Double

by Bill Pronzini

  “They found his car at the airport?”

  “Yes. But he didn’t take a flight out—at least not a commercial flight. That, however, means very little. Roland had a number of friends and associates with private planes. He could have left on any of them.”

  “But surely the police have checked that.”

  “Yes, they did. No one with any connection to my husband filed a flight plan that day. But again, that doesn’t mean much.”

  “Why not?”

  She smiled bitterly. “For a price, almost any pilot can be persuaded not to file a flight plan.”

  I paused, unsure how to ask the next question. Finally I just plunged ahead. “In the newspaper account I read, you said you didn’t know of any reason your husband would disappear voluntarily. Now you seem to have changed your mind.”

  The bitter lines around her mouth deepened. “Yes, I have, because certain things have come to light since his disappearance. Roland’s business enterprises were quite far-flung and complicated. A few months ago, he mentioned there might be some tax complications, something to do with our personal tax affairs having become mixed up with those of one of his holding companies. I was not to worry, he said, but I might be required to sign some forms.”

  “And did you?”

  “No.”

  “So perhaps the trouble amounted to nothing.”

  “Or perhaps Roland didn’t want me to know how bad it was.” She set her cup down and turned to face me, anger plain on her face. “You see, Ms. McCone, my husband attempted to shield me from the crude realities of his business whenever possible. I was to keep the home, raise the children, and amuse myself in typical genteel ways. But the home keeps itself, the children are grown, and I’ve never been contented with bridge or with volunteer work. I begged Roland to give me a more active part in his business affairs, but he flatly refused. I’m not a stupid woman, though, and I’ve done a fair amount of reading about finance. I know when something is wrong.”

  “Did you ever broach the subject again, after the first time he mentioned it?”

  “Yes. He told me not to trouble myself about it. I wasn’t equipped, he said, to understand.” She smiled, a caricature of mirth. “I find his assumption highly amusing. After all, I was the one who put Roland Deveer where he is today. Or where he was before he disappeared. I was the one who forced him to success. It was my money that founded his empire and kept it going through those first rough years. It was my prodding that kept him going. Roland Deveer was nobody when I married him. Nobody. And now he’s gone off and left....”

  She paused, looking embarrassed. Ladies of her class didn’t blurt out their anger and resentments in front of strangers. Quickly I said, “I understand. So often it’s the woman who is responsible for the man’s success. But the man gets all the credit.”

  “Yes. That was exactly the way it was with Roland and me. And now . . .”

  “Now?”

  “Now I don’t know. Something had to be terribly wrong for him to disappear the way he did. And I’m afraid that when it all comes out, it will be left for me to clear it up. But after his betrayal of me, I’m not sure I have the strength. Or the resources.”

  “You mean financially?”

  “Yes, Ms. McCone, financially. One of the things I’ve discovered in this last month is that Roland closed out all of our joint accounts, and liquidated a number of assets.”

  “Is there any logical reason for that? Is he a gambler, for instance?”

  “No, Roland was very strongly opposed to any sort of gambling. He felt it brought out man’s latent stupidity.”

  “What about foul play? Could he have taken the cash out for some sort of business deal and been murdered by someone who knew he was carrying it?”

  “His business arrangements seldom involved cash—and certainly not in that amount.”

  “Then he disappeared with a substantial amount of money?”

  “Very substantial.”

  To a woman of Celia Deveer’s background, I imagined, “very substantial” would be large indeed. “Mrs. Deveer” I said, “did your husband have an office here at home? Somewhere he might keep personal papers?”

  “His study, yes. But I’ve been through it, and so have the police.”

  “Would you allow me to go through it? It’s possible something in there might have some other significance to me than either to you or the police.”

  She hesitated. Her instinct for privacy seemed to be fighting with her anger at her husband. Anger won out. “Yes, Ms. McCone, I believe I will allow that. Come this way.”

  We went inside and back across the hall to a door at its far end. Unlike the other doors leading off there, it was closed, as if Celia Deveer were attempting to shut off all reminders of her husband. She opened it and motioned for me to go in.

  The room was paneled in dark wood, with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The volumes in them looked old and well-read. On the floor was a worn Oriental carpet, and a large mahogany desk stood in a recess by the windows.

  “This was originally my father’s study,” Celia Deveer said. “Roland has not improved the library by so much as one book.”

  I went over to the desk and began going through its drawers. The center one yielded the usual paper clips and pens and pencils. The top one on the right contained stationery, some printed with the address in La Jolla and some with Deveer Enterprises’ address downtown. In the drawer below that, I found a handgun—a .22, fully loaded and well oiled. I held it up questioningly.

  Mrs. Deveer said, “Roland had a terrible fear of burglars, even though the house is wired with an alarm system.”

  I nodded and put the gun back in the drawer. The other drawers held supplies and back copies of annual reports and other business publications.

  On the desktop was a blotter, an onyx pen-and-pencil holder, and the standard desk calendar you’d find in any office. There was nothing written on the blotter, or hidden under it. Finally I started through the calendar, beginning a few months ago, when Mrs. Deveer said he had first mentioned possible financial problems to her, and continuing up to the day he disappeared. It contained the usual notations of social and business appointments, including the meeting he’d supposedly left to attend the afternoon he’d last been seen.

  There was nothing I could see that was out of the ordinary in the calendar or the desk. I planned to continue searching, of course, taking out each drawer to see if anything was taped to its bottom or had fallen behind it, shaking out the pages of each book on the shelves. But I doubted I’d find anything of significance.

  I kept flipping through the calendar, looking at appointments Deveer had made and never kept. There were plenty, but that didn’t mean anything; he could have put them down to make his disappearance seem unintentional. But there, on September 18th, was a notation that did mean something to me: the familiar phone number of the Casa del Rey. Above it was the word “arrangements.” And below it was another number with a familiar look.

  Reaching in my bag for Elaine’s address book, I said, “Mrs. Deveer, is the date September eighteenth significant to your husband in any way?”

  “Yes, it’s his birthday.”

  His birthday. What better place to note something down where he could easily find it but where others would not be likely to look?

  I took out the address book, looked up Lloyd Beddoes’s home phone number, and compared it with the second one on the calendar. They matched.

  24 “WOLF”

  I spent better than two hours in and around Lauterbach’s office while the S.D.P.D. homicide boys went about their grim business. The cop in charge was named Gunderson. I told him everything I knew, but I didn’t get into any of the suspicions about Elaine Picard’s death, the disappearance of Nancy and Timmy Clark, or illegal activities on the part of Lloyd Beddoes and Victor Ibarcena. For one thing, despite Lauterbach’s connection to Elaine and to the Clarks, none of those matters might relate to his murder. And for another thing
, the sheriff’s department was handling the Picard case and the hotel was their jurisdiction; Tom Knowles was the man to talk to on those fronts.

  By keeping my ears open during the time I was on the scene, I found out that Lauterbach had been dead close to twenty-four hours—since Sunday noon at the latest. The first person to try to use the lavatory this morning was the screaming woman who’d found him, K. M. Ardry’s flat-chested secretary. He had been shot with a small-caliber weapon at close range; two of the entry holes bore the scorching, cruciate tears, and powder tattooing that mark contact and near-contact wounds. The murder weapon hadn’t been in the lavatory and apparently wasn’t anywhere else in the building. A search of Lauterbach’s office revealed nothing directly linked to the shooting. Nor did the people from Dutton Design & Manufacturing and the divorce specialist’s office know anything useful; none of them had been in the building the day before. They also didn’t know if Lauterbach was in the habit of coming in to his office on Sundays—but he could have done it easily enough, in any case, because each tenant had a key to the front entrance.

  Not much in any of that, except that it provided a rough fix as to the time of death. The coroner would probably be able to pare it down closer at the postmortem.

  When Gunderson finally said I could leave I had every intention of talking to Knowles first thing. The problem was, he wasn’t in when I got to the sheriff’s department on West C Street and nobody could tell me just when he’d be back. The best estimation was “sometime this afternoon” from another plainclothes officer.

  On my way to where I’d parked the rental car, I did some brooding about Lauterbach’s death. Why had he been killed? Because he was investigating Elaine Picard? Well, maybe. But if he’d found out anything that made him a candidate for homicide, I hadn’t been able to see it in his notes. It was also possible that there was a connection between his murder and whatever was going on at the Casa del Rey, and with Elaine Picard’s death. But if that was it, I couldn’t even guess what it might be. And where did Rich Woodall and a place called Borrego Springs and a house somewhere in the desert fit in?

  I gave it up for the time being and considered stopping somewhere for coffee and a sandwich. Only I had no appetite; Lauterbach’s blood-caked face, the bullet hole where his left eye had once been, had seen to that. I wondered if I should look up Henry Nyland, to ask him why he’d hired Lauterbach to investigate Elaine, but I decided against it. That was Tom Knowles’s prerogative, and Gunderson’s. And if there was anything else to be found out, anything Nyland might not tell the authorities, McCone could probably get at it better than I could. She had more of a vested interest in all of this than I did.

  A few blocks from the sheriffs department I stopped for a traffic light. There was a secondhand bookshop across the street, with a big sign that caught my eye—and it reminded me of what Charley Valdene had told me about Beddoes’s interest in pornography. Not much of an angle in that, maybe, but I could check out the shop where Valdene had run into Beddoes: Charley had given me the name and address. It was something to do, at least, until I could connect with Knowles.

  When I reached the address, out past Balboa Park near University Avenue, I found myself at a newish, boxy, four-story office building, with a realtor’s sign out front that said OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT. The occupied space seemed to belong mostly to lawyers, architects, and other professional people: all very upper middle class and proper. I wondered as I scanned the lobby directory if Valdene might have made a mistake with the address. But he hadn’t; I found the listing near the bottom—PRIAPUS BOOKS AND CURIOS, 5E.

  The elevator deposited me on the fifth floor. I went down a carpeted hallway until I came to 5E. Except for a tiny magnifying-glass peephole, the numeral and the letter were all that was on the door; but on the jamb, above an inlaid bell button, was a fancy scrolled business card tucked into a metal frame. It read:

  PRIAPUS

  Books and Curios

  MAXWELL LITTLEJOHN ADULTS ONLY

  I pushed the inlaid button. Nothing happened for a time, but I got the feeling I was being studied through the peephole. I tried to look like a guy with an interest in erotica instead of what I was, and I must have managed all right; there was the sound of a lock snicking free and the door popped open and the guy standing there said pleasantly, “Yes? May I help you?”

  He looked like somebody’s kindly grandfather. He was about sixty-five, he had wispy white hair and a wispy white mustache and polished-apple cheeks, and he was decked out in a conservative three-piece gray suit and a bow tie. He didn’t surprise me much. Purveyors of pornographic art, like everybody else, come in all shapes, sizes, ages, and dispositions.

  I said, “Mr. Littlejohn?”

  “At your service. I don’t believe I know you, sir.”

  “Ah, no, you don’t. I’ve never been here before.”

  “May I ask how you learned of Priapus?”

  “You were recommended by a friend—Lloyd Beddoes.”

  He beamed at me. “Yes, of course, Mr. Beddoes is one of my most valued customers. And your name, sir?”

  “Wade. Ivan Wade.”

  “Come in, Mr. Wade. Please come in.”

  He stepped back and I went into an area carpeted in plush wine-red, softly lighted, and outfitted as a showroom. There were glass cases along three of the four walls, another in the middle of the room. The cases were full of books and carvings and things, none of which appeared to be particularly erotic when I got close enough to see what they were. The same was true of the paintings, pen-and-ink sketches, and woodcuts illuminated on the walls. It all might have been pretty hot stuff thirty years ago, but in this permissive age it wouldn’t stimulate anyone—except maybe a sheltered old maid or a member of the Moral Majority.

  Littlejohn watched me browse for a couple of minutes. Then he asked, “Did you have anything particular in mind, Mr. Wade?”

  “Well, something a little more—you know, graphic.”

  “Books? Art?”

  “I’m not sure. Is this all you have?”

  “Oh no. This room is for my more conservative clientele. I have another that might prove more suitable. Priapus wouldn’t be worthy of the name if it didn’t offer something for the taste of every connoisseur.”

  “It wouldn’t?”

  “Ah, you’re not familiar with the mythological reference?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “In Greek mythology, Priapus was the son of Dionysus, best loved son of Zeus, and the god of wine and pleasure. Priapus was the god of virility and procreation; his symbol was an erect penis.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Will you follow me, Mr. Wade?”

  I followed him—into another room, much larger than the first one but similarly appointed. There was also a desk unobtrusively tucked into one corner, and beside it a portable bar that appeared to be well stocked. Littlejohn asked me if I cared for an aperitif; I said no thanks. Then we got down to the real stuff, the most erotic and no doubt most expensive items in Littlejohn’s stock.

  First he showed me what he called “Dionysian literature”: old books, many of them beautifully bound in leather—copies of the Chin P’ing Mei from China, Harlot’s Dialogues from Italy, Fanny Hill from England, Sade’s Justine and Juliette. Then it was Rajput miniatures from India, delicate Chinese Ming scrolls, small screen blocks and painted scrolls and two-hundred-year-old folding paper fans from Japan; wooden statues and carvings from Madagascar, Central Africa, the Philippines, silver figurines from Peru, bronze figurines from the Ivory Coast, a humorous phallic demon from Bali; paintings and sketches, both primitive and modern, from all over Europe and from the United States. Some of the stuff was downright obscene, but in the main it was highly sensual. I found myself thinking that it was a good thing I’d come here and not McCone; a few of the items made me blush. But that was my paternal streak again. McCone was a grown woman, as she’d tartly reminded me. For all I knew, she might have enjoyed all of thi
s much more than I did.

  Littlejohn gave me a running commentary on each of the objects we looked at, beaming on them in a paternal way of his own. “Erotica from every culture has passed through Priapus,” he said. “Think of it, Mr. Wade. Every culture of man! The human animal has always been fascinated by matters of the flesh, always paid tribute to his desires.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell me, what kind of erotica fascinates Lloyd Beddoes the most?”

  He looked mildly surprised. “You haven’t seen his collection?”

  “Ah ... well, no, not his recent acquisitions. I’ve been out of the country for a while. On business.”

  It was flimsy, but all he said was “What business are you in, Mr. Wade?”

  “Oil exploration.”

  “Very lucrative, that sort of thing, isn’t it?”

  “I do pretty well,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. Well, Mr. Beddoes prefers items with homosexual and S and M themes, naturally.”

  “Why ‘naturally’?”

  This time Littlejohn frowned. “You really don’t know Mr. Beddoes very well, do you?”

  “Not really, no. He’s—a friend of a friend.”

  “Indeed? May I ask who that is?”

  I had backed myself into a corner. Trying to get out of it, I said the first thing that came to my mind, “A fellow in Borrego Springs. He, ah, belongs to the club out there.”

  It was the right thing to say, even though I had no idea why. Littlejohn beamed again and said, “Mr. Darrow?”

  Darrow was one of the names that had been on the list among Lauterbach’s notes, one of those with a check mark in front of it. I said, “That’s right. Arthur Darrow. You know him, then?”

  “Oh, yes. He and his charming wife both. Lovely people. They buy from me occasionally, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that. The same sort of items Beddoes is interested in?”

  “Somewhat. Although their tastes generally run more to the heterosexual.”