Soon I was seated beside the table, the sensors attached to my arms, watching the steel pens chart my truthfulness. A small crowd gathered as I answered such questions as how long I was in town for, was I married, and would I be interested in dinner at a little seafood restaurant on Coronado.
I lied, saying, “forever,” “yes,” and “no,” and the pens zigzagged all over the chart.
8: “Wolf”
Saturday morning I went to the movies.
One of the meeting rooms off the mezzanine had been outfitted as a theater: rows of folding chairs, a big portable screen, and a 16-millimeter projector at the rear. I took a chair in the back row near the door, as I used to do at Saturday matinées when I was a kid so I’d have quick access to the snack bar. The room filled up rapidly to capacity; I looked for McCone, but she wasn’t there. Neither was the big drunk in the red shirt, Jim Lauterbach.
They closed the doors right at ten o’clock, and one of the Society’s officers got up and told us what the movie was about. It was about a day in the life of a typical private investigator, which was the title of the thing, so most of us, being trained detectives, could have figured out the essential story line by ourselves. But that didn’t stop the guy from doing a five-minute monologue, four and a half minutes of it boring. Finally he sat down and they shut off the lights and the projector began to grind.
The film was in color; after ten minutes of watching it, that was the only positive thing I’d found to recommend it. The print was sort of fuzzy and the sound was too loud and a little out of sync, so that people’s lips started moving a second or two before you heard them say anything. It was a dramatization, which meant that it had actors; but these were not ordinary actors. No, these were special actors, with special talents — all of them awful. The guy playing the typical investigator whose life this was supposed to be a day in was so bad that when he walked it was in funny little stiff strides, like a toddler with a loaded diaper; and when he spoke it was with great concentration on the proper enunciation of his words, which required exaggerated shaping and reshaping of his mouth, which got to be pretty funny after a while because of the sound being out of sync — as if the actor were chewing up his words for a second or two before spitting them out.
I wanted to laugh, but nobody else was laughing; it was a very well-behaved audience, very serious about all of this crap. I wanted to laugh about the story line too — most of all about that. If this was the life of a typical private detective, I was glad I was an untypical private detective. I would have lasted maybe a week at this guy’s job before I went bonkers.
He worked for a big agency in an unnamed city. He came into the office in the morning, to the accompaniment of some voice-over narration, and had a consultation with his boss on his current assignment: something to do with industrial espionage. The exchange of dialogue bulged with electronics jargon and buzzwords that I didn’t understand. Then he went to his desk, which happened to have a computer terminal on it. But the first thing he did was make a couple of telephone calls, some of each conversation we got to listen in on while the rest was obscured by more voice-over narration. Then he plugged in his computer, or whatever it is you do with the things, and the camera moved in for some nifty close-ups of the screen — orange letters on a black background — and there was a lot more stuff printed there that made no sense to me. Then he got up and left the office—
— and I got up and left the theater. Popeye said it best: I can stands so much, I can’t stands no more.
I went downstairs and through the lobby and outside. It was another hot day, cloudless, windless. The ocean was glass-smooth except where powerboats made clean white slashes across its surface; farther out you could see the shapes of some barren, rocky islets and a naval vessel, probably a destroyer, drifting past. The beach was already crowded, mostly with kids and young adults. I went along a path under some palm trees, to the seawall that adjoined the terrace bar, and ogled some bikini-clad women for a while. Which was a hell of a lot better than ogling a black-and-orange computer screen; even Kerry would have agreed with that.
All that calm blue water looked inviting, too, and I thought that pretty soon I would go upstairs and haul out my trunks with the hibiscus flowers on them and have myself a swim. Back before I took off weight, I might have been leery about exposing my flab to the public eye; but I didn’t look too bad in swim trunks these days. “A fifty-four-year-old Italian god,” Kerry had said to me a while back, kidding the way she does. But what the hell, there were a lot of guys my age who looked worse than I did with their clothes on.
I wandered off through the gardens that paralleled the beach. The bungalows were down that way, half a dozen of them built to resemble thatched-roof English cottages, with little enclosed gardens at the rear and easy beach access. Fronting them were several interconnecting paths that wound among palms, banana trees, stands of bamboo, jacaranda and oleander shrubs, and other kinds of tropical flora that I didn’t recognize; the paths also passed over a couple of little wooden bridges spanning a tiny creek. There were sections of formal gardens, too, that you might not think would blend in with the tropical stuff but did. Plus wooden benches where you could sit and read or contemplate your sins or whatever. Plus a little glade with some picnic tables in it.
There were three or four acres of grounds, and it was cool and kind of soothing among all that greenery. At least it was when one of the Navy patrol planes wasn’t zooming by overhead. I saw some people at one of the bungalows, and a young couple holding hands, but nobody else for a ten-minute stretch. Then I came around a turning in the path, not far from the last and most secluded of the bungalows, Number 6, and there was a kid about seven years old sitting by himself on another of the benches.
He was a big kid, blond and fair-skinned, wearing a pair of Levi’s and a blue cotton pullover. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while; the shaggy look of him made me think of a bear cub. A lost bear cub, at that: he looked kind of lonely and forlorn sitting there, staring at nothing much and picking the bark off a twig.
I went his way. He jumped a little when he saw me, as if he might be afraid of strangers. Or afraid that I was somebody he knew. But then he saw me smiling, and he relaxed and stayed where he was.
“Hi, guy,” I said.
“Hi. Who are you?”
Because kids like nicknames, I said, “You can call me Wolf, if you want.”
“Wolf. That’s a funny name.”
“I think so too. But a lady I know likes to call me that, and you can’t argue with a lady.”
“No,” he said solemnly. “I guess not.”
“What’s your name?”
“Timmy.”
“Are you staying at the hotel, Timmy?”
He looked down at the twig in his hand. Then he pointed toward Bungalow 6 and said, “Over there. But pretty soon I’m going to see my dad.”
“Your dad’s not here with you, huh?”
“No.”
“Just your mom?”
Timmy was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t like my mother,” he said finally.
“No? Why not?”
“She makes me afraid. I don’t want to talk about her.”
“Okay.”
He brightened. “My dad lives in Mexico. Have you ever been there?”