Double

8: “Wolf”

Saturday morning I went to the movies.

One of the meeting rooms off the mezzanine had been outfitted as a theater: rows of folding chairs, a big portable screen, and a 16-millimeter projector at the rear. I took a chair in the back row near the door, as I used to do at Saturday matinées when I was a kid so I’d have quick access to the snack bar. The room filled up rapidly to capacity; I looked for McCone, but she wasn’t there. Neither was the big drunk in the red shirt, Jim Lauterbach.

They closed the doors right at ten o’clock, and one of the Society’s officers got up and told us what the movie was about. It was about a day in the life of a typical private investigator, which was the title of the thing, so most of us, being trained detectives, could have figured out the essential story line by ourselves. But that didn’t stop the guy from doing a five-minute monologue, four and a half minutes of it boring. Finally he sat down and they shut off the lights and the projector began to grind.

The film was in color; after ten minutes of watching it, that was the only positive thing I’d found to recommend it. The print was sort of fuzzy and the sound was too loud and a little out of sync, so that people’s lips started moving a second or two before you heard them say anything. It was a dramatization, which meant that it had actors; but these were not ordinary actors. No, these were special actors, with special talents — all of them awful. The guy playing the typical investigator whose life this was supposed to be a day in was so bad that when he walked it was in funny little stiff strides, like a toddler with a loaded diaper; and when he spoke it was with great concentration on the proper enunciation of his words, which required exaggerated shaping and reshaping of his mouth, which got to be pretty funny after a while because of the sound being out of sync — as if the actor were chewing up his words for a second or two before spitting them out.

I wanted to laugh, but nobody else was laughing; it was a very well-behaved audience, very serious about all of this crap. I wanted to laugh about the story line too — most of all about that. If this was the life of a typical private detective, I was glad I was an untypical private detective. I would have lasted maybe a week at this guy’s job before I went bonkers.

He worked for a big agency in an unnamed city. He came into the office in the morning, to the accompaniment of some voice-over narration, and had a consultation with his boss on his current assignment: something to do with industrial espionage. The exchange of dialogue bulged with electronics jargon and buzzwords that I didn’t understand. Then he went to his desk, which happened to have a computer terminal on it. But the first thing he did was make a couple of telephone calls, some of each conversation we got to listen in on while the rest was obscured by more voice-over narration. Then he plugged in his computer, or whatever it is you do with the things, and the camera moved in for some nifty close-ups of the screen — orange letters on a black background — and there was a lot more stuff printed there that made no sense to me. Then he got up and left the office—

— and I got up and left the theater. Popeye said it best: I can stands so much, I can’t stands no more.

I went downstairs and through the lobby and outside. It was another hot day, cloudless, windless. The ocean was glass-smooth except where powerboats made clean white slashes across its surface; farther out you could see the shapes of some barren, rocky islets and a naval vessel, probably a destroyer, drifting past. The beach was already crowded, mostly with kids and young adults. I went along a path under some palm trees, to the seawall that adjoined the terrace bar, and ogled some bikini-clad women for a while. Which was a hell of a lot better than ogling a black-and-orange computer screen; even Kerry would have agreed with that.

All that calm blue water looked inviting, too, and I thought that pretty soon I would go upstairs and haul out my trunks with the hibiscus flowers on them and have myself a swim. Back before I took off weight, I might have been leery about exposing my flab to the public eye; but I didn’t look too bad in swim trunks these days. “A fifty-four-year-old Italian god,” Kerry had said to me a while back, kidding the way she does. But what the hell, there were a lot of guys my age who looked worse than I did with their clothes on.

I wandered off through the gardens that paralleled the beach. The bungalows were down that way, half a dozen of them built to resemble thatched-roof English cottages, with little enclosed gardens at the rear and easy beach access. Fronting them were several interconnecting paths that wound among palms, banana trees, stands of bamboo, jacaranda and oleander shrubs, and other kinds of tropical flora that I didn’t recognize; the paths also passed over a couple of little wooden bridges spanning a tiny creek. There were sections of formal gardens, too, that you might not think would blend in with the tropical stuff but did. Plus wooden benches where you could sit and read or contemplate your sins or whatever. Plus a little glade with some picnic tables in it.

There were three or four acres of grounds, and it was cool and kind of soothing among all that greenery. At least it was when one of the Navy patrol planes wasn’t zooming by overhead. I saw some people at one of the bungalows, and a young couple holding hands, but nobody else for a ten-minute stretch. Then I came around a turning in the path, not far from the last and most secluded of the bungalows, Number 6, and there was a kid about seven years old sitting by himself on another of the benches.

He was a big kid, blond and fair-skinned, wearing a pair of Levi’s and a blue cotton pullover. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while; the shaggy look of him made me think of a bear cub. A lost bear cub, at that: he looked kind of lonely and forlorn sitting there, staring at nothing much and picking the bark off a twig.

I went his way. He jumped a little when he saw me, as if he might be afraid of strangers. Or afraid that I was somebody he knew. But then he saw me smiling, and he relaxed and stayed where he was.

“Hi, guy,” I said.

“Hi. Who are you?”

Because kids like nicknames, I said, “You can call me Wolf, if you want.”

“Wolf. That’s a funny name.”

“I think so too. But a lady I know likes to call me that, and you can’t argue with a lady.”

“No,” he said solemnly. “I guess not.”

“What’s your name?”

“Timmy.”

“Are you staying at the hotel, Timmy?”

He looked down at the twig in his hand. Then he pointed toward Bungalow 6 and said, “Over there. But pretty soon I’m going to see my dad.”

“Your dad’s not here with you, huh?”

“No.”

“Just your mom?”

Timmy was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t like my mother,” he said finally.

“No? Why not?”

“She makes me afraid. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Okay.”

He brightened. “My dad lives in Mexico. Have you ever been there?”

“A few times. How about you?”

“One time. But I don’t remember it.”

“How come?”

“I was a baby, I guess.”

“Where in Mexico does your dad live?”

“In a town on the water with monkeys in it. I’m going to—”

“Timmy! Timmy!”

It was a woman’s voice, calling from over by Bungalow 6. The kid cringed a little; a kind of caught look came into his eyes and he went nervous, twitchy. For a moment I thought he was going to hop off the bench and run. But he didn’t do it; he just sat there, squirming.

The woman called again, and there were thrashing sounds in a group of oleander bushes nearby. Then she came around the oleanders, saw the boy, and said, “Timmy, damn it—” before she got far enough along the path to spot me sitting on the other end of the bench.

Her mouth clamped shut and she stopped and stared at me. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing with Timmy?”

“We were just having a talk,” I said.

“Talk? Talk about what?”

“Nothing much. Are you Timmy’s mother?”

“If it’s any of your business, yes.” She was a brunette in her mid-thirties, slender, pretty enough except for the suspicious scowl she wore and some heavy fatigue lines around her eyes. A tough lady, I thought, all bone and sinew and bubbling juices. Nice at the core, maybe. And maybe not. “And you?” she asked. “Who are you?”

I told her my name and that I was also a guest at the Casa del Rey. “Timmy was sitting here when I came by,” I said, “so I sat down to pass the time of day.” I gave her my best smile. “I’m not weird, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. She looked at the boy and said, “Timmy, what are you doing out here? Why did you disobey me again?”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to come outside for a while, that’s all.”

She went over and took hold of his arm and urged him off the bench. If she had tried to swat him one, I would have interfered; it was none of my business, but I don’t like to see kids abused. But she didn’t hit him and she didn’t manhandle him either. Just hung on to his arm, holding him close to her in a protective way. Timmy didn’t struggle; he wore a vaguely embarrassed look now, as if it were unmanly for me to see his mother treating him this way, like a little kid.

The woman’s eyes were on me again. She said, “What did Timmy say to you?”

“About what?”

“About anything. What were you talking about?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know, that’s why. Timmy tells stories sometimes. I don’t like him telling stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“He makes things up. About... well, about me.”

Timmy said, “I don’t. Honest, I don’t!”

“Yes, you do. Now be quiet.”

I said, “He didn’t say anything about you, Mrs. — What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say. Didn’t Timmy tell you his last name?”

“No, he didn’t.”

She hesitated as if she were going to say something else to me. Instead she turned abruptly and took the boy away toward Bungalow 6. He glanced back just before they disappeared beyond the oleanders; his face was scrunched up, the way a kid’s gets when he’s fighting back tears.

I sat there for a time after they were gone. The little episode with the boy’s mother had left a bad taste in my mouth and I didn’t quite know why. She hadn’t done or said anything that indicated she might be mistreating Timmy, and neither had he. And yet, there was some kind of tension there, something that carried the vague unpleasant smell of fear.

None of my business, I thought again; and nothing I can do about it even if it was. Forget it.

But I couldn’t forget it; it kept worrying around inside my head. I went down by their bungalow, but there wasn’t anything to see — the front windows were shuttered and hedges obscured the entrance — and there wasn’t anything to hear either.

I headed back toward the hotel. Out on the beach, some young people had started a game of volleyball and were making a not unpleasant racket. The gardens were still deserted. Nuts to the convention, I thought. I’ll go for a swim, I’ll have some lunch, then maybe I’ll come back out here and wander around some more. Not because of Timmy and his mother. Just because it’s a nice place to be.

I came around a clump of bamboo, and straight ahead there was open space and I could see most of the east side of the hotel. The tower jutting up on that corner caught my eye: it had open arches on four sides with waist-high railings in them, so that people standing up there could take in the view in all directions. I saw movement inside — one person, maybe two. I couldn’t be sure because of the angle: the inside of the tower was a blend of light and shadow.

Overhead, the droning of two or three approaching Navy planes began to build in volume. I glanced up at them briefly, then looked back at the tower.

And somebody appeared at the rail, came flying over it like a person diving off a high board — a woman dressed in something pink, arms clawing at the air, screaming.

She screamed all the way down, a death cry that was barely audible above the pulsating roar of the planes. Something moved up in the tower, a suggestion of someone there in the shadows peering down. Or maybe it was just an illusion; I couldn’t be sure of that either, because I was already running by then, with that sense of shock something unexpected and frightening always instills in you. There were fifty yards separating me and the hotel when the falling woman hit and the screaming stopped. But even with the noise of the planes I swear I could hear the sound of impact — that melon-splitting sound of bones breaking and tissue ripping that you can never forget once you’ve heard it.

I ran through some shrubs, across a square of lawn, between a couple of palms. A few people on the beach had also seen the woman fall and were just starting to come out of their own frozen moment of shock. I plowed through a bunch of tropical flowers, and there she was, lying broken on her side on a section of cobblestone path. Dead — you could see from a distance that she was dead. Part of her skull had cracked open; there were streamers of bright blood already trailing away from it.

Five paces from her I stopped, panting, feeling sick to my stomach. I had seen a guy who’d jumped from a fifteen-story window once, but it was no worse than this — and she’d only come down four stories. Several people were milling around behind me; somebody yelled, somebody else began to shriek. Overhead, more planes picked up the roar of the ones that had just gone by. All I could do was stand there staring, because I recognized the woman and that made it even worse.

McCone’s friend, the Casa del Rey’s security chief — Elaine Picard.