Double

40: “Wolf”

It was bloody damned hot in the desert. It hadn’t been so bad in the San Diego area, after that liquid humidity of the Mexican coast, but out here the temperature must have been up over a hundred. Heat shimmered off the highway, glared off the metal surfaces of other cars, made the stark countryside look sere and fiery, and blew inside the rental heap like the breath of Old Nick himself. The car had air conditioning but it had conked out coming down the steep Banner Grade. Which figured. If I hadn’t insisted on the cheapest rental the National agency had, this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened. And I wouldn’t be roasting and dripping like a chicken under a broiler.

The turn for Borrego Springs, off Highway 78, was called Yaqui Pass Road. It climbed, steep and winding, up a sagebrush-strewn hill, and from where it crested you had a pretty awesome view of empty desert spread out to the southwest. A short while later, I had my first look at Borrego Springs. The town was scattered over the floor of a brown, beige, and dull green valley, with massive, barren mountains ringing it in the distance. This entire area was part of the Anza — Borrego Desert Region — several hundred miles of state park that stretched almost to the Salton Sea on the east, almost to the Mexican border on the south.

I was here because I didn’t want to believe McCone had gone to see Woodall yesterday, that he’d done something to her. And because I had nowhere else to look for her. Nowhere else to go period, except back to San Diego to see Tom Knowles. Which was what Knowles wanted me to do. I’d finally got in touch with him, by phone from the service station near Woodall’s house, and told him what I suspected. But I was in no mood for sitting around doing nothing while he made up his mind whether or not to put out an APB on Woodall and on McCone. When he’d told me to come in and talk to him in person I had pretended that there was something wrong with the line and hung up on him.

Down in the valley I passed La Casa del Zorro, the resort hotel where June Paxton had seen Elaine Picard and Rich Woodall having dinner, but I couldn’t see much of it because it was hidden inside a grove of densely grown palms and tamarisk trees. The town, some distance beyond, wasn’t much to look at: plain desert-style buildings, most of them designed to cater to tourists and to the horde of motorcycle riders and dune-buggy drivers who clogged a central green called Christmas Circle. I looped around the circle, drove past the Road Runner Realty Company, and stopped at a Union 76 station.

Arthur Darrow was listed in the local telephone directory — a number on Pointing Rock Road. Darrow was the only lead I had out here; if McCone had come to Borrego Springs yesterday, she’d probably have looked him up. The station attendant told me how to get to Pointing Rock Road. He also told me that as far as he knew, there was no House of Slenderizing and Massage or any other health club in town. No clubs of any kind, he said, except for the De Anza Country Club and the new Ram’s Hill Country Club.

The Darrow house turned out to be nestled up against the De Anza Country Club’s golf course, with its backside abutting one of the greens. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected, somehow: a smallish hacienda-style place, with a low brick wall in front that sported a couple of old wagon wheels for decoration. The yard behind the wall had a patch of lawn, some dwarf palms and yucca trees, a lot of prickly-pear cactus, and two orange trees heavy with fruit. Still, the place had the look of money. Whoever Arthur Darrow was, he didn’t have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.

I parked the rental car in front. In the adjacent driveway was a newish Chevy pickup with the words MILNE GARDENING SERVICE painted on its door; a big man wearing a blue shirt with the same words on its back was kneeling in front of one of the orange trees, trimming the grass around it with a pair of hand clippers. I went up the path past him to the narrow front porch and rang the bell. Nobody answered. I rang it again, waited a while longer, and then turned and went down the path and over to the gardener. He hadn’t paid any attention to me up to then, and he didn’t pay much to me now.

“Afternoon,” I said. “I’m looking for Arthur Darrow. Or his wife. Would you know where I could find either of them?”

He stood up, dragged a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and mopped his sweaty face. He was in his sixties, sun-creased and in better physical condition than I was. A pair of mild gray eyes gave me a brief appraising look. “You don’t look like one of their friends,” he said. He didn’t seem to mean it as an insult.

“I’m not. It’s a business matter.”

“They’re not here,” he said.

“So I gathered. Can you tell—”

“Hawaii,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“They’re in Hawaii. Another vacation.”

“When did they leave?”

“Last week. They go to places like that three or four times a year — stay a month. Must be nice to have money.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“Neither would I.”

There was something in his tone that indicated he didn’t like his employers much. Maybe because Darrow was rich; maybe for some other reason. Which was probably why he was so willing to tell a stranger — who might be Raffles, the international jewel thief, for all he knew — that the Darrows were away in Hawaii on an extended visit.

I asked him, “Did you happen to be working here yesterday? I’m also trying to find a young woman who might have stopped by...”

“Nope,” he said. “Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days.”

“I see.”

“Ask Mrs. Flowers.”

“Who would she be?”

“Housekeeper. Lives in. She knows everything.” He didn’t like Mrs. Flowers much either.

“She’s not here now,” I said.

“No. Went shopping or something.”

“Any idea when she’ll be back?”

“Nope. Maybe she took the day off.”

“When the cats are away,” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

I left him and went back to the rental car and sat there for a time. So the Darrows were in Hawaii and had been for a week; if McCone had come here yesterday, she’d probably have discovered the same thing. So then what would she have done? Hung around to check out that club angle, probably. But what club? Not the country club over there, or the other one in town; she’d seemed to think the club Beddoes and the Darrows belonged to was some kind of health spa. Only there wasn’t a health club in Borrego Springs, according to the gas station attendant...

I kept sitting there, looking at the house. And pretty soon I realized why it wasn’t what I’d expected: those photographs I’d found in Jim Lauterbach’s office, in his file on Elaine Picard. An odd-looking house in the desert, at least semi-isolated, with an old spur track and the remains of a water tower and a loading dock not far away. When Darrow’s name came up, along with the fact that he lived in Borrego Springs, I had made the same kind of false assumption I’d made about Nancy Pollard being Timmy’s mother — that the house in the photos must be Darrow’s house.

All right, it wasn’t. Then whose was it?

I got out of the car again and went back through the front gate to where the gardener was. He wasn’t happy to see me back; but then he wasn’t unhappy either. He looked blank when I asked him about the place in the photos — until I mentioned the spur track and the ruins nearby. Then he rubbed at his creased face and began to nod.

“You must mean the old Matthews place,” he said. “Funny-looking house, looks like a big toadstool grew up out of the ground after a rain?”

“Something like that. You say somebody named Matthews owns it?”

“Not anymore. Leonard Matthews built it back in the thirties. Crazy as a coot. Owned the Matthews Gypsum Mine not far away, up in the foothills; built the spur track, too, to get his ore to Plaster City — it used to connect with the old Gypsum Mining Railroad that runs down there. Mine petered out after the war, but Matthews stayed on until he died. Must have been thirty years ago, about.”

“Who owns the house now?”

“Nobody, far as I know. Sits up in the middle of nowhere, looks like a toadstool. Who’d want it? Not many people as crazy as old Matthews was, even these days.”

“Where is it, exactly?”

“You know where the U.S. Gypsum Mine is?”

“No.”

“How about Split Mountain Road?”

“No.”

“Well, you can’t miss Split Mountain; it’s smack in the middle of Ocotillo Wells. You know where that is?”

“Not far from here on Highway 78, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You take Split Mountain past the Elephant Tree Ranger Station, almost to where it ends at the U.S. Gypsum Mine. There’s a dirt road branches off it to the south, up into the foothills. Follow that about seven miles and you’ll be at the old Matthews place.”

“Thanks.”

“You planning to go out there this time of day?” he asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“Better take some water with you, just in case,” he said. “That’s empty desert up around there and hotter’n the hinges of hell. Something happens and you get caught without water, you might not come back alive.”