Double

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.