Double

But where did that leave the sheriff’s-department investigation into the illegal goings-on at the Casa del Rey? Had Beddoes confessed his part in the escape network in his suicide note? Had Ibarcena been taken into custody or had he cut and run, as McCone had believed he might? I wouldn’t know the answers until I talked to Tom Knowles. And if he didn’t know about the escape network, then I would have to tell him; I couldn’t withhold information like that from the authorities. The tricky part, again, would be finding a way to do it without revealing the whereabouts of Timmy Ferguson and my own peripheral involvement in his kidnapping.

Knotty problem. But there wasn’t any point in worrying about it now; I would just have to see how things stood when I conferred with Knowles. And hope I didn’t make a mistake that cost me my license again: I’d lost it once, through a set of circumstances that weren’t really my fault, and if I lost it a second time I’d never get it back.

Meanwhile, there was McCone. Maybe she knew something about Beddoes’s suicide. I hurried to the telephones and called her parents’ house.

Her mother answered. “Sharon’s not here,” she said. There was both annoyance and concern in her voice. “I don’t know where she is. She didn’t come home last night.”

“Didn’t come home?”

“She said she was going out on a date with some man she met at the convention. A lie-detector salesman. If she’d been hooked up to his machine when she told me that, it would have gone crazy.”

“You mean she lied to you?”

“Right in my face. The salesman called up here last night looking for her. He hadn’t even talked to her since Saturday.”

“Do you have any idea where she might be?”

“No. All I get from that girl is lies and double-talk. She makes me crazy sometimes. What she needs is a husband.”

“When did you last see her, Mrs. McCone?”

“Yesterday morning. Around eleven.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Yes, but I didn’t believe her. More lies and double-talk. ‘I’m going shopping,’ she said. ‘If I go to dinner, I have to have something nice to wear.’ Then she said, ‘I might take a drive out into the desert,’ and off she went.”

Borrego Springs, I thought. “Did she say anything about a man named Arthur Darrow?”

“No.”

“How about Rich Woodall?”

“No. Who are these men?”

“People in the case we’re investigating,” I said. “But don’t worry, Mrs. McCone. She probably got hung up somewhere and couldn’t get back home. Car trouble or something.”

“Then why didn’t she call?”

“Would she usually call in a situation like that?”

“Usually, yes. I’ll say that much for her. She’s not a bad girl, she’s just too inquisitive for her own good.”

So why didn’t she call? I thought.

“Running around playing cops-and-robbers,” Mrs. McCone said. “What kind of life is that for a young woman? Getting shot at, rubbing elbows with criminals and hookers and God knows what other riffraff. She ought to get married, settle down—”

“Thanks, Mrs. McCone,” I said and hung up on her.

I hustled out to the car-rental booths in the main lobby. I had turned in the other clunker when I left for Mexico because I hadn’t known how long I would be down there and I hadn’t figured to need a car anymore when I got back. Well, I needed one now. It was a long way to where Rich Woodall lived. And an even longer way to Borrego Springs.

I was reasonably sure that Woodall had killed Jim Lauterbach, and it was possible that McCone had figured it out too and gone to brace him about it yesterday; she was just headstrong enough to do that without calling in the authorities first. The second possibility was that she’d gone to check out Arthur Darrow and something had happened to her in the desert. Both of those possibilities, coupled with Lloyd Beddoes’s apparent suicide, made me worried and uneasy. There had been too many deaths the past few days, one right after the other — and McCone had her nose poked smack in the middle of them all.

37: McCone

I was aware of turning over on the hard floor of the dungeon a few times, of trying to pillow my head on my arms. Then I began to stir. I thought I had heard a noise, but it must have been part of a dream.

I sat up, stiff all over, and looked at my watch. It had stopped. Stupid of me not to have wound it. I wasn’t hungry anymore, or even very thirsty. Long deprivation had almost made those senses dormant. I stretched my cramped body, then went over and sat by the outside wall — ignoring the dead woman because, after having slept, the craziness that had permitted me to deal with her the night before was gone.

I closed my eyes, trying once more to think of a way out of the dungeon. And then I heard a faint rattling sound, the sound I’d heard before that I’d thought was only part of a dream.