Double

by Bill Pronzini

“Well, I took her to the Officers’ Club—both at North Island and Miramar—a number of times. But no, I didn’t meet her there.”

  That was not what I’d hoped to hear. “Admiral Nyland, I don’t mean to pry into your personal affairs, but did you ever write Elaine a love note mentioning a club?”

  “A love note? My dear young woman, I have better things to do with my time!” He seemed genuinely affronted, as if I’d questioned his manhood.

  “Can you think of any club she might have belonged to?”

  “Club? What is this about a club?”

  “Please, can you think of any?”

  He paused. “No.”

  “What about in Borrego Springs?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Do you know of any friend of hers named Darrow? Arthur Darrow?”

  “I’ve never heard the name. Would you mind telling me what this is leading to?”

  “Apparently, Elaine spent a good deal of time at some club in Borrego Springs, and she knew the Darrow person from there.”

  His eyebrows drew together in a frown. “If she did, she never told me about it.” I could tell he was seriously upset now; he didn’t like the idea of Elaine having had a part of her life she had kept back from him. “How do you know all this, Miss McCone?”

  “Jim Lauterbach had discovered it. Hadn’t he reported any of this to you?”

  “No. He’d reported nothing of significance.”

  “Well, he’d uncovered that much.”

  “The police didn’t tell me that. By all rights, that information belongs to me.”

  “You’ll have to take it up with them. Why did you hire Jim Lauterbach, Admiral Nyland?”

  His posture went ramrod stiff.

  I added, “Didn’t the police ask you that?”

  “They did, and I told them. But I don’t feel the necessity to go into it again. So if you’ll excuse me ...”

  I’d known men like Nyland all my life—Navy types with rough exteriors, used to having their own way. My father had been like that before he’d retired and mellowed to the point of singing folk ballads. So I put on a downcast, little-girl look and reached out one hand in a supplicating gesture. “Please, sir, Elaine was my friend. I’m awfully upset about what happened to her, and I need to know ...”

  He looked down at me, his face softening. “I understand. Her death has hit me hard, too. The only way I’ve managed is to carry on with the campaign as if nothing had happened.”

  “Then please won’t you tell me why you hired Lauterbach?”

  “All right.” He sat again, straightening the computer sheets on the desk and aligning their edges with those of the blotter. “I hired Lauterbach because Elaine wouldn’t marry me and I couldn’t understand her reasons. I’m well off, respected in the community. I was giving her the opportunity to share my life, be my helpmeet. But she repeatedly turned me down.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  “Because the woman was a damned fool, that’s why.”

  “But you didn’t need a private detective to tell you that.”

  “Of course not. There had to be a reason for her foolishness, however, and I assumed it was another man. I needed to know who it was, what he was like, in order to talk her out of it.”

  “You told Lauterbach you thought Elaine was involved in something bizarre.”

  His face lost its softness and became a protective blank. “Where did you hear that?”

  “It was in his file, the one I suppose the police have now.”

  “No one has a right to see that!”

  I was silent.

  “By all rights, they should have turned that file over to me. I paid for Lauterbach’s services in advance.”

  “What was the bizarre thing, Admiral Nyland?”

  He paused, trying to calm himself. “Nothing, really. I was making too much of some little things she said once when we’d both had too much to drink. We won’t discuss it.”

  I sat contemplating framed copies of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer on the wall above Nyland’s head. I knew Navy people; they came in as many types as the population as a whole. But with old-school officers like Nyland, the things a great many of them wouldn’t discuss were sex and drugs.

  Had Elaine been using drugs? I doubted it. She couldn’t have handled her demanding job if she had been addicted. Well, she could if she’d been using uppers. But Elaine had acted too tired to be availing herself of such measures.

  What about sex? What would Nyland have considered bizarre? Homosexuality. But no less an authority than Karyn Sugarman had been certain Elaine’s orientation was heterosexual. So it couldn’t be that either.

  “Admiral Nyland—” The young man with the floppy hair stuck his head into the cubicle. “Admiral, we’ve only got half an hour before we have to tape that show for Channel Eight.”

  Nyland had been staring at the blotter, and it took a few seconds for him to rouse himself, He looked at the young man as if he had forgotten why he was taping a show.

  The aide held up his wrist and pointed to his watch.

  Nyland stood up slowly. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” To me, he added, “I’m sorry, Miss McCone, but I must keep to my schedule.”

  I got up and followed him across the large room to the door. “You run a tight campaign ship, Admiral.”

  He looked at me curiously. “Were you a Navy brat?”

  “Yes, sir. My father was a chief. Thirty-year man.”

  He looked around the room—at the envelope stuffers and the phone canvassers, and at the red, white, and blue banner. Something seemed to have gone out of him, as if my visit had recalled images of Elaine too vividly. He stared blankly at the banner, then shook his handsome gray head. “Then you know what we’re trying to do here,” he said with an effort. “The godlessness we’re dedicated to fighting.”

  “Yessir, I do.”

  And although I wouldn’t put it on religious terms, I knew far better than he, for all his years and experience. I’d been out there in the middle of the filth and the crime and the violence, while Henry Nyland had only viewed it from his lofty and protected perch. Unlike him, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to fight it, except on a slow, day-to-day basis. But I did know his way wouldn’t work.

  28 “WOLF”

  I stared at the television screen, at the woman named Ruth Ferguson. She was talking about her son again, her son Timmy. An unidentified woman in her mid-thirties with short dark hair had enticed him away from his school in Bloomfield Hills—probably someone hired by her ex-husband, she said. The ex-husband was named Carlton Ferguson and he was a design and structural engineer who had divorced her two years ago and then vanished after a bitter custody fight that had left Timmy in her charge. She thought he might have gone to South America, where he’d once spent a year “building bridges or something,” but investigators she herself had hired in the Detroit area after Timmy’s kidnapping had thus far been unable to trace him. She was offering a five-thousand-dollar reward, she said, for information leading to the whereabouts and safe return of her son—money she had been prepared to pay to Jim Lauterbach.

  Then she was gone, and the newscaster said that anyone with any information on either the death of Lauterbach or the whereabouts of Timmy Ferguson should contact the San Diego police or the channel’s newsroom. Then he went on to something else, and I reached over and shut him off.

  I sat there. Five thousand dollars. If I was right about where Timmy was, all I had to do was call the cops or the TV station and the money would be mine—half mine, because McCone was entitled to fifty percent of it. All the investigating we’d done wouldn’t be for free after all. And I’d have done my good deed for the year.

  But I didn’t move. I kept seeing Ruth Ferguson’s beautiful, cold face, kept hearing that voice of hers, emotionless except for the bitter edge, as if, instead of her son, she’d been talking about a piece of rather valuable property that had been stolen from her. She h
adn’t seemed to care much about whether or not Timmy was all right; she hadn’t seemed to care at all that Lauterbach was dead, only that he’d died before he could tell her what he knew. And all I could think of was what Timmy had said to me about his mother—not the woman I knew as Nancy Clark, but his natural mother, Ruth Ferguson.

  I don’t like my mother. She makes me afraid

  Why? I thought. Why does she make him afraid?

  I got up and paced the room for a time. But I needed more space than that, more activity. I took the elevator down to the lobby, went outside, and walked along the edge of the beach.

  Maybe I ought to go talk to Ruth Ferguson, I thought, see what kind of impression she makes in person. But I had no idea where she was staying and I couldn’t get to her through the police or through the TV station without telling them why I wanted to see her. I could try canvassing the hotels in the area by phone, but that was a tall order; and even if I did find her that way, and I saw her and didn’t like her any better face to face than I had on television, she’d know right away that I knew something about Timmy’s disappearance.

  All right, what about the boy’s father? He must have arranged the snatch, just as Ruth Ferguson thought, since she hadn’t mentioned any sort of ransom demand. What kind of father kidnaps his own son? A worried one, maybe, who cares more about the boy than his ex-wife does. Or one just as bitter and cold as she—a bastard who wants only to get back at a woman he hates. For all I knew, Carlton Ferguson could have killed Lauterbach: he might have come to San Diego too, and Lauterbach got in touch with him somehow and tried blackmail, and Ferguson had paid him off with four bullets instead of cash.

  I left the beach and walked up into the gardens, across in front of Bungalow 6. All this speculation ... what the hell good was it? There was no way I could judge what kind of man Ferguson was, because I didn’t know anything about him. And I couldn’t talk to him any more than I could talk to the boy’s mother....

  Why couldn’t I?

  I stopped walking. Fly down to Mexico, confront Ferguson, see what was what, and then make a decision what to do about Timmy. In Ferguson’s case I wouldn’t have to worry about letting on what I knew; I’d want him to know I was onto the truth, so I could gauge his reaction. Another thing: I might be able to get the full story of the operation Beddoes and Ibarcena were running here. Ferguson would know some of the details, at least.

  But hell, it was an off-the-wall idea. I wasn’t certain that Los Monos was where Carlton Ferguson lived, or that that was where Timmy was now; it could easily turn out to be a wild-goose chase—an expensive one. It would cost plenty to get to a semi-isolated place like Topolobampo Bay.

  Stupid idea. Forget it. Call the cops instead, turn it over to them, let them get Timmy back to his mother where he belongs.

  She makes me afraid ...

  Damn it, he’s just a kid. Kids make up things about their parents, kids exaggerate. She’s probably a terrific mother, gives him cake and ice cream and crap like that whenever he wants it.

  But what if she isn’t? What if she really does make him afraid? What if she abuses him in some way?

  The thoughts kept running around inside my head, scrimmaging with each other like a bunch of nervous football players. All the way to Mexico, for Christ’s sake, on a piece of guesswork and an impression of a woman based on a kid’s remark and a one-minute TV interview. I must be losing my grip on sanity even to be considering it. That was probably what McCone would say if I told her about it. You’re nuts, Wolf, she’d say. Five thousand bucks, twenty-five hundred apiece, and you want to maybe throw it away by hopping down to Mexico on a hunch and a prayer. Yeah, you’re nuts, all right.

  I went back through the gardens and into the Cantina Sin Nombre and drank two bottles of Miller Lite. I was still nuts when I was done. So I went upstairs and called McCone’s parents’ house and asked the man who answered—Sharon’s brother, he said—to have her call me as soon as she checked in. Then I rang Room Service and asked them to send me up a sandwich. Then I called two different airlines and found out that it would cost me close to four hundred bucks for a round trip, via Mazatlán, to the closest city with an airport to Topolobampo Bay, a place called Los Mochis; transportation to and from Los Monos and incidental expenses would no doubt bring the final tab to over five hundred.

  But I was still nuts even when I was done talking to the airlines. And I stayed nuts, so that when McCone called a while later, as I was eating my sandwich, I came right out and told her what I was thinking of doing.

  “I think you ought to go, Wolf,” she said. “The kid’s welfare is more important than the reward. And besides, if the father turns out to be a bastard we’ll end up with the five thousand anyway.”

  She was nuts too. We were both nuts.

  Tomorrow morning, on the first available flight, I was going to Mexico—to the town on the water with monkeys in it.

  29 McCONE

  I hung up the receiver of the kitchen wall phone and perched on the edge of the counter to think about what Wolf had found out. Interesting as it was, I couldn’t quite tie it to Elaine’s death. Well, better to let Wolf take care of the Casa del Rey angle while I continued to concentrate on the personal aspects of Elaine’s life.

  And I could rest assured he would take care of it, in his own way. The distraught mother of Timmy dark—no, Timmy Ferguson—was here in town, offering five thousand dollars just for information leading to her son. Wolf had that information, and what was he doing with it? Going to Mexico because he didn’t like the looks of the mother. Because of some chance remark the kid had made about being afraid. And who had approved the plan, told him he should go? Me.

  Five thousand dollars. Wolf had said he would split it with me if he ended up claiming the reward. That would mean we’d be compensated for all this investigative work after all. Five thousand dollars. Twenty-five hundred apiece.

  But I had the feeling we’d never see a cent of it. Money—unlike trouble and hassles and confusion—rarely made its way to my door. And I suspected it was the same with Wolf.

  I got up and looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. That was the reason I’d come back here in the first place—because I couldn’t face another greasy burger or burrito. There was some of Ma’s caraway potato salad, which I ate right out of the storage dish, standing up at the counter.

  Now what? I still didn’t think Beddoes or Ibarcena had killed Elaine. Which left me where I had started, with a more personal motive. I needed to find out about the club in Borrego Springs. And the easiest way to do that was to ask the man who had written Elaine that love note.

  Rich Woodall. If it wasn’t Henry Nyland, then it had to be Woodall.

  I set the empty dish in the sink, grabbed up my purse, and headed out to talk to him.

  I drove past Woodall’s house and parked in the shelter of some palm trees farther down the rutted, unpaved road. As I started back along it, I saw the porch light behind the pyracantha shrubs flash on. Perhaps Woodall was expecting company.

  A couple of seconds later, however, I heard the door slam and footsteps sounded on the path. I stopped and watched as Woodall came through the opening in the hedge and got into a convertible parked in the driveway. I hadn’t paid any attention to the make of the auto on Saturday night, but now I noticed it was one of those old Porsches—red and shiny, with the top down. The car fit with what Karyn Sugarman had said about people who had inadequate personalities cluttering up their lives with expensive toys, and, coupled with what else I’d seen of him, it confirmed her assessment of Woodall.

  He didn’t notice me standing there, because he gunned the car out of the driveway and down the road. I ran back and got into my MG and followed him, leaving my lights off until I turned onto the main road into Lakeside. Probably he had a hot date, or maybe he was just going to a movie, but it was worth pursuing him to make sure.

  The little red car careened along the road as if it were on a racetrack, and eventually r
oared onto Highway 67 and then over to Highway 8, heading toward San Diego. I’ve never trusted Porsche drivers—they tend to be unpredictable and do things they wouldn’t behind the wheel of a Toyota, for instance—so I followed cautiously, several car lengths behind. When we got to the exit for Balboa Park and the Porsche’s signal light flashed, I realized Woodall. was heading for the zoo. Why would he be going to work at this time of night? Maybe one of the animals was sick. No, that wouldn’t concern him—Woodall had said his was a strictly administrative capacity.

  I followed him along a wide street, past a school, and when he turned right into Zoo Place, once again I switched off the MG’s lights. He went along the palm-lined drive and made another abrupt turn directly opposite the zoo’s Warner Administration Center. The car’s brake lights flashed and then went out.

  I stopped on the drive and watched as Woodall crossed to the wood-and-glass building that housed the zoo offices. When he had disappeared into the shadows, I drove on, past where he’d left his car. It was parked in one of the slots reserved for vendors and the media. I coasted along into the vast, empty parking lot and left my car near the perimeter, where it wouldn’t be easily noticed.

  There was a covered walkway leading from the sidewalk to the front door of the administration center. The lobby was dark and there were no lights to indicate Woodall’s presence, but to my left was an iron gate with an entry-code device like a push-button phone mounted beside it. That was probably the way Woodall had gone.

  I went over to the gate and touched it, starting when it opened under the pressure of my hand. In his haste, Woodall had neglected to close it completely. I hesitated, looking through the bars at the jungly courtyard beyond. There was a pond, with a bridge to the left, and directly ahead was an archway leading into the zoo itself. The courtyard was illuminated by a shaft of light coming from one of the windows of the administration center.

  It wasn’t really breaking and entering, I thought, if I walked through an unlocked gate. There was no sign saying to keep out or warning that this gate was for employees only. I cringed mentally, knowing what Wolf would have said to that reasoning. Then I went through the gate.