Double

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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.

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