Double

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.