Bill Pronzini - Undercurrent

I stopped talking and frowned and put my coffee cup down. The evanescent thought, the certainly important scrap of dialogue that someone had spoken recently, began to tease my conscious mind again, searching for admittance. I concentrated on the thought and groped for it and caught it this time and held on, pulling it free and shaping it into coherence. And I had it. The hair on the back of my neck prickled and I had it.

I sat up straight in the chair. "How did he know?" I said aloud. "How did he know?"

Quartermain looked at me oddly. "What?"

"When you were talking to him earlier today, he said something about the woman Paige had in his bed just before he was killed. How did he know Paige had a woman in his bed Saturday afternoon-in his goddamn bed? I didn't think anything about it then because we were so damned tensed up, but I didn't tell him and you didn't tell him and you didn't release that information to the news media. How did he know?"

"Who the hell are you talking about?"

"Keith Tarrant," I said. "I'm talking about Keith Tarrant."

Braced at the edge of the ravine, silhouetted against a deep purple-black dusk, the dark house appeared to have an aura of malevolence about it as we approached on Del Lobos Canyon Road-as if it were a crouching animal ready to leap across the gap to escape our impending arrival. All of that was foolish illusion, of course, a product of my tired mind and my depressive mood, but the sudden chill on the back of my neck was nonetheless very real.

We came to the unpaved connecting drive, and went down there under the shade of the walnut trees. There were no visible lights in any of the house's three tiers, but as we neared the two-car port I could see both the cream-colored Chrysler and the sleek blue Lotus parked inside. Quartermain braked to a stop at a diagonal that effectively blocked both cars, and we got out and moved around one of the dwarf cypress to the front door.

It was very quiet there, except for the soft lament of the wind and the rustle of leaves as it played through the branches of the walnut trees. The house itself was absolutely still. Quartermain pressed an inlaid pearl doorbell and there was the faint ringing of bell chimes within. But no one opened the door-then, or when he rang a second time.

The chill remained on my neck, and I tasted brassiness when I washed saliva through my dry mouth. I looked at Quartermain. "What do you think?"

"I don't know. I don't like it. The cars are here; they've got to be here, too."

"Unless they went out with somebody else. To a party, or to some kind of meeting."

"Yeah."

He rang the bell a third time, and the chimes tolled and died and the wind blew cool against my cheek and ruffled my hair in a way that made my scalp tingle unpleasantly. I said, "Do we wait in the car-or do we go in?"

"You get the feeling something may be wrong in there?"

"A little, yeah."

"Then I guess we'd better have a look."

He reached out and rotated the lucite doorknob with the tips of his fingers. It turned and the latch clicked and the door edged inward a couple of inches. He pushed it wider with his left hand, opening his coat with his right and brushing it back behind the service revolver still holstered at his side. We went into a short, dark foyer formed by a pair of low right-angle dividers that were solid wood panels to waist level, and staggered book and knickknack shelves to the ceiling. Through gaps on the right I could see a shadowed dining area and a kitchen doorway; on the right, the short extension of what appeared to be an L-shaped living room, containing a set of wide polished-wood stairs leading down to the second tier. The main section of living room comprised most of the width of this top level, and the carpeted foyer blended into it off-center to the left. The entire rear wall was of glass, and one of the panels leading out onto the balcony had been left open; the wind came in through there and fingered the undrawn drapes on that side. The light filtering through the exposed glass was vague and dusky, but you could see the dark shapes of furniture, the dark shapes The chill that had been on my neck moved suddenly down between my shoulder blades, and I turned and reached behind me and fumbled along the wall beside the door and found a bank of switches. I touched one and nothing happened-the outside light-and touched another; indirect lighting came on instantly, transforming the darkness into mellow gold clarity.

Quartermain said, "Oh my God."

I moved up next to him at the juncture of foyer and living room. There were two long cherry-wood sofas set lengthwise in the middle of the room, facing one another, and Bianca Tarrant was sitting on the one furthest away from us-sitting there with her arms folded in an X-pattern across her breasts, fingers hugging her shoulders, forearms touching; her eyes were open wide and staring blankly, and she did not seem to have noticed that the lights had come on, much less that we were there. On one of the cushions beside her, in sharp blue-metal contrast to the pale whitish upholstery, was what looked to be a. 32-caliber pearl-handled revolver.

Keith Tarrant was also in the room, and his eyes, too, were open wide and staring blankly-but they were eyes that would never see anything again. He lay at the foot of the nearest sofa, his head twisted against one of the cushions, and the dull reddish-brown color of his blood made an even sharper contrast against the upholstery. There was blood staining his white shirt as well, and blood on his beige slacks, and blood on his face, and blood on the rug around him. The way it looked, she had emptied the revolver at him and hit him with most if not all of the slugs.

Immediately Quartermain went to the far couch, reached down, and picked up the gun by its short barrel. Mrs. Tarrant did not move. He put the weapon into his jacket pocket and straightened up and went to Tarrant's body and knelt down; but he was only going through the motions. Features waxen, blood coagulated and dried, Tarrant had been dead for some time.

I just stood there, with a kind of poisonous nausea in my stomach, thinking: I could have prevented this, I could have saved Tarrant's life if I had caught his slip at the schoolhouse or if I had remembered it before going to sleep in Quartermain's office; I could have prevented this! And yet I knew I could not blame myself, not really, because the seeds had been sown long ago by Keith and Bianca Tarrant, just as Paige had sown his seeds with Dancer's book-and that destruction, in one form or another, had been inevitable.

Quartermain stood up again and glanced around the room and saw that there was a telephone on a stand near the polished-wood inner stairs. He shambled over there, his eyes sick and his mouth twisted into a thin grimace, and caught up the receiver and dialed a number. The summons: county investigators and, this time, a matron- and the crew, too, don't forget the crew, the clean-up boys, the necessary vultures who go to work when someone dies by violence. Come on out, boys and girl, the Tarrant’s are having a party on Del Lobos Canyon Road and you're the only others invited.

Quartermain said what had to be said and put down the handset and returned to the far sofa, stepping between where Mrs. Tarrant was sitting and a glass-topped coffee table that held two empty glasses and an empty gin bottle. He sat down next to her and touched her shoulder, shook her just a little. I thought for a moment that she was not going to come out of it, but then a tremor passed through her and her eyelids fluttered and her eyes took on a dull, vacuous awareness. But if she had been drunk when she shot her husband, she showed no signs of it now. She turned her head and looked at Quartermain without expression; he might have been a part of the furniture. Her mouth worked and she said, "I shot him, I killed him," in a voice that was steady and clear and as empty as the gin bottle.