"Robin Tolliver is one. She married an artichoke heir named Jason Lomax, not long after Paige left. They've got an estate on Cypress Point. Robin was never any dummy."
I wrote the names on the note pad I carry.
Dancer said, "The other girl is Bev Winestock. I saw her a few weeks ago. She's still single and still a looker, and still living with her brother in an old place in the town proper. The brother, Brad, used to join the group once in a while."
"Were there any other regulars-people who might have known Paige fairly well?"
"A guy named Ben Simms, but he was killed in a boating accident about five years ago. And Rose Davis got married and moved east maybe three years back. Keith Tarrant is still around, though. He's Cypress Bay's largest realtor now, and owns a sweet pad over in Carmel Valley. When I knew him, he was still struggling for a toehold. The demand for land in this area, and some smart maneuvering on Tarrant's part, put him where he is today. His wife, Bianca, used to come with him sometimes, too. That's about all, except for occasionals, and I can't remember any of them offhand. I've got a lousy memory, anyway."
I wrote the Winestocks and the Tarrants into my notebook. Dancer said then, "Listen, how do you fit in with Paige and his murder?"
"He married a young girl from Idaho in San Francisco a few months ago," I said. "Then he started leaving her alone on weekends, and she figured he'd found another woman. She hired me to follow him. I tailed him down to Cypress Bay yesterday and camped in a cottage across from his at the Beachwood motel. But this woman he had-and the killer, if it wasn't the woman-came in through the rear entrance. I found the body a little later."
"Pleasant little story."
"Isn't it."
"But it doesn't surprise me much. So you're working with the local cops then?"
"Not exactly."
"Lone-wolfing for the wife?"
"Not that either," I told him. "I just had a hunch about The Dead and the Dying, and I decided to follow it through. Chief Quartermain is handling the investigation, and I'll turn what you've told me over to him."
"Sure," Dancer said. "You know, Paige having one of my books is going to bug hell out of me. I can figure most of the story, from what I knew of him, but I can't figure the book. You really think it ties in somehow?"
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"Well, if you find out, give me the word, would you?"
"I'll tell Quartermain to give you the word. I'll be going back to San Francisco with Mrs. Paige-probably tonight."
"She's a nice kid, this Mrs. Paige?"
"Yeah," I said. "She's a nice kid."
"And you're not going to follow through?"
"It's out of my hands and out of my league."
"Well, you live and learn," Dancer said. "This is my day to learn about private dicks."
I finished my beer and thanked him for his help, and we went out to the front walk. We shook hands there, and he said, "If you're ever in this area again, drop in and say hello. We could break a couple of six-packs and talk about the pulps. I knew quite a few pulp editors and writers in New York in the forties."
There was a kind of wistfulness in his voice, a nebulous request, of which Dancer himself might not have been consciously aware. You knew Rex Hannigan, his eyes said to me, you liked him, you remembered-and even though the plots and the characters and the words themselves were mere echoes now, all but forgotten by Russell Dancer and by the world at large, there was somebody who remembered and somebody who cared, and that was somehow very important. Deep down where a man lives, he did not want to lose his newly discovered, and perhaps final, touch with the old dream.
I said, "I'll do that," and I meant the words sincerely.
Eight
I drove back into Cypress Bay, parked in the lot next to the City Hall, and went around to the police-station wing. The fat sergeant told me Quartermain had gone to Salinas, the county seat, and that Lieutenant Favor had gone with him; no, he had no idea when they would be back, did I want to leave a message?
Without thinking about it, I said, "No, I’ll stop by later," and walked slowly back to my car. I sat there in the cool shade and brooded a little. Well, I could have given it to the sergeant; but it was somewhat involved and Quartermain was the Chief and handling the case personally, and he was the kind of guy I could tell it to in my own way. There was that-and there was Judith Paige, and the quiet tranquility of Cypress Bay that became almost oppressive after a while, and the restlessness which seemed to be steadily growing inside me. If you've been a cop in one form or another for most of your life, and if you've worked at it and cared for it and been pretty good at it, it bothers you to have to back out of something when there are things to be done, avenues to be explored. It was a little like being a good, well-trained bird dog; once you had the scent, you were not satisfied until you were plowing along the trail and trying to flush something out of the underbrush.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke through the open window and watched it float languidly like an ephemeral mist through the sunlight and the shadows. "It's out of my hands and out of my league," I had told Russ Dancer, but that was not quite true and I knew it was not quite true, and I kept on sitting there, restlessly, trying to make up my mind. But it was not really much of a struggle. When you're overstepping just a little, the rationalizations come easy; and since you know you're going to do it, and have known it from the moment you found out Quartermain was in Salinas, it only takes a couple of mental nudges to get you to admit it.
So I started the car and drove two blocks to a stone-and-redwood complex that did not look much like a service station, in keeping with the edicts of the Cypress Bay Chamber of Commerce. I parked under a sloping awning that did not quite conceal the row of gasoline pumps, told the attendant to fill up the tank, and went over to the telephone booth. I looked up the addresses for Jason Lomax, Brad and Beverly Winestock, and Keith Tarrant, and wrote them down on my note pad. Then I came back and paid the attendant and looked over the street map. The closest of the three seemed to be the Winestocks, on a street called Bonificacio Drive that was about ten blocks distant.
I went over there, and the house was a two-story Spanish adobe set back some distance from the street, on higher ground. You got up to it by way of twenty-five or thirty slab-stone steps grown with rock cress; at their top was a short arbor covered by reddish bougainvillea. It was cool and quiet on the narrow porch formed by a wood-railed gallery at the second-floor level-and I thought for no particular reason of Old Monterey, Old California, and what it must have been like to have lived in the days of the Bear Flag and the sprawling ranchos. Dull and simple, maybe-but the air and the land and the sea were clean then, and there were no great external pressures, and you could take your time about living. I tugged at the hand-woven bell pull located to one side of the front door, and listened to a dull, distant ringing within, like a melancholy elegy for the long-dead past.
Pretty soon the door opened and a woman in her early thirties looked out at me. She had a kind of misty beauty, enhanced by moist dark eyes and a pensive mouth and long brown-black hair parted in the middle and swept over her shoulders and down her back, like a dusky tapestry woven of very fine thread and fringed across the bottom. When you looked at her long enough, you had the feeling that she was somehow two-dimensional-an image that could and would vanish wraithlike whenever she chose. But it could have been the shaded porch and the dark shadows behind her, inside the house, that conveyed the impression, or it could have been my mood. She was heavy-breasted and flare-hipped in dark-green cotton slacks and a lime-green shirt, and I found myself thinking-the way a man does sometimes, with this kind of woman-that she would be pure sweet hell in bed.