Undercurrent

'That's how it adds up,' Quartermain agreed. 'The same simple equation we had in the beginning.'

'I take it Sarkelian doesn't know who she is.'

'No. He knew Paige was bedding some local female, but he never saw the two of them together and Paige wasn't talking, characteristically. He doesn't know her name, or what she looks like. He also thinks she's the one who killed Paige.'

I drank more coffee, and then asked, 'Did you talk to Robin Lomax? She was waiting for you when I came in at three o'clock.'

His bloodshot eyes turned grave. 'Yeah, I talked to her.'

'What did she have to say?'

'Some confidential information that I shouldn't discuss at all.' He sighed. 'But I think you've got a right to know, as long as it doesn't go any further than this office.'

'You know it won't.'

'All right. She'd been wrestling with her conscience and her pride all day, and she finally made up her mind to tell the real story of her relationship with Paige. Her husband doesn't know she came here today; he wouldn't like it if he did-but he's not going to know about it.'

'Then that story he told us this morning was a lie?'

'Half lie and half truth. Robin had a fight with Jason six years ago and she had too much to drink brooding about it and she let Paige get her alone. Only he didn't try to attack her, and she didn't fight him off.'

'Oh,' I said, 'I see.'

'There's more to it than that,' Quartermain said. His voice contained the kind of sadness a sensitive and moral man feels when he's given knowledge of the dark transgressions of people he's always liked and respected. 'Jason Lomax is sterile; he's been sterile all his life.'

I winced a little, involuntarily, and I thought: So Tommy Lomax is Walter Paige's son. But I did not say it. There was no point in saying it.

Quartermain sighed again. 'That's why they immediately became nervous and frightened when you went to see them yesterday and mentioned Paige and told them you were a private investigator. They've both subconsciously accepted that phony fictional image of a private detective as a potential blackmailer; they thought you'd found out their secret, perhaps from Paige, and had come to shake them down. Then you confused hell out of them by telling them Paige was dead and bringing me into it, and your association with me; and that also gave them a brand-new apprehension: the threat of a scandal as a result of a police investigation. That's why they left in such a hurry last night; they wanted the opportunity to concoct a lie to cover up-expecting me to show up immediately after you left, you see. Lomax convinced Robin this was their only choice, and manufactured the attempted-rape business. I guess I don't blame him, in a way; he was only trying to protect his wife's reputation, and his own. He may be something of a fool, but he's also enough of a man to have married Robin when she told him she was pregnant, and to give the boy his name.'

I agreed with that-thinking: Maybe I was a little hard on him after all; he's got his faults, but haven't we all? And my cop's mind added: But if he's that fiercely loyal to her, and if he hated Paige enough, and if they weren't playing tennis together Saturday afternoon as they claim, wouldn't he perhaps commit murder to maintain both his reputation and his wife's?

Quartermain said, 'From the tone of the questions I asked this morning, Robin was afraid we suspected her or her husband of killing Paige-perhaps even of murdering Brad Winestock, for some unknown reason. And if we uncovered the truth about her relationship with Paige, Jason's lie would look far more incriminating than it was. She decided to tell the truth, no matter how painful it would be, to save later embarrassment and misconceptions.'

'That was the right thing to do,' I said, 'assuming that the confession wasn't a last-ditch effort to cover up. She's got a better motive than ever to have killed Paige, Ned.'

'But not to have slept with him again, remember that.'

'Unless she'd been carrying the torch all these years, in spite of the boy, and gave herself to him as a result, and then something happened to kindle a murderous hatred.'

'Okay,' he admitted reluctantly, 'that's possible. I don't like it, but it is possible. Robin still says that she and Jason were together at the time of Paige's death, but that could easily enough be a lie.'

'I'm not saying she's guilty, Ned; I'm only offering potentialities. It could also be that Paige did seduce Bianca Tarrant-six years ago or just recently-despite what her husband told us this morning; and that she was the one in his bed and who killed him for some reason. Or it could be, if Mrs. Tarrant is the woman, that her husband killed Paige in a jealous rage-the same way Jason Lomax could have done it if his wife were the woman. And it could even be that the woman is Beverly Winestock; that she was Paige's mistress previously and they resumed their affair after his return-or, more likely, that she went to him specifically to talk him out of whatever he was planning with her brother, maybe knowing about that Seaside burglary Paige talked Winestock into, and used her body for bargaining power. If so, and knowing the kind of son of a bitch Paige was, he could have used her and then laughed at her and tried to throw her out-and in blind rage, she stabbed him,'

'All sound, logical possibilities,' Quartermain said. 'But if one is fact, how do we find it out? And there's another potential that I don't even want to think about: that the woman, the murderer or murderers, is or are totally divorced from anything that's happened in the past couple of days; one person, or two, who haven't entered into it at all thus far.'

'Yeah,' I said, 'but somehow I don't think so. Paige's woman is Bianca Tarrant or Robin Lomax or Beverly Winestock; I've got a feeling about that, a hunch that-'

I stopped talking and frowned and put my coffee cup down. The evanescent thought, the certainly important scrap of dialogue that someone had spoken recently, began to tease my conscious mind again, searching for admittance. I concentrated on the thought and groped for it and caught it this time and held on, pulling it free and shaping it into coherence. And I had it. The hair on the back of my neck prickled and I had it.

I sat up straight in the chair. 'How did he know?' I said aloud. 'How did he know?'

Quartermain looked at me oddly. 'What?'

'When you were talking to him earlier today, he said something about the woman Paige had in his bed just before he was killed. How did he know Paige had a woman in his bed Saturday afternoon-in his goddamn bed? I didn't think anything about it then because we were so damned tensed up, but I didn't tell him and you didn't tell him and you didn't release that information to the news media. How did he know?'

'Who the hell are you talking about?'

'Keith Tarrant,' I said. 'I'm talking about Keith Tarrant.'

Twenty One

Braced at the edge of the ravine, silhouetted against a deep purple-black dusk, the dark house appeared to have an aura of malevolence about it as we approached on Del Lobos Canyon Road-as if it were a crouching animal ready to leap across the gap to escape our impending arrival. All of that was foolish illusion, of course, a product of my tired mind and my depressive mood, but the sudden chill on the back of my neck was nonetheless very real.

We came to the unpaved connecting drive, and went down there under the shade of the walnut trees. There were no visible lights in any of the house's three tiers, but as we neared the two-car port I could see both the cream-colored Chrysler and the sleek blue Lotus parked inside. Quartermain braked to a stop at a diagonal that effectively blocked both cars, and we got out and moved around one of the dwarf cypress to the front door.

It was very quiet there, except for the soft lament of the wind and the rustle of leaves as it played through the branches of the walnut trees. The house itself was absolutely still. Quartermain pressed an inlaid pearl doorbell and there was the faint ringing of bell chimes within. But no one opened the door-then, or when he rang a second time.

The chill remained on my neck, and I tasted brassiness when I washed saliva through my dry mouth. I looked at Quartermain. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know. I don't like it. The cars are here; they've got to be here, too.'

'Unless they went out with somebody else. To a party, or to some kind of meeting.'