The Big Sleep (10 page)

“If necessary,” I said, “I’ll testify under oath that that book came from Geiger’s store. The blonde, Agnes, will admit what kind of business the store did. It’s obvious to anybody with eyes that that store is just a front for something. But the Hollywood police allowed it to operate, for their own reasons. I dare say the Grand Jury would like to know what those reasons are.”

Wilde grinned. He said: “Grand Juries do ask those embarrassing questions sometimes—in a rather vain effort to find out just why cities are run as they are run.”

Cronjager stood up suddenly and put his hat on. “I’m one against three here,” he snapped. “I’m a homicide man. If this Geiger was running indecent literature, that’s no skin off my nose. But I’m ready to admit it won’t help my division any to have it washed over in the papers. What do you birds want?”

Wilde looked at Ohls. Ohls said calmly: “I want to turn a prisoner over to you. Let’s go.”

He stood up. Cronjager looked at him fiercely and stalked out of the room. Ohls went after him. The door closed again. Wilde tapped on his desk and stared at me with his clear blue eyes.

“You ought to understand how any copper would feel about a cover-up like this,” he said. “You’ll have to make statements of all of it—at least for the files. I think it may be possible to keep the two killings separate and to keep General Sternwood’s name out of both of them. Do you know why I’m not tearing your ear off?”

“No. I expected to get both ears torn off.”

“What are you getting for it all?”

“Twenty-five dollars a day and expenses.”

“That would make fifty dollars and a little gasoline so far.”

“About that.”

He put his head on one side and rubbed the back of his left little finger along the lower edge of his chin.

“And for that amount of money you’re willing to get yourself in Dutch with half the law enforcement of this county?”

“I don’t like it,” I said. “But what the hell am I to do? I’m on a case. I’m selling what I have to sell to make a living. What little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around in order to protect a client. It’s against my principles to tell as much as I’ve told tonight, without consulting the General. As for the cover-up, I’ve been in police business myself, as you know. They come a dime a dozen in any big city. Cops get very large and emphatic when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same things themselves every other day, to oblige their friends or anybody with a little pull. And I’m not through. I’m still on the case. I’d do the same thing again, if I had to.”

“Providing Cronjager doesn’t get your license,” Wilde grinned. “You said you held back a couple of personal matters. Of what import?”

“I’m still on the case,” I said, and stared straight into his eyes.

Wilde smiled at me. He had the frank daring smile of an Irishman. “Let me tell you something, son. My father was a close friend of old Sternwood. I’ve done all my office permits—and maybe a good deal more—to save the old man from grief. But in the long run it can’t be done. Those girls of his are bound certain to hook up with something that can’t be hushed, especially that little blonde brat. They ought not to be running around loose. I blame the old man for that. I guess he doesn’t realize what the world is today. And there’s another thing I might mention while we’re talking man to man and I don’t have to growl at you. I’ll bet a dollar to a Canadian dime that the General’s afraid his son-in-law, the ex-bootlegger, is mixed up in this somewhere, and what he really hoped you would find out is that he isn’t. What do you think of that?”

“Regan didn’t sound like a blackmailer, what I heard of him. He had a soft spot where he was and he walked out on it.”

Wilde snorted. “The softness of that spot neither you nor I could judge. If he was a certain sort of man, it would not have been so very soft. Did the General tell you he was looking for Regan?”

“He told me he wished he knew where he was and that he was all right. He liked Regan and was hurt the way he bounced off without telling the old man good-bye.”

Wilde leaned back and frowned. “I see,” he said in a changed voice. His hand moved the stuff on his desk around, laid Geiger’s blue notebook to one side and pushed the other exhibits towards me. “You may as well take these,” he said. “I’ve no further use for them.”

NINETEEN

It was close to eleven when I put my car away and walked around to the front of the Hobart Arms. The plate-glass door was put on the lock at ten, so I had to get my keys out. Inside, in the square barren lobby, a man put a green evening paper down beside a potted palm and flicked a cigarette butt into the tub the palm grew in. He stood up and waved his hat at me and said: “The boss wants to talk to you. You sure keep your friends waiting, pal.”

I stood still and looked at his flattened nose and club steak ear.

“What about?”

“What do you care? Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.” His hand hovered near the upper buttonhole of his open coat.

“I smell of policemen,” I said. “I’m too tired to talk, too tired to eat, too tired to think. But if you think I’m not too tired to take orders from Eddie Mars—try getting your gat out before I shoot your good ear off.”

“Nuts. You ain’t got no gun.” He stared at me levelly. His dark wiry brows closed in together and his mouth made a downward curve.

“That was then,” I told him. “I’m not always naked.”

He waved his left hand. “Okey. You win. I wasn’t told to blast anybody. You’ll hear from him.”

“Too late will be too soon,” I said, and turned slowly as he passed me on his way to the door. He opened it and went out without looking back. I grinned at my own foolishness, went along to the elevator and upstairs to the apartment. I took Carmen’s little gun out of my pocket and laughed at it. Then I cleaned it thoroughly, oiled it, wrapped it in a piece of canton flannel and locked it up. I made myself a drink and was drinking it when the phone rang. I sat down beside the table on which it stood.

“So you’re tough tonight,” Eddie Mars’ voice said.

“Big, fast, tough and full of prickles. What can I do for you?”

“Cops over there—you know where. You keep me out of it?”

“Why should I?”

“I’m nice to be nice to, soldier. I’m not nice not to be nice to.”

“Listen hard and you’ll hear my teeth chattering.”

He laughed dryly. “Did you—or did you?”

“I did. I’m damned if I know why. I guess it was just complicated enough without you.”

“Thanks, soldier. Who gunned him?”

“Read it in the paper tomorrow—maybe.”

“I want to know now.”

“Do you get everything you want?”

“No. Is that an answer, soldier?”

“Somebody you never heard of gunned him. Let it go at that.”

“If that’s on the level, someday I may be able to do you a favor.”

“Hang up and let me go to bed.”

He laughed again. “You’re looking for Rusty Regan, aren’t you?”

“A lot of people seem to think I am, but I’m not.”

“If you were, I could give you an idea. Drop in and see me down at the beach. Any time. Glad to see you.”

“Maybe.”

“Be seeing you then.” The phone clicked and I sat holding it with a savage patience. Then I dialed the Sternwoods’ number and heard it ring four or five times and then the butler’s suave voice saying: “General Sternwood’s residence.”

“This is Marlowe. Remember me? I met you about a hundred years ago—or was it yesterday?”

“Yes, Mr. Marlowe. I remember, of course.”

“Is Mrs. Regan home?”

“Yes, I believe so. Would you—”

I cut in on him with a sudden change of mind. “No. You give her the message. Tell her I have the pictures, all of them, and that everything is all right.”

“Yes . . . yes . . . ” The voice seemed to shake a little. “You have the pictures—all of them—and everything is all right . . . Yes, sir. I may say—thank you very much, sir.”

The phone rang back in five minutes. I had finished my drink and it made me feel as if I could eat the dinner I had forgotten all about; I went out leaving the telephone ringing. It was ringing when I came back. It rang at intervals until half-past twelve. At that time I put my lights out and opened the windows up and muffled the phone bell with a piece of paper and went to bed. I had a bellyful of the Sternwood family.

I read all three of the morning papers over my eggs and bacon the next morning. Their accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come—as close as Mars is to Saturn. None of the three connected Owen Taylor, driver of the Lido Pier Suicide Car, with the Laurel Canyon Exotic Bungalow Slaying. None of them mentioned the Sternwoods, Bernie Ohls or me. Owen Taylor was “chauffeur to a wealthy family.” Captain Cronjager of the Hollywood Division got all the credit for solving the two slayings in his district, which were supposed to arise out of a dispute over the proceeds from a wire service maintained by one Geiger in the back of the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. Brody had shot Geiger and Carol Lundgren had shot Brody in revenge. Police were holding Carol Lundgren in custody. He had confessed. He had a bad record—probably in high school. Police were also holding one Agnes Lozelle, Geiger’s secretary, as a material witness.

It was a nice write-up. It gave the impression that Geiger had been killed the night before, that Brody had been killed about an hour later, and that Captain Cronjager had solved both murders while lighting a cigarette. The suicide of Taylor made Page One of Section II. There was a photo of the sedan on the deck of the power lighter, with the license plate blacked out, and something covered with a cloth lying on the deck beside the running board. Owen Taylor had been despondent and in poor health. His family lived in Dubuque, and his body would be shipped there. There would be no inquest.

TWENTY

Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau laid my card down on his wide flat desk and arranged it so that its edges exactly paralleled the edges of the desk. He studied it with his head on one side, grunted, swung around in his swivel chair and looked out of his window at the barred top floor of the Hall of Justice half a block away. He was a burly man with tired eyes and the slow deliberate movements of a night watchman. His voice was toneless, flat and uninterested.

“Private dick, eh?” he said, not looking at me at all, but looking out of his window. Smoke wisped from the blackened bowl of a briar that hung on his eye tooth. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m working for General Guy Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood.”

Captain Gregory blew a little smoke from the corner of his mouth without removing the pipe. “On what?”

“Not exactly on what you’re working on, but I’m interested. I thought you could help me.”

“Help you on what?”

“General Sternwood’s a rich man,” I said. “He’s an old friend of the D.A.’s father. If he wants to hire a full-time boy to run errands for him, that’s no reflection on the police. It’s just a luxury he is able to afford himself.”

“What makes you think I’m doing anything for him?”

I didn’t answer that. He swung around slowly and heavily in his swivel chair and put his large feet flat on the bare linoleum that covered his floor. His office had the musty smell of years of routine. He stared at me bleakly.

“I don’t want to waste your time, Captain,” I said and pushed my chair back—about four inches.

He didn’t move. He kept on staring at me out of his washed-out tired eyes. “You know the D.A.?”

“I’ve met him. I worked for him once. I know Bernie Ohls, his chief investigator, pretty well.”

Captain Gregory reached for a phone and mumbled into it: “Get me Ohls at the D.A.’s office.”

He sat holding the phone down on its cradle. Moments passed. Smoke drifted from his pipe. His eyes were heavy and motionless like his hand. The bell tinkled and he reached for my card with his left hand. “Ohls? . . . Al Gregory at headquarters. A guy named Philip Marlowe is in my office. His card says he’s a private investigator. He wants information from me . . . Yeah? What does he look like? . . . Okey, thanks.”

He dropped the phone and took his pipe out of his mouth and tamped the tobacco with the brass cap of a heavy pencil. He did it carefully and solemnly, as if that was as important as anything he would have to do that day. He leaned back and stared at me some more.

“What you want?”

“An idea of what progress you’re making, if any.”

He thought that over. “Regan?” he asked finally.

“Sure.”

“Know him?”

“I never saw him. I hear he’s a good-looking Irishman in his late thirties, that he was once in the liquor racket, that he married General Sternwood’s older daughter and that they didn’t click. I’m told he disappeared about a month back.”

“Sternwood oughta think himself lucky instead of hiring private talent to beat around in the tall grass.”

“The General took a big fancy to him. Such things happen. The old man is crippled and lonely. Regan used to sit around with him and keep him company.”

“What you think you can do that we can’t do?”

“Nothing at all, in so far as finding Regan goes. But there’s a rather mysterious blackmail angle. I want to make sure Regan isn’t involved. Knowing where he is or isn’t might help.”

“Brother, I’d like to help you, but I don’t know where he is. He pulled down the curtain and that’s that.”

“Pretty hard to do against your organization, isn’t it, Captain?”

“Yeah—but it can be done—for a while.” He touched a bell button on the side of his desk. A middle-aged woman put her head in at a side door. “Get me the file on Terence Regan, Abba.”

The door closed. Captain Gregory and I looked at each other in some more heavy silence. The door opened again and the woman put a tabbed green file on his desk. Captain Gregory nodded her out, put a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his veined nose and turned the papers in the file over slowly. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers.

“He blew on the sixteenth of September,” he said. “The only thing important about that is it was the chauffeur’s day off and nobody saw Regan take his car out. It was late afternoon, though. We found the car four days later in a garage belonging to a ritzy bungalow court place near the Sunset Towers. A garage man reported it to the stolen car detail, said it didn’t belong there. The place is called the Casa de Oro. There’s an angle to that I’ll tell you about in a minute. We couldn’t find out anything about who put the car in there. We print the car but don’t find any prints that are on file anywhere. The car in that garage don’t jibe with foul play, although there’s a reason to suspect foul play. It jibes with something else I’ll tell you about in a minute.”

I said: “That jibes with Eddie Mars’ wife being on the missing list.”

He looked annoyed. “Yeah. We investigate the tenants and find she’s living there. Left about the time Regan did, within two days anyway. A guy who sounds a bit like Regan had been seen with her, but we don’t get a positive identification. It’s goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can’t be sure.”

“That’s one of the qualifications for good hotel help,” said.

“Yeah. Eddie Mars and his wife didn’t live together, but they were friendly, Eddie says. Here’s some of the possibilities. First off Regan carried fifteen grand, packed it in his clothes all the time. Real money, they tell me. Not just a top card and a bunch of hay. That’s a lot of jack but this Regan might be the boy to have it around so he could take it out and look at it when somebody was looking at him. Then again maybe he wouldn’t give a damn. His wife says he never made a nickel off of old man Sternwood except room and board and a Packard one-twenty his wife gave him. Tie that for an ex-legger in the rich gravy.”

“It beats me,” I said.

“Well, here we are with a guy who ducks out and has fifteen grand in his pants and folks know it. Well, that’s money. I might duck out myself, if I had fifteen grand, and me with two kids in high school. So the first thought is somebody rolls him for it and rolls him too hard, so they have to take him out in the desert and plant him among the cactuses. But I don’t like that too well. Regan carried a gat and had plenty of experience using it, and not just in a greasy-faced liquor mob. I understand he commanded a whole brigade in the Irish troubles back in 1922 or whenever it was. A guy like that wouldn’t be white meat to a heister. Then, his car being in that garage makes whoever rolled him know he was sweet on Eddie Mars’ wife, which he was, I guess, but it ain’t something every poolroom bum would know.”

“Got a photo?” I asked.

“Him, not her. That’s funny too. There’s a lot of funny angles to this case. Here.” He pushed a shiny print across the desk and I looked at an Irish face that was more sad than merry and more reserved than brash. Not the face of a tough guy and not the face of a man who could be pushed around much by anybody. Straight dark brows with strong bone under them. A forehead wide rather than high, a mat of dark clustering hair, a thin short nose, a wide mouth. A chin that had strong lines but was small for the mouth. A face that looked a little taut, the face of a man who would move fast and play for keeps. I passed the print back. I would know that face, if I saw it.

Captain Gregory knocked his pipe out and refilled it and tamped the tobacco down with his thumb. He lit it, blew smoke and began to talk again.

“Well, there could be people who would know he was sweet on Eddie Mars’ frau. Besides Eddie himself. For a wonder
he
knew it. But he don’t seem to give a damn. We check him pretty thoroughly around that time. Of course Eddie wouldn’t have knocked him off out of jealousy. The set-up would point to him too obvious.”

“It depends how smart he is,” I said. “He might try the double bluff.”

Captain Gregory shook his head. “If he’s smart enough to get by in his racket, he’s too smart for that. I get your idea. He pulls the dumb play because he thinks we wouldn’t expect him to pull the dumb play. From a police angle that’s wrong. Because he’d have us in his hair so much it would interfere with his business. You might think a dumb play would be smart. I might think so. The rank and file wouldn’t. They’d make his life miserable. I’ve ruled it out. If I’m wrong, you can prove it on me and I’ll eat my chair cushion. Till then I’m leaving Eddie in the clear. Jealousy is a bad motive for his type. Top-flight racketeers have business brains. They learn to do things that are good policy and let their personal feelings take care of themselves. I’m leaving that out.”

“What are you leaving in?”

“The dame and Regan himself. Nobody else. She was a blonde then, but she won’t be now. We don’t find her car, so they probably left in it. They had a long start on us—fourteen days. Except for that car of Regan’s I don’t figure we’d have got the case at all. Of course I’m used to them that way, especially in good-class families. And of course everything I’ve done has had to be under the hat.”

He leaned back and thumped the arms of his chair with the heels of his large heavy hands.

“I don’t see nothing to do but wait,” he said. “We’ve got readers out, but it’s too soon to look for results. Regan had fifteen grand we know of. The girl had some, maybe a lot in rocks. But they’ll run out of dough some day. Regan will cash a check, drop a marker, write a letter. They’re in a strange town and they’ve got new names, but they’ve got the same old appetites. They got to get back in the fiscal system.”

“What did the girl do before she married Eddie Mars?”

“Torcher.”

“Can’t you get any old professional photos?”

“No. Eddie must of had some, but he won’t loosen up. He wants her let alone. I can’t make him. He’s got friends in town, or he wouldn’t be what he is.” He grunted. “Any of this do you any good?”

I said: “You’ll never find either of them. The Pacific Ocean is too close.”

“What I said about my chair cushion still goes. We’ll find him. It may take time. It could take a year or two.”

“General Sternwood may not live that long,” I said.

“We’ve done all we could, brother. If he wants to put out a reward and spend some money, we might get results. The city don’t give me the kind of money it takes.” His large eyes peered at me and his scratchy eyebrows moved. “You serious about thinking Eddie put them both down?”

I laughed. “No. I was just kidding. I think what you think, Captain. That Regan ran away with a woman who meant more to him than a rich wife he didn’t get along with. Besides, she isn’t rich yet.”

“You met her, I suppose?”

“Yes. She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet.”

He grunted and I thanked him for his time and information and left. A gray Plymouth sedan tailed me away from the City Hall. I gave it a chance to catch up with me on a quiet street. It refused the offer, so I shook it off and went about my business.