She got up slowly and walked around the desk and sat quite carefully on my lap. She put her arms around my neck and leaned her face close to me. I could feel the heat of her breath on my face.
"Let's see," she said and pressed her mouth against mine, open. We explored that for a while, and when we finally broke, both of us were breathing harder than we had been. Vivian looked into my eyes from very close, so close that her eyes blurred as I'm sure mine must have to her.
"Maybe just a little melting?" she said.
"You found Carmen yet?" I said.
She stiffened and then stood up and walked back around the desk to her chair.
"Damn you," she said. "Goddamn you, Marlowe. Don't you change? Can't you ever change?"
Her voice shook a little and she had to look down and breathe a bit to get her composure. When she finally spoke her voice was a little hoarse.
"I know she's all right, Marlowe. I don't know where she is, but I know that Dr. Bonsentir knows and it's all right."
"That doesn't make any sense," I said.
"Please," she said. "You want to hear me beg, okay, listen. Please leave this alone. I know you don't care about money. But I'll pay you twice what Norris is paying, three times. If you will please just leave this alone."
"Have you spoken to Norris?" I said.
She shook her head.
"I cannot speak to Norris as I can speak to you."
"Why not," I said. "You could show him your legs…" I finished it off with a hand flip.
"He's the butler, for God's sake, Marlowe. Do you enjoy humiliating me?"
"I'm not humiliating you," I said. "You're doing that yourself. I'm just after the truth."
"Truth," she said and laughed without even a hint of humor. "What the hell is the truth? And what difference does it ever make? You're like so many men. You have these things you think are so important. Truth. My Word. Honor. Right. Pride." She shook her head and laughed again. A laugh more painful than any scream. "You probably believe in love, for God's sake."
"What I believe in right now, Mrs. Regan, is finding Carmen."
"Why? In the name of God, why do you care? What difference can she ever make?"
"It's what I do for a living," I said. "Somebody hired me to do it."
"You will cause more trouble than you understand," Vivian said.
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I let it pass. We looked at each other for a while. Then Vivian sighed and stood up.
"I'm sorry, Marlowe," she said.
"Sure," I said. "I'm sorry too."
She turned and headed for the door. She opened it and turned for a moment and looked back as if she were going to say something. Then she shook her head and turned away.
"Vivian," I said.
She paused and looked back.
"I enjoyed the kiss," I said.
She stared at me for a moment and then shook her head again.
"That's the hell of it," she said. "I did too."
Then she turned and closed the door behind her. I sat and looked at it and sipped the rest of the rye. She must have left the outside door open. Because I didn't hear it close.
CHAPTER 7
After Vivian left I corked the office bottle and put it back in the drawer. I went to the sink, rinsed out the glasses, washed my hands and face, and went back to my desk. I got out the phone book and looked up some numbers and made some calls. The L. A. County medical board had no registration of Dr. Claude Bonsentir.
The licensing board had never heard of him.
That taken care of, I went down on the boulevard and sat at a counter and had some late lunch. Never-at-a-loss Marlowe, the hungry detective. After lunch I strolled back up the boulevard toward my office. The movie executives were coming out of Musso & Frank's, telling each other how much they loved each other's last picture. The tourists walked along the sidewalk, heads down, staring at the stars in the pavement. If a real star had happened by they'd have never seen him. Near the Chinese theater a group of tourists stood and looked at the footprints in the concrete and listened to some sort of guide telling them about it. Outside the Roosevelt Hotel the prostitutes waited. They'd come from Keokuk and Great Falls, planning to start as starlets and become stars. It hadn't worked out. Some had started maybe as starlets, but they'd ended up as whores and as the afternoon began to wane, with its promise of evening, they gathered with the desperation in their eyes. Hollywood the town of sex and money and hokum for the tourists. A town where guys like Bonsentir could make a handsome living without a license, without any trace in the medical board records, without any interference from the buttons. Hooray.
Having been told by everyone but Daisy Duck to butt out, and having earned a total of one dollar on the case so far, the smart thing to do would have been to go back to the office and have another couple of pulls at my bottle of rye and think long thoughts about how glamorous it was to be in Hollywood. That being the smart thing to do, I got in my car and drove down to Las Olindas to see Eddie Mars. Which is how smart I am.
The Cypress Club was half hidden by a grove of wind-twisted cypress trees, which is probably why they called it the Cypress Club. It had once been a hotel and before that a rich man's house. It still looked like a rich man's house, grown a little shabby, and tarnished a bit by the beach fog that hung over it much of the time.
There was no doorman when I arrived, too early. The big double doors that separated the main room from the entry foyer were open. Inside there was only a barman setting up for the evening, and a Filipino in a white coat dry-mopping the old parquet floor. From somewhere in the dimness to my right a pasty-faced blond man appeared. He was slim and there was no expression in his face. I remembered him from when I first saw him in Arthur Gwynne Geiger's house with the smell of ether still in the air, and blood still on the rug.
If he remembered me he didn't show it.
"Place is closed for another couple of hours, bub."
"I know," I said. "I'm here to see Eddie."
"He know you're coming?"
"No."
"Then you probably aren't going to see him."
"It's the movies," I said. "All you hard guys think you have to act like some ham you saw in the movies. But he doesn't act that way because he's tough. He acts that way because he can't act. Go tell Eddie I'm here."
He gave me the same tough-guy blank stare and turned and disappeared back into the gloom to the right. Pretty soon he came and said, "This way."
His expression hadn't changed. Nothing had changed. He acted like he didn't care about me. Maybe he wasn't acting.
Eddie Mars was still gray. Fine gray hair, gray eyes, neat gray eyebrows. His double-breasted flannel suit was gray, and his shirt was a lighter gray and his tie a darker gray except for two red diamonds in it. He had a hand in his coat pocket with the thumb out, the nail perfectly manicured, gleaming in the light from the big old bay window that looked out at the sea. The room was paneled, with a fabric frieze above the paneling. A wood fire burned in the deep stone fireplace and the smell of the woodsmoke mingled softly with the smell of the cold ocean. The time-lock safe was still in the corner. The Sevres tea set still sat on its tray. It didn't look like it had been used any more than it had the last time I was here.
Mars grinned at me sociably. "Nice to see you again, soldier," he said.
"That's not what everybody else says."
Mars raised his even gray eyebrows. His face was tanned, and smooth-shaven, and healthy looking.
"People can be cruel," he said. "Any special reason they're talking to you that way?"
"I keep asking them where Carmen Sternwood is," I said.
Mars' face darkened. The smile stayed but it seemed less sociable.
"It's that kind of a visit, is it?" Mars said.
"Of course it is," I said. "Why would I come calling on you socially?"
"I thought we got along, Marlowe."
"You're a thug, Eddie. You look like a good polo player, and you've go
t a lot of money, and you know a lot of rich folks. But behind it you're a thug, and you've got goons like Blondie there to follow you around with a rod."
"And what's that to you?" Mars said. "Supposing what you say is true. What the hell are you? You're packing a rod, right now, under your left arm. You bend the law. You did it on Rusty Regan's death. The difference between me and you, soldier, is I make money and you don't."
"The difference between you and me, Eddie, is there's things I won't do."
Mars kept his smile and shrugged.
"What is it you wanted to ask me?" he said.
"What do you know about Carmen Sternwood?"
Mars shrugged again. Distantly I could hear the sound of the Pacific as it roiled against the foot of the cliff below the Cypress Club.
"Not much," he said. "Except what you know."
"You know where she is now?"
Mars shook his head. "Last I knew she was in a sanitarium up the top of Coldwater Canyon."
"She's not there now," I said.
"She run off?"
It was my turn to shrug.
"Vivian hire you?" Mars said.
"No," I said. "She's one of the people telling me to butt out."
"Lot of hard edge to that woman," Mars said.
"She also told me that you had promised her you'd find Carmen."
Mars was silent a moment. Then he said, "That a fact?"
"What she said," I answered.
"Why would I do that?" Mars said.
"Same reason you rigged it to look like Rusty Regan ran off with your wife," I said. " 'Cause you're sweet."
Mars laughed out loud.
"Sweet," he said. "Soldier, I've got to say I always enjoy you."
"Like you enjoyed me when I found your wife and Regan wasn't with her. And you were afraid I'd blow the whistle that maybe Regan really was dead. Like you enjoyed me when you told Lash Canino to kill me?"
Mars shrugged. "I underestimated you, soldier. How'd you take Canino anyway?"
"Your wife helped me. Mona Mars in the silver wig."
"Ex-wife," Mars said.
"Canino's car was parked outside the farmhouse in Rialto." I said, "Empty..."
***
And I was behind it wearing handcuffs, but I had a gun. And big brave Lash came out to get me, pushing your wife in front of him.
She came down the steps. Now I could see the white stiffness of her face. She started toward the car. A bulwark of defense for Canino, in case I could still spit in his eye. Her voice spoke through the lisp of the rain, saying slowly, without any tone: "I can't see a thing, Lash. The windows are misted."
He grunted something and the girl's body jerked hard, as though he had jammed a gun into her back. She came on again and drew near the lightless car. I could see him behind her now, his hat, a side of his face, the bulk of his shoulder. The girl stopped rigid and screamed. A beautiful thin tearing scream that rocked me like a left hook.
"I can see him!" she screamed. "Through the window. Behind the wheel, Lash!"
He fell for it like a bucket of lead. He knocked her roughly to one side and jumped forward, throwing his hand up. Three more spurts of flame cut the darkness. More glass scarred. One bullet went on through and smacked a tree on my side. A ricochet whined off into the distance. But the motor went quietly on.
He was low down, crouched against the gloom, his face a grayness without form that seemed to come back slowly after the glare of the shots. If it was a revolver he had, it might be empty. It might not. He had fired six times, but he might have reloaded inside the house. I hoped he had. I didn't want him with an empty gun. But it might be an automatic.
I said: "Finished?"
He whirled at me. Perhaps it would have been nice to allow him another shot or two, just like a gentleman of the old school. But his gun was still up and I couldn't wait any longer. Not long enough to be a gentleman of the old school. I shot him four times, the Colt straining against my ribs. The gun jumped out of his hands as if it had been kicked. He reached both his hands for his stomach. I could hear them smack hard against his body. He fell like that, straight forward, holding himself together with his broad hands. He fell facedown in the wet gravel. And after that there wasn't a sound from him…
***
"You ever see her, Eddie?"
Mars shook his head. "Not since the night I sprang her from the DA's living room," he said. "I took her home and went to make a drink and when I came back she was gone."
"So you divorced her."
"Uh huh."
"And turned for solace to Vivian Regan."
"You think so?"
"I got the impression you and she might be sort of an item," I said.
"And if we were?"
"Then you might be sweet enough to find her little sister for her."
"Those frails are poison, Marlowe. The younger one's sicker than a week-old oyster, and Vivian's the kind of broad that will always drive too fast. She breaks things."
"But there's all that money," I said.
"Never mind that maybe I should take offense that I'd chase one of these broads to marry into the mashed potatoes," Mars said. "The thing is, I don't need it. I got enough."
"Enough doesn't mean anything to guys like you, Eddie."
Mars' smile vanished, and his face showed suddenly just how hard a guy he was.
"You don't want to get in my way, soldier, unless you like the idea of breathing through your navel."
"Lash Canino couldn't do it, Eddie."
Mars pointed at me with the forefinger of his right hand and then swiveled his wrist and pointed toward the door.
"You're on your way, soldier," he said. "But while you're leaving think about something. I got no reason to care about what happens to you, and no reason to lie to you; but I'm telling you"-Mars' face broke into a grin-"because I'm sweet, that if people are telling you to stay out of the Carmen Sternwood deal, and to stay away from that sanitarium where they stashed her, then do it. You'll regret it if you don't."
The grin had disappeared by the time he finished.
I moved toward the door.
"See you around," I said. "If somebody hasn't scared me to death in the meantime."
I closed the door and left, and drove back to Hollywood knowing every bit as much as I'd known when I drove down.
Which was nothing at all.
CHAPTER 8
The canyon where Resthaven nestled ran back along the hill for a ways, and the road on which Resthaven fronted followed the canyon and looped up and behind the sanitarium before it trailed back out onto Coldwater again. I parked my car on Coldwater Canyon under an olive tree. The morning was bright and still. It would be a hot day, but it wasn't hot yet and everything still looked unwilted. There was dust on the leaves of the olive tree, and the small black fruit that had fallen from the tree crunched underfoot when I got out of the car. The traffic on Coldwater Canyon Drive was heading both ways over the hill to work. I walked around behind Resthaven and up the side loop that put me on the canyon, looking down at the sanitarium. In Beverly Hills Oriental servants were squeezing orange juice and people in silk robes were eating soft-boiled eggs in little egg cups and glancing through the morning paper. But here, behind the screen of scrub growth along the rim of the canyon, I couldn't see the L. A. basin. I could have been in Fargo or Bellows Falls except for the heat and the dryness. I looked down at Resthaven Sanitarium.
It was a large sweep of green lawn which ended at the foot of the canyon wall on which I stood. The wall formed a natural barrier. The other end of the lawn abutted the central house and an eight-foot-high brick wall ran from either end of the house to the foot of the canyon. There were shrubs along the walls, and flowering jacaranda which made it look ornamental, but it would take an agile patient to get over it. There was a pool with red stone terracing around it, and near the canyon wall, a croquet lawn where several men and women played a morning round. The players were dressed variously. Some in what seemed t
o be a hospital uniform of black linen pajamas and sandals, but two of the men were in suits and ties, and one woman was in evening dress.
The beachboy I'd seen earlier was lounging on a chaise near the pool, watching the patients and working on his tan. The Mexican was nowhere in sight, nor was Dr. Bonsentir. I squatted on my haunches at the rim of the canyon, hidden by some scrub oak, and observed. The croquet proceeded languidly, and as the sun got higher and burned away the last wisp of night coolness, the beachboy shifted his chaise into the shade of a big beach umbrella. He was reading the paper and periodically glancing at his charges. After a while he lay back in the chaise and, with the paper draped over his face, lay perfectly still. There wouldn't be a better time. I went over the rim of the canyon.
It was nearly vertical but scattered with scrub pine and oak and juniper and I was able to slide down from handhold to handhold and drop into the croquet lawn without collecting more dirt than would grow an acre of spinach. If the players thought there was anything odd about someone sliding down the canyon into their game they didn't do anything to suggest it. In fact they paid me no attention as they went about tapping the wooden balls with their mallets and with subdued pleasure sending their opponent's ball away from the wicket. The beachboy never stirred.
There was something odd about this croquet game. It took me a minute to realize what it was as I shook the stones and assorted gravel out of my shirt. No one spoke. The game proceeded in complete silence except for the click of the ball and the occasional pleased chuckle. The woman in the evening gown played in long gloves and high slingstrap silver slippers. One of the men had on a pale tan suit with a thin cream pinstripe in it. He wore a cream-colored linen vest and light tan shoes. His bright green silk tie was tied in a wide Windsor knot. They were all doped to the eyeballs and were playing their game to a tune I couldn't hear.
Walking softly on the grass, I went past the sleeping attendant and in through a back door into the same long low ranch-style main building that I'd been in before. It was cool inside, and dim. I was in a game room. There were two billiards tables and a Ping-Pong table. Along one wall there were card tables set up and across the back wall was a low counter with stools where maybe milk and cookies was served, or maybe opium and a flagon of ether.
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