Double

“She’s a looker, paisan,” he said. “Wait’ll you meet her. Knock your eye out. We’ll all have dinner when you get back — you and Kerry, me and Wanda. Maybe tomorrow night.”

“Not tomorrow night. I don’t know if I’ll be back tomorrow. I may stay over here a day or two.”

“Ah? Don’t tell me you met somebody too?”

“No.”

“So why stay over? You having a good time at the convention in spite of all your grumbling?”

“I’m having a lousy time,” I said. “There’re some things going on around this hotel that I don’t like.”

“Oh, Christ, don’t tell me you’re working?”

“More or less.”

“What does that mean? You got a client?”

“No client. I’m sort of hooked up with Sharon McCone.”

“The female P.I. from here? So that’s it. A looker like Wanda, as I remember. Only Wanda’s a blonde.”

“Don’t go getting ideas. It’s strictly business.”

“What business? What’s going on there that you don’t like?”

I told him: Elaine Picard’s death, the disappearance of Nancy and Timmy Clark, the cover-up. He groaned a little. “Leave it to you. You go off to a convention and in two days you get yourself ass deep in trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble. I’m just poking around a little.”

“You and McCone. What a pair.”

“Eb, do me a favor. Call up one of your pals at the Hall of Justice and run a check on some people for me.”

He sighed. “I might have known. All right, who are they?”

“Private detective named Jim Lauterbach, for starters. That’s L-a-u-t-e-r-b-a-c-h. Originally from Detroit, came to San Diego a while back to take over the Owens Agency here. I need to know if he’s got a clean record or if he might be an angle player.”

“Who else?”

“Lloyd Beddoes and Victor Ibarcena, manager and assistant manager of the Casa del Rey.” I spelled both those names for him too. “Any felony record on either man. Same for Rich Woodall — works in P.R. for the San Diego Zoo.”

“The zoo, huh? That figures.”

“How long you figure it’ll take?”

“Depends on who’s working at the Hall today. Few hours, probably. You want me to call you back?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be here. Why don’t I call you. Or are you and Wanda going to get to know each other some more?”

“You’re jealous,” he said, “that’s what you are. Wait’ll you see her. Man, is she something!”

“Can I call you or not?”

“Sure, call. If there’s no answer, just try back a little later.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You old dog, you.”

I rang off. All right, now what? Well, maybe Lauterbach had come home. I called his number, and the line buzzed and nobody answered. I tried his office number again; no one there, either.

I sat down on the bed and shuffled through the directory and found a listing for Victor Ibarcena in Ocean Beach. Same thing: nobody home.

Sundays, I thought. McCone’s got things to do; everybody’s got things to do except me.

I put in a long-distance call to Kerry’s number in San Francisco. And she wasn’t home. That damn dog-food commercial must be taking more time than she’d thought. Bowzer Bits. For Christ’s sake, who would buy a product called Bowzer Bits? They could film a hundred commercials and the lousy stuff would still sit there on grocers’ shelves gathering mold.

Maybe I ought to try to hunt up Henry Nyland. But McCone had said she was planning to see him. There wasn’t anything to be gained in the two of us stumbling over each other, double-talking to people.

What else, then? Nancy and Timmy Clark — where had Ibarcena taken them yesterday afternoon? If he’d put them on a plane, where to? Mexico? Possible. What was it Timmy had said about the place where his father lived? “A town on the water with monkeys in it.” Well, maybe there was a lead in that.

I went down to the gift shop off the lobby and bought the most comprehensive map of Mexico they had. A rack of travel and guide books stood against one wall, and I rummaged through those and found one on Mexico and Baja California and bought that too. I took the map and the guide into the Cantina Sin Nombre, got a Lite beer, and sat at one of the tables to familiarize myself with the geography south of the border.

Twenty minutes later I knew exactly the same as when I’d started, which was nothing. I concentrated on Baja and on the mainland coast of the Sea of Cortez, because there was plenty of jungle along there and where you had jungle you had monkeys, but that brilliant deduction got me nowhere. There were a lot of towns large and small along both coasts, towns with names like La Paz, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, Culiacan, Los Mochis, Los Monos, Topolobampo — but none of them seemed to have anything worth mentioning to do with simians. Ditto any of the inland towns that were on lakes and rivers.

So much for that idea.

I looked at my watch. Two o’clock — the whole empty afternoon still lay ahead of me. I couldn’t just sit around here doing nothing all day; I’d be a Valium case by sunset.

Charley Valdene, I thought.