Perchance to Dream (3 page)

    "A walk down memory lane, Mr. Marlowe? Or perhaps you came courting and lost your nerve?"

    I shook my head.

    "Still the strong silent type, aren't you?"

    I grinned at her and nodded and put my hat on with the brim tipped forward over my forehead. I moved off the front step and began to move along down the slope toward my car. Vivian came along with me. I could feel the tension in her. Her movements were jagged with it.

    "You talked with Eddie Mars," she said.

    "Sure, after the Regan thing. I said I would."

    "How'd he take it?"

    "You know I talked with him," I said. "You probably know how he took it."

    "You told him to stay away from me, and from Carmen. You said my father was never to know and if he found out, you, personally, would find a way to put Eddie upstate for a long time."

    "Just making small talk," I said. "I hope I didn't upset him."

    "Eddie Mars? It would take more than a cut-rate gumshoe to scare Eddie Mars."

    "I charge full rates," I said. "And your father died without knowing."

    "Yes," she said. "He did."

    The tight planes of her face softened for a moment. She put her hand on my arm as we walked along the brick pathway toward the gate.

    "I'm grateful for that, Marlowe."

    I said, "Uh huh."

    We were almost at the gate. I had parked my car under a pepper tree on the street, the same way I had the first time, that October when I'd come to call with the look of hard rain in the foothills, because Bernie Ohls, the DA's chief investigator, had told me that General Sternwood needed a gumshoe.

    "Why are you here, Marlowe?"

    "I came to call on your butler," I said.

    "Without consulting me?"

    "This is southern California, Mrs. Regan, in the twentieth century. Servants are now employees, not slaves. I know you don't like that, but you'll have to face it sooner or later."

    She tried to slap me, but I got a forearm up between my face and her hand.

    "Bastard," she said.

    "How's Carmen?" I said.

    "Fine," Vivian said.

    "I doubt that," I said. "She wasn't fine the last time I saw her, when she tried to put five bullets in me like she did Regan."

    "I did what you said, you know that. I took her away. We went to Switzerland, she took some treatments."

    "And now you're back," I said. "And where's Carmen?"

    "In a sanitarium," Vivian said.

    "Resthaven?"

    Vivian gave me a sharp look. The skin seemed to be stretched too tight over her cheekbones.

    "What has Norris told you?" she said.

    "Privileged communication," I said. "What are you doing to find her?"

    "That bastard," Vivian said. "He told you, didn't he?"

    "She shouldn't be running around loose," I said.

    "She's all right. I've got people looking for her."

    "Mars?" I said.

    "Eddie has promised to find her. She's probably just run off with some man. You know how Carmen is."

    Vivian was as casually unconcerned as a butterfly on a tulip.

    "She met this guy she must have run off with at a party at the sanitarium?"

    "Don't be sarcastic, darling. It's so trite. They have sheltered social activity at the sanitarium. Dr. Bonsentir is very progressive."

    "I'll bet he is," I said. "How did you find him?"

    "He came highly recommended," Vivian said.

    "By who?" I said. "Eddie Mars?"

    "Damn you, Marlowe, why are you so down on Eddie? Since Father died he has been a good friend."

    "Mars is a gambler, a thug, a murderer by proxy, a thief, probably a pimp. If he's a good friend to anyone it's Eddie Mars, anyone else is just raw material," I said.

    Vivian dropped the cigarette I'd lit for her and ground it into the brick walk with the toe of a pink slipper. She looked up at me and her eyes had the hot look I remembered. The look was probably part of the Sternwood blood and made for heroism at its best and debauchery on a gaudy scale at its worst.

    "I'm sick of you, Marlowe. I'm sick of your face. I'm sick of you in my life. I'm sick of you preaching at me, and moralizing, and acting like you were something better than I am, when all you are is a second-rate shoofly with a lousy office in a crummy section of town and two suits of clothes. I could buy fifty of you and use you around the house for bookends."

    She turned and stamped back up the brick walk, looking for a door to slam. She didn't find one until she reached the house, and when she did she went inside and slammed it.

    A hummingbird hovered in frantic suspension over a flowering azalea near the gate.

    "Probably doesn't have enough books," I said to the hummingbird.

    He paid no attention to me. I shrugged and went out and got in my car and headed back toward my lousy office, in the crummy part of town.

    

    

    The first time I had met Vivian Regan I had come to see her father, who wanted me to take a blackmailer off his back. She was still married to Rusty Regan who, it was said, used to command a brigade in the Irish Republican Army. But Rusty had disappeared, and the General missed him. I thought at the time, and still think, that the General hired me to make sure the blackmailer wasn't Rusty Regan. If it had been, which it wasn't, it would have broken his heart. When I left the General that day with my shirt sticking to my back and the sweat soaking my collar, Norris told me that Mrs. Regan wanted to see me.

    I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full…

    She had wanted to know if her father had hired me to find Rusty Regan. Since she hadn't hired me it was none of her business. I wouldn't tell her. She didn't like that.

    She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. "I don't see what there is to be cagey about," she snapped. "And I don 't like your manners."

    "I'm not crazy about yours," I said. "I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind you ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a scotch bottle. I don't mind you showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don Y mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

    She slammed her glass down so hard it slopped over on an ivory cushion. She swung her legs to the floor and stood up with her eyes sparking fire and her nostrils wide. Her mouth was open and her bright teeth glared at me. Her knuckles were white. "People don't talk like that to me," she said thickly.

    I sat and grinned at her. Very slowly she closed her mouth and looked down at the spilled liquor. She sat down on the edge of the chaise longue and cupped her chin in one hand.

    "My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you…"

    The rain had come hard that day, and it would come again another day. But today, thinking about Vivian, I drove in hot sunlight back toward Hollywood.

    There had always been that between us, the harsh edge of wilfulness, grating against the insistent push of desire. It had obsessed us then, and I could feel it now, the push and pull of it between us.

    The blackmailing wasn't much, some uncollectable IOUs to a man named Geiger. I could have cleaned that up in an afternoon if I could have gotten to Geiger. But I couldn't until it was too late, and then it was really too late.

    On a sort of low dais at one end of the room was a high-backed teakwood chair in which Miss Carmen Sternwood was sitting on a fringed orange shawl She was sitting very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, her chin level, her small white teeth shining between her parted lips. Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious. She looked as if in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn't fit her expression or even move her lips.

    She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn't wearing anything else…

    I stopped looking at her and looked at Geiger. He was on his back on the floor, beyond the fringe of the Chinese rug, in front of a thing that looked like a totem pole. It had a profile like an eagle and in its wide round eye was a camera lens. The lens was aimed at the naked girl in the chair. There was a blackened flash bulb clipped to the side of the totem pole. Geiger was wearing Chinese slippers with thick felt soles, and his legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him wore a Chinese embroidered coat, the front of which was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots I heard had missed. He was very dead…

    A lot of people had died since then. And here we were, the survivors, circling still in some sort of aimless ritual around little Carmen. The thought made me need a drink and when I got to my office I sat alone at my desk and had one. It didn't do any good. On the other hand it did no great harm either.

    

    

    Resthaven sprawled in a small canyon that ran laterally off of Coldwater Canyon, just below Mulholland Drive. Some movie magnate had built it once in the late twenties, probably with the first big wad of pre-income tax money that he'd made filming two-reelers in Topanga Canyon. It might have been a ranch if you could picture a ranch built to specification for a Middle European peddler who'd struck it rich. It had a main building made of peeled redwood logs, squared and notched and fitted as snug as wallpaper. There was the bunkhouse, a longer lower echo of the main house, and there were three or four outbuildings which followed the same motif.

    Like most of southern California, the land, if left to its own devices, would have been dry and ugly. But it hadn't been left to its own devices. It had been watered and planted and pruned and fertilized and a profusion of flowering shrubs splashed across the green lawn and flanked the crushed shell driveway that curved up to the main entrance. There was no one in sight. And only a discreet sign burned into a polished square of redwood said RESTHAVEN. I parked under a big old eucalyptus tree that the wind had tortured into a posture of contorted abandon, and crunched across the driveway to ring the bell.

    The bell was soft, a lilting little chime deep somewhere in the house. Out of sight, maybe around the corner, I could hear dimly the sound of a sprinkler clicking in slow cadence as it arched back and forth. There was a trumpet vine curling up around the support pillars on the rustic porch. I waited, listening for footsteps and heard none, and then the door opened and a pale man with thin shoulders and very slick black hair combed straight back stood there.

    "Marlowe," I said. "To see Dr. Bonsentir."

    I handed him my card. The quiet one, name, address, profession. The one with the crossed sabers I saved for impressing other clients. The guy in the white coat ushered me into a hallway that was dark and cool. There were Navaho rugs strewn on the polished wide board floors. Framed on the walls were a variety of important-looking medical documents, some plaques honoring various civic achievements and a head shot of Dr. Bonsentir himself with a lot of uplighting, and some artful air brushing. A small brass plaque under the photograph said OUR FOUNDER, DR. CLAUDE BONSENTIR.

    The servant left me there to admire Dr. Claude and returned in maybe two minutes.

    "This way, sir," he said with the faint hint of an accent, though I couldn't identify it.

    I followed him through a door to the right. We went through a room that was probably a library, with books in shelves along all of the paneled walls and a vast stone fireplace against the far end of the room. There were drapes on all the windows in some sort of turquoise coloration that reached the floor and gathered in an overabundant pile at the baseboard. Beyond the library was an office, smaller than the library but done in the same motif and complete with a slightly scaled-down version of the same fieldstone fireplace on the near end wall where it could share the same chimney shaft. In here the turquoise drapes were drawn and the room was dim. In front of the windows was a desk that could have been a basketball court for midgets. And behind it was Claude Bonsentir.

    He was a dark lean jasper with longish black hair parted in the exact middle of his head. He wore a pencil moustache, and his dark eyes were deeply recessed so that he seemed to be peering out at you from far inside someplace. He was wearing a dark suit with a wide white pinstripe. There was a big gold watch chain draped across his vest, and some sort of key hung from it. He sat with his hands tented before him, elbows on the desk. His nails were manicured and gleamed with recent buffing. He tapped his fingertips gently against his lower lip. On the desk before him, set at precise square to him, was my card. There was nothing else on the desk top except an onyx pen and pencil set. He stared down at my card. I stood in front of his desk. He continued to stare down at my card. I waited.