Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) (24 page)

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.

Immediately Quartermain went to the far couch, reached down, and picked up the gun by its short barrel. Mrs. Tarrant did not move. He put the weapon into his jacket pocket and straightened up and went to Tarrant's body and knelt down; but he was only going through the motions. Features waxen, blood coagulated and dried, Tarrant had been dead for some time.

I just stood there, with a kind of poisonous nausea in my stomach, thinking: I could have prevented this, I could have saved Tarrant's life if I had caught his slip at the schoolhouse or if I had remembered it before going to sleep in Quartermain's office; I could have prevented this! And yet I knew I could not blame myself, not really, because the seeds had been sown long ago by Keith and Bianca Tarrant, just as Paige had sown his seeds with Dancer's book—and that destruction, in one form or another, had been inevitable.

Quartermain stood up again and glanced around the room and saw that there was a telephone on a stand near the polished-wood inner stairs. He shambled over there, his eyes sick and his mouth twisted into a thin grimace, and caught up the receiver and dialed a number. The summons: county investigators and, this time, a matron— and the crew, too, don't forget the crew, the clean-up boys, the necessary vultures who go to work when someone dies by violence. Come on out, boys and girl, the Tarrant’s are having a party on Del Lobos Canyon Road and you're the only others invited.

Quartermain said what had to be said and put down the handset and returned to the far sofa, stepping between where Mrs. Tarrant was sitting and a glass-topped coffee table that held two empty glasses and an empty gin bottle. He sat down next to her and touched her shoulder, shook her just a little. I thought for a moment that she was not going to come out of it, but then a tremor passed through her and her eyelids fluttered and her eyes took on a dull, vacuous awareness. But if she had been drunk when she shot her husband, she showed no signs of it now. She turned her head and looked at Quartermain without expression; he might have been a part of the furniture. Her mouth worked and she said, "I shot him, I killed him," in a voice that was steady and clear and as empty as the gin bottle.

He said, "Do you know who I am, Mrs. Tarrant? Can you understand me?"

"Yes," she said.

"Who am I?"

"Chief Quartermain."

He hesitated, and I knew why and felt some of his reluctance. It was time now for the ritual, the Miranda decision, the recitation of personal civil rights that is an absolute necessity before an individual about to be placed under arrest can be questioned in connection with a crime.
You have the right to remain silent, you have the right not to answer police questions, you have the right to know that if you do answer police questions, your answers may be used as evidence against you, you have the right to consult with an attorney before or during police questioning, you have the right to have a lawyer appointed without cost and to consult with him before and during police questioning in the event you do not have the funds with which to hire counsel yourself.
I listened to him saying that and looked at her sitting there, and the ritual was obscene—not because the Miranda decision itself was obscene or anything but perfectly just, but because with a thing like this, a drunken and irrational crime of passion, the enactment of the ritual is a cruel and bitter farce.

When he had finished, Quartermain asked her if she understood all of her rights as he had outlined them to her, and she said yes, she understood, not really understanding, not really caring, and he asked her if she was willing to answer questions without benefit of counsel and she said Yes, yes, and uncrossed her arms and put her face in her hands and began to cry. Quartermain looked over at me, helplessly, but I had nothing for him. I moved forward a little and my eyes strayed again to Tarrant and all that blood, and I thought: So much blood and so much dying in the last few days, and now it's over, there won't be any more blood or any more dying, not here, not for a while. The undercurrents have surfaced and the rumbling has stopped and the violence has consummated itself and the web has unraveled. It's over—or is it? For Walter Paige and for Brad Winestock and for Keith Tarrant, yes. But what about the others—what about Russ Dancer and Beverly Winestock and Bianca Tarrant and the Lomaxes and even Quartermain? Is it over for them, too? Is it
really
over for them?

Another tremor passed through Mrs. Tarrant, and it seemed to steady her somehow; she took her hands away from her face and sighed long and shuddering and looked at Quartermain again, waiting. Her face, sallow-white and streaked with mascara and greenish eyeshadow, was ghastly.

He asked, "Did you shoot your husband, Mrs. Tarrant?"

"Yes," she said. "I shot him. Yes."

"Why did you shoot him?"

"Because he . . . because he killed Walt"

"Walter Paige?"

"Yes."

"Are you certain of that?"

"He told me he did it. He said he did it for me, because he loved me, because he . . . loved . . ."

The words trailed off, and she began to slide her hands rigidly back and forth across her thighs; the emerald-green material of her suit pants made rhythmic rustling sounds that pulled at my nerves like the sounds of chalk squealing against a blackboard. Quartermain said, with a mixture of gentleness and infinite weariness, "You were the woman with Paige Saturday afternoon? The two of you were lovers?"

"Yes. We were lovers. We were lovers six years ago and then he went away without saying anything, just went away, and I thought I would go insane with wanting him. But after a while I got over him enough so that life had some purpose again, and Keith and I ... we were doing nicely, Keith tried, he always did try. And then Walt came back. He called me one day two months ago and said he wanted to see me again, he said he still loved me and needed me and was sorry he'd gone away, and I met him in Monterey that weekend and it was ... oh God, it was just like it was six years ago, it was better, I loved him so! We were going away together. The wife, he didn't tell me about her, he wanted to spare me, you see, but it wouldn't have mattered, Keith didn't matter, nothing mattered but Walt.