I got on my feet, and I did not know what to think. The balding guy was forty, maybe, with heavy masculine features and straight, sparse black hair combed away from the elliptical-shaped bald spot extending from forehead to crown, as if he were proud of it; he wore slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms. Nothing in any of that. Well, maybe it was his alleged business deal, and Judith had been overreacting and I had been too quick to convict Paige before he was proven guilty. But then again, what kind of business do you conduct in the park?
I stood there a little uncertainly. I wanted to hear what they were saying over on the bench, but there was no way I could eavesdrop; the bench was situated on a loop in the path, and one of the rectangles of flowers blocked it off for thirty feet to each side and to the rear. The only thing I could do was walk around in front of them on the path, and there was not much percentage in that, since I would not be able to stop anywhere near them without being conspicuous about it.
But I decided to make the walk anyway. If they were talking loudly enough, there was the chance that I could hear some of their conversation. I took off my suit coat and put it over my right shoulder on my thumb and stepped out onto the path. As I approached, sauntering, trying to look like a guy with nature on his mind and nothing else, they were still sitting with their heads close together. I did not look at them as I passed, and they appeared not to notice me. I could hear the mumble of their voices, but that was all; whatever they were discussing, it was strictly for their own ears.
I followed the path some distance away without looking back, and then turned onto the lawn; there was no point in going back the way I had just come. The two of them were still sitting there, still talking. I located an empty bench facing toward them, under a gnarled old oak, and sat down to wait until they decided to break it up. All I could do now was to keep following Paige, and to wait until something definite happened one way or another.
At the end of another ten minutes the balding guy stood up and turned away to the north, the direction from which he had arrived. Paige stayed where he was for a couple of minutes, watching the sea again; then he got to his feet and moved off to the south. I let him get seventy-five yards away, saw that he was paying no attention to his rear flank, and started after him. He took me directly back to the Beachwood.
I waited outside the motel grounds until Paige was inside his cottage. Then I went over to the office, to where they had a soft-drink machine, and bought myself an orange. I drank it there, letting a few minutes go by. Paige did not come out again. Finally I returned to my own cottage, tossed my coat on the bed, and took up my former position in front of the window.
Time passed, and I began to develop the headache once more. Paige appeared once, forty minutes later, to get something out of his car; other than that, nothing stirred in Number 9. The bamboo blinds were drawn across the cottage's front window, but even if they had been up, I could not have seen inside from where I was, and I had not brought a pair of binoculars with me.
Four o'clock. Five. The sun drifted low over the sea, and the sky turned smoky and bloodshot with lines and streaks of pale crimson. A wind came in off the ocean, gathering strength, and tousled the leaves and needles on the trees. It was quiet in the room—too quiet. I began to feel oddly restless. Nerves. Waiting was never any good, and it was worse when you did not know just what you were waiting for. But the waiting I was having to do was nothing compared to the waiting of Judith Paige— and the half-knowledge for her was agony; for me, only a source of irritation.
Five-thirty now, and I was almost out of cigarettes. How much longer? The rest of today, and tomorrow, and part of Monday? Maybe Paige's sole purpose in coming to Cypress Bay was his meeting with the balding guy in the park; maybe that's all there was to it. All right— then why did he tell Judith he was staying until late Monday afternoon this trip out? And what the hell is he doing over in that cottage? Sleeping? Drinking? Watching the goddamn television?
The rear entrance, I thought. The beach entrance.
Oh Christ, I thought. Some stakeout you are, some smart cop. You sit over here on your fat ass thinking visitors have to come in the front way, or that Paige has to go out the front way, and you can't see the rear entrance or the beach and he could be gone or he could be having a party over there with half of Cypress Bay, and even though you can't watch both entrances at the same time, you should have thought about the beach, you should have been checking it . . .
I got up on my feet and went over to the door and cracked it like a furtive, neighbor. There was a white-gravel path further down, beyond the office, that led between two of the cottages and onto the private beach. Okay, so let's go out to the beach for a stroll, I thought— and a little voyeurism if you can find a window or a keyhole or a place to put your ear. Play it according to stereotype: the peeper, the snooper. It's that kind of job, isn't it?
I opened the door wide and went out, and the wind was chill on my bare arms; my coat was still inside on the bed. The hell with that too. I started across the grounds toward the gravel path—and all at once the door to Number 9 jerked open, with a sound that was audible above the wind. I managed to keep from breaking stride, but I was looking over there now. The door was still open and it stayed open; Paige did not come out.
I kept on walking, more slowly, and then I stopped because I was almost abreast of the entrance to Number 9 and I could see that there was something in the doorway, something on the floor of the cottage just inside. The wind turned colder. The wind turned very cold.
I had to go over there, and I did it without hesitation. This was something else altogether. I got to the open doorway, and my stomach turned, and the mental image of Judith Paige's sweet pleading face made the sickness in my belly darker and more acute. The waiting was over for all of us now, but for her the agony had only just begun.
If Walter Paige had been an unfaithful husband, he would never be unfaithful again.
And whether or not Judith Paige had been a cuckolded wife, she was now something else entirely: she was a widow.
Four
There was a lot of blood—on Paige, on the floor beneath his body, in a glistening, smeared trail extending half the length of the room. He lay on his back, with one arm outflung toward the door and the other clutched at his upper chest like a bright-red claw. He wore a pair of slacks, nothing more, and his bare, thickly haired chest was soaked and matted with too much blood to make the nature of his wounds easily apparent; but it appeared obvious that he had been stabbed, and more than once.
My stomach kept on turning, but I went inside anyway, avoiding the blood, and got the door closed. The drapes were drawn almost closed across the glass at the rear of the room, and it was dark enough in there to warrant the light burning on the nearer of the two nightstands. I crossed to the drapes and drew them aside and opened the glass door carefully with a handkerchief over my hand.
Outside, there was a kind of patio, enclosed by low cypress hedges; a wood gate opened on a boardwalk leading to the motel's private beach, and the first twenty feet or so of the walk was walled by more of the cypress. I walked out there and tried the latch on the gate; it was unlocked. Beyond, the beach was deserted in both directions, and it had a lonely, hushed look, the way beaches do at sunset; the sand was a reddish-gray in the cold light of the falling sun. The sea seemed restless now, the color of ashes, and there were whitecaps out near the breakwater and white froth on the mouths of the combers as they bit into the sand. The wind was like ice on my face.
I went back inside and closed the sliding door again and looked the room over, the way you do automatically if you've been a cop for enough years. There was a thick puddle of congealing blood over by the desk, and it looked as if Paige had been stabbed there. He had too much blood in his throat to cry out loudly enough for anyone to hear, I thought, and so he dragged himself across the floor, and got the door open, and died. There was no sign of a weapon, and no indications that a struggle of any kind
had taken place; Paige had been killed by someone he knew, or possibly someone who had caught him completely by surprise.
The bed was rumpled, top sheets tossed down at the foot, one of the blankets on the floor; it could have meant something, or it could have meant he had been taking a fitful nap. There was a half-empty pint of Jack-Daniel's sour mash and a glass with an inch of dark-amber liquid on the same nightstand with the lamp; the other nightstand held a clean ashtray and the telephone. One of the room's chairs contained Paige's sports jacket and turtleneck sweater; his socks and shoes were on the floor in front of it. Against the wall next to the desk was a luggage rack with the overnight bag open on top. I stepped to the case and looked inside without touching anything. There was not much to see: a change of underwear and socks, a second and sealed pint of Daniel's, a clean shirt in a laundry wrapping, and a paperback mystery novel.
The paperback held my attention momentarily. It was torn and dog-eared, with a gaudy cover depicting a half-nude redhead and a guy with a .45 automatic; the red-head's hair-do, and the guy's clothes, and the cover price of twenty-five cents made it obvious that the book was a product of the early fifties. The title was The Dead and the Dying, and the author was Russell Dancer. I had never heard of the novel, but the writer's name was familiar. Russell Dancer had been a prolific pulp creator of detective and adventure fiction through the forties and very early fifties, until the complete collapse of the pulp market, and his name was prominently featured on at least a hundred covers among the five thousand pulp magazines which comprised my own collection. But it seemed odd that Paige would have a book like that with the newsstands filled with more modern paperbacks— unless he had been an aficionado of Dancer's work or the field in general . . .
I turned away from the bag. The odor of blood was thickly brackish in there, and my head ached malignantly. I went to the door and outside without looking at Paige again, and made certain the door was unlocked before I shut it. Then I crossed to the motel office.
Orchard was sitting behind the counter, reading the Monterey newspaper. He looked up at me, started to smile, and changed it to a frown when he saw my face. He stood up. "Is something the matter, sir?"
"Yeah," I said. "You'd better call the police, Mr. Orchard."
His eyelids worked up and down like intricately veined fans. "The police?"
"There's been a killing in one of your cottages."
"Killing? Killing?"
"In Number nine," I said. "Walter Paige."
All the color drained out of Orchard's cheeks, and his parted, too-red lips were like an open wound against the sudden marmoreal cast of his face. "Are you sure? A killing—here? My God!"
"You can go out and have a look yourself, if you want."
"Oh no, no, I . . . believe you. It's just that . . . Mr. Paige, you say?"
"That's right."
"What happened? How did—?"
"Somebody stabbed him."
"Stabbed . . . him . . ." His eyes widened, and he shrank away from me with his hands fluttering in front of him like restless white doves. "You . . . it wasn't . . ."
"No," I said, "it wasn't. Listen, will you call the police or do you want me to do it?"
"No," Orchard said, "no, it's my responsibility, I’ll call them . . ." The doves came together and mated fretfully, and he turned away and got himself through the doorway into his private office. "A killing . . . we've never had . . . the Beachwood is a respectable family motel . . . oh God, oh my God!"
I went around the counter and watched him at a polished mahogany desk, fumbling with the telephone. It took him thirty seconds to dial seven digits, and a full minute to get two sentences' worth of facts reported thickly into the receiver; but he got the story straight enough, remembering my name and using it freely. When he had finished the call, he put the handset down and began mopping at his face with a yard of silk handkerchief.
I said from the doorway, "How long will it take them to get here?"
"Five minutes, or ten, I don't know."
"We'd better go outside and wait for them."
"Yes. Yes, all right."
We went out, and it was almost dusk. Three-quarters of the sun had fallen beyond the gray rim of the sea; what little light remained had a blood-red tinge. Orchard looked up at the darkening sky and went back inside and turned on the night lighting for the motel grounds— carriage-style lamps on high ivy-covered poles. The white gravel on the drive seemed luminescent under their glare.
When Orchard came out again, he paced back and forth in front of the office, worrying his hands. Cottage Number 9 seemed to have a magnetic pull on his eyes. I sat on the topmost of the three steps that led up to the office entrance, and smoked my last cigarette.
I said to him, "Is this the first time Paige has stayed here? Or have you seen him before?"
"What? Oh—no, he's been quite a regular weekend guest."
"For how long?"
"For the past month or so."
"Do you know what business he had in Cypress Bay?"
"Of course not. How would I know?"
"I thought he might have mentioned something to you."
"No, he didn't. No."
"Did he have any visitors that you know about?"
"I really don't recall."
"Did you ever see him with a woman?"
"Here? At the Beachwood?"
"Or anywhere else."
"A respectable family motel . . . no, no, certainly not."
"How about a bald guy, forty or so, heavy-featured?"
"No."
"Do you know of any local acquaintances he might have had?"
"I do not," Orchard said. "See here, why are you asking all these questions? Did you know Mr. Paige?"
Before I could give him any kind of answer, two black-and-white police cruisers turned off Ocean Boulevard to enter the motel grounds; they used no sirens. A third cruiser remained at the entrance to screen admittance. The first two pulled up to where Orchard and I were standing, and a couple of uniformed cops got out of one and two guys in business suits got out of the other.
One of the latter—wearing a dark-brown gabardine— was six and a half feet tall, with iron-gray hair and a long, sad, intelligent face; he was maybe fifty-five, and he walked with long, shambling strides, as if he had never quite learned the art of bodily coordination. His eyes were dark and deep-set, the lids canted sharply, so that when he blinked he had a vaguely Oriental appearance. His name was Ned Quartermain, and he was the Chief of Police of Cypress Bay. The other plainclothesman was a Lieutenant Favor; thin of body, he had unruly brown hair and a thick, incongruous mustache; he reminded me of a silent-movie comedian. But his eyes, like Quartermain's, were shrewd, and you knew immediately there was nothing of the Chaplinesque buffoon about him. He was outfitted with a police camera, a fingerprint kit, and another small technician's kit: a walking crime lab.
Orchard fluttered a little, like a frightened gull, and Quartermain told him to relax; then he said to me, "You're the one who discovered the body?" His voice was soft and faintly sepulchral, but in a way that was not displeasing.
I answered, "Yes."
"Can I see some identification?"
I got my wallet and gave it to him and watched him open it up and find the photostat of my investigator's license. He read it very carefully, and then looked up at me again. "Private detective," he said with no inflection.
"Yes."
"Here on a case?"
"Yes."
"This Walter Paige a part of it?"
"He was all of it."
"You want to give me the details?"
I nodded. "Now—or after you've looked at the body?"
"After. I'll call you down when I want you."
"Whatever you say."
"Number nine, is that right?"
"Yes."
"Door unlocked?"
"Yes."
He made a thoughtful motion with his head and turned and went down there with Favor and one of the
uniformed cops at his heels; the other cop, a very young one, stayed with Orchard and me. I watched Quartermain open the door to Paige's cottage, pause, enter with Favor, and shut the door again. A couple of other guests had seen the arrival of the police cars, and were out of their cottages and walking around the way they do, rubber-necking. The second uniform went over to keep them out of the way and available for future questioning.
Some time passed, and none of us said anything. Orchard was pacing up and down again, working on his face with the handkerchief, muttering softly to himself. I tried to keep my mind inactive, but thoughts of Judith Paige kept intruding on the blankness. It would be very bad for her for a while, because death is something you can never cope with as easily as simple infidelity. Guilty of sexual promiscuity, or not guilty of it, Walter Paige was beyond her love or forgiveness or scorn; he was gone, dead, murdered, torn from her violently and without choice. The scars would be deeper now, perhaps more permanent, and some of the fine fresh innocence would be forever lost; she was the little country girl raped by the big city and the California promise—an old story, an old cliché, and it made you feel sour and empty to know that the old stories and the old clichés came about because they were realities of life that happened again and again . . .
An ambulance, without siren and without its red light in operation, pulled onto the motel grounds; behind it was a gray Buick with a single occupant. The young cop went over to tell them where to go, and they went there; the guy from the Buick—probably the county coroner or an assistant, judging from the black bag he carried— rapped on the cottage door and was admitted. The ambulance attendants, in white, stood around out front and smoked, waiting.
A large crowd had gathered out on Ocean Boulevard, and the patrol unit had its hands full keeping traffic moving and the milling people out of the way. The second uniform was still holding the small knot of motel guests off to one side of Number 9. After a while Quartermain put his head out of the cottage door and called to the ambulance attendants. They went in with a stretcher and came out a couple of minutes later with Paige strapped to it and put him inside the ambulance and took him away into the night.
Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) Page 3