Undercurrent nd-3 Read online

  "What does a private dick look like? Rex Hannigan?"

  He gave me the stare again. "You remember Rex Hannigan?"

  "Sure. Why not?"

  "I haven't written a Hannigan story in twenty years."

  "I read one a couple of weeks ago."

  "Where?"

  "In a copy of Dime Detective."

  "How did you come across that?"

  "I collect pulp magazines."

  "A private eye that collects pulp magazines," Dancer said. He shook his head wonderingly, but his eyes were friendlier now. "And the first person I've met in fifteen years who admits to reading the Hannigan stories. Christ, most people won't admit to reading anything I ever wrote; who wants to confess that he wastes his time on hack work?"

  "I don't think Hannigan was hack work," I said.

  "No? Well, Hannigan was the product of a young snot who thought he had some revolutionary ideas about detective fiction that would shake up the industry. The new Hammett, the new Chandler. Yeah. Then he woke up one morning with the truth in his mouth like the taste of vomit: his ideas were old and imitative, and he was not anywhere near as good as he thought he was. After he got over the shock of that, he sold himself out and he sold out what there was of Hannigan for the almighty dollar. He became a prolific hack and he moved to California-it might have been anywhere in the world-and he lived unhappily thereafter. End of story."

  "Well," I said.

  "Yeah," he said. His mouth turned wolfish. "So what brings a private eye to an ex-creator of private eyes? Don't tell me my former wife is trying to stir up trouble again? The bitch likes to put the shaft in my behind whenever she can, but this would be going a little far-even for her."

  "It's nothing like that."

  "You might as well come in and tell me what it is, then. The longer you're here, the longer I'm going to believe you were actually here."

  He turned, and I followed him inside and down a short hallway with an open kitchen on one side, and on the other, two closed doors that would lead to a bedroom and a bathroom. The entire rear half of the dwelling was a single room, and its end wall was mostly glass that looked out on the sun porch and the Pacific beyond; on the right, a closed door gave access to the porch. The room itself was chaotic. Unpainted tier-type bookshelves-the kind you put together yourself-covered the right-hand wall, but there were more books and magazines strewn on the floor in front of it and around it than there were on the shelves. Against the other wall was a long, narrow redwood plank mounted on two old-fashioned beer kegs; on the plank was a portable typewriter, a stack of manuscript pages in a wire basket, and a farrago of pens, pencils, sheets of paper, and overflowing ashtrays. The remainder of the room's appointments included an old mohair couch, a wicker armchair with an attached footrest, and a stack of cardboard boxes which seemed to serve as filing cabinets.

  Dancer said over his shoulder, "Some place, isn't it? Writers are slobs; not Bohemians, just slobs."

  I thought of my own apartment in San Francisco; writers were not the only ones who were slobs. I said, "It's not so bad."

  "My ex-wife couldn't stand it. She didn't like anything about this place. To tell you the truth, I don't like it much myself any more. When I bought it in '52, I thought it was arty as hell; you know, the writer living in a beach shack and all that horseshit. Now the sound of the sea gives me a perpetual headache and disturbs my concentration. I'm getting old, I guess-old and tired."

  And bitter, I thought. But I could understand some of the way he felt, some of the reasons why. There was a certain loneliness in him, too-the kind that came as the result of vanished dreams and painful understanding of individual limitations-and loneliness is a corroding substance inside a man. I found myself liking him in a kindred sort of way-and because he seemed honest; in a world filled with phonies, you did not meet many honest men.

  He asked, "How about a beer?"

  "Thanks. I could use one, I think."

  "Bottle all right?"

  "Sure."

  He went down the hallway again and into the kitchen. I wandered over to the writing table, the way you do, and I was looking at one of the manuscript pages lying face up beside the typewriter when Dancer returned with two bottles of Lucky Lager. He handed me one and said, indicating the rough-typed page, "Dancer's answer to The Ox-Bow Incident. I call it Gunsmoke on the Brazos, and I do two a year in the same vein for one of the cheaper paperback houses."

  "I didn't know you wrote westerns," I said.

  "I write anything they'll pay me to write. Crime stuff, westerns, Gothics, confession stories, juvenile sports novels, an occasional soft-core porno when the cupboard gets especially bare. I stay alive because after thirty years in the business, I'm like a machine-I can turn out fiction in any field, with any style and slant. The poor bastards who've really got something to say can't say it because the markets are glutted with stuff by guys like me-guys who haven't had anything worthwhile to say for too goddamn many years. But that's not the really tragic thing; the really tragic thing is that literature, fiction, printed matter itself is dying. It's being phased out by television and computers and space-age thinking; the writer, and especially the professional writer, is a vanishing breed-like the kit fox and the bison. In twenty years or so, we'll be in a class with hansom cabs and surreys and buggy-whip manufacturers. I hope to Christ I never live to see it."

  I was not sure I went along with that kind of thinking, but then he was in a position to know more about it than me; it was a depressing theory, anyway. I said as much-and then I said, "If this were some other time, some other day, I'd be damned interested in why you think the way you do on the subject, Mr. Dancer; but right now, I'd better get to the point of my visit." I was thinking about Judith Paige again.

  "Sure, I understand," he said, and shrugged.

  "It has to do with one of your books."

  "Yeah? Which one?"

  "The Dead and the Dying."

  He drank some of his beer, frowned, and shook his head. "I've written maybe sixty novels, and I can remember the titles of about six, offhand. That's not one of them. It sounds like a crime thing, but I haven't done a crime novel in more than five years. How far back does it go?"

  "It was published in '54, by Onyx Books."

  "I sold Onyx a lot of stuff, as I recall. That was one of the reasons they went broke in the late fifties. The Dead and the Dying. Well, why would a book published in '54 bring a private detective to see me?"

  "There was a killing in Cypress Bay last night," I said. "Did you hear about that?"

  "A killing-you mean a murder?"

  "Yes."

  "No, I didn't hear about it," Dancer said. "I'm coming on the end of the western, and I haven't been out of here in two days; and when I'm working I don't listen to the radio. What does a book of mine have to do with a murder?"

  "It was found in the dead man's overnight bag."

  "The hell you say!" Dancer was incredulous. "What's this guy's name?"

  "Walter Paige."

  "Paige-Walter Paige." He rubbed his free hand over the back of his neck, frowning. "Well, I don't know. I knew a guy named Walt Paige once, about five or six years ago."

  I released the breath I had been holding. "Where?"

  "Cypress Bay."

  "How well did you know him?"

  "Not very. He was a kind of drinking companion. We used to make the rounds together, along with a bunch of other regulars at the Mount Royal Bar-a place near Carmel Highlands. That's where I met him, at the Mount Royal. He was a smooth, glib bastard, one of these Errol Flynn types with the women. I didn't like him much."

  I described Walter Paige. "Is that the guy you knew?"

  "It sounds like him, all right," Dancer said.

  So we've got a connection now, I thought; but what else have we got? I said, "Did Paige know you were a writer?"

  "Sure. But he didn't seem particularly interested. All he cared about, as far as I could see, was pussy and money."

  "Then
you don't have any idea why he would have one of your old books?"

  "Christ no-not one that was written twelve years or so before I ever knew him."

  "What about the others in this group you mentioned?" I asked. "Did you know any of them back in '53 or '54?"

  "No. This was a pretty young crowd, aside from me."

  I pulled at my beer reflectively. There didn't seem to be anything of import in the copy of The Dead and the Dying itself-and yet it had thus far led to a tie-up with the author, Russell Dancer, and a link six years in the past between Walter Paige and Cypress Bay. I said, "How long was Paige in this area originally?"

  "Six or seven months, I think."

  "What kind of job did he have?"

  "None, that I knew of. But he was always flush."

  "Like that, huh?"

  "Like that," Dancer agreed.

  "Where did he live?"

  "Cypress Bay somewhere, I think."

  "Why did he leave, do you know?"

  Dancer shrugged. "They come and they go."

  "Any idea where Paige went?"

  "Seems to me somebody said he'd headed south."

  "To Santa Barbara maybe?"

  "Could be. Does Paige tie up there?"

  "Uh-huh. He took a fall for burglary and spent four years in San Quentin. He got out five months ago."

  Dancer pursed his lips sardonically. "Nice company I used to keep."

  "Have you heard anything from him or about him since he left those six years ago?"

  "Not a word. I'd forgotten all about him. Hell, why would he come back after all these years?"

  "It might have been for a woman. There were indications."

  "I can imagine what they were," Dancer said. "You figure this woman did for him?"

  "Possibly."

  "Well, if so, she probably had plenty of provocation."

  "Yeah," I said. "Were there any females in this group you and Paige were part of?"

  "Sure. It was pretty free-wheeling."

  "Some were more regular than others, though?"

  "A kind of nucleus, you mean?"

  "More or less."

  "Two, I guess."

  "Was Paige involved with either of them?"

  Dancer shrugged again. "If so, they weren't talking and neither was he. I'll say this for Paige-he didn't brag up his conquests."

  "Is the group still active?"

  "No, not for a long time. You know how those things go."

  "Do the two women still live in Cypress Bay?"

  He nodded. "But I don't see either one committing murder."

  "Maybe not, but they might be able to offer a lead."

  "I suppose so."

  "Can you give me their names?"

  "Robin Tolliver is one. She married an artichoke heir named Jason Lomax, not long after Paige left. They've got an estate on Cypress Point. Robin was never any dummy."

  I wrote the names on the note pad I carry.

  Dancer said, "The other girl is Bev Winestock. I saw her a few weeks ago. She's still single and still a looker, and still living with her brother in an old place in the town proper. The brother, Brad, used to join the group once in a while."

  "Were there any other regulars-people who might have known Paige fairly well?"

  "A guy named Ben Simms, but he was killed in a boating accident about five years ago. And Rose Davis got married and moved east maybe three years back. Keith Tarrant is still around, though. He's Cypress Bay's largest realtor now, and owns a sweet pad over in Carmel Valley. When I knew him, he was still struggling for a toehold. The demand for land in this area, and some smart maneuvering on Tarrant's part, put him where he is today. His wife, Bianca, used to come with him sometimes, too. That's about all, except for occasionals, and I can't remember any of them offhand. I've got a lousy memory, anyway."

  I wrote the Winestocks and the Tarrants into my notebook. Dancer said then, "Listen, how do you fit in with Paige and his murder?"

  "He married a young girl from Idaho in San Francisco a few months ago," I said. "Then he started leaving her alone on weekends, and she figured he'd found another woman. She hired me to follow him. I tailed him down to Cypress Bay yesterday and camped in a cottage across from his at the Beachwood motel. But this woman he had-and the killer, if it wasn't the woman-came in through the rear entrance. I found the body a little later."

  "Pleasant little story."

  "Isn't it."

  "But it doesn't surprise me much. So you're working with the local cops then?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Lone-wolfing for the wife?"

  "Not that either," I told him. "I just had a hunch about The Dead and the Dying, and I decided to follow it through. Chief Quartermain is handling the investigation, and I'll turn what you've told me over to him."

  "Sure," Dancer said. "You know, Paige having one of my books is going to bug hell out of me. I can figure most of the story, from what I knew of him, but I can't figure the book. You really think it ties in somehow?"

  "I don't know," I said honestly.

  "Well, if you find out, give me the word, would you?"

  "I'll tell Quartermain to give you the word. I'll be going back to San Francisco with Mrs. Paige-probably tonight."

  "She's a nice kid, this Mrs. Paige?"

  "Yeah," I said. "She's a nice kid."

  "And you're not going to follow through?"

  "It's out of my hands and out of my league."

  "Well, you live and learn," Dancer said. "This is my day to learn about private dicks."

  I finished my beer and thanked him for his help, and we went out to the front walk. We shook hands there, and he said, "If you're ever in this area again, drop in and say hello. We could break a couple of six-packs and talk about the pulps. I knew quite a few pulp editors and writers in New York in the forties."

  There was a kind of wistfulness in his voice, a nebulous request, of which Dancer himself might not have been consciously aware. You knew Rex Hannigan, his eyes said to me, you liked him, you remembered-and even though the plots and the characters and the words themselves were mere echoes now, all but forgotten by Russell Dancer and by the world at large, there was somebody who remembered and somebody who cared, and that was somehow very important. Deep down where a man lives, he did not want to lose his newly discovered, and perhaps final, touch with the old dream.

  I said, "I'll do that," and I meant the words sincerely.

  Eight

  I drove back into Cypress Bay, parked in the lot next to the City Hall, and went around to the police-station wing. The fat sergeant told me Quartermain had gone to Salinas, the county seat, and that Lieutenant Favor had gone with him; no, he had no idea when they would be back, did I want to leave a message?

  Without thinking about it, I said, "No, I’ll stop by later," and walked slowly back to my car. I sat there in the cool shade and brooded a little. Well, I could have given it to the sergeant; but it was somewhat involved and Quartermain was the Chief and handling the case personally, and he was the kind of guy I could tell it to in my own way. There was that-and there was Judith Paige, and the quiet tranquility of Cypress Bay that became almost oppressive after a while, and the restlessness which seemed to be steadily growing inside me. If you've been a cop in one form or another for most of your life, and if you've worked at it and cared for it and been pretty good at it, it bothers you to have to back out of something when there are things to be done, avenues to be explored. It was a little like being a good, well-trained bird dog; once you had the scent, you were not satisfied until you were plowing along the trail and trying to flush something out of the underbrush.

  I lit a cigarette and blew smoke through the open window and watched it float languidly like an ephemeral mist through the sunlight and the shadows. "It's out of my hands and out of my league," I had told Russ Dancer, but that was not quite true and I knew it was not quite true, and I kept on sitting there, restlessly, trying to make up my mind. But it was not really much of a stru
ggle. When you're overstepping just a little, the rationalizations come easy; and since you know you're going to do it, and have known it from the moment you found out Quartermain was in Salinas, it only takes a couple of mental nudges to get you to admit it.

  So I started the car and drove two blocks to a stone-and-redwood complex that did not look much like a service station, in keeping with the edicts of the Cypress Bay Chamber of Commerce. I parked under a sloping awning that did not quite conceal the row of gasoline pumps, told the attendant to fill up the tank, and went over to the telephone booth. I looked up the addresses for Jason Lomax, Brad and Beverly Winestock, and Keith Tarrant, and wrote them down on my note pad. Then I came back and paid the attendant and looked over the street map. The closest of the three seemed to be the Winestocks, on a street called Bonificacio Drive that was about ten blocks distant.

  I went over there, and the house was a two-story Spanish adobe set back some distance from the street, on higher ground. You got up to it by way of twenty-five or thirty slab-stone steps grown with rock cress; at their top was a short arbor covered by reddish bougainvillea. It was cool and quiet on the narrow porch formed by a wood-railed gallery at the second-floor level-and I thought for no particular reason of Old Monterey, Old California, and what it must have been like to have lived in the days of the Bear Flag and the sprawling ranchos. Dull and simple, maybe-but the air and the land and the sea were clean then, and there were no great external pressures, and you could take your time about living. I tugged at the hand-woven bell pull located to one side of the front door, and listened to a dull, distant ringing within, like a melancholy elegy for the long-dead past.

  Pretty soon the door opened and a woman in her early thirties looked out at me. She had a kind of misty beauty, enhanced by moist dark eyes and a pensive mouth and long brown-black hair parted in the middle and swept over her shoulders and down her back, like a dusky tapestry woven of very fine thread and fringed across the bottom. When you looked at her long enough, you had the feeling that she was somehow two-dimensional-an image that could and would vanish wraithlike whenever she chose. But it could have been the shaded porch and the dark shadows behind her, inside the house, that conveyed the impression, or it could have been my mood. She was heavy-breasted and flare-hipped in dark-green cotton slacks and a lime-green shirt, and I found myself thinking-the way a man does sometimes, with this kind of woman-that she would be pure sweet hell in bed.