Double

At the bottom of the folder was a plain white business-size envelope. When I opened it, I found half a dozen black-and-white photographs taken with a wide-angle lens. A couple of them were off-center and the rest were not quite in focus, as if they’d been hurriedly snapped; but you could see that all of them were of a big, odd-looking house somewhere in the desert, a sort of free-form thing that blended into the jumble of high, jagged rocks against which it had been built. Parked in front of the house were a number of cars. In one of the photos, more of the desert itself was visible — an open part that contained the usual vegetation and what looked to be the remains of an old spur railroad track, a decaying water tower, and a dilapidated loading platform of some kind. None of the photographs bore any written notations.

I couldn’t find any significance in them. They just weren’t very good or very clear, which made me wonder if maybe there were more, if these were culls from an entire roll of film. If so, the rest weren’t in the folder and they probably weren’t anywhere in the office.

Then again, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt to look.

I put the photos back in the envelope, the envelope back under the papers, the folder back into the briefcase, and the case back inside the kneehole. The two partly open desk drawers didn’t contain any photographs or further information on Elaine Picard; neither did the other two drawers. Nothing of interest at all, unless you considered a rolled pair of socks an interesting thing to keep in a desk drawer.

I shut the last one and turned toward the file cabinets. Maybe there was something enlightening in there. Something on Nancy and Timmy Clark, for instance—

Out in the hallway, a woman screamed.

The cry came again and kept on coming, cutting through the walls like a knife through sponge cake. I wheeled around with my scalp prickling and ran out through the anteroom, yanked the door open, and lumbered into the hall. She was down at the far end near the elevator, backed up against the wall, pointing and yowling. I started to run toward her, but men and women were spilling out of the offices of the Dutton Design & Manufacturing Co. and K. M. Ardry, Divorce Specialist, and they got in my way.

One of the men grabbed the screaming woman, a fortyish secretarial type with glasses hanging on a chain over her flat chest. “What is it, Millie? For God’s sake, what’s happened?”

“In there!” she said, screeching the words. She was still pointing, not at the elevator, as I’d first thought, but at the door to the lavatory. “In there, in there!”

The guy started toward the john, but I got to the door ahead of him and shoved inside. I didn’t see anything wrong at first, not until I got to where I could look into the open stall to one side. There was a dead man inside it, one leg hooked over the toilet and the rest of him wedged back against the wall. One of his eyes was wide open; the other was now a black-edged hole full of dried blood. Shot. Not once, at least four times: there were also bloody holes in his chest, in his neck, in his right arm.

I had finally caught up with Jim Lauterbach. And from the way the body looked, he’d been dead most of the time I had been trying to find him.

23: McCone

At nine-thirty Monday morning I called Elaine’s lawyer, Alan Thorburn. At first he was reluctant even to see me — Elaine’s affairs were confidential, he insisted — but when I mentioned I worked for All Souls, he allowed as how he had gone to school with our tax attorney, Anne-Marie Altman. Could he get back to me in a few minutes? he asked.

I waited, knowing Thorburn was calling Anne-Marie to check me out. I wondered if she would guess I’d stumbled onto an unofficial investigation. Probably; she’d been with the co-op as long as I had and had been watching me do just that for years.

After about fifteen minutes Thorburn called back, sounding considerably more friendly. He could see me at eleven-thirty, he said, and gave me a suite number in one of the newer high-rises downtown.

Since I had time to kill, I went to the kitchen to see if there was any coffee. A couple of cups remained in the percolator, so I poured myself one and sat down in the breakfast nook to think. The house was quiet; my mother was off at Safeway, Pa was out on a job, and Charlene and the kids had gone back to L.A. the previous evening. Joey was at work, his latest attempt at a career being a supervisory position at a McDonald’s. John, as far as I knew, was still asleep.

After I’d left Ibarcena’s apartment late yesterday afternoon, I’d tried to hunt up Beddoes, but with no luck. Either he hadn’t gone home or he wasn’t answering his phone or his door. Then I’d gone back down my list of other people to talk to, but had similar bad fortune. I didn’t know what they did, but the people Elaine had known must have made the most of their Sundays. Finally, at around eight o’clock, I’d taken myself back to my parents’ house.