The Collected Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

  “That is scarcely answering my question.”

  I nodded. “No. That is scarcely answering your question. I guess I just don’t like to admit that I played a hunch. The morning I was here, after I left you out in the orchid house, Mrs. Regan sent for me. She seemed to assume I was hired to look for her husband and she didn’t seem to like it. She let drop however that ‘they’ had found his car in a certain garage. The ‘they’ could only be the police. Consequently the police must know something about it. If they did, the Missing Persons Bureau would be the department that would have the case. I didn’t know whether you had reported it, of course, or somebody else, or whether they had found the car through somebody reporting it abandoned in a garage. But I know cops, and I knew that if they got that much, they would get a little more—especially as your driver happened to have a police record. I didn’t know how much more they would get. That started me thinking about the Missing Persons Bureau. What convinced me was something in Mr. Wilde’s manner the night we had the conference over at his house about Geiger and so on. We were alone for a minute and he asked me whether you had told me you were looking for Regan. I said you had told me you wished you knew where he was and that he was all right. Wilde pulled his lip in and looked funny. I knew just as plainly as though he had said it that by ‘looking for Regan’ he meant using the machinery of the law to look for him. Even then I tried to go up against Captain Gregory in such a way that I wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already.”

  “And you allowed Captain Gregory to think I had employed you to find Rusty?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did—when I was sure he had the case.”

  He closed his eyes. They twitched a little. He spoke with them closed. “And do you consider that ethical?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  The eyes opened again. The piercing blackness of them was startling coming suddenly out of that dead face. “Perhaps I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t. The head of a Missing Persons Bureau isn’t a talker. He wouldn’t be in that office if he was. This one is a very smart cagey guy who tries, with a lot of success at first, to give the impression he’s a middle-aged hack fed up with his job. The game I play is not spillikins. There’s always a large element of bluff connected with it. Whatever I might say to a cop, he would be apt to discount it. And to that cop it wouldn’t make much difference what I said. When you hire a boy in my line of work it isn’t like hiring a window-washer and showing him eight windows and saying: ‘Wash those and you’re through.’ You don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor. The client comes first, unless he’s crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut. After all you didn’t tell me not to go to Captain Gregory.”

  “That would have been rather difficult,” he said with a faint smile.

  “Well, what have I done wrong? Your man Norris seemed to think when Geiger was eliminated the case was over. I don’t see it that way. Geiger’s method of approach puzzled me and still does. I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don’t expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don’t know much about cops. It’s not things like that they overlook, if they overlook anything. I’m not saying they often overlook anything when they’re really allowed to work. But if they do, it’s apt to be something looser and vaguer, like a man of Geiger’s type sending you his evidence of debt and asking you to pay like a gentleman—Geiger, a man in a shady racket, in a vulnerable position, protected by a racketeer and having at least some negative protection from some of the police. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to find out if there was anything putting pressure on you. If there was, you would pay him. If not, you would ignore him and wait for his next move. But there was something putting a pressure on you. Regan. You were afraid he was not what he had appeared to be, that he had stayed around and been nice to you just long enough to find out how to play games with your bank account.”

  He started to say something but I interrupted him. “Even at that it wasn’t your money you cared about. It wasn’t even your daughters. You’ve more or less written them off. It’s that you’re still too proud to be played for a sucker—and you really liked Regan.”

  There was a silence. Then the General said quietly: “You talk too damn much, Marlowe. Am Ito understand you are still trying to solve that puzzle?”

  “No. I’ve quit. I’ve been warned off. The boys think I play too rough. That’s why! thought! should give you back your money—because it isn’t a completed job by my standards.”

  He smiled. “Quit, nothing,” he said. “I’ll pay you another thousand dollars to find Rusty. He doesn’t have to come back. I don’t even have to know where he is. A man has a right to live his own life. I don’t blame him for walking out on my daughter, nor even for going so abruptly. It was probably a sudden impulse. I want to know that he is all right wherever he is. I want to know it from him directly, and if he should happen to need money, I should want him to have that also. Am I clear?”

  I said: “Yes, General.”

  He rested a little while, lax on the bed, his eyes closed and dark-lidded, his mouth tight and bloodless. He was used up. He was pretty nearly licked. He opened his eyes again and tried to grin at me.

  “I guess I’m a sentimental old goat,” he said. “And no soldier at all. I took a fancy to that boy. He seemed pretty clean to me. I must be a little too vain about my judgment of character. Find him for me, Marlowe. Just find him.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “You’d better rest now. I’ve talked your arm off.”

  I got up quickly and walked across the wide floor and out. He had his eyes shut again before I opened the door. His hands lay limp on the sheet. He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. I shut the door quietly and went back along the upper hall and down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 31

  The butler appeared with my hat. I put it on and said: “What do you think of him?”

  “He’s not as weak as he looks, sir.”

  “If he was, he’d be ready for burial. What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”

  The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”

  “Like yours,” I said.

  “If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”

  “Thanks. How are the ladies this morning?”

  He shrugged politely.

  “Just what I thought,” I said, and he opened the door for me.

  I stood outside on the step and looked down the vistas of grassed terraces and trimmed trees and flowerbeds to the tall metal railing at the bottom of the gardens. I saw Carmen about halfway down, sitting on a stone bench, with her head between her hands, looking forlorn and alone.

  I went down the red brick steps that led from terrace to terrace. I was quite close before she heard me. She jumped up and whirled like a cat. She wore the light blue slacks she had worn the first time I saw her. Her blonde hair was the same loose tawny wave. Her face was white. Red spots flared in her cheeks as she looked at me. Her eyes were slaty.

  “Bored?” I said.

  She smiled slowly, rather shyly, then nodded quickly. Then she whispered: “You’re not mad at me?”

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  She put her thumb up and giggled. “I’m not.” When she giggled I didn’t like her any more. I looked around. A target hung on a tree about thirty feet away, with some darts sticking to it. There were three or four more on the stone bench where she had been sitting.

  “For people with money you and your sister don’t seem to have much fun,” I said.

  She looked at me under her long lashes. Thi
s was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back. I said: “You like throwing those darts?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That reminds me of something.” I looked back towards the house. By moving about three feet I made a tree hide me from it. I took her little pearl-handled gun out of my pocket. “I brought you back your artillery. I cleaned it and loaded it up. Take my tip—don’t shoot it at people, unless you get to be a better shot. Remember?”

  Her face went paler and her thin thumb dropped. She looked at me, then at the gun I was holding. There was a fascination in her eyes. “Yes,” she said, and nodded. Then suddenly: “Teach me to shoot.”

  “Huh?”

  “Teach me how to shoot. I’d like that.”

  “Here? It’s against the law.”

  She came close to me and took the gun out of my hand, cuddled her hand around the butt. Then she tucked it quickly inside her slacks, almost with a furtive movement, and looked around.

  “I know where,” she said in a secret voice. “Down by some of the old wells.” She pointed off down the hill. “Teach me?”

  I looked into her slaty blue eyes. I might as well have looked at a couple of bottle-tops. “All right. Give me back the gun until I see if the place looks all right.”

  She smiled and made a mouth, then handed it back with a secret naughty air, as if she was giving me a key to her room. We walked up the steps and around to my car. The gardens seemed deserted. The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile. We got into the car and I drove down the sunken driveway and out through the gates.

  “Where’s Vivian?” I asked.

  “Not up yet.” She giggled.

  I drove on down the hill through the quiet opulent streets with their faces washed by the rain, bore east to La Brea, then south. We reached the place she meant in about ten minutes.

  “In there.” She leaned out of the window and pointed.

  It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. A wide five-barred gate was folded back against a stump and looked as if it hadn’t been shut in years. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. It was empty and sunny now, but not yet dusty. The rain had been too hard and too recent. I followed the ruts along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained, motionless walking-beam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over a branch. I could see the rusty old steel cable that connected this walking-beam with a half a dozen others. The beams didn’t move, probably hadn’t moved for a year. The wells were no longer pumping. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight.

  “Are they going to make a park of all this?” I asked.

  She dipped her chin down and gleamed at me.

  “It’s about time. The smell of that sump would poison a herd of goats. This the place you had in mind?”

  “Uh-huh. Like it?”

  “It’s beautiful.” I pulled up beside the loading platform. We got out. I listened. The hum of the traffic was a distant web of sound, like the buzzing of bees. The place was as lonely as a churchyard. Even after the rain the tall eucalyptus trees still looked dusty. They always look dusty. A branch broken off by the wind had fallen over the edge of the sump and the flat leathery leaves dangled in the water.

  I walked around the sump and looked into the pump-house. There was some junk in it, nothing that looked like recent activity. Outside a big wooden bull wheel was tilted against the wall. It looked like a good place all right.

  I went back to the car. The girl stood beside it preening her hair and holding it out in the sun. “Gimme,” she said, and held her hand out.

  I took the gun out and put it in her palm. I bent down and picked up a rusty can.

  “Take it easy now,” I said. “It’s loaded in all five. I’ll go over and set this can in that square opening in the middle of that big wooden wheel. See?” I pointed. She ducked her head, delighted. “That’s about thirty feet. Don’t start shooting until I get back beside you. Okey?”

  “Okey,” she giggled.

  I went back around the sump and set the can up in the middle of the bull wheel. It made a swell target. If she missed the can, which she was certain to do, she would probably hit the wheel. That would stop a small slug completely. However, she wasn’t going to hit even that.

  I went back towards her around the sump. When I was about ten feet from her, at the edge of the sump, she showed me all her sharp little teeth and brought the gun up and started to hiss.

  I stopped dead, the sump water stagnant and stinking at my back.

  “Stand there, you son of a bitch,” she said.

  The gun pointed at my chest. Her hand seemed to be quite steady. The hissing sound grew louder and her face had the scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.

  I laughed at her. I started to walk towards her. I saw her small finger tighten on the trigger and grow white at the tip. I was about six feet away from her when she started to shoot.

  The sound of the gun made a sharp slap, without body, a brittle crack in the sunlight. I didn’t see any smoke. I stopped again and grinned at her.

  She fired twice more, very quickly. I don’t think any of the shots would have missed. There were five in the little gun. She had fired four. I rushed her.

  I didn’t want the last one in my face, so I swerved to one side. She gave it to me quite carefully, not worried at all. I think I felt the hot breath of the powder blast a little.

  I straightened up. “My, but you’re cute,” I said.

  Her hand holding the empty gun began to shake violently. The gun fell out of it. Her mouth began to shake. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up towards her left ear and froth showed on her lips. Her breath made a whining sound. She swayed.

  I caught her as she fell. She was already unconscious. I pried her teeth open with both hands and stuffed a wadded handkerchief in between them. It took all my strength to do it. I lifted her up and got her into the car, then went back for the gun and dropped it into my pocket. I climbed in under the wheel, backed the car and drove back the way we had come along the rutted road, out of the gateway, back up the hill and so home.

  Carmen lay crumpled in the corner of the car, without motion. I was halfway up the drive to the house before she stirred. Then her eyes suddenly opened wide and wild. She sat up.

  “What happened?” she gasped.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Oh, yes it did,” she giggled. “I wet myself.”

  “They always do,” I said.

  She looked at me with a sudden sick speculation and began to moan.

  CHAPTER 32

  The gentle-eyed, horse-faced maid let me into the long gray and white upstairs sitting room with the ivory drapes tumbled extravagantly on the floor and the white carpet from wall to wall. A screen star’s boudoir, a place of charm and seduction, artificial as a wooden leg. It was empty at the moment. The door closed behind me with the unnatural softness of a hospital door. A breakfast table on wheels stood by the chaise-longue. Its silver glittered. There were cigarette ashes in the coffee cup. I sat down and waited.

  It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

  She went past me in long smooth strides and sat down on the edge of the chaise-longue. There was a cigarette in her lips, at the corner of her mouth. Her nails today were copper red from quick to tip, without half moons.

  “So you’re just a brute after all,” she said quietly, staring at me. “An utter callous brute. You killed a man last night. Never mind how I heard it. I heard
it. And now you have to come out here and frighten my kid sister into a fit.”

  I didn’t say a word. She began to fidget. She moved over to a slipper chair and put her head back against a white cushion that lay along the back of the chair against the wall. She blew pale gray smoke upwards and watched it float towards the ceiling and come apart in wisps that were for a little while distinguishable from the air and then melted and were nothing. Then very slowly she lowered her eyes and gave me a cool hard glance.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I’m thankful as hell one of us kept his head the night before last. It’s bad enough to have a bootlegger in my past. Why don’t you for Christ’s sake say something?”

  “How is she?”

  “Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. Fast asleep. She always goes to sleep. What did you do to her?”

  “Not a thing. I came out of the house after seeing your father and she was out in front. She had been throwing darts at a target on a tree. I went down to speak to her because I had something that belonged to her. A little revolver Owen Taylor gave her once. She took it over to Brody’s place the other evening, the evening he was killed. I had to take it away from her there. I didn’t mention it, so perhaps you didn’t know it.”

  The black Sternwood eyes got large and empty. It was her turn not to say anything.

  “She was pleased to get her little gun back and she wanted me to teach her how to shoot and she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money. So we went down there and the place was pretty creepy, all rusted metal and old wood and silent wells and greasy scummy sumps. Maybe that upset her. I guess you’ve been there yourself. It was kind of eerie.”

  “Yes—it is.” It was a small breathless voice now.

  “So we went in there and I stuck a can up in a bull wheel for her to pop at. She threw a wingding. Looked like a mild epileptic fit to me.”

  “Yes.” The same minute voice. “She has them once in a while. Is that all you wanted to see me about?”