Double

“Yes. That was exactly the way it was with Roland and me. And now...”

“Now?”

“Now I don’t know. Something had to be terribly wrong for him to disappear the way he did. And I’m afraid that when it all comes out, it will be left for me to clear it up. But after his betrayal of me, I’m not sure I have the strength. Or the resources.”

“You mean financially?”

“Yes, Ms. McCone, financially. One of the things I’ve discovered in this last month is that Roland closed out all of our joint accounts, and liquidated a number of assets.”

“Is there any logical reason for that? Is he a gambler, for instance?”

“No, Roland was very strongly opposed to any sort of gambling. He felt it brought out man’s latent stupidity.”

“What about foul play? Could he have taken the cash out for some sort of business deal and been murdered by someone who knew he was carrying it?”

“His business arrangements seldom involved cash — and certainly not in that amount.”

“Then he disappeared with a substantial amount of money?”

“Very substantial.”

To a woman of Celia Deveer’s background, I imagined, “very substantial” would be large indeed. “Mrs. Deveer” I said, “did your husband have an office here at home? Somewhere he might keep personal papers?”

“His study, yes. But I’ve been through it, and so have the police.”

“Would you allow me to go through it? It’s possible something in there might have some other significance to me than either to you or the police.”

She hesitated. Her instinct for privacy seemed to be fighting with her anger at her husband. Anger won out. “Yes, Ms. McCone, I believe I will allow that. Come this way.”

We went inside and back across the hall to a door at its far end. Unlike the other doors leading off there, it was closed, as if Celia Deveer were attempting to shut off all reminders of her husband. She opened it and motioned for me to go in.

The room was paneled in dark wood, with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The volumes in them looked old and well-read. On the floor was a worn Oriental carpet, and a large mahogany desk stood in a recess by the windows.

“This was originally my father’s study,” Celia Deveer said. “Roland has not improved the library by so much as one book.”

I went over to the desk and began going through its drawers. The center one yielded the usual paper clips and pens and pencils. The top one on the right contained stationery, some printed with the address in La Jolla and some with Deveer Enterprises’ address downtown. In the drawer below that, I found a handgun — a .22, fully loaded and well oiled. I held it up questioningly.

Mrs. Deveer said, “Roland had a terrible fear of burglars, even though the house is wired with an alarm system.”

I nodded and put the gun back in the drawer. The other drawers held supplies and back copies of annual reports and other business publications.

On the desktop was a blotter, an onyx pen-and-pencil holder, and the standard desk calendar you’d find in any office. There was nothing written on the blotter, or hidden under it. Finally I started through the calendar, beginning a few months ago, when Mrs. Deveer said he had first mentioned possible financial problems to her, and continuing up to the day he disappeared. It contained the usual notations of social and business appointments, including the meeting he’d supposedly left to attend the afternoon he’d last been seen.

There was nothing I could see that was out of the ordinary in the calendar or the desk. I planned to continue searching, of course, taking out each drawer to see if anything was taped to its bottom or had fallen behind it, shaking out the pages of each book on the shelves. But I doubted I’d find anything of significance.

I kept flipping through the calendar, looking at appointments Deveer had made and never kept. There were plenty, but that didn’t mean anything; he could have put them down to make his disappearance seem unintentional. But there, on September 18th, was a notation that did mean something to me: the familiar phone number of the Casa del Rey. Above it was the word “arrangements.” And below it was another number with a familiar look.

Reaching in my bag for Elaine’s address book, I said, “Mrs. Deveer, is the date September eighteenth significant to your husband in any way?”

“Yes, it’s his birthday.”

His birthday. What better place to note something down where he could easily find it but where others would not be likely to look?

I took out the address book, looked up Lloyd Beddoes’s home phone number, and compared it with the second one on the calendar. They matched.

24: “Wolf”