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.
In 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.”
Paige 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.