Undercurrent nd-3

by Bill Pronzini

  Quartermain went to the Chrysler and said something to Tarrant as he was about to open the door for his wife. I saw him frown slightly, and then shrug, and then lean in to speak to her; I knew Quartermain had asked that Mrs. Tarrant remain in the car-that he wanted to ask questions of Tarrant without her being present. She stayed where she was, and Quartermain and Tarrant came up to join Dancer and me on a packed-earth path leading through the grounds.

  The schoolhouse's front entrance was set into a recessed arch-heavy, triangular-hinged double doors with an old-fashioned bronze latch in one of them. Tarrant used his key, and the door swung inward to reveal a cool mustiness and thick, mass-shadowed gloom.

  "We've had the electricity turned on for some time now," he said. "I'll get the lights."

  He stepped inside and moved away to the left and moments later fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling flickered like strobe lights and then came on brightly. I saw as we entered that a considerable amount of labor had been expended by the volunteer citizens' group. Walls had been knocked down and partitions erected, and there was scaffolding and an array of ladders and sawhorses and paint canvases and hand tools strewn about the dusty floor.

  Tarrant indicated an archway across the enlarged main room. "The basement stairs are through there, in the back. I'll take you down, if you want."

  Quartermain nodded. "We can do our talking on the way."

  "Just what was it you wanted to discuss with me, Chief?"

  "I'm going to get a little personal, but it can't be avoided. Just how well did your wife know Walter Paige six years ago?"

  Tarrant gave him a sharp-eyed look. "Why do you ask that?"

  "She seems to be taking his death pretty hard-a man she hadn't seen in six years and supposedly knew only in a casual way at that time."

  "Supposedly? Just what are you getting at?"

  "The truth, I hope."

  "Are you trying to intimate Bianca is the woman Paige had in his bed just before he was killed? That you think she had something to do with his death?"

  "I don't think anything at this point. I'm only trying to find out why she's so obviously emotionally upset by Paige's murder. Are you going to tell me you haven't noticed, Keith?"

  Tarrant started to say something, appeared to change his mind, and pressed his lips together in a thin, tight line.

  Quartermain said, "Well?"

  "Oh Christ, all right. I've noticed."

  "Can you explain why?"

  "I think I can." Tarrant stopped as we passed under the rear arch into another work-littered chamber, and looked pointedly at Dancer. "Will you hold what I say in confidence, Russ?"

  "I do enough tale-telling on paper," Dancer said.

  Tarrant took a long breath as we began moving again, toward a short hallway at the far end of the chamber. "Six years ago," he said, "Bianca was… attracted to Paige. Just one of those things that happen: a powerful physical attraction. I saw it almost immediately, and instead of trying to delude myself that there was nothing to it, I confronted her with it. She tried to deny it, but I managed to get the truth out of her; Paige wasn't averse to dating other men's wives, God knows, and she had let him talk her into a meeting. I told her that if she wanted to keep that date, if she wanted Paige that much, I wouldn't stand in her way. She could have him if he was what she really wanted, but she had better make up her mind right away. If she chose to sacrifice our marriage for a love affair that couldn't possibly last, all right, but she would have to make a quick, clean break with me. I wouldn't stand for an affair."

  Quartermain said, "And she chose you-your marriage."

  "That's right. Putting it all on the line was the wisest thing I could have done; otherwise she would probably have let him seduce her on that date she'd made."

  "You're certain nothing like that happened between them?"

  "Yes, I'm certain. I watched her carefully after she'd made her announced choice. She was faithful to me and to her word; I would have known if she wasn't."

  "She said she thought you and Paige were friends; she was surprised when we told her about Paige's phone call five weeks ago, and why you turned him down on the store rental. Why would she think you were friendly after what happened-or almost happened?"

  "If I had shown hatred or animosity toward Paige, made an issue of my real feelings toward the man, it might well have driven her away from me-or at least have established a wall between us. But by pretending I was still friendly to Paige, that I bore no grudges, I maintained the status quo in our relationship and there were no difficulties. Then Paige left Cypress Bay and I thought he'd gone for good. When he called me about the vacant newsstand, I naturally refused him and I naturally did not tell Bianca about his presence in this area again. You can understand that."

  "Uh-huh. But six years is a lot of water under the bridge. If she hadn't seen him in that length of time, why is she so upset over his death?"

  We were in the hallway now, and Tarrant stopped before a heavy door set into the right-hand wall. He unlocked it with a second key, pushed it open, and reached along the wall inside to click a toggle switch. Pale light cut through the blackness to reveal a set of railed wooden steps leading downward. He began to descend, speaking over his shoulder. "Bianca is an emotional woman, Chief. Even though she realized six years ago and knows now that an affair with Paige would have been the gravest mistake of her life, I think she still feels or felt a certain something for him. I hate to admit that, but it seems to be a fact. And when she learned he was dead and dead so violently here in Cypress Bay, she was understandably upset by it. I suppose if you were throwing questions at her like you've been throwing them at me, she became flustered and began acting guilty of something or other. That's simply the way she is."

  We reached the bottom of the steps. The basement was stuffy and smelled of dust and dry rot, as all basements in temperate climates seem to. Huge and low-ceilinged, it was jammed with boxes and crates and paper-wrapped pictures in frames and rolled canvases and cloth-covered sculptures and miscellaneous pottery and two very old typewriters which had probably belonged to some local early-century writer.

  Tarrant took us off to the right and indicated a great conglomerate of items, most of them cardboard and wooden boxes of various sizes, stacked apart from the rest of the accumulation of art and memorabilia. "That's the Anita Hartman donation," he said. "We haven't had the chance to do any cataloguing of it as yet; we've barely begun cataloguing anything, as a matter of fact."

  "Okay," Quartermain said. "We'll take over from here."

  "No more questions?"

  "For now, no."

  "For now," Tarrant said. "I suppose that means you'll be around to see Bianca and me again."

  "I don't know, Keith. I hope not."

  "So do I. Good luck with your hunting-here and elsewhere." He turned brusquely and left the three of us standing there and went up the steps and was gone.

  Looking sourly at the conglomerate, Dancer said, "Where the hell do we start? The stuff I gave the old lady could be any place in this mess."

  "One of us on each end of the pile and one in the middle," Quartermain told him. "Let's get busy."

  We got busy. We moved sculptures and paintings out of the way and went to work on the crates and boxes. None of us said anything; further talk would have been a waste of time. Punctuated only by the rustle of papers and cardboard and the scrape of wood, the silence was grim and tense. The stuffiness became oppressive, and sweat poured freely down my cheeks and into the soiled collar of my shirt; I could smell the sour, unhygienic odor of it on my body. The fine dust we continually stirred up aggravated my lungs and created a dry cough that combined with Quartermain's labored, almost asthmatic breathing and Dancer's occasional sick belches to form a kind of consumptive symphony.

  Twenty unproductive minutes had gone by, and we had sifted through maybe two-thirds of the Anita Hartman collection, when Dancer pulled out a heavy cardboard box and opened it and said thickly, "This is it-o
ne of them."

  Quartermain and I moved quickly to his side, and Dancer was down on his knees pulling papers out of the box. "I think I gave her two cartons," he said. "I hope to God it's in this one. I hope to God it's in one of them."

  Near the bottom he uncovered several rubber-band-bound book manuscript carbons, rumpled and yellow with age. He shuffled through the pages of four and discarded them while we watched sweating, then he began to go through a fifth with the title You Can't Run Away from Murder centered on the facing page, and after a moment he stopped shuffling the pages and turned his face up to me. "What did you say the lead's name was?"

  "Johnny Sunderland."

  The beginnings of a savage smile touched his mouth. "This is it, then. The publishers changed the title, the way they used to do. But Johnny Sunderland-this is it, all right."

  The rubber banding crumbled as he pulled it off and began to scan the manuscript pages, his lips moving silently as he read the words and sought to refamiliarize himself with the book. Quartermain and I said nothing, waiting grimly, knowing that the answer was in there and that we would have it in a matter of minutes, dreading the knowledge just a little because of the kind of thing it surely had to be.

  And it was that kind of thing, all right. Dancer's memory yielded the book’s plot after two chapters, and he was able to pinpoint then the exact location of what we were looking for.

  A bank robbery.

  Just as simple as that: a bank robbery.

  We spent three or four additional minutes urgently talking it over, making certain; then we got out of the basement and out of the schoolhouse in search of the nearest telephone-running all the way.

  Nineteen

  Two-ten P.M.

  I was sitting in a place called the Old Bavarian Inn, a combination cafe and German-style beer hall located directly across Balboa Street from the vacant newsstand Walter Paige had tried to rent in Cypress Bay. I had been there for close to an hour, in one of the high-backed wooden booths next to the curtained front window-burning my lungs with too many cigarettes and tightening my nerves dangerously with too much coffee and no food at all; watching the dark and cobblestoned little alley that bisected the block next to the newsstand, waiting for something to happen, wondering if something would happen or if the balding guy had abandoned the thing at the last minute because of the heavy risk factor.

  There was a thin, cold-hot sweat on my forehead and my eyes felt inflamed and my thoughts were sluggish and somewhere along the line I had developed a sore throat; I had pushed myself to just about the limit of my physical endurance, and unless I got some tension-free rest pretty soon, there would be physiological hell to pay. But the tension would not abate, and I would not be able to sleep until something happened or did not happen across the street and seven doors to the south: the Cypress Bay National Exchange Bank.

  We still did not know much of the background yet, but the what and the how had all been there in The Dead and the Dying. The robbery had only been important in the book because it was the source of the two hundred thousand dollars which the protagonist, Johnny Sunderland, and his mistress had later stolen from the four men who had pulled the holdup; Dancer had spent only a chapter on the robbery, and that in flashback. But the plan was a relatively clever one, and he had related its execution in detail.

  In the book, one of the holdup men had once been an electrician who was familiar with both the small California town of Cliffside and with the town's major banking operation, the Cliffside Savings and Loan. On the day of the robbery he was the first of the team to enter the bank-dressed in a business suit and posing as a new and well-to-do arrival in the community. He had asked to see the president of the bank about a loan and had been granted the audience. Once alone with the president, the electrician had produced a gun and forced the president to conduct him downstairs into the basement area where the bank's alarm system was located.

  The electrician had rendered the alarms inoperable, as well as all phone lines, and had then taken the president back upstairs into the bank proper. Waiting there were two of the remaining three members of the gang, pretending to be customers and fussing with deposit slips. At gunpoint they had taken over the bank, locking the door and pulling the shades over the front window; teller's cages and the vault were cleaned out for the exaggerated sum of two hundred thousand, employees and four unfortunate citizens were made to lie on the floor at the rear of the building. Then the three men had made good their exit.

  Dancer's cleverness went one step further here: there was a vacant bakery located half a block from the bank and which bordered on an alley leading through to the next parallel street. Some weeks prior to the holdup date, one member of the gang had managed to rent the bakery under an assumed name; on the day of the robbery and just prior to it, he had let himself into the vacant store with his key, leaving the alley door unlocked and ajar. When the other three reached the alley, they checked to make certain it was empty and then entered and began stripping off certain simple items of disguise such as dark glasses and wigs; then, as they passed the partially open bakery door, they stuffed the items plus the guns they had used in the holdup into the satchel containing the bank's money. One of them opened the door, tossed the satchel inside to the waiting fourth man, and the trio then continued through to the parallel street. The maneuver in the alley required no more than a few seconds.

  There was as a result no need for a swift and dangerous getaway, along roads which soon would be blocked by local, county, and state police. They had no incriminating evidence in their possession-no money and no weapons-and they looked somewhat different from the men who had held up the bank as well; even if, by some chance, they had later been stopped for questioning, which they had not been, there was nothing at all to link them with the crime. They simply split up, on foot, wandered around town for a while like any other resident or tourist, and then met later at one of two motels they were utilizing in a nearby city. The two hundred thousand remained inside the vacant bakery overnight; the following morning it had been transported, in a cardboard box, by the fourth man to a third Cliffside motel. After a week to allow things to cool down, the four left the area separately and met in San Francisco to divide the swag; and that was where Johnny Sunderland had come in.

  Dancer told Quartermain and me that he had gotten the robbery idea from an electrician friend of his, in 1953, who had helped to install the basement alarm system in Cypress Bay National Exchange Bank. Caper books were not much in vogue in the early fifties, and so Dancer had simply "thrown away" the holdup idea in his contrivance of The Dead and the Dying; and it was because he had, because it played such a small part in the actual plot of the book, that he had not been able to remember it these twenty years later.

  The way it seemed to us, Paige or the balding guy or Winestock-most probably Paige-had happened upon Dancer's book, had read it, and had known or remembered enough about Cypress Bay to recognize both that the village was the model for the fictional Cliffside and that the Cypress Bay National Exchange Bank was the model for the fictional Cliffside Savings and Loan. Some simple if discreet checking had revealed that the National Exchange Bank was still housed in the same building as in 1953, and that its alarm system-comprised today of silent alarms and hidden television cameras-was still located and still vulnerable in its basement. And once they were able, by luck or design, to obtain a vacant store bordering on an alley near the bank, they had the perfect blueprint for an actual holdup.

  Now, with knowledge of the robbery and with simple hindsight, I could see the various facts which Quartermain and I might have put together without the book to determine that a bank holdup was the answer-the pieces I had known were there earlier, but which I had not been able to separate and correlate from all the other pieces. There was the vacant newsstand and its location in downtown Cypress Bay; we could not have known exactly why it was important without The Dead and the Dying, but if I had noted yesterday which business establishments were located in th
e general vicinity as well as immediately surrounding the newsstand-or if Quartermain had made an association between the proximity of the store and the bank-we would have, with the other facts, been able to guess the truth. The other facts: today’s date-the first of May, the first of the month-payday for a large number of local employees; the banners I had seen on Saturday announcing the beginning of the Sentinel Hill Professional Golf Classic, a major tournament which always attracts golf buffs and tourists equipped with traveler's checks and personal checks that require cashing; the combination of those two facts to make a third: the necessity of a local bank such as the National Exchange to have a large amount of available cash on hand-more cash than it would normally keep and thus a boodle big enough to make the time and expense of a complicated holdup worthwhile; the fact that at least three men-Paige, the balding man, Winestock-were involved, which tended to rule out a large number of major-profit crimes, since such ploys as kidnapping and extortion would hardly require more than one or two principals; the fact that in a small community like Cypress Bay, a bank would be the only source of enough money to make feasible a plot involving three or more men and the subsequent split of the take; and finally, Judith Paige's comment in my office on Friday that her husband had told her he would be in Cypress Bay not only until Sunday but until "late Monday afternoon," which confirmed the day and approximate time of the robbery and bore out our feelings of urgency.

  Quartermain's frantic check with the president of the National Exchange Bank, following our reading of the carbon at the schoolhouse, had determined that until that moment everything was perfectly normal. The robbery, then, had either been aborted or they were waiting until later in the day-any time up until six o'clock, since the bank stayed open late on the first of the month. Quarter- main had had to make the choice, assuming there had been no abortion of the plan, of whether or not to allow the execution of it.