Undercurrent

Eight

I drove back into Cypress Bay, parked in the lot next to the City Hall, and went around to the police-station wing. The fat sergeant told me Quartermain had gone to Salinas, the county seat, and that Lieutenant Favor had gone with him; no, he had no idea when they would be back, did I want to leave a message?

Without thinking about it, I said, "No, I’ll stop by later," and walked slowly back to my car. I sat there in the cool shade and brooded a little. Well, I could have given it to the sergeant; but it was somewhat involved and Quartermain was the Chief and handling the case personally, and he was the kind of guy I could tell it to in my own way. There was that-and there was Judith Paige, and the quiet tranquility of Cypress Bay that became almost oppressive after a while, and the restlessness which seemed to be steadily growing inside me. If you've been a cop in one form or another for most of your life, and if you've worked at it and cared for it and been pretty good at it, it bothers you to have to back out of something when there are things to be done, avenues to be explored. It was a little like being a good, well-trained bird dog; once you had the scent, you were not satisfied until you were plowing along the trail and trying to flush something out of the underbrush.

I lit a cigarette and blew smoke through the open window and watched it float languidly like an ephemeral mist through the sunlight and the shadows. "It's out of my hands and out of my league," I had told Russ Dancer, but that was not quite true and I knew it was not quite true, and I kept on sitting there, restlessly, trying to make up my mind. But it was not really much of a struggle. When you're overstepping just a little, the rationalizations come easy; and since you know you're going to do it, and have known it from the moment you found out Quartermain was in Salinas, it only takes a couple of mental nudges to get you to admit it.

So I started the car and drove two blocks to a stone-and-redwood complex that did not look much like a service station, in keeping with the edicts of the Cypress Bay Chamber of Commerce. I parked under a sloping awning that did not quite conceal the row of gasoline pumps, told the attendant to fill up the tank, and went over to the telephone booth. I looked up the addresses for Jason Lomax, Brad and Beverly Winestock, and Keith Tarrant, and wrote them down on my note pad. Then I came back and paid the attendant and looked over the street map. The closest of the three seemed to be the Winestocks, on a street called Bonificacio Drive that was about ten blocks distant.

I went over there, and the house was a two-story Spanish adobe set back some distance from the street, on higher ground. You got up to it by way of twenty-five or thirty slab-stone steps grown with rock cress; at their top was a short arbor covered by reddish bougainvillea. It was cool and quiet on the narrow porch formed by a wood-railed gallery at the second-floor level-and I thought for no particular reason of Old Monterey, Old California, and what it must have been like to have lived in the days of the Bear Flag and the sprawling ranchos. Dull and simple, maybe-but the air and the land and the sea were clean then, and there were no great external pressures, and you could take your time about living. I tugged at the hand-woven bell pull located to one side of the front door, and listened to a dull, distant ringing within, like a melancholy elegy for the long-dead past.

Pretty soon the door opened and a woman in her early thirties looked out at me. She had a kind of misty beauty, enhanced by moist dark eyes and a pensive mouth and long brown-black hair parted in the middle and swept over her shoulders and down her back, like a dusky tapestry woven of very fine thread and fringed across the bottom. When you looked at her long enough, you had the feeling that she was somehow two-dimensional-an image that could and would vanish wraithlike whenever she chose. But it could have been the shaded porch and the dark shadows behind her, inside the house, that conveyed the impression, or it could have been my mood. She was heavy-breasted and flare-hipped in dark-green cotton slacks and a lime-green shirt, and I found myself thinking-the way a man does sometimes, with this kind of woman-that she would be pure sweet hell in bed.

I brushed the thought aside and put on a polite smile for her. "Miss Winestock?"

She nodded. I gave her my name, and then I said, "I wonder if I might talk to you for a few minutes? It's rather important."

She looked at me steadily. "You're the man who found Walter Paige last night, aren't you? The private detective?"

Her voice was cool and matter-of-fact, and it gave substance to her and destroyed some of the ephemeral quality. I said, "Yes, that's right."

"I heard about it on the midnight news. Is that why you're here?"

"Yes."

"I expected someone would be, sooner or later," she said. "How did you get my name?"

"From Russ Dancer."

"Mmmm," she said without inflection.

"There was an old paperback book of his among Paige's effects," I told her. "One called The Dead and the Dying. The police released it to me earlier today, and I followed up a hunch that led me to Dancer."

"Now what would a man like Walt Paige be doing with one of Russ's books?"

"That's one of the things I'd like to know."

"Doesn't Russ have any idea?"

"No, he doesn't."

"I didn't even know Walt could read," she said, and smiled faintly. "Well, won't you come in?"

"Thank you, Miss Winestock."

"Beverly," she said. "I'm not quite an old maid, and Miss Winestock makes me sound like one."

"Beverly," I said.

She took me inside and down an arched hallway hung with Spanish murals and into a tile-floored parlor, darkly furnished. There, she asked, "Would you like a drink? I think we have some beer and wine in the refrigerator; we're out of anything stronger at the moment, I'm afraid."

"Nothing, thanks."

I sat down on a tapestried-cloth sofa and she took the chair across from me and crossed her ankles and smoothed her hands along her upper thighs in a gesture that was sensual and yet seemingly unaffected. I kept my eyes on her face as she said, "There's not very much I can tell you about Walt Paige. I didn't know that he was back in Cypress Bay, and I wouldn't have cared if I had. And I have no idea who could have killed him, though God knows, enough people might have had justification. He was a thorough bastard, you know."

"So I've learned," I said. "How well did you know him when he lived here originally?"

"Not as well as he would have liked."

"Did you ever talk to him about personal matters?"

The faint smile again. "His or mine?"

"His."

"Not really. Russ told you about our group, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Well, we were a winy bunch. Laughter and liquor, and never a serious moment. At least, not while the group was together. And that's the only place I ever saw Walt Paige, though he tried to change that enough times."

"Do you have any idea who he might have been involved with?"

"Who he was sleeping with, you mean?"

"Well-yes."

"Half the women in Cypress Bay and vicinity, no doubt. He had no morals, and general tastes."

"Any one woman more than another?"

"If so, I never knew about it."

"How about Robin Lomax-or Tolliver at that time?"

Beverly laughed softly; it was the kind of laugh that put cool fingers on your spine and made you think of warm, dark bedrooms. She said, "I doubt it. Robin was hardly a virgin when she married Jason Lomax, although she'd like everybody to think so; but she was more or less going with Jason when Walt Paige was here, and she paid no more attention to Walt than I did. I think we both saw him for exactly what he was."

"I see."

"Do the police think it was a woman who killed him? Is that why you're asking about his former love life?"

"There's a good possibility of it," I said. "He was seeing a woman here in Cypress Bay recently."

"Are there any clues as to who she is?"

"Not at the moment."

"What makes you think she's someone he knew six years ago? Passions cool considerably in six years-unless, of course, he was seeing her fairly regularly since then."

"He didn't see her for at least four years, except maybe on visitors' day."

"I don't think I understand."

"Walter Paige spent four years for burglary in San Quentin," I said. "He was released five months ago."

She frowned deeply. "I didn't know that."

"Does it surprise you?"

"Not much, I guess. I always wondered where he got the money he used to spread around so freely. Was he arrested around here?"

"No. In Santa Barbara."

"Maybe he just never got caught in this area."

"Maybe not."

She moved restlessly on her chair. "Well, if any woman waited four years or more for Walt Paige, she's the biggest fool in creation. Or just plain blind."

"That happens-too often."

"Don't I know it!" Beverly said. "The radio mentioned that Walt had a wife and that you were doing some kind of job for her. Did it have to do with this woman, the one here in Cypress Bay?"

"Yes. He'd been leaving his wife alone on the weekends, and she wanted to know why."

"And now she knows."

"Not yet. She isn't ready to know."

"She must be taking it pretty hard."

"Pretty hard."

"What's she like?"

"Nice. Very nice and very young."

"I thought she might be. That's the only kind of woman Walt Paige would have bothered marrying. She'll be all right, though; you learn to accept the crap life deals out to you."

"Sometimes you do."

"You have to if you want to get along in this world," Beverly said. "Voice of experience."

"Has it been that rough for you?"

"And then some. I've led a hell of a life." She shrugged. "But then, I've made my own bed most of the time-literally as well as figuratively."

"What do you do for a living, if I can ask?"

"I'm a potter. How about that?"

"I didn't think there was any money in it."

"There is when you make cheap souvenirs for the tourists," she said, and shrugged again. "Well-do you have any more questions about Walt Paige?"

"Not directly," I answered. "Did your brother know Paige very well?"

She seemed to tense slightly, but I could not be sure in the room's lighting. "About as well as I did, I suppose."

"Do you think he might know anything that would help?"

"I doubt it."

"Is he here now?"

"No, he went out earlier today. I can ask him about Walt when he gets home, and have him call you if he can help by some chance."

"I won't be pursuing things much further-as a matter of fact, I'll probably be returning to San Francisco tonight-so you'd better have him call Chief Quartermain at the City Hall."

"All right."

"One last thing, Beverly. Do you know a short, bald guy in his forties, dark and heavy-featured?"

"That doesn't sound like anybody I know. Why?"

"Paige talked with him not long before he was killed."

"A stranger in Cypress Bay?"

"There's no way of knowing just yet," I said. I got up on my feet. "I guess that's about all, Beverly. Thanks for your time and cooperation."

"Not at all."

She smiled and rose, and she was standing close enough to me so that I could look into her eyes. There was nothing there for me; I had simply not registered with her. So we went to the door and I did not say any of the tentative things a man says to a woman who appeals to him. But maybe it was just as well, I thought. She would not want another loveless affair, a man who had an itch to scratch, a man who was thinking of her only as pure sweet hell in bed; and I had absolutely nothing to offer her along any other lines.

We said goodbye on the porch and touched hands very briefly, and I went down the slab-stone steps without looking back at her. Bonificacio Drive was empty and quiet, like a street in Old Monterey when the air and the land and the sea were clean and you could take your time about living-and the tomorrows were all filled with promise.