“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 other 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.
She waggled her finger at me — the thing she’d poked into my back — and said cheerfully, “Hi, Wolf.”
I tried not to wince. Wolf. She’d got that from a newspaper story that had appeared a few years ago in which some smart-ass yellow journalist had referred to me as “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.” Other people called me that and I got annoyed and told them to cut it out. But with McCone I couldn’t seem to muster up the effort. I just grinned and took it like a nice old papa.