Perchance to Dream (2 page)

    

    

    She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn't look too healthy.

    "Tall, aren't you?" she said.

    "I didn't mean to be."

    Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

    "Handsome too," she said. "And I bet you know it."

    I grunted.

    "What's your name?"

    "Reilly," I said. "Doghouse Reilly. "

    "That's a funny name." She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

    "Are you a prizefighter?" she asked, when I didn't.

    "Not exactly. I'm a sleuth. "

    "A-a-" She tossed her head angrily, and the rich color of it glistened in the rather dim light of the big hall. "You're making fun of me."

    "Uh-uh."

    "What?"

    "Get on with you," I said. "You heard me."

    "You didn't say anything. You 're just a big tease." She put a thumb up and bit it. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.

    "You're awfully tall," she said. Then she giggled with secret merriment. Then she turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet. Her hands dropped limp at her sides. She tilted herself toward me on her toes. She fell straight back into my arms. I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor. I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up. When her head was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me.

    "You're cute," she giggled. "I'm cute too."

    I didn't say anything. So the butler chose that convenient moment to come back through the French doors and see me holding her.

    Well, maybe not quite yesterday.

    

    

    I followed Norris's straight back down the same corridor toward the French doors. The house seemed quieter now. Probably my imagination. It was too big a house and too chilled with sadness ever to have been noisy. This time, we turned under the stairs and went down some stairs to the kitchen. The horsefaced maid was there. She smiled and bobbed her head at me. Norris glanced at her and she bobbed her head again and went out of the kitchen.

    The kitchen was big and opened out onto the back lawn as it dropped away from the house. Like so many hillside mansions in Los Angeles the first floor in front was the second floor in back. The floors were a polished brown Mexican tile. There was a large wooden work-table in the center of the room, a big professional-looking cookstove against the far wall, two refrigerators to the right, and a long counter with two sinks and a set tub along the left wall.

    "Will you have coffee, sir?" Norris said.

    I said I would and Norris disappeared into a pantry off the kitchen and returned in a moment with a silver coffee service and a bone china cup and saucer. He poured the coffee into the cup in front of me. And placed an ashtray nearby.

    "Please smoke if you wish to, Mr. Marlowe," Norris said.

    I sipped the coffee, got out a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match.

    "How are the girls?" I said.

    Norris smiled. "The very subject I wished to discuss, sir."

    Norris stood erect beside the table. I waited.

    "The General used to like brandy in his coffee, sir," Norris said. "Would you care for some?"

    "Join me," I said.

    Norris started to shake his head.

    "For the General," I said.

    Norris nodded, got another cup, put brandy in my cup and a splash, straight, in his cup. He raised his cup toward me.

    "To General Guy Sternwood," he said, giving "Guy" the French pronunciation.

    I raised my cup back.

    "General Sternwood," I said. I had first met him in the greenhouse, at the foot of the velvet lawn.

    

    

    The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom… after a while we came to a clearing in the middle of the jungle, under the domed roof. Here, in a space of hexagonal flags, an old red Turkish rug was laid down and on the rug was a wheelchair, and in the wheelchair an old and obviously dying man watched us come with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago, but which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes in the portrait that hung over the mantel in the hall. The rest of his face was a leaden mask, with the bloodless lips and the sharp nose and the sunken temples and the outward-turning earlobes of approaching dissolution. His long narrow body was wrapped-in that heat-in a traveling rug and a faded red bathrobe. His thin clawlike hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.

    

    

    I sipped my coffee. Norris took a discreet drink of his brandy. There was no sound in the big kitchen. The General's ghost was with us, and both of us were quiet in its presence.

    

    

    "What do you know about my family?"

    "I'm told you are a widower and have two young daughters, both pretty and both wild. One of them has been married three times, the last time to an ex-bootlegger who went in the trade by the name of Rusty Regan. That's all I heard, General…"

    

    

    "I'm afraid Miss Carmen has disappeared," Norris said, interrupting my thoughts.

    "From where?" I said.

    "After that, ah, misfortune with Rusty Regan," Norris said, "Miss Vivian placed her in a sanitarium as, I believe, you advised her to."

    I nodded. The coffee was strong and too hot to drink except in small sips. The brandy lay atop the coffee and made a different kind of warmth when I sipped it. I could hear the General's voice thin with age, taut with feeling long denied.

    

    

    "Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart, and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat. Neither have I…"

    There was another sound in the voice. Besides the tiredness and the iron self-control, there was a wistful sound, a sound of what might have been, a sound of sins revisited but irredeemable. And it was that sound which held me, as I knew it held Norris, if only in memory, long after the speaker had fallen silent.

    "Vivian went to good schools of the snob type and to college. Carmen went to half a dozen schools of greater and greater liberality, and ended up where she started. I presume they both had, and still have, all the usual vices. If I sound a little sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it is because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy." He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, then opened them again suddenly. "I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets…"

    

    

    "She was doing very well at the sanitarium," Norris said. "I myself had the privilege of visiting her every week."

    "And Vivian?" I said. The daughters' names seemed to dispel the father's ghost.

    "Miss Vivian visited whenever she was, ah, able." Norris turned the cup slowly in his clean strong hands. "Her father's death was difficult for her. And she is still seeing Mr. Mars."

    Norris's voice was careful when he said it, empty of any evaluation. The voice of the perfect servant, not thinking, merely recording.

    "How nice for her," I said. "Did she tell you to call me?"

    "No, sir. I took that liberty. Miss Vivian feels that Mr. Mars will find Miss Carmen and return her to the sanitarium."

    "His price will be higher than mine," I said.

    "Exactly so, sir."

    "And you know what I charge?"

    "Yes, sir. You'll recall that I handled the General's checkbook for him when he employed you previously."

    "And you can afford me?"

    "The General was very generous to me in his will, sir."

    I took a lungful of smoke and let it out slowly and tilted my chair on its back legs.

    "But still you're working here," I said.

    "I believe the General would have wished that, sir. His daughters…" Norris let the rest of the sentence disappear into an eloquent servant's self-effacement.

    "Yes," I said. "I'm sure he would have. When did Carmen disappear?"

    "A week ago. I went on my weekly visit and found that she was gone. The staff was somewhat reticent about her disappearance, but I was able to ascertain that she had in fact been gone for at least two nights."

    "And no one had reported it?"

    "Apparently not, sir. I informed Miss Vivian Sternwood, of course, and took the liberty of speaking on the telephone with Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau."

    "And?" I said.

    "And it was, as I remember his words, 'the first I'd heard of it.' "

    "And Vivian?" I said.

    "Miss Vivian said that I was not to worry about it. That she had resources and that Carmen would turn up."

    "And by 'resources' you understood her to mean Eddie Mars?" I said.

    "I did, sir."

    "How does she feel about you calling me?" I said.

    "I have not yet informed her of that, sir."

    I drank the rest of the coffee laced with brandy. It had cooled enough to go down softly. I nodded more to myself than to Norris.

    "What is the name of this sanitarium?" I said.

    "Resthaven, sir. It is supervised by a Dr. Bonsentir."

    "Okay," I said, "I'll take a run out there."

    "Yes, sir," Norris said. "Thank you very much, sir. May I give you a retainer?"

    "A dollar will do for now," I said. "Make it official. We'll talk about the rest of it later."

    "That's very kind indeed, sir," Norris said. He took a long pale leather wallet out of his inside pocket and extracted a dollar bill and gave it to me. I wrote him out a receipt, took the bill, and put it in my pocket, negligently, like there were many more in there and I had no need to think about it.

    "May I call you here?" I said.

    "Indeed, sir. I often receive calls here. Answering the phone is normally among my duties."

    "And how is Vivian?" I said.

    "She is still very beautiful, sir, if I may be so bold."

    "And still dating a loonigan," I said.

    "If you mean Mr. Mars, sir, I'm afraid that is the case."

    

    

    I came out of the Sternwood house and stood on the front stoop with my hat in my hand, holding it by the brim against my right thigh. Below me, many terraced levels down the hill, was the big spiked fence that separated the Sternwoods, or what was left of them, from the people who still worked for a living. The sun glinted off the gilt spear points of the fence. To the north it shone on the snow in the San Gabriel Mountains. I looked back down the lawn the other way, at the few creaking oil derricks still tiredly pumping five or six barrels a day. It was hard to see them from here, and impossible to see beyond them to the stinking sump where Rusty Regan lay dreamless, sleeping the big sleep.

    Behind me the door opened.

    "Marlowe?"

    I turned and looked at Vivian Regan, the General's older daughter, the one with the hot eyes and the sulky mouth and the great legs. She was in some kind of white silk lounging outfit today; a bell-sleeved silk top with a plunging neckline and wide floppy silk pants that hid the great legs but hinted to you that if you got a look they would indeed be great. She had an unlighted cigarette in her mouth.

    "Got a match?" she said and leaned a little toward me through the open door.

    I dug out a kitchen match and snapped it on my thumbnail and lit her cigarette.

    "Still a masterful brute, aren't you," she said.

    I didn't want to say I wasn't, so I let it drift with the aimless current of Sternwood life.

    "Still sitting in the window," I said, "peeking through the curtains?"

    "I live here, Marlowe, or had you forgotten? I like to know who's going in and out."

    "I came in a while ago," I said. "Now I'm going out."

    Vivian stepped through the door and closed it behind her. She took in some smoke and held it a long time and then let it trail out slowly as she stared down at the distant line of derricks.