Double

I had nothing in mind for when I got there; this was just a little scouting expedition, because the incident with Timmy and his mother still bothered me and because I needed something to take my mind off Elaine Picard. Maybe I would have done nothing more than wander by in front of the bungalow, just to find out if there was anything worth seeing or listening to. Or maybe I would have gone up to the door and knocked and made some excuse for showing up again, so I could have another chat with Timmy or his mother or both of them. But I didn’t do either of those things. When I came within sight of the bungalow, there was a maid’s cart on the front walk and somebody was coming past it in quick angry strides. The alcoholic local detective, Jim Lauterbach.

He was wearing a flowered shirt today, and nursing a bad hangover; you could see it in the slack pouchy flesh of his face, the red-veined whites of his eyes. He still smelled of liquor, too — or, more likely, he’d had some hair of the dog to brace himself for the day. He gave me a scowling glance as he passed by, but without recognition: he’d been too drunk last night to remember much of anything that had happened.

What’s he doing here? I wondered. I turned to watch him hurrying off among the tropical greenery. Then I shrugged and went down the path around the maid’s cart.

The front door of Bungalow 6 was standing wide open. Inside, a heavyset black woman in a crisp blue uniform was busily opening windows. There was nobody else in the bungalow that I could see. And no sign of habitation, either — no luggage or personal effects of any kind. I rapped on the door panel, poked my head and shoulders through the opening.

“Excuse me, miss.”

The maid jumped a little, startled. “Another one,” she said when she’d had a look at me. “Well?”

“I’m looking for the woman and her little boy who—”

“What woman? What little boy?”

“The ones staying in this bungalow.”

The maid shook her head in an emphatic way. “What’s the matter with everybody today? I told that other man — ain’t nobody in this bungalow. Just me, here to air it out and get it ready for guests coming tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Nobody staying here,” the maid said. “No woman, no little boy. This here bungalow’s been empty for a week now.”

11: McCone

After I left Wolf, I looked up Elaine’s address in the telephone directory and then headed south on the Silver Strand and crossed over to Chula Vista. All the way there, I kept thinking about Rich, the man who had bothered Elaine in the Cantina Sin Nombre. A boyfriend? A former boyfriend? The “no one worth mentioning” in Elaine’s life? Who?

Wolf had said that Rich was a good bit younger than Elaine. Would she really have become involved with a younger man? I wondered. Elaine was so self-possessed and successful that a younger man would have had to have been someone special to attract her. And a man who roughed up a woman in a bar didn’t sound very special to me.

The house was a ranch-style on Hilltop Drive, not far from downtown Chula Vista. It was an older area of nice homes on reasonably large lots. Elaine’s was shaded by pepper trees, and a line of willows shielded it from its neighbors to the right. A tall redwood fence provided privacy on the left.

The sheriffs department, of course, would check out Elaine’s home eventually, but I doubted they would be here this soon. Still, I drove by slowly, looking for official cars, before I parked a couple of doors down the street. I walked back up there, glancing around to see if there were any nosy neighbors, but saw no one. The street was quiet for a Saturday afternoon; in this heat, probably most of the residents had taken off for the beach.

I went up the walk, tried the front door, and, as I’d expected, found it locked. A little graveled path led around to the side. I followed it to the backyard, where there was a patio with redwood furniture and a thatched structure — called a Tiki Hut — which I remembered as being popular in the early sixties. Glass doors opened onto the patio, the kind whose locks are fairly easy to slip.

As I took out my Mastercard to void the lock, I felt a twinge of conscience. I knew what Wolf would think of this. He was so damned ethical, played everything to the letter of the law. But then Elaine had been my friend, and, from things I’d heard, I suspected Wolf had stepped outside the law when his friend and partner, Eberhardt, had been shot a while back. I was only doing what I had to, and — should he find out, which was doubtful — Wolf would understand. I went to work on the door latch.

In minutes I was standing in a fair-sized dining area off an immaculately clean kitchen. I waited, listening, but all I could hear was a fly buzzing in the greenhouse window over the sink. The heat in the closed-up house was oppressive.