Double

26: “Wolf”

Lieutenant Tom Knowles was a hard man to connect with. When I left Priapus Books and Curios I drove back downtown to the sheriff’s department, but he still hadn’t returned. And probably wouldn’t until late, if he came in at all today, the deputy I talked to said; he was somewhere up in Escondido on a case. The deputy wouldn’t tell me if it was the Elaine Picard case or not.

So all right. That left me with nothing more to do for the time being — until I talked to McCone and we could compare notes. There was a chance she wanted to get in touch with me, too, and that she’d left a message at the Casa del Rey. If not, maybe I could reach her through her parents; she’d told me she was staying with them, in an area of the city near Old Town, so I figured they’d be listed in the phone book.

It was almost four by the time I got back to the hotel. There weren’t any messages. In my room I looked up the McCone name in the directory: only one listing, and it turned out to be the right one. The man who answered said he was Sharon’s father, but that she wasn’t there and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since early morning. I left a message for her to call me and he said he’d see that she got it.

I switched on the TV, looking for an early newscast that might give me some additional information on Lauterbach’s murder. There wasn’t one; I would probably have to wait until five o’clock. I left the thing on, with the sound turned off, and got out the map of Mexico and the Mexico guidebook, just to have something to do, and went over them again for some hint of that “town on the water with monkeys in it” where Timmy Clark’s father lived. I was still getting nowhere when the telephone rang.

McCone. “That was quick,” I said.

“Quick?”

“I called your parents’ house not ten minutes ago and left the message.”

“Message? Oh,” she said. “No, I didn’t get it. I’m up in Point Loma. I just thought I’d check in with you. What’s up?”

“You already know if you’ve been listening to your car radio.”

“I haven’t. What—?”

“Jim Lauterbach’s been murdered. Shot sometime yesterday morning in the lavatory down the hall from his office. I happened to be there this morning when he was found.”

She breathed in my ear for a time. Then she said, “Any idea who did it?”

“None I’d want to go on record with.”

“Wolf, a second killing this soon... It has to be connected with Elaine’s death.”

“Looks that way, yeah,” I agreed. “And there’s a definite connection between Lauterbach and Elaine. I was in Lauterbach’s office for a while before a secretary stumbled on his body, and I did a little snooping. His briefcase was hidden under his desk, with a file folder in it — seems Henry Nyland hired Lauterbach to investigate Elaine.”

“He did? Why?”

“Couple of reasons. He thought she was seeing another man. And he thought she was involved in quote something bizarre unquote.”

“Such as what?”

“If he had an idea, it wasn’t in Lauterbach’s notes. Have you talked to Nyland yet?”

“No. I’m on my way to do that now. When did he hire Lauterbach?”

“Six weeks ago.”

“What’d Lauterbach find out?”

I filled her in on the details of the file. “Looked to me like he held back some of the stuff from Nyland for his own purposes — blackmail, maybe. But I couldn’t make enough sense of the notes to figure out exactly what he’d uncovered.”

“Well, there might be something in that club angle. Nyland mentioned a club in the love note I found in Elaine’s house. And Rich Woodall had a funny reaction when I mentioned the club to him.”

“What kind of club is it?”

“‘The one I told you about yesterday, I think. The House of Slenderizing and Massage, downtown.”

“Is there a branch in Borrego Springs?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“One of Lauterbach’s notes indicated Elaine spent time at some club out there. And June Paxton saw her in Borrego Springs with Rich Woodall, remember. There’s another connection too. Does the name Darrow mean anything to you? Arthur Darrow?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“Somebody who lives in Borrego Springs. Somebody who knows Beddoes and who’s connected with the club there. I got his name from a pornographic art dealer named Maxwell Littlejohn.”

“Pornographic art?”

“The high-quality type,” I said, and explained how I’d got Littlejohn’s name and what I’d found out at Priapus Books and Curios. The only thing I omitted was a detailed description of Littlejohn’s stock.

McCone said, “I don’t quite see how pornography fits in. But Beddoes does collect the stuff; I just came from his house and I saw part of his collection.” She paused. “Come to think of it, Karyn Sugarman mentioned his quirk on Saturday morning, in Elaine’s office. I didn’t pay much attention at the time.”

“Did Elaine have any interests along those lines?”

“Not that I know about. She didn’t have any porn in her house.”

“Any of the other people you’ve talked to?”

“No. Dammit, Wolf, this is all so confusing.”

“Yeah. What’ve you turned up?”

“Well, I went to see Elaine’s lawyer, Thorburn, and he showed me the clipping she mentioned in her letter to him. It was about the disappearance of a financier, a man named Roland Deveer, some six weeks ago.”

“What sort of disappearance?”

“The kind that might be deliberate. I looked up Mrs. Deveer and had a talk with her. She thinks her husband deserted her and she hates him for it, so she let me go through his papers. Deveer had the telephone numbers of the Casa del Rey and Beddoes’s home written down on his calendar.”

Now it was my turn for some silent ruminating. At length I said, “Could there be any link between Deveer and the Clarks?”

“I doubt it. The only link seems to be Beddoes and the Casa del Rey.”

“Some kind of operation to get people out of the country, maybe — people who want to vanish for one reason or another.”

“Makes sense that way.”

“Except for one thing. Why would Nancy and Timmy Clark want to disappear?”

“Could be they’re running away,” McCone said. “From something or somebody.”

“Yeah, could be. Did Elaine give her lawyer any details about what she’d found out?”

“No. All her note to Thorburn said was that she was afraid something illegal was going on and she was writing the letter to him to protect herself. She wouldn’t talk about what it was and she wouldn’t mention any names. She wanted more information first, she said.”

“Would she have confided in any of her friends?”

“I don’t think so. She kept pretty much to herself.”

“How about Karyn Sugarman? Was Elaine seeing her professionally?”

“Sugarman says no. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me anything about Elaine’s problems.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I wish I knew what Tom Knowles has found out. Maybe he’s got more than we have and we’re beating our heads against a wall for nothing.”

“Haven’t you been in touch with him?”

“No. He was off yesterday and he’s been out of town all day today.”

“I’ll bet he knows even less than we do,” she said. “As far as I know, the only person he’s talked to so far is Beddoes.”

“You’re probably right.”

“It’s up to us, Wolf. And we’ll get to the bottom of it, too, if we can just find the motive for Elaine’s murder.”

“If she was murdered,” I said.

“She was, I’m sure of it. I’d like to believe it was because she found out about the hotel scam, but I can’t anymore. I just don’t see Beddoes as a murderer. Ibarcena is capable of it, but he says he was with Beddoes when she died, and the way things are between them now, he wouldn’t stick to that story if it wasn’t true.”

“The two of them have some sort of falling-out?”

“A personal one. They were lovers, but Ibarcena’s taken up with somebody else and he and Beddoes had it out over that. I think Beddoes is afraid Ibarcena is going to run off and leave him holding the bag.”

“He could be right.”

“I think so too. Ibarcena was born in Mexico; he could jump over the border, bribe some people here and there, and disappear without much trouble.”

“How’s Beddoes holding up?”

“Not very well. But he still wouldn’t admit anything when I threw Deveer’s name at him, even though it shook him up.” She made a wry chuckling sound. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“What?”

“The three wise monkeys. He’s got an obscene Mexican statuette of the little monos. I was just thinking how ironic that is.”

I said sharply, “What did you just say?”

“That I was thinking how ironic—”

“No, no. You used a word, a Spanish word.”

“Mono?”

“Yeah. What does it mean?”

“It means monkey. Wolf, what—?”

“Sure, that’s it. That’s got to be it.”

“What’s got to be it?”

“I think I know where Nancy and Timmy Clark might be.”

“Where?”

“A town on the Mexican seacoast. Hang on a minute, I want to check the map.”

I put the receiver down, hauled the map over, and spread it out on the bed. And there it was, the small town on the Bahia Topolobampo that I’d noticed before: Los Monos. The Monkeys. But not real monkeys; seven-year-old kids aren’t nearly as precise as adults, I should have known that. Just the word, the word in Spanish. Los Monos — “a town on the water with monkeys in it.”

I caught up the receiver again. “Sharon? Got it. It’s a place a couple of hundred miles north of Mazatlan. Los Monos.”

“Are you sure that’s where they are?”

“No. But from what Timmy Clark told me, it’s a pretty good bet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet. Turn the information over to Knowles, I suppose. Maybe he’ll be able to turn up something on who the Clarks are.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Listen, if I need to talk to you again, can I reach you through your folks?”

“Yes. I’ll check in there as often as I can.”

“Okay. And I should be here tonight if you need me.”

We rang off. I opened the guidebook and looked up Los Monos. It was a fishing village not far from the town of Topolobampo, on the bay of the same name — one of the best spots on the Sea of Cortez for billfish, marlin, sailfish, yellowfin tuna, and other big-game fish. There wasn’t much there otherwise to attract tourists: a couple of small hotels, a shrimp cannery, a boatworks, housing and supply stores for the local fishermen, and “a few spacious villas for those from Mexico and the United States who enjoy a combination of privacy and primitive beauty.” The population was under a thousand, which meant that if the Clarks were there, they could be found easily enough.

I got on the horn again and called the sheriffs department, but Knowles still wasn’t in. I left another message — he had to pick up his damn messages sometime — and started to get up and pace while I did some thinking. But the TV, which was still on, caught my eye: it must have been five o’clock because a newscast was just starting. I leaned over to turn up the sound, then sat back down again.

The Lauterbach murder was one of the day’s top stories, at least on this channel. The newscaster made plenty of the fact that Lauterbach was the “second local private eye to die under mysterious circumstances” in as many days; he also made reference to the convention and allowed as how the real world of the private investigator didn’t seem so far removed from the fictional one, after all. But he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know — not until he mentioned a woman from Michigan named Ruth Ferguson, and hinted that there might be a possible link between Lauterbach’s death and “a personal tragedy” she’d recently suffered.

Then I was looking at Ruth Ferguson herself, in an interview with one of the station’s roving reporters: a thin, beautifully dressed, beautifully made-up woman with icy good looks and an unpleasant way of speaking. She said Lauterbach had called her at the Bloomfield Hills home yesterday morning, identifying himself as a San Diego private detective who had once worked for her ex-husband and who had information on the whereabouts of her seven-year-old son: the boy had been kidnapped — probably by his father, she said with heavy bitterness — from his school in the Detroit suburb one week ago. Lauterbach had urged her to fly to San Diego and she had done so, arriving this morning to discover that he’d been murdered. And then a photograph of Ruth Ferguson’s son appeared on the screen, and I saw what Lauterbach had been up to at the Casa del Rey, I saw the false assumption I’d been operating under from the beginning.

The boy in the photograph was Timmy Clark.