Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) (10 page)

"Oh—really?" she said. There was no warmth, no feeling of any kind in her tone; apparently she had no fond memories about Russ Dancer or her days as a member of the laughter-and-liquor group. Maybe she thought guys like Dancer were beneath her now—or maybe I was just overreacting. "Are you a friend of Mr. Dancer's?"

"In a way," I said. "The reason I'm here has to do with a mutual acquaintance of yours and his, several years ago. A man named Walter Paige."

She jerked as if I had slapped her, and her color dissolved suddenly and completely under the tan. Lomax lost his polite smile and his eyes turned brittle and angry and his mouth pinched white at the corners. They stood staring at me, and it was abruptly very quiet in the small Disney valley; even the birds that had been singing soft medleys in the surrounding woods seemed breathlessly still. You could feel the sudden tension like a dark, chill wind.

Lomax said in a thin, tight voice, "Who the hell are you? What do you want here?"

"I'm a private detective. I'd like to—"

"Oh God!" Robin Lomax said.

She sounded stricken, and her husband put his arm around her and hated me too passionately with his eyes. "So that's the way it is," he said.

"The way what is, Mr. Lomax?"

"Get off my property."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

"Why?"

"Damn you, if you don't leave, I’ll call the police."

"Maybe you'd better do that, Mr. Lomax," I said quietly. "I was at City Hall not long ago, but Chief Quartermain was out. He might have come back by now. You can tell him I'm here, if so, and you can tell him
why
I'm here. I think he'll be interested."

Some of the volatile anger went out of his eyes. He looked at his wife for a long moment, and then the two of them looked at me again. "Why should Chief Quartermain be interested?" Lomax asked.

"You don't know?"

"No. Look, just why are you here?"

"I want to ask you some questions about Walter Paige."

"What's your involvement with Paige?"

"I found his body, for one thing."

"His . . . body?"

"That's right."

"He's dead?"

"He was murdered last night."

Deepening silence. They looked at each other again, but I could not read what passed between them—if anything passed between them. A muscle jumped on Lomax's left cheek, but there was nothing on his face or in his eyes that told me much. There was nothing in Robin Lomax's expression either as she stepped out of the half-circle of his arm, and the sighing breath she took might have meant anything at all.

"Who . . . killed him?" she asked softly.

"No one knows yet."

"Where did it happen?"

"In Cypress Bay. The Beachwood motel."

Lomax said, "Why was he back in Cypress Bay?"

"To meet a woman—and possibly for some other reason as well. He'd been coming here for the past five weekends."

"What woman? Someone from this area?"

"It would seem that way. She was with him shortly before he died."

Lomax wet his lips. "And what time was that?"

"Between five-thirty and quarter of six."

"You think we know something about it, is that it?"

"I didn't say that, Mr. Lomax."

"Well, we don't know anything about it. Robin and I were right here all of yesterday. We played tennis from midafternoon until dusk."

"Yes," she said. "Yes, that's right."

I studied their faces and I had the feeling that they were both lying, but it was Quartermain's place and not mine to break them down on it. I said, "What can you tell me about
The Dead and the Dying
?"

I had dragged that one out of left field, but it did not get me anything. Lomax looked surprised, and his wife still had that pale, stricken, withdrawn look about her. He said, "The what?"

"It's an old book of Russ Dancer's. Paige had a copy of it in his overnight bag. Do you know the book?"

"Hardly. We don't read the kind of trash Dancer writes."

Trash, I thought. A man's livelihood, a man's talent no matter how limited, a man's thoughts and feelings and impressions and guts. Trash. I said, "You didn't know that Paige had returned to Cypress Bay, I take it."

"Of course not. How would we know?"

"Mrs. Lomax?"

"No," she said. "No."

"He didn't try to contact you at any time?"

"Why should he contact me?"

"You didn't know him well originally?"

"No. I never cared to know him well."

"Why not?"

"He was vain and . . . crude."

"Who
did
know him well?"

"I have no idea."

"You were a regular member of the group, Mrs. Lomax."

"The affairs of others are no concern of mine," she said. "I never gave a thought to Walter Paige then, and I haven't since."

"Then why were you so upset when I first mentioned his name?"

Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and she clutched at her husband's arm and put her eyes imploringly on his face. Lomax said with tremulous anger, "Listen, we don't have to talk to you any longer. You're not the police."

"The police will ask the same questions, Mr. Lomax."

"I don't care about that. Now get off my property."

"All right," I said. "But if I were you, I'd be a little more candid with Chief Quartermain than you've been with me. Innocent people don't need to lie or evade the truth."

I turned and left them standing there—a pair of bronzed statues with the beginnings of what might be an irremovable and no longer concealable tarnish marring their clean, polished luster. When I reached my car I could hear the little boy with the pet rabbit named Bugs, laughing happily from somewhere behind the house. The back of my neck felt cold. And as I drove out of there, the shaded areas on the landscaped grounds seemed deeper and darker, like shadowed corners hiding secret things.

*****

Most of the shops along Grove Avenue were open to accommodate the Sunday tourist trade, and the sidewalks flowed with shoppers and strollers; vehicular traffic was heavy as well, and they had the traffic lights at the intersections and pedestrian crossings in operation. I crawled east toward Highway 1 and the Carmel Valley Road that would take me to Del Lobos Canyon, where the realtor, Keith Tarrant, lived.

The light at one of the pedestrian crossings about halfway along flashed red, and I stopped back of the crosswalk and took the time to put a cigarette into my mouth. I cupped my hands around the flame of the match, glancing over them and through the open window the way you do—and I saw the old faded-blue Studebaker pull to the curb on the other side of Grove Avenue. The passenger door opened immediately and a guy on that side got out, leaving the driver alone in the car. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, face turned toward me, and I forgot the cigarette and the burning match.

It was the bald man I had seen with Walter Paige the previous afternoon.

I stared over at him, and he pivoted and moved away swiftly along Sierra Verde—one of Cypress Bay's quaint, winding village streets, and one that ended or began at Grove Avenue on that side. I felt the heat of the match then and dropped it on the floor and looked over to my right for a place to park; there was no opening. The traffic light had gone to green when I turned back again, and an impatient horn sounded behind me. I could not make a left turn across the narrow pedestrian walk that formed a break in the center divider; the only damned thing I could do was to go up to the next full intersection and negotiate a U-turn.

I got the car in gear and leaned on the gas trying to watch the street in front and the bald guy behind me on Sierra Verde. But it was no good. I lost sight of him before I had gone fifty feet, although I could still see the old Studebaker waiting at the curbing for a break in the steady stream of traffic moving down toward Ocean Boulevard. I tried to read the license number, but the angle was no good for that either; and all I had seen of the driver was a dark masculine head in quarter profile.

When I reached the intersection I could not complete the U-turn immediately because of the flow of cars, and I was forced to wait for the light. Half turned as I was, I could see the Studebaker wedge its way into the stream, but I still could not read the license number. The light changed finally and I made the turn and got down to Sierra Verde, working the brakes as I came abreast of the intersection. There was no sign of the bald guy; the sidewalks were less crowded along there, and if he had been walking in either of the first two blocks, I would have seen him.

My first impulse was to turn into Sierra Verde and try to locate him, but he might have gone anywhere—into one of the buildings, down an alleyway, onto a cross street—and if I turned up a blank it would be a complete one. The Studebaker was something else again. I could see it plainly enough two blocks down, stopped at a light. I made my decision, right or wrong, and followed Grove Avenue into the next block as the Stude moved with the changing light.

It was three cars in front of me when it made the turn north on Carmelo, one street up from Ocean Boulevard, and went out toward the Seventeen Mile Drive that took you on a scenic tour of Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove and the Monterey Peninsula. But the guy in the Studebaker was not going out on the drive. He stopped two blocks short of it, in front of a log-facaded tavern called the Stillwater, and hurried inside. I had a pretty good glimpse of him then; he was thirty or so, thick-shouldered, with dark hair wind-tossed and hanging down over his eyes; he wore brown slacks and a navy-blue windbreaker.

I parked close enough to see the Studebaker's license plate clearly, and copied the number down in my notebook; then I lit the cigarette that was still between my lips and waited with the engine running. I would give him ten minutes, I thought, and if he did not come out, I would go in after him. But it did not come to that; he was out in four and a half minutes, carrying something that might have been a quart bottle wrapped in a paper bag. He got into the Stude again and went down to the next corner and turned right and began to double back toward the center of Cypress Bay. I let him have two full blocks all the way.

He took me over to Guadalupe, and then east onto Mission Court, and then south on Santa Rosa. He made one more turn, east again, and drove half a block and took the Stude in to the curb. Then he slid out, carrying the paper-wrapped bottle, and went up twenty-five or thirty slab-stone steps, and, using a key, entered the Old Spanish adobe house with the rust-tile roof and the second-floor gallery and the tired reddish bougainvillea growing over the short arbor at the top of the steps.

Bonificacio Drive.

The Winestock house.

And, very probably, Brad Winestock.

I drove past on the still quiet, still empty street, and made directly for the City Hall. The back of my neck had begun to feel cold again. The Lomaxes were hiding something, in spite of their denials and in spite of what Beverly Winestock had told me about Robin's noninvolvement with Paige; and even though Beverly herself had been cooperative, I had sensed an uneasiness in her, a holding back of something intangible—and since she had known about Paige's death for some time, whereas the Lomaxes apparently had not, she had had more time to prepare herself for possible questioning. Now there was her brother, linked to the bald man, who in turn had been linked to Walter Paige, and maybe she had been lying about the bald guy and about some of the other things as well.

You could feel the undercurrents lying blackly under the surface of it all, deep and swift, and you wondered where the bald man came into it and where the others came into it and who else might still come into it. You wondered how Russ Dancer's book worked into the scheme of things, if it worked in, and if Dancer had maybe been holding back something, too, for some reason of his own. And you wondered how far the undercurrents extended, and whether or not they formed a kind of intricate pattern, and just how deep and black they really were . . .

Ten

Quartermain was still in Salinas, and the fat sergeant still did not know when he would be back.

I stood looking at him and debating whether or not I should give him what I had learned thus far. I decided again that it should go directly to Quartermain, because the telling would take a while and Quartermain was patient and a good, careful listener; and, too, because I thought Quartermain would understand my own unauthorized involvement a little better. I told the sergeant the same thing I had earlier—that I would be back—and I went out to my car.

It was coming on late afternoon now, and I had not eaten anything all day. I stopped at the first cafe I saw and had coffee and a cheeseburger, and came to the conclusion that I would not be wise to confront Brad Winestock on my own. All I could justify in my own mind was the laying of a little groundwork, and if Winestock was directly involved in Paige's death, he could be dangerous. More important, I could conceivably do more harm than good with an unofficial visit—put him on his guard, perhaps even set him on the run if his involvement was deep enough. Quartermain was the one to talk to Winestock, all right; but I saw no harm in carrying out my previous intention of seeing Keith Tarrant and perhaps finding out a little more about those undercurrents which had been created by the catalyst, Walter Paige.

I went over to Highway 1 and south to Carmel Valley Road; Del Lobos Canyon was five miles in, judging from the map scale, and on the northern side. I drove into the valley and pretty soon I could see the lazy silver-blue path of the Carmel River, flanked by sycamore and willow trees—and pale-green artichoke fields and strawberry patches, and the well-known Carmel Valley pear orchards with their fragrant white spring blossoms like high, soft drifts of sun-bright snow. Cattle still grazed peacefully on the sloping sides of the valley, the way they had when the California rancheros led their quiet and languid lives on the fertile fields and flowing meadows that comprised the old Spanish land grants.

Del Lobos Canyon Road was narrow and wound upward along the side of the ravine itself; lichen-coated fence posts lined both sides, and on the left there were towering redwoods and moss-shawled oaks and an occasional home set high among the trees. Down in the canyon you could see flaming poison oak and sycamores and long multicolored carpets of wildflowers.