The Big Sleep (18 page)

“And you allowed Captain Gregory to think I had employed you to find Rusty?”

“Yeah. I guess I did—when I was sure he had the case.”

He closed his eyes. They twitched a little. He spoke with them closed. “And do you consider that ethical?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

The eyes opened again. The piercing blackness of them was startling coming suddenly out of that dead face. “Perhaps I don’t understand,” he said.

“Maybe you don’t. The head of a Missing Persons Bureau isn’t a talker. He wouldn’t be in that office if he was. This one is a very smart cagey guy who tries, with a lot of success at first, to give the impression he’s a middle-aged hack fed up with his job. The game I play is not spillikins. There’s always a large element of bluff connected with it. Whatever I might say to a cop, he would be apt to discount it. And to
that
cop it wouldn’t make much difference what I said. When you hire a boy in my line of work it isn’t like hiring a window-washer and showing him eight windows and saying: ‘Wash those and you’re through.’
You
don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor. The client comes first, unless he’s crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut. After all you didn’t tell me
not
to go to Captain Gregory.”

“That would have been rather difficult,” he said with a faint smile.

“Well, what have I done wrong? Your man Norris seemed to think when Geiger was eliminated the case was over. I don’t see it that way. Geiger’s method of approach puzzled me and still does. I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don’t expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don’t know much about cops. It’s not things like that they overlook, if they overlook anything. I’m not saying they often overlook anything when they’re really allowed to work. But if they do, it’s apt to be something looser and vaguer, like a man of Geiger’s type sending you his evidence of debt and asking you to pay like a gentleman—Geiger, a man in a shady racket, in a vulnerable position, protected by a racketeer and having at least some negative protection from some of the police. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to find out if there was anything putting pressure on you. If there was, you would pay him. If not, you would ignore him and wait for his next move. But there was something putting a pressure on you. Regan. You were afraid he was not what he had appeared to be, that he had stayed around and been nice to you just long enough to find out how to play games with your bank account.”

He started to say something but I interrupted him. “Even at that it wasn’t your money you cared about. It wasn’t even your daughters. You’ve more or less written them off. It’s that you’re still too proud to be played for a sucker—and you really liked Regan.”

There was a silence. Then the General said quietly: “You talk too damn much, Marlowe. Am I to understand you are still trying to solve that puzzle?”

“No. I’ve quit. I’ve been warned off. The boys think I play too rough. That’s why I thought I should give you back your money—because it isn’t a completed job by my standards. ”

He smiled. “Quit, nothing,” he said. “I’ll pay you another thousand dollars to find Rusty. He doesn’t have to come back. I don’t even have to know where he is. A man has a right to live his own life. I don’t blame him for walking out on my daughter, nor even for going so abruptly. It was probably a sudden impulse. I want to know that he is all right wherever he is. I want to know it from him directly, and if he should happen to need money, I should want him to have that also. Am I clear?”

I said: “Yes, General.”

He rested a little while, lax on the bed, his eyes closed and dark-lidded, his mouth tight and bloodless. He was used up. He was pretty nearly licked. He opened his eyes again and tried to grin at me.

“I guess I’m a sentimental old goat,” he said. “And no soldier at all. I took a fancy to that boy. He seemed pretty clean to me. I must be a little too vain about my judgment of character. Find him for me, Marlowe. Just find him.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “You’d better rest now. I’ve talked your arm off.”

I got up quickly and walked across the wide floor and out. He had his eyes shut again before I opened the door. His hands lay limp on the sheet. He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. I shut the door quietly and went back along the upper hall and down the stairs.

THIRTY-ONE

The butler appeared with my hat. I put it on and said: “What do you think of him?”

“He’s not as weak as he looks, sir.”

“If he was, he’d be ready for burial. What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”

The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”

“Like yours,” I said.

“If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”

“Thanks. How are the ladies this morning?”

He shrugged politely.

“Just what I thought,” I said, and he opened the door for me.

I stood outside on the step and looked down the vistas of grassed terraces and trimmed trees and flowerbeds to the tall metal railing at the bottom of the gardens. I saw Carmen about halfway down, sitting on a stone bench, with her head between her hands, looking forlorn and alone.

I went down the red brick steps that led from terrace to terrace. I was quite close before she heard me. She jumped up and whirled like a cat. She wore the light blue slacks she had worn the first time I saw her. Her blonde hair was the same loose tawny wave. Her face was white. Red spots flared in her cheeks as she looked at me. Her eyes were slaty.

“Bored?” I said.

She smiled slowly, rather shyly, then nodded quickly. Then she whispered: “You’re not mad at me?”

“I thought you were mad at me.”

She put her thumb up and giggled. “I’m not.” When she giggled I didn’t like her any more. I looked around. A target hung on a tree about thirty feet away, with some darts sticking to it. There were three or four more on the stone bench where she had been sitting.

“For people with money you and your sister don’t seem to have much fun,” I said.

She looked at me under her long lashes. This was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back. I said: “You like throwing those darts?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That reminds me of something.” I looked back towards the house. By moving about three feet I made a tree hide me from it. I took her little pearl-handled gun out of my pocket. “I brought you back your artillery. I cleaned it and loaded it up. Take my tip—don’t shoot it at people, unless you get to be a better shot. Remember?”

Her face went paler and her thin thumb dropped. She looked at me, then at the gun I was holding. There was a fascination in her eyes. “Yes,” she said, and nodded. Then suddenly: “Teach me to shoot.”

“Huh?”

“Teach me how to shoot. I’d like that.”

“Here? It’s against the law.”

She came close to me and took the gun out of my hand, cuddled her hand around the butt. Then she tucked it quickly inside her slacks, almost with a furtive movement, and looked around.

“I know where,” she said in a secret voice. “Down by some of the old wells.” She pointed off down the hill. “Teach me?”

I looked into her slaty blue eyes. I might as well have looked at a couple of bottle-tops. “All right. Give me back the gun until I see if the place looks all right.”

She smiled and made a mouth, then handed it back with a secret naughty air, as if she was giving me a key to her room. We walked up the steps and around to my car. The gardens seemed deserted. The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile. We got into the car and I drove down the sunken driveway and out through the gates.

“Where’s Vivian?” I asked.

“Not up yet.” She giggled.

I drove on down the hill through the quiet opulent streets with their faces washed by the rain, bore east to La Brea, then south. We reached the place she meant in about ten minutes.

“In there.” She leaned out of the window and pointed.

It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. A wide five-barred gate was folded back against a stump and looked as if it hadn’t been shut in years. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. It was empty and sunny now, but not yet dusty. The rain had been too hard and too recent. I followed the ruts along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained, motionless walking-beam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over a branch. I could see the rusty old steel cable that connected this walking-beam with a half a dozen others. The beams didn’t move, probably hadn’t moved for a year. The wells were no longer pumping. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight.

“Are they going to make a park of all this?” I asked.

She dipped her chin down and gleamed at me.

“It’s about time. The smell of that sump would poison a herd of goats. This the place you had in mind?”

“Uh-huh. Like it?”

“It’s beautiful.” I pulled up beside the loading platform. We got out. I listened. The hum of the traffic was a distant web of sound, like the buzzing of bees. The place was as lonely as a churchyard. Even after the rain the tall eucalyptus trees still looked dusty. They always look dusty. A branch broken off by the wind had fallen over the edge of the sump and the flat leathery leaves dangled in the water.

I walked around the sump and looked into the pump-house. There was some junk in it, nothing that looked like recent activity. Outside a big wooden bull wheel was tilted against the wall. It looked like a good place all right.

I went back to the car. The girl stood beside it preening her hair and holding it out in the sun. “Gimme,” she said, and held her hand out.

I took the gun out and put it in her palm. I bent down and picked up a rusty can.

“Take it easy now,” I said. “It’s loaded in all five. I’ll go over and set this can in that square opening in the middle of that big wooden wheel. See?” I pointed. She ducked her head, delighted. “That’s about thirty feet. Don’t start shooting until I get back beside you. Okey?”

“Okey,” she giggled.

I went back around the sump and set the can up in the middle of the bull wheel. It made a swell target. If she missed the can, which she was certain to do, she would probably hit the wheel. That would stop a small slug completely. However, she wasn’t going to hit even that.

I went back towards her around the sump. When I was about ten feet from her, at the edge of the sump, she showed me all her sharp little teeth and brought the gun up and started to hiss.

I stopped dead, the sump water stagnant and stinking at my back.

“Stand there, you son of a bitch,” she said.

The gun pointed at my chest. Her hand seemed to be quite steady. The hissing sound grew louder and her face had the scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.

I laughed at her. I started to walk towards her. I saw her small finger tighten on the trigger and grow white at the tip. I was about six feet away from her when she started to shoot.

The sound of the gun made a sharp slap, without body, a brittle crack in the sunlight. I didn’t see any smoke. I stopped again and grinned at her.

She fired twice more, very quickly. I don’t think any of the shots would have missed. There were five in the little gun. She had fired four. I rushed her.

I didn’t want the last one in my face, so I swerved to one side. She gave it to me quite carefully, not worried at all. I think I felt the hot breath of the powder blast a little.

I straightened up. “My, but you’re cute,” I said.

Her hand holding the empty gun began to shake violently. The gun fell out of it. Her mouth began to shake. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up towards her left ear and froth showed on her lips. Her breath made a whining sound. She swayed.

I caught her as she fell. She was already unconscious. I pried her teeth open with both hands and stuffed a wadded handkerchief in between them. It took all my strength to do it. I lifted her up and got her into the car, then went back for the gun and dropped it into my pocket. I climbed in under the wheel, backed the car and drove back the way we had come along the rutted road, out of the gateway, back up the hill and so home.

Carmen lay crumpled in the corner of the car, without motion. I was halfway up the drive to the house before she stirred. Then her eyes suddenly opened wide and wild. She sat up.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“Nothing. Why?”

“Oh, yes it did,” she giggled. “I wet myself.”

“They always do,” I said.

She looked at me with a sudden sick speculation and began to moan.

THIRTY-TWO

The gentle-eyed, horse-faced maid let me into the long gray and white upstairs sitting room with the ivory drapes tumbled extravagantly on the floor and the white carpet from wall to wall. A screen star’s boudoir, a place of charm and seduction, artificial as a wooden leg. It was empty at the moment. The door closed behind me with the unnatural softness of a hospital door. A breakfast table on wheels stood by the chaise-longue. Its silver glittered. There were cigarette ashes in the coffee cup. I sat down and waited.

It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

She went past me in long smooth strides and sat down on the edge of the chaise-longue. There was a cigarette in her lips, at the corner of her mouth. Her nails today were copper red from quick to tip, without half moons.

“So you’re just a brute after all,” she said quietly, staring at me. “An utter callous brute. You killed a man last night. Never mind how I heard it. I heard it. And now you have to come out here and frighten my kid sister into a fit.”

I didn’t say a word. She began to fidget. She moved over to a slipper chair and put her head back against a white cushion that lay along the back of the chair against the wall. She blew pale gray smoke upwards and watched it float towards the ceiling and come apart in wisps that were for a little while distinguishable from the air and then melted and were nothing. Then very slowly she lowered her eyes and gave me a cool hard glance.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I’m thankful as hell one of us kept his head the night before last. It’s bad enough to have a bootlegger in my past. Why don’t you for Christ’s sake say something?”

“How is she?”

“Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. Fast asleep. She always goes to sleep. What did you do to her?”

“Not a thing. I came out of the house after seeing your father and she was out in front. She had been throwing darts at a target on a tree. I went down to speak to her because I had something that belonged to her. A little revolver Owen Taylor gave her once. She took it over to Brody’s place the other evening, the evening he was killed. I had to take it away from her there. I didn’t mention it, so perhaps you didn’t know it.”

The black Sternwood eyes got large and empty. It was her turn not to say anything.

“She was pleased to get her little gun back and she wanted me to teach her how to shoot and she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money. So we went down there and the place was pretty creepy, all rusted metal and old wood and silent wells and greasy scummy sumps. Maybe that upset her. I guess you’ve been there yourself. It was kind of eerie.”

“Yes—it is.” It was a small breathless voice now.

“So we went in there and I stuck a can up in a bull wheel for her to pop at. She threw a wingding. Looked like a mild epileptic fit to me.”

“Yes.” The same minute voice. “She has them once in a while. Is that all you wanted to see me about?”

“I guess you still wouldn’t tell me what Eddie Mars has on you.”

“Nothing at all. And I’m getting a little tired of that question,” she said coldly.

“Do you know a man named Canino?”

She drew her fine black brows together in thought. “Vaguely. I seem to remember the name.”

“Eddie Mars’ trigger man. A tough hombre, they said. I guess he was. Without a little help from a lady I’d be where he is—in the morgue.”

“The ladies seem to—” She stopped dead and whitened. “I can’t joke about it,” she said simply.

“I’m not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it just seems that way. It all ties together—everything. Geiger and his cute little blackmail tricks, Brody and his pictures, Eddie Mars and his roulette tables, Canino and the girl Rusty Regan didn’t run away with. It all ties together.”

“I’m afraid I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Suppose you did—it would be something like this. Geiger got his hooks into your sister, which isn’t very difficult, and got some notes from her and tried to blackmail your father with them, in a nice way. Eddie Mars was behind Geiger, protecting him and using him for a cat’s-paw. Your father sent for me instead of paying up, which showed he wasn’t scared about anything. Eddie Mars wanted to know that. He had something on you and he wanted to know if he had it on the General too. If he had, he could collect a lot of money in a hurry. If not, he would have to wait until you got your share of the family fortune, and in the meantime be satisfied with whatever spare cash he could take away from you across the roulette table. Geiger was killed by Owen Taylor, who was in love with your silly little sister and didn’t like the kind of games Geiger played with her. That didn’t mean anything to Eddie. He was playing a deeper game than Geiger knew anything about, or than Brody knew anything about, or anybody except you and Eddie and a tough guy named Canino. Your husband disappeared and Eddie, knowing everybody knew there had been bad blood between him and Regan, hid his wife out at Realito and put Canino to guard her, so that it would look as if she had run away with Regan. He even got Regan’s car into the garage of the place where Mona Mars had been living. But that sounds a little silly taken merely as an attempt to divert suspicion that Eddie had killed your husband or had him killed. It isn’t so silly, really. He had another motive. He was playing for a million or so. He knew where Regan had gone and why and he didn’t want the police to have to find out. He wanted them to have an explanation of the disappearance that would keep them satisfied. Am I boring you?”

“You tire me,” she said in a dead, exhausted voice. “God, how you tire me!”

“I’m sorry. I’m not just fooling around trying to be clever. Your father offered me a thousand dollars this morning to find Regan. That’s a lot of money to me, but I can’t do it.”

Her mouth jumped open. Her breath was suddenly strained and harsh. “Give me a cigarette,” she said thickly. “Why?” The pulse in her throat had begun to throb.

I gave her a cigarette and lit a match and held it for her. She drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out raggedly and then the cigarette seemed to be forgotten between her fingers. She never drew on it again.

“Well, the Missing Persons Bureau can’t find him,” I said. “It’s not so easy. What they can’t do it’s not likely that I can do.”

“Oh.” There was a shade of relief in her voice.

“That’s one reason. The Missing Persons people think he just disappeared on purpose, pulled down the curtain, as they call it. They don’t think Eddie Mars did away with him.”

“Who said anybody did away with him?”

“We’re coming to it,” I said.

For a brief instant her face seemed to come to pieces, to become merely a set of features without form or control. Her mouth looked like the prelude to a scream. But only for an instant. The Sternwood blood had to be good for something more than her black eyes and her recklessness.

I stood up and took the smoking cigarette from between her fingers and killed it in an ashtray. Then I took Carmen’s little gun out of my pocket and laid it carefully, with exaggerated care, on her white satin knee. I balanced it there, and stepped back with my head on one side like a window-dresser getting the effect of a new twist of a scarf around a dummy’s neck.

I sat down again. She didn’t move. Her eyes came down millimeter by millimeter and looked at the gun.

“It’s harmless,” I said. “All five chambers empty. She fired them all. She fired them all at me.”

The pulse jumped wildly in her throat. Her voice tried to say something and couldn’t. She swallowed.

“From a distance of five or six feet,” I said. “Cute little thing, isn’t she? Too bad I had loaded the gun with blanks.” I grinned nastily. “I had a hunch about what she would do—if she got the chance.”

She brought her voice back from a long way off. “You’re a horrible man,” she said. “Horrible.”

“Yeah. You’re her big sister. What are you going to do about it?”

“You can’t prove a word of it.”

“Can’t prove what?”

“That she fired at you. You said you were down there around the wells with her, alone. You can’t prove a word of what you say.”

“Oh that,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of trying. I was thinking of another time—when the shells in the little gun had bullets in them.”

Her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness.

“I was thinking of the day Regan disappeared,” I said. “Late in the afternoon. When he took her down to those old wells to teach her to shoot and put up a can somewhere and told her to pop at it and stood near her while she shot. And she didn’t shoot at the can. She turned the gun and shot him, just the way she tried to shoot me today, and for the same reason.”

She moved a little and the gun slid off her knee and fell to the floor. It was one of the loudest sounds I ever heard. Her eyes were riveted on my face. Her voice was a stretched whisper of agony. “Carmen! . . . Merciful God, Carmen! . . . Why?”

“Do I really have to tell you why she shot at me?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were still terrible. “I’m—I’m afraid you do.”

“Night before last when I got home she was in my apartment. She’d kidded the manager into letting her in to wait for me. She was in my bed—naked. I threw her out on her ear. I guess maybe Regan did the same thing to her sometime. But you can’t do that to Carmen.”

She drew her lips back and made a half-hearted attempt to lick them. It made her, for a brief instant, look like a frightened child. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up slowly like an artificial hand worked by wires and its fingers closed slowly and stiffly around the white fur at her collar. They drew the fur tight against her throat. After that she just sat staring.

“Money,” she croaked. “I suppose you want money.”

“How much money?” I tried not to sneer.

“Fifteen thousand dollars?”

I nodded. “That would be about right. That would be the established fee. That was what he had in his pockets when she shot him. That would be what Mr. Canino got for disposing of the body when you went to Eddie Mars for help. But that would be small change to what Eddie expects to collect one of these days, wouldn’t it?”

“You son of a bitch!” she said.

“Uh-huh. I’m a very smart guy. I haven’t a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals, I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up. I do all this for twenty-five bucks a day—and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many nice girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers. And that makes me a son of a bitch. All right. I don’t care anything about that. I’ve been called that by people of all sizes and shapes, including your little sister. She called me worse than that for not getting into bed with her. I got five hundred dollars from your father, which I didn’t ask for, but he can afford to give it to me. I can get another thousand for finding Mr. Rusty Regan, if I could find him. Now you offer me fifteen grand. That makes me a big shot. With fifteen grand I could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes. I might even take a vacation without worrying about losing a case. That’s fine. What are you offering it to me for? Can I go on being a son of a bitch, or do I have to become a gentleman, like that lush that passed out in his car the other night?”

She was as silent as a stone woman.

“All right,” I went on heavily. “Will you take her away? Somewhere far off from here where they can handle her type, where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her? Hell, she might even get herself cured, you know. It’s been done.”

She got up and walked slowly to the windows. The drapes lay in heavy ivory folds beside her feet. She stood among the folds and looked out, towards the quiet darkish foothills. She stood motionless, almost blending into the drapes. Her hands hung loose at her sides. Utterly motionless hands. She turned and came back along the room and walked past me blindly. When she was behind me she caught her breath sharply and spoke.

“He’s in the sump,” she said. “A horrible decayed thing. I did it. I did just what you said. I went to Eddie Mars. She came home and told me about it, just like a child. She’s not normal. I knew the police would get it all out of her. In a little while she would even brag about it. And if dad knew, he would call them instantly and tell them the whole story. And sometime in that night he would die. It’s not his dying—it’s what he would be thinking just before he died. Rusty wasn’t a bad fellow. I didn’t love him. He was all right, I guess. He just didn’t mean anything to me, one way or another, alive or dead, compared with keeping it from dad.”

“So you let her run around loose,” I said, “getting into other jams.”

“I was playing for time. Just for time. I played the wrong way, of course. I thought she might even forget it herself. I’ve heard they do forget what happens in those fits. Maybe she has forgotten it. I knew Eddie Mars would bleed me white, but I didn’t care. I had to have help and I could only get it from somebody like him There have been times when I hardly believed it all myself. And other times when I had to get drunk quickly—whatever time of day it was. Awfully damn quickly.”

“You’ll take her away,” I said. “And do that awfully damn quickly.”

She still had her back to me. She said softly now: “What about you?”

“Nothing about me. I’m leaving. I’ll give you three days. If you’re gone by then—okey. If you’re not, out it comes. And don’t think I don’t mean that.”

She turned suddenly. “I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know how to begin.”