Bill Pronzini - Undercurrent

"It's okay, Ned, thanks,"

"Did you get much sleep?"

"I don't know, what time is it?"

"Quarter of seven."

"Christ, that late? I guess about three hours, but it feels more like three minutes."

I put my head in my hands and tried to gather enough strength to get up on my feet. My mouth felt cottony, and my head and throat kept on hurting. I took several thick breaths and heaved up and moved shakily over to the desk and sat down again in one of the armchairs. I was fully awake now, and I remembered the evanescent thought I had been trying to grasp just before falling asleep; but the thought itself seemed to be gone for the time being, vanished into my subconscious.

Quartermain walked around behind the desk and sank into his chair. His long face was so deeply lined that the creases looked like knife cuts, and his eyes seemed to be bleeding. I said, "You've got to get some sleep yourself pretty soon. You look dead on your tail, Ned."

"Don't I know it?" He poured coffee for both of us and slid one of the cups over to me. "But Christ knows when I'll get to bed now, or when any of us will."

"Problems?"

"Yeah. Paige's death. The bald guy-his name is Sarkelian, Edward Sarkelian-claims he didn't have anything to do with the stabbing of Paige. The other two, Androvitch and Collins, claim the same thing."

"They couldn't be lying?"

"No reason for them to lie, not now. We've got them cold on the Winestock killing. One of the guns stuffed into the valise with the bank's money was the murder weapon; a ballistics check proved that. Androvitch, the tall one that waited in the newsstand, says it's Sarkelian's gun. He also says Sarkelian shot Winestock; he's trying to cop a plea."

"What does Sarkelian say?"

"He admitted it. In the face of the evidence, the public defender we got for them advised him to tell it straight, and he told it. I think you and I both figured him for a sharpie, but he's not smart at all-a strong-arm body, a three-time loser, and all for armed robbery. He knows he's going back for life anyway, with this fall, and the way things are in California these days, he knows the odds are good he'll never be executed for murder even if he's given the death sentence in court. But he flatly denies killing Paige. He says he had no motive, and the other two back him up."

I began to think about all the undercurrents that had manifested themselves in the past two days, and the kind of man Paige had been, and I was not surprised that it had turned out this way. I said, "So it's two separate murders, two separate cases."

"Some irony, isn't it? Paige's death led us to the book and the book led us to the robbery, but that's as far as it goes. The damned book didn't have anything to do with the murder of Paige, after all."

I drank a little coffee and took a bite out of a sandwich and managed to force it down. Hunger pangs instantly began to form under my breastbone. I ate more of the sandwich, mincingly. "What else did you get out of Sarkelian and the other two? Was Paige the mastermind behind the robbery?"

Quartermain nodded. "It's pretty much the way we figured. Paige met Sarkelian in San Quentin, and they struck up an acquaintance; Sarkelian was serving a ten-year stretch for a San Diego holdup. They talked about working a job together when they were on the outside again, since they were due to be released at about the same time, Sarkelian three months before Paige-some pair of incorrigibles, all right. But they didn't have anything definite in mind. It was only after Paige got out, and his parole officer found him a job in San Francisco, that Dancer's book came into it.

"According to what Sarkelian says, Paige was living in a hotel near the Tenderloin and the clerk there had a box of old paperback books that he kept around for the tenants. Paige happened to notice one of the tenants reading The Dead and the Dying, and recognized Dancer's name, and got hold of the book for the hell of it He wasn't much of a reader, as his wife confirmed, but he read the thing anyway-fate, maybe, sowing the seeds of his own destruction.

"Anyway, the robbery blueprint intrigued him enough to keep the book around, but not enough for him to do anything about it at that time; he was looking for something better, something less complicated. Meanwhile, he met Judith and talked her into marrying him when he couldn't get at her any other way and moved to Glen Park. When nothing else came up, he began thinking again about the robbery Dancer had outlined and finally got in touch with Sarkelian; the two of them met and talked it over and decided it was worth looking into. So Paige contacted Brad Winestock."

"Why Winestock?" I asked.

"The two of them knew one another a hell of a lot better six years ago than Winestock's sister or anyone else thought. Paige talked Winestock at that time into helping him pull off a three or four-thousand dollar burglary in Seaside, and then kept most of the money for himself. It was the only job the two of them did together; Paige's leaving of Cypress Bay, for what he thought were greener pastures down south, took place just afterward."

"Paige had a way with everybody, didn't he?" I said sourly, and tried not to think of Beverly Winestock.

"Some sweet son of a bitch, all right," Quartermain said. "Well, he talked Winestock into checking out the local banks as unobtrusively as possible; when Winestock reported on the National Exchange Bank, it began to look pretty good to Paige. The fact that there were no vacant stores bordering on through alleys in the vicinity stopped them for a time, but Winestock did some more checking and found out about the old guy who ran the newsstand and how shaky things were for him. Acting on Paige's orders, he broke into the place on two separate occasions and vandalized it; inside two months the old guy was out of business."

"And Paige was in business."

"Yeah. He came down to Cypress Bay himself and contacted Keith Tarrant about renting the newsstand; he might have been smarter to keep his name out of it entirely, but he didn't and Tarrant turned him down. It didn't matter much; Paige got Androvitch to pose as an L.A. businessman and two days later Tarrant rented Androvitch the newsstand. All they needed then was a time when the bank would be at its heaviest with cash, and they settled on today.

"The holdup was to work exactly as Dancer had outlined it in the book, except that they figured to use Winestock as a safety valve; he was to be waiting in a car at the Pine Street mouth of the alley, in case anything went wrong, and for that and for the other errands he'd done he was in for a full fifth. Paige would be the one to wait in the newsstand for the drop. Collins, who was once an electrician's apprentice, would handle the alarm system; and Sarkelian and Androvitch would supply the muscle. That's the way they planned it and that's the way it would have come off if Paige hadn't gotten himself killed on Saturday."

"The others must have been in a hell of a sweat when they learned of the stabbing," I said.

"They were. They couldn't figure why Paige had been killed or who had killed him; there had been no trouble among themselves, so they knew none of them had done it. And when Paige and Sarkelian met where you saw them in the park, to discuss final preparations and a time schedule, Paige didn't seem to be worried about anything. Sarkelian and the others talked it over and decided it was tough for Paige, but a four-way split was fatter than a five-way split and they didn't see any reason for not going through with the holdup as planned."

"And then I began asking questions about The Dead and the Dying, and about Sarkelian."

"Uh-huh. Beverly Winestock told her brother about your visit to her yesterday, and he told Sarkelian, and the cheese really began to get binding. If you or I read that book, the whole thing was blown. But they knew we hadn't read it yet; you wouldn't have been asking the questions you were asking. And when you and I went to see Winestock last night, they knew we still hadn't read it or we wouldn't have still been fishing; but they also knew, from Winestock's phone call to Sarkelian after we left, that we were dangerously close to the truth. Sarkelian ordered Winestock to meet him later at his motel in Monterey, and then went to the Beachwood-he knew you were staying there from the radio reports-on the gamble you'd have the book in your cottage rather than on your person, or that you hadn't already given it back to me. He won that hand, even though it set him up to lose the gamble. Then he drove down to Dancer's, threw Paige's copy of the book into the sea, and set fire to the shack after picking the porch-door lock. If Dancer had been there, he would have died in the blaze, all right."