Double

6: “Wolf”

Charley Valdene was a character. And then some.

He showed up at the convention wearing a belted trench coat and a slouch hat, which caused quite a stir among all those muumuus and party dresses and Bermuda shorts. They wouldn’t let him into the convention room, because he wasn’t a registered member of the Society, but he hung around out on the mezzanine gawking at people and introducing himself and generally acting like a kid in a toyshop. Some of the conventioneers were put off by him — I heard one call him a “buffoon” and another say snootily that the image he presented was “just the kind of idiotic stereotype our profession is trying to live down.” But most of the people seemed to find him charming and refreshing. It was a good thing I did too, because he latched onto me first thing — I was hanging around the mezzanine myself, where it wasn’t so crowded — and peppered me with questions and comments.

He was about fifty, pudgy, crackling with energy and enthusiasm; bald as an egg under the hat, as I found out later, except for a thin dangly fringe of sand-colored hair. He had fat red cheeks and a fat red nose like Santa Claus, pale blue eyes full of candlepower, and a voice so deep it sounded as if it were coming out of a well. Or maybe out of a geyser: his words seemed to erupt from his mouth, tumbling over each other and wet with spray.

After about an hour he insisted on taking me to dinner. But not at the hotel, he knew a much better place, did I like cannelloni, sure he knew I would because I was Italian, a much better place, cannelloni and garlic bread and sour red wine, that was their specialty, it was out near his house in Pacific Beach and I’d come there afterward of course, see his collection of private-eyeiana. I said okay; anything was better than sitting in on a sociological overview of the private detective and group dynamics.

The restaurant he took me to was a little place with about a dozen tables. The cannelloni and garlic bread and red wine lived up to his advertising; it was the kind of fare that would have brought smiles and approving nods in any kitchen in San Francisco’s North Beach. We had espresso afterward, and homemade spumoni ice cream. And throughout the meal, he kept asking questions about this or that case of mine — the more public ones, because damned if he hadn’t studied up on them through back issues of the S.F. newspapers on file in the San Diego Library.

The one he was most interested in had involved another convention a couple of years ago, that one in San Francisco and devoted to the pulps, featuring a gaggle of former pulp writers who had called themselves “The Pulpeteers” and who were being reunited for the first time in thirty years. (“I wanted to go myself,” Valdene said, “and I would have but I had a rush job up in Carlsbad and I just couldn’t get away.”) The gathering had degenerated into homicide and then, later on, multiple homicide, and I had been involved. It had worked out all right, though, primarily because it was at that convention that I’d met Kerry: both her parents, Cybil and Ivan Wade, were writers and had been members of the Pulpeteers.

“Maybe there’ll be a murder at this convention too,” Valdene said at one point. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it sure would. But nothing like that is going to happen here.”

We left the restaurant finally, and went to Valdene’s modest little house on a modest little street. But when I stepped inside it was like walking into the past — into the dark but still gaudy world of the Depression thirties and war-torn forties.

The furniture was straight out of a 1935 Sears Roebuck catalogue, right down to the fringe on the lampshades and the big console Philco radio in one corner. The walls were papered with old movie posters: Meet Nero Wolfe, Fog Over Frisco, Lady in the Lake, The Maltese Falcon. There were shelves stacked with plastic-bagged pulp magazines, by far the most prominent title being Private Detective. There were cabinets jammed with rows of video tapes, each one neatly labeled; other cabinets with old radio-show tapes: “The Adventures of Sam Spade”; “The Fat Man”; “Pat Novak for Hire”; “Martin Kane, Private Detective.” In other rooms were shelves of hardcover and paperback books, among them a section of soft-core and hard-core porn items with private-detective protagonists.

Valdene gave me a guided tour of all this, complete with running commentary, and his pride at what he had amassed here was evident and justifiable. The tour ended in a basement workroom, where he had a table of duplicate pulps that he had set out for my inspection. Among them were seven issues of Dime Mystery, four of Dime Detective, four of Clues, one of G-Man Detective, and one of Crimebusters that I didn’t have. The total was more than I had brought with me for trade, but Valdene insisted that I take all of them anyway; we could work out something later on.

He got beers for us — Pabst Blue Ribbon, in honor of Mike Hammer, he said — and we sat in the living room and talked for a while. About eleven-thirty, in the middle of a second beer, I began to get drowsy. Valdene noticed it; he noticed everything about me, it seemed. You could almost see him making mental notes, filing them away in his storehouse of material on private eyes real and imaginary.

“You must be pretty tired,” he said, “plane flight and the convention and everything. I’ll run you back to the hotel so you can get some sleep.”

“Thanks, Charley.”

“Wish we’d had more time, though. I’ve got a good print of Sleepers West, with Lloyd Nolan as Mike Shayne. You ever see that one?”

“Long, long time ago.”

“Great flick, one of the best of the B private-eye films. Nobody knows it today; you hardly ever see it on TV anymore. But I guess you can’t make it another night?”

“Well...”

“Or maybe Sunday afternoon, before the banquet?”

He sounded so eager and hopeful, like a puppy with its leash in its mouth, that I didn’t have the heart to refuse him. Besides which, I wanted to see that Lloyd Nolan film.

I said, “You know, I think Sunday afternoon might work out fine,” and he beamed, and I thought: And if Sunday afternoon slides into Sunday evening, and it gets too late for me to make the banquet, why that’ll be just too bad. No rubber chicken, no boring speeches, no postprandial champagne, and no all-night hoofing with the Mexican Bandit Band. Yeah, that sure would be a shame.

We went out and got into Valdene’s coupe and headed south to the Casa del Rey. It was after midnight when we got there, but the place was still lit up pretty good and the parking lot was still half full. Valdene turned in to the lot and swung up one of the rows toward the circular drive in front. And after about thirty yards the headlights picked up something ahead that made me sit up and take notice.

Valdene saw it too. He said, “Hey, look at that! Somebody’s on the ground over there.”

Somebody was. The driver’s door to one of the parked cars — a ten-year-old Ford — stood open; the dome light inside was on, and the bulky figure of a man was half sprawled between the door and the seat.

“Stop the car, Charley.”

He came down on the brake, and I opened my door and was out before the coupe came to a full stop. I ran around the rear and over to where the guy was kneeling on the pavement with his head against the seat and one arm flung over it. I squatted beside him. But there wasn’t any crisis. Hell, there wasn’t even any emergency.

Behind me Valdene said, “He hurt or something?”

“Drunk,” I said. Parboiled might have been a better term; the smell of liquor came off him in near-palpable shimmers on the hot night air. He moved when I touched him, made grumbling noises in his throat. I turned him a little, so I could get a better look at him. Big guy, heavyset, not much to look at. Wearing a red shirt that now had a fresh decoration of vomit on it. Also wearing a convention name tag, and in the domelight I could read what it said: Jim Lauterbach — San Diego, CA.

“He’s a private eye, huh?” Valdene said.

“One of the alcoholic variety, apparently.”

“Must be a lousy one if he can’t hold his booze. What should we do with him?”

“Leave him in his car to sober up,” I said. “If this is his car.”

I leaned over Lauterbach and the clutter of stuff on the seat beside him — a small wire recorder, some other electronic stuff, and a scatter of brochures, all of which said that he was one of the computer-age investigators. I opened up the glove box, poked around among the papers inside, and found the registration: the car was his, all right. Valdene helped me hoist him up and lay him out across the seat. Lauterbach grumbled and grunted some more, and then he said, clearly, “Dumb son of a bitch.” But he wasn’t talking to either of us. To himself, maybe. After that, he was quiet.

The keys were on the pavement outside, where he must have dropped them after he got the door open; he’d passed out right on top of them. I put the keys in my pocket. Then I got my notebook out and wrote on a clean page: Drunk driving is a felony. You ought to know that, Lauterbach. You can pick up your keys at the hotel desk. I signed it A fellow P.I., and put the note on the dashboard where he’d be sure to find it when he got his senses back, such as they were.

In the row of parked cars beyond Valdene’s coupe, somebody gave several sharp blasts on a horn. I glanced over there as I shut the driver’s door on the Ford. A guy in a suit was standing alongside what appeared to be a light-colored Cadillac, looking impatient; then, when neither Valdene nor I ran to do his bidding, he came stalking toward us. I got a look at him as he passed through the glare of the coupe’s headlights. About my age, mid-fifties, with a stiff military bearing, brush-cut iron-gray hair and a matching mustache. Fancy three-piece suit, a diamond stickpin in his tie. I knew it was a diamond because other kinds of jewels don’t throw off that kind of reflected dazzle.

He said something as he neared us, but the words were lost in the roar of an airplane passing overhead: one of the Navy patrol planes that were constantly taking off and landing at the North Island Naval Air Station nearby. He looked up in annoyance, waited for the noise to fade, and then said, “What’s the idea of parking your car in the middle of the lane? If you don’t move it instantly, I’ll call the police.”

“I’ll move it,” Valdene said. “We were just trying to—”

“I don’t care what you were trying to do. There’s no excuse for blocking the lane this way.”

“Look, mister, we maybe just saved your life.”

The rich type blinked at him. “What was that?”

“The guy in this Ford is drunk, drunk as hell. We hadn’t come along and spotted him and my friend here took his keys away, he might’ve woken up and started driving. He might’ve run right up your fat tailpipe.”

A sputtering sound came out of the rich guy; he didn’t know what to say. For about five seconds, anyway. Then he said, “Move your car,” huffily, and stalked off to the Cadillac.

“Asshole,” Valdene said.

“Lots of them around these days, Charley.”

“That kind’s one of the worst. Damn politician.”

“You know him?”

“Seen him on television. His name’s Henry Nyland. Used to be in the Navy. Now he’s running in a special election for the San Diego City Council. One of those Let’s-Nuke-the-Commies nuts, big on religion and all hot for censorship. That type sets my teeth on edge, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”

We walked back to the coupe, not hurrying, and Valdene drove around to the hotel entrance. I gathered up my pulps, we shook hands, he told me again how great it was to meet me and not to forget Sunday afternoon and Sleepers West, and we said good night.

The plush lobby was empty when I entered. But as I started across to the desk, to get my key and to turn over Jim Lauterbach’s car keys for safekeeping, the doors to one of the elevators whispered open and Elaine Picard came out. She passed within ten feet of me, and I said hello, but she either didn’t hear or chose to ignore me. She looked tired, preoccupied; the skin across her forehead was drawn so tight it had a waxy look.

I watched her walk out through the front doors. Odd lady, I thought. Not as odd as that guy Rich who’d been bothering her this afternoon, but odd enough. Maybe it came with the job. I had yet to meet a female P.I. of any variety who wasn’t strange in some way, and that included McCone.

Not to be sexist, though. Women didn’t have a corner on the oddball P.I. market; this convention was proof positive of that. Look at Jim Lauterbach. Look at the guys who held earnest discussions about worblegang veeblefetzers.

Hell, look at me.