Double

“One of Lauterbach’s notes indicated Elaine spent time at some club out there. And June Paxton saw her in Borrego Springs with Rich Woodall, remember. There’s another connection too. Does the name Darrow mean anything to you? Arthur Darrow?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“Somebody who lives in Borrego Springs. Somebody who knows Beddoes and who’s connected with the club there. I got his name from a pornographic art dealer named Maxwell Littlejohn.”

“Pornographic art?”

“The high-quality type,” I said, and explained how I’d got Littlejohn’s name and what I’d found out at Priapus Books and Curios. The only thing I omitted was a detailed description of Littlejohn’s stock.

McCone said, “I don’t quite see how pornography fits in. But Beddoes does collect the stuff; I just came from his house and I saw part of his collection.” She paused. “Come to think of it, Karyn Sugarman mentioned his quirk on Saturday morning, in Elaine’s office. I didn’t pay much attention at the time.”

“Did Elaine have any interests along those lines?”

“Not that I know about. She didn’t have any porn in her house.”

“Any of the other people you’ve talked to?”

“No. Dammit, Wolf, this is all so confusing.”

“Yeah. What’ve you turned up?”

“Well, I went to see Elaine’s lawyer, Thorburn, and he showed me the clipping she mentioned in her letter to him. It was about the disappearance of a financier, a man named Roland Deveer, some six weeks ago.”

“What sort of disappearance?”

“The kind that might be deliberate. I looked up Mrs. Deveer and had a talk with her. She thinks her husband deserted her and she hates him for it, so she let me go through his papers. Deveer had the telephone numbers of the Casa del Rey and Beddoes’s home written down on his calendar.”

Now it was my turn for some silent ruminating. At length I said, “Could there be any link between Deveer and the Clarks?”

“I doubt it. The only link seems to be Beddoes and the Casa del Rey.”

“Some kind of operation to get people out of the country, maybe — people who want to vanish for one reason or another.”

“Makes sense that way.”

“Except for one thing. Why would Nancy and Timmy Clark want to disappear?”

“Could be they’re running away,” McCone said. “From something or somebody.”

“Yeah, could be. Did Elaine give her lawyer any details about what she’d found out?”

“No. All her note to Thorburn said was that she was afraid something illegal was going on and she was writing the letter to him to protect herself. She wouldn’t talk about what it was and she wouldn’t mention any names. She wanted more information first, she said.”

“Would she have confided in any of her friends?”

“I don’t think so. She kept pretty much to herself.”

“How about Karyn Sugarman? Was Elaine seeing her professionally?”

“Sugarman says no. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me anything about Elaine’s problems.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I wish I knew what Tom Knowles has found out. Maybe he’s got more than we have and we’re beating our heads against a wall for nothing.”

“Haven’t you been in touch with him?”

“No. He was off yesterday and he’s been out of town all day today.”

“I’ll bet he knows even less than we do,” she said. “As far as I know, the only person he’s talked to so far is Beddoes.”

“You’re probably right.”

“It’s up to us, Wolf. And we’ll get to the bottom of it, too, if we can just find the motive for Elaine’s murder.”

“If she was murdered,” I said.

“She was, I’m sure of it. I’d like to believe it was because she found out about the hotel scam, but I can’t anymore. I just don’t see Beddoes as a murderer. Ibarcena is capable of it, but he says he was with Beddoes when she died, and the way things are between them now, he wouldn’t stick to that story if it wasn’t true.”

“The two of them have some sort of falling-out?”

“A personal one. They were lovers, but Ibarcena’s taken up with somebody else and he and Beddoes had it out over that. I think Beddoes is afraid Ibarcena is going to run off and leave him holding the bag.”

“He could be right.”

“I think so too. Ibarcena was born in Mexico; he could jump over the border, bribe some people here and there, and disappear without much trouble.”

“How’s Beddoes holding up?”

“Not very well. But he still wouldn’t admit anything when I threw Deveer’s name at him, even though it shook him up.” She made a wry chuckling sound. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“What?”

“The three wise monkeys. He’s got an obscene Mexican statuette of the little monos. I was just thinking how ironic that is.”

I said sharply, “What did you just say?”

“That I was thinking how ironic—”

“No, no. You used a word, a Spanish word.”

“Mono?”

“Yeah. What does it mean?”

“It means monkey. Wolf, what—?”

“Sure, that’s it. That’s got to be it.”

“What’s got to be it?”

“I think I know where Nancy and Timmy Clark might be.”

“Where?”

“A town on the Mexican seacoast. Hang on a minute, I want to check the map.”