Double Read online

  By Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller

  Lighthouse

  Beyond the Grave

  Duo

  By Bill Pronzini

  The Snatch

  The Vanished

  Undercurrent

  Blowback

  Labyrinth

  Hoodwink

  Scattershot

  By Marcia Muller

  Dark Star

  There Hangs the Knife

  The Cavalier in White

  The Legend of the Slain Soldiers

  The Tree of Death

  Double

  A Nameless Detective Mystery

  Bill Pronzini

  Marcia Muller

  SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2011

  DOUBLE

  Copyright © 1984 by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781612320861

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  1 McCONE

  2 “WOLF”

  3 McCONE

  4 “WOLF”

  5 McCONE

  6 “WOLF”

  7 McCONE

  8 “WOLF”

  9 McCONE

  10 “WOLF”

  11 McCONE

  12 “WOLF”

  13 McCONE

  14 “WOLF”

  15 McCONE

  16 “WOLF”

  17 McCONE

  18 “WOLF”

  19 McCONE

  20 “WOLF”

  21 McCONE

  22 “WOLF”

  23 McCONE

  24 “WOLF”

  25 McCONE

  26 “WOLF”

  27 McCONE

  28 “WOLF”

  29 McCONE

  30 “WOLF”

  31 McCONE

  32 “WOLF”

  33 McCONE

  34 “WOLF”

  35 McCONE

  36 “WOLF”

  37 McCONE

  38 “WOLF”

  39 McCONE

  40 “WOLF”

  41 McCONE

  42 “WOLF”

  43: McCONE

  44 “WOLF”

  For Larry Herschenfeld, who First suggested this

  “Meeting of the Eyes ”; and for Phyllis Brown,

  Lewis Burger, and the staff of the Grounds for

  Murder Bookstore in San Diego, with thanks for

  their help and encouragement

  1 McCONE

  The Casa del Rey Hotel gleamed white in the afternoon sunlight. With its peaks and gables and round turrets at each corner, it looked like something straight out of a Gothic novel. It was, I thought, as unlikely a setting for a convention of private investigators as I’d ever seen.

  I steered my beat-up red MG around the circular driveway—where I was pointedly ignored by the valet parking attendant—and into the lot at the side. Getting out, I glanced over at the well-tended grounds that stretched toward the ocean. A couple of people were walking across the lawn, probably heading for the little white bungalows that nestled among the tropical gardens, but otherwise it was deserted. The heat was fierce, even for August, and any sensible person would have been at the beach or pool.

  Taking my purse from the convertible, I turned toward the hotel. The Casa del Rey, on the Silver Strand south of Coronado Island, was a San Diego institution, as was its counterpart, the Hotel del Coronado, on the island itself. I’d been coming to the Casa del Rey all my life—first for Easter egg hunts in the formal gardens, then for high-school proms, and finally for the wedding receptions of old friends. For as long as I could remember, it had belonged to a prominent La Jolla family; in fact, during the 1920s, one of them had hanged herself in the east tower—reputedly over a blighted romance—and after that the place had been said to be haunted. Then, two years ago, it had been bought by a Japanese conglomerate. Somehow I doubted any grieving ghost still walked the Casa del Rey’s corridors; the Japanese, with their high-tech approach to business, were too pragmatic to permit that sort of thing.

  Of course, other things had changed too. The hotel and its beautifully landscaped grounds had once stood in splendid isolation. Now it abutted a group of high-rise buildings—apartments or perhaps condominiums—called the Coronado Shores. Once chauffeured limousines had waited in the circular driveway; now tour buses disgorged hordes of passengers. The accepted mode of dress had become less formal, and probably the service was less gracious. Changes—I’d found them everywhere during this visit to San Diego, my old hometown.

  I climbed the wide front steps and went into the chill of the air-conditioned lobby. There were lines at the registration desk, luggage heaped all over, and bellboys in the hotel livery running back and forth. The people didn’t look like conventioneers. Probably they were tourists from one of the buses parked outside. I tried to squeeze past a particularly noisy group with cameras, and when they wouldn’t budge, I shoved a luggage cart aside and went around them. Ahead was a bulletin board telling convention members to go to the mezzanine.

  It was quieter up there, although the buzz of voices rose from the lobby. At the far end, next to a circular staircase that led up to the formerly haunted east tower, was a registration table staffed by the same fussy, officious types who are always behind registration tables. It was backed by a red-and-gold banner that said WELCOME, NATIONAL SOCIETY OF INVESTIGATORS. I got my badge and an information kit—fat and doubtless full of papers describing seminars and panels, lectures and films—and went, as directed, into a large room at the right.

  There was a bar to one side and on the others were manufacturers’ booths that apparently displayed the latest in electronic surveillance equipment. Quite a few people were already milling around and talking, some clutching plastic cups of wine. They ranged in age from the early twenties to the sixties; the men were dressed in everything from formal summer suits to golf clothes; some of the women wore jeans like me, others had on colorful floor-length dresses. It might have been a roomful of life-insurance agents, and I smiled as I looked around for someone I knew, thinking of how this crowd could explode once and for all the stereotype of the private eye.

  I headed for the drink table, listening to snatches of conversation as I went.

  “... which parts of the program are you planning to attend?”

  “I don’t know. They all look awful to me.”

  “What about the seminar on ‘Interpersonal Relationships with Law Enforcement Officers and Government Officials’?”

  “Christ!”

  Personally I agreed. I’d learned all I needed to know about interpersonal relationships with law enforcement officers during a two-year affair with a homicide lieutenant.

  “. . . terrifically high airfare down here. Why didn’t they schedule this thing when the airlines were having that special deal last winter?”

  “. . . brought Marie and the kids along. It’s the closest thing we’ll get to a vacation this year.”

  “. . . ethics, ethics, ethics! Why are all these panels about ethics?”

  I finally reached the bar and got some wine. Sipping it, I continued to scan the room for a familiar face and eventually spotted Elaine Picard, a striking woman in her late forties who had been my supervisor when I worked in security for Huston’s Department Store some ten years ago. I’d heard she’d recently come to Casa del Rey as head of security, and wondered if she’d been instrumental in bringing this convention to the hotel. I began weaving through the crowd toward her, but stopped at the sight of a second familiar figure—this one skulking by a display of wiretapping equipment.

/>   It was a fellow investigator from San Francisco, the one the newspapers had dubbed “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.” He was a big Italian guy in his fifties, sloppy in a comfortable sort of way, and right now he looked far from happy. In fact, he was eyeing a voice recorder as if it might bite him.

  I was delighted to see him there. Besides being the kind of investigator I could look up to, he was a gentle man with a wry sense of humor and a somewhat jaundiced way of looking at the world that was often at odds with an idealism he did his best to hide. We’d met while testifying on the same court case a few years ago, had discovered a common intolerance for abuses of the justice system, and since then we’d kept in touch. A couple of times, I had called him to kick around ideas on a case, and I’d found the price of a few beers would buy me a great deal of expertise.

  Moving up behind him, I stuck my forefinger against his back like a gun. He started and turned around. “Hi, Wolf,” I said, using my nickname for him.

  “Sharon McCone. Well, this is a surprise.”

  “I can say the same.”

  “That cheap outfit you work for send you?”

  “Not exactly.” He was right in his assessment of All Souls, the legal cooperative where I work; they are as tight as they come. “San Diego’s my hometown, and it’s a good chance to visit my family. I paid for the gas driving down, All Souls picked up the registration fee.”

  “You ought to get a better job, Sharon.”

  “I know, but what better outfit would have me?” I glanced over at Elaine Picard. She was talking to a heavyset man in a loud red shirt. “What about you? I didn’t think you went in for stuff like this.”

  His face became even more gloomy. “I don’t usually. I let Eberhardt talk me into it.”

  I nodded. Eberhardt was his partner and had been a cop on the San Francisco homicide detail for many years. I studied my friend. “You’re looking svelte, Wolf.”

  “Yeah. I took off about twenty pounds.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Lots of eggs. Rabbit food. And I gave up beer.”

  “What!” I couldn’t imagine him not drinking beer. It was all he drank, but he was very fond of it. “No beer at all, even now?”

  “Well, just the light stuff. It’s beer-flavored water, but it’s better than none.”

  I wondered how much his lady, Kerry Wade, had had to do with this new image, and was about to ask him when a fat woman in a Hawaiian muumuu pushed between us. I was enveloped in a cloud of her sickly-sweet perfume and moved back, grinning helplessly at Wolf. Someone bumped into me from behind and my wine sloshed over onto my hand. Then two men in business suits began elbowing between me and the fat woman, complaining loudly about the lack of a full bar.

  It seemed hopeless to try to continue the conversation, so I called, “Let’s have a drink sometime this weekend.”

  “Sure. I’ll be around.”

  By the time the men moved, he had been swallowed up in the crowd. I turned and went to find Elaine Picard. On the way I stopped at a couple of tables displaying video equipment, picked up some brochures —wistfully, since All Souls would never spring for that sort of gear—and chatted with an extremely good-looking lie-detector salesman. When Elaine saw me, her face lit up and she waved.

  All in all, it looked like this was going to be a great weekend.

  2 “WOLF”

  The Casa del Rey wasn’t at all what I had expected. With a name like that, it should have had stucco walls and red tile roofs and courtyards full of yucca plants and Spanish mosaic tile. Instead it looked like something you’d find on the English moors: big white Gothicky affair, lots of gingerbread trimming, round open-sided towers poking up on all four corners of the main building, flags flying like medieval pennants. There were also gardens full of palms and tropical flora, an acre of bright green lawn, and some quaint little bungalows for those folk who liked their privacy. Out behind the complex, a silvery strip of beach and the deep dark blue of the ocean glittered under the hot summer sun.

  I took my airport rental car past the expensive-looking Glorietta Bay Marina, diagonally opposite the Casa del Rey on the bay side of the Silver Strand highway, and turned in to the hotel parking area. This is a hell of a place for a convention of private eyes, I thought as I bypassed the valet and parked the thing myself. Makes it seem as if we’re all getting fat off our clients, rolling in big bucks.

  Maybe the rest of them are rolling in big bucks, I thought.

  I managed to work up a pretty good sweat in the walk from the parking lot to the front entrance; it must have been a hundred degrees, and I have never dealt well with heat. But as soon as I stepped inside the plush lobby, the air conditioners froze the sweat and left me feeling chilled. I have never dealt well with air conditioners either.

  At the desk, a clerk who looked as if he’d come out of an Esquire fashion ad took in my shiny suit and my wrinkled shirt and my paisley tie and gave me an Oh-you’re-one-of-those look. But all he said was “You’re with the convention, sir?” I said I was, and he found my reservation, and I signed myself in. But I didn’t get a key until he had satisfied himself that I’d paid for my three days in advance and that my check hadn’t bounced.

  A uniformed bellhop insisted on conducting me and my bag up to my room. It was on the third floor and about the size of a walk-in closet, and it had a nice view of a big building farther down the coast that bore the words HEADQUARTERS OF NAVAL SURFACE FORCE, U.S. PACIFIC FLEET—part of one of the military installations in the area. Obviously this was one of the luxury accommodations reserved for famous detectives like me. I decided to forgo the luxury for the time being and left when the bellhop did. On the way down in the elevator, I asked him where I went to sign up for the convention, and he told me the mezzanine. So that was where I got off.

  The first thing I saw was a big red silk banner that said WELCOME, NATIONAL SOCIETY OF INVESTIGATORS in gold letters. Under it was a registration table, and behind that was a guy wearing a name tag that said he was a Society vice-president from an agency in Kansas City. I told him my name, and he asked me twice to spell it before he got it straight; then he gave me what he called an information packet and a name tag of my own. The badge thing was supposed to be pinned onto your shirt or coat; I hid it in a pocket instead. Then I went where the guy told me, through a doorway into a big room filled with people and booths and an open bar and plenty of noise.

  Most of the people were men, but there were more women than I’d expected, even considering that some of them would be wives and girlfriends. A lot of both sexes looked young, too young to have had much experience as private investigators. And not many of them looked like detectives, either: there wasn’t a trench coat or an underarm bulge in the place. Hawaiian shirts and muumuus, and one guy in a pair of Bermuda shorts. Except for the booths, and the displays of equipment inside them, it might have been a gathering of tourists waiting for a luau.

  I took a deep breath and went in among them. Nobody paid any attention to me. And none of the faces was familiar. I hadn’t been to one of these conventions in fifteen years, but I knew a fair number of people in the business; there should have been somebody around that I recognized. A roomful of strangers. It made me feel old and out of touch and probably out of date.

  The stuff in the booths definitely made me feel out of date. The latest in electronic surveillance equipment, everything from large scanners to the famous martini-olive bug invented by Hal Lipset, San Francisco’s richest P.I. Equipment for home, automobile, and personal use. Voice recorders, video recorders, bugs, wiretaps. Cameras, both conventional and of the spy variety. Home and business computers. Even a lie detector and a guy to demonstrate how it worked. At one of the displays, two earnest types were talking about a “worblegang veeblefetzer,” or something like that, in a language that sounded like English but might have been Serbo-Croatian for all the sense it made to me.

  I stopped at another booth and stared at a jumble of wires and oth
er apparatus that a sign said was “the latest in ultramodern multidirectional voice recorders.” I thought that if I had to learn to operate one of those things in order to conduct my business, I would retire and raise vegetables for a living—and somebody poked something into my back and made me jump a little.

  When I turned around I was looking into the smiling face of somebody I knew, finally: Sharon McCone, one of the women who had come into the profession in the past few years and who also worked out of San Francisco. It was an attractive face, with high cheekbones and a dark complexion and a framing of long black hair that testified to her Shoshone Indian blood. She had a nice figure, too, but she was twenty years younger than me and I didn’t want her to think I was a dirty old man by staring at it. Besides which, she brought out latent paternal feelings in me for some reason. Maybe part of it was that I knew she’d been in some tough scrapes in the past and was lucky to be alive. I’m hardly a male chauvinist, even though my lady, Kerry Wade, accuses me of it sometimes; I think women ought to be and do anything they damned well please and get paid equal money for their efforts. But that didn’t stop me from feeling protective toward McCone.