Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  "Morning, Jason," Quartermain said. His tone was deceptively mild, edged with authority, and I knew that even though the Lomaxes were important people in the community of Cypress Bay, too much had happened in the past thirty-six hours for him to use the soft approach; he was not about to stand for any bullshit, no matter what the source or cause.

  Lomax said coolly, ignoring me, "Good morning, Chief. Is there something I can do for you?"

  "There is. Is your wife here at the moment?"

  "Yes, she's here. But I don't think—"

  "Shall we go inside? Or do you want to call Robin out here? What we have to talk about concerns her, too."

  Lomax stared at him for a long moment, read his haggard face correctly, and asked, "All right, then. But I know why you're here, and you're making a very large mistake. I told this man yesterday"—gesturing at me the way you would gesture at a tree stump—"everything my wife and I know about Walter Paige and his death, which amounts to almost nothing at all."

  "I hope so, Jason. I hope that's what it amounts to."

  Lomax started to say something else, changed his mind, and turned grimly to the door. He opened it and we went inside and into a long, deep living room furnished in eighteenth-century Early American, paneled in maple, floored in gros point, and decorated with old-bronze lamps and knick-knacks. Blue drapes were open at a picture window that took up most of the side wall, and beyond you could see the flagstone terrace and, around toward the back, part of a green-tile swimming pool.

  Robin Lomax entered by way of a door at the rear of the room. She wore a plain short-sleeved white dress—she was the kind of woman who would wear white whenever possible, because it complemented her tanned skin and because it made her look young and fresh and innocent—and her face was carefully composed, her lips turned in a small, polite smile. But there was faint disapproval and more than a little fear in her eyes as she looked at Quartermain and me, as if in our rumpled, unshaven condition we were derelict intruders come for some dark purpose. The amenities were brief and strained—the polite good mornings, her invitation to sit down, her automatic offer of coffee, which we automatically refused. Then we took a long sofa and the two of them sat in facing chairs and we got to the point of it.

  Lomax asked stiffly, "Just what is it you want to ask us, Chief?" His manner continued to negate my presence.

  "To begin with, where you were last night?"

  The question startled them; they had not been prepared for that kind of opener. He said, "Last night?"

  "Yes. We came by just after dark, and no one was here."

  "Oh, I see. Well, we took Tommy to his grandmother's in Salinas and then we went to dinner and cocktails at Del Monte Lodge."

  "You left in something of a hurry, didn't you?"

  "Hurry?"

  "You neglected to close the front gate, and you forgot to turn on the night-lighting here on the grounds. When you go out for a casual evening, don't you usually attend to those things?"

  Robin Lomax moved uncomfortably in her chair and looked at her husband. He said, "We were rather upset. Your private detective's visit accounted for that"

  "He's not my private detective, Jason."

  "He's here with you now. He seemed to have your sanction to come around here yesterday making accusations . . ."

  "No one made any accusations, Mr. Lomax," I said evenly.

  Quartermain made an angry, impatient gesture. "All right," he said to Lomax, "so you took your son to his grandmother's and then you went out to supper and cocktails at Del Monte."

  "Yes," Lomax answered, and nodded.

  "Do you normally go out to dinner when you're upset?"

  "We had promised Robin's mother that we would bring Tommy to see her, and the drive to Salinas seemed just what both of us needed. We felt much better on the way home, and we decided to stop at the lodge. That's all."

  "What time did you leave there?"

  "Midnight or shortly after."

  "Did you come straight home?"

  "Yes, of course. Why are you asking all these questions about last night?"

  "Because Brad Winestock was murdered just before or just after midnight—shot to death at Spanish Bay, or somewhere else, and then taken out there in his car."

  Robin Lomax made a small, shocked sound and reached out in a blind sort of way to pluck at her husband's arm again. He just sat there, staring at us. "Who did it? Who would want to kill a poor nothing like Brad Winestock?"

  "Very possibly the same person who killed Walter Paige."

  "And we're under suspicion for both crimes, is that it?"

  "I didn't say you were under suspicion, did I, Jason?"

  "Well, you're acting as if we are, coming here with your questions and your intimations. We're respectable people, for God's sake, and I resent your trying to involve us in sordidness and murder."

  "I'm not trying to involve you, I'm trying to do my job the best way I know how. Now, the two of you knew Paige six years ago and you knew Brad Winestock; you reacted violently when confronted by Paige's name yesterday, and you seemed hardly willing to answer questions pertaining to Paige and your relationship with him. Those are the simple facts, and I'm here to find out the reasons for them. As long as you cooperate, and as long as you have nothing to hide, I'll apologize for my intrusion and for any inconvenience and you won't be bothered again. I don't see the need for indignation in any of that—unless you do have something to hide."

  "We have nothing to hide," Lomax said.

  "Fine. Now suppose you tell me about Walter Paige, and why you were so upset at the mention of his name yesterday."

  Lomax and his wife exchanged glances—they were good at exchanging glances—and again I could see nothing of any significance pass between them. He said, "Very well. I'll tell you why Walter Paige was and still is a filthy name around here, and I'll tell you why both my wife and I are glad he's dead even though we had absolutely nothing to do with his death."

  He paused, and took a long breath, and went on, "Paige thought he was irresistible, and that every woman in the world ought to fall fawning at his feet. Well, Robin didn't fall and that hurt his ego. So he got her somewhat . . . intoxicated one night, after she'd had a minor argument with me—we were going together at the time, you see—and he tried to attack her. She fought him off and managed to get away from him, but it was a very messy business, as you can well imagine. Naturally, when she told me, I wanted to attend to Paige personally, but we both saw the folly of that. We simply put the matter out of our minds as best we could, and shortly afterward Paige left Cypress Bay. We thought he had gone for good. When we heard he was back"—looking at me now, finally acknowledging my presence—"and this was before you told us of his death, you may remember, we were both angry and upset."

  "And that's all there is to it?" Quartermain asked.

  "Absolutely all."

  The hell it is, I thought. I said, "You seemed almost as unnerved by the fact that I was a private detective as you were by my mention of Paige's name. Why, Mr. Lomax?"

  His eyes flared with a kind of unreasonable hatred for me, and then he blinked and it was gone. Mrs. Lomax worked on her lower lip with her sharp white teeth; the fear was still in her eyes and she seemed to be having difficulty maintaining her composure.

  Quartermain said, "Answer his question, Jason."

  "We're not at all used to being visited by private detectives, right out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon." Lomax's voice was brittle again. "Naturally we were surprised and a little taken aback. Private detectives, if you can believe television and films, are hardly the type of people one likes to be confronted with unexpectedly."

  God, what a supercilious bastard! What he knew about private detectives you could put in a goddamn thimble; what he knew about a lot of things—including natural human emotions and compassions—you could put in a goddamn thimble. I looked at Quartermain, but I could not tell from his expression what he thought of Lomax's rehearsed-sounding and pompous an
swers.

  He said, "You were both here between four and six o'clock Saturday afternoon, is that right?"

  "Yes," she said, "that's right."

  "Playing tennis," Lomax added.

  "And you hadn't seen or heard from Walter Paige in six years?"

  "Yes. Or rather, no."

  "And you've never heard of a book of Russell Dancer's called The Dead and the Dying."

  "Certainly not."

  "And you don't know a fortyish, kind of bald man who was apparently a friend of Paige's and of Winestock's."

  "No."

  "Do you have anything more to tell me, about anything at all we've discussed just now or which might have any bearing on either or both murders?"

  Lomax moistened his lips. "No," he said, "we have nothing more to tell you, Chief."

  "Then I'll take you at your word," Quartermain said, "and hope for your sakes that I don't have to come back again with more questions." He stood up and I stood up with him. "Thanks for your time, Jason, and yours, Robin."

  Lomax started to get up, but Quartermain told him we could find our own way out and muttered a good morning. I followed him across to the door and out and through the facing garden to his car. Once inside, he said, "They're holding something back, too, the stubborn goddamn fools. Jesus Christ, I can't get a straight story out of anybody!"

  I did not say anything; I had nothing to offer on the subject of the Lomaxes. Their involvement, whatever it was, was too nebulous at this point to make conjecture worthwhile. Quartermain had taken his questions as far as he could without getting tough, and you don't get tough with people like the Lomaxes unless you've got something definite to back you up. As it was, there would no doubt be repercussions from the City Fathers once Lomax, being the kind of man he was, got through screaming about police harassment. It took a lot of guts, I thought, for Quartermain to handle things as he had—to allow me to keep my unofficial hand in. He's a good cop, a hell of a good cop, and he deserves better than he's getting. He deserves a break. And soon, damned soon.

  As if reading my thoughts, he said as he started the car, "God, I wish things would open up for us before long, before anything else happens. I wish we could get a break, just one little break."

  And we got one.

  Just like that, just as if all you had to do was ask for it in the right kind of thoughts and words.

  Donovan called on the transceiver while we were driving back to City Hall. He had just had a report from the county sheriff's unit which Quartermain had earlier asked be posted on Beach Road: they were on their way into Cypress Bay, and they were bringing with them—badly hungover but otherwise alive and well—the driver of an old wood-sided station wagon that had turned up at nine-ten.

  The driver's—and the break's—name was Russell Dancer.

  Seventeen

  Dancer was badly hungover, all right—his hands trembled vaguely and his eyes were crosshatched with blood-red veins and the skin of his face was loose and alternately splotched red and gray—but the intake of too much alcohol was only part of the reason for his sick condition. He had seen what was left of his beach shack, his home, his possessions, perhaps the last of his dreams; and the sight seemed to have unleashed a toxic, destructive combination of bitterness and frustration and self-pity inside him, joining with the hangover symptoms to give him a zombielike appearance as he came slowly, stiffly, through the door of Quartermain's office. He may have been guilty of or responsible for or involved in some of the things that had happened in Cypress Bay this past weekend, or six years ago, but I felt immediate compassion for him just the same; he was still a lonely man, and even though it was nothing I could have put into the right kind of words, I could understand something of the depth of his loss and of his feeling.

  He looked at me first, and his mouth twisted into a ghost of his wry smile. "I thought you were getting out and going back to San Francisco," he said. His voice was hollow and burned out, the words thickened by the dry rolling movement of his tongue. "But here you are, looking like you've been up all night in the bargain."

  "I have been up all night," I said. "Some things happened to change my mind about leaving and about becoming involved."

  "So you're no different than the standard fictional private dick, after all. Or maybe you are. I can't decide which."

  Quartermain said, "Sit down, Dancer. You look like you'd better have some coffee."

  "Unless you've got a little hair of the dog."

  "Just coffee. Black?"

  "God, yes."

  Quartermain motioned to the two county patrol cops who had escorted Dancer from Beach Road, and the Cypress Bay uniformed officer who had come in with them through the police entrance at the building's rear. They turned and went out into the anteroom, where the office secretary was back on duty and banging away on his typewriter, and Quartermain and I followed. He shut the door, dismissed the uniform, told the secretary to get a pot of hot black coffee, and then looked at the two county cops.

  "Dancer tell you where he's been all night?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir, on the way in," one of them said. "He claims to have been shacked up with an old girl friend and a bottle, and that his car was parked in her garage all night."

  "Where?"

  "Jamesburg."

  "Would he tell you the girl friend's name?"

  "Yes, sir. It's Verna Nunnally."

  The other cop said, "A widow—or so he claimed."

  "What about an address?" Quartermain asked.

  "That too: Los Piños Drive. We radioed over to Jamesburg for a check, and as soon as it's made they'll contact you direct."

  "Good, thanks. Did Dancer have anything else to say?"

  "He seemed pretty shaken up by what happened to his place," the first cop said. "I don't blame him much; it's a hell of a thing to have to come home to."

  "He wanted to know how it happened," the second cop said. "We didn't tell him anything; we didn't know how you wanted it handled."

  Quartermain nodded. "That's it?"

  "Yes, sir, that's about it."

  He thanked them again and told them they could go. The secretary came in with the coffee as they were leaving, and I took the pot from him and we went into the inner office again. Dancer was sitting in one of the armchairs, holding his head in both hands. He brought the hands down as Quartermain went around the desk and I went up to it and poured him some coffee.

  "Angel of mercy," he said dully, and took the cup I handed him. He held it between both palms and stared into it for a time, and then raised it shakily to his lips and drank a little. I sat down and looked at him; Quartermain had a hip cocked against the rear edge of the desk, leaning forward.

  He said, "We've been trying to find you ever since ten o'clock last night. I understand you were in Jamesburg."

  "Yeah. Celebrating the completion of my latest western epic with a piece of tail and some bonded bourbon. Dancer fiddling while his Rome burns. What a lousy fucking thing."

  "What time did you leave your place last night?"

  "Eight or a little before, I think. I finished the last page around seven and had a shower and changed my clothes; then I took the manuscript and went up to the Mount Royal Bar." The bitter, ghostly smile again. "That's something, at least—the manuscript. I was going to mail it today, so I took it with me. I've still got that much anyway. A whole hell of a lot, all right"

  I said, "You didn't have any personal property insurance?"

  "Oh sure, I've got personal property insurance; I'm not stupid enough to live in a place like that without it But there are some things you can't replace with insurance money."

  "Yeah," I said, and I thought I knew what some of those things were.

  Quartermain asked, "How long were you at the Mount Royal last night?"

  "Long enough to have a couple of drinks and decide I was horny and to call Verna over in Jamesburg. That's Verna Nunnally, a friend of my ex-wife's. I take a perverse pleasure in banging friends of my ex-wife's. She w
as home and I drove over there with a bottle and spent the night and drove back this morning." He got the coffee cup to his mouth and drank again. "Listen, what happened? It wasn't any accident, was it? I knew that much when the two county boys said they had instructions to bring me here."

  "No, it wasn't an accident."

  "Somebody set it on purpose."

  "That's right."

  "Who?"

  "A fortyish bald guy who so far doesn't have a name. We went down to have a talk with you around nine-thirty last night, and we got there in time to see him running away along the beach—but not in time to do anything about saving your place. The guy got away and we haven't found him yet."

  The left side of Dancer's mouth began to tic. He looked at me. "Is this the guy you mentioned to me yesterday—Paige's friend?"

  I nodded, and Quartermain said, "You claimed yesterday not to know him, that you'd never seen him before. Does that still hold?"

  "Yeah, it holds. I don't know anybody who looks like that, and I don't know why the son of a bitch would want to set fire to my goddamn house."

  "We can answer that one. He wanted to destroy any and all copies of The Dead and the Dying that you might have had."

  Dancer stared at him grimly. "So that's it."

  "That's it."

  "How do you know?"

  I said, "Paige's copy of the book was stolen from my cottage at the Beachwood, probably just before that guy went to your place. And when he went there, he took a can of gasoline with him. He didn't want to take the time to search through all of your belongings, and maybe miss something in the bargain; the simplest, surest way was for him to fire the house."