Undercurrent nd-3

by Bill Pronzini

  Quartermain nodded. "It's pretty much the way we figured. Paige met Sarkelian in San Quentin, and they struck up an acquaintance; Sarkelian was serving a ten-year stretch for a San Diego holdup. They talked about working a job together when they were on the outside again, since they were due to be released at about the same time, Sarkelian three months before Paige-some pair of incorrigibles, all right. But they didn't have anything definite in mind. It was only after Paige got out, and his parole officer found him a job in San Francisco, that Dancer's book came into it.

  "According to what Sarkelian says, Paige was living in a hotel near the Tenderloin and the clerk there had a box of old paperback books that he kept around for the tenants. Paige happened to notice one of the tenants reading The Dead and the Dying, and recognized Dancer's name, and got hold of the book for the hell of it He wasn't much of a reader, as his wife confirmed, but he read the thing anyway-fate, maybe, sowing the seeds of his own destruction.

  "Anyway, the robbery blueprint intrigued him enough to keep the book around, but not enough for him to do anything about it at that time; he was looking for something better, something less complicated. Meanwhile, he met Judith and talked her into marrying him when he couldn't get at her any other way and moved to Glen Park. When nothing else came up, he began thinking again about the robbery Dancer had outlined and finally got in touch with Sarkelian; the two of them met and talked it over and decided it was worth looking into. So Paige contacted Brad Winestock."

  "Why Winestock?" I asked.

  "The two of them knew one another a hell of a lot better six years ago than Winestock's sister or anyone else thought. Paige talked Winestock at that time into helping him pull off a three or four-thousand dollar burglary in Seaside, and then kept most of the money for himself. It was the only job the two of them did together; Paige's leaving of Cypress Bay, for what he thought were greener pastures down south, took place just afterward."

  "Paige had a way with everybody, didn't he?" I said sourly, and tried not to think of Beverly Winestock.

  "Some sweet son of a bitch, all right," Quartermain said. "Well, he talked Winestock into checking out the local banks as unobtrusively as possible; when Winestock reported on the National Exchange Bank, it began to look pretty good to Paige. The fact that there were no vacant stores bordering on through alleys in the vicinity stopped them for a time, but Winestock did some more checking and found out about the old guy who ran the newsstand and how shaky things were for him. Acting on Paige's orders, he broke into the place on two separate occasions and vandalized it; inside two months the old guy was out of business."

  "And Paige was in business."

  "Yeah. He came down to Cypress Bay himself and contacted Keith Tarrant about renting the newsstand; he might have been smarter to keep his name out of it entirely, but he didn't and Tarrant turned him down. It didn't matter much; Paige got Androvitch to pose as an L.A. businessman and two days later Tarrant rented Androvitch the newsstand. All they needed then was a time when the bank would be at its heaviest with cash, and they settled on today.

  "The holdup was to work exactly as Dancer had outlined it in the book, except that they figured to use Winestock as a safety valve; he was to be waiting in a car at the Pine Street mouth of the alley, in case anything went wrong, and for that and for the other errands he'd done he was in for a full fifth. Paige would be the one to wait in the newsstand for the drop. Collins, who was once an electrician's apprentice, would handle the alarm system; and Sarkelian and Androvitch would supply the muscle. That's the way they planned it and that's the way it would have come off if Paige hadn't gotten himself killed on Saturday."

  "The others must have been in a hell of a sweat when they learned of the stabbing," I said.

  "They were. They couldn't figure why Paige had been killed or who had killed him; there had been no trouble among themselves, so they knew none of them had done it. And when Paige and Sarkelian met where you saw them in the park, to discuss final preparations and a time schedule, Paige didn't seem to be worried about anything. Sarkelian and the others talked it over and decided it was tough for Paige, but a four-way split was fatter than a five-way split and they didn't see any reason for not going through with the holdup as planned."

  "And then I began asking questions about The Dead and the Dying, and about Sarkelian."

  "Uh-huh. Beverly Winestock told her brother about your visit to her yesterday, and he told Sarkelian, and the cheese really began to get binding. If you or I read that book, the whole thing was blown. But they knew we hadn't read it yet; you wouldn't have been asking the questions you were asking. And when you and I went to see Winestock last night, they knew we still hadn't read it or we wouldn't have still been fishing; but they also knew, from Winestock's phone call to Sarkelian after we left, that we were dangerously close to the truth. Sarkelian ordered Winestock to meet him later at his motel in Monterey, and then went to the Beachwood-he knew you were staying there from the radio reports-on the gamble you'd have the book in your cottage rather than on your person, or that you hadn't already given it back to me. He won that hand, even though it set him up to lose the gamble. Then he drove down to Dancer's, threw Paige's copy of the book into the sea, and set fire to the shack after picking the porch-door lock. If Dancer had been there, he would have died in the blaze, all right."

  "How come they went through with the robbery with Dancer still alive?"

  "Paige had told Sarkelian a little about Dancer, how he'd turned out millions of words in his career and how he didn't think Dancer would remember the book after twenty years. And they figured, since the book was that old, we wouldn't be able to dig up another copy in time to prevent the robbery. Like I said, Paige was the brains behind this whole thing, and Sarkelian and the other two nothing but strong-arms. All they could think about was the money. Like moths to a flame."

  "How much was in the valise? How much would they have gotten away with if it had worked out the way they planned?"

  "A little better than seventy thousand."

  "Not much for all the trouble they went to," I said. "And for murder besides."

  "Not much at all."

  "Why did Sarkelian kill Winestock?"

  "Winestock was scared, ready to crack from the pressure we put on him last night at his house; he'd been nervous as hell from the time he talked to Sarkelian in the afternoon, when you saw them together, and the liquor he'd drunk hadn't helped any. He wanted out, all the way out; he was planning to skip town, like a damned fool, and he tried to threaten some money out of Sarkelian. Sarkelian wrapped his gun in bathroom towels to muffle the noise and shot him. It was the only thing he could do, Sarkelian said. If he'd let Winestock try to make a run for it, we'd have picked him up in a matter of hours-and in his condition we'd have gotten the truth out of him sure as hell.

  "After he shot Winestock, he drove the body out to Spanish Bay, with Androvitch following in their car, and left the Studebaker where it was found this morning. Spanish Bay is only about two miles from Sarkelian's motel, but even so they were damned lucky not to have been spotted in Winestock's car and stopped; if they had, it would have been finished right there."

  "Except for whoever killed Paige," I said.

  "Except for that."

  "It's got to be the woman, Ned. Or someone connected with the woman."

  "That's how it adds up," Quartermain agreed. "The same simple equation we had in the beginning."

  "I take it Sarkelian doesn't know who she is."

  "No. He knew Paige was bedding some local female, but he never saw the two of them together and Paige wasn't talking, characteristically. He doesn't know her name, or what she looks like. He also thinks she's the one who killed Paige."

  I drank more coffee, and then asked, "Did you talk to Robin Lomax? She was waiting for you when I came in at three o'clock."

  His bloodshot eyes turned grave. "Yeah, I talked to her."

  "What did she have to say?"

  "Some confidential
information that I shouldn't discuss at all." He sighed. "But I think you've got a right to know, as long as it doesn't go any further than this office."

  "You know it won't."

  "All right. She'd been wrestling with her conscience and her pride all day, and she finally made up her mind to tell the real story of her relationship with Paige. Her husband doesn't know she came here today; he wouldn't like it if he did-but he's not going to know about it."

  "Then that story he told us this morning was a lie?"

  "Half lie and half truth. Robin had a fight with Jason six years ago and she had too much to drink brooding about it and she let Paige get her alone. Only he didn't try to attack her, and she didn't fight him off."

  "Oh," I said, "I see."

  "There's more to it than that," Quartermain said. His voice contained the kind of sadness a sensitive and moral man feels when he's given knowledge of the dark transgressions of people he's always liked and respected. "Jason Lomax is sterile; he's been sterile all his life."

  I winced a little, involuntarily, and I thought: So Tommy Lomax is Walter Paige's son. But I did not say it. There was no point in saying it.

  Quartermain sighed again. "That's why they immediately became nervous and frightened when you went to see them yesterday and mentioned Paige and told them you were a private investigator. They've both subconsciously accepted that phony fictional image of a private detective as a potential blackmailer; they thought you'd found out their secret, perhaps from Paige, and had come to shake them down. Then you confused hell out of them by telling them Paige was dead and bringing me into it, and your association with me; and that also gave them a brand-new apprehension: the threat of a scandal as a result of a police investigation. That's why they left in such a hurry last night; they wanted the opportunity to concoct a lie to cover up-expecting me to show up immediately after you left, you see. Lomax convinced Robin this was their only choice, and manufactured the attempted-rape business. I guess I don't blame him, in a way; he was only trying to protect his wife's reputation, and his own. He may be something of a fool, but he's also enough of a man to have married Robin when she told him she was pregnant, and to give the boy his name."

  I agreed with that-thinking: Maybe I was a little hard on him after all; he's got his faults, but haven't we all? And my cop's mind added: But if he's that fiercely loyal to her, and if he hated Paige enough, and if they weren't playing tennis together Saturday afternoon as they claim, wouldn't he perhaps commit murder to maintain both his reputation and his wife's?

  Quartermain said, "From the tone of the questions I asked this morning, Robin was afraid we suspected her or her husband of killing Paige-perhaps even of murdering Brad Winestock, for some unknown reason. And if we uncovered the truth about her relationship with Paige, Jason's lie would look far more incriminating than it was. She decided to tell the truth, no matter how painful it would be, to save later embarrassment and misconceptions."

  "That was the right thing to do," I said, "assuming that the confession wasn't a last-ditch effort to cover up. She's got a better motive than ever to have killed Paige, Ned."

  "But not to have slept with him again, remember that."

  "Unless she'd been carrying the torch all these years, in spite of the boy, and gave herself to him as a result, and then something happened to kindle a murderous hatred."

  "Okay," he admitted reluctantly, "that's possible. I don't like it, but it is possible. Robin still says that she and Jason were together at the time of Paige's death, but that could easily enough be a lie."

  "I'm not saying she's guilty, Ned; I'm only offering potentialities. It could also be that Paige did seduce Bianca Tarrant-six years ago or just recently-despite what her husband told us this morning; and that she was the one in his bed and who killed him for some reason. Or it could be, if Mrs. Tarrant is the woman, that her husband killed Paige in a jealous rage-the same way Jason Lomax could have done it if his wife were the woman. And it could even be that the woman is Beverly Winestock; that she was Paige's mistress previously and they resumed their affair after his return-or, more likely, that she went to him specifically to talk him out of whatever he was planning with her brother, maybe knowing about that Seaside burglary Paige talked Winestock into, and used her body for bargaining power. If so, and knowing the kind of son of a bitch Paige was, he could have used her and then laughed at her and tried to throw her out-and in blind rage, she stabbed him,"

  "All sound, logical possibilities," Quartermain said. "But if one is fact, how do we find it out? And there's another potential that I don't even want to think about: that the woman, the murderer or murderers, is or are totally divorced from anything that's happened in the past couple of days; one person, or two, who haven't entered into it at all thus far."

  "Yeah," I said, "but somehow I don't think so. Paige's woman is Bianca Tarrant or Robin Lomax or Beverly Winestock; I've got a feeling about that, a hunch that-"

  I stopped talking and frowned and put my coffee cup down. The evanescent thought, the certainly important scrap of dialogue that someone had spoken recently, began to tease my conscious mind again, searching for admittance. I concentrated on the thought and groped for it and caught it this time and held on, pulling it free and shaping it into coherence. And I had it. The hair on the back of my neck prickled and I had it.

  I sat up straight in the chair. "How did he know?" I said aloud. "How did he know?"

  Quartermain looked at me oddly. "What?"

  "When you were talking to him earlier today, he said something about the woman Paige had in his bed just before he was killed. How did he know Paige had a woman in his bed Saturday afternoon-in his goddamn bed? I didn't think anything about it then because we were so damned tensed up, but I didn't tell him and you didn't tell him and you didn't release that information to the news media. How did he know?"

  "Who the hell are you talking about?"

  "Keith Tarrant," I said. "I'm talking about Keith Tarrant."

  Twenty One

  Braced at the edge of the ravine, silhouetted against a deep purple-black dusk, the dark house appeared to have an aura of malevolence about it as we approached on Del Lobos Canyon Road-as if it were a crouching animal ready to leap across the gap to escape our impending arrival. All of that was foolish illusion, of course, a product of my tired mind and my depressive mood, but the sudden chill on the back of my neck was nonetheless very real.

  We came to the unpaved connecting drive, and went down there under the shade of the walnut trees. There were no visible lights in any of the house's three tiers, but as we neared the two-car port I could see both the cream-colored Chrysler and the sleek blue Lotus parked inside. Quartermain braked to a stop at a diagonal that effectively blocked both cars, and we got out and moved around one of the dwarf cypress to the front door.

  It was very quiet there, except for the soft lament of the wind and the rustle of leaves as it played through the branches of the walnut trees. The house itself was absolutely still. Quartermain pressed an inlaid pearl doorbell and there was the faint ringing of bell chimes within. But no one opened the door-then, or when he rang a second time.

  The chill remained on my neck, and I tasted brassiness when I washed saliva through my dry mouth. I looked at Quartermain. "What do you think?"

  "I don't know. I don't like it. The cars are here; they've got to be here, too."

  "Unless they went out with somebody else. To a party, or to some kind of meeting."

  "Yeah."

  He rang the bell a third time, and the chimes tolled and died and the wind blew cool against my cheek and ruffled my hair in a way that made my scalp tingle unpleasantly. I said, "Do we wait in the car-or do we go in?"

  "You get the feeling something may be wrong in there?"

  "A little, yeah."

  "Then I guess we'd better have a look."

  He reached out and rotated the lucite doorknob with the tips of his fingers. It turned and the latch clicked and the door edged inward a
couple of inches. He pushed it wider with his left hand, opening his coat with his right and brushing it back behind the service revolver still holstered at his side. We went into a short, dark foyer formed by a pair of low right-angle dividers that were solid wood panels to waist level, and staggered book and knickknack shelves to the ceiling. Through gaps on the right I could see a shadowed dining area and a kitchen doorway; on the right, the short extension of what appeared to be an L-shaped living room, containing a set of wide polished-wood stairs leading down to the second tier. The main section of living room comprised most of the width of this top level, and the carpeted foyer blended into it off-center to the left. The entire rear wall was of glass, and one of the panels leading out onto the balcony had been left open; the wind came in through there and fingered the undrawn drapes on that side. The light filtering through the exposed glass was vague and dusky, but you could see the dark shapes of furniture, the dark shapes The chill that had been on my neck moved suddenly down between my shoulder blades, and I turned and reached behind me and fumbled along the wall beside the door and found a bank of switches. I touched one and nothing happened-the outside light-and touched another; indirect lighting came on instantly, transforming the darkness into mellow gold clarity.

  Quartermain said, "Oh my God."

  I moved up next to him at the juncture of foyer and living room. There were two long cherry-wood sofas set lengthwise in the middle of the room, facing one another, and Bianca Tarrant was sitting on the one furthest away from us-sitting there with her arms folded in an X-pattern across her breasts, fingers hugging her shoulders, forearms touching; her eyes were open wide and staring blankly, and she did not seem to have noticed that the lights had come on, much less that we were there. On one of the cushions beside her, in sharp blue-metal contrast to the pale whitish upholstery, was what looked to be a. 32-caliber pearl-handled revolver.

  Keith Tarrant was also in the room, and his eyes, too, were open wide and staring blankly-but they were eyes that would never see anything again. He lay at the foot of the nearest sofa, his head twisted against one of the cushions, and the dull reddish-brown color of his blood made an even sharper contrast against the upholstery. There was blood staining his white shirt as well, and blood on his beige slacks, and blood on his face, and blood on the rug around him. The way it looked, she had emptied the revolver at him and hit him with most if not all of the slugs.