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 and the Dying, and the author was Russell Dancer. I had never heard of the novel, but the writer's name was familiar. Russell Dancer had been a prolific pulp creator of detective and adventure fiction through the forties and very early fifties, until the complete collapse of the pulp market, and his name was prominently featured on at least a hundred covers among the five thousand pulp magazines which comprised my own collection. But it seemed odd that Paige would have a book like that with the newsstands filled with more modern paperbacks- unless he had been an aficionado of Dancer's work or the field in general…
I turned away from the bag. The odor of blood was thickly brackish in there, and my head ached malignantly. I went to the door and outside without looking at Paige again, and made certain the door was unlocked before I shut it. Then I crossed to the motel office.
Orchard was sitting behind the counter, reading the Monterey newspaper. He looked up at me, started to smile, and changed it to a frown when he saw my face. He stood up. "Is something the matter, sir?"
"Yeah," I said. "You'd better call the police, Mr. Orchard."
His eyelids worked up and down like intricately veined fans. "The police?"
"There's been a killing in one of your cottages."
"Killing? Killing?"
"In Number nine," I said. "Walter Paige."
All the color drained out of Orchard's cheeks, and his parted, too-red lips were like an open wound against the sudden marmoreal cast of his face. "Are you sure? A killing- here? My God!"
"You can go out and have a look yourself, if you want."
"Oh no, no, I… believe you. It's just that… Mr. Paige, you say?"
"That's right."
"What happened? How did-?"
"Somebody stabbed him."
"Stabbed… him…" His eyes widened, and he shrank away from me with his hands fluttering in front of him like restless white doves. "You… it wasn't…"
"No," I said, "it wasn't. Listen, will you call the police or do you want me to do it?"
"No," Orchard said, "no, it's my responsibility, I’ll call them.." The doves came together and mated fretfully, and he turned away and got himself through the doorway into his private office. "A killing… we've never had… the Beachwood is a respectable family motel… oh God, oh my God!"
I went around the counter and watched him at a polished mahogany desk, fumbling with the telephone. It took him thirty seconds to dial seven digits, and a full minute to get two sentences' worth of facts reported thickly into the receiver; but he got the story straight enough, remembering my name and using it freely. When he had finished the call, he put the handset down and began mopping at his face with a yard of silk handkerchief.
I said from the doorway, "How long will it take them to get here?"
"Five minutes, or ten, I don't know."
"We'd better go outside and wait for them."
"Yes. Yes, all right."
We went out, and it was almost dusk. Three-quarters of the sun had fallen beyond the gray rim of the sea; what little light remained had a blood-red tinge. Orchard looked up at the darkening sky and went back inside and turned on the night lighting for the motel groundscarriage-style lamps on high ivy-covered poles. The white gravel on the drive seemed luminescent under their glare.
When Orchard came out again, he paced back and forth in front of the office, worrying his hands. Cottage Number 9 seemed to have a magnetic pull on his eyes. I sat on the topmost of the three steps that led up to the office entrance, and smoked my last cigarette.
I said to him, "Is this the first time Paige has stayed here? Or have you seen him before?"
"What? Oh-no, he's been quite a regular weekend guest."
"For how long?"
"For the past month or so."
"Do you know what business he had in Cypress Bay?"
"Of course not. How would I know?"
"I thought he might have mentioned something to you."
"No, he didn't. No."
"Did he have any visitors that you know about?"
"I really don't recall."
"Did you ever see him with a woman?"
"Here? At the Beachwood?"