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 gotten thrown out; my ex-wife was a great one for throwing things out."
"Goddamn it, can't you remember any of the book? At least what type of crime, besides murder, it dealt with?"
"I'm lucky I can remember my name this morning."
I said, "The lead's name was Johnny Sunderland-a Korean War vet with a game leg. He came home to San Francisco and got mixed up with a couple of women, one of them named… Dina, I think. There were some hoods involved and two hundred thousand dollars. Sunderland and this Dina pulled some kind of double-cross, apparently, and tried to run off with the money."
"That sounds like the plot of half the crappy crime books I did in the fifties. Look, I used to crank those things out in a week or two, first draft with minor revisions. I put titles on them, but the publishers always changed the titles; half the time they edited the stuff and changed character names, too. The gimpy Korean vet sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't place him in any kind of situation. I'm sorry as hell-don't you think I want to help you find out what this is all about, who that bald bastard is? — but I just can't remember."
Quartermain got up and began pacing off his frustrated anger, and then stopped moving just as abruptly and said to Dancer, "Have you got any idea where we might get a copy of the book now, this morning?"
"An old paperback like that-no, I don't have any idea."
"You were living in this area when you wrote it, weren't you?"
"I moved out here from New York in 1950."
"Is it possible you gave copies to friends at that time? You did have copies then, didn't you?"
"Christ, I don't know. I always try to get copies of my published stuff, but there were some books the publishers didn't bother sending and I couldn't locate; The Dead and the Dying might have been one of them. If I did have copies, I may have given some away, but nobody except a collector would have kept the damned thing around for twenty years, and I never knew any collectors."
"All right, then," Quartermain said thinly. "Let's forget about the book for the time being and talk about Walter Paige."
"What about Paige?"
"You had trouble with him at one time, didn't you?"
"Trouble-?"
"Words about something, bad feelings, a fight."
Dancer hesitated, and then sighed in a resigned way. "All right, yeah, we had some words once."
"What about?"
"A chick I was seeing at that time. He tried to move in on her one night and I didn't like it. I told him to lay off and he told me to go screw, and it looked for a time as if we might take a few swings at one another. We were both pretty drunk. But it was at the Mount Royal and some of the others in the group broke it up. Keith Tarrant was there, I think. Is he the one who told you about it?"
I said, "Why didn't you mention this yesterday?"
"It didn't amount to anything, and I didn't think it was particularly relevant. Besides, I didn't want to put ideas in your head."
"Who was the girl?" Quartermain asked him.
"Rose Davis."
"Does she still live in this area?"
"No, she moved back east a couple of years ago."
"Where back east?"
"St. Louis. She got married to some guy from there."
"Did Paige leave her alone after that one night?"
"If he didn't, Rose never said anything to me about it."
"Then you didn't have any more trouble with Paige?"
"No."
"Did you ever hear of an alleged attempt by Paige to attack Robin Lomax?"
Dancer frowned. "You mean a rape thing?"
"That's what I mean."
"No, I never heard of anything like that."
"Does it sound like something Paige might have done?"
"Not really. He was glib and smooth and virile as hell; he could talk most broads out of their pants with a little effort, and he was never lacking for pussy as far as I could see. A guy like that doesn't usually blow his cool enough to attempt rape." He frowned again. "Did Robin tell you that Paige tried to attack her?"
"Her husband told us."
"You think they're involved in Paige's death-this business with my book?"
"Anything is possible at this point," Quartermain said. "Did Paige seem to be hot for Robin six years ago?"
"No hotter than he was for every other woman he met. But she was pretty thick with Lomax back then; I doubt if she ever gave Paige a tumble."
"Was she much of a drinker?"
"Yeah, she could put it away."
"Could she hold it?"
"Fair. I've seen her juiced a few times, before she married Lomax and became a Miss Junior League."
"Then she might have gotten drunk enough, if she'd had a fight with Lomax, say, to go out with Paige?"
Dancer shrugged. "I suppose so."
"Lomax used to join your little group once in a while?"
"Robin dragged him along a couple of times. He didn't seem to approve of us-a stuffy bastard."
"How did he get along with Paige?"
"They seemed to tolerate one another."
"No trouble over Robin?"
"Not that I know about."
"When Paige moved away, were either of the Lomaxes still attending your group sessions?"
"Sure, they both were."
"No animosity, no strained feelings toward Paige?"
"If there were, I can't remember them."
"You'd think there would be if Paige had tried to rape her, wouldn't you?" The question was rhetorical; he followed it immediately with: "Tell me something about Brad Winestock."
"Like what?"
"How well did he know Paige six years ago?"
"As well as the rest of us, I guess. Winestock used to join the group with his sister once in a while, just like Lomax used to come with Robin."
"He never seemed thick with Paige?"
"If you mean buddy-buddy, no."
"When was the last time you saw Winestock?"
"A month, two months; he drives a bread truck, and I saw him here in Cypress Bay one morning and we said hello."
"Just that? You didn't talk about anything?"
"The weather, maybe. Why all the interest in Winestock now?"
"He was murdered last night," Quartermain told him flatly.
Dancer blinked a couple of times, absorbing that. Then he said "God" and put the coffee cup down on the desk. "Does Beverly know yet?"
"Yes, she knows."
"Ah Christ! And I thought I had it rough today." His throat worked painfully. "Who did it? The bald man again?"
"Maybe; we can't be sure yet. But Winestock was mixed up with the bald man, and with Walter Paige. He spent part of the afternoon with the guy yesterday, and Paige called him up on the phone a few weeks ago and had at least one meeting with him. His sister thinks they were planning something, some kind of crime, something to do with that book of yours. We came down a little hard on Winestock last night, and then left him sweating; I figured maybe he'd lead us to the bald man. But he slipped the tail I had on him and vanished. A Highway Patrol unit found him out at Spanish-"