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

but it was somewhat involved and Quartermain was the Chief and handling the case personally, and he was the kind of guy I could tell it to in my own way. There was that—and there was Judith Paige, and the quiet tranquility of Cypress Bay that became almost oppressive after a while, and the restlessness which seemed to be steadily growing inside me. If you've been a cop in one form or another for most of your life, and if you've worked at it and cared for it and been pretty good at it, it bothers you to have to back out of something when there are things to be done, avenues to be explored. It was a little like being a good, well-trained bird dog; once you had the scent, you were not satisfied until you were plowing along the trail and trying to flush something out of the underbrush.
    I lit a cigarette and blew smoke through the open window and watched it float languidly like an ephemeral mist through the sunlight and the shadows. "It's out of my hands and out of my league," I had told Russ Dancer, but that was not quite true and I knew it was not quite true, and I kept on sitting there, restlessly, trying to make up my mind. But it was not really much of a struggle. When you're overstepping just a little, the rationalizations come easy; and since you know you're going to do it, and have known it from the moment you found out Quartermain was in Salinas, it only takes a couple of mental nudges to get you to admit it.
    So I started the car and drove two blocks to a stone-and-redwood complex that did not look much like a service station, in keeping with the edicts of the Cypress Bay Chamber of Commerce. I parked under a sloping awning that did not quite conceal the row of gasoline pumps, told the attendant to fill up the tank, and went over to the telephone booth. I looked up the addresses for Jason Lomax, Brad and Beverly Winestock, and Keith Tarrant, and wrote them down on my note pad. Then I came back and paid the attendant and looked over the street map. The closest of the three seemed to be the Winestocks, on a street called Bonificacio Drive that was about ten blocks distant.
    I went over there, and the house was a two-story Spanish adobe set back some distance from the street, on higher ground. You got up to it by way of twenty-five or thirty slab-stone steps grown with rock cress; at their top was a short arbor covered by reddish bougainvillea. It was cool and quiet on the narrow porch formed by a wood-railed gallery at the second-floor level—and I thought for no particular reason of Old Monterey, Old California, and what it must have been like to have lived in the days of the Bear Flag and the sprawling ranchos. Dull and simple, maybe—but the air and the land and the sea were clean then, and there were no great external pressures, and you could take your time about living. I tugged at the hand-woven bell pull located to one side of the front door, and listened to a dull, distant ringing within, like a melancholy elegy for the long-dead past.
    Pretty soon the door opened and a woman in her early thirties looked out at me. She had a kind of misty beauty, enhanced by moist dark eyes and a pensive mouth and long brown-black hair parted in the middle and swept over her shoulders and down her back, like a dusky tapestry woven of very fine thread and fringed across the bottom. When you looked at her long enough, you had the feeling that she was somehow two-dimensional—an image that could and would vanish wraithlike whenever she chose. But it could have been the shaded porch and the dark shadows behind her, inside the house, that conveyed the impression, or it could have been my mood. She was heavy-breasted and flare-hipped in dark-green cotton slacks and a lime-green shirt, and I found myself thinking—the way a man does sometimes, with this kind of woman—that she would be pure sweet hell in bed.
    I brushed the thought aside and put on a polite smile for her. "Miss Winestock?"
    She nodded. I gave her my name, and then