Double

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.