Perchance to Dream (17 page)

    If I dreamed I don't remember.

    

    

    When I got to my office in the morning, my phone was ringing. When I answered, it was Pauline Snow.

    "Marlowe," she said. "I don't know if it means anything but there's a desert rat out here, says he's found a murder site near Randolph Simpson's place. The old fool's drunk most of the time, and I'm not sure but what he sees things."

    "What makes him think it's a murder site?" I said.

    "He says there's blood all over the place."

    "Hang up and look out the window," I said. "You'll see me parking my car."

    

    

    When I got there, Pauline Snow had made a pitcher of iced tea and we sat in the newspaper office and had some while she talked.

    "I started looking into the Rancho Springs Development Corporation, and into Randolph Simpson, since you seemed to think he was involved somehow."

    The tea had a wedge of lemon in it, and a lot of ice. I added some sugar and waited for it to dissolve and for the tea to become clear again. The desert heat was like a substance that pervaded everything.

    "So I asked around, just casual, you know. Anybody know anything about the Rancho Springs company? Anybody know anything unusual about Randolph Simpson? I have a lot of contacts in this town, ought to, been here half my damned life, and the word spread. First thing happened was Cecil came around. Cecil Coleman's the chief of police here. He wanted to know why I was asking questions, and I told him it was because I was in the newspaper business and that's what you did in the newspaper business. And he said he thought I better not ask any more questions. And I said I was thinking about doing an editorial about how the local police don't seem to arrest anybody except occasional speeders passing through. And he said I better not do that either. And we sort of jawed at each other for a while and then he left and said Fd be hearing from him."

    "He's a bad enemy," I said.

    "Marlowe, at my age, even an enemy is better than boredom."

    "How about the murder site?" I said.

    "Well, Shorty, that's the desert rat, he heard from somebody I was interested and he came in here and said he could tell me a story to put in the paper. So I gave him a shot of whiskey and he sat and told me that he was nosing around in an old deserted mineshaft-lot of desert rats do that, see if there might be a little dust left that got overlooked-and he found a sort of room a little ways in, really just a widening of the shaft, probably, that was splashed all over, he says, with blood. According to Shorty the whole room was covered with dried blood. So I thought I better let you know. As I say, it may be nothing…"

    "Shorty talk to the cops?" I said.

    "He says no, and I believe him. People like Shorty get pretty short shrift from Cecil."

    "And Vern," I said.

    "You've met them?"

    "Yeah. Where is this mineshaft?"

    "Southeast of town," Pauline said. "I'll drive you."

    "You don't need to," I said.

    "I used to be a crime reporter, Marlowe. I've seen blood. It doesn't scare me."

    "Scares me," I said.

    

    

    She had a Ford pickup and she drove it far too fast for the roads. Or maybe it was right for the roads and too fast for me. I decided it didn't matter. We went southeast out of town through the flat hot land. There was tumbleweed, and occasionally a saguaro cactus looking somehow regal in the still desert air. The road was unpaved and soon became merely two wheel ruts as the pickup jounced and rattled along.

    The mineshaft went horizontally into a low rise about two hundred yards off the road. The entrance was shored with timbers and the rubble of mine dross fanned out from the entrance for maybe fifty yards. There were the faint indentations of wagon wheels leading from the mine entrance toward the road, and the only sound I heard as we walked toward the mine was the desert wind that swept almost unimpeded over hundreds of miles and scattered the grit around the entrance, and pushed the tumbleweed along. Inside the mine entrance the sound of the wind turned into a hollow tone a little like a train whistle, but nowhere near as loud. Pauline Snow turned on the big battery lantern she'd brought and we walked, our feet crunching, through the litter of the shaft floor for maybe twenty feet where it turned a little and widened before it started to descend. The walls and gravel floor were crusted with blackened blood. I could smell it, no longer rich as it must have been when it was fresh, but still the lingering unmistakable scent of it. Blood had splashed on the walls, and ran in thick puddles on the floor where it had coagulated around the small scatter of stones. I heard Pauline's breath go in.

    "Maybe you should stay with the truck," I said.

    "No."

    The light moved slowly as she panned the room. On one wall at about shoulder height a bloody handprint stood in black outline to the reddish stone of the shaft. There were drip lines where blood had spattered and run slowly down the walls.

    I squatted on my haunches and looked closely at the dried pools, the surface faintly glossy in the lantern light. I was always amazed at the amount of blood there was in a human body. Among some rocks the size of footballs something metallic gleamed.

    "Over there," I said, and Pauline flashed the light where I pointed. I went over and picked up a surgical saw. I handled it carefully, although the chance of useful fingerprints was about equal to the chance of a genie popping out of the mineshaft and telling us what happened. I moved slowly over the floor of the room. Among some other rocks, further back in the shaft, I found a scalpel. I was careful with it, too. There was nothing else to find in the murder room, we went a little further down the shaft and saw no sign of anything having been before us. We went back to the blood room.

    "What do you think?" Pauline Snow said.

    "I think I know where Lola Monforte was cut up," I said.

    "The dismemberment murder in L. A.?"

    "Yeah."

    "You think it happened here?"

    "Yeah. Where's Simpson's place from here?"

    We were walking back out of the shaft. I carried the surgical saw and scalpel.

    In the daylight I could see the manufacturer's name engraved on the blade near the handle, where the blood hadn't covered it. Williamson Surgery it said. I took a deep breath of hot desert air trying to get the faint smell of old blood out of my lungs.

    "We may be on Simpson's place," Pauline said. "He owns two thirds of everything out here."

    "Can we take a look?" I said. "At some of the more settled parts?"

    "Sure."

    We walked back to the truck. I put the saw and the scalpel behind the front seat and we went back out to the wagon ruts and headed east. In maybe twenty minutes we came to a paved highway.

    "It's Simpson's," Pauline said. "Runs up and connects to the interstate. He had it built for him."

    "Anyone would," I said.

    We drove south on the highway for another fifteen minutes and there ahead of us rising from the desert was something from Scheherazade. Three stories with turret, made of stucco, surrounded by a high stone wall off of which the sun glittered.

    "No moat?" I said.

    "Maybe inside," she said. "I don't know."

    When we were close enough I could see the broken glass set in the top of it. There were the tops of trees showing above the walls, which meant there was water in there. The house and the walls were in a faded pink tone that probably looked rose in the hot desert sunset. Pauline parked a hundred yards or so away from the citadel and left the motor running. For the first time since I'd met her, including the trip down the mine-shaft, she looked frightened.

    "Simpson doesn't welcome company," I said.

    "No."

    The complex of Simpson's desert retreat seemed to be the size of a medium city. Beyond the walls was a runway for, no doubt, Simpson's private plane. There was barbed wire around that, and around the cluster of outbuildings that gathered at the far end of the runway.

    "It's best not to stay long," Pauline said. She was unconsciously revving the truck motor as we sat.

    "Hard to get in there," I said.

    "Hard? My God, Marlowe, it's impossible. You'd have to have an army."

    The walls were too high to see into the citadel. From where we were there was no sign of movement. But Carmen Sternwood was probably in there. Sucking her thumb, giggling, and maybe, now and again, for old times' sake, throwing a wingding.

    For all I knew she liked it in there. For all I knew Randolph Simpson was her dream man. For all I knew he'd been Lola Monforte's dream man too.

    "We got to get out of here, Marlowe," Pauline said.

    I said, "Sure," and she spun the truck in a gravel-spinning U-turn and headed back away from Simpson's bastion, faster than we'd come.

    

    

    We were back in Pauline Snow's office and I was on the phone with Bernie Ohls.

    "That's San Bernardino County," Ohls was saying. "I'll get someone from the San Berdoo DA to go down and take a look."

    "And a blood sample?"

    "Now there's an idea," Ohls said. "And we could even compare it to Lola Monforte's, see if they were the same type."

    "You're lucky to be dealing with a trained professional."

    "Come in and see me when you get back to Los Angeles," Ohls said and hung up the phone.

    "I left you out of it," I said to Pauline Snow.

    "I don't mind being in it."

    "You will if some of Simpson's boys stop by, or the Rancho Springs police force, which is probably saying the same thing."

    "I told you before, Marlowe. I'm too old and fat to be scared. Besides, they'll want to know how you found the mineshaft, and what I know about cops, they won't be satisfied with you not telling."

    "What I think is you should go stay with someone, away from here, until this is over."

    She shook her head. "No," she said. "I'm in, and I'm here. For the duration."

    

    

    The someone from the San Berdoo DA's office turned out to be two plainclothes dicks and a technician type. We all trooped out to the shaft and the dicks talked to us while the technician meditated over the death scene. I gave them the saw and the scalpel and they told me that I shouldn't be tampering with evidence and I told them that I agreed. That it would have been better to leave them around and let someone take them away. And they said they didn't need a smart punk from Los Angeles to take care of evidence for them, and I said that it didn't matter where the smart punk came from as long as there was one, and we got along famously. One of the dicks was a big sandy-haired guy with freckles and humorous eyes who looked like he might have sampled a drink now and then.

    "You going to coordinate with the Rancho Springs police?" I asked him.

    He grinned and looked at his partner, a dark slender cop named Hernandez.

    "We going to coordinate with Cecil, Manny?"

    The dark cop shook his head. He didn't seem to have much to say, and his sandy-haired partner appeared to think he had to make up for that.

    "Manny says no," he said. "Manny don't say, but probably thinks, that Cecil is some sort of cat vomit, and we don't coordinate parking violations with him, never mind maybe a homicide."

    "I got no argument with that," I said.

    They took down statements from us, and looked blank at the mention of Randolph Simpson, and told us to be available if they needed us. Then we went back to town and the San Berdoo boys went back to San Berdoo.

    "Be very careful," I said to Pauline Snow. "This thing is bigger and uglier than any of us could have known."

    "I'm not in danger now," she said. "Too many people know what I know. No point to killing me. Hell, the San Bernardino DA knows it now."

    "True," I said, "but these are vicious people. And you're alone."

    She reached into a drawer in her desk and came out with an old frontier Colt.

    "Not entirely," she said.

    

    

    I drove back to Los Angeles in the late afternoon with the sun in my eyes most of the way. To the north the mountains were sere and lifeless. As I drove through Pasadena I could see the Rose Bowl far down to my right. Ahead was the San Fernando Valley, green and precisely parceled. I knew Simpson had killed Lola Monforte. I didn't know it in ways that could be proved yet, but I knew it. I knew in the same way that Lola Monforte had been at Resthaven and been passed on to Simpson, just as, when he had tired of Lola, Carmen Sternwood had been passed on to Simpson. I was hoping that he hadn't tired of her yet. I knew Simpson and Bonsentir were partners in the Neville Valley water deal. Marlowe the super sleuth. Knows all, proves nothing.

    I swung down on North Figueroa Street, through Highland Park, and on through Elysian Park onto Sunset, and west past hamburger stands and pink stucco places that sold hot dogs, and mortuaries made to look like mission churches, and fancy restaurants made to look like Greek temples or French country inns. Here and there a modest stucco house, or a shingle house, with a deep wide front porch, popped out among the rest of the junk and reminded me that people lived here too, not often, but just often enough to remind you of how it once was when Los Angeles was a comfortable sleepy place relaxing in the sun.