Undercurrent

'Because Brad Winestock was murdered just before or just after midnight-shot to death at Spanish Bay, or somewhere else, and then taken out there in his car.'

Robin Lomax made a small, shocked sound and reached out in a blind sort of way to pluck at her husband's arm again. He just sat there, staring at us. 'Who did it? Who would want to kill a poor nothing like Brad Winestock?'

'Very possibly the same person who killed Walter Paige.'

'And we're under suspicion for both crimes, is that it?'

'I didn't say you were under suspicion, did I, Jason?'

'Well, you're acting as if we are, coming here with your questions and your intimations. We're respectable people, for God's sake, and I resent your trying to involve us in sordidness and murder.'

'I'm not trying to involve you, I'm trying to do my job the best way I know how. Now, the two of you knew Paige six years ago and you knew Brad Winestock; you reacted violently when confronted by Paige's name yesterday, and you seemed hardly willing to answer questions pertaining to Paige and your relationship with him. Those are the simple facts, and I'm here to find out the reasons for them. As long as you cooperate, and as long as you have nothing to hide, I'll apologize for my intrusion and for any inconvenience and you won't be bothered again. I don't see the need for indignation in any of that-unless you do have something to hide.'

'We have nothing to hide,' Lomax said.

'Fine. Now suppose you tell me about Walter Paige, and why you were so upset at the mention of his name yesterday.'

Lomax and his wife exchanged glances-they were good at exchanging glances-and again I could see nothing of any significance pass between them. He said, 'Very well. I'll tell you why Walter Paige was and still is a filthy name around here, and I'll tell you why both my wife and I are glad he's dead even though we had absolutely nothing to do with his death.'

He paused, and took a long breath, and went on, 'Paige thought he was irresistible, and that every woman in the world ought to fall fawning at his feet. Well, Robin didn't fall and that hurt his ego. So he got her somewhat… intoxicated one night, after she'd had a minor argument with me-we were going together at the time, you see-and he tried to attack her. She fought him off and managed to get away from him, but it was a very messy business, as you can well imagine. Naturally, when she told me, I wanted to attend to Paige personally, but we both saw the folly of that. We simply put the matter out of our minds as best we could, and shortly afterward Paige left Cypress Bay. We thought he had gone for good. When we heard he was back'-looking at me now, finally acknowledging my presence-'and this was before you told us of his death, you may remember, we were both angry and upset.'

'And that's all there is to it?' Quartermain asked.

'Absolutely all.'

The hell it is, I thought. I said, 'You seemed almost as unnerved by the fact that I was a private detective as you were by my mention of Paige's name. Why, Mr. Lomax?'

His eyes flared with a kind of unreasonable hatred for me, and then he blinked and it was gone. Mrs. Lomax worked on her lower lip with her sharp white teeth; the fear was still in her eyes and she seemed to be having difficulty maintaining her composure.

Quartermain said, 'Answer his question, Jason.'

'We're not at all used to being visited by private detectives, right out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon.' Lomax's voice was brittle again. 'Naturally we were surprised and a little taken aback. Private detectives, if you can believe television and films, are hardly the type of people one likes to be confronted with unexpectedly.'

God, what a supercilious bastard! What he knew about private detectives you could put in a goddamn thimble; what he knew about a lot of things-including natural human emotions and compassions-you could put in a goddamn thimble. I looked at Quartermain, but I could not tell from his expression what he thought of Lomax's rehearsed-sounding and pompous answers.

He said, 'You were both here between four and six o'clock Saturday afternoon, is that right?'

'Yes,' she said, 'that's right.'

'Playing tennis,' Lomax added.

'And you hadn't seen or heard from Walter Paige in six years?'

'Yes. Or rather, no.'

'And you've never heard of a book of Russell Dancer's called The Dead and the Dying.'

'Certainly not.'

'And you don't know a fortyish, kind of bald man who was apparently a friend of Paige's and of Winestock's.'

'No.'

'Do you have anything more to tell me, about anything at all we've discussed just now or which might have any bearing on either or both murders?'

Lomax moistened his lips. 'No,' he said, 'we have nothing more to tell you, Chief.'

'Then I'll take you at your word,' Quartermain said, 'and hope for your sakes that I don't have to come back again with more questions.' He stood up and I stood up with him. 'Thanks for your time, Jason, and yours, Robin.'

Lomax started to get up, but Quartermain told him we could find our own way out and muttered a good morning. I followed him across to the door and out and through the facing garden to his car. Once inside, he said, 'They're holding something back, too, the stubborn goddamn fools. Jesus Christ, I can't get a straight story out of anybody!'

I did not say anything; I had nothing to offer on the subject of the Lomaxes. Their involvement, whatever it was, was too nebulous at this point to make conjecture worthwhile. Quartermain had taken his questions as far as he could without getting tough, and you don't get tough with people like the Lomaxes unless you've got something definite to back you up. As it was, there would no doubt be repercussions from the City Fathers once Lomax, being the kind of man he was, got through screaming about police harassment. It took a lot of guts, I thought, for Quartermain to handle things as he had-to allow me to keep my unofficial hand in. He's a good cop, a hell of a good cop, and he deserves better than he's getting. He deserves a break. And soon, damned soon.

As if reading my thoughts, he said as he started the car, 'God, I wish things would open up for us before long, before anything else happens. I wish we could get a break, just one little break.'

And we got one.

Just like that, just as if all you had to do was ask for it in the right kind of thoughts and words.

Donovan called on the transceiver while we were driving back to City Hall. He had just had a report from the county sheriff's unit which Quartermain had earlier asked be posted on Beach Road: they were on their way into Cypress Bay, and they were bringing with them-badly hungover but otherwise alive and well-the driver of an old wood-sided station wagon that had turned up at nine-ten.

The driver's-and the break's-name was Russell Dancer.

Seventeen

Dancer was badly hungover, all right-his hands trembled vaguely and his eyes were crosshatched with blood-red veins and the skin of his face was loose and alternately splotched red and gray-but the intake of too much alcohol was only part of the reason for his sick condition. He had seen what was left of his beach shack, his home, his possessions, perhaps the last of his dreams; and the sight seemed to have unleashed a toxic, destructive combination of bitterness and frustration and self-pity inside him, joining with the hangover symptoms to give him a zombielike appearance as he came slowly, stiffly, through the door of Quartermain's office. He may have been guilty of or responsible for or involved in some of the things that had happened in Cypress Bay this past weekend, or six years ago, but I felt immediate compassion for him just the same; he was still a lonely man, and even though it was nothing I could have put into the right kind of words, I could understand something of the depth of his loss and of his feeling.

He looked at me first, and his mouth twisted into a ghost of his wry smile. 'I thought you were getting out and going back to San Francisco,' he said. His voice was hollow and burned out, the words thickened by the dry