Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (7 page)

I went through the watch-checking-and-annoyance routine, smoked a couple of cigarettes and glanced through a 1949 issue of FBI Detective that I'd brought along to help pass the time. And at twenty of eight, Paige came out and walked straight to the VW. The sun had gone down by then, but there was still enough reddish twilight to let me see that he was a tall, slender guy dressed in a blue suit, with one of those toothbrush mustaches that looked from a distance like a caterpillar humped on his upper lip.

I started my car just as he swung out, and I let him have a half-block lead before I went after him. He drove without hurry, observing the speed limits. Whenever possible, I put another car between us — and on the four-lane streets
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like Ocean Avenue, I used the lane opposite to the one he was in. You pick up ways and means like that over the years, but if you're following a pro, or somebody alert to the possibility of a tail, there's not much you can do; the subject will spot you nine times out of ten.

Paige was not expecting a tail, though, and I had no trouble staying with him. We picked up Highway 280 near the City College, followed it to where it connects with the Bayshore Freeway southbound. Fifteen minutes later, Paige exited in South San Francisco and went up Grand Avenue and finally turned into the parking lot of a big shopping center. He parked near a large cut-rate liquor store. I put my car into a slot in the next row, watched him get out and enter the liquor store. Five minutes later, he came back out with a bottle of some kind in a small paper sack and got back into his car. But he didn't go anywhere — he just sat there.

I figured it this way: Paige was playing around, all right, and the woman he was playing with was probably married as well, which necessitated a neutral meeting ground. He was waiting for her now, and when she arrived they would go to a motel or maybe to a little love nest they had set up somewhere — and that would be it as far as I was concerned. I'd get the license number of the woman's car when she showed, then follow her and Paige to wherever it was they had their assignations. Then I would call Mrs. Paige and listen to her cry; they always cry when you tell them, even though they expect the worst. And then I would go home and try to sleep.

So we sat there in the lot, Paige and I, waiting. It got to be nine o'clock; most of the stores were closing for the night, and there were not nearly as many cars as there had been earlier. I thought that if the lot became too empty, I would have to move out to the street somewhere; I did not want Paige noticing me, questioning the presence of another guy waiting alone as he was doing.

At nine-thirty, the woman still hadn't shown up. Everything was closed in the center except the liquor store and a bowling alley over at the far end. I had about decided it was time for me to move when Paige abruptly got out of the VW and headed toward the bowling alley.

He's going to call her, I thought. He wants to know why she stood him up tonight.

I let him get inside the building before I followed. League bowlers were occupying all twenty lanes in there; after the relative silence of the past hour, the noise was deafening. I went down by the coffee shop, where there was a phone booth, but I didn't see Paige anywhere. I came back and went into the bar. He was there, in another booth, talking animatedly on the phone.

I found a place to sit at the bar where I could see the booth in the back-bar mirror and ordered a beer. It was close to ten minutes before Paige finished his conversation. He stopped at the bar long enough to toss off a shot of bourbon neat; he did not even glance in my direction. I gave him two minutes and then moved after him.

He was just pulling out of the lot when I reached my car. I got going in plenty of time to pick him up, but it was pointless, really: he led me straight back to San Francisco and the Parkside district. From down the block, with my headlights dark, I watched him park the VW and then enter his apartment building. He didn't come out again in the next ten minutes.

I said to hell with it and went home to bed.

I
n the morning, from my office, I called Judith Paige and made my report. She tried to muffle her tears, but I could hear the sob in her voice; it grated at my nerves like fingernails across a blackboard.

"Then . . . then it's true, isn't it?" she said. "Walter has another woman."

"I'll be blunt with you, Mrs. Paige," I said, even though I did not feel blunt at all. "The chances of it are pretty good. He wasn't working last night, and he was obviously waiting for someone in that parking lot."

"But there's still a chance that he was there for some other reason, isn't there?"

"Yes, there's a chance."

"I have to be sure," she said. "You understand, don't you?"

"I understand."

"You'll be there tonight?"

"Yes, Mrs. Paige," I said. "I'll be there."

P
aige did not leave that night until after eight.

I was beginning to think that he wasn't going at all, and I was growing nervous about sitting there much longer, when he finally appeared. He got into the VW and led me along the same route he had last night, past the City College and onto 280. I decided he was heading for the same shopping center in South San Francisco; I dropped back a little, giving him plenty of room. And that was just where he went.

He parked in about the same place. I took a slot farther back this time and a little more to one side, in the event we were in for
another long wait past the closing time of the center's shops.

It developed just that way. Nine-thirty came, and then ten, and the parking area was just about empty. But it was dark where I was, and I had slumped low in the seat with the window down and my eyes on a level with the sill. I was pretty sure Paige couldn't see me from where he was.

So we waited, and I was about ready to call it another bust. Damn it, I thought, why doesn't she come? This kind of job played on my nerves anyway; the waiting only made it worse. If she was —

There was movement at the periphery of my vision. When I turned my head, I saw a lone figure hurrying across the darkened lot from the direction of the bowling alley. It moved in a straight line toward Paige's car, glancing left and right, its gaze flicking over my car but not lingering. And when it got to the VW and opened the door and slipped inside, the flash of the dome light let me see a leather jacket, jeans — crew cut hair.

Paige's visitor was a man, not a woman.

What the hell? I thought. Paige had not struck me as the homosexual type, but then you never knew these days who might have leanings in that direction; I could not figure any other immediate explanation for this kind of meeting. I sat there a little nonplussed, thinking about Mrs. Paige, waiting for them to leave.

Only they didn't leave, not yet. The driver's door opened and Paige stepped out; he was wearing a hat now, a long overcoat that he must have put on while he'd been sitting in the darkness. Dimly, I could see the other guy slide over under the wheel. Paige walked to the liquor store, went inside. There was no other activity at this end of the lot — and no one else had entered the liquor store in the past five minutes.

I began to get it then, but by the time I put it all together it was too late for me to do anything about it. The new guy started the VW and took it slowly toward the lot's entrance a few doors down from the liquor store, keeping it clear of the bright outspill from the store's fluorescent lighting. I couldn't see what was happening inside the store, because of the angle.

Three minutes after he'd gone inside, Paige came running out with one hand jammed up under his coat and the other gripping a small sack of some kind. He ran down to where the other guy had the VW rolling forward, jerked open the door and jumped in. The car pitched ahead, burning a little rubber, and when it turned east out of the lot its headlights came on for the first time. There was no movement over at the liquor store, no one in the lot to see or wonder what had happened except me.

I'd had the engine of my car going before Paige appeared, but I stayed where I was until the VW was a half-block away. Then I went after it, running dark, hanging back as far as I could without losing sight of its taillights.

The other car was moving fast but not recklessly; they must have figured they'd pull it off clean, and they didn't want to call attention to themselves. The streets were dark here, except for intermittent house lights and the yellow puddles cast by street lamps. Clouds had begun to pile up, blotting out the moon: that made it all the darker and easier for me to follow without being seen. I was able to stay within a block of them.

They were heading for Hillside Boulevard; I could tell that before we'd gone a dozen blocks. That road runs along the western foot of the San Bruno Mountains, connecting to the southeast with the Bayshore Freeway and to the northeast with Daly City. It was a toss-up as to which way they would turn when they got there.

I wasn't at all sure now that I was doing the right thing. Maybe I should have gone into the liquor store to check on the clerk, make sure he was all right; then I could have telephoned the local police and given them Paige's name and that WALLY P license plate of his. But my instinctive reaction had been to give chase, to be able to pinpoint them when I finally did make the call. Wise or not, I had made my choice and I would have to stand by it.

When the VW neared Hillside Boulevard, I dropped back to see how it would go. They turned left. Daly City, then, and on into San Francisco that way. Or maybe they had another destination along the line.

I could still see the red glow of their taillights when I got to the intersection, but they were diminishing rapidly: the driver had opened it up now. It would have been dangerous for me to try driving that dark road without lights; I switched on my headlamps before I made the turn. And then bore down on the accelerator to match their speed.

As I drove, I thought about how wrong Mrs. Paige and I had been about her husband. He didn't have another woman, or if he did she had nothing to do with these nocturnal outings of his. They were all explainable in the same way. There had been a string of liquor store holdups the past month, in a different Bay area city each time — two men, one to pull the job and the other to drive the car. I hadn't thought of Paige in connection with the holdups; there was no reason I should have. I had been hired to investigate infidelity, not armed robbery.

So Paige and this other guy were the heisters; and that put an altogether different explanation on last night's events. Paige hadn't been waiting at the shopping center for anyone; he'd been casing the liquor store — the same thing he had probably done the past few nights, and on some or all of the other jobs they'd pulled. He would have been checking on how much traffic went in and out of the lot around this time of night, how many clerks and customers there were in the store, things like that. When he'd gone to the bowling alley, it had been to call his partner and make a report. It had looked good to them, and they were ready, and so they'd set it up for tonight.

The only things that weren't clear were why the other guy had
showed up at the parking lot on foot instead of meeting Paige and driving there with him, and why they were using Paige's VW, with that easy-to-remember WALLY P license plate, as the getaway car. But I could find out the answers to those questions later on. They didn't matter much at this point.

What mattered was staying with those two, seeing to it they were arrested and put away. What mattered was how Judith Paige would feel when she found out her husband was something much worse than unfaithful . . .

The VW was in Colma now, a small community that had the
dubious distinction of being the primary burial grounds for the San Francisco area. There were a dozen different cemeteries along here, and one golf course — Cypress Hills — sitting there incongruously in the middle of it all. This stretch of Hillside Boulevard was very dark; no other cars moved on it in either direction.

Another tenth of a mile clicked off on my odometer. And then the VW's brake lights came on ahead, and the car made a sharp right-hand turn into Cynthia Street — a narrow lane that marked the boundary between the golf course on the right and Mount Olivert Cemetery on the left. At its upper end, there were a couple of short dead-end streets and the looming black shapes of the San Bruno Mountains. Maybe the one guy lived there, I thought, and they were going to his place. Or maybe they were planning to stop for a few minutes and split the take from the liquor store.

I slowed, waiting until the VW passed behind a screen of eucalyptus lining the lane, then switched off my lights and swung up after them. The other car was better than a hundred yards ahead by then. We traveled a fifth of a mile with that much distance between us — and suddenly the taillights winked out, their headlights did the same and heavy darkness folded in on the road.

I punched the brake pedal, thinking they'd pull off onto the shoulder, getting ready to do the same thing. Only then the VW's backup lights flared, and when I heard the sharp whine of its engine in reverse I realized what a damned fool I'd been. They knew I was there, they had known it all along; somehow they'd spotted me tailing them. So they'd maneuvered me up here, where it was isolated, with the idea of ramming me, forcing me off the road.

I said a short, vicious word and managed to do three things at once: jammed the gearshift lever into reverse with my right hand, found the headlight switch and flicked it on with my left hand, and brought my left foot down on the high-beam button on the floor. The car leaped backward, yawing a little. The VW was almost on top of me by then, a hurtling black-and-red
shape; its rear end missed my front bumper by a foot or less, then veered off toward the fence bordering the cemetery on the left. The guy behind the wheel had to fight it around, straighten out again, and that gave me a couple of extra seconds.