Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) (19 page)

"Somebody set it on purpose."

"That's right."

"Who?"

"A fortyish bald guy who so far doesn't have a name. We went down to have a talk with you around nine-thirty last night, and we got there in time to see him running away along the beach—but not in time to do anything about saving your place. The guy got away and we haven't found him yet."

The left side of Dancer's mouth began to tic. He looked at me. "Is this the guy you mentioned to me yesterday—Paige's friend?"

I nodded, and Quartermain said, "You claimed yesterday not to know him, that you'd never seen him before. Does that still hold?"

"Yeah, it holds. I don't know anybody who looks like that, and I don't know why the son of a bitch would want to set fire to my goddamn house."

"We can answer that one. He wanted to destroy any and all copies of
The Dead and the Dying
that you might have had."

Dancer stared at him grimly. "So that's it."

"That's it."

"How do you know?"

I said, "Paige's copy of the book was stolen from my cottage at the Beachwood, probably just before that guy went to your place. And when he went there, he took a can of gasoline with him. He didn't want to take the time to search through all of your belongings, and maybe miss something in the bargain; the simplest, surest way was for him to fire the house."

"If you'd been there," Quartermain put in, "he might have seen to it that you went up along with it."

Dancer said "Jesus" almost reverently.

"There's something damned important in that book, Dancer, something important enough to create a motive for murder. The key to everything is in that book, in
why
it's important."

"I don't understand that, any of it. A book of mine, a potboiler paperback crime novel twenty years old—how could a thing like that be important enough to anybody to cause murder and arson?"

"That's why you're here: to help us find out."

"I can't even remember the thing."

"No, none of it."

"No, none of it."

Quartermain's mouth tightened. "The bald man must have thought you could. If you'd been home last night, you'd very likely be dead now because of it."

"It's a farce," Dancer said, and shook his head numbly. "This whole thing is a farce, for Christ's sake. I can't tell you anything." With a kind of mute appeal in his eyes, he looked at me again. "Listen, after you came to see me yesterday, I was bugged about the book and I went to my shelves to dig out a copy. But I didn't have one. I didn't have one. The bastard fired the house for nothing. For
nothing
. I didn't even have a goddamn copy of it!" He laughed abruptly—humorless and savagely bitter.

Quartermain asked, "Not even a manuscript carbon?"

"No. I looked for that, too; it wasn't among my other papers. I don't know what happened to it. It might have gotten thrown out; my ex-wife was a great one for throwing things out."

"Goddamn it, can't you remember
any
of the book? At least what type of crime, besides murder, it dealt with?"

"I'm lucky I can remember my name this morning."

I said, "The lead's name was Johnny Sunderland—a Korean War vet with a game leg. He came home to San Francisco and got mixed up with a couple of women, one of them named . . . Dina, I think. There were some hoods involved and two hundred thousand dollars. Sunderland and this Dina pulled some kind of double-cross, apparently, and tried to run off with the money."

"That sounds like the plot of half the crappy crime books I did in the fifties. Look, I used to crank those things out in a week or two, first draft with minor revisions. I put titles on them, but the publishers always changed the titles; half the time they edited the stuff and changed character names, too. The gimpy Korean vet sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't place him in any kind of situation. I'm sorry as hell—don't you think I want to help you find out what this is all about, who that bald bastard is?—but I just can't remember."

Quartermain got up and began pacing off his frustrated anger, and then stopped moving just as abruptly and said to Dancer, "Have you got any idea where we might get a copy of the book now, this morning?"

"An old paperback like that—no, I don't have any idea."

"You were living in this area when you wrote it, weren't you?"

"I moved out here from New York in 1950."

"Is it possible you gave copies to friends at that time? You did have copies then, didn't you?"

"Christ, I don't know. I always try to get copies of my published stuff, but there were some books the publishers didn't bother sending and I couldn't locate;
The Dead and the Dying
might have been one of them. If I did have copies, I may have given some away, but nobody except a collector would have kept the damned thing around for twenty years, and I never knew any collectors."

"All right, then," Quartermain said thinly. "Let's forget about the book for the time being and talk about Walter Paige."

"What about Paige?"

"You had trouble with him at one time, didn't you?"

"Trouble—?"

"Words about something, bad feelings, a fight."

Dancer hesitated, and then sighed in a resigned way. "All right, yeah, we had some words once."

"What about?"

"A chick I was seeing at that time. He tried to move in on her one night and I didn't like it. I told him to lay off and he told me to go screw, and it looked for a time as if we might take a few swings at one another. We were both pretty drunk. But it was at the Mount Royal and some of the others in the group broke it up. Keith Tarrant was there, I think. Is he the one who told you about it?"

I said, "Why didn't you mention this yesterday?"

"It didn't amount to anything, and I didn't think it was particularly relevant. Besides, I didn't want to put ideas in your head."

"Who was the girl?" Quartermain asked him.

"Rose Davis."

"Does she still live in this area?"

"No, she moved back east a couple of years ago."

"Where back east?"

"St. Louis. She got married to some guy from there."

"Did Paige leave her alone after that one night?"

"If he didn't, Rose never said anything to me about it."

"Then you didn't have any more trouble with Paige?"

"No."

"Did you ever hear of an alleged attempt by Paige to attack Robin Lomax?"

Dancer frowned. "You mean a rape thing?"

"That's what I mean."

"No, I never heard of anything like that."

"Does it sound like something Paige might have done?"

"Not really. He was glib and smooth and virile as hell; he could talk most broads out of their pants with a little effort, and he was never lacking for pussy as far as I could see. A guy like that doesn't usually blow his cool enough to attempt rape." He frowned again. "Did Robin tell you that Paige tried to attack her?"

"Her husband told us."

"You think they're involved in Paige's death—this business with my book?"

"Anything is possible at this point," Quartermain said. "Did Paige seem to be hot for Robin six years ago?"

"No hotter than he was for every other woman he met. But she was pretty thick with Lomax back then; I doubt if she ever gave Paige a tumble."

"Was she much of a drinker?"

"Yeah, she could put it away."

"Could she hold it?"

"Fair. I've seen her juiced a few times, before she married Lomax and became a Miss Junior League."

"Then she might have gotten drunk enough, if she'd had a fight with Lomax, say, to go out with Paige?"

Dancer shrugged. "I suppose so."

"Lomax used to join your little group once in a while?"

"Robin dragged him along a couple of times. He didn't seem to approve of us—a stuffy bastard."

"How did he get along with Paige?"

"They seemed to tolerate one another."

"No trouble over Robin?"

"Not that I know about."

"When Paige moved away, were either of the Lomaxes still attending your group sessions?"

"Sure, they both were."

"No animosity, no strained feelings toward Paige?"

"If there were, I can't remember them."

"You'd think there would be if Paige had tried to rape her, wouldn't you?" The question was rhetorical; he followed it immediately with: "Tell me something about Brad Winestock."

"Like what?"

"How well did he know Paige six years ago?"

"As well as the rest of us, I guess. Winestock used to join the group with his sister once in a while, just like Lomax used to come with Robin."

"He never seemed thick with Paige?"

"If you mean buddy-buddy, no."

"When was the last time you saw Winestock?"

"A month, two months; he drives a bread truck, and I saw him here in Cypress Bay one morning and we said hello."

"Just that? You didn't talk about anything?"

"The weather, maybe. Why all the interest in Winestock now?"

"He was murdered last night," Quartermain told him flatly.

Dancer blinked a couple of times, absorbing that. Then he said "God" and put the coffee cup down on the desk. "Does Beverly know yet?"

"Yes, she knows."

"Ah Christ! And I thought I had it rough today." His throat worked painfully. "Who did it? The bald man again?"

"Maybe; we can't be sure yet. But Winestock was mixed up with the bald man, and with Walter Paige. He spent part of the afternoon with the guy yesterday, and Paige called him up on the phone a few weeks ago and had at least one meeting with him. His sister thinks they were planning something, some kind of crime, something to do with that book of yours. We came down a little hard on Winestock last night, and then left him sweating; I figured maybe he'd lead us to the bald man. But he slipped the tail I had on him and vanished. A Highway Patrol unit found him out at Spanish—"

The telephone bell, as shrill as the cry of a loon, cut Quartermain off. He went to the desk and caught up the handset and listened for a time, not contributing much; then he thanked the caller, replaced the receiver, and said to us, "County people at Jamesburg. The Nunnally woman confirmed that you spent the night with her, Dancer—reluctantly, but she confirmed it. She says you weren't out of her sight more than ten minutes at any time."

Dancer did not say anything. His eyebrows were humped in a V over the bridge of his nose, and there was sweat on his splotched gray face, and you could see that he was trying to think on something or other and having difficulty with it because of the hangover dullness of his mind. Finally he said, with slow deliberateness as if testing the words and his memory, "Anita Hartman."

Quartermain looked at him blankly. "What?"

"Anita Hartman," Dancer said again. "An old lady, a pioneer type, who used to live in Cypress Bay. I think she died two or three years ago."

The blankness congealed into a frown. "Sure, I remember her; she was something of an institution in this area. What about her?"

"She was trying to start up this combination art and historical society back in the late fifties—a museum or something for the storage and preservation of artistic memorabilia relating to Cypress Bay and environs, supposed to date back to the time of the Spanish possession. I don't know why she was interested in an old pulp hack, but she found out I was a local writer and came to see me. She wanted me to donate some of my papers to this society of hers—she was seeing other writers and artists in the area and getting them to donate stuff and she wanted to include me. I guess I was flattered and so I said all right and gave her two or three boxes of stuff. She said she wanted all future papers, too, but the project fell through and I never heard from her again. I'd forgotten all about her until just now."

Quartermain and I were both on our feet, and there was a kind of electric tenseness in the air. He said, "You think there may have been copies of
The Dead and the Dying
among those papers of yours, is that it?"

"Not copies—the manuscript carbon. I don't know exactly what was in the boxes I gave her, but I'm pretty sure, now that I remember it, that most of the stuff was manuscript carbons and notes on some of the books and stories I'd done since 1950."

I said to Quartermain, "Do you know what happened, after she died, to all the memorabilia Anita Hartman had collected?"

"Hell yes. She willed it to the city of Cypress Bay, with the stipulation that it be stored safely until such time as it could be used to start or implement a local historical art society. There's been a lot of renewed interest in our local heritage of late, and a community group with city sanction and funding is in the process of creating a Cypress Bay Historical Museum of Art and Literature. Not long ago they bought an old schoolhouse on Gutierrez Avenue and have begun to restore it. All of Anita Hartman's collection, and other donations, are stored in the basement until restoration is complete and they can sort it and arrange displays."

"Is there a custodian, someone to let us in?"

"No, not yet; it's still a volunteer group and they won't get somebody in there until it's opened to the public. It's kept locked."

"Who would have the key?"

"I'm not sure. The head of the group, probably. I think that's John Benjamin, but I'd better—Wait a minute! Keith Tarrant belongs to the group; he got them the schoolhouse property through his real-estate office. He'd have a key; sure he would."

We pulled Dancer up from his chair—there was the chance we might need his help in combing the school-house basement, if not in further explanations, were we to locate the manuscript of The Dead and the Dying—and hurried the hell out of there . . .

Eighteen

The real-estate office which Keith Tarrant maintained in Cypress Bay was located on Newberry Road, just inside the northern city limits. We went there directly from the City Hall because it was close and because it seemed reasonable that Tarrant would keep a schoolhouse key there rather than at his Carmel Valley home; even if he had not as yet come in, the secretary he had told me about would more than likely have opened the office for Monday morning business.