Perchance to Dream

by Robert B. Parker

  "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.

  CHAPTER 14

  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."

&n
bsp; 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."

  "It sounds to me like you want me to nail this guy for you," I said.

  Wilde smiled without speaking. I looked at Ohls. He had shaken one of his little cigars loose from the tin in which they came and was about to light up.

  "Anyone say something like that, peeper?" Ohls said. "I didn't hear anything like that said. What you got from us is permission to go ahead and look for the girl, like you was hired to do."

  "I don't need your permission," I said.

  "So, good," Ohls said. "So whyn't you get the hell out of here and start looking?"

  I stood up.

  "You guys are a scream," I said. "Thanks for nothing at all."

  "Go carefully, Marlowe," Wilde said.

  "Sure thing," I said.

  Ohls grinned humorlessly at me past his toy cigar.

  "Call anytime, peeper," he said.

  I turned and left Wilde's office and went downstairs and caught a cab home.

  CHAPTER 15

  I was living that year in the Hobart Arms on Franklin just west of Kenmore. It was where I went after I picked up my car. I had found and then lost a dippy old lady trying to see her house, and parts of another lady. And Taggert Wilde and Ohls and Bonsentir-I'd found all of them. Fd even found Randolph Simpson, for all the good it did me. Unfortunately I wasn't supposed to find them. I was supposed to find Carmen Sternwood, and I was setting a record for not finding her.

  The apartment had the closed-up smell that empty places get, the smell of nobody home. It was a smell I knew well, though Fd never gotten used to it. I went and opened the windows and let the hot air move vaguely around. It didn't do much to the atmosphere inside. It hadn't been doing a hell of a lot for the atmosphere outside. I got a bottle of Vat 69 out of the kitchen cabinet, and built myself a tall scotch and water, took it into the living room, and looked down onto Franklin Avenue. There were the usual cars parked along the sidewalk, Fd stared down at them a lot in the late afternoon with a drink in my hand and no one else around. The street was far enough below so that not much noise drifted up, mostly I heard the silence behind me in the room, almost tangible, shimmering in the late summer afternoon like the heat waves that miraged up from the surface of the avenue. After you're alone long enough you get used to it. Almost.

  Parked across the street halfway down the block toward Alexandria was a car that didn't fit into the pattern my eyes automatically expected. It was bigger and newer than most cars that park in my neighborhood, and its motor was idling. I looked at it harder, but the sun glancing off the windows made it impossible to see inside. I watched it for a while and sipped my drink. When the drink was gone I went back in and bought myself another one and looked at the chess puzzle set up on the table. It didn't interest me. Kings and Queens and Knights seemed irrelevant. I did feel some kinship with the pawns. I sipped a little more of my drink and went and looked out the window again. The Buick was still there. That was okay. I was still here.

  There had to be a reason a mutilated corpse showed up with the Sternwoods' phone number in her purse. Everyone was assuming it was Carmen's number but it was also Vivian's. Hell, it was also Norris's number and the horsefaced maid's. Still, Carmen was a good bet. It was at least one angle, and it would make sense if Carmen and the unnamed cut-up lady had crossed paths at the Resthaven Sanitarium, or maybe they were both palsy with Randolph Simpson, or maybe they met at the May Company, trying on aprons, and took an instant liking to each other.

  My drink was gone. I went to the kitchen and rinsed out the glass and put it away. I looked at my chess puzzle again, shook my head, went back to the window and stared down for a while at the black Buick. And the phone rang.

  The voice I heard belonged to Vincent Norris.

  "Mr. Marlowe, Mrs. Regan would like very much to see you this evening, if you could stop by at your first convenience."

  "Cops been there?" I said.

  "I dare say they have, sir. And Mrs. Regan seems visibly upset by their visit. I do urge you to come and visit, sir."

  "You're my employer, Norris. You urge, I comply."

  "Quite so, sir. Thank you, sir."

  "Tell Mrs. Regan I'll be there as soon as I break my date with the Countess of Columbia," I said.

  "I hope the Countess will understand, sir."

  "Yeah," I said. "I'm sure she will."

  I hung up and got a gun out of the desk drawer and slipped on a shoulder holster. Then I went down and got in my car and headed west on Franklin past the Buick. By the time I reached Normandie the Buick was behind me, and it stayed behind me all the way to Alta Brea Crescent.

  It was a competent tail job by a guy who didn't seem to care if I made him. He stayed up close, no more than two cars away, and didn't try to get any closer. It appeared that he just wanted to know where I was going. After Alta Brea Crescent, I didn't know either.

  CHAPTER 16

  Vivian Sternwoods room was still too white and too high and too big. And the drapes still spilled onto the floor as if the interior decorator had measured wrong. She was in white silk pajamas this evening and was drinking scotch. She might have drunk quite a lot of it from the hard bright look in her eyes. But her speech was clear. When I came in she was sprawled on some kind of white satin fainting couch, one white satin slipper hung from her foot, the other was on the floor.

  "Well, Marlowe," she said when the maid had shut the door behind me, "the bargain basement Lancelot. How's the maiden rescuing going?"

  I let that ride, there was nothing in it for me.

  "Have a drink," Vivian said. She made a fluttering hand gesture at a silver ice bucket and a bottle of scotch and some glasses and tongs. I mixed up a light one and squirted some seltzer in from the silver filigreed siphon. I made a slight here's-to-you gesture with the glass and took a swallow. It was better scotch than I was used to.

  "Tired of drinking alone?" I said.

  "Tired of not getting drunk," she said. "I've been trying for the last couple of hours."

  "Boys with the steel-toed shoes been tramping around on your rug?" I said.

  She nodded and took a long drink. I could tell from the color that it was mostly scotch and very little soda. She nodded slowly.

  "My God, Marlowe, that woman…"

  "Yeah."

  "You saw her?"

  "Yea
h."

  "Carmen…" she said and let it trail off. She took a cigarette from a lacquer box beside her and put it in her mouth and leaned slightly toward me. I got up and put a match to it for her and shook the match out and dropped it in the silver ashtray beside the lacquer box.

  "What about Carmen?" I said.

  "The woman had her phone number."

  "Or yours," I said.

  "Marlowe, people do not walk around with my phone number written on the inside of matchbooks. It had to be Carmen."

  "Any ideas?" I said.

  Vivian shook her head and drank again and took a deep lungful of smoke and let it drift out slowly. We were quiet. Vivian drank the rest of her drink and held the empty glass out toward me. I got up and took it and mixed her a fresh one.

  "Lots of scotch, please," she said. "I need to get drunk awfully damned badly."

  I gave her the new drink and waited, nursing mine.

  "You don't think…" She stopped and looked into her glass for a moment before she drank. Then she tried again.

  "You don't think Carmen… could have…"

  "Could have killed the woman?"

  "Or helped someone."

  The room ached with silence as the question hung there between us.

  "You know her better than anyone," I said. "Could she do that?"

  Vivian shrugged. The skin was very tight on her face, and the lines at the corners of her mouth were harshly etched into her pale skin. I thought about Carmen, about the time I'd come home and found her naked in my bed and I'd turned her down.

  Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth. She didn't answer me. I went out to the kitchenette and got out some scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs. I didn't have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerine or distilled tiger's breath. She hadn't moved when I got back with the glasses. The hissing had stopped. Her eyes were dead again. Her lips started to smile at me. Then she sat up suddenly and threw all the covers off her body and reached.

  "Gimme."

  "When you're dressed. Not until you're dressed."

  I put the two glasses down on the card table and sat down myself and lit another cigarette. "Go ahead. I won't watch you."