"Soon," he said, his tone dark and very guttural. "I feel it coming on. Soon it will be Carmen's time."
"She has lasted longer than many," Bonsentir said.
"I like to think-" Simpson said, the words oozing out of him like some viscous effluent. "I like to think of her face the first moment when she knows, when she realizes what will happen to her."
Both men were silent, admiring the thought. Then the door opened and Carmen floated in again.
"All done," she announced and plumped herself back down beside Simpson, and leaned her head against his fleshy shoulder. He tilted her chin up with one hand and kissed her hard on the mouth. She wriggled her little body, excitedly, like a fish on a hook.
I got down from my chair and moved to the door and opened it a crack. It was time to take her out of there. The corridor was empty. I opened the door wider and stepped through. I took the three steps down to the next door and put my hand inside my coat for my gun. Suddenly a steel cable, thicker than the ones on which they hung the Brooklyn Bridge, went around my neck, and a vise clamped on my gun hand. I could smell the owner, it was the Mexican. And it wasn't a steel cable, it was his forearm. I tried to stamp on his instep but the cable around my neck kept tightening. I jammed my left elbow back into his ribs. It had as much effect as if I'd slugged him with a marshmallow. I could feel the pressure build in my head. I couldn't see anything but a reddish haze. My gun and gun hand were still immobile under my coat. I tried to bend forward and throw him but it was like trying to bend an oak tree. I couldn't breathe. The reddish haze got darker and redder and finally enveloped me and I plunged into it and disappeared.
CHAPTER 32
I woke up sitting on the floor in a bright little room with no furniture. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again. There was a strong light shining in my face. My neck hurt, my head throbbed, I was aware that the reassuring weight of my gun was gone from under my left arm. I squinted past the light and could make out forms, not very clearly. One of them was surely the Mexican with his huge upper body and long arms. Others I couldn't make out. My mouth felt as if I'd eaten a blotter.
"He appears to have regained consciousness." It was the voice of Dr. Bonsentir, descending from the clouds. "How convenient of you, Mr. Marlowe, to have come to us, just when we had decided we must find you."
I braced my feet and edged my back up the wall and got myself standing. The Mexican moved out from behind the light and stepped closer to me. I could see my gun stuck in his belt. At least he hadn't tied a knot in the barrel.
"Why don't we just kill him right now." Simpson's voice came deep and thick from the darkness. "Then we won't have to think about it anymore."
I heard Carmen's suppurating giggle.
"I think it would be better," Bonsentir said, "to wait until we put out to sea again. It will make disposal of the body safer and less troublesome."
"I don't like to sail at night," Simpson said. His voice was back up again. It had the petulant ring of a kid who didn't want to go to bed early.
"I know, Randolph. It's all right. We'll keep him here until we get under way in the morning."
"It's too late," I said. "Too many people know."
"Who knows?" Simpson said. "I told you, Claude, he told people. Who knows? What do they know?" His voice went up and down like a piccolo solo.
"He would say that, Randolph. He's in profound jeopardy and he knows it. He would say that and hope it would save him, but it won't."
"The DA's chief investigator, Bernie Ohls, knows it," I said. "And the DA, Taggert Wilde, and the San Bernardino DA's office, and a Missing Persons' cop named Gregory, and a hard case named Eddie Mars who right now is maybe a hundred yards away with a boatload of tough boys who are ready to come over here and shoot your ears off."
"I know Eddie Mars," Carmen said excitedly. Oh boy! A familiar name.
Simpson came around into the lamplight. His soft face was red.
"Stop it," he said, his voice fluting down the scale as he spoke. It was eerie to hear, and at another time it would have been an interesting phenomenon. "You're trying to frighten me. Nobody knows. They can't. I'm too powerful. No one can know about me. So just shut your mouth, because you're going to be killed." The last sentence bottomed off into darkness.
My head felt like it was ready to rupture and my neck hurt and my throat was sore and I was a little dizzy, and sick of the light in my eyes and sick of being yammered at by an oversized brat. I hit him. It was a pretty good punch given the shape I was in. I felt his nose flatten and saw blood come. He screamed with a sound like glass shattering and stumbled back with his hands to his face and the blood running between his fingers, and kept screaming in high sharp bursts, like a European fire engine: whoop, whoop, whoop! I turned toward the Mex and something hit the side of my head and I went back once again to a place I'd been spending too much time in.
CHAPTER 33
This time when I came around I was alone. The only light came from a small bulb in the ceiling. All the parts that had hurt before hurt worse, and in addition I had an aching bruise on the left side of my jaw just in front of my ear. I sat for a while, fighting nausea. There was no movement in the yacht other than the slight toss of the easy swells on which we rode. Through the porthole I could see that it was still dark. Time to stand up. I could do it. Six feet tall, 190 pounds. In top condition. I could just stand right up. I tried to get my legs under me and they felt like seaweed. I compromised by inching over against the wall and slowly sitting up with my back supported by the wall. Even the dim light hurt my eyes. I squinted. Maybe I wouldn't get up just yet. Instead I'd survey the room, while I rested. There wasn't much to survey. Whatever light had shone in my eyes was gone, as was all the furniture. There was another flowering tropical plant growing in a big pot in the corner, and two throw pillows that might have been on a couch at one time. Other than that I was in an empty steel room painted ivory, with a porthole too small to squeeze through.
My watch was broken, probably smashed when I fell, I didn't know which time. I'd been falling so much that it could have happened anytime. There was a smear of blood on my shirt that must have gushed from Simpson's nose when I'd hit him. I took some satisfaction in that. Painfully, with rest stops often, I got to my feet. The room spun. I hung there for a moment, teetering over the void. Then it stabilized. I was up. I edged along the wall to the door and tried it. It was locked. Surprise! There was no other way out. I looked at the potted plant. It was real, growing in dirt. With a big purple trumpet-shaped flower on it. If you were as rich as Randolph Simpson you could have flowering plants grow anywhere you wanted.
I looked at the plant for a minute and then sat down on the floor again, and held steady until the room stopped spinning, and took off my right shoe and sock. I put the shoe back on my sockless foot and slowly got to my feet again. I was getting the hang of it. Someday I'd probably be able to do it whenever I wanted to. If there was going to be a someday. Carefully I filled the sock about two-thirds full of dirt from the pot. Then I tied a knot in it and slapped it gently across my hand.
It felt about right. I walked to the porthole and opened it and took a couple of deep breaths of cool sea air. Then I went back and stood against the wall next to the door where it latched and with my left hand began to bang on the door.
"Let me out," I hollered as loud as I could. "Let me out of here!"
I had to holler it several more times and keep banging on the door before I heard footsteps in the corridor and a jangle of keys and the door swung open. The Mexican came in with my gun still stuck in his belt and I laid the dirt-filled sock carefully against the side of his head back of his left ear. Very hard. He grunted and stumbled forward and went to his knees and I hit him again with my homemade sap, square across the back of the head this time, and he sighed and pitched face forward onto the floor. I kicked him hard in the head and then crouched beside him and got my hand under him and pulled my gun loose from his belt. The keys he'd used
to open my door were sprawled five feet in front of his outflung hand. I picked them up and went into the corridor and locked the door behind me. I had the reassuring weight of the gun again, and this time I kept it in my hand. So many people had taken it away from me, I barely recognized it.
The corridor was empty and silent. The doors that lined it were closed. I went along the corridor, listening at each door. There were no sounds except snoring in one cabin. There was no way to know who was snoring. I continued along, and at the last door on the port side I heard the familiar giggle. I tried the door. It was locked. I looked at the lock and tried a key that looked like it would match from the key ring Fd taken from the Mex. It fit and I opened the door gently.
Carmen was there all right, and Simpson. The lights were on. He was handcuffed to the bed, facedown, and Carmen, in a condition I was beginning to tire of, was naked as a minnow. She stood over Simpson, giggling her giggle and spanking him with a gold-inlaid ivory hairbrush.
I closed the door softly behind me and stepped into the room. Carmen looked up with her big eyes all iris and smiled.
"I know you," she said. "You've got the funny name."
"Doghouse Reilly," I said.
Simpson turned his head to look at me and I smiled at the thick white tape over his nose and the beginnings of a wonderful pair of shiners starting to darken under his eyes. He opened his mouth and I stepped over and put the gun barrel into it.
"Not a peep," I said.
His eyes widened but he was silent. Without clothing, his soft body was fleshy and white. I looked around the room. On the wall next to the bed, hanging on a hook, was a lacy peignoir. With the gun still in Simpson's mouth, I said to Carmen, "Put that robe on."
She smiled at me that loopy void smile that she had and put her thumb in her mouth. As always, it was supposed to make me jump in the air and click my heels. As always, it didn't work.
"If you make a sound I'll kill you," I said.
I took the gun out of Simpson's mouth and went and got the peignoir off the hook and slipped my gun under my arm while I forced Carmen's arms through the sleeves and buttoned the two buttons, which didn't do a very good job of holding the thing together. There was a sash, too, and I tied it around her waist. Then I took my gun out from under my arm again, pulled the sheet and two blankets up over Simpson's head, took a firm grip on Carmen's wrist, and went out of the room and into the corridor. As I closed the door behind me I heard Simpson, muffied through two blankets, yell "Help!" Five feet down the corridor I couldn't hear him.
"Where are we going?" Carmen said. She didn't seem scared. She seemed excited. Her lips were pulled back over her small white teeth. They were sharp teeth and whiter than teeth had any business being.
"Home," I said.
We went up the ladder well to the deck, with my gun in my right hand and my left with a death grip on Carmen's wrist. On deck there was only the boy in the sailor suit at the stern, gazing out over the black water at the shoreline.
"Shhh," I said to Carmen.
She giggled, her little sharp teeth showing even in the pale moonlight, and screamed as loud as she could. The boy in the sailor suit whirled, clawing at the gun in its regulation holster. I fired once and he yelped and staggered against the rail and then pitched forward. I heard doors open below me and footsteps on the ladder wells. I dragged Carmen to the rail and stowed my gun again under my arm. Behind me I heard the hatchway open and someone yelling, "Over there, by the rail."
I got my arms around Carmen's waist and heaved her up. She screamed again and I pitched her over the rail into the darkness, and dove after her. The water stung when I hit the surface and then I was in it and went under maybe ten or fifteen feet before I was able to turn and start up. My wet clothes dragged me back, and the weight of the gun under my arm was no longer comforting. My lungs had already been abused once this evening and they didn't enjoy further abuse.
At about the time I began to get the panicky feeling that I wouldn't make it to the surface, I did, and came back into the world in the ebony water and started looking for Carmen. I saw her twenty feet away, floundering. I swam toward her as someone on the yacht began to sweep the water with a flashlight. It must have been one of those long affairs with six batteries, because the beam was strong and the circle of light was large. I reached Carmen, who was giggling and crying and spluttering at the same time.
The flashlight swept by us and started back and then Blondie was there in the skiff and reaching for Carmen. The light hit us and a shot splashed the water near the skiff and then from somewhere in the darkness south of us a chatter of shots sounded and bullets spanged off the hull of the yacht and the flashlight went out and someone yelled, "Get down!" Then Carmen was in, and I was, rolling in over the gunwales of the skiff without quite knowing how I had and Blondie was silently pulling in the direction of the gunfire.
"I never thought I'd be glad to see you," I said to him.
"Sure," he said.
CHAPTER 34
"I don't want to go home," Carmen said. She was sitting with a blanket wrapped around her in the tiny below-decks stateroom of Mars' cabin cruiser. We were heading for the landing pier in the very earliest gray hint of dawn. Simpson's yacht had too much draft to follow us in. It was under full power, running north around the point.
I was there with my jacket off but the rest of me still soaking wet and Mars was looking fresh and comfortable as he leaned against the bulkhead.
"I still say we should have gone in and finished it," Mars said.
"Bad idea, Eddie. Simpson's got about a regiment with him whenever he travels. You'd have gotten wiped out."
"I got some pretty good boys with me, soldier."
"We came for Carmen," I said. "We've got her."
"I don't want to go home," Carmen said.
"It's not going to end here, soldier."
"I know," I said. "We have assault charges, and kidnapping, illegal restraint, attempted murder, murder, probably two counts. We have a witness." I nodded toward Carmen.
"Not much of a witness," Mars said. "You think you can make any of them stick against Simpson?"
"If we ever get Simpson alone," I said, "in a quiet room, with maybe a couple of tough cops who know how it's done, he'll babble like a brook. It's Bonsentir that keeps him together."
"You know any tough cops like that?" Mars said.
"One or two," I said. "When we get ashore I'll call one."
"Be a good thing," Mars said, "if you kinda leave me out of it. Cops would like to tag me anyway, and what we pulled off here may not be exactly one hundred percent legal."
"I'll do what I can," I said. "I owe you that much."
"You don't owe me a thing, soldier. I wasn't doing it for you."
"I'll keep you out of it anyway."
The cabin cruiser slowed to an idle and bumped gently broadside against the landing. It was early dawn and the sky was a lighter gray in the east. I collected Carmen and went ashore to find my car and find a phone and make a phone call.
Which I did.
CHAPTER 35
We were in a brightly lighted clean gray room in the Coast Guard Station in Long Beach. Ohls was there smoking one of his toy cigars and looking as if he'd had a good breakfast. There was also a captain from the Long Beach police, who was tall and thin and had a big Adam's apple and the expression of a man who didn't like his job. Behind a neat gray government-issue desk was a Coast Guard lieutenant commander named Fenton, who had a red face and the upper body of a beer barrel. I sat on a straight chair in front of the commander. Carmen, dressed in a Coast Guard fatigue shirt and dungarees four sizes too big, looked like Mary Pickford on the chair beside me. Ohls was standing near the doorway, and the Long Beach police captain, whose name was Rackley, was leaning on the wall next to Fenton's desk.
"We don't need her," Ohls said. "We brought Simpson into the Coast Guard brig and he wouldn't shut up. He told us about the Neville Valley water scheme. He told us about chopping
up Lola Monforte and four or five others from all over the country. He told us that Dr. Bonsentir was with him in everything and was his, ah, 'mentor' I think he called him, and 'spiritual adviser.' "
"Where's Bonsentir?" I said.
Ohls looked at Fenton.
"Had a Mexican with him," Fenton said. "Built like a gorilla. He put up a fight-trying to protect Bonsentir, I guess. I got a seaman in the hospital and another with a broken arm. The chief in charge of the detail had to shoot him dead."
"And?"
"And in the scuffle Bonsentir disappeared."
"He'll turn up," Ohls said. "We cut off his juice anyway, with Simpson."
"Can I see Randolph?" Carmen said.
"Not right now," Ohls said. He looked at me. "We got your statement, Marlowe, and hers. And before Simpson stops talking we may get him for murdering Lincoln."
I nodded. Carmen was working on her thumb again.
"Wait a minute," Rackley said. His Adam's apple juggled up and down his thin neck. "Are you turning them loose?"
"Yeah."
"Long Beach might have something to say about that," Rackley said.
"Long Beach would still be tripping over its own handcuffs, if Fenton here hadn't made a courtesy call," Ohls said. "Nothing going on here happened in Long Beach."
"I resent the crack about the handcuffs," Rackley said.
"I was kinda hoping you would," Ohls said. "You got any problems letting them walk?" He looked at Fenton.
"We're going to need her, it comes to trial," Fenton said. "Him too."
"Look," Ohls said patiently. "This guy goes out by himself onto a boat full of guys with big guns to rescue a nymphomaniac lulu that's sicker than two buzzards. He gets strangled and sapped and damn nears drowns and gets her out and brings her to us. He also solves a noisy dismemberment murder for us and prevents somebody from stealing a lifetime supply of water from some people up north."
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