Perchance to Dream (8 page)

    "We'll hold the rod till you come down," he said. "So you don't hurt yourself."

    I got back in my car and cranked the starter. The big gates swung slowly back and I drove slowly through them. Inside it was greener and brighter than a movie star's dreams. There were fountains and flowers in profusion and the grass under the steady arc of the sprinklers gleamed like the top of a pool table under the unwavering southern California sun. The drive was done in some kind of crushed shell, and curved, white and still, through the intense landscape until it reached the main building. The place looked like a Moorish fortress in a pale gray stucco with turrets on the corners and gunports every few feet across the top.

    Another guy in a dark suit and hard face opened the door for me and turned me over to a Chinese houseman who led me through a series of darkly paneled rooms to a long room with a gas fire in the oversized, tile-inlaid fireplace. In a huge oak chair with elaborately carved arms a woman sat, with her hands folded in her lap. She had steel-gray hair, and eyes to match.

    "I'm Jean Rudnick," she said. "Kindly tell me the purpose of your visit."

    She was wearing a mannish gray suit with a pinstripe, and a white shirt and a little gray and white striped tie. Her nails were painted lavender, and her gold-rimmed glasses enlarged her eyes so that they dominated her face.

    "My name is Philip Marlowe," I said. "I'm a private detective and I've been hired to find Carmen Sternwood, who is missing from a sanitarium in Beverly Hills."

    "And why do you wish to see Mr. Simpson?" she said.

    "I have information that Carmen's here."

    "From whom?"

    I shook my head. "Sorry," I said.

    "Mr. Marlowe," she said and her voice was full of the tiredness and superiority that people's voices get full of when they have too much power and wield it much too often, "I don't know if you know who I am, but I am Mr. Simpson's personal assistant and if someone is making ludicrous charges involving some girl and Mr. Simpson, then I must insist on knowing who that person is."

    "How'd you know Carmen is a girl?" I said.

    "I beg your pardon?"

    "You said charges involving Mr. Simpson and some girl. Why do you think it's a girl? There's lots of men named Carmen. Carmen Lombardo, Carmen Cavallaro, Carmen…"

    "Mr. Marlowe, please, I have no time for cheap parlor games."

    "Then don't play them with me, Miss Rudnick."

    "Mrs."

    "My congratulations to Mr.," I said.

    "Mr. Rudnick is deceased," she said. "Are you actually aware of who Mr. Simpson is?"

    "Looking around," I said, "I'd guess he was Ali Baba."

    "My God-how stupid can you be. You are entirely over your head and you haven't any idea. You really don't know."

    "Yeah," I said. "Sometimes I weep softly into my pillow just thinking about it. How about Simpson, do I see him?"

    "Certainly not," Mrs. Rudnick said. The thought seemed to cause her chest pains.

    "Does Simpson know anyone named Sternwood?" I said.

    "He certainly does not," Mrs. Rudnick said.

    Throughout our conversation she sat perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap, like a picture of Queen Victoria.

    "Maybe he knows them and hasn't told you," I said.

    That seemed to give her more chest pains.

    "Mr. Marlowe," she said, "I am Mr. Simpson's personal assistant! I have the pleasure of his full confidence. If he knew anyone named Sternwood, I too would know of it."

    "Vivian Sternwood knows him," I said.

    "Mr. Marlowe, I'm afraid this conversation is at an end."

    She picked up a small brass bell on the side table and jingled it discreetly.

    The door behind me opened and two of the suits came through it.

    "I want you to pay attention to me," Mrs. Rudnick said, "and not dismiss what I tell you simply because I am a woman. If you persist in annoying Mr. Simpson on this, or any matter, you will regret it for whatever is left of your life."

    "I'm not dismissing it because you're a woman, Mrs. Rudnick," I said. "I'm dismissing it because it doesn't scare me. The boys in the dark suits don't scare me. Randolph Simpson, whoever the hell he is, doesn't scare me. And if you think I've been annoying so far, wait until I shift into third."

    "You've been warned, Mr. Marlowe," Jean Rudnick said coldly. Her hands were still folded in her lap and her steely eyes never blinked as she watched me leave.

    The two suits walked me to rny car and stood looking at me blankly as I got in.

    I started up and let out the clutch and started down the driveway. As I left, I thought, for a moment, that I saw something stir in a second-floor window, a face for only a moment, then nothing. I drove on down the curving roadway and out through the ornate iron gate that closed silently behind me.

    

    

    Captain Gregory gazed sadly at me across his desk and slowly shook his head.

    "You got a better chance of getting a search warrant for the White House," Gregory said. "I told you Bonsentir was wired. Simpson's who he's wired to."

    "Just because he's got a hundred million dollars?"

    "Just because of that," Gregory said. "I know it shouldn't be that way, and you know it shouldn't be that way, but you and I both been around too long to think it won't be that way here in the good old USA."

    "Even though I have reason to believe that there's a missing girl there, maybe a kidnap victim?"

    "You got the word of one wappy old dame in a sanitarium who spends her time reading stuff would make me blush."

    "And Mrs. Rudnick's denial that she'd ever heard of the Sternwoods?"

    "Maybe she hasn't. Maybe she doesn't know everyone her boss knows. Maybe Vivian knows him and he don't know her. Just because she knows him don't mean he's got her sister."

    "Be a pretty fair-sized coincidence," I said. "The old lady in Resthaven tells me Carmen's with a guy named Simpson, and Vivian knows a guy named Simpson."

    "Sure," Gregory said. "I don't like coincidence either. In the cop business you learn to doubt it. But it happens. And even if you and me and the mayor all saw her there, you still don't get a search warrant in this county to go through Randolph Simpson's house."

    "He buy a piece of you too, Captain?" I said.

    Gregory shifted comfortably in his chair and fumbled in his coat for pipe and tobacco.

    "Sure," he said. "I'm just a dumb crooked copper. Everybody buys me. I got it coming in in grocery sacks. Which is why I'm driving a ten-year-old heap and living in a house too small and take the old lady out, maybe once a month, for an enchilada and a small beer."

    "Forget I said that," I said.

    "I try and stay reasonably honest, Marlowe. And I try to do my job. But I got a kid to put through college and I got retirement pay to think about. I do what I can."

    "Sure," I said.

    "You're not going to leave this alone, are you, Marlowe?"

    "It's how I make my living, Captain. People hire me to do stuff that the cops don't or won't do. It doesn't help my career to leave things unfinished. All I got to sell is that I'll stick to something, that I'll take it to the end, you know?"

    Gregory nodded. He had the pipe filled and was lighting it as carefully as he always did everything. As if it were the most important thing he would do that day, maybe ever.

    "Where I can help you, son, I will. But don't look for much."

    "I never have, Captain."

    Gregory nodded again, and took in a lot of pipe smoke and let it out in a slow reflective cloud that hung in the air between us. He put up a thick hand and waved it gently to dispel the smoke.

    "You got any next of kin?" he said.

    "No," I said. "Anything you care to tell me about Simpson except how rich he is?"

    "Nope," Gregory said. "You know more than you ought to now."

    "Thanks for the encouragement, Captain. I hope you enjoy your pension."

    "Hit the road, Marlowe," Gregory said. "I'm tired of talking with you."

    "Sorry to disturb your nap," I said and turned and left the office.

    Outside the heat shimmered up off the pavement like a mirage. The tar on the streets was soft from it. I drove back out Sunset to Hollywood with the top down and the hot wind in my face.

    

    

    It was hot. I had the window open in my office but all that did was let me know that it was just as hot outside. The heat made everything still. There was little traffic on the boulevard, and what people there were walked slowly and stayed in the hot shade whenever they could find any. The sky was cloudless and bluer than cornflowers. I had my coat and vest off, and every little while I'd go to the sink in the corner and rinse my face and neck with tepid water from the tap.

    It was the kind of heat where families begin to eye each other's throats, where mousy accountants turn savagely on their boss, where irritation turns to anger and anger turns to murder, and murder turns into rampage.

    The phone rang. It was Bernie Ohls, the DA's chief investigator.

    "Got a murder off Beverly Glen," he said. "Near Stone Canyon Reservoir. Thought you might want to ride out with me and take a look."

    "Better than sitting here in a slow oven," I said.

    

    

    I was outside on the corner of Cahuenga when Ohls came by ten minutes later. He didn't seem in a hurry. He didn't hit the siren as we rolled down the boulevard west, toward Beverly Glen.

    Ohls was a medium-sized guy, blondish hair, stiff white eyebrows. He had nice even teeth and calm eyes and looked like most other medium-sized guys, except that I knew he had killed at least nine men, three when somebody thought he'd been covered. He was smoking a little cigar.

    "Found several pieces of a woman, in a gully off the Glen, down maybe a hundred yards from the road. There wasn't much blood and there were several parts missing, so it looks like she was dismembered somewhere else and dumped there." Ohls puffed a bit of smoke and the hot air swirled it out the open window. "Since not all of her is there, we figure she was probably dumped elsewhere too."

    I felt the pull of gravity at the bottom of my stomach.

    "You ID'd her yet?" I said.

    "Not really," Ohls said. "Her head's missing and both hands."

    We slid down Fairfax and onto Sunset.

    "So why'd you invite me along? You miss me?"

    "I heard you were looking for Carmen Sternwood," Ohls said.

    The weight at the bottom of my stomach got heavier.

    "Un huh."

    "There was a purse with the body. All the ID was out of it, but whoever did it missed a book of matches. Inside the matches was a phone number."

    "Carmen's?" I said.

    Ohls nodded.

    "One of the harness boys called and checked as soon as they found it."

    "I thought they were supposed to leave that to the detectives," I said.

    Ohls grinned. "Guy's planning to be chief," he said.

    

    

    Near the top of Beverly Glen, before you make the curve to Mulholland Drive, there were four black and white L. A. police cars, and two L. A. sheriff's cars. Behind them was an ambulance with its back doors open, and an L. A. County fire rescue truck with its light still rotating. Ohls pulled in behind the ambulance and flashed his badge to the sweating uniform cop directing traffic. Then he and I scrambled on down the embankment, through the scrub pine and interlacing thorny vines that grew among them. There was the hot smell of vegetation and old pine needles and the harsher smell of fallen eucalyptus leaves. The slope flattened into a gully and in the gully were half a dozen assorted county employees including a man from the coroner's office with a white coat on over his tie and vest. He was a fat guy with a neck that spilled out over his collar and his face was bright red as he straightened from squatting next to a tarpaulin-covered form.

    He knew Ohls.

    "This is a real mess, Lieutenant," he said. He shook his head in disgust and slowly peeled back the tarp by one corner. "Guy didn't even have sharp tools," he said.

    Under the tarp was the bottom half of a woman's torso, with one leg attached.

    Ohls had no reaction.

    The medical examiner draped the tarpaulin back over the corpse.

    "There's couple other parts," he said, "over here." He nodded his head toward another tarp. "We let everything lie where we found it."

    "Wonderful," Ohls said.

    "Want to take a look?"

    "Not right now," Ohls said. "You know anything?"

    "Woman's dead," the medical examiner said.

    "Always brightens up a case," Ohls said, "to have a funny ME."

    The medical examiner chuckled so that the fat on his neck wobbled a little over his collar.

    "Don't know a hell of a lot more than that, yet."

    "Cause of death?" Ohls said. "Aside from getting cut up like a fryer?"

    "No way to know until we find all the pieces," the medical examiner said. "Don't know if she was alive when she was cut up."

    Ohls shook his head harshly as if there was a bee in his ear.

    "ID?" he said.

    "Caucasian, female, judging from what we've got, not an old woman. Twenties or thirties, maybe a well-preserved forty at the oldest. Skin tone is still pretty good, what there is of it."