Double

I put the receiver down, hauled the map over, and spread it out on the bed. And there it was, the small town on the Bahia Topolobampo that I’d noticed before: Los Monos. The Monkeys. But not real monkeys; seven-year-old kids aren’t nearly as precise as adults, I should have known that. Just the word, the word in Spanish. Los Monos — “a town on the water with monkeys in it.”

I caught up the receiver again. “Sharon? Got it. It’s a place a couple of hundred miles north of Mazatlan. Los Monos.”

“Are you sure that’s where they are?”

“No. But from what Timmy Clark told me, it’s a pretty good bet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet. Turn the information over to Knowles, I suppose. Maybe he’ll be able to turn up something on who the Clarks are.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Listen, if I need to talk to you again, can I reach you through your folks?”

“Yes. I’ll check in there as often as I can.”

“Okay. And I should be here tonight if you need me.”

We rang off. I opened the guidebook and looked up Los Monos. It was a fishing village not far from the town of Topolobampo, on the bay of the same name — one of the best spots on the Sea of Cortez for billfish, marlin, sailfish, yellowfin tuna, and other big-game fish. There wasn’t much there otherwise to attract tourists: a couple of small hotels, a shrimp cannery, a boatworks, housing and supply stores for the local fishermen, and “a few spacious villas for those from Mexico and the United States who enjoy a combination of privacy and primitive beauty.” The population was under a thousand, which meant that if the Clarks were there, they could be found easily enough.

I got on the horn again and called the sheriffs department, but Knowles still wasn’t in. I left another message — he had to pick up his damn messages sometime — and started to get up and pace while I did some thinking. But the TV, which was still on, caught my eye: it must have been five o’clock because a newscast was just starting. I leaned over to turn up the sound, then sat back down again.

The Lauterbach murder was one of the day’s top stories, at least on this channel. The newscaster made plenty of the fact that Lauterbach was the “second local private eye to die under mysterious circumstances” in as many days; he also made reference to the convention and allowed as how the real world of the private investigator didn’t seem so far removed from the fictional one, after all. But he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know — not until he mentioned a woman from Michigan named Ruth Ferguson, and hinted that there might be a possible link between Lauterbach’s death and “a personal tragedy” she’d recently suffered.

Then I was looking at Ruth Ferguson herself, in an interview with one of the station’s roving reporters: a thin, beautifully dressed, beautifully made-up woman with icy good looks and an unpleasant way of speaking. She said Lauterbach had called her at the Bloomfield Hills home yesterday morning, identifying himself as a San Diego private detective who had once worked for her ex-husband and who had information on the whereabouts of her seven-year-old son: the boy had been kidnapped — probably by his father, she said with heavy bitterness — from his school in the Detroit suburb one week ago. Lauterbach had urged her to fly to San Diego and she had done so, arriving this morning to discover that he’d been murdered. And then a photograph of Ruth Ferguson’s son appeared on the screen, and I saw what Lauterbach had been up to at the Casa del Rey, I saw the false assumption I’d been operating under from the beginning.

The boy in the photograph was Timmy Clark.

27: McCone

I sat in the phone booth I’d called Wolf from, contemplating the graffiti scrawled on its wall. Fuck the devil, it said. And underneath: God is love, and if you don’t believe me, I’ll kill you. At any other time it would have made me smile wryly. Now it just brought up questions about the mentality of the average American — questions I’d just as soon avoid thinking on.

Now that Jim Lauterbach had been murdered, it seemed certain that Elaine had been killed to cover up something. The illegal activities at Casa del Rey? Ibarcena and Beddoes both had an alibi, backed up by their secretary. Beddoes, even disintegrating emotionally as he was, had stuck to the story, which meant it was probably true.

Once again I considered a personal motive, one stemming from a romantic relationship. There was Rich Woodall, of course, and I would want to talk with him again. But more important, there was Henry Nyland, who had hired Lauterbach to investigate Elaine. Nyland was connected with both murders, and my first priority should be to talk to him. I’d been intending to do that anyway.