Perchance to Dream (16 page)

    Blondie appeared at the door as soon as she went through it.

    "Take somebody, drive her home. Stay with her."

    Blondie disappeared.

    The club was silent, the way night places are in the day. Mars reached into a desk drawer and took out a short-barreled Colt .45 and put it on his desk. He put a box of shells beside it.

    "You got a theory on all this?" he said.

    I sat across the desk from him and crossed my legs and tossed my foot a minute.

    "I figure Carmen's an accident." I said. "I figure the issue is some kind of trick that's happening between Neville Valley and Rancho Springs. Somebody's buying water rights up in Neville Valley where there's a government irrigation project in the works. And they're buying real estate in a place called Rancho Springs- which doesn't have any springs-in the desert east of Pasadena."

    "You got a thought who that might be, soldier?"

    "I'm getting to that," I said. "I figure that the plan is to divert the water from Neville Valley to Rancho Springs and get rich selling fertile land which they bought for nothing when it was dust bowl."

    "Two hundred miles?" Mars said.

    "Sure," I said. "I've done a little reading. The Los Angeles aqueduct runs that long, down from Owens Valley."

    "So they buy cheap land, steal some water to fertilize it, and sell it expensive," Mars said.

    I nodded. "I figure Bonsentir's in it, and Simpson's in it. This kind of deal needs a lot of bankroll. And I figure they have bribed the government people doing the water development in Neville Valley, and I figure they own the law in Rancho Springs. Couple of desert cops chased me out of there the other day."

    "People been sort of unfriendly toward you," Mars said.

    "I'm used to it," I said. "So they have this sweet deal all locked up and under control and then I come along, Marlowe the snoop, looking for Carmen Sternwood and everyone has a swivet for fear that I'll stumble onto the Neville Valley scheme."

    "So why didn't somebody just dump you?" Mars said. He took a silk show handkerchief out of his breast pocket, refolded it carefully, and put it back in his breast pocket.

    "They thought they could scare me off. A murder attracts too much attention."

    "So why didn't somebody give Carmen back? You say you think Simpson's got her," Mars said.

    "Hard to figure that," I said. "It may have something to do with Simpson being such a twisted gee. He's so rich he may not think like you and me, Eddie."

    "And he's wired," Mars said.

    "Very," I said. "His protection has got protection. I think he thinks he can do anything he wants without consequences."

    "He can't beat up my girl," Mars said.

    There wasn't anything there for me to talk about. I let it slide.

    "Thing that doesn't fit is the murder. And maybe it doesn't fit, maybe it's just a random thing that's not connected to the rest."

    "The hack murder?"

    "Yeah. The Sternwood phone number was on a matchbook in her purse."

    "I read about it," Mars said. "Didn't mention any names in the paper."

    "Sternwoods got a little juice themselves," I said.

    "You figure it was Carmen gave her the number?"

    "I don't know. I don't know anything about the murder. I wish it weren't in here at all, it muddies everything up."

    "A sweet deal like that," Mars said. "They're not going to let you push them off it."

    "True."

    "There's maybe fifty, maybe a hundred million dollars you could make in that kind of a deal."

    "Yeah."

    "They'll kill you if they have to," Mars said. "I would."

    "It's been tried," I said. "One of yours tried."

    Mars nodded thoughtfully.

    "I don't care about you, soldier," he said. "But to take them off Vivian's back, we're going to have to bust this deal for them, I think."

    "I think so," I said. "And we're going to have to find Carmen."

    "Little Miss Hotpants," Mars said and shook his head. "You'd do her sister a favor if you buried her."

    "Wasn't hired to do that," I said.

    "Maybe you could be hired to forget it," Mars said.

    "You know better, Eddie," I said.

    "Yeah," he said. "You're not smart, soldier. But I'll give you that you're stubborn. So we find Carmen too."

    I nodded. Me and Eddie Mars. Partners. A couple of pals. Two smart boys side by side. Mars and Marlowe. Marlowe and Mars. Had a nice ring to it. I felt like I ought to go home and gargle. Which I did.

    

    

    I was in my office, with my coat off and my tie down, drinking a shot of rye from a water glass and thinking about whether to have another one or go to dinner, when Bernie Ohls came in.

    "Cocktail hour?" he said.

    "Sure," I said. "I settle in, drink a couple of these, and tell myself about my day. It's very convivial."

    "Want to come to the morgue and look at a body?"

    "What could be nicer," I said.

    Ohls had the siren on all the way downtown through the rush-hour traffic.

    "Corpse in a hurry?" I said.

    "What's the point of being a cop if you can't use the siren?" Ohls said. "It's the only fringe benefit."

    The L. A. County morgue was cool and dim and pleasant on a hot day. Our footsteps were loud as we followed the attendant along the stacked rows of pull-out storage drawers, like filing cabinets for the dead. The body the morgue attendant pulled out was an old woman, with white hair, and her head twisted at an odd angle. It was an old woman I knew. Maybe she could see her house now.

    "Mrs. Swayze," I said.

    "She fit your description," Ohls said.

    "Broken neck?"

    "ME hasn't seen her yet," Ohls said. "But that's what it looks like."

    "Where'd you find her?"

    "Off the coast highway," Ohls said.

    "Figure she was killed elsewhere and dumped?" I said.

    "We don't know she was killed," Ohls said. "She could have fallen."

    "Come on, Bernie," I said, "you been a cop too long to believe that. She's a patient at Resthaven, a witness in Carmen Sternwood's disappearance, when we want to question her she's gone. Now she turns up dead, the second person with a Sternwood connection to do so."

    "Sure," Ohls said. "But I also been a cop long enough to wait for the coroner to tell me what he knows."

    "And what about the sanitarium?"

    "What about it? We got not one piece of evidence that Bonsentir's not clean as toothpaste. Two people he claims he discharged turn out to be problems-maybe. Can we close him down because of that?"

    "He's dirty as hell," I said.

    "Sure," Ohls said. "You know it and I know it. Can you convince a DA? A judge? A jury? You know the answer to that, Marlowe."

    "Okay I put her away?" the morgue attendant said.

    Ohls nodded. The drawer slid silently shut on an oiled track.

    Ohls and I left her there and headed back outside where life was on going and the sun was the color of old brass in the late afternoon sky.

    The traffic had thinned by then and Ohls left the siren off and let the car cruise with the traffic flow back toward Hollywood.

    "Got something else for you to chew on, Marlowe," Ohls said.

    I had my hat tilted forward over my eyes to keep the setting sun out, and was leaning back against the seat feeling older than Mount Rainier.

    "Yeah?"

    "Lola Monforte," Ohls said. "The dismembered stiff in the canyon."

    "Yeah."

    "Told you she used to be an actress, we turned up a guy used to be her agent. Says she was trouble, a boozer and a nympho."

    "Something else?" I said.

    "Said she spent some time at Resthaven, getting a few of the kinks straightened out."

    I stayed perfectly still under my hat brim. Ohls and I were both silent. Ohls bore left at the V where Hollywood runs off of Sunset.

    "We figure that's the Sternwood connection," Ohls said. "Pals, a little girl talk about their mutual hobby, 'call me, honey, when you get out,' she writes the number in a matchbook."

    "I suppose she was cured and discharged too," I said.

    "Surprise, surprise," Ohls said.

    "And you're not going to close him down?" I said.

    "We're kind of hoping you'll find us something, Marlowe, help us do that."

    I felt something icy move in the pit of my stomach. Where was Carmen?

    "Sure," I said from under my hat brim. "Glad to."

    

    

    My building was empty and my office was dark. I sat alone in it nursing a drink, staring out the open window at the hot California night. Below me on the boulevard fast cars roared up and down The Strip, double-clutching sometimes to make the engines roar. The neon splashed its bright colors upward and across my office, making bright shifting patterns in the unlit room. Some of the patterns were bright red like blood splattering on my walls.

    Everywhere I looked in this case there was Dr. Bonsentir, and lurking behind him, getting more sinister each time his shadow fell, was Randolph Simpson. Randolph Simpson, the man with the money, the man with the power, the man with the twisted sexual appetites. Carmen was supposed to be with him and I was supposed to get her back. After that it got tricky.

    Simpson had to be involved in the water rights swindle. It was a swindle that took big money. It was a swindle that required a lot of people to be bought off, or scared off, or both. And it required a guy to run it that didn't worry about eight or ten thousand people up in the Neville Valley whose lives would dry up and blow away as a result of the swindle.

    The smell of gasoline exhaust drifted up through my open window, and of food being fried. More faintly came the hint of hibiscus, and bougainvillea, and the acrid perfume of eucalyptus. And barely discernible, almost obliterated by the gasoline fumes and cooking smells, was the scent of the ocean to the west as it came lumbering in from Asia. I felt old and tired and gritty, as if I'd been wrestling in a gravel pit.

    I thought about dinner. It had no appeal. I thought about Vivian with her face bruised and her soul tangled in the dark tragedy of her family, and about the way her lips had felt, and the way her body had arched so strongly toward me that night in her bedroom. And I thought about Rusty Regan, whom I'd never met and who had gone a long ways quite a while ago to the place where Lola Monforte had gone, and Mrs. Swayze. Was it a peaceful sleep, I wondered, or did they dream? And if they did, what dreams? Nightmares? And when I went to sleep the Big Sleep would I have nightmares too? If I did, one of them would be the day Carmen asked me to teach her to shoot the little gun I'd taken from her when she tried to send Joe Brody over.

    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 even going to hit that I went back toward 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 toward 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 violently. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up toward 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 and got her into the car, then went back for the gun and dropped it in 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.

    I got up and poured the rest of my drink down the sink and rinsed the glass. I turned back my cuffs and splashed cold water on my face and toweled dry. I went to the window and shut it and turned and left the office and went home to the Hobart Arms to try and sleep.