Double

I would never forget the night when, leaving the store at ten-thirty, I’d encountered her in the cosmetics department where she’d once been a saleswoman. One of the new clerks was in tears over an enormous cash shortage, and Elaine was sitting beside her on the floor, calmly going through the cash register receipts. The other woman was doing more snuffling and crying than helping, but Elaine was unperturbed. She kept saying in soothing tones, “It’s all right. We’ll fix this if it takes all night. I know you didn’t steal the money.”

That was Elaine; she’d cared deeply for the people around her. And I suspected, in spite of whatever might be troubling her, that the same concern and consideration persisted to this day.

Now she asked me, “Are you planning to come to my panel on hotel security?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Good. I’m sure to be finished with Lloyd by then.”

At the mention of Beddoes, I wanted to ask her if it was true about him being interested in porn, as Sugarman had indicated. Somehow it didn’t fit with his elegant appearance. But time was running short, and we’d have an opportunity to discuss that later. “In the meantime,” I added, “I’ll stroll up to the mezzanine and see what’s happening.”

It was quiet up there, with no one staffing the registration desk and only about a dozen people wandering through the displays in the room behind it. I spotted the good-looking lie-detector salesman and remembered he’d promised me a demonstration, so I went over to his display and he cheerfully consented to hook me up to the polygraph apparatus.

Soon I was seated beside the table, the sensors attached to my arms, watching the steel pens chart my truthfulness. A small crowd gathered as I answered such questions as how long I was in town for, was I married, and would I be interested in dinner at a little seafood restaurant on Coronado.

I lied, saying, “forever,” “yes,” and “no,” and the pens zigzagged all over the chart.

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.