Double

“...terrifically high airfare down here. Why didn’t they schedule this thing when the airlines were having that special deal last winter?”

“...brought Marie and the kids along. It’s the closest thing we’ll get to a vacation this year.”

“... ethics, ethics, ethics! Why are all these panels about ethics?”

I finally reached the bar and got some wine. Sipping it, I continued to scan the room for a familiar face and eventually spotted Elaine Picard, a striking woman in her late forties who had been my supervisor when I worked in security for Huston’s Department Store some ten years ago. I’d heard she’d recently come to Casa del Rey as head of security, and wondered if she’d been instrumental in bringing this convention to the hotel. I began weaving through the crowd toward her, but stopped at the sight of a second familiar figure — this one skulking by a display of wiretapping equipment.

It was a fellow investigator from San Francisco, the one the newspapers had dubbed “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.” He was a big Italian guy in his fifties, sloppy in a comfortable sort of way, and right now he looked far from happy. In fact, he was eyeing a voice recorder as if it might bite him.

I was delighted to see him there. Besides being the kind of investigator I could look up to, he was a gentle man with a wry sense of humor and a somewhat jaundiced way of looking at the world that was often at odds with an idealism he did his best to hide. We’d met while testifying on the same court case a few years ago, had discovered a common intolerance for abuses of the justice system, and since then we’d kept in touch. A couple of times, I had called him to kick around ideas on a case, and I’d found the price of a few beers would buy me a great deal of expertise.

Moving up behind him, I stuck my forefinger against his back like a gun. He started and turned around. “Hi, Wolf,” I said, using my nickname for him.

“Sharon McCone. Well, this is a surprise.”

“I can say the same.”

“That cheap outfit you work for send you?”

“Not exactly.” He was right in his assessment of All Souls, the legal cooperative where I work; they are as tight as they come. “San Diego’s my hometown, and it’s a good chance to visit my family. I paid for the gas driving down, All Souls picked up the registration fee.”

“You ought to get a better job, Sharon.”

“I know, but what better outfit would have me?” I glanced over at Elaine Picard. She was talking to a heavyset man in a loud red shirt. “What about you? I didn’t think you went in for stuff like this.”

His face became even more gloomy. “I don’t usually. I let Eberhardt talk me into it.”

I nodded. Eberhardt was his partner and had been a cop on the San Francisco homicide detail for many years. I studied my friend. “You’re looking svelte, Wolf.”

“Yeah. I took off about twenty pounds.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Lots of eggs. Rabbit food. And I gave up beer.”

“What!” I couldn’t imagine him not drinking beer. It was all he drank, but he was very fond of it. “No beer at all, even now?”

“Well, just the light stuff. It’s beer-flavored water, but it’s better than none.”

I wondered how much his lady, Kerry Wade, had had to do with this new image, and was about to ask him when a fat woman in a Hawaiian muumuu pushed between us. I was enveloped in a cloud of her sickly-sweet perfume and moved back, grinning helplessly at Wolf. Someone bumped into me from behind and my wine sloshed over onto my hand. Then two men in business suits began elbowing between me and the fat woman, complaining loudly about the lack of a full bar.

It seemed hopeless to try to continue the conversation, so I called, “Let’s have a drink sometime this weekend.”

“Sure. I’ll be around.”

By the time the men moved, he had been swallowed up in the crowd. I turned and went to find Elaine Picard. On the way I stopped at a couple of tables displaying video equipment, picked up some brochures — wistfully, since All Souls would never spring for that sort of gear — and chatted with an extremely good-looking lie-detector salesman. When Elaine saw me, her face lit up and she waved.

All in all, it looked like this was going to be a great weekend.

2: “Wolf”

The Casa del Rey wasn’t at all what I had expected. With a name like that, it should have had stucco walls and red tile roofs and courtyards full of yucca plants and Spanish mosaic tile. Instead it looked like something you’d find on the English moors: big white Gothicky affair, lots of gingerbread trimming, round open-sided towers poking up on all four corners of the main building, flags flying like medieval pennants. There were also gardens full of palms and tropical flora, an acre of bright green lawn, and some quaint little bungalows for those folk who liked their privacy. Out behind the complex, a silvery strip of beach and the deep dark blue of the ocean glittered under the hot summer sun.