Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) Read Free Page B

adobe bricks and redwood shakes and hewn local timbers; log-cabin style, with heavy emphasis on pioneer simplicity; and saccharine Hansel and Gretel doll houses, popular in the twenties, that featured whimsical windows, chimneys, gambrels, and gabled roofs. You had to go some distance outside the village proper to find anything of a modern design.
    Paige took me through the middle of Cypress Bay on Grove Avenue—a two-lane street divided in the middle by shrubbery, lined with souvenir shops and spanned at intervals by banners proclaiming: Sentinel Hill Professional Golf Classic • Thursday, May 4, Through Sunday, May 7 • Qualifying Monday, May 1. Sentinel Hill, like its more famous neighbor Pebble Beach, was located on the peninsula not far from Cypress Bay; and the annual pro tournament there, like the ones at Pebble, always brought in a heavy stream of tourists and camp followers. From the packed sidewalks, it appeared as if most of them had arrived early.
    At the foot of Grove was a wide thoroughfare called Ocean Boulevard, which ran in a parallel curve to the harbor. Across it was a large, thickly shaded park, a municipal pier where you could hire a charter boat for salmon trolling or deep-sea fishing, and a public beach that curved in a white-powder crescent around the inlet. Cypress Bay had a little something for everyone; I wondered sourly what it had for Walter Paige.
    Paige made a left turn on Ocean and drove a fifth of a mile; there, beachfront, was a motel that you might have mistaken for a series of private beach cottages if you had glanced at them in a cursory way. The only sign was a small, neat, bucolic one with letters fashioned out of strips of bark; it said: The Beachwood.
    Paige took the Cutlass onto a white-gravel drive and stopped in front of a log-cabin-style building in the middle of the grounds; the drive formed a small inner square, servicing each of the cottages in their squared-off, extended U arrangement. I stopped on Ocean Boulevard and watched Paige get out and enter the motel office.
    This looked like the end of the line—for now, anyway. But I was not going in until I made certain. So I sat there, waiting, and looked at the cottages. They were as neat and rustic as the sign, as the rest of Cypress Bay. Pines filled the grounds—and roses and lilac bushes— and each cottage was separated from its neighbor by a high Monterey cypress hedge. Those cottages at the rear of the grounds had their backsides to the sea and to what looked like a private beach; the others, which formed the shortened arms of the U, seemed to have lush rear gardens bounded by more of the cypress hedges. A little something for everyone here, too—in keeping with the community image. But the Beachwood was not a place for the flotsam and jetsam that washed into Cypress Bay in the spring and summer months—and that made me wonder a little. It seemed well out of Paige's range, judging from his San Francisco address, but then, it could be that he was not paying for the accommodations.
    Paige reappeared after a couple of minutes and got into the Cutlass again and drove it over to one of the cottages offering a rear view of the sea, parking under a kind of shake-roofed porte-cochere attached to the side wall. Then he got out with his overnight bag and used a key on the front door.
    I sat there for ten minutes, but he did not come out again. I started my car and entered the white-gravel drive and parked in approximately the same spot as Paige had originally. When I stepped out, I could see that the number of his cottage was 9. I went into the office, and it was a dark, well-appointed room with a counter at one end and unvarnished redwood walls. A bell over the door announced my entrance, and a guy dressed in a gray business suit appeared through a doorway behind the counter and smiled at me in a professional way. He was a couple of years younger than my forty-seven, with a round, pink, complacent face and a mouth that was red