “Sure wish I could go,” he said wistfully. “You know, I’m kind of surprised they didn’t cancel it, after what happened to that Picard woman yesterday.”

  “Nobody pays much attention to death anymore, Charley.”

  “I guess not. All those people outside after it happened, staring at the body ... it was pretty gruesome.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That guy who manages the hotel . . . what’s his name, Beddoes? He sure seemed upset. You hear him yelling at people to break it up?”

  “I heard him. Look, Charley . . .”

  “He’s weird, that guy. I mean weird.”

  I had been about to ask him to drop the subject, but there was something in the way he said the word “weird” that made me change my mind. “How do you mean?”

  “I ran into him once in a place out by Balboa Park, a couple of months ago. He was there when I got there, buying some stuff.”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “This place ... well, it’s a specialty shop. I mean, real specialty items. Exotic stuff. You know what I mean?”

  “Pornography?”

  “Right. But high class. Books, mostly, but also artwork—statues and paintings and curios.” He looked a little sheepish. “I’m not into that kind of thing, in case you’re wondering. The guy who runs the place, Max Littlejohn, is a friend of a friend and he got me some pornographic private-eye books. I didn’t even know they existed, but Max told me about ‘em and I had to have ’em for my collection.”

  I nodded. “What was Beddoes buying?”

  “Some books. Looked pretty old. But the really weird thing was this carved statue of a bunch of naked people, guys and women, all tangled up together . . . you know, having an orgy. It was made out of marble or something. Christ, it didn’t leave anything to the imagination.”

  “You’re sure the man was Beddoes?”

  “Positive. The way he and Max talked, I figured he was a regular customer. Like I said—a weird guy.”

  In more ways than one, I thought.

  And then I thought: Pornography. Now what, if anything, could that mean?

  Lauterbach didn’t show up for the Society banquet that night. I hung around on the mezzanine during the cocktail hour, talking to Brock Callahan and Miles Jacoby and an old friend from Hollywood, Ben Chadwick, just to make sure. McCone was also a no-show. I wondered if she was finding out anything useful.

  There was no way I was going to sit through the rubber chicken and the speeches and the awards ceremony, not to mention the postprandial champagne party and the Latin melodies of the Mexican Bandit Band. I went away as soon as the banquet started, ate a hamburger in the coffee shop, and then retreated to my room to call Eberhardt.

  He still sounded smirky and pleased with himself—he’d probably got laid again by Wanda the Footwear Queen since we’d last talked—but he had the information I wanted. Lauterbach was pretty much the type of operative I had pegged him to be: an angle player, skirting the edges of the law, no doubt working petty scams whenever he could. He’d come close to having his ticket pulled twice in Michigan, once on a divorce case before the no-fault law was adopted, once on a shakedown involving electronic bugging. Lack of evidence had saved his bacon in both cases. He’d had a little difficulty getting a California ticket, but his friend Jack Owens, the guy whose agency he’d taken over, had gone to bat for him and the State Board had finally granted him one on a contingency basis. So far, he’d kept his nose clean in San Diego.

  With the other three I drew a blank. Neither Beddoes nor Ibarcena nor Rich Woodall had been convicted of a felony in California or anywhere else in the U.S. Woodall had been arrested three years ago on suspicion of selling animals in violation of the federal Endangered Species Act, but lack of evidence had kept him from being indicted.

  When Eberhardt and I were done talking, I gave Kerry’s number another try. No answer. Without much hope I dialed Lauterbach’s home and office numbers one last time. No answer at either place. Scratch him until tomorrow.

  Scratch me until tomorrow too. I took one of the issues of Dime Detective I’d got from Charley Valdene into the bathroom and into the tub. H. H. Stinson’s “Rancho El Maniac” was just what I needed to cap a perfect day.

  21 McCONE

  I found a phone booth in a shopping arcade not far from Karyn Sugarman’s office and tried to call June Paxton. Her line was busy. Next I looked up Henry Nyland in the directory; he lived on Coronado. A woman whose voice held the professional tones of a housekeeper informed me he had gone to campaign headquarters and then would be meeting with party officials all afternoon. I got the address of his headquarters downtown and drove there.

  The headquarters were in a storefront that looked as if it might once have been an auto dealership. Red, white, and blue banners draped the large plate-glass windows—exce
ssively patriotic, I thought, for a campaign for city council. I tried the door and found it locked, then peered inside. There were desks covered with envelopes and literature, numerous phones, and the obligatory coffee urn for weary volunteers, but no people. Nyland must already be on the way to his meeting. That eliminated the possibility of seeing him, at least until evening.

  I found another phone booth and tried to call June Paxton again. Her line was still busy. Lloyd Beddoes and Victor Ibarcena were both absent from the Casa del Rey—Ibarcena’s day off and Beddoes temporarily unavailable, the switchboard said. I wondered who minded the store while they were gone.

  Beddoes’s home number was in Elaine’s book. I called it, and listened while it rang ten times. Ibarcena, I found, was listed in the directory at an Ocean Beach address. No answer there either. I tried Paxton again: still busy.

  I was running out of people to call and starting to get frustrated. It was steaming hot in the booth, and I propped the door open, trying to decide what to do next. This was a rotten way to spend a Sunday, a rotten way to spend a vacation. I wished I was home in San Francisco, with Don.

  Don. Good Lord. I had called him the night I’d arrived, promised to call again in a couple of days. And then I’d totally forgotten to do so.

  I fished out my phone company credit card, stuck my well-used dime in the slot, and placed a call to his home number. A woman answered and said to hold on, Don was in the shower.

  The temperature in the phone booth must have risen thirty degrees while I waited. When Don’s cheerful voice came on the line, I snarled, “Who was that?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “What am I supposed to think? There’s a woman in your apartment, answering your phone while you’re in the shower.”

  “Right. It’s, uh, my cousin Laura from Tacoma. We used to play doctor together, so I hardly think my taking a shower in the same apartment with her is anything new or shocking.”

  That gave me pause. Don did have a cousin in Tacoma.