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

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.
    Â 
    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."
    Â 
    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