Undercurrent nd-3

by Bill Pronzini

  Immediately Quartermain went to the far couch, reached down, and picked up the gun by its short barrel. Mrs. Tarrant did not move. He put the weapon into his jacket pocket and straightened up and went to Tarrant's body and knelt down; but he was only going through the motions. Features waxen, blood coagulated and dried, Tarrant had been dead for some time.

  I just stood there, with a kind of poisonous nausea in my stomach, thinking: I could have prevented this, I could have saved Tarrant's life if I had caught his slip at the schoolhouse or if I had remembered it before going to sleep in Quartermain's office; I could have prevented this! And yet I knew I could not blame myself, not really, because the seeds had been sown long ago by Keith and Bianca Tarrant, just as Paige had sown his seeds with Dancer's book-and that destruction, in one form or another, had been inevitable.

  Quartermain stood up again and glanced around the room and saw that there was a telephone on a stand near the polished-wood inner stairs. He shambled over there, his eyes sick and his mouth twisted into a thin grimace, and caught up the receiver and dialed a number. The summons: county investigators and, this time, a matron- and the crew, too, don't forget the crew, the clean-up boys, the necessary vultures who go to work when someone dies by violence. Come on out, boys and girl, the Tarrant’s are having a party on Del Lobos Canyon Road and you're the only others invited.

  Quartermain said what had to be said and put down the handset and returned to the far sofa, stepping between where Mrs. Tarrant was sitting and a glass-topped coffee table that held two empty glasses and an empty gin bottle. He sat down next to her and touched her shoulder, shook her just a little. I thought for a moment that she was not going to come out of it, but then a tremor passed through her and her eyelids fluttered and her eyes took on a dull, vacuous awareness. But if she had been drunk when she shot her husband, she showed no signs of it now. She turned her head and looked at Quartermain without expression; he might have been a part of the furniture. Her mouth worked and she said, "I shot him, I killed him," in a voice that was steady and clear and as empty as the gin bottle.

  He said, "Do you know who I am, Mrs. Tarrant? Can you understand me?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Who am I?"

  "Chief Quartermain."

  He hesitated, and I knew why and felt some of his reluctance. It was time now for the ritual, the Miranda decision, the recitation of personal civil rights that is an absolute necessity before an individual about to be placed under arrest can be questioned in connection with a crime. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right not to answer police questions, you have the right to know that if you do answer police questions, your answers may be used as evidence against you, you have the right to consult with an attorney before or during police questioning, you have the right to have a lawyer appointed without cost and to consult with him before and during police questioning in the event you do not have the funds with which to hire counsel yourself. I listened to him saying that and looked at her sitting there, and the ritual was obscene-not because the Miranda decision itself was obscene or anything but perfectly just, but because with a thing like this, a drunken and irrational crime of passion, the enactment of the ritual is a cruel and bitter farce.

  When he had finished, Quartermain asked her if she understood all of her rights as he had outlined them to her, and she said yes, she understood, not really understanding, not really caring, and he asked her if she was willing to answer questions without benefit of counsel and she said Yes, yes, and uncrossed her arms and put her face in her hands and began to cry. Quartermain looked over at me, helplessly, but I had nothing for him. I moved forward a little and my eyes strayed again to Tarrant and all that blood, and I thought: So much blood and so much dying in the last few days, and now it's over, there won't be any more blood or any more dying, not here, not for a while. The undercurrents have surfaced and the rumbling has stopped and the violence has consummated itself and the web has unraveled. It's over-or is it? For Walter Paige and for Brad Winestock and for Keith Tarrant, yes. But what about the others-what about Russ Dancer and Beverly Winestock and Bianca Tarrant and the Lomaxes and even Quartermain? Is it over for them, too? Is it really over for them?

  Another tremor passed through Mrs. Tarrant, and it seemed to steady her somehow; she took her hands away from her face and sighed long and shuddering and looked at Quartermain again, waiting. Her face, sallow-white and streaked with mascara and greenish eyeshadow, was ghastly.

  He asked, "Did you shoot your husband, Mrs. Tarrant?"

  "Yes," she said. "I shot him. Yes."

  "Why did you shoot him?"

  "Because he… because he killed Walt"

  "Walter Paige?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you certain of that?"

  "He told me he did it. He said he did it for me, because he loved me, because he… loved…"

  The words trailed off, and she began to slide her hands rigidly back and forth across her thighs; the emerald-green material of her suit pants made rhythmic rustling sounds that pulled at my nerves like the sounds of chalk squealing against a blackboard. Quartermain said, with a mixture of gentleness and infinite weariness, "You were the woman with Paige Saturday afternoon? The two of you were lovers?"

  "Yes. We were lovers. We were lovers six years ago and then he went away without saying anything, just went away, and I thought I would go insane with wanting him. But after a while I got over him enough so that life had some purpose again, and Keith and I… we were doing nicely, Keith tried, he always did try. And then Walt came back. He called me one day two months ago and said he wanted to see me again, he said he still loved me and needed me and was sorry he'd gone away, and I met him in Monterey that weekend and it was… oh God, it was just like it was six years ago, it was better, I loved him so! We were going away together. The wife, he didn't tell me about her, he wanted to spare me, you see, but it wouldn't have mattered, Keith didn't matter, nothing mattered but Walt.

  "I began to see him regularly at the Beachwood, every Saturday, coming through the rear entrance and along the beach because we didn't want to take the chance of my coming in the front way and someone seeing me and recognizing me. I was always very careful when I came out again, too. It was… I don't know, it was even more exciting that way…"

  "But your husband found out, in spite of your precautions."

  "Yes. Yes, Keith found out. He know about Walt and me six years ago, I had no idea he knew, I thought I had hidden it from him and I thought he was still friendly toward Walt and had no idea Walt had come back after all these years. That's why I didn't suspect Keith of Walt's murder, not at first. But then you told me today about Walt calling Keith five weeks ago, I don't know why Walt wanted to rent that store when we were going away together, and about Keith saying he didn't care for Walt, and I began thinking and thinking and suddenly I knew Keith had done it, even though you said you suspected someone else, I knew Keith was the one.

  "After we came back from Monterey-he insisted we go even though I didn't want to-I started drinking and then I asked him if he had killed Walt, just like that. He denied it at first, but I kept on and on and he started drinking, too, and finally he admitted it, he told me he knew all about Walt and me and that I had been seeing Walt again because of the peculiar way I'd been acting, and he told me exactly how he had killed Walt and why he had killed him, and I… all at once I hated Keith, I hated him more than I've ever hated anyone or anything and I wanted him to be dead too.

  "He was sitting over there on the other sofa, telling me how he had lied to you this morning, how he'd claimed to have given me an ultimatum and I chose him instead of Walt, my God! — he knew about us back then, but only just before Walt left, and Keith never said a word to me, not a word… sitting over there telling me how he would have to be very careful to stand by that he if you came to question us again and how lucky we were that you were so involved with Russ Dancer's book when it had nothing to do with his having killed Walt. He w
as very calm and oh so rational, talking like that with Walt's blood on his hands, and I couldn't stand it, I just couldn't stand it. Something seemed to snap inside me and I got up and went downstairs to Keith's study and got his gun and came up here and shot him while he was sitting there. I shot him and shot him and watched him die and I wasn't sorry but I… I don't know… I don't know…"

  She stopped talking again, but her hands continued their nervous rubbing movement on her pant legs. There was moistness in her eyes once more, and she seemed to be trembling-a middle-aged woman now, broken and empty and tormented by something that could never have been and by an irrational mistake that could never be rectified. But I did not think she would break down; there did not seem to be enough left in her now for a breakdown.

  Quartermain asked, to get the final piece in place, "Will you tell me what happened Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Tarrant?"

  She nodded convulsively, and swallowed twice, and said, "Walt called me about two o'clock, I was waiting here for his call, he always called about two o'clock, you see. After he told me which unit he was in at the Beachwood, I made an excuse to Keith, he was home that day, and drove down to Cypress Bay and parked my car on Ocean Boulevard and walked along the beach to Walt's cottage. But Keith had been drinking and he suspected where I was going, knowing but not really knowing — do you understand? — about Walt and me, and so he followed me to Cypress Bay and along the beach and watched me go inside with Walt. Then he went through the gate there without being seen and up to the rear glass wall and we… Walt hadn't closed the drapes all the way and Keith saw us, he saw us in bed and he said he went half crazy, seeing me with Walt, what we were doing, and that was when… when he decided to kill… Walt…"

  She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again and went on in her empty voice, "He went back to his car and got one of the company letter openers that he kept to give away to customers, and came back and waited until I left the cottage, hiding out there, and when I was gone he knocked on the glass and Walt thought… he thought it was me coming back for something and opened the door and Keith shoved him inside and stabbed him before he could cry out… stabbed him… and Walt's blood was on his hands and he went into the bathroom to wash it off and saw the glass I had used when Walt and I had a drink and put that into his pocket because it had my lipstick on it, and then he emptied the ashtray I had used into the toilet, and the whole time he was doing those things Walt was lying on the floor, dying, but Keith said he thought Walt was dead already or he would have finished the job… he would have finished…"

  Her shoulders began to tremble violently and her body jerked as if she were undergoing convulsions. The tears began to flow, thick and glistening, further mingling with the mascara and the eyeshadow to stain her cheeks in grotesque, tragic-clown colors; she knuckled her eyes in a pathetic little-girl gesture and then took her hands down and pressed them hard against her stomach.

  "I think I'm going to be sick," she said.

  "I'll take you to the bathroom," Quartermain said, and he stood up and reached out a hand to her.

  I felt as if I were suffocating. I turned and went around the other couch, not looking at what was left of Keith Tarrant, and stepped out through the open glass door onto the balcony. Leaning forward against the railing, breathing deeply, I thought about Judith Paige and how I would have to talk to her and how she would react to the knowledge of what her husband had been, the evil of him and what he had precipitated in the quiet, make-believe hamlet of Cypress Bay. And when the thought became too painful, I stopped thinking at all and looked across the canyon at the dark, shimmering meadow stretching from the ravine wall toward the horizon, and at the chaparral and pine that took over and leaned up to touch the star-spattered velvet of the sky, and felt the cool breath of a spring night blowing against my face.

  And shuddered, because it was filled with the smell of blood.

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