Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) (2 page)

I said, "Well, I guess that's about all I'll need, Mrs. Paige. I'll be on the job early in the morning. Try to act natural tonight and tomorrow—and don't check out the door or window for me before he leaves."

She nodded once, convulsively, and her hands were restless on the suede bag. "You won't let him know you're following him, will you? I mean, if I'm wrong and Walter is just . . . working, I wouldn't want him to know what I've done.

"I’ll be as careful as I can."

"Thank you," she said, and her lower lip trembled slightly. There were more tears building in her eyes, but she would not let them get out until she was alone; they were the kind of tears a woman cries only when she is alone. "Will you call me as soon as you find out anything?"

"Right away."

"Shall I give you a check now?"

"I can bill you."

"Well, I'd like to give you something."

"All right."

"Twenty-five dollars?"

"That would be fine, Mrs. Paige."

I looked away while she made out the check. Through the window I could see the rising spans of the Bay Bridge in the distance. Somewhere out there, on the bay itself, a ship's whistle sounded. I thought: Freighter going out, down to Panama, maybe, or off to the Far East. God, how nice it must be out there on the sea! Wind and spray washing over you, washing you clean. You can't get clean in the city; there's too much dirt, tangible and intangible, literal and         figurative . . .

She put the check on my blotter, and I got it into the center drawer without looking at it. Then I stood up and she stood up, and there was nothing for either of us to say in the way of parting. I went with her to the door, and held it for her, and she gave me her shy, wistful little smile and went out hugging the suede jacket tightly around her, as if she were very cold.

When she was gone, I closed the door and went back to my desk and opened the center drawer and looked at her check lying within. Twenty-five dollars advance. Seventy-five total, plus expenses, if the job lasted just the one day. Seventy-five bucks to become a part of the private life and private emotions of a nice young girl. How does it make you feel, guy? Like a gigolo, maybe? Like a goddamned heel?

I closed the drawer again and got my hat and my lightweight overcoat from the office alcove and locked the door behind me and went out into the sunshine. It seemed faintly gray somehow, even though the sky was cloudless, and there was no warmth in it. The young girls in their spring fashions reminded me of Judith Paige, and there was no warmth in that either.

Two

I left my flat in Pacific Heights at seven-fifteen the following morning, and drove out to the address Judith Paige had given me—on Sussex Street, in Glen Park. It was one of those borderline neighborhoods that never seem to be able to make up their minds which way to go. The streets ran in twisting confusion—climbing sharply, dropping sharply, dead-ending with no warning at all—and on each of them you saw fairly nice, if old, middle-class homes, and shabby unpainted tenements, and new low-rent apartment buildings, and old low-rent duplexes. The business district, off Monterey Boulevard, was comprised of grim-visaged shops and buildings that gave you the odd feeling of having regressed thirty or forty years into the dim, Depression past.

The Paige’s lived in one of the apartment dwellings on upper Sussex—a two-story, four-unit thing with an ocher-colored plaster facade and tiny balconies railed in black iron. On the street in front, parked facing downhill, was a dark-blue Cutlass with the license number TTD-679. I drove up to the top of Sussex, turned around in somebody’s driveway, and came down to park on the upper edge of a convex hook in the street, sixty yards or so above the Cutlass. I could see the entrance to the apartment building from there as well. My watch said that it was seven-fifty.

I got my cigarettes out and looked at them and put them away again. My chest felt tight and hot, and I had coughed up a wad of gray-flecked phlegm over my breakfast coffee. Bronchial trouble, created and nurtured by the consumption of too many cigarettes—or maybe it was the other thing, the dark thing you don't like to think about. No. Bronchial trouble, that's all it was. What was the point in wasting money on a doctor to confirm it? Bronchial trouble. Sure.

The simple truth is, you don't want to know.

The simple truth is, you're afraid to find out.

So the hell with it.

A guy and his family came out of a stucco-fronted house on my side of the street, carrying picnic baskets, and got into a vintage Ford and drove off down the hill. The front door banged in the house next door to that one, and a woman with ankles like a heron's legs and a body as thin as a wafer began hunting for her morning paper; she found it after a while, used it to scratch herself in an intimate place, and shuffled back inside again. An elderly lady with too much rouge on her cheeks struggled up the hill with a lean poodle on a red leash; the poodle made a pass for my right front tire, and the elderly lady jerked him away, smiling at me in a self-consciously apologetic way. When I glanced up into my rear-view mirror a moment later, the poodle was washing off the right front tire on the car parked behind mine, while she looked on; that car was empty. Three kids came flying down the opposite sidewalk on roller skates, laughing and shouting. One of them took a header down by the Cutlass—a fat kid in baggy pants—and rolled over in the gutter and began to cry; the other two sailed on down the hill, taunting over their shoulders, and the fat one sat there in the gutter and watched them forlornly with the tears running down his cheeks. Then he got up and took off his skates and began to trudge slowly up the hill. I was sorry for him, because I knew, a little, how he felt.

Eight-fifteen.

There had been a high, early-morning fog, but it was lifting off now and the sky was a faded indigo to the east. Sunlight, the universal cleanser, washed the street and the houses in pale gold, and the neighborhood looked a little nicer, a little friendlier, and a little more hopeful. The smell of spring was thick and fresh in the air.

Across the street a woman with reddish-gold hair that shone like distant fire came out of her house and went into a side garden; she carried a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves. For a brief instant the flaming hair reminded me of Cheryl Rosmond. I looked away and got out my cigarettes and lit one—the hell with my chest.

Cheryl Rosmond. A memory now—still vivid, still immediate, but a memory nonetheless. She was something that might have been for me, something that should have been, something which now could never be. The attraction, the rapport, we had had, had died before it had really lived—the result of a tragedy which neither of us could have foreseen in the beginning, and which, bitterly, neither of us could have prevented even if we had.

It had died because I had unmasked her brother—her only living relative, the one person she loved more than anything in this world—as a cold-blooded murderer, and because I had been an integral part of the reason for his ultimate suicide by hanging.

What can you say to a woman after something like that? How can you bridge the sudden chasm between you? The answers are painfully simple: there is nothing you can say, there is no way to span the chasm. You cannot bring her brother back to life, and undo his wrongs, and you cannot bring back to life the spark that had begun between you and her; both are dead, both are gone. And the fact that Doug Rosmond had addressed his suicide note to me, and begged me to take care of his sister and to love her and to help her, only made the situation that much more untenable; he would always be between us, the ghost of him and of his crimes, even if our relationship could have somehow continued. Cheryl knew that, and I knew it, and there was simply nothing more for either of us.

But I tried. You have to try. I saw her, I called her— and it was useless, so damned futile because all the while you
know
it's futile. The papers made a thing out of the case—there was no way to keep it out of the papers—and that had made it unbearable for Cheryl in San Francisco; she had given up her house on Vicente and given up her job and her few friends and moved back to Truckee, where she had grown up but where she had no family and she was as alone as I. I had written her four times since then, and she had answered each letter politely but with no encouragement, and then I had stopped writing and stopped myself three times from getting into my car and driving up to the Sierras to see her again, because you can only try for so long before you have to admit the absolute finality of it, the impossibility of resurrection. So now it was over; it was buried along with Doug Rosmond.

I had made a promise to myself then that I would no longer become involved, that involvement brought pain more acute than that of simple loneliness. It had been a tough six months for me, because before Cheryl there had been a woman named Erika, who had walked out of my life for a much different if no less painful reason, and I did not think I could endure another bittersweet love affair—now or ever again. I was too old, too tired, too sensitive. It was better to be a loner, to be alone, to be objective; the pleasures were few, but they were good and simple ones, and the less complications there were, the more peaceful life was.

I finished the cigarette and threw the butt out the window and watched the languid breeze roll it down the hill toward the silently waiting Cutlass. Almost nine now. Come on, Paige, let's get the show on the road, let's get your ass in gear. If you're screwing around on a girl like Judith, you son of a bitch, you're the biggest damned fool who ever walked the earth. Don't you see what you've got there? Don't you know how fortunate you are? Don't you know there are those who would give their eyes for the love of a woman like that?

Another five minutes went by, darkly. I felt nervous and irritable with the waiting; I wished I had not seen the woman with the reddish-gold hair, and I wished that Judith Paige had not come into my office the day before. I could have called Eberhardt—my best friend for better than twenty-five years, the youthfully idealistic days at the Police Academy and on the San Francisco cops, where he was currently a Lieutenant of Detectives—and have talked him into going fishing up at Black Point. We could have sat in a skiff and drunk beer in the warm spring sunshine and enjoyed life a little, the simple pleasures . . .

The entrance door to the apartment building opened, and a lean, sinuous guy carrying an overnight bag and wearing a sports coat over a thin brown turtleneck came out briskly. He had one of these sharp-featured faces that you could call handsome if you liked the type, and curly black hair and long barlike sideburns. He walked quickly to the Cutlass, unlocked the driver's door, and slid in under the wheel.

I waited until he was half a block down the hill before I started my car and pulled out after him. Once we got off Sussex, there was just enough traffic so that I could stay fairly close—and he led me directly to the Southern Freeway entrance on Monterey Boulevard. I gave him a long lead out on the freeway, and then closed the gap a little as we neared the arteries branching into the James Lick north and south, and into 280 leading down to Third Street; I half expected him to make the swing north, into San Francisco proper, but he cut over to the right instead and got onto James Lick southbound. If there was another woman, she did not apparently live in the city.

Paige held his speed down in the moderately heavy traffic, driving leisurely, and I had no trouble keeping him in sight. If you put other cars between yourself and your subject, and use a lane opposite to his, maintaining a tail on the freeway is no real problem—as long as the subject does not expect to be followed in the first place. Paige seemed to have no suspicions whatsoever.

We went down the length of the peninsula on 101, leaving the bay and its crisp breezes behind. We left San Jose behind too—and then Gilroy and Watsonville—and it began to look as if the two-hundred-odd miles Paige had driven the previous weekend meant something after all. The further south we traveled, the warmer it got to be. We passed through the agricultural belt, the fields of lettuce and artichokes—Steinbeck country; and a few miles outside of Salinas, Paige finally quit 101 on State 156 leading west toward the ocean. Just below Castroville, 156 joins Highway 1, and when we got there, Paige swung south again along the coast.

Highway 1 was two-lane and had considerably less traffic; I dropped further back with a car between the Cutlass and me. Artichoke fields stretched away on both sides of the road for a while, but when we approached Fort Ord—the Army's West Coast training camp—the landscape changed to seaward and became a series of rolling sand dunes topped with tule grass, like an endless string of human heads with all the features and most of the hair erased by the sea winds. The buildings of Fort Ord came and went, as did the town of Seaside, and pretty soon we were in more of Steinbeck country—the city of Monterey.

We came down off a steep hill on the southern outskirts, and through thickly grown Monterey cypress and pine I had my first glimpse of the Pacific, and of the small inlet of Cypress Bay; the water was blue-green and sun-jeweled, dotted with sailboats and pleasure craft. A little further along, there was a turnoff for the village of Cypress Bay; Paige took the exit, and we began to descend along a wood-lined concourse toward the center of the hamlet.

Cypress Bay was a haven for artists and writers—and for sightseers and vacationers and college students and hippies and the more sedate among the swingers. Art galleries and workshops, more than a hundred souvenir shops, quaint French and seafood restaurants, and dozens of motels, hotels, and inns comprised the bulk of its buildings; and there were pastoral streets and curving little alleys to complete the illusion of a vanished and cherished rusticity. You would find no billboards, few street signs, few street lights; the city fathers maintained and protected the illusion with strict building codes and rigid laws. The architecture was a mixture of traditional Old Spanish; Monterey adobe, which utilized waterproof adobe bricks and redwood shakes and hewn local timbers; log-cabin style, with heavy emphasis on pioneer simplicity; and saccharine Hansel and Gretel doll houses, popular in the twenties, that featured whimsical windows, chimneys, gambrels, and gabled roofs. You had to go some distance outside the village proper to find anything of a modern design.