“Elaine was probably horrified by what she’d done with you. That would partly explain her very noticeable depression. And she also must have realized she’d gotten in over her head with Les Club. After all, Rich Woodall had started bothering her. Her life was no longer contained, compartmentalized.
“So what did she do about it? I think she probably quit coming here. I found all those slinky, sexy clothes exiled in the back of her closet, the handcuffs and thongs stuffed in a bottom drawer, your paddle tossed in with her mementos. I think she decided to get out while she still could. But she found she couldn’t get away from it — not even at work. After all, her boss was a member of Les Club. I bet she got her job because she met him here. And he knew he could control his chief of security — because he had something on her.”
My voice was growing hoarse from thirst and talking too much. But I kept on; I had to work this out.
“Okay, when Elaine quit coming here, what did you do? Probably not much at first. Continued to see her. Lunches, committee meetings for the Women’s Forum. Little dinners. You thought you could win her over. You thought she’d be better off with you. Remember what you said to me about Elaine’s sexual orientation? That she wasn’t bisexual or lesbian and perhaps that was her problem. So you decided to court her. And when she still resisted, you wrote that note.
“And she crumpled it and tossed it away. She rejected you and your offer of love. When she didn’t respond to the note, you tried to talk to her. I think you’d been trying for some days before she died. You must have been frantic — you knew you were going to lose her.”
I knew I was going a little crazy, holding a conversation with a dead woman, but it seemed so normal to be confronting her with it all.
“I think you gave it one last try, Karyn, that morning after the breakfast meeting in her office at Casa del Rey. Remember how you told her you were going to escort June to her car so she’d leave Lloyd Beddoes alone? And on your way out to the door, you looked back and said — ever so meaningfully — ‘And remember — we have to talk about that other matter.’ And Elaine nodded — ever so wearily — and said, ‘Yes, I know.’ ”
I leaned back, propping myself on my elbows, tired of sitting erect.
“There may be no way I can prove it, Karyn, but I think you came back to the office after you escorted June to her car. You waited until Elaine came out of the meeting with Beddoes and Ibarcena. And you had that talk. Why didn’t you have it in the office? Because there were too many people around, and besides Elaine was due to chair a panel at the convention soon. So you went upstairs and into the tower, where it was secluded and quiet.
“Did you go up there with the intention of killing her if she rejected you? I don’t think so. I think going there might even have been her suggestion — just a quiet, out-of-the-way place. Did you beg her? Plead with her? I guess you must have. And once again she turned you down.
“And that was it for Elaine Picard. Jealousy and rage made you shove her, and over the rail she went.”
I paused. The words rang with such finality in the empty room.
“In a way,” I went on after a moment, “it was also the end for you. Because somebody figured it out just as I have. Somebody who belonged to Les Club, probably. Somebody who cared for Elaine. He got you out here, and he killed you. I won’t know who or why or how until I get out of here and find him.”
If I get out of here, my inner voice said.
“When I get out of here,” I said.
There was still a lot I didn’t understand, however. I lay back on the floor, closing my eyes. For one thing, I didn’t see where Jim Lauterbach’s murder fit. He couldn’t have known that Sugarman had killed Elaine — or could he? Well, maybe. And maybe not. And what about Roland Deveer? And Timmy Ferguson? And Beddoes’s and Ibarcena’s scheme? Were all these things connected with Elaine’s death? Or were they merely confusing side issues?
And then I slept, the heavy sleep of the truly exhausted. Slept on and on, wasting precious time...
36: “Wolf”
The guy who flew me to San Diego from Los Mochis was an American named Bradley. He regaled me with an endless string of ribald stories in a buttery Southern drawl, some of them pretty funny, which helped to ease my terror at being up in his small, cramped, and speedy Beechcraft. But he was a good pilot — a professional who operated a full-time shuttle service — and we didn’t run into any bad weather or other airplanes en route. So it wasn’t a bad trip, all things considered. And he had me back on U.S. soil before noon.
I went through Customs in less than five minutes. Out on the concourse I spotted a bank of public telephones and started in that direction. The first person I wanted to talk to was McCone — to tell her that I’d soft-hearted us out of Ruth Ferguson’s reward money, to find out if she’d learned anything, and to confer with her on my suspicions about Rich Woodall. She might have more information that I could arm myself with when I went to see the San Diego cops, something more concrete that would nail down Woodall as the murderer of Jim Lauterbach; if so, I would have an easier time keeping Timmy and Carlton Ferguson and Nancy Pollard out of it.
But I didn’t get to the telephones immediately. What delayed me was a guy sitting in one of the waiting areas, reading a copy of the San Diego Union that he held wide open in front of him so the front page faced outward. I glanced at it as I went by, the way you do, and one of the larger headlines caught my attention and held it. I stopped and stared at the headline for a couple of seconds. Then I went on a quick hunt for a newspaper-vending machine. When I had my own copy of the Union, I sat down with it to read the story on page 1.
The headline said: HOTEL MANAGER IN MYSTERIOUS SUICIDE. And the story under it began:
The body of Lloyd R. Beddoes, 48, manager of the fashionable Casa del Rey on the Silver Strand, was found in his Point Loma home late last night, an apparent victim of suicide.
An empty bottle of sleeping pills and a suicide note were found nearby. County sheriff’s investigators would not reveal the contents of the note pending the outcome of their investigation.
The mysterious death of Beddoes comes less than one week after Elaine Picard, Casa del Rey’s chief of security, fell to her death from one of the hotel towers. Lieutenant Thomas J. Knowles, the officer in charge of both cases, refused to speculate as to a possible connection between the two...
There wasn’t much in the rest of the story. No mention of Victor Ibarcena; Beddoes’s body had been discovered by a neighbor. The reporter did bring in the shooting of Jim Lauterbach, as “a third unexplained death in the past week,” and hinted that it, too, might be connected to Beddoes’s suicide. He also managed to deepen the mystery and hint at a bizarre angle by mentioning Beddoes’s penchant for erotic art.
I put the paper down. Murder? Maybe; his death was no less suspect, on the basis of the skimpy information given in the news story, than Elaine Picard’s. But I remembered McCone’s assessment of Beddoes, that he knew his world was coming apart and that he seemed to be coming apart with it. That type — weak, afraid of losing everything that mattered to him, afraid of prison — was a prime candidate for self-destruction. The odds were that he’d taken the easy way out.