Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  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 entrance 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."

  "Okay."

  He asked me to send Orchard down there, and I said I would; then we nodded to each other, because it was not the kind of situation that called for handshaking, and I returned to the motel office. I relayed Quartermain's request to Orchard, and watched him flutter some more, and then walk down to where the Chief was waiting.

  The police guard on the motel entrance allowed a couple of cars to pass through, and as they approached I could see the Press cards in their windshields. I did not want to talk to reporters, but there was no way out of the area just yet. I stood there and took it, shielding my face from the cameras and ignoring most of the questions. They got tired of me very quickly, and half of them went down to try to get at Quartermain, and the other half went to the assemblage of motel guests.

  I decided I wanted out of there and left the grounds as unobtrusively as I could manage it. I walked along Ocean Boulevard until I came to a small seafood restaurant, ate a bowl of chowder and drank a bottle of beer because I had not had anything to eat since breakfast, and then lingered over a second beer that I did not really want either.

  When I finally returned to the Beachwood, things had settled down to normal; the cops and the reporters and the morbid public were gone, and the grounds were hushed and empty. I entered my cottage and lay down on the bed and tried to forget the way Paige had looked lying there with all the blood on him. I could forget that easily enough, I discovered, but the image and the ordeal of Judith Paige was something else again—and it was too many hours before sleep came around to pull down the veil . . .

  Five

  The phone rang at seven-fifty the next morning.

  I had slept maybe four hours, and I was up and shaving in the bathroom. My eyes, in the medicine-cabinet mirror, were shot through with webs of pink and red lines; my lungs were thick with bitter phlegm, and every now and then a spasm of coughing would bring some of it up. I felt gray and irritable, the way you do with a bad hangover. Outside in the garden, sparrows chattered senselessly—and in the distance there was the sound of church bells, like gently imploring words drifting on the sweet spring air. Sunday morning. The loneliest time of the week, if you're alone to begin with. And the Sunday morning following a bad Saturday, a Saturday filled with blood and death and sorrow, is the worst kind of lonely there is.

  When the telephone bell went off, I jumped a little and cut myself. I had a fine set of nerves. I tore off a piece of toilet paper and dabbed at the pustule of blood as I went out and hooked the receiver off the unit on the nightstand. I gave my name, and a woman's voice— sweet and low, like the old blues song, and painfully melancholy, too, like the voice of Billie Holiday—said hesitatingly, "I . . . this is Judith Paige."

  I tried to think of something to say, but I had no words. There are no words. It was an awkward moment, and I wished she had not called; and yet, I was relieved that she had.

  I said finally, to break the deepening stillness, "Are you here in Cypress Bay, Mrs. Paige?"

  "Yes. I flew down to Monterey last night, with the San Francisco officer who . . . came to tell me what happened."

  "I couldn't call you," I said. "It was out of my hands."

  "You mustn't apologize. I understand."

  "Did they treat you all right?"

  "Everyone has been very kind."

  "You talked with Chief Quartermain?"

  "Yes. He met us at the airport last night."

  "Is there anything . . . definite yet?"

  "I don't think so. He promised to tell me as soon as there was." Tremulous breath. "Can I . . . talk to you? I mean, would you come here for a little while?"

  I did not want to stand face to face with her grief, but there was no way I could turn her down. "Yes," I said. "Where are you?"

  "The Bay Head Inn. Room five."

  "I'll be there as soon as I can."

  I left the cottage ten minutes later, fully shaved. The sunlight was warm and effulgent, and the glare stabbed at my eyes like sharpened fingernails. The day was sharply voluble with the barking of sea lions and the screaming of gulls and cormorants and loons and the drifting sound of distant laughter. The bay was speckled with the whiteness of sails and with golden threads woven by the rising sun. Idyllic Sunday morning: illusion, concealing human folly and human despair. Or maybe I just had a hard-on for the world today.

  I crossed to the motel office, and there were two cars just leaving the grounds—travelers moving on, as travelers do, or nervous vacationers fleeing the onus of prolonged association with violent death. I went inside, and Orchard was not on duty; his place had been taken by a plump, matronly woman wearing a bright dress and a brighter smile. If she knew what had happened at the Beachwood the previous night and the part I had played in it—and she must have known—she was not letting on about it. Her greeting was cordial and professional. I told her I would probably be staying another full day, if not the night itself, and got a street map of the area from her and asked her where I could find the Bay Head Inn. She told me, and
I found the street on the map; it was a couple of blocks off Grove Avenue, in the heart of the village.

  I was there in five minutes, and the inn was an Old Spanish-style building three stories high, with wrought-iron balconies and a tile roof and a whitewashed adobe facade grown with ivy and shaded by tall Monterey pines. A slender clerk told me where Room 5 was located, and I went up a curving iron-railed staircase to the second floor and stopped in front of the door with Five spelled in black iron. I knocked softly. She said my name in there, questioningly; when I confirmed it, she told me to come in, the door was unlocked.

  I depressed the antique latch and stepped into a long, large room darkened against the brilliancy of the morning; sunlight and spring, like laughter by the side of a grave, make a mockery of grief. Judith was sitting in a saddle chair studded with black rail-spike heads, her legs tucked under her, her face a white oval in the room's half-light. She wore a simple black dress, and no make-up that I could see; the blond hair was limp, uncombed. She looked like a sad, lost little girl, sitting there that way, her hands folded in her lap. You could sense the feeling of privation in the dark silence, like the essence of vanished youth and faded memories that lingers in the room of a very old gentlewoman.

  I shut the door, and she said "Thank you for coming" in that low, painful voice. She watched me as I crossed to the second of the two chairs and sat down and tried to find something to do with my hands.

  I said inadequately, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Paige."

  "Yes," she said. "I know that."

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  "That was what I wanted to ask you. Can you . . . help the police in some way?"

  I had been afraid of that sort of response to my question, because there was only one answer I could give her. I said, "I don't think so, Mrs. Paige. The authorities don't like private individuals involving themselves in murder investigations. And I have no facilities of my own, even if I could get permission to look into it."

  "I see." She looked beyond me, to something only she could see. "Why would anyone kill him?"

  "I don't know, Mrs. Paige."

  "He had no enemies. He was very easygoing."

  You only knew him for a few months, I thought. I said, "The police will find out who it was. And why it was. It will only be a matter of time." The words seemed hollow as I spoke them.

  "There's a chance it was a woman, isn't there?"

  I couldn't lie to her. "Yes, there's a chance."

  "If I knew at least that much," she said, "I might be able to feel something. I don't feel anything now. I mean, I feel numb now. I can't cry anymore and I can't think any more."

  I said nothing; what can you say?

  Seconds went by, like furtive footsteps, and then she said, "I have to know. I don't think I can live with it if I don't know why he died."

  "You have to live with it," I said, "with or without the answer. You can't hide from it and you can't run away from it."

  "I know. I . . . know."

  "What will you do, later on? Will you go back to Idaho?"

  "I suppose I will. I have nowhere else to go."

  "Do you have family there?"

  "Yes."

  "They'll make it easier for you, if you let them."

  "Thank you, I know they will."

  I felt uneasy. "I didn't mean to preach, Mrs. Paige."

  "No, you're being very practical. I need that just now."

  I wanted my first cigarette of the day, but tobacco smoke would have been as inappropriate in there as the sunlight. I said, "Did the police ask you about the man I saw with your husband yesterday?"

  "Several times."

  "You don't know him, then?"

  "No. I'm very certain I don't."

  "And you've never seen a man of that description?"

  "Not that I can recall."

  "Did your husband mention Cypress Bay at any time?"

  She moved her head slightly in a negative way. "I had no idea there was such a place. I had to ask the officer who came last night where it was."

  "Did he keep an address book—your husband?"

  "No. Walter was . . . well, nongregarious. We didn't have very many friends, you see."

  "Was there anything in his effects?"

  "Chief Quartermain didn't tell me if there was."

  I could not think of anything else of pertinence to say, and she would not want small talk of any kind. I put my hands on the arms of the chair—and I remembered then, for no particular reason or because it had been in the back of my mind all along, looking for a rational escape, about the paperback mystery novel I had seen in Walter Paige's overnight bag. I put voice to the recollection, and then I said, "Did the police ask you about the book, Mrs. Paige?"

  "No, they didn't say anything about it. What kind of book is it?"

  "A mystery novel—a thing called The Dead and the Dying by Russell Dancer."

  "The dead and the dying," she said. "That's very appropriate, isn't it?"

  "No," I said. I did not want her feeling sorry for herself. "Have you ever seen the book?"

  She sighed. "I don't think so."

  "Did your husband read much mystery fiction?"

  "He didn't read any, that I know of."

  "Was he a collector or accumulator of books?"

  "No. He didn't seem interested in them at all."

  "That makes an odd point, then."

  "Do you think it might be important?"

  "I don't know. Probably not."

  "I don't see how it could be."

  "Neither do I," I said. "Still, the book is fifteen or twenty years old—and it isn't common for someone to have a paperback of that vintage unless he collects them or reads enough to frequent secondhand stores."

  "Should you tell the police about that?"

  "I think it would be a good idea," I said. "I have to see Chief Quartermain today and I'll tell him then."

  She nodded quietly.

  "Were you told when you could leave Cypress Bay?" I asked.

  "Not exactly. Chief Quartermain asked me to stay until he makes a more thorough investigation. They're paying for this room, he said. It's a nice room, don't you think?"

  "Yes. Look, Mrs. Paige, I'll be here for a while too. I could drive you back to San Francisco if you like, when the time comes."

  "Yes, I'd appreciate that. Thank you. You've been very nice about everything. I only wish you hadn't had to get involved in a thing like this."

  There was no irony in her words, but I could feel an irony just the same—hot and sharp and virulent. I got up on my feet. "I'd better be going now," I said. "Will you be okay here?"

  "Yes. You mustn't worry about me."

  Somebody was going to have to worry about her—for a while anyway, until she got home to her family in Idaho. I said, "If you want company later on, call me at the Beachwood. Will you do that?"

  She inclined her head, and I stood there looking at her a moment longer; but there were no more words for either of us. I turned and went to the door and got out of there—out of dark reality and into the bright world of make-believe.

  Six

  Cypress Bay's City Hall was one of the Monterey adobe buildings, freshly whitewashed and quietly official behind a lime-green lawn and the inevitable woodsy shade of pines and black oaks. There was a parking lot off to one side, and I took my car in there and left it and went over to the front of the building. To the right of the brick stairs was a small white picket sign, like the ones you see in national parks; it said Police on it and had an arrow pointing to a wide brick-paved, pine-needled path. The path led me around to a redwood-roofed wing, fronted by a kind of plaza decorated with wooden planters full of ferns. A much larger sign on the whitewashed facing wall read: Cypress Bay Police Department.

  I passed through double glass doors and up to a long counter behind which were a modern PBX, a couple of blue-metal filing cabinets, two blue-metal desks, and a fat sergeant with grave brown eyes and jughandle ears. He told me Quarterm
ain was in, checked with him, got an okay for me to see him, and buzzed me through a set of electronically controlled doors on the left. I went down a long corridor, past private offices and interrogation cubicles and file rooms, until I came to a perpendicular hallway that looked as if it ran part of the length of the main City Hall building. At the apex of the T, there was a door with dark blue lettering that said: Office of the Chief of Police.

  I entered through there, and a uniformed secretary was banging away on a portable typewriter. In the far wall was a door that had Quartermain's name on it in small blue letters; the secretary told me to go right in.

  Quartermain's office was large and comfortable, though more functional than decorative. The carpeting was blue, the walls were white and furbished with framed certificates and a couple of good seascapes; the desk was of flame- swirled walnut, with a glass top, and there were upholstered blue armchairs arranged in front of it and walnut file cases to one side. The only thing that seemed out of place was a very old, dark leather couch against the left-hand wall; but it gave the office a personal touch and told you a little something about Quartermain in the bargain.

  He was standing when I knocked and entered. His suit was a loose-fitting oyster-gray today and it made him seem even taller than he was. He thanked me in his soft, sepulchral voice for coming in, and we shook hands this time. I saw then that his eyes were a muted sea-blue, warm or cool depending on the situation—warm now, I thought—and I had the feeling that they were like the shutters on expensive cameras in that they would never miss recording any detail upon which they were focused. Quartermain was every bit the big, shrewd, intelligent cop—but you sensed a gentleness in him, too, an innate fairness; he reminded me a little of Eberhardt, without the falsely sour exterior.

  I sat down in one of the armchairs, and Quartermain said, "I've got your statement typed up and ready for your signature." He took a manila folder from one of the four wire baskets on his desk, removed a two-page deposition, and handed it across to me. I read it over and signed it for him and passed it back.