“A personal one.”
“I see.” He stared down at the desktop, drumming his thick fingers on a sheet of computer printout. “I can appreciate why you’re doing this — I cared for Elaine a great deal. If anything, she was the love of my life. And if someone killed her, I want to see him punished. But I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“You may be able to shed light on some of the things that are puzzling me. When did you last see Elaine?”
“Several weeks ago. I’d tried to reach her since then, the last time being Friday night. I went to the Casa del Rey, hoping to talk, but the clerk said she’d already gone home. I doubted his story because her car was still in the lot. Probably she’d asked him to lie for her.”
“Why wouldn’t she want to see you?”
“That is personal.”
I tried another tack. “Where did you meet Elaine?”
“At the Casa del Rey. The party held a fund-raiser there last spring. There was some trouble, and the security people were called in. Elaine was efficient, very take-charge. I appreciate that in a woman, so I asked to see her again.”
“Trouble? What kind?”
“Nothing serious. A bunch of young punks — radicals — setting off fireworks outside the banquet room.”
“And this was the first time you’d seen Elaine?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“I had the impression you’d met her at a club.”
“Well, I took her to the Officers’ Club — both at North Island and Miramar — a number of times. But no, I didn’t meet her there.”
That was not what I’d hoped to hear. “Admiral Nyland, I don’t mean to pry into your personal affairs, but did you ever write Elaine a love note mentioning a club?”
“A love note? My dear young woman, I have better things to do with my time!” He seemed genuinely affronted, as if I’d questioned his manhood.
“Can you think of any club she might have belonged to?”
“Club? What is this about a club?”
“Please, can you think of any?”
He paused. “No.”
“What about in Borrego Springs?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you know of any friend of hers named Darrow? Arthur Darrow?”
“I’ve never heard the name. Would you mind telling me what this is leading to?”
“Apparently, Elaine spent a good deal of time at some club in Borrego Springs, and she knew the Darrow person from there.”
His eyebrows drew together in a frown. “If she did, she never told me about it.” I could tell he was seriously upset now; he didn’t like the idea of Elaine having had a part of her life she had kept back from him. “How do you know all this, Miss McCone?”
“Jim Lauterbach had discovered it. Hadn’t he reported any of this to you?”
“No. He’d reported nothing of significance.”
“Well, he’d uncovered that much.”
“The police didn’t tell me that. By all rights, that information belongs to me.”
“You’ll have to take it up with them. Why did you hire Jim Lauterbach, Admiral Nyland?”
His posture went ramrod stiff.
I added, “Didn’t the police ask you that?”
“They did, and I told them. But I don’t feel the necessity to go into it again. So if you’ll excuse me...”
I’d known men like Nyland all my life — Navy types with rough exteriors, used to having their own way. My father had been like that before he’d retired and mellowed to the point of singing folk ballads. So I put on a downcast, little-girl look and reached out one hand in a supplicating gesture. “Please, sir, Elaine was my friend. I’m awfully upset about what happened to her, and I need to know...”
He looked down at me, his face softening. “I understand. Her death has hit me hard, too. The only way I’ve managed is to carry on with the campaign as if nothing had happened.”
“Then please won’t you tell me why you hired Lauterbach?”
“All right.” He sat again, straightening the computer sheets on the desk and aligning their edges with those of the blotter. “I hired Lauterbach because Elaine wouldn’t marry me and I couldn’t understand her reasons. I’m well off, respected in the community. I was giving her the opportunity to share my life, be my helpmeet. But she repeatedly turned me down.”
“Why, do you think?”
“Because the woman was a damned fool, that’s why.”
“But you didn’t need a private detective to tell you that.”
“Of course not. There had to be a reason for her foolishness, however, and I assumed it was another man. I needed to know who it was, what he was like, in order to talk her out of it.”
“You told Lauterbach you thought Elaine was involved in something bizarre.”
His face lost its softness and became a protective blank. “Where did you hear that?”
“It was in his file, the one I suppose the police have now.”
“No one has a right to see that!”
I was silent.
“By all rights, they should have turned that file over to me. I paid for Lauterbach’s services in advance.”
“What was the bizarre thing, Admiral Nyland?”
He paused, trying to calm himself. “Nothing, really. I was making too much of some little things she said once when we’d both had too much to drink. We won’t discuss it.”
I sat contemplating framed copies of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer on the wall above Nyland’s head. I knew Navy people; they came in as many types as the population as a whole. But with old-school officers like Nyland, the things a great many of them wouldn’t discuss were sex and drugs.
Had Elaine been using drugs? I doubted it. She couldn’t have handled her demanding job if she had been addicted. Well, she could if she’d been using uppers. But Elaine had acted too tired to be availing herself of such measures.
What about sex? What would Nyland have considered bizarre? Homosexuality. But no less an authority than Karyn Sugarman had been certain Elaine’s orientation was heterosexual. So it couldn’t be that either.
“Admiral Nyland—” The young man with the floppy hair stuck his head into the cubicle. “Admiral, we’ve only got half an hour before we have to tape that show for Channel Eight.”
Nyland had been staring at the blotter, and it took a few seconds for him to rouse himself, He looked at the young man as if he had forgotten why he was taping a show.
The aide held up his wrist and pointed to his watch.
Nyland stood up slowly. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” To me, he added, “I’m sorry, Miss McCone, but I must keep to my schedule.”
I got up and followed him across the large room to the door. “You run a tight campaign ship, Admiral.”
He looked at me curiously. “Were you a Navy brat?”
“Yes, sir. My father was a chief. Thirty-year man.”
He looked around the room — at the envelope stuffers and the phone canvassers, and at the red, white, and blue banner. Something seemed to have gone out of him, as if my visit had recalled images of Elaine too vividly. He stared blankly at the banner, then shook his handsome gray head. “Then you know what we’re trying to do here,” he said with an effort. “The godlessness we’re dedicated to fighting.”
“Yessir, I do.”
And although I wouldn’t put it on religious terms, I knew far better than he, for all his years and experience. I’d been out there in the middle of the filth and the crime and the violence, while Henry Nyland had only viewed it from his lofty and protected perch. Unlike him, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to fight it, except on a slow, day-to-day basis. But I did know his way wouldn’t work.