Double

I took my airport rental car past the expensive-looking Glorietta Bay Marina, diagonally opposite the Casa del Rey on the bay side of the Silver Strand highway, and turned in to the hotel parking area. This is a hell of a place for a convention of private eyes, I thought as I bypassed the valet and parked the thing myself. Makes it seem as if we’re all getting fat off our clients, rolling in big bucks.

Maybe the rest of them are rolling in big bucks, I thought.

I managed to work up a pretty good sweat in the walk from the parking lot to the front entrance; it must have been a hundred degrees, and I have never dealt well with heat. But as soon as I stepped inside the plush lobby, the air conditioners froze the sweat and left me feeling chilled. I have never dealt well with air conditioners either.

At the desk, a clerk who looked as if he’d come out of an Esquire fashion ad took in my shiny suit and my wrinkled shirt and my paisley tie and gave me an Oh-you’re-one-of-those look. But all he said was “You’re with the convention, sir?” I said I was, and he found my reservation, and I signed myself in. But I didn’t get a key until he had satisfied himself that I’d paid for my three days in advance and that my check hadn’t bounced.

A uniformed bellhop insisted on conducting me and my bag up to my room. It was on the third floor and about the size of a walk-in closet, and it had a nice view of a big building farther down the coast that bore the words HEADQUARTERS OF NAVAL SURFACE FORCE, U.S. PACIFIC FLEET — part of one of the military installations in the area. Obviously this was one of the luxury accommodations reserved for famous detectives like me. I decided to forgo the luxury for the time being and left when the bellhop did. On the way down in the elevator, I asked him where I went to sign up for the convention, and he told me the mezzanine. So that was where I got off.

The first thing I saw was a big red silk banner that said WELCOME, NATIONAL SOCIETY OF INVESTIGATORS in gold letters. Under it was a registration table, and behind that was a guy wearing a name tag that said he was a Society vice-president from an agency in Kansas City. I told him my name, and he asked me twice to spell it before he got it straight; then he gave me what he called an information packet and a name tag of my own. The badge thing was supposed to be pinned onto your shirt or coat; I hid it in a pocket instead. Then I went where the guy told me, through a doorway into a big room filled with people and booths and an open bar and plenty of noise.

Most of the people were men, but there were more women than I’d expected, even considering that some of them would be wives and girlfriends. A lot of both sexes looked young, too young to have had much experience as private investigators. And not many of them looked like detectives, either: there wasn’t a trench coat or an underarm bulge in the place. Hawaiian shirts and muumuus, and one guy in a pair of Bermuda shorts. Except for the booths, and the displays of equipment inside them, it might have been a gathering of tourists waiting for a luau.

I took a deep breath and went in among them. Nobody paid any attention to me. And none of the faces was familiar. I hadn’t been to one of these conventions in fifteen years, but I knew a fair number of people in the business; there should have been somebody around that I recognized. A roomful of strangers. It made me feel old and out of touch and probably out of date.

The stuff in the booths definitely made me feel out of date. The latest in electronic surveillance equipment, everything from large scanners to the famous martini-olive bug invented by Hal Lipset, San Francisco’s richest P.I. Equipment for home, automobile, and personal use. Voice recorders, video recorders, bugs, wiretaps. Cameras, both conventional and of the spy variety. Home and business computers. Even a lie detector and a guy to demonstrate how it worked. At one of the displays, two earnest types were talking about a “worblegang veeblefetzer,” or something like that, in a language that sounded like English but might have been Serbo-Croatian for all the sense it made to me.

I stopped at another booth and stared at a jumble of wires and other apparatus that a sign said was “the latest in ultramodern multidirectional voice recorders.” I thought that if I had to learn to operate one of those things in order to conduct my business, I would retire and raise vegetables for a living — and somebody poked something into my back and made me jump a little.