Double

“Did you get anything out of him about Elaine?”

“Not much,” she said. “I pretended ignorance of what happened in the bar on Friday, and he didn’t mention it either. He said he wasn’t Elaine’s boyfriend and didn’t see her socially. According to him, they were just casual friends who got acquainted when she adopted an animal at the San Diego Zoo. One of those sponsorship deals — a gorilla. But I think that’s a lie.”

“How come?”

“When I knew Elaine she didn’t like animals. Wouldn’t own a pet, wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

“I can give you another reason Woodall might be lying. One of Elaine’s friends, a woman named June Paxton, told me last night that she saw Elaine and Woodall together in a place called Borrego Springs six weeks ago. Having dinner at some hotel there — the Casa del Zorro.”

McCone gave that some thought. One of the patrol planes from North Island came zooming over. When it was gone and the beach was quiet again she said, “How’d you happen to meet June Paxton?”

I told her. When I started to explain who June Paxton was, she broke in, saying, “I’ve met her. Yesterday morning in Elaine’s office. She seemed like a nice person.”

“I thought so too. She was taking Elaine’s death pretty hard.”

“Did she think it was an accident or what?”

“Suicide. Because Elaine hadn’t been herself recently.”

“She have any idea why?”

“No definite idea. She thinks it was man trouble.”

“Rich Woodall?”

I nodded. “But she said there was another man in Elaine’s life too.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Guy named Henry Nyland. A retired admiral and budding right-wing politico. Seems he’d been trying to get Elaine to marry him and she kept turning him down.”

McCone looked thoughtful again. “I’ve heard of Nyland. He’s running for city council on what amounts to a Moral Majority ticket. God knows why Elaine would get mixed up with somebody like that.”

I said, “I had a little brush with the man on Friday night,” and told her about it. “He seemed to be a pretty unpleasant type.”

“I wonder if he came here to see Elaine,” she said. Then she said, “That love note I found. Nyland must have sent it to her.”

“Sounds likely.”

“It said they met at some club. Probably a health club downtown — the House of Slenderizing and Massage. She had their address in her book.”

Another plane went over. When the sound of it faded, McCone asked, “Did you find out anything else from June Paxton?”

“Not much. Except that one of her and Elaine’s friends is bisexual, if that means anything.”

“Which one?”

“A woman named Karyn Sugarman. She’s a shrink — might have been seeing Elaine professionally.”

McCone looked surprised. “I met her too. I wouldn’t have thought she was the type to go both ways.”

“You never know these days,” I said. “Everybody’s got some kink or other, it seems,” and I found myself thinking again, stupidly, of foot fetishes and McCone’s feet.

“Well, Sugarman is one of the people I’m planning to talk to,” she said. “June Paxton, too. Now I’ll have to add Henry Nyland to the list.” She paused. “What are you going to do?”

“Something I should have done yesterday: call Tom Knowles and tell him about the Clarks. That’ll clear my conscience. Then I think I’ll talk to Lauterbach, see what he knows. After that... we’ll see.”

She stopped walking and put a hand on my arm. “Wolf, we’ve sort of been working together on this and we ought to continue — keep each other informed of what we’re doing and what we find out. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah. But if you do any more breaking and entering, or pull off some other kind of felony, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“You’ll be the last person I tell,” she said, and damned if she didn’t lean up and kiss me on the cheek like a damn daughter.

19: McCone

I hurried back to the hotel lobby feeling faintly embarrassed. What on earth had possessed me to kiss Wolf on the cheek? I am not an overly demonstrative person; it was the sort of thing I would only do to a lover — and Wolf certainly was not that — or to my own father. Well, that must be it. Wolf did have a tendency to fatherize.

The Casa del Rey was humming this morning, with people checking in and out, and all the phone booths were occupied. While I waited, I debated trying to call Elaine’s lawyer, Thorburn, once more, but decided that since he hadn’t returned the message I’d left with his service, he must still be out on his boat. Then I consulted Elaine’s address book and found a listing for Karyn Sugarman but none for Henry Nyland. June Paxton’s name was there, but the address and number had been crossed out and no new ones entered.

A fat woman in a muumuu, whom I’d been seeing off and on since the convention had started, squeezed out of the phone booth nearest me, catching her voluminous garment on the door. I helped her free herself, then slipped inside, leaving the door open so the scent of her heavy perfume would dissipate.