Then silence for a little while, except for the rain and the quietly throbbing motor of the car. Then the house door crawled open, a deeper blackness in the black night. A figure showed in it cautiously, something white around the neck. It was her collar. She came out on the porch stiffly, a wooden woman. I caught the pale shine of her silver wig. Canino came crouched methodically behind her. It was so deadly it was almost funny.
She came down the steps. Now I could see the white stiffness of her face. She started towards 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 into 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 hand 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 face down in the wet gravel. And after that there wasn’t a sound from him.
Silver-Wig didn’t make a sound either. She stood rigid, with the rain swirling at her. I walked around Canino and kicked his gun, without any purpose. Then I walked after it and bent over sideways and picked it up. That put me close beside her. She spoke moodily, as if she was talking to herself.
“I—I was afraid you’d come back.”
I said: “We had a date. I told you it was all arranged.” I began to laugh like a loon.
Then she was bending down over him, touching him. And after a little while she stood up with a small key on a thin chain.
She said bitterly: “Did you have to kill him?”
I stopped laughing as suddenly as I had started. She went behind me and unlocked the handcuffs.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I suppose you did.”
THIRTY
This was another day and the sun was shining again.
Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau looked heavily out of his office window at the barred upper floor of the Hall of Justice, white and clean after the rain. Then he turned ponderously in his swivel chair and tamped his pipe with a heat-scarred thumb and stared at me bleakly.
“So you got yourself in another jam.”
“Oh, you heard about it.”
“Brother, I sit here all day on my fanny and I don’t look as if I had a brain in my head. But you’d be surprised what I hear. Shooting this Canino was all right I guess, but I don’t figure the homicide boys pinned any medals on you.”
“There’s been a lot of killing going on around me,” I said. “I haven’t been getting my share of it.”
He smiled patiently. “Who told you this girl out there was Eddie Mars’ wife?”
I told him. He listened carefully and yawned. He tapped his gold-studded mouth with a palm like a tray. “I guess you figure I ought to of found her.”
“That’s a fair deduction.”
“Maybe I knew,” he said. “Maybe I thought if Eddie and his woman wanted to play a little game like that, it would be smart—or as smart as I ever get—to let them think they were getting away with it. And then again maybe you think I was letting Eddie get away with it for more personal reasons.” He held his big hand out and revolved the thumb against the index and second fingers.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t really think that. Not even when Eddie seemed to know all about our talk here the other day.”
He raised his eyebrows as if raising them was an effort, a trick he was out of practice on. It furrowed his whole forehead and when it smoothed out it was full of white lines that turned reddish as I watched them.
“I’m a copper,” he said. “Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style. That’s mainly why I asked you to come in this morning. I’d like you to believe that. Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed muggs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way.”
I didn’t say anything. He blew smoke with a backward jerk of his head, looked at the mouthpiece of his pipe and went on:
“But that don’t mean I think Eddie Mars bumped off Regan or had any reason to or would have done it if he had. I just figured maybe he knows something about it, and maybe sooner or later something will sneak out into the open. Hiding his wife out at Realito was childish, but it’s the kind of childishness a smart monkey thinks is smart. I had him in here last night, after the D.A. got through with him. He admitted the whole thing. He said he knew Canino as a reliable protection guy and that’s what he had him for. He didn’t know anything about his hobbies or want to. He didn’t know Harry Jones. He didn’t know Joe Brody. He did know Geiger, of course, but claims he didn’t know about his racket. I guess you heard all that.”
“Yes.”
“You played it smart down there at Realito, brother. Not trying to cover up. We keep a file on unidentified bullets nowadays. Someday you might use that gun again. Then you’d be over a barrel.”
“I played it smart,” I said, and leered at him.
He knocked his pipe out and stared down at it broodingly. “What happened to the girl?” he asked, not looking up.
“I don’t know. They didn’t hold her. We made statements, three sets of them, for Wilde, for the Sheriffs office, for the Homicide Bureau. They turned her loose. I haven’t seen her since. I don’t expect to.”
“Kind of a nice girl, they say. Wouldn’t be one to play dirty games.”
“Kind of a nice girl,” I said.
Captain Gregory sighed and rumpled his mousy hair. “There’s just one more thing,” he said almost gently. “You look like a nice guy, but you play too rough. If you really want to help the Sternwood family—leave ’em alone.”
“I think you’re right, Captain.”
“How do you feel?”
“Swell,” I said. “I was standing on various pieces of carpet most of the night, being balled out. Before that I got soaked to the skin and beaten up. I’m in perfect condition.”
“What the hell did you expect, brother?”
“Nothing else.” I stood up and grinned at him and started for the door. When I had almost reached it he cleared his throat suddenly and said in a harsh voice: “I’m wasting my breath, huh? You still think you can find Regan.”
I t
urned around and looked him straight in the eyes. “No, I don’t think I can find Regan. I’m not even going to try. Does that suit you?”
He nodded slowly. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell I even said that for. Good luck, Marlowe. Drop around any time.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
I went down out of the City Hall and got my car from the parking lot and drove home to the Hobart Arms. I lay down on the bed with my coat off and stared at the ceiling and listened to the traffic sounds on the street outside and watched the sun move slowly across a corner of the ceiling. I tried to go to sleep, but sleep didn’t come. I got up and took a drink, although it was the wrong time of day, and lay down again. I still couldn’t go to sleep. My brain ticked like a clock. I sat up on the side of the bed and stuffed a pipe and said out loud:
“That old buzzard knows something.”
The pipe tasted as bitter as lye. I put it aside and lay down again. My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the same people, say the same words to them, over and over again, and yet each time it seemed real, like something actually happening, and for the first time. I was driving hard along the highway through the rain, with Silver-Wig in the corner of the car, saying nothing, so that by the time we reached Los Angeles we seemed to be utter strangers again. I was getting out at an all night drugstore and phoning Bernie Ohls that I had killed a man at Realito and was on my way over to Wilde’s house with Eddie Mars’ wife, who had seen me do it. I was pushing the car along the silent, rain-polished streets to Lafayette Park and up under the porte-cochere of Wilde’s big frame house and the porch light was already on, Ohls having telephoned ahead that I was coming. I was in Wilde’s study and he was behind his desk in a flowered dressing-gown and a tight hard face and a dappled cigar moved in his fingers and up to the bitter smile on his lips. Ohls was there and a slim gray scholarly man from the Sheriffs office who looked and talked more like a professor of economics than a cop. I was telling the story and they were listening quietly and Silver-Wig sat in a shadow with her hands folded in her lap, looking at nobody. There was a lot of telephoning. There were two men from the Homicide Bureau who looked at me as if I was some kind of strange beast escaped from a traveling circus. I was driving again, with one of them beside me, to the Fulwider Building. We were there in the room where Harry Jones was still in the chair behind the desk, the twisted stiffness of his dead face and the sour-sweet smell in the room. There was a medica1 examiner, very young and husky, with red bristles on his neck. There was a fingerprint man fussing around and I was telling him not to forget the latch of the transom. (He found Canino’s thumb print on it, the only print the brown man had left to back up my story.)
I was back again at Wilde’s house, signing a typewritten statement his secretary had run off in another room. Then the door opened and Eddie Mars came in and an abrupt smile flashed to his face when he saw Silver-Wig, and he said: “Hello, sugar,” and she didn’t look at him or answer him. Eddie Mars fresh and cheerful, in a dark business suit, with a fringed white scarf hanging outside his tweed overcoat. Then they were gone, everybody was gone out of the room but myself and Wilde, and Wilde was saying in a cold, angry voice: “This is the last time, Marlowe. The next fast one you pull I’ll throw you to the lions, no matter whose heart it breaks.”
It was like that, over and over again, lying on the bed and watching the patch of sunlight slide down the corner of the wall. Then the phone rang, and it was Norris, the Sternwood butler, with his usual untouchable voice.
“Mr. Marlowe? I telephoned your office without success, so I took the liberty of trying to reach you at home.”
“I was out most of the night,” I said. “I haven’t been down.”
“Yes, sir. The General would like to see you this morning, Mr. Marlowe, if it’s convenient.”
“Half an hour or so,” I said. “How is he?”
“He’s in bed, sir, but not doing badly.”
“Wait till he sees me,” I said, and hung up.
I shaved, changed clothes and started for the door. Then I went back and got Carmen’s little pearl-handled revolver and dropped it into my pocket. The sunlight was so bright that it danced. I got to the Sternwood place in twenty minutes and drove up under the arch at the side door. It was eleven-fifteen. The birds in the ornamental trees were crazy with song after the rain, the terraced lawns were as green as the Irish flag, and the whole estate looked as though it had been made about ten minutes before. I rang the bell. It was five days since I had rung it for the first time. It felt like a year.
A maid opened the door and led me along a side hall to the main hallway and left me there, saying Mr. Norris would be down in a moment. The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantel had the same hot black eyes and the knight in the stained-glass window still wasn’t getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.
In a few minutes Norris appeared, and he hadn’t changed either. His acid-blue eyes were as remote as ever, his grayish-pink skin looked healthy and rested, and he moved as if he was twenty years younger than he really was. I was the one who felt the weight of the years.
We went up the tiled staircase and turned the opposite way from Vivian’s room. With each step the house seemed to grow larger and more silent. We reached a massive old door that looked as if it had come out of a church. Norris opened it softly and looked in. Then he stood aside and I went in past him across what seemed to be about a quarter of a mile of carpet to a huge canopied bed like the one Henry the Eighth died in.
General Sternwood was propped up on pillows. His bloodless hands were clasped on top of the sheet. They looked gray against it. His black eyes were still full of fight and the rest of his face still looked like the face of a corpse.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.” His voice sounded weary and a little stiff.
I pulled a chair close to him and sat down. All the windows were shut tight. The room was sunless at that hour. Awnings cut off what glare there might be from the sky. The air had the faint Sweetish smell of old age.
He stared at me silently for a long minute. He moved a hand, as if to prove to himself that he could still move it, then folded it back over the other. He said lifelessly:
“I didn’t ask you to look for my son-in-law, Mr. Marlowe.”
“You wanted me to, though.”
“I didn’t ask you to. You assume a great deal. I usually ask for what I want.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You have been paid,” he went on coldly. “The money is of no consequence one way or the other. I merely feel that you have, no doubt unintentionally, betrayed a trust.”
He closed his eyes on that. I said: “Is that all you wanted to see me about?”
He opened his eyes again, very slowly, as though the lids were made of lead. “I suppose you are angry at that remark,” he said.
I shook my head. “You have an advantage over me, General. It’s an advantage I wouldn’t want to take away from you, not a hair of it. It’s not much, considering what you have to put up with. You can say anything you like to me and I wouldn’t think of getting angry. I’d like to offer you your money back. It may mean nothing to you. It might mean something to me.”
“What does it mean to you?”
“It means I have refused payment for an unsatisfactory job. That’s all.”
“Do you do many unsatisfactory jobs?”
“A few. Everyone does.”
“Why did you go to see Captain Gregory?”
I leaned back and hung an arm over the back of the chair. I studied his face. It told me nothing. I didn’t know the answer to his question—no satisfactory answer.
I said: “I was convinced you put those Geiger notes up to me chiefly as a test, and that you were a little afraid Regan might somehow be involved in an attempt to blackmail you. I didn’t know anything about Regan then. It wasn’t until I talked t
o Captain Gregory that I realized Regan wasn’t that sort of guy in all probability.”
“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.”
The Big Sleep Page 18
