Another five minutes of just sitting was all I could take. I got up and tried to pace, but the anteroom was too small for that. All right, what the hell: I went through the open door into the back half of the office.
Old kneehole desk that looked as if it had come out of a cheap secondhand store. Windows behind it that looked out on Sixth Avenue and a parking lot across the street. Bank of file cabinets, the top drawer of one pulled open. A table with stacks of police-science brochures, F.B.I. flyers, electronics magazines, and bulletins from the National Society of Investigators. A smaller table containing a hot plate, a coffeepot, a jar of coffee, a jar of peanut butter, a package of crackers, a box of sugar, an almost empty fifth of Ten High bourbon, a dirty knife, a dirty coffee cup, a dirty glass with a cigarette butt lying on the bottom like a dead bug, and a sifting of crumbs. The walls were bare except for a framed photostat of Lauterbach’s California license and another of his Michigan license. And that was all there was to see. No electronic equipment, which struck me as a little odd, considering Lauterbach’s apparent fondness for the stuff. But then maybe he kept whatever he had in his trailer or locked in the trunk of his car.
I wandered over to the desk, letting myself feel annoyed at Lauterbach’s absence so I would have an excuse to snoop. The desktop was cluttered but not half as sloppy as the inside of his trailer, if it hadn’t been for the remains of his lunch or breakfast or whatever, the office would have been moderately neat. Telephone, pens and pencils, typing paper, a notepad, part of last Friday’s
Two of the desk drawers were pulled out a little; I went around behind the desk with the idea of opening them a little more, so I could see what they contained. As I bent toward the lower one my foot snagged one leg of the chair, which was pushed up into the kneehole, and scraped the thing back a few inches. Inside the kneehole something fell over with a small plopping sound. I moved the chair the rest of the way out and bent down to peer under there. A briefcase. It had been propped against the inside of the kneehole — a sort of semi-hiding place, I supposed, where a man like Lauterbach would put something large that he didn’t want out in plain sight.
I didn’t move for a couple of seconds, looking at the briefcase and listening. There wasn’t anything to hear except muted traffic sounds from the street and the distant clacking of somebody’s typewriter. So then I dragged the case out and put it on the desk and opened it. The only item inside was a thick manila file folder with a typed name on the tag at its top.
NYLAND, HENRY I.
Well, well, I thought. Sometimes it pays to be as clumsy as I am: you stumble on the damnedest things.
I flipped open the folder with my forefinger. The first thing I saw was a 5” X 7” photograph, in color, clipped to a sheaf of papers. There were two people and a boat in the photo. The boat was the yacht variety, small and sleek with gleaming brightwork. The woman was Elaine Picard, wearing slacks and a tank top and a wind-blown look, smiling at the camera. The man, dressed in white ducks and a blue blazer and a yachting cap, was the same gray-haired military type I’d seen in the hotel parking lot on Friday night — Henry Nyland.
I unclipped the photo and turned it over. There wasn’t anything written on the reverse. I put it back and shuffled through the sheaf of papers. The first few were from the desk notepad or one like it, a lot of hen scratches and what I took to be a personal code; but the gist of it was clear enough: Henry Nyland had hired Lauterbach six weeks ago to investigate Elaine Picard. And he’d done it because he suspected there was another man in her life, and because he was afraid she was involved in “something bizarre.” If he had speculated about what that something might be, Lauterbach hadn’t written it down.
The rest of the papers were carbons of reports he’d sent to Nyland at an address on Coronado, and notes scribbled to himself at various points in his investigation. There wasn’t much in the reports. According to what Lauterbach had told Nyland, Elaine’s behavior had been normal and above reproach; as far as he’d been able to determine, she hadn’t had any clandestine dealings with men.
But the scribbled notes seemed to tell a different story. Most of them were indecipherable — the personal shorthand again — but there were some references to Rich Woodall, who had evidently bothered Elaine while she was eating lunch in a restaurant one day and whose name Lauterbach had got by checking the license number of Woodall’s car through the D.M.V. Other references told me that Elaine regularly spent time at or near Borrego Springs, at some sort of club. On one sheet was a list of names, a few of which had check marks in front of them. I recognized three: Woodall, Lloyd Beddoes, and Karyn Sugarman.
