"How long will you want Mrs. Paige and me to remain in Cypress Bay?"
"Today at least, in case anything comes up. You can both leave tonight if nothing does-and if we need that drawing of the bald guy, you can work with one of the artists on the San Francisco force."
I nodded. "Can I ask a small favor, then?"
"I guess that would depend on the favor."
"I'd like to have the book."
"Now?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't really know," I said. "Maybe because I happen to collect pulp magazines, and this Russell Dancer is an old pulp writer-or maybe because I can't quite put it out of my mind."
"Pulp magazines," Quartermain said. "I used to read those when I was a kid."
"So did I. But I never got over them. In a way, they were the reason I became a cop."
"Well, I guess everybody has to have a hobby." He smiled faintly. "I don't see any reason why you can't have the book. Mrs. Paige isn't going to want it."
"No," I said.
"But you'll keep it available, just in case?"
I said I would, and Quartermain inclined his head and got up on his feet. He was some big guy, all right. He came around his desk, said, "I'll have to go down to the property room," banged my shoulder in a friendly way, and shambled out.
I sat there in the silence, smoking and waiting and trying to control the irrational rage I was building up toward a dead man I had scarcely known at all. So he was a son of a bitch, so he was an ex-con, the world is full of both kinds and both combinations, you can't change the goddamn world. But even though I kept telling myself that, cynically, it was plain fact that Judith Paige had stirred my paternal embers, and I could not get her and this whole affair out of my system. It would take a while, and then there would be ghosts-the way there were ghosts of Erika and Cheryl and some others too…
Quartermain came back with the copy of The Dead and the Dying, and I glanced at it briefly and put it into the pocket of my suit coat. He said, "I'll give you a call at the motel when it's all right for you and Mrs. Paige to return to San Francisco, or if I need you again. In either case, you should hear from me late this afternoon sometime."
"Okay," I said. "Thanks, Chief."
We clasped hands again and I went over to the door. I had just gotten it open when Quartermain said, "What do you think she'll do now? After this thing is finished, I mean?"
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe she'll go back to Idaho."
"That would be the best thing for her."
"I think so, too. San Francisco is a nice city but it's no place for little girls from Idaho."
"Look, why don't you keep an eye on her for a while- until she goes home? She could use a friend."
"I was planning on it." I looked at him soberly. "You sound as if she made an impression on you, too."
"Yeah," he said in a grave voice. "Yeah, I guess she did."
When I got back to my cottage at the Beachwood, I looked at the four walls briefly and then went out into the private rear garden and sat on one of the wooden picnic chairs they had there, in the shade of a
cone-heavy Bishop pine. I took the copy of The Dead and the Dying out of my coat pocket and turned it over and read the back-cover blurb. It went this way: A LITTLE PEACE AND QUIET…
Johnny Sunderland came home to California from the bloody battlefields of Korea with a game leg and a bellyful of war. All he wanted was a little peace and quiet. What he got was a fast trip to a hell that made Korea look like a Sunday School picnic!
First he met Nora, who drank too much and played too hard-and died too easy. Then there were Bernie and Alf, a couple of little men with big. 45s. Next came Therm, who would do anything for the likes of two hundred grand-including the murder of his wife.
Then Ritter, the sadistic cop who had more on his mind than his job; Hallinan, the horseplayer who lost his one big bet, his nerve, and his life all in one day; and finally, there was Dina, the flaming redhead whose arms promised unlimited passion-or sudden death!
Before he had been home two days, Johnny Sunderland was plunged into a nightmare of murder, treachery, and big-time crime. The
Object of a massive manhunt conducted by the police on one side and several desperate men on the other, Johnny ran and ran hard.
But it wasn't long before he found out that the road he thought would take him to freedom was nothing more than a dead end; and that he was running on a treadmill to oblivion…
Pretty lurid stuff; I wondered about the book itself. I opened it up and looked at the inside blurb, which is usually a short cut of narrative from the novel. The heading there read: DRESSED FIT TO KILL, and the first line was: She came into his room wearing nothing but the smell of her perfume and a. 45 automatic. Well. I turned the page, saw that the copyright date was 1954, and turned another page to
Chapter One.
I read the first five pages and put the book down. None of the fast, wacky flair which had characterized Russell Dancer's pulp stuff in Dime Detective, Detective Tales, Black Mask, Argosy, and the others; he had had this series character, a private eye named Rex Hannigan, and I had found a lot of redeeming features and a kind of cockeyed charm in Hannigan. Johnny Sunderland was pretty much of a wise-cracking ass, war hero and game leg notwithstanding. But there was one thing about the book, and that was its setting; the cover blurb had mentioned only California, but San Francisco was the stated locale.
I remembered then that all of the early Hannigan stories had been set in New York City, but that around 1950 Dancer had moved him out to San Francisco and environs. I thought about that, and I wondered if the reason for the move was because Dancer himself had come west. Then I began to wonder if Dancer had lived in San Francisco, since he had set the later pulp stories and this novel there; and then I began to wonder where Dancer was now, if he was still around and still writing, and if so, where he was.
An idea got itself into my head and kept working away in there. Suppose Russell Dancer-assuming the name was not pseudonymous-lived not in San Francisco but in Cypress Bay or somewhere else on the Monterey Peninsula? Suppose Paige had had the book because, somehow, he knew Dancer? It was a long shot in several different ways, and even if it were possible, it did not have to mean anything in terms of Paige's murder; but it was a nagging little idea, the kind that keeps after you until you do something about it one way or another.
So I got up and went inside and found a telephone directory for the Monterey Peninsula, in the bottom of the nightstand which contained the phone. I opened it up to the D section and ran my finger down the page, and there was a listing for an R. Dancer, on Beach Road, County. That put the idea to work a little harder inside my head. I picked up the phone and dialed the listed number, and after three rings a recorded voice came on and told me the number had been disconnected.
I frowned and closed the directory and looked at the copy of The Dead and the Dying. Then I got up and walked around the room for a while. R. Dancer, I thought, Beach Road, County. Well, all right-you haven't got anything else to do today, and if you sit around here you'll do nothing but think about Judith Paige up in that dark room, grieving, and there's nothing in that, you know there's nothing in that. But there may be something in this R. Dancer, if he is the writer; and if he is, and there isn't any connection with Paige, you can still talk pulps with him; you've always wanted to meet a pulp writer, haven't you? Go on, get out of here.
I got out of there.
Seven
The coastline south of Cypress Bay was scalloped with jagged cliffs and jutting promontories and deep canyons-the most beautiful coastline in the state, and perhaps on the entire Pacific shore. Monterey cypress trees, native only to this area, their branches and dark-green foliage shaped by the sea winds into grotesquely appealing forms, stood like old, old watchmen atop the bare erosions of rock. The blue-green sea, calm and sunstreaked to the horizon, found a restless energy approaching land and flung itself against the cliffs in a churning froth of foam and spray, as if it harbored a kind of deep-seated resentment for the impassive solidarity of its boundaries. Fat brown pelicans and oyster catchers and pigeon guillemots dotted the headlands and rock islands, and there were glimpses of low-tide beaches teeming with sponges, anemones, crabs, starfish, sea urchins, and beds of golden kelp. It was everything you could want in the way of scenic splendor-or it would have been if there were no oil slicks and garbage dumps and beer cans and toilet paper and cardboard boxes and condoms and litter bags; if humanity had not spread the diseased wastes of its "civilization" like a plague over the land…