Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Eight-fifteen.

  There had been a high, early-morning fog, but it was lifting off now and the sky was a faded indigo to the east. Sunlight, the universal cleanser, washed the street and the houses in pale gold, and the neighborhood looked a little nicer, a little friendlier, and a little more hopeful. The smell of spring was thick and fresh in the air.

  Across the street a woman with reddish-gold hair that shone like distant fire came out of her house and went into a side garden; she carried a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves. For a brief instant the flaming hair reminded me of Cheryl Rosmond. I looked away and got out my cigarettes and lit one—the hell with my chest.

  Cheryl Rosmond. A memory now—still vivid, still immediate, but a memory nonetheless. She was something that might have been for me, something that should have been, something which now could never be. The attraction, the rapport, we had had, had died before it had really lived—the result of a tragedy which neither of us could have foreseen in the beginning, and which, bitterly, neither of us could have prevented even if we had.

  It had died because I had unmasked her brother—her only living relative, the one person she loved more than anything in this world—as a cold-blooded murderer, and because I had been an integral part of the reason for his ultimate suicide by hanging.

  What can you say to a woman after something like that? How can you bridge the sudden chasm between you? The answers are painfully simple: there is nothing you can say, there is no way to span the chasm. You cannot bring her brother back to life, and undo his wrongs, and you cannot bring back to life the spark that had begun between you and her; both are dead, both are gone. And the fact that Doug Rosmond had addressed his suicide note to me, and begged me to take care of his sister and to love her and to help her, only made the situation that much more untenable; he would always be between us, the ghost of him and of his crimes, even if our relationship could have somehow continued. Cheryl knew that, and I knew it, and there was simply nothing more for either of us.

  But I tried. You have to try. I saw her, I called her— and it was useless, so damned futile because all the while you know it's futile. The papers made a thing out of the case—there was no way to keep it out of the papers—and that had made it unbearable for Cheryl in San Francisco; she had given up her house on Vicente and given up her job and her few friends and moved back to Truckee, where she had grown up but where she had no family and she was as alone as I. I had written her four times since then, and she had answered each letter politely but with no encouragement, and then I had stopped writing and stopped myself three times from getting into my car and driving up to the Sierras to see her again, because you can only try for so long before you have to admit the absolute finality of it, the impossibility of resurrection. So now it was over; it was buried along with Doug Rosmond.

  I had made a promise to myself then that I would no longer become involved, that involvement brought pain more acute than that of simple loneliness. It had been a tough six months for me, because before Cheryl there had been a woman named Erika, who had walked out of my life for a much different if no less painful reason, and I did not think I could endure another bittersweet love affair—now or ever again. I was too old, too tired, too sensitive. It was better to be a loner, to be alone, to be objective; the pleasures were few, but they were good and simple ones, and the less complications there were, the more peaceful life was.

  I finished the cigarette and threw the butt out the window and watched the languid breeze roll it down the hill toward the silently waiting Cutlass. Almost nine now. Come on, Paige, let's get the show on the road, let's get your ass in gear. If you're screwing around on a girl like Judith, you son of a bitch, you're the biggest damned fool who ever walked the earth. Don't you see what you've got there? Don't you know how fortunate you are? Don't you know there are those who would give their eyes for the love of a woman like that?

  Another five minutes went by, darkly. I felt nervous and irritable with the waiting; I wished I had not seen the woman with the reddish-gold hair, and I wished that Judith Paige had not come into my office the day before. I could have called Eberhardt—my best friend for better than twenty-five years, the youthfully idealistic days at the Police Academy and on the San Francisco cops, where he was currently a Lieutenant of Detectives—and have talked him into going fishing up at Black Point. We could have sat in a skiff and drunk beer in the warm spring sunshine and enjoyed life a little, the simple pleasures . . .

  The entrance door to the apartment building opened, and a lean, sinuous guy carrying an overnight bag and wearing a sports coat over a thin brown turtleneck came out briskly. He had one of these sharp-featured faces that you could call handsome if you liked the type, and curly black hair and long barlike sideburns. He walked quickly to the Cutlass, unlocked the driver's door, and slid in under the wheel.

  I waited until he was half a block down the hill before I started my car and pulled out after him. Once we got off Sussex, there was just enough traffic so that I could stay fairly close—and he led me directly to the Southern Freeway entrance on Monterey Boulevard. I gave him a long lead out on the freeway, and then closed the gap a little as we neared the arteries branching into the James Lick north and south, and into 280 leading down to Third Street; I half expected him to make the swing north, into San Francisco proper, but he cut over to the right instead and got onto James Lick southbound. If there was another woman, she did not apparently live in the city.

  Paige held his speed down in the moderately heavy traffic, driving leisurely, and I had no trouble keeping him in sight. If you put other cars between yourself and your subject, and use a lane opposite to his, maintaining a tail on the freeway is no real problem—as long as the subject does not expect to be followed in the first place. Paige seemed to have no suspicions whatsoever.

  We went down the length of the peninsula on 101, leaving the bay and its crisp breezes behind. We left San Jose behind too—and then Gilroy and Watsonville—and it began to look as if the two-hundred-odd miles Paige had driven the previous weekend meant something after all. The further south we traveled, the warmer it got to be. We passed through the agricultural belt, the fields of lettuce and artichokes—Steinbeck country; and a few miles outside of Salinas, Paige finally quit 101 on State 156 leading west toward the ocean. Just below Castroville, 156 joins Highway 1, and when we got there, Paige swung south again along the coast.

  Highway 1 was two-lane and had considerably less traffic; I dropped further back with a car between the Cutlass and me. Artichoke fields stretched away on both sides of the road for a while, but when we approached Fort Ord—the Army's West Coast training camp—the landscape changed to seaward and became a series of rolling sand dunes topped with tule grass, like an endless string of human heads with all the features and most of the hair erased by the sea winds. The buildings of Fort Ord came and went, as did the town of Seaside, and pretty soon we were in more of Steinbeck country—the city of Monterey.

  We came down off a steep hill on the southern outskirts, and through thickly grown Monterey cypress and pine I had my first glimpse of the Pacific, and of the small inlet of Cypress Bay; the water was blue-green and sun-jeweled, dotted with sailboats and pleasure craft. A little further along, there was a turnoff for the village of Cypress Bay; Paige took the exit, and we began to descend along a wood-lined concourse toward the center of the hamlet.

  Cypress Bay was a haven for artists and writers—and for sightseers and vacationers and college students and hippies and the more sedate among the swingers. Art galleries and workshops, more than a hundred souvenir shops, quaint French and seafood restaurants, and dozens of motels, hotels, and inns comprised the bulk of its buildings; and there were pastoral streets and curving little alleys to complete the illusion of a vanished and cherished rusticity. You would find no billboards, few street signs, few street lights; the city fathers maintained and protected the illusion with strict building codes and rigid laws. The architecture was
a mixture of traditional Old Spanish; Monterey adobe, which utilized waterproof adobe bricks and redwood shakes and hewn local timbers; log-cabin style, with heavy emphasis on pioneer simplicity; and saccharine Hansel and Gretel doll houses, popular in the twenties, that featured whimsical windows, chimneys, gambrels, and gabled roofs. You had to go some distance outside the village proper to find anything of a modern design.

  Paige took me through the middle of Cypress Bay on Grove Avenue—a two-lane street divided in the middle by shrubbery, lined with souvenir shops and spanned at intervals by banners proclaiming: Sentinel Hill Professional Golf Classic • Thursday, May 4, Through Sunday, May 7 • Qualifying Monday, May 1. Sentinel Hill, like its more famous neighbor Pebble Beach, was located on the peninsula not far from Cypress Bay; and the annual pro tournament there, like the ones at Pebble, always brought in a heavy stream of tourists and camp followers. From the packed sidewalks, it appeared as if most of them had arrived early.

  At the foot of Grove was a wide thoroughfare called Ocean Boulevard, which ran in a parallel curve to the harbor. Across it was a large, thickly shaded park, a municipal pier where you could hire a charter boat for salmon trolling or deep-sea fishing, and a public beach that curved in a white-powder crescent around the inlet. Cypress Bay had a little something for everyone; I wondered sourly what it had for Walter Paige.

  Paige made a left turn on Ocean and drove a fifth of a mile; there, beachfront, was a motel that you might have mistaken for a series of private beach cottages if you had glanced at them in a cursory way. The only sign was a small, neat, bucolic one with letters fashioned out of strips of bark; it said: The Beachwood.

  Paige took the Cutlass onto a white-gravel drive and stopped in front of a log-cabin-style building in the middle of the grounds; the drive formed a small inner square, servicing each of the cottages in their squared-off, extended U arrangement. I stopped on Ocean Boulevard and watched Paige get out and enter the motel office.

  This looked like the end of the line—for now, anyway. But I was not going in until I made certain. So I sat there, waiting, and looked at the cottages. They were as neat and rustic as the sign, as the rest of Cypress Bay. Pines filled the grounds—and roses and lilac bushes— and each cottage was separated from its neighbor by a high Monterey cypress hedge. Those cottages at the rear of the grounds had their backsides to the sea and to what looked like a private beach; the others, which formed the shortened arms of the U, seemed to have lush rear gardens bounded by more of the cypress hedges. A little something for everyone here, too—in keeping with the community image. But the Beachwood was not a place for the flotsam and jetsam that washed into Cypress Bay in the spring and summer months—and that made me wonder a little. It seemed well out of Paige's range, judging from his San Francisco address, but then, it could be that he was not paying for the accommodations.

  Paige reappeared after a couple of minutes and got into the Cutlass again and drove it over to one of the cottages offering a rear view of the sea, parking under a kind of shake-roofed porte-cochere attached to the side wall. Then he got out with his overnight bag and used a key on the front door.

  I sat there for ten minutes, but he did not come out again. I started my car and entered the white-gravel drive and parked in approximately the same spot as Paige had originally. When I stepped out, I could see that the number of his cottage was 9. I went into the office, and it was a dark, well-appointed room with a counter at one end and unvarnished redwood walls. A bell over the door announced my entrance, and a guy dressed in a gray business suit appeared through a doorway behind the counter and smiled at me in a professional way. He was a couple of years younger than my forty-seven, with a round, pink, complacent face and a mouth that was red enough to have been made up with lip rouge. A small rectangular card pinned to the breast pocket of his suit coat said that he was Mr. Orchard.

  "Yes, sir?" He had a rich, masculine voice that belied the fruity appearance of his lips. "May I help you?"

  I told him I wanted a sea-view cottage—8, 9, or 10, if any of those were available. Apologetically: they were not; in fact, all of the rear cottages were occupied at the moment. I asked him what he had with southern exposure, and he said that both 6 and 7 were free.

  "May I see one before I register?"

  "Certainly, sir." He took a couple of keys off a slotted wallboard to one side and led me out and across the grounds to Number 6. One room, with bath; good-sized, containing a double bed and Naugahyde chairs and a desk and redwood walls and a beamed ceiling—and a television set in one corner that spoiled the entire effect. The rear wall, behind tasteful gold monk's-cloth drapes, was of glass, with a sliding glass door; it looked out onto the private rear garden, but I was more interested in the view from the front window. I pulled bamboo blinds aside and looked over at Number 9. The angle was pretty good, if a little further away than I would have liked; I could see the front door clearly.

  "It looks okay," I said to Orchard. "How much per day?"

  "Twenty-five dollars, sir."

  "Well, that's fine," I told him, even though it wasn't. "I'll only be here tonight, I think."

  We went back to the office and I filled in the registration form and paid Orchard in advance and took my car over to the porte-cochere for Number 6. Inside, I drew one of the Naugahyde chairs up to the window; then I pulled the blinds halfway up and sat down in the chair with my cigarettes and my thoughts to wait for something to happen.

  Three

  Nothing happened until a quarter to one, and then it was not much.

  The boredom of waiting had led to too many cigarettes, and the cigarettes had led to a thin pulsing headache and a deepening of the tightness in my chest. I began to cough a little—dry, sharp sounds like the barking of a very old hound. I stood up and paced back and forth in front of the window to ease cramped muscles, holding a handkerchief over my mouth to catch the phlegm, not looking at the handkerchief, not thinking about the phlegm. I wished to Christ this other woman would come, so I could call Judith Paige and confirm her fears and listen to her cry; they always cry when you tell them, even though they expect the worst. Then I could go home and drink a couple of bottles of beer and try to forget the entire damned thing. Or I wished that Paige would do something to alleviate suspicion completely, to restore some of my tenuous faith in the basic goodness of man; my telephone call, and Judith Paige's tears, would have different meanings then, and those beers would taste better and my apartment would be a little less lonely tonight.

  My throat felt dry, and I went into the bathroom and drank a glass of water. When I returned to the window, Paige was several steps from the front door of his cottage, walking without haste along the white-gravel drive toward Ocean Boulevard.

  I watched him from the window until he had passed the motel office, and then I opened my door and stepped out into the warm, salt-fragrant afternoon. I came around a couple of conifers in time to see Paige turn left on the boulevard and begin to make his way toward the village proper. He could not be going far, I thought, if he was walking and not driving. Maybe this was it—something, anyway, to give me an idea of which way this thing was going to go.

  I gave him a good fifty yards, and followed him on the same side of the boulevard. The sidewalks were filled with humanity, and their bright faces reflected the joy of problem-free moments and a day abundant in the sweet breath of early spring; I felt a little like an alien among them.

  Paige went along the edge of the white beach and entered the verdurous park I had seen earlier. Picnickers and chess players, relaxers and readers and watchers sat on the rolling greensward or on curving wooden benches; and beyond, the long municipal pier was crowded with a smooth ebb and flow like the surf itself. There were more sunbathers, more strollers on the shining white sand of the beach. Signs told you the surfs were unsafe, that there were riptides and undertows, but there were still a few waders; there would always be a few waders, a few swimmers, a few challengers.

  At one of the
benches near the beach, Paige sat down next to an old lady wearing a loose-brimmed straw sun hat. She did not look at him and he did not look at her; he sat with his legs crossed, very relaxed, staring out to sea. I stepped off the wide cinder path and sat down on the lawn under one of the pine trees. I was wearing an old suit, the oldest of the three I owned, and it was of a dark enough color so that grass stains would not show. The walk and the sea air had helped my headache a little, and my chest felt less constricted.

  Paige kept on sitting motionless on the bench, communing with the vast Pacific. Out on the rock headlands, cormorants and loons rested between fishing excursions, and even at this distance you could hear the atonal but somehow pleasant barking of sea lions. Near the breakwater, sailboats drifted languidly and a pair of fiberglass ski boats raced side by side, raising fans of white spume not quite as graceful as those created by the skiers they towed behind; and beyond, on the Pacific itself, a charter boat coming in sleek and white against the solid-blue backdrop of sea and sky.

  Ten minutes went by. I saw Paige raise his left arm and look at a watch on his wrist and lower the arm again. So all right—he seemed to be waiting for somebody; if you're taking in the air or the sights, you don't usually pay much attention to time. Assuming it was a woman— why here in the park? Why not at the Beachwood, where you could get down to basics in a matter of seconds?

  I was good at asking myself rhetorical questions, so I stopped it and tried to blank my mind enough to enjoy the surroundings. Paige glanced at his watch again at one-ten, and again at one-fifteen; other than that, he was very patient sitting there. It began to get a little cool in the shade, and I moved over to a wide patch of sunlight. One twenty-five.

  The old woman in the sun hat got up and moved away arthritically. Paige paid no attention to her. But he paid plenty of attention to the wedge-shaped, balding man who took her place on the bench a couple of minutes later; he acknowledged a greeting, slid over a little, and the two of them began an earnest conversation without preamble. I could see their lips moving in profile.