The Big Sleep (13 page)

“Killer,” she said softly, her breath going into my mouth.

I strained her against me until the shivering of her body was almost shaking mine. I kept on kissing her. After a long time she pulled her head away enough to say: “Where do you live?”

“Hobart Arms. Franklin near Kenmore.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Want to?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“What has Eddie Mars got on you?”

Her body stiffened in my arms and her breath made a harsh sound. Her head pulled back until her eyes, wide open, ringed with white, were staring at me.

“So that’s the way it is,” she said in a soft dull voice.

“That’s the way it is. Kissing is nice, but your father didn’t hire me to sleep with you.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said calmly, without moving.

I laughed in her face. “Don’t think I’m an icicle,” I said. “I’m not blind or without senses. I have warm blood like the next guy. You’re easy to take—too damned easy. What has Eddie Mars got on you?”

“If you say that again, I’ll scream.”

“Go ahead and scream.”

She jerked away and pulled herself upright, far back in the corner of the car.

“Men have been shot for little things like that, Marlowe.”

“Men have been shot for practically nothing. The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it.”

She fumbled in her bag and got a handkerchief out and bit on it, her head turned away from me. The tearing sound of the handkerchief came to me. She tore it with her teeth, slowly, time after time.

“What makes you think he has anything on me?” she whispered, her voice muffled by the handkerchief.

“He lets you win a lot of money and sends a gunpoke around to take it back for him. You’re not more than mildly surprised. You didn’t even thank me for saving it for you. I think the whole thing was just some kind of an act. If I wanted to flatter myself, I’d say it was at least partly for my benefit.”

“You think he can win or lose as he pleases.”

“Sure. On even money bets, four times out of five.”

“Do I have to tell you I loathe your guts, Mister Detective?”

“You don’t owe me anything. I’m paid off.”

She tossed the shredded handkerchief out of the car window. “You have a lovely way with women.”

“I liked kissing you.”

“You kept your head beautifully. That’s so flattering. Should I congratulate you, or my father?”

“I liked kissing you.”

Her voice became an icy drawl. “Take me away from here, if you will be so kind. I’m quite sure I’d like to go home.”

“You won’t be a sister to me?”

“If I had a razor, I’d cut your throat—just to see what ran out of it.”

“Caterpillar blood,” I said.

I started the car and turned it and drove back across the interurban tracks to the highway and so on into town and up to West Hollywood. She didn’t speak to me. She hardly moved all the way back. I drove through the gates and up the sunken driveway to the porte-cochere of the big house. She jerked the car door open and was out of it before it had quite stopped. She didn’t speak even then. I watched her back as she stood against the door after ringing the bell. The door opened and Norris looked out. She pushed past him quickly and was gone. The door banged shut and I was sitting there looking at it.

I turned back down the driveway and home.

TWENTY-FOUR

The apartment house lobby was empty this time. No gunman waiting under the potted palm to give me orders. I took the automatic elevator up to my floor and walked along the hallway to the tune of a muted radio behind a door. I needed a drink and was in a hurry to get one. I didn’t switch the light on inside the door. I made straight for the kitchenette and brought up short in three or four feet. Something was wrong. Something on the air, a scent. The shades were down at the windows and the street light leaking in at the sides made a dim light in the room. I stood still and listened. The scent on the air was a perfume, a heavy cloying perfume.

There was no sound, no sound at all. Then my eyes adjusted themselves more to the darkness and I saw there was something across the floor in front of me that shouldn’t have been there. I backed, reached the wall switch with my thumb and flicked the light on.

The bed was down. Something in it giggled. A blond head was pressed into my pillow. Two bare arms curved up and the hands belonging to them were clasped on top of the blond head. Carmen Sternwood lay on her back, in my bed, giggling at me. The tawny wave of her hair was spread out on the pillow as if by a careful and artificial hand. Her slaty eyes peered at me and had the effect, as usual, of peering from behind a barrel. She smiled. Her small sharp teeth glinted.

“Cute, aren’t I?” she said.

I said harshly: “Cute as a Filipino on Saturday night.”

I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight, then pulled my hat and coat off and threw them somewhere. All this time the soft giggling went on from the bed, that sound that made me think of rats behind a wainscoting in an old house.

“I bet you can’t even guess how I got in.”

I dug a cigarette out and looked at her with bleak eyes. “I bet I can. You came through the keyhole, just like Peter Pan.”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, a fellow I used to know around the poolroom.”

She giggled. “You’re cute, aren’t you?” she said.

I began to say: “About that thumb—” but she was ahead of me. I didn’t have to remind her. She took her right hand from behind her head and started sucking the thumb and eyeing me with very round and naughty eyes.

“I’m all undressed,” she said, after I had smoked and stared at her for a minute.

“By God,” I said, “it was right at the back of my mind. I was groping for it. I almost had it, when you spoke. In another minute I’d have said ‘I bet you’re all undressed.’ I always wear my rubbers in bed myself, in case I wake up with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it.”

“You’re cute.” She rolled her head a little, kittenishly. Then she took her left hand from under her head and took hold of the covers, paused dramatically, and swept them aside. She was undressed all right. She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl. The Sternwood girls were giving me both barrels that night.

I pulled a shred of tobacco off the edge of my lower lip.

“That’s nice,” I said. “But I’ve already seen it all. Remember? I’m the guy that keeps finding you without any clothes on.”

She giggled some more and covered herself up again. “Well, how
did
you get in?” I asked her.

“The manager let me in. I showed him your card. I’d stolen it from Vivian. I told him you told me to come here and wait for you. I was—I was mysterious.” She glowed with delight.

“Neat,” I said. “Managers are like that. Now I know how you got in tell me how you’re going to go out.”

She giggled. “Not going—not for a long time. . . . I like it here. You’re cute.”

“Listen,” I pointed my cigarette at her. “Don’t make me dress you again. I’m tired. I appreciate all you’re offering me. It’s just more than I could possibly take. Doghouse Reilly never let a pal down that way. I’m your friend. I won’t let you down—in spite of yourself. You and I have to keep on being friends, and this isn’t the way to do it. Now will you dress like a nice little girl?”

She shook her head from side to side.

“Listen,” I plowed on, “you don’t really care anything about me. You’re just showing how naughty you can be. But you don’t have to show me. I knew it already. I’m the guy that found—”

“Put the light out,” she giggled.

I threw my cigarette on the floor and stamped on it. I took a handkerchief out and wiped the palms of my hands. I tried it once more.

“It isn’t on account of the neighbors,” I told her. “They don’t really care a lot. There’s a lot of stray broads in any apartment house and one more won’t make the building rock. It’s a question of professional pride. You know—professional pride. I’m working for your father. He’s a sick man, very frail, very helpless. He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts. Won’t you please get dressed, Carmen?”

“Your name isn’t Doghouse Reilly,” she said. “It’s Philip Marlowe. You can’t fool me.”

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.

I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn’t know about it yet. It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.

I said: “I’m going out in the kitchen and mix a drink. Want one?”

“Uh-huh.” Dark silent mystified eyes stared at me solemnly, the doubt growing larger in them, creeping into them noiselessly, like a cat in long grass stalking a young blackbird.

“If you’re dressed when I get back, you’ll get the drink. Okey?”

Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth. She didn’t answer me. I went out to the kitchenette and got out some Scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs. I didn’t have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger’s breath. She hadn’t moved when I got back with the glasses. The hissing had stopped. Her eyes were dead again. Her lips started to smile at me. Then she sat up suddenly and threw all the covers off her body and reached.

“Gimme.”

“When you’re dressed. Not
until
you’re dressed.”

I put the two glasses down on the card table and sat down myself and lit another cigarette. “Go ahead. I won’t watch you.”

I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman’s eyes.

Then her lips moved very slowly and carefully, as if they were artificial lips and had to be manipulated with springs.

She called me a filthy name.

I didn’t mind that. I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.

I couldn’t stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that.

I said carefully: “I’ll give you three minutes to get dressed and out of here. If you’re not out by then, I’ll throw you out—by force. Just the way you are, naked. And I’ll throw your clothes after you into the hall. Now—get started.”

Her teeth chattered and the hissing noise was sharp and animal. She swung her feet to the floor and reached for her clothes on a chair beside the bed. She dressed. I watched her. She dressed with stiff awkward fingers—for a woman—but quickly at that. She was dressed in a little over two minutes. I timed it.

She stood there beside the bed, holding a green bag tight against a fur-trimmed coat. She wore a rakish green hat crooked on her head. She stood there for a moment and hissed at me, her face still like scraped bone, her eyes still empty and yet full of some jungle emotion. Then she walked quickly to the door and opened it and went out, without speaking, without looking back. I heard the elevator lurch into motion and move in the shaft.

I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets.

I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely.

TWENTY-FIVE

It was raining again the next morning, a slanting gray rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads. I got up feeling sluggish and tired and stood looking out of the windows, with a dark harsh taste of Sternwoods still in my mouth. I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets. I went out to the kitchenette and drank two cups of black coffee. You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.

I shaved and showered and dressed and got my raincoat out and went downstairs and looked out of the front door. Across the street, a hundred feet up, a gray Plymouth sedan was parked. It was the same one that had tried to trail me around the day before, the same one that I had asked Eddie Mars about. There might be a cop in it, if a cop had that much time on his hands and wanted to waste it following me around. Or it might be a smoothie in the detective business trying to get a noseful of somebody else’s case in order to chisel a way into it. Or it might be the Bishop of Bermuda disapproving of my night life.

I went out back and got my convertible from the garage and drove it around front past the gray Plymouth. There was a small man in it, alone. He started up after me. He worked better in the rain. He stayed close enough so that I couldn’t make a short block and leave that before he entered it, and he stayed back far enough so that other cars were between us most of the time. I drove down to the boulevard and parked in the lot next to my building and came out of there with my raincoat collar up and my hat brim low and the raindrops tapping icily at my face in between. The Plymouth was across the way at a fire-plug. I walked down to the intersection and crossed with the green light and walked back, close to the edge of the sidewalk and the parked cars. The Plymouth hadn’t moved. Nobody got out of it. I reached it and jerked open the door on the curb side.

A small bright-eyed man was pressed back into the corner behind the wheel. I stood and looked in at him, the rain thumping my back. His eyes blinked behind the swirling smoke of a cigarette. His hands tapped restlessly on the thin wheel.

I said: “Can’t you make your mind up?”

He swallowed and the cigarette bobbed between his lips. “I don’t think I know you,” he said, in a tight little voice.

“Marlowe’s the name. The guy you’ve been trying to follow around for a couple of days.”

“I ain’t following anybody, doc.”

“This jalopy is. Maybe you can’t control it. Have it your own way. I’m now going to eat breakfast in the coffee shop across the street, orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, honey, three or four cups of coffee and a toothpick. I am then going up to my office, which is on the seventh floor of the building right opposite you. If you have anything that’s worrying you beyond endurance, drop up and chew it over. I’ll only be oiling my machine gun.”

I left him blinking and walked away. Twenty minutes later I was airing the scrubwoman’s Soirée d’Amour out of my office and opening up a thick rough envelope addressed in a fine old-fashioned pointed handwriting. The envelope contained a brief formal note and a large mauve check for five hundred dollars, payable to Philip Marlowe and signed, Guy de Brisay Sternwood, by Vincent Norris. That made it a nice morning. I was making out a bank slip when the buzzer told me somebody had entered my two by four reception room. It was the little man from the Plymouth.

“Fine,” I said. “Come in and shed your coat.”

He slid past me carefully as I held the door, as carefully as though he feared I might plant a kick in his minute buttocks. We sat down and faced each other across the desk. He was a very small man, not more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher’s thumb. He had tight brilliant eyes that wanted to look hard, and looked as hard as oysters on the half shell. He wore a double-breasted dark gray suit that was too wide in the shoulders and had too much lapel. Over this, open, an Irish tweed coat with some badly worn spots. A lot of foulard tie bulged out and was rainspotted above his crossed lapels.

“Maybe you know me,” he said. “I’m Harry Jones.”

I said I didn’t know him. I pushed a flat tin of cigarettes at him. His small neat fingers speared one like a trout taking the fly. He lit it with the desk lighter and waved his hand.

“I been around,” he said. “Know the boys and such. Used to do a little liquor-running down from Hueneme Point. A tough racket, brother. Riding the scout car with a gun in your lap and a wad on your hip that would choke a coal chute. Plenty of times we paid off four sets of law before we hit Beverly Hills. A tough racket.”

“Terrible,” I said.

He leaned back and blew smoke at the ceiling from the small tight corner of his small tight mouth.

“Maybe you don’t believe me,” he said.

“Maybe I don’t,” I said. “And maybe I do. And then again maybe I haven’t bothered to make my mind up. Just what is the build-up supposed to do to me?”

“Nothing,” he said tartly.

“You’ve been following me around for a couple of days,” I said. “Like a fellow trying to pick up a girl and lacking the last inch of nerve. Maybe you’re selling insurance. Maybe you knew a fellow called Joe Brody. That’s a lot of maybes, but I have a lot on hand in my business.”

His eyes bulged and his lower lip almost fell in his lap. “Christ, how’d you know that?” he snapped.

“I’m psychic. Shake your business up and pour it. I haven’t got all day.”

The brightness of his eyes almost disappeared between the suddenly narrowed lids. There was silence. The rain pounded down on the flat tarred roof over the Mansion House lobby below my windows. His eyes opened a little, shined again, and his voice was full of thought.

“I was trying to get a line on you, sure,” he said. “I’ve got something to sell—cheap, for a couple of C notes. How’d you tie me to Joe?”

I opened a letter and read it. It offered me a six months’ correspondence course in fingerprinting at a special professional discount. I dropped it into the waste basket and looked at the little man again. “Don’t mind me. I was just guessing. You’re not a cop. You don’t belong to Eddie Mars’ outfit. I asked him last night. I couldn’t think of anybody else but Joe Brody’s friends who would be that much interested in me.”

“Jesus,” he said and licked his lower lip. His face had turned white as paper when I mentioned Eddie Mars. His mouth drooped open and his cigarette hung to the corner of it by some magic, as if it had grown there. “Aw, you’re kidding me,” he said at last, with the sort of smile the operating room sees.

“All right. I’m kidding you.” I opened another letter. This one wanted to send me a daily newsletter from Washington, all inside stuff, straight from the cookhouse. “I suppose Agnes is loose,” I added.

“Yeah. She sent me. You interested?”

“Well—she’s a blonde.”

“Nuts. You made a crack when you were up there that night—the night Joe got squibbed off. Something about Brody must have known something good about the Sternwoods or he wouldn’t have taken the chance on that picture he sent them.”

“Uh-huh. So he had? What was it?”

“That’s what the two hundred bucks pays for.”

I dropped some more fan mail into the basket and lit myself a fresh cigarette.

“We gotta get out of town,” he said. “Agnes is a nice girl. You can’t hold that stuff on her. It’s not so easy for a dame to get by these days.”

“She’s too big for you,” I said. “She’ll roll on you and smother you.”

“That’s kind of a dirty crack, brother,” he said with something that was near enough to dignity to make me stare at him.

I said: “You’re right. I’ve been meeting the wrong kind of people lately. Let’s cut out the gabble and get down to cases. What have you got for the money?”

“Would you pay for it?”

“If it does what?”

“If it helps you find Rusty Regan.”

“I’m not looking for Rusty Regan.”

“Says you. Want to hear it or not?”

“Go ahead and chirp. I’ll pay for anything I use. Two C notes buys a lot of information in my circle.”

“Eddie Mars had Regan bumped off,” he said calmly, and leaned back as if he had just been made a vice-president.

I waved a hand in the direction of the door. “I wouldn’t even argue with you,” I said. “I wouldn’t waste the oxygen. On your way, small size.”

He leaned across the desk, white lines at the corners of his mouth. He snubbed his cigarette out carefully, over and over again, without looking at it. From behind a communicating door came the sound of a typewriter clacking monotonously to the bell, to the shift, line after line.

“I’m not kidding,” he said.

“Beat it. Don’t bother me. I have work to do.”

“No you don’t,” he said sharply. “I ain’t that easy. I came here to speak my piece and I’m speaking it. I knew Rusty myself. Not well, well enough to say ‘How’s a boy?’ and he’d answer me or he wouldn’t, according to how he felt. A nice guy though. I always liked him. He was sweet on a singer named Mona Grant. Then she changed her name to Mars. Rusty got sore and married a rich dame that hung around the joints like she couldn’t sleep well at home. You know all about her, tall, dark, enough looks for a Derby winner, but the type would put a lot of pressure on a guy. High-strung. Rusty wouldn’t get along with her. But Jesus, he’d get along with her old man’s dough, wouldn’t he? That’s what you think. This Regan was a cockeyed sort of buzzard. He had long-range eyes. He was looking over into the next valley all the time. He wasn’t scarcely around where he was. I don’t think he gave a damn about dough. And coming from me, brother, that’s a compliment.”

The little man wasn’t so dumb after all. A three for a quarter grifter wouldn’t even think such thoughts, much less know how to express them.

I said: “So he ran away.”

“He started to run away, maybe. With this girl Mona. She wasn’t living with Eddie Mars, didn’t like his rackets. Especially the side lines, like blackmail, bent cars, hideouts for hot boys from the east, and so on. The talk was Regan told Eddie one night, right out in the open, that if he ever messed Mona up in any criminal rap, he’d be around to see him.”

“Most of this is on the record, Harry,” I said. “You can’t expect money for that.”

“I’m coming to what isn’t. So Regan blew. I used to see him every afternoon in Vardi’s drinking Irish whiskey and staring at the wall. He don’t talk much any more. He’d give me a bet now and then, which was what I was there for, to pick up bets for Puss Walgreen.”

“I thought he was in the insurance business.”

“That’s what it says on the door. I guess he’d sell you insurance at that, if you tramped on him. Well, about the middle of September I don’t see Regan any more. I don’t notice it right away. You know how it is. A guy’s there and you see him and then he ain’t there and you don’t not see him until something makes you think of it. What makes me think about it is I hear a guy say laughing that Eddie Mars’ woman lammed out with Rusty Regan and Mars is acting like he was best man, instead of being sore. So I tell Joe Brody and Joe was smart.”

“Like hell he was,” I said.

“Not copper smart, but still smart. He’s out for the dough. He gets to figuring could he get a line somehow on the two lovebirds he could maybe collect twice—once from Eddie Mars and once from Regan’s wife. Joe knew the family a little.”

“Five grand worth,” I said. “He nicked them for that a while back.”

“Yeah?” Harry Jones looked mildly surprised. “Agnes ought to of told me that. There’s a frail for you. Always holding out. Well, Joe and me watch the papers and we don’t see anything, so we know old Sternwood has a blanket on it. Then one day I see Lash Canino in Vardi’s. Know him?”

I shook my head.

“There’s a boy that is tough like some guys think they are tough. He does a job for Eddie Mars when Mars needs him—trouble-shooting. He’d bump a guy off between drinks. When Mars don’t need him he don’t go near him. And he don’t stay in L.A. Well it might be something and it might not. Maybe they got a line on Regan and Mars has just been sitting back with a smile on his puss, waiting for the chance. Then again it might be something else entirely. Anyway I tell Joe and Joe gets on Canino’s tail. He can tail. Me, I’m no good at it. I’m giving that one away. No charge. And Joe tails Canino out to the Sternwood place and Canino parks outside the estate and a car come up beside him with a girl in it. They talk for a while and Joe thinks the girl passes something over, like maybe dough. The girl beats it. It’s Regan’s wife. Okey, she knows Canino and Canino knows Mars. So Joe figures Canino knows something about Regan and is trying to squeeze a little on the side for himself. Canino blows and Joe loses him. End of Act One.”

“What does this Canino look like?”

“Short, heavy set, brown hair, brown eyes, and always wears brown clothes and a brown hat. Even wears a brown suede raincoat. Drives a brown coupe. Everything brown for Mr. Canino.”

“Let’s have Act Two,” I said.

“Without some dough that’s all.”

“I don’t see two hundred bucks in it. Mrs. Regan married an ex-bootlegger out of the joints. She’d know other people of his sort. She knows Eddie Mars well. If she thought anything had happened to Regan, Eddie would be the very man she’d go to, and Canino might be the man Eddie would pick to handle the assignment. Is that all you have?”

“Would you give the two hundred to know where Eddie’s wife is?” the little man asked calmly.

He had all my attention now. I almost cracked the arms of my chair leaning on them.

“Even if she was alone?” Harry Jones added in a soft, rather sinister tone. “Even if she never run away with Regan at all, and was being kept now about forty miles from L.A. in a hideout—so the law would keep on thinking she had dusted with him? Would you pay two hundred bucks for that, shamus?”

I licked my lips. They tasted dry and salty. “I think I would,” I said. “Where?”

“Agnes found her,” he said grimly. “Just by a lucky break. Saw her out riding and managed to tail her home. Agnes will tell you where that is—when she’s holding the money in her hand.”

I made a hard face at him. “You could tell the coppers for nothing, Harry. They have some good wreckers down at Central these days. If they killed you trying, they still have Agnes.”