Bill Pronzini - Undercurrent

Quartermain said, "Well?"

"Oh Christ, all right. I've noticed."

"Can you explain why?"

"I think I can." Tarrant stopped as we passed under the rear arch into another work-littered chamber, and looked pointedly at Dancer. "Will you hold what I say in confidence, Russ?"

"I do enough tale-telling on paper," Dancer said.

Tarrant took a long breath as we began moving again, toward a short hallway at the far end of the chamber. "Six years ago," he said, "Bianca was… attracted to Paige. Just one of those things that happen: a powerful physical attraction. I saw it almost immediately, and instead of trying to delude myself that there was nothing to it, I confronted her with it. She tried to deny it, but I managed to get the truth out of her; Paige wasn't averse to dating other men's wives, God knows, and she had let him talk her into a meeting. I told her that if she wanted to keep that date, if she wanted Paige that much, I wouldn't stand in her way. She could have him if he was what she really wanted, but she had better make up her mind right away. If she chose to sacrifice our marriage for a love affair that couldn't possibly last, all right, but she would have to make a quick, clean break with me. I wouldn't stand for an affair."

Quartermain said, "And she chose you-your marriage."

"That's right. Putting it all on the line was the wisest thing I could have done; otherwise she would probably have let him seduce her on that date she'd made."

"You're certain nothing like that happened between them?"

"Yes, I'm certain. I watched her carefully after she'd made her announced choice. She was faithful to me and to her word; I would have known if she wasn't."

"She said she thought you and Paige were friends; she was surprised when we told her about Paige's phone call five weeks ago, and why you turned him down on the store rental. Why would she think you were friendly after what happened-or almost happened?"

"If I had shown hatred or animosity toward Paige, made an issue of my real feelings toward the man, it might well have driven her away from me-or at least have established a wall between us. But by pretending I was still friendly to Paige, that I bore no grudges, I maintained the status quo in our relationship and there were no difficulties. Then Paige left Cypress Bay and I thought he'd gone for good. When he called me about the vacant newsstand, I naturally refused him and I naturally did not tell Bianca about his presence in this area again. You can understand that."

"Uh-huh. But six years is a lot of water under the bridge. If she hadn't seen him in that length of time, why is she so upset over his death?"

We were in the hallway now, and Tarrant stopped before a heavy door set into the right-hand wall. He unlocked it with a second key, pushed it open, and reached along the wall inside to click a toggle switch. Pale light cut through the blackness to reveal a set of railed wooden steps leading downward. He began to descend, speaking over his shoulder. "Bianca is an emotional woman, Chief. Even though she realized six years ago and knows now that an affair with Paige would have been the gravest mistake of her life, I think she still feels or felt a certain something for him. I hate to admit that, but it seems to be a fact. And when she learned he was dead and dead so violently here in Cypress Bay, she was understandably upset by it. I suppose if you were throwing questions at her like you've been throwing them at me, she became flustered and began acting guilty of something or other. That's simply the way she is."

We reached the bottom of the steps. The basement was stuffy and smelled of dust and dry rot, as all basements in temperate climates seem to. Huge and low-ceilinged, it was jammed with boxes and crates and paper-wrapped pictures in frames and rolled canvases and cloth-covered sculptures and miscellaneous pottery and two very old typewriters which had probably belonged to some local early-century writer.

Tarrant took us off to the right and indicated a great conglomerate of items, most of them cardboard and wooden boxes of various sizes, stacked apart from the rest of the accumulation of art and memorabilia. "That's the Anita Hartman donation," he said. "We haven't had the chance to do any cataloguing of it as yet; we've barely begun cataloguing anything, as a matter of fact."

"Okay," Quartermain said. "We'll take over from here."

"No more questions?"

"For now, no."

"For now," Tarrant said. "I suppose that means you'll be around to see Bianca and me again."

"I don't know, Keith. I hope not."

"So do I. Good luck with your hunting-here and elsewhere." He turned brusquely and left the three of us standing there and went up the steps and was gone.

Looking sourly at the conglomerate, Dancer said, "Where the hell do we start? The stuff I gave the old lady could be any place in this mess."

"One of us on each end of the pile and one in the middle," Quartermain told him. "Let's get busy."

We got busy. We moved sculptures and paintings out of the way and went to work on the crates and boxes. None of us said anything; further talk would have been a waste of time. Punctuated only by the rustle of papers and cardboard and the scrape of wood, the silence was grim and tense. The stuffiness became oppressive, and sweat poured freely down my cheeks and into the soiled collar of my shirt; I could smell the sour, unhygienic odor of it on my body. The fine dust we continually stirred up aggravated my lungs and created a dry cough that combined with Quartermain's labored, almost asthmatic breathing and Dancer's occasional sick belches to form a kind of consumptive symphony.

Twenty unproductive minutes had gone by, and we had sifted through maybe two-thirds of the Anita Hartman collection, when Dancer pulled out a heavy cardboard box and opened it and said thickly, "This is it-one of them."

Quartermain and I moved quickly to his side, and Dancer was down on his knees pulling papers out of the box. "I think I gave her two cartons," he said. "I hope to God it's in this one. I hope to God it's in one of them."

Near the bottom he uncovered several rubber-band-bound book manuscript carbons, rumpled and yellow with age. He shuffled through the pages of four and discarded them while we watched sweating, then he began to go through a fifth with the title You Can't Run Away from Murder centered on the facing page, and after a moment he stopped shuffling the pages and turned his face up to me. "What did you say the lead's name was?"

"Johnny Sunderland."

The beginnings of a savage smile touched his mouth. "This is it, then. The publishers changed the title, the way they used to do. But Johnny Sunderland-this is it, all right."

The rubber banding crumbled as he pulled it off and began to scan the manuscript pages, his lips moving silently as he read the words and sought to refamiliarize himself with the book. Quartermain and I said nothing, waiting grimly, knowing that the answer was in there and that we would have it in a matter of minutes, dreading the knowledge just a little because of the kind of thing it surely had to be.

And it was that kind of thing, all right. Dancer's memory yielded the book’s plot after two chapters, and he was able to pinpoint then the exact location of what we were looking for.

A bank robbery.

Just as simple as that: a bank robbery.

We spent three or four additional minutes urgently talking it over, making certain; then we got out of the basement and out of the schoolhouse in search of the nearest telephone-running all the way.

Two-ten P.M.

I was sitting in a place called the Old Bavarian Inn, a combination cafe and German-style beer hall located directly across Balboa Street from the vacant newsstand Walter Paige had tried to rent in Cypress Bay. I had been there for close to an hour, in one of the high-backed wooden booths next to the curtained front window-burning my lungs with too many cigarettes and tightening my nerves dangerously with too much coffee and no food at all; watching the dark and cobblestoned little alley that bisected the block next to the newsstand, waiting for something to happen, wondering if something would happen or if the balding guy had abandoned the thing at the last minute because of the heavy risk factor.