Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

him, will you? I mean, if I'm wrong and he's, well, just working, I wouldn't want him to know what I've done."
    "I'll be as careful as I can."
    "Thank you," she said, and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief and cleared her throat. "Will you call me as soon as you find out anything?"
    "Right away."
    "I'll give you a check. Will fifty dollars be all right?"
    "Fine."
    I looked away while she made out the check, out through the window. Sunlight and bright blue sky softened the look of the ugly, crumbling buildings in the Tenderloin. Even the panhandlers and dope pushers seemed to be enjoying the weather; they were out in droves this afternoon.
    A nice day for a lot of people, all right. But not for Judith Paige and not for me.
    At seven o'clock I was sitting behind the wheel of my car, parked four buildings down and on the opposite side of the street from the stucco-fronted apartment house the Paiges lived in. The dark-blue VW with the WALLY P license plate was thirty feet away, facing in the same direction.
    This was a fairly well-to-do neighborhood in the Parkside district; kids were out playing, husbands and wives were still arriving home from work. If you're staked out in an area like that, you run a risk by sitting around in a parked car for any length of time. People get suspicious, and the next thing you know, you've got a couple of patrol cops pulling up and asking questions. But if you don't stay more than an hour, and if you keep glancing at your watch and show signs of increasing annoyance, you can get away with it; the residents tend to think you're waiting for somebody and leave you alone. I expected to be here less than an hour, so I wasn't worried.
    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 - 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