blocked it off for thirty feet to each side and to the rear. The only thing I could do was walk around in front of them on the path, and there was not much percentage in that, since I would not be able to stop anywhere near them without being conspicuous about it.
But I decided to make the walk anyway. If they were talking loudly enough, there was the chance that I could hear some of their conversation. I took off my suit coat and put it over my right shoulder on my thumb and stepped out onto the path. As I approached, sauntering, trying to look like a guy with nature on his mind and nothing else, they were still sitting with their heads close together. I did not look at them as I passed, and they appeared not to notice me. I could hear the mumble of their voices, but that was all; whatever they were discussing, it was strictly for their own ears.
I followed the path some distance away without looking back, and then turned onto the lawn; there was no point in going back the way I had just come. The two of them were still sitting there, still talking. I located an empty bench facing toward them, under a gnarled old oak, and sat down to wait until they decided to break it up. All I could do now was to keep following Paige, and to wait until something definite happened one way or another.
At the end of another ten minutes the balding guy stood up and turned away to the north, the direction from which he had arrived. Paige stayed where he was for a couple of minutes, watching the sea again; then he got to his feet and moved off to the south. I let him get seventy-five yards away, saw that he was paying no attention to his rear flank, and started after him. He took me directly back to the Beachwood.
I waited outside the motel grounds until Paige was inside his cottage. Then I went over to the office, to where they had a soft-drink machine, and bought myself an orange. I drank it there, letting a few minutes go by. Paige did not come out again. Finally I returned to my own cottage, tossed my coat on the bed, and took up my former position in front of the window.
Time passed, and I began to develop the headache once more. Paige appeared once, forty minutes later, to get something out of his car; other than that, nothing stirred in Number 9. The bamboo blinds were drawn across the cottage's front window, but even if they had been up, I could not have seen inside from where I was, and I had not brought a pair of binoculars with me.
Four o'clock. Five. The sun drifted low over the sea, and the sky turned smoky and bloodshot with lines and streaks of pale crimson. A wind came in off the ocean, gathering strength, and tousled the leaves and needles on the trees. It was quiet in the room-too quiet. I began to feel oddly restless. Nerves. Waiting was never any good, and it was worse when you did not know just what you were waiting for. But the waiting I was having to do was nothing compared to the waiting of Judith Paige- and the half-knowledge for her was agony; for me, only a source of irritation.
Five-thirty now, and I was almost out of cigarettes. How much longer? The rest of today, and tomorrow, and part of Monday? Maybe Paige's sole purpose in coming to Cypress Bay was his meeting with the balding guy in the park; maybe that's all there was to it. All rightthen why did he tell Judith he was staying until late Monday afternoon this trip out? And what the hell is he doing over in that cottage? Sleeping? Drinking? Watching the goddamn television?
The rear entrance, I thought. The beach entrance.
Oh Christ, I thought. Some stakeout you are, some smart cop. You sit over here on your fat ass thinking visitors have to come in the front way, or that Paige has to go out the front way, and you can't see the rear entrance or the beach and he could be gone or he could be having a party over there with half of Cypress Bay, and even though you can't watch both entrances at the same time, you should have thought about the beach, you should have been checking it…
I got up on my feet and went over to the door and cracked it like a furtive, neighbor. There was a white- gravel path further down, beyond the office, that led between two of the cottages and onto the private beach. Okay, so let's go out to the beach for a stroll, I thought- and a little voyeurism if you can find a window or a keyhole or a place to put your ear. Play it according to stereotype: the peeper, the snooper. It's that kind of job, isn't it?
I opened the door wide and went out, and the wind was chill on my bare arms; my coat was still inside on the bed. The hell with that too. I started across the grounds toward the gravel path-and all at once the door to Number 9 jerked open, with a sound that was audible above the wind. I managed to keep from breaking stride, but I was looking over there now. The door was still open and it stayed open; Paige did not come out.
I kept on walking, more slowly, and then I stopped because I was almost abreast of the entrance to Number 9 and I could see that there was something in the doorway, something on the floor of the cottage just inside. The wind turned colder. The wind turned very cold.
I had to go over there, and I did it without hesitation. This was something else altogether. I got to the open doorway, and my stomach turned, and the mental image of Judith Paige's sweet pleading face made the sickness in my belly darker and more acute. The waiting was over for all of us now, but for her the agony had only just begun.
If Walter Paige had been an unfaithful husband, he would never be unfaithful again.
And whether or not Judith Paige had been a cuckolded wife, she was now something else entirely: she was a widow.
Four
There was a lot of blood-on Paige, on the floor beneath his body, in a glistening, smeared trail extending half the length of the room. He lay on his back, with one arm outflung toward the door and the other clutched at his upper chest like a bright-red claw. He wore a pair of slacks, nothing more, and his bare, thickly haired chest was soaked and matted with too much blood to make the nature of his wounds easily apparent; but it appeared obvious that he had been stabbed, and more than once.
My stomach kept on turning, but I went inside anyway, avoiding the blood, and got the door closed. The drapes were drawn almost closed across the glass at the rear of the room, and it was dark enough in there to warrant the light burning on the nearer of the two nightstands. I crossed to the drapes and drew them aside and opened the glass door carefully with a handkerchief over my hand.
Outside, there was a kind of patio, enclosed by low cypress hedges; a wood gate opened on a boardwalk leading to the motel's private beach, and the first twenty feet or so of the walk was walled by more of the cypress. I walked out there and tried the latch on the gate; it was unlocked. Beyond, the beach was deserted in both directions, and it had a lonely, hushed look, the way beaches do at sunset; the sand was a reddish-gray in the cold light of the falling sun. The sea seemed restless now, the color of ashes, and there were whitecaps out near the breakwater and white froth on the mouths of the combers as they bit into the sand. The wind was like ice on my face.
I went back inside and closed the sliding door again and looked the room over, the way you do automatically if you've been a cop for enough years. There was a thick puddle of congealing blood over by the desk, and it looked as if Paige had been stabbed there. He had too much blood in his throat to cry out loudly enough for anyone to hear, I thought, and so he dragged himself across the floor, and got the door open, and died. There was no sign of a weapon, and no indications that a struggle of any kind had taken place; Paige had been killed by someone he knew, or possibly someone who had caught him completely by surprise.
The bed was rumpled, top sheets tossed down at the foot, one of the blankets on the floor; it could have meant something, or it could have meant he had been taking a fitful nap. There was a half-empty pint of Jack- Daniel's sour mash and a glass with an inch of dark-amber liquid on the same nightstand with the lamp; the other nightstand held a clean ashtray and the telephone. One of the room's chairs contained Paige's sports jacket and turtleneck sweater; his socks and shoes were on the floor in front of it. Against the wall next to the desk was a luggage rack with the overnight bag open on top. I stepped to the case and looked inside without touching anything. There was not much to see: a change of underwear and socks, a second and sealed pint of Daniel's, a clean shirt in a laundry wrapping, and a paperback mystery novel.
The paperback held my attention momentarily. It was torn and dog-eared, with a gaudy cover depicting a half-nude redhead and a guy with a. 45 automatic; the red-head's hair-do, and the guy's clothes, and the cover price of twenty-five cents made it obvious that the book was a product of the early fifties. The title was The Dead
