Double

by Bill Pronzini

  I pretended to study a complicated Oriental silk painting. “Does Beddoes come in often?”

  “Oh, yes,” Littlejohn said. “Every week or two.”

  “Does he buy much?”

  “Well, I do consider him one of my best customers. He has a very large collection.”

  “All homosexual and S and M stuff?”

  “For the most part. Just last week I found a marvelous whipping statuette from Germany for him. And before that, a rare first edition of Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal—one of the earliest and best of the homosexual erotic novels, published in 1893 and quite probably written by Oscar Wilde.” Littlejohn beamed again, but there was a glint of avarice in his eyes. He was telling me all this because he thought I had money to spend and that I would be impressed by his ability to satisfy his customers. I was impressed, all right. But not the way he thought.

  I said, “Items like that rare first edition must be pretty expensive.”

  “One must always pay well for the rare and the unusual. Don’t you agree, Mr. Wade?”

  “Sure. Always.”

  “And may I ask what you’ve seen that strikes your fancy?”

  I hesitated. I wanted to ask him some more questions about Beddoes, and about the Darrows of Borrego Springs, but I couldn’t figure a way to do it without arousing his suspicions. And if his suspicions got aroused, he’d be on the phone thirty seconds after I walked out the door, telling Beddoes and the Darrows all about my visit. The smart thing for me to do was to back off and be satisfied, for now, with what I had already learned.

  To make it look as if my hesitation had been over one of his offerings, I reached out and picked up an item at random. “What would this set me back?”

  “Ah,” Littlejohn said. His smile got wider and the gleam in his eyes got brighter. “An excellent choice, sir. A truly excellent choice. That figure is from the third or fourth century B.C., of Mexican origin. Note the simplicity of the design, the superior condition of the terra-cotta. A rare work of art. I know of only three others like it in existence.”

  “How much?”

  “I could let you have it for five thousand.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand dollars. A bargain at that price, Mr. Wade. A bargain.”

  I took a closer look at the thing in my hand. And then put it down in a hurry. “Well, uh, I’ll have to think it over, Mr. Littlejohn. Five thousand might be a little out of my price range.”

  But it wasn’t the price that made me put the figure down so fast. It was what the thing was—for all I knew, a statuette of old Priapus himself. The guy it depicted was naked and grinning, probably because he had the biggest jutting phallus you ever saw. And that, for God’s sake, was what I had been holding it by.

  25 McCONE

  Lloyd Beddoes looked terrible. He sat hunched on the edge of his couch, wearing a blue shirt and pants that he must have slept in. Yesterday afternoon his hair had had the appearance of having been clawed at; now it looked like someone had been working on it with a rake. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes red. I couldn’t decide if he’d been crying or had a bad hangover—or both.

  I’d spent a while longer at the Deveer place, making a thorough search of the office and Deveer’s personal belongings, in the hopes of turning up a more concrete link between the financier and Beddoes, but nothing had materialized. Then I’d called to see if Beddoes was at home and, on hearing his subdued voice, had hung up without speaking and driven to his shingle-and-glass home perched high on a bluff in Point Loma. To my surprise, he’d admitted me without a protest, almost indifferently, and now he was trying to ignore my presence.

  In spite of his wretched appearance, I had an irresistible urge to needle him. “Are you feeling okay, Mr. Beddoes?” I asked, sitting down on the other end of the couch.

  He gave me a baleful sidelong look. “What do you think?”

  “That was a nasty scene yesterday at Victor Ibarcena’s.”

  “No more than I should have expected from the little faggot. But surely you didn’t come here to talk about my emotional life. What is it?”

  I got up and began moving around the room. It was expensively furnished, in nubby brown and white fabrics and good teakwood, and had a panoramic view of the sea. The walls were covered with abstract prints and drawings, and several of the glass-fronted cabinets contained what looked to be valuable curios.

  Beddoes’s eyes followed me slowly, as if the effort hurt. When I didn’t answer, he said, “This is what I get for allowing a convention of private investigators to meet at my hotel. First my head of security dies violently, and then I’m beset by detectives.”

  “Who else besides me?”

  “A big Italian-looking fellow who’s staying at the hotel. I forget his name.”

  Wolf. I pretended ignorance and asked, “Why is he bothering you?”

  Beddoes waved a weary hand. “He seems to be finding fault with our establishment in every way possible. I won’t go into it.”

  I continued to pace around the room. Beddoes was in bad shape, and even a small amount of pressure might make him crack and tell me more than he wished to. I stopped in front of a large ink drawing—sweeping lines that at a distance made no sense. Leaning closer, I examined the patterns they made, then drew back in surprise. It represented three, or maybe four, people engaged in various kinds of sexual activity with various parts of one another’s bodies. Whips, too. And ropes.

  I looked at some of the other drawings. They were definitely interesting—and I supposed a couple of them could have been arousing, if I hadn’t been here for reasons far removed from looking at high-class porn. One thing I found significant was that few were strictly homosexual in content—bearing out young Roger’s comment about the “old switch-hitter.”

  When I looked back at Beddoes, he was staring blankly out the window at the sea. I went to the nearest curio cabinet and checked out the statuettes displayed there. They were of the same ilk as the drawings; the one that held my attention was a Mexican pottery rendition of the classical three monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. These weren’t seeing, hearing, or speaking, but they sure were doing, in every way their little monkey brains could possibly have thought up.

  Beddoes was still looking away from me. I went back to the couch, sat down again, and said, “What about Roland Deveer, Mr. Beddoes?”

  He twitched convulsively, glanced at me, and then covered up by propping his elbows on his knees and lowering his face into his hands. After a moment, he said, “Who?”

  “Roland Deveer, the La Jolla businessman who disappeared six weeks ago.”

  “I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know anything about any disappearance.”

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Beddoes. It was front-page news.”

  “I don’t read the papers.”

  “Mr. Beddoes, Roland Deveer had your phone number, as well as that of the Casa del Rey, in his desk calendar. And above it he’d written the word ‘arrangements.’”

  He rolled his head against his palms and looked at me with one bloodshot eye. “So? Perhaps he was planning a function at the hotel. Needed something catered. You say he was a businessman? Maybe he was arranging an office party.”

  “With you personally? Why wouldn’t he just deal with the catering department?”

  “My management style is very hands-on, Ms. McCone. Our guests and other customers are free to get in touch with me personally, day or night. The staff have all been given instructions about that.”

  Sure, I thought; that’s why Wolf had such an easy time getting hold of you. I said, “Was that true of the Clarks?”

  Now he lifted his head and looked at me with both eyes. “The who?”

  “The Clarks. The woman and little boy who were staying in Bungalow Six—only, according to some of your staff, they weren’t there at »

  Beddoes let out a protracted sigh. “Now I see what this is all about. You’ve been talking to what’s-his-name,
that Italian fellow. He ran into the Clark woman and built up the fact that the clerk had forgotten to register them into a big thing. I tried to explain it, but apparently he—and you—want to create some sort of mystery around it. Just like you want to create a mystery around Elaine Picard’s death.”

  “Isn’t there one?”

  “No! The woman was distraught. She took her own life. It’s unfortunate, but that’s what happened.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yesl”

  “You sound as if you were there.”

  “What?”

  “You sound as if you were in that tower watching her.”

  He stood up, then put his fingers to his temples, pressing hard. “Ms. McCone,” he said, “I was nowhere near the tower. I was in my office with Victor Ibarcena, going over the monthly accounts. I have told this to the sheriffs department. Victor has told them. Our secretary has told them. What more do you need?”

  Obviously they were standing firm on the alibi, in spite of yesterday’s falling-out. I was beginning to wonder if it wasn’t true after all.

  Beddoes went to the window and drew the heavy white draperies against the late-afternoon glare. His movements were slow and pained.

  “Mr. Beddoes, what’s going to happen with you and Victor, after your argument yesterday?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounded pretty final.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  “Will you fire him?”

  He laughed harshly. “I doubt I’ll get the opportunity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I know Victor, he’s already—” Beddoes broke off.

  “Already what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Making plans to run and leave you holding the bag? That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

  He turned slowly, his face reddening. His hands were clenched into fists, and for a moment I thought he was going to rush at me. Then he seemed to deflate. The fists unclenched, and he crossed his arms, clutching each elbow with the opposite hand. He looked at me quietly, his eyes growing bleak and dead, as if some inner resource had finally been depleted. Then he said, “You’d better go, Ms. McCone.”

  “You know, if you went to the sheriff now, you wouldn’t be stuck holding that bag.”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing to go to the sheriff about.”

  “Sooner or later it will all come out about Roland Deveer.”

  “Will you please go!”

  I finally complied. I would get nothing out of him by continuing the pressure. People are funny when they’re at the end of that proverbial rope. Some will break down and tell you everything in a gush of relief; others will cling to their lies because that’s all they have left.

  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 tioned 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.”