Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) Read Free Page A

beer in the warm spring sunshine and enjoyed life a little, the simple pleasures . . .
    The entrance door to the apartment building opened, and a lean, sinuous guy carrying an overnight bag and wearing a sports coat over a thin brown turtleneck came out briskly. He had one of these sharp-featured faces that you could call handsome if you liked the type, and curly black hair and long barlike sideburns. He walked quickly to the Cutlass, unlocked the driver's door, and slid in under the wheel.
    I waited until he was half a block down the hill before I started my car and pulled out after him. Once we got off Sussex, there was just enough traffic so that I could stay fairly close—and he led me directly to the Southern Freeway entrance on Monterey Boulevard. I gave him a long lead out on the freeway, and then closed the gap a little as we neared the arteries branching into the James Lick north and south, and into 280 leading down to Third Street; I half expected him to make the swing north, into San Francisco proper, but he cut over to the right instead and got onto James Lick southbound. If there was another woman, she did not apparently live in the city.
    Paige held his speed down in the moderately heavy traffic, driving leisurely, and I had no trouble keeping him in sight. If you put other cars between yourself and your subject, and use a lane opposite to his, maintaining a tail on the freeway is no real problem—as long as the subject does not expect to be followed in the first place. Paige seemed to have no suspicions whatsoever.
    We went down the length of the peninsula on 101, leaving the bay and its crisp breezes behind. We left San Jose behind too—and then Gilroy and Watsonville—and it began to look as if the two-hundred-odd miles Paige had driven the previous weekend meant something after all. The further south we traveled, the warmer it got to be. We passed through the agricultural belt, the fields of lettuce and artichokes—Steinbeck country; and a few miles outside of Salinas, Paige finally quit 101 on State 156 leading west toward the ocean. Just below Castroville, 156 joins Highway 1, and when we got there, Paige swung south again along the coast.
    Highway 1 was two-lane and had considerably less traffic; I dropped further back with a car between the Cutlass and me. Artichoke fields stretched away on both sides of the road for a while, but when we approached Fort Ord—the Army's West Coast training camp—the landscape changed to seaward and became a series of rolling sand dunes topped with tule grass, like an endless string of human heads with all the features and most of the hair erased by the sea winds. The buildings of Fort Ord came and went, as did the town of Seaside, and pretty soon we were in more of Steinbeck country—the city of Monterey.
    We came down off a steep hill on the southern outskirts, and through thickly grown Monterey cypress and pine I had my first glimpse of the Pacific, and of the small inlet of Cypress Bay; the water was blue-green and sun-jeweled, dotted with sailboats and pleasure craft. A little further along, there was a turnoff for the village of Cypress Bay; Paige took the exit, and we began to descend along a wood-lined concourse toward the center of the hamlet.
    Cypress Bay was a haven for artists and writers—and for sightseers and vacationers and college students and hippies and the more sedate among the swingers. Art galleries and workshops, more than a hundred souvenir shops, quaint French and seafood restaurants, and dozens of motels, hotels, and inns comprised the bulk of its buildings; and there were pastoral streets and curving little alleys to complete the illusion of a vanished and cherished rusticity. You would find no billboards, few street signs, few street lights; the city fathers maintained and protected the illusion with strict building codes and rigid laws. The architecture was a mixture of traditional Old Spanish; Monterey adobe, which utilized waterproof