Undercurrent nd-3

by Bill Pronzini

  "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.

  Seven

  The coastline south of Cypress Bay was scalloped with jagged cliffs and jutting promontories and deep canyons-the most beautiful coastline in the state, and perhaps on the entire Pacific shore. Monterey cypress trees, native only to this area, their branches and dark-green foliage shaped by the sea winds into grotesquely appealing forms, stood like old, old watchmen atop the bare erosions of rock. The blue-green sea, calm and sunstreaked to the horizon, found a restless energy approaching land and flung itself against the cliffs in a churning froth of foam and spray, as if it harbored a kind of deep-seated resentment for the impassive solidarity of its boundaries. Fat brown pelicans and oyster catchers and pigeon guillemots dotted the headlands and rock islands, and there were glimpses of low-tide beaches teeming with sponges, anemones, crabs, starfish, sea urchins, and beds of golden kelp. It was everything you could want in the way of scenic splendor-or it would have been if there were no oil slicks and garbage dumps and beer cans and toilet paper and cardboard boxes and condoms and litter bags; if humanity had not spread the diseased wastes of its "civilization" like a plague over the land…

  Beach Road was a narrow paved lane that turned off Highway 1 six miles below Cypress Bay and dropped on a sharp incline toward the ocean. Three or four bungalows and a small trailer encampment were interspersed among dense stands of pine. Rural mailboxes on wooden poles lined the road, but the largest number was 27 and the phone directory had listed R. Dancer at 31. I drove to the end of the lane-a fifth of a mile from the high-way-and found myself on a sort of convex bluff face, half-mooned at the edge by low white guardrails mounted with reflectors. Over on the left was an old Ford wood sided station wagon, drawn up near the head of a set of wood-railed steps leading down to the sea; the number of the mailbox there was 31.

  I parked in the dappled shade of one of the large cypress growing there and walked to the stairs, the clean, pungent smell of salt in my nostrils. Once there, I could see the dwelling built on a long sand-and-rock shelf some fifty feet below; the shelf tapered downward into an irregular-shaped, driftwood-strewn beach bounded on both sides by projections formed of a series of eroded, bird-limed boulders-like natural stone jetties extending into the Pacific. The structure was a kind of shack, heavily weathered, fashioned of redwood shingles and beams that had withstood the elements for a long while, but which would not withstand them a great deal longer. It was raised off the shelf on concrete blocks, with gap-toothed lattice board to cover the open spacing; a tired-looking catwalk was attached to the right wall, leading onto a sort of sun porch across the rear width. There was a short walk in front, log-railed like the catwalk and porch, which led from the bottom of the steps to the shack's door; the property was otherwise unadorned, save for a carpeting of sand and small bits of driftwood that had been blown back against the bluff by the wind.

  I went down the wooden steps, hanging onto the handrail and moving carefully. The angle of them was not steep, but there was a thin coating of sand on each, and the boards were old and loose. An exposed network of water piping ran down the side of the bluff alongside the steps, and there wer
e power lines that looped down from overhead. I wondered irrelevantly if Dancer's phone had been disconnected because he could not or would not pay his bill.

  When I reached the bottom of the steps and started along the sandy walk, I could hear the steady, rhythmic clacking of typewriter keys from inside the shack. I looked for a doorbell, did not find one, and rapped sharply on the heavy door. The typewriter maintained its rhythm. There was a window beside the door, but jalousied shutters were drawn over it and I could not see inside. I knocked again, loudly this time.

  Another ten seconds went by, and I was getting ready to knock a third time; but then the keys fell silent and I could hear steps approaching within. The door opened jerkily, under an irritated hand, and I was looking at a thin guy in his early fifties dressed in an old pullover sweater and blue Levi's and white canvas sneakers. He had a shaggy mane of dust-colored hair, clean-shaven if faintly hollowed cheeks, a wryly crooked mouth, and a long Grecian nose marbled by whiskey veins. His eyes were a liquidy blue-gray under thick dust-colored brows that formed lopsided, inverted V's on his forehead, and they were not particularly friendly at the moment.

  He looked me over, decided I was nobody he knew, and said, "Well? What is it?"

  "Are you Russell Dancer-the writer?"

  "No, I'm Russell Dancer-the hack. There's a hell of a big difference. What do you want?"

  "I'd like to talk to you, if you wouldn't mind."

  "I would mind. I'm working right now."

  "It won't take very long."

  "You wouldn't be a goddamn bill collector, would you?"

  "No," I said. "I'm a private detective."

  He stared at me. "A what?"

  "A private detective."

  "Are you putting me on?"

  I got my wallet out of my coat pocket and opened it to the photostat of my license and let him look at it. He read it over twice, ran a prominently veined hand through his shaggy hair, and said, "Well, I'll be damned. You sure as hell don't look like a private dick."