Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) (7 page)

Quartermain came back with the copy of
The Dead and the Dying
, and I glanced at it briefly and put it into the pocket of my suit coat. He said, "I'll give you a call at the motel when it's all right for you and Mrs. Paige to return to San Francisco, or if I need you again. In either case, you should hear from me late this afternoon sometime."

"Okay," I said. "Thanks, Chief."

We clasped hands again and I went over to the door. I had just gotten it open when Quartermain said, "What do you think she'll do now? After this thing is finished, I mean?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe she'll go back to Idaho."

"That would be the best thing for her."

"I think so, too. San Francisco is a nice city but it's no place for little girls from Idaho."

"Look, why don't you keep an eye on her for a while— until she goes home? She could use a friend."

"I was planning on it." I looked at him soberly. "You sound as if she made an impression on you, too."

"Yeah," he said in a grave voice. "Yeah, I guess she did."

*****

When I got back to my cottage at the Beachwood, I looked at the four walls briefly and then went out into the private rear garden and sat on one of the wooden picnic chairs they had there, in the shade of a cone-heavy Bishop pine. I took the copy of The Dead and the Dying out of my coat pocket and turned it over and read the back-cover blurb. It went this way:

A LITTLE PEACE AND QUIET . . .

Johnny Sunderland came home to California from the bloody battlefields of Korea with a game leg and a bellyful of war. All he wanted

was a little peace and quiet. What he got was a fast trip to a hell that made Korea look like a Sunday School picnic!

First he met Nora, who drank too much and played too hard—and

died too easy. Then there were Bernie and Alf, a couple of little

men with big .45s. Next came Therm, who would do anything for

the likes of two hundred grand—including the murder of his wife.

Then Ritter, the sadistic cop who had more on his mind than his

job; Hallinan, the horseplayer who lost his one big bet, his nerve,

and his life all in one day; and finally, there was Dina, the flaming

redhead whose arms promised unlimited passion—or sudden death!

Before he had been home two days, Johnny Sunderland was plunged-

into a nightmare of murder, treachery, and big-time crime. The

Object of a massive manhunt conducted by the police on one side

and several desperate men on the other, Johnny ran and ran hard.

But it wasn't long before he found out that the road he thought

would take him to freedom was nothing more than a dead end; and

that he was running on a treadmill to oblivion . . .

Pretty lurid stuff; I wondered about the book itself. I opened it up and looked at the inside blurb, which is usually a short cut of narrative from the novel. The heading there read: DRESSED FIT TO KILL, and the first line was:
She came into his room wearing nothing but the smell of her perfume and a .45 automatic.
Well. I turned the page, saw that the copyright date was 1954, and turned another page to Chapter One.

I read the first five pages and put the book down. None of the fast, wacky flair which had characterized Russell Dancer's pulp stuff in
Dime Detective, Detective Tales, Black Mask, Argosy
, and the others; he had had this series character, a private eye named Rex Hannigan, and I had found a lot of redeeming features and a kind of cockeyed charm in Hannigan. Johnny Sunderland was pretty much of a wise-cracking ass, war hero and game leg notwithstanding. But there was one thing about the book, and that was its setting; the cover blurb had mentioned only California, but San Francisco was the stated locale.

I remembered then that all of the early Hannigan stories had been set in New York City, but that around 1950 Dancer had moved him out to San Francisco and environs. I thought about that, and I wondered if the reason for the move was because Dancer himself had come west. Then I began to wonder if Dancer had lived in San Francisco, since he had set the later pulp stories and this novel there; and then I began to wonder where Dancer was
now
, if he was still around and still writing, and if so, where he was.

An idea got itself into my head and kept working away in there. Suppose Russell Dancer—assuming the name was not pseudonymous—lived not in San Francisco but in Cypress Bay or somewhere else on the Monterey Peninsula? Suppose Paige had had the book because, somehow, he knew Dancer? It was a long shot in several different ways, and even if it were possible, it did not have to mean anything in terms of Paige's murder; but it was a nagging little idea, the kind that keeps after you until you do something about it one way or another.

So I got up and went inside and found a telephone directory for the Monterey Peninsula, in the bottom of the nightstand which contained the phone. I opened it up to the D section and ran my finger down the page, and there was a listing for an R. Dancer, on Beach Road, County. That put the idea to work a little harder inside my head. I picked up the phone and dialed the listed number, and after three rings a recorded voice came on and told me the number had been disconnected.

I frowned and closed the directory and looked at the copy of
The Dead and the Dying
. Then I got up and walked around the room for a while. R. Dancer, I thought, Beach Road, County. Well, all right—you haven't got anything else to do today, and if you sit around here you'll do nothing but think about Judith Paige up in that dark room, grieving, and there's nothing in that, you know there's nothing in that. But there may be something in this R. Dancer, if he
is
the writer; and if he is, and there isn't any connection with Paige, you can still talk pulps with him; you've always wanted to meet a pulp writer, haven't you? Go on, get out of here.

I got out of there.

Seven

The coastline south of Cypress Bay was scalloped with jagged cliffs and jutting promontories and deep canyons—the most beautiful coastline in the state, and perhaps on the entire Pacific shore. Monterey cypress trees, native only to this area, their branches and dark-green foliage shaped by the sea winds into grotesquely appealing forms, stood like old, old watchmen atop the bare erosions of rock. The blue-green sea, calm and sunstreaked to the horizon, found a restless energy approaching land and flung itself against the cliffs in a churning froth of foam and spray, as if it harbored a kind of deep-seated resentment for the impassive solidarity of its boundaries. Fat brown pelicans and oyster catchers and pigeon guillemots dotted the headlands and rock islands, and there were glimpses of low-tide beaches teeming with sponges, anemones, crabs, starfish, sea urchins, and beds of golden kelp. It was everything you could want in the way of scenic splendor—or it would have been if there were no oil slicks and garbage dumps and beer cans and toilet paper and cardboard boxes and condoms and litter bags; if humanity had not spread the diseased wastes of its "civilization" like a plague over the land . . .

Beach Road was a narrow paved lane that turned off Highway 1 six miles below Cypress Bay and dropped on a sharp incline toward the ocean. Three or four bungalows and a small trailer encampment were interspersed among dense stands of pine. Rural mailboxes on wooden poles lined the road, but the largest number was 27 and the phone directory had listed R. Dancer at 31. I drove to the end of the lane—a fifth of a mile from the high-way—and found myself on a sort of convex bluff face, half-mooned at the edge by low white guardrails mounted with reflectors. Over on the left was an old Ford wood sided station wagon, drawn up near the head of a set of wood-railed steps leading down to the sea; the number of the mailbox there was 31.

I parked in the dappled shade of one of the large cypress growing there and walked to the stairs, the clean, pungent smell of salt in my nostrils. Once there, I could see the dwelling built on a long sand-and-rock shelf some fifty feet below; the shelf tapered downward into an irregular-shaped, driftwood-strewn beach bounded on both sides by projections formed of a series of eroded, bird-limed boulders—like natural stone jetties extending into the Pacific. The structure was a kind of shack, heavily weathered, fashioned of redwood shingles and beams that had withstood the elements for a long while, but which would not withstand them a great deal longer. It was raised off the shelf on concrete blocks, with gap-toothed lattice board to cover the open spacing; a tired-looking catwalk was attached to the right wall, leading onto a sort of sun porch across the rear width. There was a short walk in front, log-railed like the catwalk and porch, which led from the bottom of the steps to the shack's door; the property was otherwise unadorned, save for a carpeting of sand and small bits of driftwood that had been blown back against the bluff by the wind.

I went down the wooden steps, hanging onto the handrail and moving carefully. The angle of them was not steep, but there was a thin coating of sand on each, and the boards were old and loose. An exposed network of water piping ran down the side of the bluff alongside the steps, and there were power lines that looped down from overhead. I wondered irrelevantly if Dancer's phone had been disconnected because he could not or would not pay his bill.

When I reached the bottom of the steps and started along the sandy walk, I could hear the steady, rhythmic clacking of typewriter keys from inside the shack. I looked for a doorbell, did not find one, and rapped sharply on the heavy door. The typewriter maintained its rhythm. There was a window beside the door, but jalousied shutters were drawn over it and I could not see inside. I knocked again, loudly this time.

Another ten seconds went by, and I was getting ready to knock a third time; but then the keys fell silent and I could hear steps approaching within. The door opened jerkily, under an irritated hand, and I was looking at a thin guy in his early fifties dressed in an old pullover sweater and blue Levi's and white canvas sneakers. He had a shaggy mane of dust-colored hair, clean-shaven if faintly hollowed cheeks, a wryly crooked mouth, and a long Grecian nose marbled by whiskey veins. His eyes were a liquidy blue-gray under thick dust-colored brows that formed lopsided, inverted V's on his forehead, and they were not particularly friendly at the moment.

He looked me over, decided I was nobody he knew, and said, "Well? What is it?"

"Are you Russell Dancer—the writer?"

"No, I'm Russell Dancer—the hack. There's a hell of a big difference. What do you want?"

"I'd like to talk to you, if you wouldn't mind."

"I would mind. I'm working right now."

"It won't take very long."

"You wouldn't be a goddamn bill collector, would you?"

"No," I said. "I'm a private detective."

He stared at me. "A what?"

"A private detective."

"Are you putting me on?"

I got my wallet out of my coat pocket and opened it to the photostat of my license and let him look at it. He read it over twice, ran a prominently veined hand through his shaggy hair, and said, "Well, I'll be damned. You sure as hell don't look like a private dick."

"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.