Double

There was still a lot I didn’t understand, however. I lay back on the floor, closing my eyes. For one thing, I didn’t see where Jim Lauterbach’s murder fit. He couldn’t have known that Sugarman had killed Elaine — or could he? Well, maybe. And maybe not. And what about Roland Deveer? And Timmy Ferguson? And Beddoes’s and Ibarcena’s scheme? Were all these things connected with Elaine’s death? Or were they merely confusing side issues?

And then I slept, the heavy sleep of the truly exhausted. Slept on and on, wasting precious time...

36: “Wolf”

The guy who flew me to San Diego from Los Mochis was an American named Bradley. He regaled me with an endless string of ribald stories in a buttery Southern drawl, some of them pretty funny, which helped to ease my terror at being up in his small, cramped, and speedy Beechcraft. But he was a good pilot — a professional who operated a full-time shuttle service — and we didn’t run into any bad weather or other airplanes en route. So it wasn’t a bad trip, all things considered. And he had me back on U.S. soil before noon.

I went through Customs in less than five minutes. Out on the concourse I spotted a bank of public telephones and started in that direction. The first person I wanted to talk to was McCone — to tell her that I’d soft-hearted us out of Ruth Ferguson’s reward money, to find out if she’d learned anything, and to confer with her on my suspicions about Rich Woodall. She might have more information that I could arm myself with when I went to see the San Diego cops, something more concrete that would nail down Woodall as the murderer of Jim Lauterbach; if so, I would have an easier time keeping Timmy and Carlton Ferguson and Nancy Pollard out of it.

But I didn’t get to the telephones immediately. What delayed me was a guy sitting in one of the waiting areas, reading a copy of the San Diego Union that he held wide open in front of him so the front page faced outward. I glanced at it as I went by, the way you do, and one of the larger headlines caught my attention and held it. I stopped and stared at the headline for a couple of seconds. Then I went on a quick hunt for a newspaper-vending machine. When I had my own copy of the Union, I sat down with it to read the story on page 1.

The headline said: HOTEL MANAGER IN MYSTERIOUS SUICIDE. And the story under it began:

The body of Lloyd R. Beddoes, 48, manager of the fashionable Casa del Rey on the Silver Strand, was found in his Point Loma home late last night, an apparent victim of suicide.

An empty bottle of sleeping pills and a suicide note were found nearby. County sheriff’s investigators would not reveal the contents of the note pending the outcome of their investigation.

The mysterious death of Beddoes comes less than one week after Elaine Picard, Casa del Rey’s chief of security, fell to her death from one of the hotel towers. Lieutenant Thomas J. Knowles, the officer in charge of both cases, refused to speculate as to a possible connection between the two...

There wasn’t much in the rest of the story. No mention of Victor Ibarcena; Beddoes’s body had been discovered by a neighbor. The reporter did bring in the shooting of Jim Lauterbach, as “a third unexplained death in the past week,” and hinted that it, too, might be connected to Beddoes’s suicide. He also managed to deepen the mystery and hint at a bizarre angle by mentioning Beddoes’s penchant for erotic art.

I put the paper down. Murder? Maybe; his death was no less suspect, on the basis of the skimpy information given in the news story, than Elaine Picard’s. But I remembered McCone’s assessment of Beddoes, that he knew his world was coming apart and that he seemed to be coming apart with it. That type — weak, afraid of losing everything that mattered to him, afraid of prison — was a prime candidate for self-destruction. The odds were that he’d taken the easy way out.