Perchance to Dream (9 page)

    "Any idea yet when?"

    The medical examiner shook his head.

    "Last couple days at the outside, assuming she was dumped here shortly after she was killed, and wasn't refrigerated someplace. That's as close as I can get." He glanced down at the tarpaulin heap in front of him. "We've got a stomach, at least, so we can make some guesses depending on when she ate, and what she ate, but we're not going to get much closer. Blood's all drained out of her. That screws us up."

    "What a shame," Ohls said. "Any thoughts, Marlowe? Could be the Sternwood girl."

    "Guess on the skin coloration?" I said.

    The medical examiner reached down. "I'd say dark. Here, take a look."

    "No, thanks," I said. "That was my guess. Was she slim?"

    The medical examiner shrugged, still bending over with a hand on the edge of the tarpaulin. He peeled it back again. I looked away. From the corner of my eye I could see him bend over and pinch some flesh on the one leg. I looked away harder.

    "No," he said. "I'd say she was fleshy-not fat, mind you, but sort of, you know, buxom. Mae West, say."

    "That would make her not one of the Sternwood girls," I said.

    "Body hair's black," the medical examiner said.

    "Carmen was blonde," I said.

    Ohls nodded.

    "Who found her?" he said to one of the sheriff's deputies.

    "Couple high school kids had three quarts of beer," the deputy said, "slid down here in the woods to drink it and stumbled right on her. Probably take care of their underaged drinking for a while."

    "Every cloud," Ohls said. "Lemme talk to them, and the officer that found the matchbook."

    He climbed back up the banking to the road with me behind him. By the time I got to the road my shirt collar was limp and I could feel the sweat trickling down my spine. I leaned against the car while Ohls talked to the scared kids and to the young L. A. cop that had discovered the purse with the matchbook. Above us a little way the hill crested and Beverly Glen turned and headed down into the valley. Ventura, Sherman Oaks, people in ranch houses with two bedrooms and GI mortgages. People with kids, coming home from work, sitting down to supper, talking about the job and about the weather and about baseball and the stock market. None of them thinking anything about a one-legged half of a female body with the blood long since drained from it lying in the leaf mulch at the bottom of an arroyo off Beverly Glen. None of them were talking about that or thinking about it. But I was and I'd think about it for a long time.

    Ohls came back to the car when he finished with the witnesses. He jerked his head at me and we got in and headed back toward Hollywood.

    "Why don't you kind of tell me about what it is exactly that you're doing with Carmen Sternwood," he said.

    I told him what I knew except for the part about Eddie Mars and Vivian. I left that out for no particular reason, except there's never any need for cops to know everything. And there was something about telling him that Vivian was with Eddie Mars that I didn't like.

    "This Bonsentir," Ohls said. "He's got so much clout that he doesn't need to cooperate."

    "That's what he says."

    "And Al Gregory says so?"

    "Yeah," I said.

    "And he's up the top of Coldwater Canyon?" Ohls said.

    "Yeah."

    Ohls wrenched the car around and headed up Beverly Drive.

    "Let's you and me go give his chain a jangle," Ohls said.

    

    

    Ohls showed the slick-haired guy at the door his buzzer and said he was here to see Dr. Bonsentir. The slick-haired guy gave me the fisheye and said to Ohls, "May I enquire what it's about, officer?"

    "Lieutenant," Ohls said, "not officer. And it's about police business which ain't your business so hustle it up."

    The slick-haired man ushered us into the foyer and excused himself and walked away with his shoulders hunched in a stiff angle.

    "You've hurt his feelings," I said.

    "I do that," Ohls said.

    We waited in front of the founder's picture for a couple of minutes and then the slick-haired guy brought his hurt feelings back into the foyer and with him came the Muscle Beach boy that I'd last seen snoozing on a chaise in the backyard.

    He gave me a long stare and then said to Ohls, "What is it you want, Lieutenant?"

    Ohls looked tired.

    "Not you," he said to the beachboy. "I wanted you, I'd go out to Venice. I could get fifty like you in Venice."

    "You think so?" the beachboy said.

    "Listen, sonny, if you would like to go downtown and dance with me in the back room where the boys pitch pennies against the wall, you keep talking to me like I wasn't a cop. I want to see your boss, and it better be very damned quick."

    The beachboy reddened, but he didn't say anything. He turned and went back in through the big door that led to Bonsentir's office, and in another minute he returned and beckoned us to follow.

    Bonsentir was at his desk again. His tie up tight, his vest buttoned, his white coat spotless. He was on the phone. He hung up as we entered.

    "I have very little time," he said. "Please make this as brief as possible."

    "I'm investigating a murder," Ohls said. "Marlowe here is helping me. Not heavyweight stuff like you do, but it keeps me from hanging around poolrooms. Carmen Sternwood is a possible witness in the murder and I want to question her."

    "I'm sorry, Lieutenant… Ohls is it? Miss Sternwood has been discharged."

    "In whose care?" I said.

    "In her own, Mr. Marlowe." Bonsentir's face was beatific. He had his fingers steepled near the point of his chin.

    "She's fully cured of her problems."

    "How about Mrs. Swayze?" I said. "We'll talk with her, then."

    "Mrs. Swayze too has been discharged," Bonsentir said. "We have great success in returning our patients to the pursuit of a normal healthy life."

    "I'll bet you do," Ohls said.

    "Did you turn Mrs. Swayze loose on her own?" I said.

    "Certainly. She's a grown woman with no further mental problems."

    "I think we might just amble around a little," Ohls said.

    "Without a warrant?" Bonsentir said.

    "Well, well," Ohls said.

    The phone rang, Bonsentir picked it up and spoke. Then he listened a moment and looked at Ohls. He held the phone out.

    "It's for you, Lieutenant," he said. His face looked benevolent.

    Ohls took the phone and listened. His face didn't change expression. He didn't speak.

    Then he said, "Right," and hung up the phone and handed it back to Bonsentir.

    "Are you satisfied, Lieutenant?" Bonsentir said.

    Ohls ignored him.

    "Come on, Marlowe," Ohls said. "We're leaving."

    I raised my eyebrows.

    "Like that," I said.

    "Like that," Ohls said. "You got a lot of weight," he said to Bonsentir. "But that doesn't mean it's over."

    Bonsentir nodded over his tented fingertips.

    "Race," he said to the beachboy, "show these gentlemen out."

    The beachboy stepped forward and took Ohls by the arm.

    "Come on," he said, "let's go."

    Almost negligently Ohls chopped the edge of a right hand against the beachboy's Adam's apple. He turned sort of absentmindedly and took the beachboy's right wrist in his left hand. He put his right hand up under the beachboy's armpit, leaned in with his right shoulder and threw the beachboy into the fireplace.

    "We can find the way," Ohls said and went out of the room. I smiled a friendly smile at Bonsentir. And followed Ohls out.

    

    

    Taggert Wilde, the DA for whom I had once worked, was a plump man with clear blue eyes that managed to look at the same time friendly and expressionless. He was from an old Los Angeles family and had been DA for quite some time now. Ohls and I sat in his office while Wilde lit a thin, dappled cigar and got his feet in just the right position on the pulled-out lower drawer of his massive oak desk. On the walls around the office were muted paintings of serious-looking men in suits. Probably Wilde's predecessors in office, though they might have been his relatives.

    "Doesn't mean that Bonsentir is untouchable, Bernie," Wilde said. "There are ways of handling things. But it does mean you can't go up there and roust him whenever you feel like it. None of this should surprise you."

    "It doesn't surprise me," Ohls said calmly. "But I don't have to like it."

    "No, you don't," Wilde said. "Hell, Bernie, I don't like it all that terribly much either. But it's a big rough wide open country, and it's the way cities are run these days."

    "Who supplies the juice?" I said.

    Wilde shook his head.

    "You know better, Marlowe," he said. "It's not that simple."

    "What do you know about Randolph Simpson?" I said.

    Wilde's face got very still. "What about Randolph Simpson?" he said.

    "Mrs. Swayze, who's now supposed to have been discharged, told me that Carmen was with him," I said. "Vivian told me she knew him. I went up there and couldn't get in. Every time I mention his name the people I mention his name to get the same look you've got."

    Wilde took his cigar out and looked at the tip and put it back in his mouth. He clasped both hands back of his head and looked up at the ceiling, balancing his spring swivel chair with one oxford shoe tip on the desk drawer, his other leg crossed over it. He allowed himself to teeter back and forth like that.

    "Randolph Simpson is Bonsentir's clout," Wilde said finally.

    "I knew that," I said. "He lives in some kind of castle up in the Santa Monica Mountains."

    Wilde nodded slowly, still gazing up at the ceiling.

    "It doesn't make any sense to say that Simpson is rich," Wilde said. "It's a meaningless phrase when you're talking about a man like Simpson. He has more wealth than many countries. He has resources that go with having that kind of money. He can literally buy anything."

    "And has," I said.

    "I'm an elected official, Marlowe. I try to do the job as decently as I'm permitted. But I am also part of a larger government and social entity, and as such am not an entirely free agent."

    "Sure," I said.

    "When you worked here you couldn't tolerate that," Wilde went on. "I understand that and I can respect it. But if the community is to function there must also be people who can tolerate working inside a system, however compromised."

    "Do I salute?" I said. "Maybe stand at attention and sing 'Yankee Doodle'?"

    Wilde's feet came off the desk drawer and his chair snapped forward and his eyes came level with mine.

    "No," he snapped, "but you might sit still and listen and learn whatever there is to learn about Simpson. Lieutenant Ohls is bound by many of the constraints that bind me. But you are not."

    I sat back in my chair and got out a cigarette and got it burning. Ohls grinned at me.

    "Randolph Simpson inherited an unspeakable fortune when he was twenty-one," Wilde said. "Oil mostly, which is how he knows the Sternwoods, and some manufacturing. He tripled it in ten years and doubled that in the next five years. He plays golf regularly with the speaker of the California State Assembly. He is a close associate of both the governor of this state and the mayor of this city. His cousin is the senior senator from California, and the president of the United States comes several times a year and spends time with him at a place Simpson has in the desert. He contributes heavily and often to all of these people's election campaigns and those of a hundred aldermen and assemblymen and ward heelers of all levels that you and I may never have heard of but who turn the cranks that move things in this city."

    Wilde inhaled a little smoke, savored it, let it out slowly in a thin blue stream and looked appreciatively at it as it hung in the close air of his office. Outside his window the evening was beginning to settle. Wilde continued.

    "There have been a couple of marriages that didn't work out, which he settled with money, the way he settles everything else. One of the wives filed a complaint against him alleging abusive treatment, but it never went anywhere. Whether she was bought off or scared off or Simpson simply had it squelched, I don't know. Probably all three. There was a squabble in a restaurant in Bay City a few years back when some tourist tried to take his picture and a couple of Simpson's bodyguards got rough. But nothing came of that. I have heard it said that he has peculiar sexual preferences and that some of them tend to break the rules. But no one's ever gotten near to charging him with anything, let alone getting him into court."

    "What kind of sexual preferences?" I said.

    Wilde took another satisfied puff on his cigar. He eased the smoke out carefully. He held the cigar out and looked at it as if to reassure himself that it was as good as it smoked. Then he said, "Sadomasochistic."

    "Sounds to me like he'd suit little Carmen just fine," Ohls said.

    "Fine," I said.

    "He is a very dangerous man, Marlowe," Wilde said. "We can't help you unless you have evidence so unimpeachable that he can't buy it off or scare it off or cover it up or bury it."

    "Or you," Ohls said.

    "Stop trying to cheer me up, Bernie," I said.

    "You can't go up against him alone," Wilde said. "And neither Lieutenant Ohls nor I can help you until you have incontrovertible evidence against him of whatever he may have done."