More Oddments

One of Those Cases (A “Nameless Detective” Story)

It was one of those cases you take on when you’re on your uppers. You want to turn it down — it’s an old story, a sordid one, a sad one — but you know you can’t afford to. So you look into tear-filmed eyes, and you sigh, and you say yes.

Her name was Judith Paige. She was in her late twenties, attractive in a quiet, shy sort of way. She had pale blond hair, china-blue eyes, and the kind of translucent white skin that seems brittle and makes you think of opaque and finely blown glass. Until the previous year, she had lived in a small town in Idaho and had come to San Francisco “to search for some meaning in life.” Which probably meant that she had come looking for a husband.

And she’d found one, a salesman named Walter Paige. They had been married six weeks now, and it was something less than the idyllic union she had expected. It wasn’t that Paige abused her in any way, or was a drinker or a gambler; it was just that, in the past month, he’d taken to leaving her alone in the evenings. He told her it was business — he worked for a real estate firm out near the Cow Palace — and when she pressed him for details he grew short-tempered. He was working on a couple of large prospects, he said, that would set them up for the future.

She figured he was working on another woman.

Like I said; an old, sordid, sad story. And one of those cases.

She wanted me to follow him for a few days, either to confirm or deny her suspicions. That was all. You don’t need to prove adultery, or much of anything else, to obtain a divorce in the state of California these days, so I would not be required to — testify in any civil proceedings. It was just that she had to know, one way or the other — the tears starting then — and if she were right, she wanted to dissolve the marriage and go back to Idaho. She had a little money saved and could pay my standard rates; and she was sure I was honest and capable, which meant that she hoped I wouldn’t take advantage of her in any way.

I sat there behind my desk feeling old and tired and cynical. It was a nice day outside, and I had the window open a little; the breeze off the Bay was cool and fresh, but the air I was pulling into my lungs tasted sour somehow. I lit a cigarette. And then took one of the contract forms out of the bottom drawer and slid it over for her to examine.

When she had, without much interest, I drew it back and filled it out and had her sign it. Then I said, “All right, Mrs. Paige. What time does your husband come home from work?”

“Usually about six o’clock.”

“Does he use public transportation or drive?”

“He drives.”

“What kind of car?”

“A dark-blue VW.”

“License number?”

“It has one of those personalized plates. WALLY P.”

“Uh-huh. What time does he leave again when he goes out?”

“Right after supper,” Mrs. Paige said. “Seven-thirty or so.”

“He comes back at what time?”

“Around midnight.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Four or five times a week, lately.”

“Any particular nights?”

“No, not really.”

“Saturdays and Sundays?”

“Saturdays, sometimes. Not Sundays, though. He... he always spends that day with me.”

Never on Sunday, I thought sourly. I said, “Which real estate company does he work for?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know. Walter is very closemouthed about his job.”

“He’s never told you where he works?”

“Well, he did once, but I can’t remember it. Is it important?”

“Probably not.” I put down the pencil I had been using to take notes. “I think I have everything I need for now, Mrs. Paige. I’ll be on the job tonight if your husband goes out.”

“You won’t let him know you’re following him, will you? I mean, if I’m wrong and he’s, well, just working, I wouldn’t want him to know what I’ve done.”

“I’ll be as careful as I can.”

“Thank you,” she said, and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief and cleared her throat. “Will you call me as soon as you find out anything?”

“Right away.”

“I’ll give you a check. Will fifty dollars be all right?”

“Fine.”

I looked away while she made out the check, out through the window. Sunlight and bright blue sky softened the look of the ugly, crumbling buildings in the Tenderloin. Even the panhandlers and dope pushers seemed to be enjoying the weather; they were out in droves this afternoon.

A nice day for a lot of people, all right. But not for Judith Paige and not for me.

At seven o’clock I was sitting behind the wheel of my car, parked four buildings down and on the opposite side of the street from the stucco-fronted apartment house the Paiges lived in. The dark-blue VW with the WALLY P license plate was thirty feet away, facing in the same direction.

This was a fairly well-to-do neighborhood in the Parkside district; kids were out playing, husbands and wives were still arriving home from work. If you’re staked out in an area like that, you run a risk by sitting around in a parked car for any length of time. People get suspicious, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a couple of patrol cops pulling up and asking questions. But if you don’t stay more than an hour, and if you keep glancing at your watch and show signs of increasing annoyance, you can get away with it; the residents tend to think you’re waiting for somebody and leave you alone. I expected to be here less than an hour, so I wasn’t worried.

I went through the watch-checking-and-annoyance routine, smoked a couple of cigarettes and glanced through a 1949 issue of FBI Detective that I’d brought along to help pass the time. And at twenty of eight, Paige came out and walked straight to the VW. The sun had gone down by then, but there was still enough reddish twilight to let me see that he was a tall, slender guy dressed in a blue suit, with one of those toothbrush mustaches that looked from a distance like a caterpillar humped on his upper lip.

I started my car just as he swung out, and I let him have a half-block lead before I went after him. He drove without hurry, observing the speed limits. Whenever possible, I put another car between us — and on the four-lane streets^-like Ocean Avenue, I used the lane opposite to the one he was in. You pick up ways and means like that over the years, but if you’re following a pro, or somebody alert to the possibility of a tail, there’s not much you can do; the subject will spot you nine times out of ten.

Paige was not expecting a tail, though, and I had no trouble staying with him. We picked up Highway 280 near the City College, followed it to where it connects with the Bayshore Freeway southbound. Fifteen minutes later, Paige exited in South San Francisco and went up Grand Avenue and finally turned into the parking lot of a big shopping center. He parked near a large cut-rate liquor store. I put my car into a slot in the next row, watched him get out and enter the liquor store. Five minutes later, he came back out with a bottle of some kind in a small paper sack and got back into his car. But he didn’t go anywhere — he just sat there.

I figured it this way: Paige was playing around, all right, and the woman he was playing with was probably married as well, which necessitated a neutral meeting ground. He was waiting for her now, and when she arrived they would go to a motel or maybe to a little love nest they had set up somewhere — and that would be it as far as I was concerned. I’d get the license number of the woman’s car when she showed, then follow her and Paige to wherever it was they had their assignations. Then I would call Mrs. Paige and listen to her cry; they always cry when you tell them, even though they expect the worst. And then I would go home and try to sleep.

So we sat there in the lot, Paige and I, waiting. It got to be nine o’clock; most of the stores were closing for the night, and there were not nearly as many cars as there had been earlier. I thought that if the lot became too empty, I would have to move out to the street somewhere; I did not want Paige noticing me, questioning the presence of another guy waiting alone as he was doing.

At nine-thirty, the woman still hadn’t shown up. Everything was closed in the center except the liquor store and a bowling alley over at the far end. I had about decided it was time for me to move when Paige abruptly got out of the VW and headed toward the bowling alley.

He’s going to call her, I thought. He wants to know why she stood him up tonight.

I let him get inside the building before I followed. League bowlers were occupying all twenty lanes in there; after the relative silence of the past hour, the noise was deafening. I went down by the coffee shop, where there was a phone booth, but I didn’t see Paige anywhere. I came back and went into the bar. He was there, in another booth, talking animatedly on the phone.

I found a place to sit at the bar where I could see the booth in the back-bar mirror and ordered a beer. It was close to ten minutes before Paige finished his conversation. He stopped at the bar long enough to toss off a shot of bourbon neat; he did not even glance in my direction. I gave him two minutes and then moved after him.

He was just pulling out of the lot when I reached my car. I got going in plenty of time to pick him up, but it was pointless, really: he led me straight back to San Francisco and the Parkside district. From down the block, with my headlights dark, I watched him park the VW and then enter his apartment building. He didn’t come out again in the next ten minutes.

I said to hell with it and went home to bed.

In the morning, from my office, I called Judith Paige and made my report. She tried to muffle her tears, but I could hear the sob in her voice; it grated at my nerves like fingernails across a blackboard.

“Then... then it’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “Walter has another woman.”

“I’ll be blunt with you, Mrs. Paige,” I said, even though I did not feel blunt at all. “The chances of it are pretty good. He wasn’t working last night, and he was obviously waiting for someone in that parking lot.”

“But there’s still a chance that he was there for some other reason, isn’t there?”

“Yes, there’s a chance.”

“I have to be sure,” she said. “You understand, don’t you?”

“I understand.”

“You’ll be there tonight?”

“Yes, Mrs. Paige,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

Paige did not leave that night until after eight.

I was beginning to think that he wasn’t going at all, and I was growing nervous about sitting there much longer, when he finally appeared. He got into the VW and led me along the same route he had last night, past the City College and onto 280. I decided he was heading for the same shopping center in South San Francisco; I dropped back a little, giving him plenty of room. And that was just where he went.

He parked in about the same place. I took a slot farther back this time and a little more to one side, in the event we were in for another long wait past the closing time of the center’s shops.

It developed just that way. Nine-thirty came, and then ten, and the parking area was just about empty. But it was dark where I was, and I had slumped low in the seat with the window down and my eyes on a level with the sill. I was pretty sure Paige couldn’t see me from where he was.

So we waited, and I was about ready to call it another bust. Damn it, I thought, why doesn’t she come? This kind of job played on my nerves anyway; the waiting only made it worse. If she was —

There was movement at the periphery of my vision. When I turned my head, I saw a lone figure hurrying across the darkened lot from the direction of the bowling alley. It moved in a straight line toward Paige’s car, glancing left and right, its gaze flicking over my car but not lingering. And when it got to the VW and opened the door and slipped inside, the flash of the dome light let me see a leather jacket, jeans — crew cut hair.

Paige’s visitor was a man, not a woman.

What the hell? I thought. Paige had not struck me as the homosexual type, but then you never knew these days who might have leanings in that direction; I could not figure any other immediate explanation for this kind of meeting. I sat there a little nonplussed, thinking about Mrs. Paige, waiting for them to leave.

Only they didn’t leave, not yet. The driver’s door opened and Paige stepped out; he was wearing a hat now, a long overcoat that he must have put on while he’d been sitting in the darkness. Dimly, I could see the other guy slide over under the wheel. Paige walked to the liquor store, went inside. There was no other activity at this end of the lot — and no one else had entered the liquor store in the past five minutes.

I began to get it then, but by the time I put it all together it was too late for me to do anything about it. The new guy started the VW and took it slowly toward the lot’s entrance a few doors down from the liquor store, keeping it clear of the bright outspill from the store’s fluorescent lighting. I couldn’t see what was happening inside the store, because of the angle.

Three minutes after he’d gone inside, Paige came running out with one hand jammed up under his coat and the other gripping a small sack of some kind. He ran down to where the other guy had the VW rolling forward, jerked open the door and jumped in. The car pitched ahead, burning a little rubber, and when it turned east out of the lot its headlights came on for the first time. There was no movement over at the liquor store, no one in the lot to see or wonder what had happened except me.

I’d had the engine of my car going before Paige appeared, but I stayed where I was until the VW was a half-block away. Then I went after it, running dark, hanging back as far as I could without losing sight of its taillights.

The other car was moving fast but not recklessly; they must have figured they’d pull it off clean, and they didn’t want to call attention to themselves. The streets were dark here, except for intermittent house lights and the yellow puddles cast by street lamps. Clouds had begun to pile up, blotting out the moon: that made it all the darker and easier for me to follow without being seen. I was able to stay within a block of them.

They were heading for Hillside Boulevard; I could tell that before we’d gone a dozen blocks. That road runs along the western foot of the San Bruno Mountains, connecting to the southeast with the Bayshore Freeway and to the northeast with Daly City. It was a toss-up as to which way they would turn when they got there.

I wasn’t at all sure now that I was doing the right thing. Maybe I should have gone into the liquor store to check on the clerk, make sure he was all right; then I could have telephoned the local police and given them Paige’s name and that WALLY P license plate of his. But my instinctive reaction had been to give chase, to be able to pinpoint them when I finally did make the call. Wise or not, I had made my choice and I would have to stand by it.

When the VW neared Hillside Boulevard, I dropped back to see how it would go. They turned left. Daly City, then, and on into San Francisco that way. Or maybe they had another destination along the line.

I could still see the red glow of their taillights when I got to the intersection, but they were diminishing rapidly: the driver had opened it up now. It would have been dangerous for me to try driving that dark road without lights; I switched on my headlamps before I made the turn. And then bore down on the accelerator to match their speed.

As I drove, I thought about how wrong Mrs. Paige and I had been about her husband. He didn’t have another woman, or if he did she had nothing to do with these nocturnal outings of his. They were all explainable in the same way. There had been a string of liquor store holdups the past month, in a different Bay area city each time — two men, one to pull the job and the other to drive the car. I hadn’t thought of Paige in connection with the holdups; there was no reason I should have. I had been hired to investigate infidelity, not armed robbery.

So Paige and this other guy were the heisters; and that put an altogether different explanation on last night’s events. Paige hadn’t been waiting at the shopping center for anyone; he’d been casing the liquor store — the same thing he had probably done the past few nights, and on some or all of the other jobs they’d pulled. He would have been checking on how much traffic went in and out of the lot around this time of night, how many clerks and customers there were in the store, things like that. When he’d gone to the bowling alley, it had been to call his partner and make a report. It had looked good to them, and they were ready, and so they’d set it up for tonight.

The only things that weren’t clear were why the other guy had showed up at the parking lot on foot instead of meeting Paige and driving there with him, and why they were using Paige’s VW, with that easy-to-remember WALLY P license plate, as the getaway car. But I could find out the answers to those questions later on. They didn’t matter much at this point.

What mattered was staying with those two, seeing to it they were arrested and put away. What mattered was how Judith Paige would feel when she found out her husband was something much worse than unfaithful...

The VW was in Colma now, a small community that had the dubious distinction of being the primary burial grounds for the San Francisco area. There were a dozen different cemeteries along here, and one golf course — Cypress Hills — sitting there incongruously in the middle of it all. This stretch of Hillside Boulevard was very dark; no other cars moved on it in either direction.

Another tenth of a mile clicked off on my odometer. And then the VW’s brake lights came on ahead, and the car made a sharp right-hand turn into Cynthia Street — a narrow lane that marked the boundary between the golf course on the right and Mount Olivert Cemetery on the left. At its upper end, there were a couple of short dead-end streets and the looming black shapes of the San Bruno Mountains. Maybe the one guy lived there, I thought, and they were going to his place. Or maybe they were planning to stop for a few minutes and split the take from the liquor store.

I slowed, waiting until the VW passed behind a screen of eucalyptus lining the lane, then switched off my lights and swung up after them. The other car was better than a hundred yards ahead by then. We traveled a fifth of a mile with that much distance between us — and suddenly the taillights winked out, their headlights did the same and heavy darkness folded in on the road.

I punched the brake pedal, thinking they’d pull off onto the shoulder, getting ready to do the same thing. Only then the VW’s backup lights flared, and when I heard the sharp whine of its engine in reverse I realized what a damned fool I’d been. They knew I was there, they had known it all along; somehow they’d spotted me tailing them. So they’d maneuvered me up here, where it was isolated, with the idea of ramming me, forcing me off the road.

I said a short, vicious word and managed to do three things at once: jammed the gearshift lever into reverse with my right hand, found the headlight switch and flicked it on with my left hand, and brought my left foot down on the high-beam button on the floor. The car leaped backward, yawing a little. The VW was almost on top of me by then, a hurtling black-and-red shape; its rear end missed my front bumper by a foot or less, then veered off toward the fence bordering the cemetery on the left. The guy behind the wheel had to fight it around, straighten out again, and that gave me a couple of extra seconds.

Hunched around on the seat now, I leaned over the back to look through the rear window and pushed the accelerator all the way down. The high white glare of my headlights, the crimson wash from my backup lights, bleached the darkness enough so that I could see the road behind me. It was pretty straight, and I had a white-fisted grip on the wheel. I kept my eyes on the road, not looking to see where the VW was; the metallic taste of fear was sharp in my mouth. I wasn’t armed — I had not carried a gun since I’d been on the cops years ago — and these characters had at least one and probably two weapons. I had nowhere to go if I lost control of the car or they managed to get me off the road.

The intersection with Hillside Boulevard came up quickly, less than a hundred yards away now. Sweat half-blinded me, but when I dropped below the screen of trees I could see there were headlights approaching from the direction of South San Francisco — two sets of them. Relief dulled the edge of my fear. The nearest set of lights was maybe five hundred yards off: enough time, just enough time.

There was a sudden, glancing impact: the VW had rammed me, but not hard enough to do the job for them. I managed to keep the rear end straight as the intersection rushed up, held off using the brakes as long as I could; then I touched them lightly and laid my other hand on the horn ring and swung the wheel hard to the right. The tires screamed as I slid sideways, rocking, out onto Hillside Boulevard.

Another horn blared; there was more shrieking of rubber. The first of the oncoming cars swerved to the left, nosing off the road, to avoid a collision with me; the second braked hard and skidded around to the side of the first one — and in the next second a red light began revolving on its roof, sweeping the darkness with an eerie pulsing glow. It was a county police cruiser, a traffic unit that patrols Hillside for speeders at night.

I turned my head to see where the VW was, saw it right in front of me. They had swung out in the same direction I had, but the red light on the cruiser had made them quit worrying about me. The little car rocked as the transmission was thrown into a forward gear; rubber howled again. They had been half turned around on the road, as I had been, and they tried to come out of it too fast, with too much power. The rear end fishtailed and they started to slide one way, then the other. And then the VW spun around twice in the middle of the road, like a toy car in the hands of a playful kid; tilted and went over, rolling; finally settled on its top in the culvert between the road and the cemetery fence.

The county patrol car slid around mine and cut diagonally in front, blocking me off. One of the two cops who came out of it ran to where the VW lay in the culvert like a huge beetle on its back, wheels spinning lazily in the light-spattered darkness; the other cop came over to me with his service revolver drawn. He looked in through the open window. “What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded.

I told him — as much as he needed to know right away. It took him a couple of minutes to believe me, but when I showed him the photostat of my investigator’s license and told him what he would find in the wreckage, he was convinced. He left me to use his car radio, because the other cop was still at the wrecked VW and yelling for an ambulance and a tow truck; Paige and his partner were wedged inside, and he couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive.

I was pretty shaky for a while, but by the time the ambulance and the tow truck arrived I was all right. A couple of guys went to work on the VW with blowtorches. When they got Paige and the other one out, they were still alive but cut up and unconscious; Paige had a broken leg, too. The ambulance took them away to the nearest emergency hospital.

The county officers escorted me to the police station in South San Francisco, where I made a formal statement. None of the cops was too pleased that I had given chase after the robbery, instead of notifying the law like a good citizen was supposed to do, but they didn’t make an issue of it. They let me go on home after a couple of hours.

I had bad dreams that night. But they could not have been any worse than the dreams Judith Paige would be having...

In the morning I learned that Paige was an ex-con — four years at San Quentin for armed robbery — who’d figured that his job as a real estate salesman wasn’t paying off and wasn’t likely to. Two months ago, he’d reestablished contact with another armed robber he’d met in prison, and they had worked out the liquor store heists. The other guy’s name was Stryker.

The rest was about as I’d figured it. Stryker, alert and strung out after the holdup, had spotted me coming out of the lot after them. They’d figured me for a heroic-citizen type, and at first they’d thought of trying to outrun me; but the VW didn’t have all that much power, they had no idea how good a driver I was and they didn’t want to risk alerting a cop by exceeding the speed limits. So they’d hit on Cynthia Street — and although they refused to admit it to the police, they would have killed me if they’d succeeded in forcing me off the road.

As for why Stryker had been on foot that night — and why they’d used Paige’s VW, with its distinctive WALLY P license plate, instead of Stryker’s car — the reason was so simple and ironic that it made me laugh sardonically when I heard it. Stryker lived down the Peninsula, near South San Francisco, and he was married, and his wife had insisted on using their car to attend an audition: she was a singer, and there was a job she badly wanted in the city. So he’d given in, notified Paige and then had her drop him off at the shopping center on her way into San Francisco.

Crooks, I thought. Christ!

There was irony, too, in the fact that Paige had apparently been faithful to Judith all along. He had married her because he loved her, or had some kind of feeling for her. If she hadn’t suspected him of playing around, and come to me, he and Stryker might have carried on their string of liquor store heists for quite a while before they screwed up and got themselves caught.

The police had been the ones to break the news to Judith Paige last night; better them than me. But I knew I had to see her again anyway: it was one of those things you have to do. So I drove out to the Parkside district late that afternoon and spent twenty minutes with her — twenty long minutes that were not easy for either of us.

She told me she was going to file for divorce and then go home to Idaho, which struck me as the wisest decision she could have made. She would meet another guy there someday, and she’d get remarried, and maybe then she would be happy. I hoped so.

I would never see her again in any case, but the future would still bring another Judith Paige. There is always another Judith Paige for somebody in my business. One of these days she would walk into my office, and I would hear the old story again — the old, sad, sordid story.

Only that next time it would probably be true.