Double

10: “Wolf”

When the sheriffs investigators decided they didn’t need me anymore, and the coroner’s assistants moved in with their body bag, McCone came up and caught my arm and said she wanted to talk to me. She had been hanging around the whole time, listening in on conversations, looking pretty upset.

I suggested the Cantina Sin Nombre, because I needed something alcoholic and it looked as if she did too, and she agreed. We went there and got our drinks — beer for me, a bourbon for her — and sat near the terrace windows, at the same table she and Elaine Picard had occupied yesterday. There wasn’t anybody on the terrace now, and only a few people on the beach. The pleasure boats were still out, but the ocean had a hard brassy look under the noonday sun — not an inviting place to be right now.

McCone took a slug of bourbon, ran a nervous hand over her black hair. “Did it really look to you like Elaine jumped?” she asked.

“Well... she went over the railing in a kind of dive. People don’t fall that way if they trip accidentally.”

“People do if they’ve been pushed.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I heard you tell Lieutenant Knowles you might’ve seen somebody else up there with her.”

“I can’t be sure if I did or not. I wasn’t paying that much attention before she fell — and while she was falling... I didn’t want to but I was watching her.”

“Did you look up at the tower again after she landed?”

I nodded. “But I didn’t see anybody. No movement then at all.”

McCone was silent for a time, her dark eyes fixed and unblinking — turned inward, I thought. At length she said, “Elaine didn’t kill herself, Wolf. It just isn’t possible; she wasn’t the suicidal type.”

“Are you sure of that? How long had it been since you’d seen her?”

“Years. But that doesn’t mean anything. People like Elaine don’t change.”

Some people do change, lose some part of themselves for any one of a hundred reasons, lose their taste for living; but I wasn’t going to argue with her about it. I said, “Maybe there’ll be a note. Would that convince you?”

“It might,” McCone said. “But I don’t think there’ll be a note. And if there is, it’ll probably be a fake. Dammit, Wolf, I think she was pushed.”

“By who? For what reason?”

“I don’t know — yet. But something was bothering her, and I could see it getting worse in just the short time I’ve been here.”

“You mean she seemed despondent?”

“No. Very preoccupied about something. Upset. Worried, somehow.”

I remembered seeing her leave the hotel last night; that was how she’d impressed me, too. I asked, “Do you know a friend — a former friend — of hers named Rich?”

“Rich who?”

“I didn’t get his last name. He might have been a boyfriend once, although he seemed younger than her by several years. Handsome guy, wavy brown hair, gray-blue eyes with a peculiar look to them.”

“I’ve never met anyone like that,” McCone said. “And Elaine never mentioned him. How do you know about this Rich?”

I told her about the little altercation here in the bar yesterday. McCone’s eyes narrowed; her mouth and jaw took on a determined set.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “Grabbing her arm, hurting her... and she told you he’d done it before?”

“Bothered her in public before, yes. She didn’t say if he was in the habit of putting his hands on her. She didn’t seem to think he was dangerous.”

“What did you think?”

“Well... maybe. I didn’t like those eyes of his.”

“Did Elaine say he was an old boyfriend or what?”

“No. I asked her if he was and she denied it, but I got the impression she might not be telling the truth. And he said something to some customers on the way out, something about a little spat between lovers.”

McCone did some more nibbling at her bourbon. “Did you tell Knowles all of this?”

“Sure.”

“What did he say?”

“That he’d look into it.”

“Well, so will I. Just in case he doesn’t look very hard.”

“Sharon...”

“Elaine was my friend,” she said. “I’m just not going to sit by and let the sheriffs department treat her death as an accident or a suicide.”

“If it was anything else, they’ll find it out. Don’t go messing around in it, stirring things up.”

That made her angry. She said, “I hate it when people start lecturing me. I’m not a little girl, Wolf. I’m a grown woman and I know what I’m doing.”

“I just don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“What makes you think I’m going to get into trouble?”

“Well, you’ve done it before, for personal reasons.”

“And you haven’t, I suppose?”

I didn’t say anything. She had me and she knew it. And I had been about to lecture her, like a father trying in his stumbling and bumbling way to explain the facts of life to his daughter. Why did I have to turn paternal with McCone every time I dealt with her? The last thing in the world I needed was a daughter who packed a .38, and the last thing in the world she needed was an old curmudgeon like me for a papa.

She finished her drink. When she put the glass down, her anger was gone and the look she gave me was softer. “I’d better be going,” she said.

“Going where?”

“My business, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

She reached over and patted my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be all right. This is just something I have to do. You know how that is, if anybody does.”

“Too damned well,” I said. “Sharon, if you need me for anything...”

“Thank, Wolf. I’ll remember.”

When she was gone, I felt kind of low and empty. In a corner of my mind I could still see Elaine Picard falling, that terrible, futile clawing at the air; still sense her screams like after-echoes just beyond the range of hearing. I debated having another beer, decided against it, and got up to leave.

A bunch of people came in just then, among them Charley Valdene — minus his trench coat and slouch hat, as if the sudden entry of death had put an end to his role-playing. He saw me and detoured in my direction. Watching him approach, I remembered what he’d said to me last night at dinner, jokingly at the time but words that might have been a kind of prophecy: Maybe there’ll be a murder at this convention.

Valdene was subdued. He said, “It’s a hell of a thing — an awful thing. You saw it happen, huh? That must have been a shock.”

“It was,” I said. “Be glad you weren’t there.”

He seemed to want to talk about it, but I didn’t; I put him off until later. “Sure,” he said, “sure, I understand,” and I left him and went out onto the terrace, down onto the white sand beach.

I walked a ways, with the sun hammering down on my head and neck. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just drifting — or so I thought until I noticed the thatched roofs of the bungalows half hidden among the tropical vegetation. And then I found myself thinking again of the little boy, Timmy, who’d said his mother made him afraid; and of the brunette woman with the suspicious frown and the odd reaction to strangers talking to her son. And not long after that, I was back in the gardens and on my way to Bungalow 6.

I had nothing in mind for when I got there; this was just a little scouting expedition, because the incident with Timmy and his mother still bothered me and because I needed something to take my mind off Elaine Picard. Maybe I would have done nothing more than wander by in front of the bungalow, just to find out if there was anything worth seeing or listening to. Or maybe I would have gone up to the door and knocked and made some excuse for showing up again, so I could have another chat with Timmy or his mother or both of them. But I didn’t do either of those things. When I came within sight of the bungalow, there was a maid’s cart on the front walk and somebody was coming past it in quick angry strides. The alcoholic local detective, Jim Lauterbach.

He was wearing a flowered shirt today, and nursing a bad hangover; you could see it in the slack pouchy flesh of his face, the red-veined whites of his eyes. He still smelled of liquor, too — or, more likely, he’d had some hair of the dog to brace himself for the day. He gave me a scowling glance as he passed by, but without recognition: he’d been too drunk last night to remember much of anything that had happened.

What’s he doing here? I wondered. I turned to watch him hurrying off among the tropical greenery. Then I shrugged and went down the path around the maid’s cart.

The front door of Bungalow 6 was standing wide open. Inside, a heavyset black woman in a crisp blue uniform was busily opening windows. There was nobody else in the bungalow that I could see. And no sign of habitation, either — no luggage or personal effects of any kind. I rapped on the door panel, poked my head and shoulders through the opening.

“Excuse me, miss.”

The maid jumped a little, startled. “Another one,” she said when she’d had a look at me. “Well?”

“I’m looking for the woman and her little boy who—”

“What woman? What little boy?”

“The ones staying in this bungalow.”

The maid shook her head in an emphatic way. “What’s the matter with everybody today? I told that other man — ain’t nobody in this bungalow. Just me, here to air it out and get it ready for guests coming tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Nobody staying here,” the maid said. “No woman, no little boy. This here bungalow’s been empty for a week now.”