Undercurrent

rolling movement of his tongue. 'But here you are, looking like you've been up all night in the bargain.'

'I have been up all night,' I said. 'Some things happened to change my mind about leaving and about becoming involved.'

'So you're no different than the standard fictional private dick, after all. Or maybe you are. I can't decide which.'

Quartermain said, 'Sit down, Dancer. You look like you'd better have some coffee.'

'Unless you've got a little hair of the dog.'

'Just coffee. Black?'

'God, yes.'

Quartermain motioned to the two county patrol cops who had escorted Dancer from Beach Road, and the Cypress Bay uniformed officer who had come in with them through the police entrance at the building's rear. They turned and went out into the anteroom, where the office secretary was back on duty and banging away on his typewriter, and Quartermain and I followed. He shut the door, dismissed the uniform, told the secretary to get a pot of hot black coffee, and then looked at the two county cops.

'Dancer tell you where he's been all night?' he asked.

'Yes, sir, on the way in,' one of them said. 'He claims to have been shacked up with an old girl friend and a bottle, and that his car was parked in her garage all night.'

'Where?'

'Jamesburg.'

'Would he tell you the girl friend's name?'

'Yes, sir. It's Verna Nunnally.'

The other cop said, 'A widow-or so he claimed.'

'What about an address?' Quartermain asked.

'That too: Los Pinos Drive. We radioed over to Jamesburg for a check, and as soon as it's made they'll contact you direct.'

'Good, thanks. Did Dancer have anything else to say?'

'He seemed pretty shaken up by what happened to his place,' the first cop said. 'I don't blame him much; it's a hell of a thing to have to come home to.'

'He wanted to know how it happened,' the second cop said. 'We didn't tell him anything; we didn't know how you wanted it handled.'

Quartermain nodded. 'That's it?'

'Yes, sir, that's about it.'

He thanked them again and told them they could go. The secretary came in with the coffee as they were leaving, and I took the pot from him and we went into the inner office again. Dancer was sitting in one of the armchairs, holding his head in both hands. He brought the hands down as Quartermain went around the desk and I went up to it and poured him some coffee.

'Angel of mercy,' he said dully, and took the cup I handed him. He held it between both palms and stared into it for a time, and then raised it shakily to his lips and drank a little. I sat down and looked at him; Quartermain had a hip cocked against the rear edge of the desk, leaning forward.

He said, 'We've been trying to find you ever since ten o'clock last night. I understand you were in Jamesburg.'

'Yeah. Celebrating the completion of my latest western epic with a piece of tail and some bonded bourbon. Dancer fiddling while his Rome burns. What a lousy fucking thing.'

'What time did you leave your place last night?'

'Eight or a little before, I think. I finished the last page around seven and had a shower and changed my clothes; then I took the manuscript and went up to the Mount Royal Bar.' The bitter, ghostly smile again. 'That's something, at least-the manuscript. I was going to mail it today, so I took it with me. I've still got that much anyway. A whole hell of a lot, all right'

I said, 'You didn't have any personal property insurance?'

'Oh sure, I've got personal property insurance; I'm not stupid enough to live in a place like that without it But there are some things you can't replace with insurance money.'

'Yeah,' I said, and I thought I knew what some of those things were.

Quartermain asked, 'How long were you at the Mount Royal last night?'

'Long enough to have a couple of drinks and decide I was horny and to call Verna over in Jamesburg. That's Verna Nunnally, a friend of my ex-wife's. I take a perverse pleasure in banging friends of my ex-wife's. She was home and I drove over there with a bottle and spent the night and drove back this morning.' He got the coffee cup to his mouth and drank again. 'Listen, what happened? It wasn't any accident, was it? I knew that much when the two county boys said they had instructions to bring me here.'

'No, it wasn't an accident.'

'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