The Big Sleep (4 page)

EIGHT

There was dim light behind narrow leaded panes in the side door of the Sternwood mansion. I stopped the Packard under the porte-cochere and emptied my pockets out on the seat. The girl snored in the corner, her hat tilted rakishly over her nose, her hands hanging limp in the folds of the raincoat. I got out and rang the bell. Steps came slowly, as if from a long dreary distance. The door opened and the straight, silvery butler looked out at me. The light from the hall made a halo of his hair.

He said: “Good evening, sir,” politely and looked past me at the Packard. His eyes came back to look at my eyes.

“Is Mrs. Regan in?”

“No, sir.”

“The General is asleep, I hope?”

“Yes. The evening is his best time for sleeping.”

“How about Mrs. Regan’s maid?”

“Mathilda? She’s here, sir.”

“Better get her down here. The job needs the woman’s touch. Take a look in the car and you’ll see why.”

He took a look in the car. He came back. “I see,” he said. “I’ll get Mathilda.”

“Mathilda will do right by her,” I said.

“We all try to do right by her,” he said.

“I guess you have had practice,” I said.

He let that one go. “Well, good-night,” I said. “I’m leaving it in your hands.”

“Very good, sir. May I call you a cab?”

“Positively,” I said, “not. As a matter of fact I’m not here. You’re just seeing things.”

He smiled then. He gave me a duck of his head and I turned and walked down the driveway and out of the gates.

Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rain-swept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows high on the hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest. I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windbreaker sat hunched on a stool, inside the steamed glass, reading a paper. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi. And taxi drivers remember.

I made it back to Geiger’s house in something over half an hour of nimble walking. There was nobody there, no car on the street except my own car in front of the next house. It looked as dismal as a lost dog. I dug my bottle of rye out of it and poured half of what was left down my throat and got inside to light a cigarette. I smoked half of it, threw it away, got out again and went down to Geiger’s. I unIocked the door and stepped into the still warm darkness and stood there, dripping quietly on the floor and listening to the rain. I groped to a lamp and lit it.

The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of embroidered silk were gone from the wall. I hadn’t counted them, but the spaces of brown plaster stood out naked and obvious. I went a little farther and put another lamp on. I looked at the totem pole. At its foot, beyond the margin of the Chinese rug, on the bare floor another rug had been spread. It hadn’t been there before. Geiger’s body had. Geiger’s body was gone.

That froze me. I pulled my lips back against my teeth and leered at the glass eye in the totem pole. I went through the house again. Everything was exactly as it had been. Geiger wasn’t in his flounced bed or under it or in his closet. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. That left the locked door on the right of the hall. One of Geiger’s keys fitted the lock. The room inside was interesting, but Geiger wasn’t in it. It was interesting because it was so different from Geiger’s room. It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man’s toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks. The bed was narrow and looked hard and had a maroon batik cover. The room felt cold. I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole. I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door. I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged. Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

It wasn’t the law. They would have been there still, just about getting warmed up with their pieces of string and chalk and their cameras and dusting powders and their nickel cigars. They would have been very much there. It wasn’t the killer. He had left too fast. He must have seen the girl. He couldn’t be sure she was too batty to see him. He would be on his way to distant places. I couldn’t guess the answer, but it was all right with me if somebody wanted Geiger missing instead of just murdered. It gave me a chance to find out if I could tell it leaving Carmen Sternwood out. I locked up again, choked my car to life and rode off home to a shower, dry clothes and a late dinner. After that I sat around in the apartment and drank too much hot toddy trying to crack the code in Geiger’s blue indexed notebook. All I could be sure of was that it was a list of names and addresses, probably of the customers. There were over four hundred of them. That made it a nice racket, not to mention any blackmail angles, and there were probably plenty of those. Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer. I didn’t envy the police their job when it was handed to them.

I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.

NINE

The next morning was bright, clear and sunny. I woke up with a motorman’s glove in my mouth, drank two cups of coffee and went through the morning papers. I didn’t find any reference to Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger in either of them. I was shaking the wrinkles out of my damp suit when the phone rang. It was Bernie Ohls, the D.A.’s chief investigator, who had given me the lead to General Sternwood.

“Well, how’s the boy?” he began. He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.

“I’ve got a hangover,” I said.

“Tsk, tsk.” He laughed absently and then his voice became a shade too casual, a cagey cop voice. “Seen General Sternwood yet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Done anything for him?”

“Too much rain,” I answered, if that was an answer.

“They seem to be a family things happen to. A big Buick belonging to one of them is washing about in the surf off Lido fish pier.”

I held the telephone tight enough to crack it. I also held my breath.

“Yeah,” Ohls said cheerfully. “A nice new Buick sedan all messed up with sand and sea water. . . . Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a guy inside it.”

I let my breath out so slowly that it hung on my lip. “Regan?” I asked.

“Huh? Who? Oh, you mean the ex-legger the eldest girl picked up and went and married. I never saw him. What would he be doing down there?”

“Quit stalling. What would anybody be doing down there?”

“I don’t know, pal. I’m dropping down to look see. Want to go along?”

“Yes.”

“Snap it up,” he said. “I’ll be in my hutch.”

Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the Hall of Justice in less than an hour. I rode up to the seventh floor and went along to the group of small offices used by the D.A.’s men. Ohls’ was no larger than the others, but he had it to himself. There was nothing on his desk but a blotter, a cheap pen set, his hat and one of his feet. He was a medium-sized blondish man with stiff white eyebrows, calm eyes and well-kept teeth. He looked like anybody you would pass on the street. I happened to know he had killed nine men—three of them when he was covered, or somebody thought he was.

He stood up and pocketed a flat tin of toy cigars called Entractes, jiggled the one in his mouth up and down and looked at me carefully along his nose, with his head thrown back.

“It’s not Regan,” he said. “I checked. Regan’s a big guy, as tall as you and a shade heavier. This is a young kid.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What made Regan skip out?” Ohls asked. “You interested in that?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“When a guy out of the liquor traffic marries into a rich family and then waves good-bye to a pretty dame and a couple million legitimate bucks—that’s enough to make even me think. I guess you thought that was a secret.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okey, keep buttoned, kid. No hard feelings.” He came around the desk tapping his pockets and reaching for his hat.

“I’m not looking for Regan,” I said.

He fixed the lock on his door and we went down to the official parking lot and got into a small blue sedan. We drove out Sunset, using the siren once in a while to beat a signal. It was a crisp morning, with just enough snap in the air to make life seem simple and sweet, if you didn’t have too much on your mind. I had.

It was thirty miles to Lido on the coast highway, the first ten of them through traffic. Ohls made the run in three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a faded stucco arch and I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out. A long pier railed with white two-by-fours stretched seaward from the arch. A knot of people leaned out at the far end and a motorcycle officer stood under the arch keeping another group of people from going out on the pier. Cars were parked on both sides of the highway, the usual ghouls, of both sexes. Ohls showed the motorcycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night’s hard rain hadn’t even dented.

“There she is—on the power barge,” Ohls said, pointing with one of his toy cigars.

A low black barge with a wheelhouse like a tug’s was crouched against the pilings at the end of the pier. Something that glistened in the morning sunlight was on its deck, with hoist chains still around it, a large black and chromium car. The arm of the hoist had been swung back into position and lowered to deck level. Men stood around the car. We went down slippery steps to the deck.

Ohls said hello to a deputy in green khaki and a man in plain clothes. The barge crew of three men leaned against the front of the wheelhouse and chewed tobacco. One of them was rubbing at his wet hair with a dirty bath-towel. That would be the man who had gone down into the water to put the chains on.

We looked the car over. The front bumper was bent, one headlight smashed, the other bent up but the glass still unbroken. The radiator shell had a big dent in it, and the paint and nickel were scratched up all over the car. The upholstery was sodden and black. None of the tires seemed to be damaged.

The driver was still draped around the steering post with his head at an unnatural angle to his shoulders. He was a slim dark-haired kid who had been good-looking not so long ago. Now his face was bluish white and his eyes were a faint dull gleam under the lowered lids and his open mouth had sand in it. On the left side of his forehead there was a dull bruise that stood out against the whiteness of the skin.

Ohls backed away, made a noise in his throat and put a match to his little cigar. “What’s the story?”

The uniformed man pointed up at the rubbernecks on the end of the pier. One of them was fingering a place where the white two-by-fours had been broken through in a wide space. The splintered wood showed yellow and clean, like fresh-cut pine.

“Went through there. Must have hit pretty hard. The rain stopped early down here, around nine p.m. The broken wood’s dry inside. That puts it after the rain stopped. She fell in plenty of water not to be banged up worse, not more than half tide or she’d have drifted farther, and not more than half tide going out or she’d have crowded the piles. That makes it around ten last night. Maybe nine-thirty, not earlier. She shows under the water when the boys come down to fish this morning, so we get the barge to hoist her out and we find the dead guy.”

The plainclothesman scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. Ohls looked sideways along his eyes at me, and twitched his little cigar like a cigarette.

“Drunk?” he asked, of nobody in particular.

The man who had been toweling his head went over to the rail and cleared his throat in a loud hawk that made everybody look at him. “Got some sand,” he said, and spat. “Not as much as the boy friend got—but some.”

The uniformed man said: “Could have been drunk. Showing off all alone in the rain. Drunks will do anything.”

“Drunk, hell,” the plainclothesman said. “The hand throttle’s set halfway down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.”

Ohls looked at the man with the towel. “What do you think, buddy?”

The man with the towel looked flattered. He grinned. “I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide. First off the guy plowed an awful straight furrow down that pier. You can read his tread marks all the way nearly. That puts it after the rain like the Sheriff said. Then he hit the pier hard and clean or he don’t go through and land right side up. More likely turned over a couple of times. So he had plenty of speed and hit the rail square. That’s more than half-throttle. He could have done that with his hand falling and he could have hurt his head falling too.”

Ohls said: “You got eyes, buddy. Frisked him?” he asked the deputy. The deputy looked at me, then at the crew against the wheelhouse. “Okey, save that,” Ohls said.

A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came down the steps from the pier. He picked out a fairly clean spot on the deck and put the bag down. Then he took his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck and stared out to sea, as if he didn’t know where he was or what he had come for.

Ohls said: “There’s your customer, Doc. Dove off the pier last night. Around nine to ten. That’s all we know.”

The small man looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, peered at the bruise on the temple, moved the head around with both hands, felt the man’s ribs. He lifted a lax dead hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall and watched it fall. He stepped back and opened his bag and took out a printed pad of D.O.A. forms and began to write over a carbon.

“Broken neck’s the apparent cause of death,” he said, writing. “Which means there won’t be much water in him. Which means he’s due to start getting stiff pretty quick now he’s out in the air. Better get him out of the car before he does. You won’t like doing it after.”

Ohls nodded. “How long dead, Doc?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Ohls looked at him sharply and took the little cigar out of his mouth and looked at that sharply. “Pleased to know you, Doc. A coroner’s man that can’t guess within five minutes has me beat.”

The little man grinned sourly and put his pad in his bag and clipped his pencil back on his vest. “If he ate dinner last night, I’ll tell you—if I know what time he ate it. But not within five minutes.”

“How would he get that bruise—falling?”

The little man looked at the bruise again. “I don’t think so. That blow came from something covered. And it had already bled subcutaneously while he was alive.”

“Blackjack, huh?”

“Very likely.”

The little M.E.’s man nodded, picked his bag off the deck and went back up the steps to the pier. An ambulance was backing into position outside the stucco arch. Ohls looked at me and said: “Let’s go. Hardly worth the ride, was it?”

We went back along the pier and got into Ohls’ sedan again. He wrestled it around on the highway and drove back towards town along a three-lane highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with pink moss. Seaward a few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf and far out a white yacht looked as if it was hanging in the sky.

Ohls cocked his chin at me and said: “Know him?”

“Sure. The Sternwood chauffeur. I saw him dusting that very car out there yesterday.”

“I don’t want to crowd you, Marlowe. Just tell me, did the job have anything to do with him?”

“No. I don’t even know his name.”

“Owen Taylor. How do I know? Funny about that. About a year or so back we had him in the cooler on a Mann Act rap. It seems he run Sternwood’s hotcha daughter, the young one, off to Yuma. The sister ran after them and brought them back and had Owen heaved into the icebox. Then next day she comes down to the D.A. and gets him to beg the kid off with the U. S. ’cutor. She says the kid meant to marry her sister and wanted to, only the sister can’t see it. All
she
wanted was to kick a few high ones off the bar and have herself a party. So we let the kid go and then darned if they don’t have him come back to work. And a little later we get the routine report on his prints from Washington, and he’s got a prior back in Indiana, attempted hold-up six years ago. He got off with six months in the county jail, the very one Dillinger bust out of. We hand that to the Sternwoods and they keep him on just the same. What do you think of that?”

“They seem to be a screwy family,” I said. “Do they know about last night?”

“No. I gotta go up against them now.”

“Leave the old man out of it, if you can.”

“Why?”

“He has enough troubles and he’s sick.”

“You mean Regan?”

I scowled. “I don’t know anything about Regan, I told you. I’m not looking for Regan. Regan hasn’t bothered anybody that I know of.”

Ohls said: “Oh,” and stared thoughtfully out to sea and the sedan nearly went off the road. For the rest of the drive back to town he hardly spoke. He dropped me off in Hollywood near the Chinese Theater and turned back west to Alta Brea Crescent. I ate lunch at a counter and looked at an afternoon paper and couldn’t find anything about Geiger in it.

After lunch I walked east on the boulevard to have another look at Geiger’s store.