Double

2: “Wolf”

The Casa del Rey wasn’t at all what I had expected. With a name like that, it should have had stucco walls and red tile roofs and courtyards full of yucca plants and Spanish mosaic tile. Instead it looked like something you’d find on the English moors: big white Gothicky affair, lots of gingerbread trimming, round open-sided towers poking up on all four corners of the main building, flags flying like medieval pennants. There were also gardens full of palms and tropical flora, an acre of bright green lawn, and some quaint little bungalows for those folk who liked their privacy. Out behind the complex, a silvery strip of beach and the deep dark blue of the ocean glittered under the hot summer sun.

I took my airport rental car past the expensive-looking Glorietta Bay Marina, diagonally opposite the Casa del Rey on the bay side of the Silver Strand highway, and turned in to the hotel parking area. This is a hell of a place for a convention of private eyes, I thought as I bypassed the valet and parked the thing myself. Makes it seem as if we’re all getting fat off our clients, rolling in big bucks.

Maybe the rest of them are rolling in big bucks, I thought.

I managed to work up a pretty good sweat in the walk from the parking lot to the front entrance; it must have been a hundred degrees, and I have never dealt well with heat. But as soon as I stepped inside the plush lobby, the air conditioners froze the sweat and left me feeling chilled. I have never dealt well with air conditioners either.

At the desk, a clerk who looked as if he’d come out of an Esquire fashion ad took in my shiny suit and my wrinkled shirt and my paisley tie and gave me an Oh-you’re-one-of-those look. But all he said was “You’re with the convention, sir?” I said I was, and he found my reservation, and I signed myself in. But I didn’t get a key until he had satisfied himself that I’d paid for my three days in advance and that my check hadn’t bounced.

A uniformed bellhop insisted on conducting me and my bag up to my room. It was on the third floor and about the size of a walk-in closet, and it had a nice view of a big building farther down the coast that bore the words HEADQUARTERS OF NAVAL SURFACE FORCE, U.S. PACIFIC FLEET — part of one of the military installations in the area. Obviously this was one of the luxury accommodations reserved for famous detectives like me. I decided to forgo the luxury for the time being and left when the bellhop did. On the way down in the elevator, I asked him where I went to sign up for the convention, and he told me the mezzanine. So that was where I got off.

The first thing I saw was a big red silk banner that said WELCOME, NATIONAL SOCIETY OF INVESTIGATORS in gold letters. Under it was a registration table, and behind that was a guy wearing a name tag that said he was a Society vice-president from an agency in Kansas City. I told him my name, and he asked me twice to spell it before he got it straight; then he gave me what he called an information packet and a name tag of my own. The badge thing was supposed to be pinned onto your shirt or coat; I hid it in a pocket instead. Then I went where the guy told me, through a doorway into a big room filled with people and booths and an open bar and plenty of noise.

Most of the people were men, but there were more women than I’d expected, even considering that some of them would be wives and girlfriends. A lot of both sexes looked young, too young to have had much experience as private investigators. And not many of them looked like detectives, either: there wasn’t a trench coat or an underarm bulge in the place. Hawaiian shirts and muumuus, and one guy in a pair of Bermuda shorts. Except for the booths, and the displays of equipment inside them, it might have been a gathering of tourists waiting for a luau.

I took a deep breath and went in among them. Nobody paid any attention to me. And none of the faces was familiar. I hadn’t been to one of these conventions in fifteen years, but I knew a fair number of people in the business; there should have been somebody around that I recognized. A roomful of strangers. It made me feel old and out of touch and probably out of date.

The stuff in the booths definitely made me feel out of date. The latest in electronic surveillance equipment, everything from large scanners to the famous martini-olive bug invented by Hal Lipset, San Francisco’s richest P.I. Equipment for home, automobile, and personal use. Voice recorders, video recorders, bugs, wiretaps. Cameras, both conventional and of the spy variety. Home and business computers. Even a lie detector and a guy to demonstrate how it worked. At one of the displays, two earnest types were talking about a “worblegang veeblefetzer,” or something like that, in a language that sounded like English but might have been Serbo-Croatian for all the sense it made to me.

I stopped at another booth and stared at a jumble of wires and other apparatus that a sign said was “the latest in ultramodern multidirectional voice recorders.” I thought that if I had to learn to operate one of those things in order to conduct my business, I would retire and raise vegetables for a living — and somebody poked something into my back and made me jump a little.

When I turned around I was looking into the smiling face of somebody I knew, finally: Sharon McCone, one of the women who had come into the profession in the past few years and who also worked out of San Francisco. It was an attractive face, with high cheekbones and a dark complexion and a framing of long black hair that testified to her Shoshone Indian blood. She had a nice figure, too, but she was twenty years younger than me and I didn’t want her to think I was a dirty old man by staring at it. Besides which, she brought out latent paternal feelings in me for some reason. Maybe part of it was that I knew she’d been in some tough scrapes in the past and was lucky to be alive. I’m hardly a male chauvinist, even though my lady, Kerry Wade, accuses me of it sometimes; I think women ought to be and do anything they damned well please and get paid equal money for their efforts. But that didn’t stop me from feeling protective toward McCone.

She waggled her finger at me — the thing she’d poked into my back — and said cheerfully, “Hi, Wolf.”

I tried not to wince. Wolf. She’d got that from a newspaper story that had appeared a few years ago in which some smart-ass yellow journalist had referred to me as “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.” Other people called me that and I got annoyed and told them to cut it out. But with McCone I couldn’t seem to muster up the effort. I just grinned and took it like a nice old papa.

But I was still glad to see her, so my answering smile was genuine. “Sharon McCone,” I said. “Well, this is a surprise.”

“I can say the same.”

“That cheap outfit you work for send you?”

“Not exactly. San Diego is my hometown and it’s a good chance to visit my family. I paid for the gas driving down, All Souls picked up the registration fee.”

All Souls was a legal cooperative she worked for that undertook cases for people who didn’t have much money, some of whom had backgrounds that were questionable at best. It was an aboveboard operation, but that couldn’t make it any more pleasant to work for.

“You ought to get a better job, Sharon.”

“I know, but what better outfit would have me?” She glanced away for a moment, as if someone in the crowd had caught her eye. Then she said, “What about you? I didn’t think you went in for stuff like this.”

“I don’t usually. I let Eberhardt talk me into it.”

She nodded. And then gave me an up-and-down look, as if she’d just realized that there was less of me than the last time we’d seen each other. She said approvingly, “You’re looking svelte, Wolf.”

“Yeah. I took off about twenty pounds.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Lots of eggs. Rabbit food. And I gave up beer.”

“What! No beer at all, even now?”

“Well, just the light stuff. It’s beer-flavored water, but it’s better than none.”

She started to say something else, but a fat woman in a muumuu that looked like a paint-factory explosion got between us. McCone backed up, and somebody bumped into her and spilled the plastic cup of wine she was holding, and somebody else got in my way. Conventions. Crowds — I hated crowds. Somebody was always shoving his way into your space.

McCone called, “Let’s have a drink sometime this weekend,” and I said, “Sure. I’ll be around,” and then two more guys, both of them wearing suits, blocked my view of her and I said the hell with it and went away to find a quiet corner to grumble in.

“Why not go to the convention?” Eberhardt had said when the Society’s flyer came in the mail. “Talk to some other private cops, get a different perspective on things. It’ll be good for you and good for the agency. I can take care of business here for three days.”

“I’d love to go to San Diego,” Kerry had said later, “but you know I can’t get away that weekend. The new Bowzer Bits dog-food commercial is being filmed on Friday and Saturday and I’ve got to be there in case they want any last-minute changes in the promo material. But you go ahead. It’ll do you good to get away for a few days, be among people in the same profession.”

So here I was, among people in the same profession — people who wore hideous muumuus and Bermuda shorts and looked like tourists from Cincinnati and talked about worblegang veeblefetzers. I felt like a guy who had just stepped off a time machine, or maybe into another dimension. I felt like an anachronism. I felt obsolete.

This, I thought, is going to be a lousy weekend.