Double

36: “Wolf”

The guy who flew me to San Diego from Los Mochis was an American named Bradley. He regaled me with an endless string of ribald stories in a buttery Southern drawl, some of them pretty funny, which helped to ease my terror at being up in his small, cramped, and speedy Beechcraft. But he was a good pilot — a professional who operated a full-time shuttle service — and we didn’t run into any bad weather or other airplanes en route. So it wasn’t a bad trip, all things considered. And he had me back on U.S. soil before noon.

I went through Customs in less than five minutes. Out on the concourse I spotted a bank of public telephones and started in that direction. The first person I wanted to talk to was McCone — to tell her that I’d soft-hearted us out of Ruth Ferguson’s reward money, to find out if she’d learned anything, and to confer with her on my suspicions about Rich Woodall. She might have more information that I could arm myself with when I went to see the San Diego cops, something more concrete that would nail down Woodall as the murderer of Jim Lauterbach; if so, I would have an easier time keeping Timmy and Carlton Ferguson and Nancy Pollard out of it.

But I didn’t get to the telephones immediately. What delayed me was a guy sitting in one of the waiting areas, reading a copy of the San Diego Union that he held wide open in front of him so the front page faced outward. I glanced at it as I went by, the way you do, and one of the larger headlines caught my attention and held it. I stopped and stared at the headline for a couple of seconds. Then I went on a quick hunt for a newspaper-vending machine. When I had my own copy of the Union, I sat down with it to read the story on page 1.

The headline said: HOTEL MANAGER IN MYSTERIOUS SUICIDE. And the story under it began:

There wasn’t much in the rest of the story. No mention of Victor Ibarcena; Beddoes’s body had been discovered by a neighbor. The reporter did bring in the shooting of Jim Lauterbach, as “a third unexplained death in the past week,” and hinted that it, too, might be connected to Beddoes’s suicide. He also managed to deepen the mystery and hint at a bizarre angle by mentioning Beddoes’s penchant for erotic art.

I put the paper down. Murder? Maybe; his death was no less suspect, on the basis of the skimpy information given in the news story, than Elaine Picard’s. But I remembered McCone’s assessment of Beddoes, that he knew his world was coming apart and that he seemed to be coming apart with it. That type — weak, afraid of losing everything that mattered to him, afraid of prison — was a prime candidate for self-destruction. The odds were that he’d taken the easy way out.

But where did that leave the sheriff’s-department investigation into the illegal goings-on at the Casa del Rey? Had Beddoes confessed his part in the escape network in his suicide note? Had Ibarcena been taken into custody or had he cut and run, as McCone had believed he might? I wouldn’t know the answers until I talked to Tom Knowles. And if he didn’t know about the escape network, then I would have to tell him; I couldn’t withhold information like that from the authorities. The tricky part, again, would be finding a way to do it without revealing the whereabouts of Timmy Ferguson and my own peripheral involvement in his kidnapping.

Knotty problem. But there wasn’t any point in worrying about it now; I would just have to see how things stood when I conferred with Knowles. And hope I didn’t make a mistake that cost me my license again: I’d lost it once, through a set of circumstances that weren’t really my fault, and if I lost it a second time I’d never get it back.

Meanwhile, there was McCone. Maybe she knew something about Beddoes’s suicide. I hurried to the telephones and called her parents’ house.

Her mother answered. “Sharon’s not here,” she said. There was both annoyance and concern in her voice. “I don’t know where she is. She didn’t come home last night.”

“Didn’t come home?”

“She said she was going out on a date with some man she met at the convention. A lie-detector salesman. If she’d been hooked up to his machine when she told me that, it would have gone crazy.”

“You mean she lied to you?”

“Right in my face. The salesman called up here last night looking for her. He hadn’t even talked to her since Saturday.”

“Do you have any idea where she might be?”

“No. All I get from that girl is lies and double-talk. She makes me crazy sometimes. What she needs is a husband.”

“When did you last see her, Mrs. McCone?”

“Yesterday morning. Around eleven.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Yes, but I didn’t believe her. More lies and double-talk. ‘I’m going shopping,’ she said. ‘If I go to dinner, I have to have something nice to wear.’ Then she said, ‘I might take a drive out into the desert,’ and off she went.”

Borrego Springs, I thought. “Did she say anything about a man named Arthur Darrow?”

“No.”

“How about Rich Woodall?”

“No. Who are these men?”

“People in the case we’re investigating,” I said. “But don’t worry, Mrs. McCone. She probably got hung up somewhere and couldn’t get back home. Car trouble or something.”

“Then why didn’t she call?”

“Would she usually call in a situation like that?”

“Usually, yes. I’ll say that much for her. She’s not a bad girl, she’s just too inquisitive for her own good.”

So why didn’t she call? I thought.

“Running around playing cops-and-robbers,” Mrs. McCone said. “What kind of life is that for a young woman? Getting shot at, rubbing elbows with criminals and hookers and God knows what other riffraff. She ought to get married, settle down—”

“Thanks, Mrs. McCone,” I said and hung up on her.

I hustled out to the car-rental booths in the main lobby. I had turned in the other clunker when I left for Mexico because I hadn’t known how long I would be down there and I hadn’t figured to need a car anymore when I got back. Well, I needed one now. It was a long way to where Rich Woodall lived. And an even longer way to Borrego Springs.

I was reasonably sure that Woodall had killed Jim Lauterbach, and it was possible that McCone had figured it out too and gone to brace him about it yesterday; she was just headstrong enough to do that without calling in the authorities first. The second possibility was that she’d gone to check out Arthur Darrow and something had happened to her in the desert. Both of those possibilities, coupled with Lloyd Beddoes’s apparent suicide, made me worried and uneasy. There had been too many deaths the past few days, one right after the other — and McCone had her nose poked smack in the middle of them all.