Undercurrent nd-3

by Bill Pronzini

  Four o'clock. Five. The sun drifted low over the sea, and the sky turned smoky and bloodshot with lines and streaks of pale crimson. A wind came in off the ocean, gathering strength, and tousled the leaves and needles on the trees. It was quiet in the room-too quiet. I began to feel oddly restless. Nerves. Waiting was never any good, and it was worse when you did not know just what you were waiting for. But the waiting I was having to do was nothing compared to the waiting of Judith Paige- and the half-knowledge for her was agony; for me, only a source of irritation.

  Five-thirty now, and I was almost out of cigarettes. How much longer? The rest of today, and tomorrow, and part of Monday? Maybe Paige's sole purpose in coming to Cypress Bay was his meeting with the balding guy in the park; maybe that's all there was to it. All rightthen why did he tell Judith he was staying until late Monday afternoon this trip out? And what the hell is he doing over in that cottage? Sleeping? Drinking? Watching the goddamn television?

  The rear entrance, I thought. The beach entrance.

  Oh Christ, I thought. Some stakeout you are, some smart cop. You sit over here on your fat ass thinking visitors have to come in the front way, or that Paige has to go out the front way, and you can't see the rear entrance or the beach and he could be gone or he could be having a party over there with half of Cypress Bay, and even though you can't watch both entrances at the same time, you should have thought about the beach, you should have been checking it…

  I got up on my feet and went over to the door and cracked it like a furtive, neighbor. There was a white-gravel path further down, beyond the office, that led between two of the cottages and onto the private beach. Okay, so let's go out to the beach for a stroll, I thought- and a little voyeurism if you can find a window or a keyhole or a place to put your ear. Play it according to stereotype: the peeper, the snooper. It's that kind of job, isn't it?

  I opened the door wide and went out, and the wind was chill on my bare arms; my coat was still inside on the bed. The hell with that too. I started across the grounds toward the gravel path-and all at once the door to Number 9 jerked open, with a sound that was audible above the wind. I managed to keep from breaking stride, but I was looking over there now. The door was still open and it stayed open; Paige did not come out.

  I kept on walking, more slowly, and then I stopped because I was almost abreast of the entrance to Number 9 and I could see that there was something in the doorway, something on the floor of the cottage just inside. The wind turned colder. The wind turned very cold.

  I had to go over there, and I did it without hesitation. This was something else altogether. I got to the open doorway, and my stomach turned, and the mental image of Judith Paige's sweet pleading face made the sickness in my belly darker and more acute. The waiting was over for all of us now, but for her the agony had only just begun.

  If Walter Paige had been an unfaithful husband, he would never be unfaithful again.

  And whether or not Judith Paige had been a cuckolded wife, she was now something else entirely: she was a widow.

  Four

  There was a lot of blood-on Paige, on the floor beneath his body, in a glistening, smeared trail extending half the length of the room. He lay on his back, with one arm outflung toward the door and the other clutched at his upper chest like a bright-red claw. He wore a pair of slacks, nothing more, and his bare, thickly haired chest was soaked and matted with too much blood to make the nature of his wounds easily apparent; but it appeared obvious that he had been stabbed, and more than once.

  My stomach kept on turning, but I went inside anyway, avoiding the blood, and got the door closed. The drapes were drawn almost closed across the glass at the rear of the room, and it was dark enough in there to warrant the light burning on the nearer of the two nightstands. I crossed to the drapes and drew them aside and opened the glass door carefully with a handkerchief over my hand.

  Outside, there was a kind of patio, enclosed by low cypress hedges; a wood gate opened on a boardwalk leading to the motel's private beach, and the first twenty feet or so of the walk was walled by more of the cypress. I walked out there and tried the latch on the gate; it was unlocked. Beyond, the beach was deserted in both directions, and it had a lonely, hushed look, the way beaches do at sunset; the sand was a reddish-gray in the cold light of the falling sun. The sea seemed restless now, the color of ashes, and there were whitecaps out near the breakwater and white froth on the mouths of the combers as they bit into the sand. The wind was like ice on my face.

  I went back inside and closed the sliding door again and looked the room over, the way you do automatically if you've been a cop for enough years. There was a thick puddle of congealing blood over by the desk, and it looked as if Paige had been stabbed there. He had too much blood in his throat to cry out loudly enough for anyone to hear, I thought, and so he dragged himself across the floor, and got the door open, and died. There was no sign of a weapon, and no indications that a struggle of any kind had taken place; Paige had been killed by someone he knew, or possibly someone who had caught him completely by surprise.

  The bed was rumpled, top sheets tossed down at the foot, one of the blankets on the floor; it could have meant something, or it could have meant he had been taking a fitful nap. There was a half-empty pint of Jack-Daniel's sour mash and a glass with an inch of dark-amber liquid on the same nightstand with the lamp; the other nightstand held a clean ashtray and the telephone. One of the room's chairs contained Paige's sports jacket and turtleneck sweater; his socks and shoes were on the floor in front of it. Against the wall next to the desk was a luggage rack with the overnight bag open on top. I stepped to the case and looked inside without touching anything. There was not much to see: a change of underwear and socks, a second and sealed pint of Daniel's, a clean shirt in a laundry wrapping, and a paperback mystery novel.

  The paperback held my attention momentarily. It was torn and dog-eared, with a gaudy cover depicting a half-nude redhead and a guy with a. 45 automatic; the red-head's hair-do, and the guy's clothes, and the cover price of twenty-five cents made it obvious that the book was a product of the early fifties. The title was The Dead and the Dying, and the author was Russell Dancer. I had never heard of the novel, but the writer's name was familiar. Russell Dancer had been a prolific pulp creator of detective and adventure fiction through the forties and very early fifties, until the complete collapse of the pulp market, and his name was prominently featured on at least a hundred covers among the five thousand pulp magazines which comprised my own collection. But it seemed odd that Paige would have a book like that with the newsstands filled with more modern paperbacks- unless he had been an aficionado of Dancer's work or the field in general…

  I turned away from the bag. The odor of blood was thickly brackish in there, and my head ached malignantly. I went to the door and outside without looking at Paige again, and made certain the door was unlocked before I shut it. Then I crossed to the motel office.

  Orchard was sitting behind the counter, reading the Monterey newspaper. He looked up at me, started to smile, and changed it to a frown when he saw my face. He stood up. "Is something the matter, sir?"

  "Yeah," I said. "You'd better call the police, Mr. Orchard."

  His eyelids worked up and down like intricately veined fans. "The police?"

  "There's been a killing in one of your cottages."

  "Killing? Killing?"

  "In Number nine," I said. "Walter Paige."

  All the color drained out of Orchard's cheeks, and his parted, too-red lips were like an open wound against the sudden marmoreal cast of his face. "Are you sure? A killing- here? My God!"

  "You can go out and have a look yourself, if you want."

  "Oh no, no, I… believe you. It's just that… Mr. Paige, you say?"

  "That's right."

  "What happened? How did-?"

  "Somebody stabbed him."

  "Stabbed… him…" His eyes widened, and he shrank away from me with his hands fluttering in front
of him like restless white doves. "You… it wasn't…"

  "No," I said, "it wasn't. Listen, will you call the police or do you want me to do it?"

  "No," Orchard said, "no, it's my responsibility, I’ll call them.." The doves came together and mated fretfully, and he turned away and got himself through the doorway into his private office. "A killing… we've never had… the Beachwood is a respectable family motel… oh God, oh my God!"

  I went around the counter and watched him at a polished mahogany desk, fumbling with the telephone. It took him thirty seconds to dial seven digits, and a full minute to get two sentences' worth of facts reported thickly into the receiver; but he got the story straight enough, remembering my name and using it freely. When he had finished the call, he put the handset down and began mopping at his face with a yard of silk handkerchief.

  I said from the doorway, "How long will it take them to get here?"

  "Five minutes, or ten, I don't know."

  "We'd better go outside and wait for them."

  "Yes. Yes, all right."

  We went out, and it was almost dusk. Three-quarters of the sun had fallen beyond the gray rim of the sea; what little light remained had a blood-red tinge. Orchard looked up at the darkening sky and went back inside and turned on the night lighting for the motel groundscarriage-style lamps on high ivy-covered poles. The white gravel on the drive seemed luminescent under their glare.

  When Orchard came out again, he paced back and forth in front of the office, worrying his hands. Cottage Number 9 seemed to have a magnetic pull on his eyes. I sat on the topmost of the three steps that led up to the office entrance, and smoked my last cigarette.

  I said to him, "Is this the first time Paige has stayed here? Or have you seen him before?"

  "What? Oh-no, he's been quite a regular weekend guest."

  "For how long?"

  "For the past month or so."

  "Do you know what business he had in Cypress Bay?"

  "Of course not. How would I know?"

  "I thought he might have mentioned something to you."

  "No, he didn't. No."

  "Did he have any visitors that you know about?"

  "I really don't recall."

  "Did you ever see him with a woman?"

  "Here? At the Beachwood?"

  "Or anywhere else."

  "A respectable family motel… no, no, certainly not."

  "How about a bald guy, forty or so, heavy-featured?"

  "No."

  "Do you know of any local acquaintances he might have had?"

  "I do not," Orchard said. "See here, why are you asking all these questions? Did you know Mr. Paige?"

  Before I could give him any kind of answer, two black-and-white police cruisers turned off Ocean Boulevard to enter the motel grounds; they used no sirens. A third cruiser remained at the entrance to screen admittance. The first two pulled up to where Orchard and I were standing, and a couple of uniformed cops got out of one and two guys in business suits got out of the other.

  One of the latter-wearing a dark-brown gabardine- was six and a half feet tall, with iron-gray hair and a long, sad, intelligent face; he was maybe fifty-five, and he walked with long, shambling strides, as if he had never quite learned the art of bodily coordination. His eyes were dark and deep-set, the lids canted sharply, so that when he blinked he had a vaguely Oriental appearance. His name was Ned Quartermain, and he was the Chief of Police of Cypress Bay. The other plainclothesman was a Lieutenant Favor; thin of body, he had unruly brown hair and a thick, incongruous mustache; he reminded me of a silent-movie comedian. But his eyes, like Quartermain's, were shrewd, and you knew immediately there was nothing of the Chaplinesque buffoon about him. He was outfitted with a police camera, a fingerprint kit, and another small technician's kit: a walking crime lab.

  Orchard fluttered a little, like a frightened gull, and Quartermain told him to relax; then he said to me, "You're the one who discovered the body?" His voice was soft and faintly sepulchral, but in a way that was not displeasing.

  I answered, "Yes."

  "Can I see some identification?"

  I got my wallet and gave it to him and watched him open it up and find the photostat of my investigator's license. He read it very carefully, and then looked up at me again. "Private detective," he said with no inflection.

  "Yes."

  "Here on a case?"

  "Yes."

  "This Walter Paige a part of it?"

  "He was all of it."

  "You want to give me the details?"

  I nodded. "Now-or after you've looked at the body?"

  "After. I'll call you down when I want you."

  "Whatever you say."

  "Number nine, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  "Door unlocked?"

  "Yes."

  He made a thoughtful motion with his head and turned and went down there with Favor and one of the uniformed cops at his heels; the other cop, a very young one, stayed with Orchard and me. I watched Quartermain open the door to Paige's cottage, pause, enter with Favor, and shut the door again. A couple of other guests had seen the arrival of the police cars, and were out of their cottages and walking around the way they do, rubber-necking. The second uniform went over to keep them out of the way and available for future questioning.

  Some time passed, and none of us said anything. Orchard was pacing up and down again, working on his face with the handkerchief, muttering softly to himself. I tried to keep my mind inactive, but thoughts of Judith Paige kept intruding on the blankness. It would be very bad for her for a while, because death is something you can never cope with as easily as simple infidelity. Guilty of sexual promiscuity, or not guilty of it, Walter Paige was beyond her love or forgiveness or scorn; he was gone, dead, murdered, torn from her violently and without choice. The scars would be deeper now, perhaps more permanent, and some of the fine fresh innocence would be forever lost; she was the little country girl raped by the big city and the California promise-an old story, an old cliche, and it made you feel sour and empty to know that the old stories and the old cliches came about because they were realities of life that happened again and again…

  An ambulance, without siren and without its red light in operation, pulled onto the motel grounds; behind it was a gray Buick with a single occupant. The young cop went over to tell them where to go, and they went there; the guy from the Buick-probably the county coroner or an assistant, judging from the black bag he carried- rapped on the cottage door and was admitted. The ambulance attendants, in white, stood around out front and smoked, waiting.

  A large crowd had gathered out on Ocean Boulevard, and the patrol unit had its hands full keeping traffic moving and the milling people out of the way. The second uniform was still holding the small knot of motel guests off to one side of Number 9. After a while Quartermain put his head out of the cottage door and called to the ambulance attendants. They went in with a stretcher and came out a couple of minutes later with Paige strapped to it and put him inside the ambulance and took him away into the night.

  Quartermain appeared again and motioned up to me. When I got down there, he said quietly, "Okay, you can tell your story now."

  So I told him why Judith Paige had hired me, and gave him her San Francisco address; I explained what I had seen and done on this day, describing the balding man Paige had met in the park and relating what Orchard told me. When I was finished with all of that, I asked him to be gentle with Judith Paige when he talked to her; and I told him why.

  He studied me for a time. "She must have made quite an impression on you."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Well," he said, "you can rest your mind-all right?"

  "All right."

  "Now let's go over things a little. You didn't see anybody come or go while you were watching the cottage here, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  "And you were at the window the whole time."

  "Yes. I didn't even think about the rear entra
nce until just before I found him. Maybe, if I had, I could have prevented what happened."

  "You blaming yourself?"

  "There wouldn't be any point in that."

  "No, there wouldn't," Quartermain said. "Did you go inside the cottage when you found Paige?"

  I nodded. "I thought maybe the killer was somewhere nearby. I went out to the rear, but the beach was deserted."

  "Touch anything?"

  "No. I used my handkerchief when I went through the sliding door."

  "Did you look around inside?"

  "A little."

  "Notice anything that might help us?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Okay. Any idea who this bald guy might be?"

  "None at all."

  "You heard nothing of his conversation with Paige?"

  "They had their heads too close together."

  "Like old friends?"

  "Like that."

  "Maybe Mrs. Paige knows him."

  "It's possible."

  "Did you notice where the guy went when they broke it up?"

  "North through the park. I didn't see him leave it. I was concentrating on Paige, and he left a minute or two later."

  Quartermain ran a hand through his iron-gray hair and looked at the palm as if he expected to find something there. "I guess that's about all," he said. "Thanks for the cooperation. We appreciate it."

  "I was a cop once," I said. "I know how tough it can be."

  "San Francisco force?"

  "For fifteen years."

  "How come you quit?"

  "It's a long story," I said. "Look, I imagine you'll want to check me out up there. You can talk to Lieutenant Eberhardt, in General Works. I think he'll vouch for me."

  "I'll do that," Quartermain said. "You won't mind remaining here in Cypress Bay for a day or so, will you? Until we clear this thing up a little."

  "No, I guess not."

  "Drop around to City Hall sometime tomorrow. I'll be there, I think. We'll talk some more-I'll have a statement typed up for you to sign."