She finished her drink. When she put the glass down, her anger was gone and the look she gave me was softer. “I’d better be going,” she said.
“Going where?”
“My business, okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
She reached over and patted my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be all right. This is just something I have to do. You know how that is, if anybody does.”
“Too damned well,” I said. “Sharon, if you need me for anything...”
“Thank, Wolf. I’ll remember.”
When she was gone, I felt kind of low and empty. In a corner of my mind I could still see Elaine Picard falling, that terrible, futile clawing at the air; still sense her screams like after-echoes just beyond the range of hearing. I debated having another beer, decided against it, and got up to leave.
A bunch of people came in just then, among them Charley Valdene — minus his trench coat and slouch hat, as if the sudden entry of death had put an end to his role-playing. He saw me and detoured in my direction. Watching him approach, I remembered what he’d said to me last night at dinner, jokingly at the time but words that might have been a kind of prophecy: Maybe there’ll be a murder at this convention.
Valdene was subdued. He said, “It’s a hell of a thing — an awful thing. You saw it happen, huh? That must have been a shock.”
“It was,” I said. “Be glad you weren’t there.”
He seemed to want to talk about it, but I didn’t; I put him off until later. “Sure,” he said, “sure, I understand,” and I left him and went out onto the terrace, down onto the white sand beach.
I walked a ways, with the sun hammering down on my head and neck. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just drifting — or so I thought until I noticed the thatched roofs of the bungalows half hidden among the tropical vegetation. And then I found myself thinking again of the little boy, Timmy, who’d said his mother made him afraid; and of the brunette woman with the suspicious frown and the odd reaction to strangers talking to her son. And not long after that, I was back in the gardens and on my way to Bungalow 6.
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.
I’d have to work fast and get out of here before the sheriff’s men arrived. Quickly I went into the living room at the front of the house. It was furnished in light wood and tasteful blue upholstery; the only jarring note was a wall of mirrored squares that probably had already been there when Elaine bought the house. I caught sight of myself behind their tacky gold veining — bedraggled, nervous-looking, and clearly depressed.
So much for your terrific weekend, I thought.
There was a hallway off the living room, probably leading to the bedrooms. I turned, about to go that way, when there was a crashing noise near the front door. Whirling, I got ready to run.
One of the mirrored squares lay on the floor of the little tiled area near the door. The heat, of course, had softened the adhesive that held it to the wall. Smiling weakly, I remembered when my sister Charlene had decided — in a fit of teenaged worldliness — that she had to have the same sort of squares on the ceiling above her bed. My parents, adopting the attitude of letting us live out harmless fantasies, allowed her to do it; my father even helped her affix the squares to the ceiling. The fantasy, which involved a lot of posturing and risque talk from Charlene, lasted until the first hot spell. Then, in the middle of one torrid night, the entire thing had come down, right on Charlene’s rear, scaring hell out of her. The next day, the squares had been dumped unceremoniously in the trash.