Undercurrent

Six

Cypress Bay's City Hall was one of the Monterey adobe buildings, freshly whitewashed and quietly official behind a lime-green lawn and the inevitable woodsy shade of pines and black oaks. There was a parking lot off to one side, and I took my car in there and left it and went over to the front of the building. To the right of the brick stairs was a small white picket sign, like the ones you see in national parks; it said Police on it and had an arrow pointing to a wide brick-paved, pine-needled path. The path led me around to a redwood-roofed wing, fronted by a kind of plaza decorated with wooden planters full of ferns. A much larger sign on the whitewashed facing wall read: Cypress Bay Police Department.

I passed through double glass doors and up to a long counter behind which were a modern PBX, a couple of blue-metal filing cabinets, two blue-metal desks, and a fat sergeant with grave brown eyes and jughandle ears. He told me Quartermain was in, checked with him, got an okay for me to see him, and buzzed me through a set of electronically controlled doors on the left. I went down a long corridor, past private offices and interrogation cubicles and file rooms, until I came to a perpendicular hallway that looked as if it ran part of the length of the main City Hall building. At the apex of the T, there was a door with dark blue lettering that said: Office of the Chief of Police.

I entered through there, and a uniformed secretary was banging away on a portable typewriter. In the far wall was a door that had Quartermain's name on it in small blue letters; the secretary told me to go right in.

Quartermain's office was large and comfortable, though more functional than decorative. The carpeting was blue, the walls were white and furbished with framed certificates and a couple of good seascapes; the desk was of flame- swirled walnut, with a glass top, and there were upholstered blue armchairs arranged in front of it and walnut file cases to one side. The only thing that seemed out of place was a very old, dark leather couch against the left-hand wall; but it gave the office a personal touch and told you a little something about Quartermain in the bargain.

He was standing when I knocked and entered. His suit was a loose-fitting oyster-gray today and it made him seem even taller than he was. He thanked me in his soft, sepulchral voice for coming in, and we shook hands this time. I saw then that his eyes were a muted sea-blue, warm or cool depending on the situation-warm now, I thought-and I had the feeling that they were like the shutters on expensive cameras in that they would never miss recording any detail upon which they were focused. Quartermain was every bit the big, shrewd, intelligent cop-but you sensed a gentleness in him, too, an innate fairness; he reminded me a little of Eberhardt, without the falsely sour exterior.

I sat down in one of the armchairs, and Quartermain said, "I've got your statement typed up and ready for your signature." He took a manila folder from one of the four wire baskets on his desk, removed a two-page deposition, and handed it across to me. I read it over and signed it for him and passed it back.

I said then, "I was over to see Judith Paige at the Bay Head Inn a little while ago. She phoned me and asked me to stop by."

"I'll be going over to see her myself shortly, more or less unofficially. How is she this morning?"

"Not bad, not good."

"She took the news pretty hard, from what Kanin, the San Francisco inspector who broke it to her, told me last night. He brought her down on the Monterey plane and she seemed to be bearing up; but when she saw her husband in the hospital morgue she went to pieces, and it was a hell of a thing to see. One of the nurses took her over to the inn-she refused to stay at the hospital-and put her to bed with a sedative."

"I suppose this Kanin questioned her about her whereabouts at the time of Paige's death."

"Of course."

"And she checked out clear?"

"Clear enough for me," Quartermain said. "She was baby-sitting three neighbor kids in her apartment; mother and father went to some lodge affair. The kids were old enough to verify her presence in the apartment at the time of the killing."

"There was never any doubt," I said, "as far as I was concerned. She couldn't kill anyone." I paused. "Have you got a line on the bald man yet-the one I saw with Paige?"

"Not yet. Mrs. Paige says she doesn't know anyone who looks as you described him."

"Yeah, she told me the same thing."

"I'd like you to have a look through our mug files, if you don't mind. I don't suppose there's much chance we'll have a card on the guy, but then again you never know."

"Be glad to," I said, and he led me out and to their Records Room. I spent the next twenty minutes flipping through a not surprisingly small rogues' gallery of men arrested at one time or another in the Cypress Bay area. The bald man was not among them.

Quartermain said, "Well, if we start running into dead ends, I may want you to work with a police artist on a drawing. So far, he's the only definite local link we've got with Paige, and I'd like to know who he is and why the two of them met in the park."

"Fine. Just say the word."

"We'll see how the investigation develops."

We returned to his office and sat down again, and I asked, "Was Paige carrying anything to give you a lead?"

"Nothing. His effects yielded zero."

"Did you find any fingerprints aside from Paige's?"

"Nothing identifiable. There were traces of blood in the bathroom lavatory, which probably means the killer was splashed during the stabbing and took the time to wash some of it off before leaving."

"None of the other motel guests saw anything?"

"If they did, they're not admitting it."

"What about the murder weapon?"

"No sign of it."

"What was it, could they tell?"

"Something long and sharp and fairly thin. Stiletto maybe, or a letter opener of some kind. Along those lines."

"Doesn't sound like you've got much to go on," I said carefully.

"We've got a couple of things." He put his elbows on the desk glass and folded his left fist into his right palm. "I don't suppose I ought to tell you about them, but I gave your Lieutenant Eberhardt a call last night; he was working the four-to-midnight, so I caught him at the Hall of Justice. He has kind words for you, all right."

"Yeah, well, we've been friends for a long time."

"He says you'll cooperate one hundred percent, and you've done that so far. We've got two things to work with on Paige's killing-neither of which have to mean anything, strictly speaking-and maybe you can give me a fresh slant"

"If I can. I appreciate the confidence."

"First of all, we ran Paige's name through R I in Sacramento as a matter of routine, and came up with a positive. He spent four years in San Quentin out of a seven-year sentence, the usual time off for a clean prison record. He was released about five months ago."

I felt my mouth pull tight. "What was the charge?"

"Burglary. He was convicted in Santa Barbara."

"Does Mrs. Paige know about this?"

"No. At least, I don't think so."

"You're not releasing it to the papers?"

"Hell no," Quartermain said. "But there's always the chance they'll pick it up anyway."

I moved uncomfortably in the chair. "Was Paige lone-wolf on this burglary, or did he have accomplices?"

"Lone-wolf. He tried to pop one of those old-fashioned box safes you still find in some of the older companies-a marine equipment outfit, in this case-and a private security patrol picked him up coming out of the building."

"First offense?"

"Two drunk-driving priors, one in San Francisco and one in the Santa Barbara area. Nothing else in California and nothing in his native Pennsylvania. We're still checking his background."

"What's this other thing you've got?"

"This one isn't very pretty either," Quartermain said. His long face seemed even sadder, and when those canted eyelids came down he resembled a kind of elongated Buddha; some other time it might have been comical. Some other time. "There were semen and vaginal secretions on the bed sheets in Paige's cottage. He was with a woman not long before he was killed."

It did not surprise me; I had been waiting for it all along. I lit a cigarette and coughed and stared through the smoke, and I could see her sitting in that saddle chair, curled up in the darkness, grieving-for an ex-convict, a son-of-a-bitching womanizer. Why? Because love is blind, and he was handsome and probably glib, and she was just that little country girl looking for happiness and security and affection. And Paige? Well, you could figure his motivations simply enough as far as their marriage was concerned: if you can't score one way, and you want to score badly enough, you can always come up with a proposal and a ring; then, when you're tired of the innocence and the responsibility-tired enough to want out of the union-you go to the accommodating California divorce courts and dissolve the whole thing with a minimum of difficulty…

I said, "So she came in from the beach while I was watching the front, and they were banging away in there the whole time." The words sounded harsh and bitter.

"It figures that way," Quartermain agreed. He rubbed wearily at his temples. "The thing that we can't know yet is whether she left and then Paige was killed by someone else, or whether she killed him herself."

"If it was somebody else, that rear entrance was a regular goddamned concourse."

"The woman might not have wanted to be seen. Coming in that way would lower the risk. Paige must have called her from the phone in his cottage to let her know which one he was in."

"No clues at all to her, I guess?"

"None. Ashtrays were all clean, and there were no tissues or any other feminine items. If it hadn't been for the bed, we'd never even know she was there."

"I remember seeing half a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a glass on one of the nightstands," I said. "How about another glass?"

"None in the cottage."

"So she didn't drink. Or they shared the same glass, and she had her lipstick scrubbed off. Or she took the damned thing with her when she left."

"Or the killer took it, if it wasn't the woman."

Neither of us cared for further speculation, and more silence built between us. I put fire to another cigarette; the first one was still smoldering in the abalone-shell tray on Quartermain's desk. At length I said, "I don't know if this means anything, but I thought I'd better mention it to you. Did you notice the paperback book in Paige's bag?"

"I noticed it. Why?"

I related my conversation with Judith Paige, and Quartermain looked thoughtful for a time. He said finally, "Well, I admit that it might be pretty odd for Paige to have a book that old if he wasn't a reader or a collector, but I don't see what it could have to do with his death. And there's another thing, too: the book might not have been his."

"It was in his bag."

"Sure, but he had that woman in the cottage. She might have left it."

"From what was found on the sheets," I said, "the two of them weren't doing any damned reading."

"It could have been in her purse, and she could have put the purse on his bag, and it could have fallen out accidentally. That's just one possible explanation."

I thought it over. "It could have happened like that, I guess."

"I examined the book myself," Quartermain said, "after Lieutenant Favor got through taking print smudges off the covers. It's just a book, pretty well beat up but with all the pages intact and no markings on it-nothing underlined or written on the margins, like that. Just a book."

"So you're not holding it as evidence?"

"I don't see any point in it. I'll release it with Paige's effects later today."

"How long will you want Mrs. Paige and me to remain in Cypress Bay?"

"Today at least, in case anything comes up. You can both leave tonight if nothing does-and if we need that drawing of the bald guy, you can work with one of the artists on the San Francisco force."

I nodded. "Can I ask a small favor, then?"

"I guess that would depend on the favor."

"I'd like to have the book."

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't really know," I said. "Maybe because I happen to collect pulp magazines, and this Russell Dancer is an old pulp writer-or maybe because I can't quite put it out of my mind."

"Pulp magazines," Quartermain said. "I used to read those when I was a kid."

"So did I. But I never got over them. In a way, they were the reason I became a cop."

"Well, I guess everybody has to have a hobby." He smiled faintly. "I don't see any reason why you can't have the book. Mrs. Paige isn't going to want it."

"No," I said.

"But you'll keep it available, just in case?"

I said I would, and Quartermain inclined his head and got up on his feet. He was some big guy, all right. He came around his desk, said, "I'll have to go down to the property room," banged my shoulder in a friendly way, and shambled out.

I sat there in the silence, smoking and waiting and trying to control the irrational rage I was building up toward a dead man I had scarcely known at all. So he was a son of a bitch, so he was an ex-con, the world is full of both kinds and both combinations, you can't change the goddamn world. But even though I kept telling myself that, cynically, it was plain fact that Judith Paige had stirred my paternal embers, and I could not get her and this whole affair out of my system. It would take a while, and then there would be ghosts-the way there were ghosts of Erika and Cheryl and some others too…

Quartermain came back with the copy of The Dead and the Dying, and I glanced at it briefly and put it into the pocket of my suit coat. He said, "I'll give you a call at the motel when it's all right for you and Mrs. Paige to return to San Francisco, or if I need you again. In either case, you should hear from me late this afternoon sometime."

"Okay," I said. "Thanks, Chief."

We clasped hands again and I went over to the door. I had just gotten it open when Quartermain said, "What do you think she'll do now? After this thing is finished, I mean?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe she'll go back to Idaho."

"That would be the best thing for her."

"I think so, too. San Francisco is a nice city but it's no place for little girls from Idaho."

"Look, why don't you keep an eye on her for a while- until she goes home? She could use a friend."

"I was planning on it." I looked at him soberly. "You sound as if she made an impression on you, too."

"Yeah," he said in a grave voice. "Yeah, I guess she did."

When I got back to my cottage at the Beachwood, I looked at the four walls briefly and then went out into the private rear garden and sat on one of the wooden picnic chairs they had there, in the shade of a

cone-heavy Bishop pine. I took the copy of The Dead and the Dying out of my coat pocket and turned it over and read the back-cover blurb. It went this way: A LITTLE PEACE AND QUIET…

Johnny Sunderland came home to California from the bloody battlefields of Korea with a game leg and a bellyful of war. All he wanted was a little peace and quiet. What he got was a fast trip to a hell that made Korea look like a Sunday School picnic!

First he met Nora, who drank too much and played too hard-and died too easy. Then there were Bernie and Alf, a couple of little men with big. 45s. Next came Therm, who would do anything for the likes of two hundred grand-including the murder of his wife.

Then Ritter, the sadistic cop who had more on his mind than his job; Hallinan, the horseplayer who lost his one big bet, his nerve, and his life all in one day; and finally, there was Dina, the flaming redhead whose arms promised unlimited passion-or sudden death!

Before he had been home two days, Johnny Sunderland was plunged into a nightmare of murder, treachery, and big-time crime. The

Object of a massive manhunt conducted by the police on one side and several desperate men on the other, Johnny ran and ran hard.

But it wasn't long before he found out that the road he thought would take him to freedom was nothing more than a dead end; and that he was running on a treadmill to oblivion…

Pretty lurid stuff; I wondered about the book itself. I opened it up and looked at the inside blurb, which is usually a short cut of narrative from the novel. The heading there read: DRESSED FIT TO KILL, and the first line was: She came into his room wearing nothing but the smell of her perfume and a. 45 automatic. Well. I turned the page, saw that the copyright date was 1954, and turned another page to

Chapter One.

I read the first five pages and put the book down. None of the fast, wacky flair which had characterized Russell Dancer's pulp stuff in Dime Detective, Detective Tales, Black Mask, Argosy, and the others; he had had this series character, a private eye named Rex Hannigan, and I had found a lot of redeeming features and a kind of cockeyed charm in Hannigan. Johnny Sunderland was pretty much of a wise-cracking ass, war hero and game leg notwithstanding. But there was one thing about the book, and that was its setting; the cover blurb had mentioned only California, but San Francisco was the stated locale.

I remembered then that all of the early Hannigan stories had been set in New York City, but that around 1950 Dancer had moved him out to San Francisco and environs. I thought about that, and I wondered if the reason for the move was because Dancer himself had come west. Then I began to wonder if Dancer had lived in San Francisco, since he had set the later pulp stories and this novel there; and then I began to wonder where Dancer was now, if he was still around and still writing, and if so, where he was.

An idea got itself into my head and kept working away in there. Suppose Russell Dancer-assuming the name was not pseudonymous-lived not in San Francisco but in Cypress Bay or somewhere else on the Monterey Peninsula? Suppose Paige had had the book because, somehow, he knew Dancer? It was a long shot in several different ways, and even if it were possible, it did not have to mean anything in terms of Paige's murder; but it was a nagging little idea, the kind that keeps after you until you do something about it one way or another.

So I got up and went inside and found a telephone directory for the Monterey Peninsula, in the bottom of the nightstand which contained the phone. I opened it up to the D section and ran my finger down the page, and there was a listing for an R. Dancer, on Beach Road, County. That put the idea to work a little harder inside my head. I picked up the phone and dialed the listed number, and after three rings a recorded voice came on and told me the number had been disconnected.

I frowned and closed the directory and looked at the copy of The Dead and the Dying. Then I got up and walked around the room for a while. R. Dancer, I thought, Beach Road, County. Well, all right-you haven't got anything else to do today, and if you sit around here you'll do nothing but think about Judith Paige up in that dark room, grieving, and there's nothing in that, you know there's nothing in that. But there may be something in this R. Dancer, if he is the writer; and if he is, and there isn't any connection with Paige, you can still talk pulps with him; you've always wanted to meet a pulp writer, haven't you? Go on, get out of here.

I got out of there.