Free Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Page A

Winestock. I saw her a few weeks ago. She's still single and still a looker, and still living with her brother in an old place in the town proper. The brother, Brad, used to join the group once in a while."
    "Were there any other regulars—people who might have known Paige fairly well?"
    "A guy named Ben Simms, but he was killed in a boating accident about five years ago. And Rose Davis got married and moved east maybe three years back. Keith Tarrant is still around, though. He's Cypress Bay's largest realtor now, and owns a sweet pad over in Carmel Valley. When I knew him, he was still struggling for a toehold. The demand for land in this area, and some smart maneuvering on Tarrant's part, put him where he is today. His wife, Bianca, used to come with him sometimes, too. That's about all, except for occasionals, and I can't remember any of them offhand. I've got a lousy memory, anyway."
    I wrote the Winestocks and the Tarrants into my notebook. Dancer said then, "Listen, how do you fit in with Paige and his murder?"
    "He married a young girl from Idaho in San Francisco a few months ago," I said. "Then he started leaving her alone on weekends, and she figured he'd found another woman. She hired me to follow him. I tailed him down to Cypress Bay yesterday and camped in a cottage across from his at the Beachwood motel. But this woman he had—and the killer, if it wasn't the woman—came in through the rear entrance. I found the body a little later."
    "Pleasant little story."
    "Isn't it."
    "But it doesn't surprise me much. So you're working with the local cops then?"
    "Not exactly."
    "Lone-wolfing for the wife?"
    "Not that either," I told him. "I just had a hunch about The Dead and the Dying , and I decided to follow it through. Chief Quartermain is handling the investigation, and I'll turn what you've told me over to him."
    "Sure," Dancer said. "You know, Paige having one of my books is going to bug hell out of me. I can figure most of the story, from what I knew of him, but I can't figure the book. You really think it ties in somehow?"
    "I don't know," I said honestly.
    "Well, if you find out, give me the word, would you?"
    "I'll tell Quartermain to give you the word. I'll be going back to San Francisco with Mrs. Paige—probably tonight."
    "She's a nice kid, this Mrs. Paige?"
    "Yeah," I said. "She's a nice kid."
    "And you're not going to follow through?"
    "It's out of my hands and out of my league."
    "Well, you live and learn," Dancer said. "This is my day to learn about private dicks."
    I finished my beer and thanked him for his help, and we went out to the front walk. We shook hands there, and he said, "If you're ever in this area again, drop in and say hello. We could break a couple of six-packs and talk about the pulps. I knew quite a few pulp editors and writers in New York in the forties."
    There was a kind of wistfulness in his voice, a nebulous request, of which Dancer himself might not have been consciously aware. You knew Rex Hannigan, his eyes said to me, you liked him, you remembered—and even though the plots and the characters and the words themselves were mere echoes now, all but forgotten by Russell Dancer and by the world at large, there was somebody who remembered and somebody who cared, and that was somehow very important. Deep down where a man lives, he did not want to lose his newly discovered, and perhaps final, touch with the old dream.
    I said, "I'll do that," and I meant the words sincerely.

 
    Eight
    I drove back into Cypress Bay, parked in the lot next to the City Hall, and went around to the police-station wing. The fat sergeant told me Quartermain had gone to Salinas, the county seat, and that Lieutenant Favor had gone with him; no, he had no idea when they would be back, did I want to leave a message?
    Without thinking about it, I said, "No, I’ll stop by later," and walked slowly back to my car. I sat there in the cool shade and brooded a little. Well, I could have given it to the sergeant;