Double

22: “Wolf”

When I woke up on Monday morning, there was no longer any question that I would be staying on for at least one more day. So first thing after I got out of the shower, even though it wasn’t eight yet, I called Kerry. She was always up by seven-thirty at the latest; and I missed her and wanted to hear her voice.

She sounded grouchy, and when I asked her how she was she said, “Crappy. That damn dog-food commercial.”

“It didn’t go well, huh?”

“No. We didn’t finish shooting until last night.”

“How come?”

“Trouble with the dogs.”

“What dogs?”

“The goddamn mutts they brought in to eat Bowzer Bits. Don’t be dense.”

“What happened?”

“One of them bit Al Douglas, the director. Then it bit me.”

“What? Are you all right?”

“I’ll live. It was just a nip. But it still hurts.”

“Where did you get nipped?”

“Never mind where.”

“Not on your—”

“I said never mind.”

“Poor baby. I’ll kiss it and make it better when I get home.”

“Like fun you will,” she said. “And how was your weekend?”

“Also crappy. But I’m going to stick around here another day or two, just the same.”

“What for?”

I told her what for. She didn’t like it; she never likes it when I get involved in homicide cases. Which is all right, because I don’t like it either.

“So you’re working with that McCone woman,” Kerry said. “She’s attractive, isn’t she.”

“So are you.”

“No fooling around?”

“Hell. She’s young enough to be my daughter.”

“So am I. That didn’t stop you with me.”

“Cut it out,” I said. “Desist. You can worry about my health, that’s okay. But you don’t have to worry about my virtue.”

“Mmm. Take care of yourself, will you?”

I said I would. Then I told her that I missed her, and told her some other things, and she said maybe she’d let me kiss her dog bite and make it better, after all. I was smiling when I rang off and I thought she probably was too.

It was after eight by then. I called the airline and canceled my one o’clock return flight and got an open reservation instead. While I had the directory out, I flipped open the Yellow Pages to “Investigators” to see if the Owens Detective Agency carried an ad. It did, a small one that said it opened for business “promptly at 9 a.m., Monday thru Friday.”

I had a quick cup of coffee in the coffee shop and then took my rental car across the Coronado Bridge and downtown. The building that housed the Owens Agency was on Sixth Avenue between Broadway and E Street, a block that just missed being shabby. It was flanked on one side by a transient hotel and on the other by an out-of-business Mexican café. The lobby was empty except for a couple of potted plants and a big sand-filled urn. The elevator was old and cranky and made grumbling noises to itself, but it got me to the third and top floor in under five minutes.

I went down a hallway past a door marked LAVATORY, another one marked DUTTON DESIGN & MANUFACTURING CO., a third that said K. M. ARDRY, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW — DIVORCE SPECIALIST. There didn’t seem to be much going on behind the last two doors. Most people probably hadn’t shown up for work yet.

The Owens Agency was at the far end. I tried the knob, half expecting to find it locked, but it turned under my hand and let me into an anteroom large enough for three cane-bottom chairs and two small tables. Nobody was in it. Opposite, bisecting the room, was a floor-to-ceiling partition made out of wallboard to waist level and old-fashioned pebbled glass the rest of the way up; a doorframe and a door were set in the middle of it, the door standing open, and on the other side I could see the rest of the office. I went over and poked my head through for a closer look. That part was empty too.

So maybe he’s down in the john, I thought. I backed up to one of the cane-bottom chairs and sat down to wait.

Ten minutes went by. There weren’t any magazines around; nothing at all on the tables except a lone ashtray. I sat there. But I don’t sit well without something to do with my hands or something to occupy my mind. I began to fidget, to cross and uncross my legs, to squirm my fanny around on the chair. I had quit smoking years ago and had no desire to start up again, but at times like this I found myself developing a vague hunger for a cigarette. At least smoking one would have been an activity.

From out in the hallway I heard footsteps, voices — but none of them came this far down. Other people arriving for work. And where the hell was Lauterbach? The air in the anteroom was warm and stuffy and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. You’d have thought the first thing anybody would do on a Monday morning would be to open a window, air the place out a little.

Well, maybe Lauterbach hadn’t come in yet. But then why was the door unlocked? Was he that careless — go off on Friday or Saturday and forget to secure his office? Could be. Lots of people are careless. And he might have been in a hurry, distracted — even drunk, given Lauterbach’s apparent taste for the sauce.

Another five minutes of just sitting was all I could take. I got up and tried to pace, but the anteroom was too small for that. All right, what the hell: I went through the open door into the back half of the office.

Old kneehole desk that looked as if it had come out of a cheap secondhand store. Windows behind it that looked out on Sixth Avenue and a parking lot across the street. Bank of file cabinets, the top drawer of one pulled open. A table with stacks of police-science brochures, F.B.I. flyers, electronics magazines, and bulletins from the National Society of Investigators. A smaller table containing a hot plate, a coffeepot, a jar of coffee, a jar of peanut butter, a package of crackers, a box of sugar, an almost empty fifth of Ten High bourbon, a dirty knife, a dirty coffee cup, a dirty glass with a cigarette butt lying on the bottom like a dead bug, and a sifting of crumbs. The walls were bare except for a framed photostat of Lauterbach’s California license and another of his Michigan license. And that was all there was to see. No electronic equipment, which struck me as a little odd, considering Lauterbach’s apparent fondness for the stuff. But then maybe he kept whatever he had in his trailer or locked in the trunk of his car.

I wandered over to the desk, letting myself feel annoyed at Lauterbach’s absence so I would have an excuse to snoop. The desktop was cluttered but not half as sloppy as the inside of his trailer, if it hadn’t been for the remains of his lunch or breakfast or whatever, the office would have been moderately neat. Telephone, pens and pencils, typing paper, a notepad, part of last Friday’s San Diego Union — that was all.

Two of the desk drawers were pulled out a little; I went around behind the desk with the idea of opening them a little more, so I could see what they contained. As I bent toward the lower one my foot snagged one leg of the chair, which was pushed up into the kneehole, and scraped the thing back a few inches. Inside the kneehole something fell over with a small plopping sound. I moved the chair the rest of the way out and bent down to peer under there. A briefcase. It had been propped against the inside of the kneehole — a sort of semi-hiding place, I supposed, where a man like Lauterbach would put something large that he didn’t want out in plain sight.

I didn’t move for a couple of seconds, looking at the briefcase and listening. There wasn’t anything to hear except muted traffic sounds from the street and the distant clacking of somebody’s typewriter. So then I dragged the case out and put it on the desk and opened it. The only item inside was a thick manila file folder with a typed name on the tag at its top.

Well, well, I thought. Sometimes it pays to be as clumsy as I am: you stumble on the damnedest things.

I flipped open the folder with my forefinger. The first thing I saw was a 5” X 7” photograph, in color, clipped to a sheaf of papers. There were two people and a boat in the photo. The boat was the yacht variety, small and sleek with gleaming brightwork. The woman was Elaine Picard, wearing slacks and a tank top and a wind-blown look, smiling at the camera. The man, dressed in white ducks and a blue blazer and a yachting cap, was the same gray-haired military type I’d seen in the hotel parking lot on Friday night — Henry Nyland.

I unclipped the photo and turned it over. There wasn’t anything written on the reverse. I put it back and shuffled through the sheaf of papers. The first few were from the desk notepad or one like it, a lot of hen scratches and what I took to be a personal code; but the gist of it was clear enough: Henry Nyland had hired Lauterbach six weeks ago to investigate Elaine Picard. And he’d done it because he suspected there was another man in her life, and because he was afraid she was involved in “something bizarre.” If he had speculated about what that something might be, Lauterbach hadn’t written it down.

The rest of the papers were carbons of reports he’d sent to Nyland at an address on Coronado, and notes scribbled to himself at various points in his investigation. There wasn’t much in the reports. According to what Lauterbach had told Nyland, Elaine’s behavior had been normal and above reproach; as far as he’d been able to determine, she hadn’t had any clandestine dealings with men.

But the scribbled notes seemed to tell a different story. Most of them were indecipherable — the personal shorthand again — but there were some references to Rich Woodall, who had evidently bothered Elaine while she was eating lunch in a restaurant one day and whose name Lauterbach had got by checking the license number of Woodall’s car through the D.M.V. Other references told me that Elaine regularly spent time at or near Borrego Springs, at some sort of club. On one sheet was a list of names, a few of which had check marks in front of them. I recognized three: Woodall, Lloyd Beddoes, and Karyn Sugarman.

At the bottom of the folder was a plain white business-size envelope. When I opened it, I found half a dozen black-and-white photographs taken with a wide-angle lens. A couple of them were off-center and the rest were not quite in focus, as if they’d been hurriedly snapped; but you could see that all of them were of a big, odd-looking house somewhere in the desert, a sort of free-form thing that blended into the jumble of high, jagged rocks against which it had been built. Parked in front of the house were a number of cars. In one of the photos, more of the desert itself was visible — an open part that contained the usual vegetation and what looked to be the remains of an old spur railroad track, a decaying water tower, and a dilapidated loading platform of some kind. None of the photographs bore any written notations.

I couldn’t find any significance in them. They just weren’t very good or very clear, which made me wonder if maybe there were more, if these were culls from an entire roll of film. If so, the rest weren’t in the folder and they probably weren’t anywhere in the office.

Then again, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt to look.

I put the photos back in the envelope, the envelope back under the papers, the folder back into the briefcase, and the case back inside the kneehole. The two partly open desk drawers didn’t contain any photographs or further information on Elaine Picard; neither did the other two drawers. Nothing of interest at all, unless you considered a rolled pair of socks an interesting thing to keep in a desk drawer.

I shut the last one and turned toward the file cabinets. Maybe there was something enlightening in there. Something on Nancy and Timmy Clark, for instance—

Out in the hallway, a woman screamed.

The cry came again and kept on coming, cutting through the walls like a knife through sponge cake. I wheeled around with my scalp prickling and ran out through the anteroom, yanked the door open, and lumbered into the hall. She was down at the far end near the elevator, backed up against the wall, pointing and yowling. I started to run toward her, but men and women were spilling out of the offices of the Dutton Design & Manufacturing Co. and K. M. Ardry, Divorce Specialist, and they got in my way.

One of the men grabbed the screaming woman, a fortyish secretarial type with glasses hanging on a chain over her flat chest. “What is it, Millie? For God’s sake, what’s happened?”

“In there!” she said, screeching the words. She was still pointing, not at the elevator, as I’d first thought, but at the door to the lavatory. “In there, in there!”

The guy started toward the john, but I got to the door ahead of him and shoved inside. I didn’t see anything wrong at first, not until I got to where I could look into the open stall to one side. There was a dead man inside it, one leg hooked over the toilet and the rest of him wedged back against the wall. One of his eyes was wide open; the other was now a black-edged hole full of dried blood. Shot. Not once, at least four times: there were also bloody holes in his chest, in his neck, in his right arm.

I had finally caught up with Jim Lauterbach. And from the way the body looked, he’d been dead most of the time I had been trying to find him.