Double

When I turned around I was looking into the smiling face of somebody I knew, finally: Sharon McCone, one of the women who had come into the profession in the past few years and who also worked out of San Francisco. It was an attractive face, with high cheekbones and a dark complexion and a framing of long black hair that testified to her Shoshone Indian blood. She had a nice figure, too, but she was twenty years younger than me and I didn’t want her to think I was a dirty old man by staring at it. Besides which, she brought out latent paternal feelings in me for some reason. Maybe part of it was that I knew she’d been in some tough scrapes in the past and was lucky to be alive. I’m hardly a male chauvinist, even though my lady, Kerry Wade, accuses me of it sometimes; I think women ought to be and do anything they damned well please and get paid equal money for their efforts. But that didn’t stop me from feeling protective toward McCone.

She waggled her finger at me — the thing she’d poked into my back — and said cheerfully, “Hi, Wolf.”

I tried not to wince. Wolf. She’d got that from a newspaper story that had appeared a few years ago in which some smart-ass yellow journalist had referred to me as “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.” Other people called me that and I got annoyed and told them to cut it out. But with McCone I couldn’t seem to muster up the effort. I just grinned and took it like a nice old papa.

But I was still glad to see her, so my answering smile was genuine. “Sharon McCone,” I said. “Well, this is a surprise.”

“I can say the same.”

“That cheap outfit you work for send you?”

“Not exactly. San Diego is 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.”

All Souls was a legal cooperative she worked for that undertook cases for people who didn’t have much money, some of whom had backgrounds that were questionable at best. It was an aboveboard operation, but that couldn’t make it any more pleasant to work for.

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

“I know, but what better outfit would have me?” She glanced away for a moment, as if someone in the crowd had caught her eye. Then she said, “What about you? I didn’t think you went in for stuff like this.”

“I don’t usually. I let Eberhardt talk me into it.”

She nodded. And then gave me an up-and-down look, as if she’d just realized that there was less of me than the last time we’d seen each other. She said approvingly, “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! No beer at all, even now?”

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

She started to say something else, but a fat woman in a muumuu that looked like a paint-factory explosion got between us. McCone backed up, and somebody bumped into her and spilled the plastic cup of wine she was holding, and somebody else got in my way. Conventions. Crowds — I hated crowds. Somebody was always shoving his way into your space.

McCone called, “Let’s have a drink sometime this weekend,” and I said, “Sure. I’ll be around,” and then two more guys, both of them wearing suits, blocked my view of her and I said the hell with it and went away to find a quiet corner to grumble in.

“Why not go to the convention?” Eberhardt had said when the Society’s flyer came in the mail. “Talk to some other private cops, get a different perspective on things. It’ll be good for you and good for the agency. I can take care of business here for three days.”

“I’d love to go to San Diego,” Kerry had said later, “but you know I can’t get away that weekend. The new Bowzer Bits dog-food commercial is being filmed on Friday and Saturday and I’ve got to be there in case they want any last-minute changes in the promo material. But you go ahead. It’ll do you good to get away for a few days, be among people in the same profession.”

So here I was, among people in the same profession — people who wore hideous muumuus and Bermuda shorts and looked like tourists from Cincinnati and talked about worblegang veeblefetzers. I felt like a guy who had just stepped off a time machine, or maybe into another dimension. I felt like an anachronism. I felt obsolete.

This, I thought, is going to be a lousy weekend.

3: McCone

Elaine Picard was as slender as ever, her sleekly styled dark hair frosted with the lightest touch of gray. She wore an impeccable beige linen suit and tasteful gold jewelry, and, as I remembered, exuded an air of control and confidence. Strangely missing, however, was the impression of bursting health and vitality that she usually conveyed. There were tired lines around her mouth and dark circles under her eyes; she looked almost haggard.

She smiled at me, though, and said, “I’d hoped you’d be here, Sharon. How are you?”

“Fine. And you?”