I went straight downtown to the hall of records and spent maybe an hour and a half looking up the incorporation papers that the California secretary of state's office requires of all new companies. Neville Valley Trust was in there, and the Rancho Springs Development Corp. Everything was written in the conventional language of lawyers, which is why it took me an hour and a half. But when I was through I knew that the Neville Valley Realty Trust and Rancho Springs Development Corporation were legal corporations in the State of California. And I knew that a member of the incorporating board of Rancho Springs was Claude Bonsentir.
Then I went to the library and spent another couple of hours in the periodical room reading up on the Neville Valley Land Reclamation Project. It was almost as boring as the documents of incorporation, but basically I learned that it was a part of a federal effort to reclaim barren land in the West and Southwest. The plan in Neville Valley was to use the spill from the Neville River to irrigate land all over the valley and turn it into rich farming country. There was no mention of the Neville Valley Trust in anything I read.
Driving back to Hollywood, I thought about all of this. Was Neville Valley Realty buying up water rights as representatives of the government? Were they buying the rights so they could resell them to the government at extortion-level prices? What was kindly old doctor Heal-all doing on the board of the Rancho Springs Development Corp.? And why did some employees of the Neville Valley Realty Trust come to Hollywood and pour it on me?
***
Back in my office I put in a call to the Bureau of Land Management's Los Angeles office. It took about a half an hour, and most of that on hold, to get anyone who even knew about the Neville Valley project, and he didn't know anything about the Neville Realty Trust. Which didn't prove that they weren't working for the government. It only proved what I already knew about the government.
I sat at my desk with the window open, smelling the fumes from the coffee shop downstairs and pushing the things I knew around in my head, hoping they'd form a pattern I could recognize. It was late afternoon. I looked out my window at the boulevard below me. Nobody was frying eggs on the sidewalk. Off on another street somewhere a police siren wailed. They'd be busy in this heat. People got a little crazy in heat like this. Husbands began to ball their fists and frown at their wives. Meek, mousy-haired wives began to look at the breadknife and eye their husbands taking a nap in their undershirts and snoring, their throats exposed. In the barrio the prowl car boys would keep their hands a little closer to their guns. And in the hills where the stars lived, people would sit on patios looking at the lights twinkle in the steamy evening below them in the basin, and the sweat that beaded on the sides of cocktail shakers would trickle off and make a wet spot in their linen slacks. The heat played no favorites.
It got slowly dark while I sat there looking out at the baking city and thinking and not getting anywhere. The end of another perfect day. Nobody called. Nobody came in. Nobody cared if I died or bought a house in Encino.
CHAPTER 21
The Rancho Springs Development Corp. was on the second floor over a gas station in a pale beige stucco building with the rounded shape of the Spanish Southwest that everyone south of Oregon thought was authentic native Californian. The building was on the main street in Rancho Springs next to a place that sold tacos and across the street from a general store where three desert rats in bib overalls sat out front in the thick heat and rocked and spat occasionally out onto the street. A big yellow tomcat with a torn ear sprawled on the bottom stair leading up to the Rancho Springs Development oflBce and I had to step over him when I went up.
Inside at the only desk in the place was a young woman with a bad sunburn. It was bad enough so that she moved a little stiffly as she turned toward me when I came in. The desk at which she sat and the chair on which she was sitting was all there was in the office for furniture. On the floor beside the desk was a cardboard carton and in the carton were a number of manila file folders. On the desk was a phone. That was it, there was nothing on the walls, no curtains on the windows. The room was as charming as a heap of coffee grounds.
I took off my sunglasses and smiled at the young woman. Her nose was peeling, and her pale hair was dry and bleached looking. She wore a flimsy white blouse with short sleeves and her thin arms were bright red.
"Dr. Bonsentir around?" I said.
She looked blank. She also looked pained and bored and tighter than a Methodist deacon.
"Who?"
"Dr. Claude Bonsentir," I said. "I was hoping to find him here."
"Never heard of him," she said.
She was chewing gum and her jaws moved slowly and with iron regularity on it. Occasionally she would open her mouth to stretch some of the gum into a thin grayish membrane with her tongue. Then her lips would close and the gum would disappear.
"This is Rancho Springs Development Corporation?" I said.
"Ann huh." She was busy with the gum.
"What exactly is it you develop?"
She tucked the gum away into some corner of her mouth and looked at me as if I had wriggled up from the kitchen drain.
"Listen, Jack," she said, "they hire me to sit here and answer the phone and take messages and if they want something typed I type it. You want to leave a message?"
"Who're 'they'?"
"Guys that run this place. Vinnie and Chuck."
"Vinnie and Chuck who?" I said.
She shook her head.
"You wanna leave a message?" she said.
"When you see Vinnie and Chuck," I said.
She got out a little note pad and a pencil.
"Yeah?" she said.
"Give them a big kiss for me," I said, and turned and went back out and down the stairs and over the cat and into the main street. The main street was maybe 100 yards long and didn't need to be, it only supported about six buildings. Between the buildings were vacant lots, mostly sand and a few weeds and here and there tumbleweed resting still in the windless heat.
I strolled down toward a gray, weathered clapboard building where a sign out front read rancho springs gazette and chronicle. It was a single-storied storefront with a wide front window and a screen door. Inside was a counter running across the room. Behind it was a printing press and two desks.
A big woman in a man's white shirt and gabardine slacks smiled easily at me when I came in. She wore her white hair short, and her face had the dark-tanned look of a desert person who spends a lot of time outdoors. She seemed in excellent health and fine spirits.
"Hello, stranger," she said. "Come to place an ad? Report something interesting? Either case this is the spot for it."
"Information," I said.
"Got that too," she said. "Name's Pauline Snow. Only thing in this godforsaken wasteland ain't hot is my name."
"Marlowe," I said. Guile hadn't done anything for me. I decided to try truth. "I'm a private detective from Los Angeles working on a case, and the name of the Rancho Springs Development Corporation has popped up in it."
Pauline Snow said "Humph," with a lot of feeling.
"I've been to the office and talked with the young woman who works there. I would have done better to talk with the cat, which doesn't chew gum."
"Rita," Pauline Snow said with as much feeling as she'd said humph.
"Yes," I said, "that's what I thought."
"Rancho Springs Development Corporation is a fancy name for a back-shanty operation in which two bozos come in and start buying up any land they can get," she said. "You got a cigarette?"
I got the pack out and gave it to her, she shook one loose, put it in her mouth, gave me back the pack. I held a match for her. She took a long inhale and let the smoke out in two streams through her nostrils. She looked me over.
"Private eye, is it?"
I nodded modestly.
"Well, you got the build for it, I'll give you that."
"Why are they buying up land?" I said. "Is there something about Rancho Springs Fm missing?"
"Only thirty miles," she said, "east of Pasadena."
"Perfect for fans of the Rose Parade," I said. "Anything else?"
"I don't know, Marlowe. It doesn't make any sense at all. This is hardscrabble dry land. No farming, no industry, damned little of anything. A few people still prospect out here, and a few damn fools like me and my husband come out here thinking about clean air and freedom. Then the son of a bitch up and died on me and left me to run this paper myself for the last seven years."
"Thoughtless," I said. "Maybe Vinnie and Chuck know something we don't."
"Vincent Tartabull and Charles Gardenia. They belter for their sake, because right now they're holding a passel of the most worthless acreage God ever made."
"They local people?" I said.
"Hell no," Pauline Snow said. "They come in here about six months ago and rented that hole up over the gas station, which is pretty much a damn hole itself if you think about it, and hired that idiot Rita. And started buying land. Easy enough to do, nobody wants it, everybody's happy as hell to sell and get out. Most folks are here 'cause they can't sell."
"Know where they came from?" "Los Angeles," she said.
"How do you know?"
"I used to be a reporter, Mr. Marlowe, for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now Imjust a fat old babe with no husband who runs a hicktown weekly in East Overshoe. But I haven't forgotten everything I used to know."
"I get the feeling, Mrs. Snow, that you haven't forgotten anything you used to know, and that you used to know a lot."
"You know how to make a girl feel right, Marlowe. You surely do."
"Anything else you can tell me about these guys?"
She shook her head. "Been trying to figure out their angle for a while," she said, "but I can't. It just doesn't make any sense."
"Know anybody named Bonsentir, Dr. Claude Bonsentir?"
"Sure. He's one of the names on the incorporation papers in the secretary of state's office."
I grinned at her. And nodded my head in mock homage.
"Happen to know his sock size?" I said. "Any identifying marks?"
"I'm not that good, Marlowe. I looked up the incorporation papers, like you probably did. Don't know more than that. They didn't tell me anything useful."
"No. They wouldn't. But I'm going to tell you something useful," I said. "There's some sort of connection between this outfit, the Rancho Springs Development Corp., and an outfit up in Neville Valley, called the Neville Valley Realty Trust."
"Neville Valley," she said. "Is that up north a ways, in the Mountains?"
"Yeah, about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevadas," I said. "And you know what they're doing?"
"How the hell would I know that?" she said.
"It was a rhetorical question, Mrs. Snow. They're buying up water rights."
She stared at me and opened her mouth and closed it and went and got a rolled-up map of California out of one of the file drawers near the printing press.
She unrolled it and spread it out on a desk top and bent over it, resting her hands on the desk, her head hanging as she pored over the map. After a few minutes she began to nod her head silently and kept nodding it as she rolled the map back up and put it away. When she returned to the counter she was still nodding.
"Gimme another smoke," she said.
I did. And a light. When she had her cigarette going and a lungful of smoke expelled she bent down behind the counter and rummaged around for a moment and came out with a bottle of rye whiskey and two glasses.
"We need to drink a little whiskey, I think, while we think about this."
I took the inch and a half she poured in one neat swallow.
So did she. She exhaled happily once and then poured two more drinks.
"You think they're going to run that water down from Neville Valley to here and make all that cheap desert land they bought worth a fortune?"
"They might," I said.
"Wouldn't that be something," she said.
"Problem is," I said, "the government's running some kind of land-reclamation project up there designed to do the same for Neville Valley."
"And you figure somebody's trying to steal it. The water."
"I don't know," I said. "I'm just trying to find one young woman, and everywhere I look things are peculiar and the case gets bigger and bigger."
"Well, maybe I can do some poking around at this end," she said. "You got someplace I can reach you?"
I gave her my card. She looked at the address. "Hollywood, isn't it?"
"Sure," I said. "Gumshoe to the stars."
"You know," she said, "what's funny. If we find out that everything is not, ah, kosher, in this deal. I mean, who the hell do you report a stolen river to?"
I drank the rest of my second drink and dried my mouth on the back of my first knuckle.
"Me, I guess," I said.
CHAPTER 22
I had parked my car on the street across from the gas station above which the Rancho Springs Development Corp. had its rathole. When I got back to my car it was blocked by a black and white police car with a big silver star on the side. Around the circumference of the star were the words rancho springs police.
Leaning against my car were two of Rancho Springs' finest. Probably all of Rancho Springs' finest. One was a long rangy leathery customer with a big walrus moustache. He wore a tan shirt and pants that had been laundered threadbare, and a big white ten-gallon hat with sweat stains around the base of the crown. There was a star pinned to his shirt, that said Chief, and he carried an old frontier-style.44 Colt in a scuffed leather holster which hung from a wide cartridge belt. The Colt must have had a barrel ten inches long. The other guy leaning on my car was probably six inches shorter than his chief and maybe a yard wider. He had no neck at all, his jowly red face rising directly from his shoulders, and his faded tan uniform shirt was stretched to its limit over his stomach, so that the buttonholes pulled, and in the gaps between the buttons the pallid skin showed through. He too wore a big hat and it succeeded in making him seem even squatter. Above his small eyes, his blond eyebrows were bleached pale and looked like white slashes against his red face. His silver badge said Sergeant on it. He had a government-issue.45 automatic in a military-style flap holster on a web belt that he wore tight, allowing his belly to hang over it.
"This your car?" the fat cop said.
"Nice huh?" I said. "You want to sit in it?"
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" the fat cop said.
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to talk so fast."
"You'll be talking fast in the back cell under the big lights in a little while," the fat cop said.
"The smaller the town, the tougher the buttons talk," I said.
The fat cop put his hand on his holster.
"You want to say that again, tough guy?" he said.
The chief put a hand like a catcher's mitt on the fat cop's shoulder.
"Now, Vern," he said mildly. "Got no call getting yourself into some sort of rutting contest with this fella. Just deliver our message and help him on his way."
"I figured there'd be a message," I said.
The fat cop continued to glower at me, hand poised on his holster flap. I could have shot off his nose and put the gun away by the time he got unbuttoned.
"Smart fella," the chief said easily. "Could tell you were a smart fella, minute you showed up in town. Lotta smart fellas in the city, I guess. Don't get a chance to see many of them out here eating sand with us cactus rats."
"You actually hire this guy as a cop?" I said, and jerked my head at the fat cop, "or do you just keep him around for shade?"
"Vern's a handy fella. Does good work with a blackjack. But he ain't always as polite as he should be, I guess. What's the purpose of your visit to our town, Mr. Marlowe?"
"Did you get it off the registration?" I said. "Or did Rita give it to you?"
"Registration," the chief said. "Rita couldn't remember if you give her a na
me."
I nodded. There was a moment of silence.
"We asked you a question, city boy."
"I'm a private detective on a case," I said.
"What case?" the chief said.
"Confidential," I said.
The chief made a little nod of his head and the fat cop hit me on the right shoulder with a blackjack. The pain went the length of my arm and up into my head. The fat cop was very quick with his blackjack, I hadn't seen him take it out.
"He makes another move with that sap," I said to the chief, "and I'm going to feed it to him."
The chief made a small move with his right hand and the frontier Colt was in it and pointing up under my chin.
"Let's just all stop fiddling around with this thing," he said. "You out here asking questions about Rancho Springs Development Corporation. We don't like that. We don't like big-time hotshot city private detectives come weasling into our town and asking questions about our businesses. Vern here, he hates that especially."
"I guessed that," I said. The muzzle of the Colt was pressing firmly into the soft area under my jawbone.
"So we don't want you to do it no more, smart boy. We want you to get in your car and haul it out of Rancho Springs and not come back. 'Cause if you do come back we got a cell, way down back with no windows and one bright light where you and Vern can sort of cha cha cha until everything's clear. Comprende?"
"Yeah," I said. "I can follow that."
The tall chief turned my head toward the car with the muzzle of his Colt.
"Dust," he said.
My right arm was numb and throbbing. I could barely move it. I tried not to let it show. I opened the car door with my left hand, just as if I always opened it with my left hand, and got in and started up. The two cops got in their car and pulled up and I went past them and headed out of town. They followed me all the way to the town line and then U-turned and headed back toward Rancho Springs, leaving a low pall of dust behind them as they dwindled in the rearview mirror. Every day some new friends.
CHAPTER 23
I woke up with an idea. I also woke up with one arm throbbing like a toothache, and some soreness left in my jaw, and a dull tenderness behind my ear. But mostly it was the idea. I remembered something Vivian had said about Simpson having a place in the desert. I rolled out of bed and called her while the coffee dripped.
Perchance to Dream Page 10