Double

“None that I know of. Perhaps something came up after I last spoke with her.”

Knowles nodded as if he were filing that away in some mental folder. “Getting back to this meeting you had with Ms. Picard, how did she seem? Was she in good spirits?”

“She was...” Beddoes hesitated and glanced at Ibarcena again. “Lieutenant, are you implying that she killed herself?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Knowles said patiently. “Please answer the question.”

“She was... well, she was distraught,” Beddoes said. “I had the feeling her mind was not on what we were discussing. Isn’t that so, Victor?”

“Oh, yes.” Ibarcena nodded.

“In fact,” Beddoes added, “she has been in quite a state for some time now.”

“What kind of ‘state,’ Mr. Beddoes?” Knowles asked.

“Distracted. Not herself. She seemed worried, depressed.”

“Do you have any idea what might have caused this?”

“None at all. Ms. Picard was not one to confide in her co-workers. Isn’t that so, Victor?”

Ibarcena nodded again. “Ms. Picard kept very much to herself.”

Knowles looked back to where the body lay. The medics and lab crew appeared to have finished and were obviously waiting for him. “I’ll need more detailed statements from the three of you,” he said, “but that can wait, until later. In the meantime, if you’ll stay close by and make yourselves available to us, I’d appreciate it.” He turned and walked over to the technicians.

I glanced at Wolf. He was staring up at the tower again, a puzzled expression on his face.

As I had before, I looked at the tower too, wondering why Elaine had gone up there. She’d been in a meeting, and her panel was due to start momentarily. Unless some security problem had arisen suddenly... But a security problem would have involved other people, and Wolf had said he hadn’t seen anyone, only movement...

I wanted to ask him about that, so I started over to him again. Beddoes and Ibarcena had moved away, and were conferring with one another near the French doors. After a moment, Ibarcena hurried off into the lobby.

From Knowles’s questions, I knew the sheriff would treat this as either an accident or a suicide. And the surface facts definitely pointed that way. But I remembered Elaine from our days at Huston’s; she was as surefooted as they come. One time we’d had a saleswoman who’d just been fired threaten to commit suicide by hurling herself off the roof. Elaine had gone out there, walking on a ledge with precision balance, and talked the woman out of it. She was not the sort to slip and fall.

We’d also talked a good bit about suicide after the incident, and I’d found Elaine strongly opposed to it. She felt it was a reprehensible act, a nasty piece of emotional blackmail that only a coward would inflict on friends and family.

And one thing I knew beyond a doubt: Elaine Picard had been no coward. She might have been worried, as I’d seen. She might even have been distraught, as Beddoes had claimed. But she had definitely not been afraid.

10: “Wolf”

When the sheriffs investigators decided they didn’t need me anymore, and the coroner’s assistants moved in with their body bag, McCone came up and caught my arm and said she wanted to talk to me. She had been hanging around the whole time, listening in on conversations, looking pretty upset.

I suggested the Cantina Sin Nombre, because I needed something alcoholic and it looked as if she did too, and she agreed. We went there and got our drinks — beer for me, a bourbon for her — and sat near the terrace windows, at the same table she and Elaine Picard had occupied yesterday. There wasn’t anybody on the terrace now, and only a few people on the beach. The pleasure boats were still out, but the ocean had a hard brassy look under the noonday sun — not an inviting place to be right now.

McCone took a slug of bourbon, ran a nervous hand over her black hair. “Did it really look to you like Elaine jumped?” she asked.

“Well... she went over the railing in a kind of dive. People don’t fall that way if they trip accidentally.”

“People do if they’ve been pushed.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I heard you tell Lieutenant Knowles you might’ve seen somebody else up there with her.”

“I can’t be sure if I did or not. I wasn’t paying that much attention before she fell — and while she was falling... I didn’t want to but I was watching her.”

“Did you look up at the tower again after she landed?”

I nodded. “But I didn’t see anybody. No movement then at all.”

McCone was silent for a time, her dark eyes fixed and unblinking — turned inward, I thought. At length she said, “Elaine didn’t kill herself, Wolf. It just isn’t possible; she wasn’t the suicidal type.”

“Are you sure of that? How long had it been since you’d seen her?”

“Years. But that doesn’t mean anything. People like Elaine don’t change.”

Some people do change, lose some part of themselves for any one of a hundred reasons, lose their taste for living; but I wasn’t going to argue with her about it. I said, “Maybe there’ll be a note. Would that convince you?”