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.
Paige took me through the middle of Cypress Bay on Grove Avenue-a two-lane street divided in the middle by shrubbery, lined with souvenir shops and spanned at intervals by banners proclaiming: Sentinel Hill Professional Golf Classic Thursday, May 4, Through Sunday, May 7 • Qualifying Monday, May 1. Sentinel Hill, like its more famous neighbor Pebble Beach, was located on the peninsula not far from Cypress Bay; and the annual pro tournament there, like the ones at Pebble, always brought in a heavy stream of tourists and camp followers. From the packed sidewalks, it appeared as if most of them had arrived early.
At the foot of Grove was a wide thoroughfare called Ocean Boulevard, which ran in a parallel curve to the harbor. Across it was a large, thickly shaded park, a municipal pier where you could hire a charter boat for salmon trolling or deep-sea fishing, and a public beach that curved in a white-powder crescent around the inlet. Cypress Bay had a little something for everyone; I wondered sourly what it had for Walter Paige.
Paige made a left turn on Ocean and drove a fifth of a mile; there, beachfront, was a motel that you might have mistaken for a series of private beach cottages if you had glanced at them in a cursory way. The only sign was a small, neat, bucolic one with letters fashioned out of strips of bark; it said: The Beachwood.
Paige took the Cutlass onto a white-gravel drive and stopped in front of a log-cabin-style building in the middle of the grounds; the drive formed a small inner square, servicing each of the cottages in their squared-off, extended U arrangement. I stopped on Ocean Boulevard and watched Paige get out and enter the motel office.
This looked like the end of the line-for now, anyway. But I was not going in until I made certain. So I sat there, waiting, and looked at the cottages. They were as neat and rustic as the sign, as the rest of Cypress Bay. Pines filled the grounds-and roses and lilac bushesand each cottage was separated from its neighbor by a high Monterey cypress hedge. Those cottages at the rear of the grounds had their backsides to the sea and to what
