The Big Sleep (11 page)

TWENTY-ONE

I didn’t go near the Sternwood family. I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. There was a gusty wind blowing in at the windows and the soot from the oil burners of the hotel next door was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot. I was thinking about going out to lunch and that life was pretty flat and that it would probably be just as flat if I took a drink and that taking a drink all alone at that time of day wouldn’t be any fun anyway. I was thinking this when Norris called up. In his carefully polite manner he said that General Sternwood was not feeling very well and that certain items in the newspaper had been read to him and he assumed that my investigation was now completed.

“Yes, as regards Geiger,” I said. “I didn’t shoot him, you know.”

“The General didn’t suppose you did, Mr. Marlowe.”

“Does the General know anything about those photographs Mrs. Regan was worrying about?”

“No, sir. Decidedly not.”

“Did you know what the General gave me?”

“Yes, sir. Three notes and a card, I believe.”

“Right. I’ll return them. As to the photos I think I’d better just destroy them.”

“Very good, sir. Mrs. Regan tried to reach you a number of times last night—”

“I was out getting drunk,” I said.

“Yes. Very necessary, sir, I’m sure. The General has instructed me to send you a check for five hundred dollars. Will that be satisfactory?”

“More than generous,” I said.

“And I presume we may now consider the incident closed?”

“Oh sure. Tight as a vault with a busted time lock.”

“Thank you, sir. I am sure we all appreciate it. When the General is feeling a little better—possibly tomorrow—he would like to thank you in person.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come out and drink some more of his brandy, maybe with champagne.”

“I shall see that some is properly iced,” the old boy said, almost with a smirk in his voice.

That was that. We said good-bye and hung up. The coffee shop smell from next door came in at the windows with the soot but failed to make me hungry. So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.

I counted it up on my fingers. Rusty Regan had run away from a lot of money and a handsome wife to go wandering with a vague blonde who was more or less married to a racketeer named Eddie Mars. He had gone suddenly without good-byes and there might be any number of reasons for that. The General had been too proud, or, at the first interview he gave me, too careful, to tell me the Missing Persons Bureau had the matter in hand. The Missing Persons people were dead on their feet on it and evidently didn’t think it worth bothering over. Regan had done what he had done and that was his business. I agreed with Captain Gregory that Eddie Mars would have been very unlikely to involve himself in a double murder just because another man had gone to town with the blonde he was not even living with. It might have annoyed him, but business is business, and you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes. If there had been a lot of money involved, that would be different. But fifteen grand wouldn’t be a lot of money to Eddie Mars. He was no two-bit chiseler like Brody.

Geiger was dead and Carmen would have to find some other shady character to drink exotic blends of hootch with. I didn’t suppose she would have any trouble. All she would have to do would be to stand on the corner for five minutes and look coy. I hoped that the next grifter who dropped the hook on her would play her a little more smoothly, a little more for the long haul rather than the quick touch.

Mrs. Regan knew Eddie Mars well enough to borrow money from him. That was natural, if she played roulette and was a good loser. Any gambling house owner would lend a good client money in a pinch. Apart from this they had an added bond of interest in Regan. He was her husband and he had gone off with Eddie Mars’ wife.

Carol Lundgren, the boy killer with the limited vocabulary, was out of circulation for a long, long time, even if they didn’t strap him in a chair over a bucket of acid. They wouldn’t, because he would take a plea and save the county money. They all do when they don’t have the price of a big lawyer. Agnes Lozelle was in custody as a material witness. They wouldn’t need her for that, if Carol took a plea, and if he pleaded guilty on arraignment, they would turn her loose. They wouldn’t want to open up any angles on Geiger’s business, apart from which they had nothing on her.

That left me. I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar check coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.

That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming down to Las Olindas that evening to talk to him. That was how smart I was.

I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog. The Cypress Club was at the far end of the town, a rambling frame mansion that had once been the summer residence of a rich man named De Cazens, and later had been a hotel. It was now a big dark outwardly shabby place in a thick grove of wind-twisted Monterey cypresses, which gave it its name. It had enormous scrolled porches, turrets all over the place, stained-glass trims around the big windows, big empty stables at the back, a general air of nostalgic decay. Eddie Mars had left the outside much as he had found it, instead of making it over to look like an MGM set. I left my car on a street with sputtering arc lights and walked into the grounds along a damp gravel path to the main entrance. A doorman in a double-breasted guard’s coat let me into a huge dim silent lobby from which a white oak staircase curved majestically up to the darkness of an upper floor. I checked my hat and coat and waited, listening to music and confused voices behind heavy double doors. They seemed a long way off, and not quite of the same world as the building itself. Then the slim pasty-faced blond man who had been with Eddie Mars and the pug at Geiger’s place came through a door under the staircase, smiled at me bleakly and took me back with him along a carpeted hall to the boss’s office.

This was a square room with a deep old bay window and a stone fireplace in which a fire of juniper logs burned lazily. It was wainscoted in walnut and had a frieze of faded damask above the paneling. The ceiling was high and remote. There was a smell of cold sea.

Eddie Mars’ dark sheenless desk didn’t belong in the room, but neither did anything made after 1900. His carpet had a Florida suntan. There was a bartop radio in the corner and a Sèvres china tea set on a copper tray beside a samovar. I wondered who that was for. There was a door in the corner that had a time lock on it.

Eddie Mars grinned at me sociably and shook hands and moved his chin at the vault. “I’m a pushover for a heist mob here except for that thing,” he said cheerfully. “The local johns drop in every morning and watch me open it. I have an arrangement with them.”

“You hinted you had something for me,” I said. “What is it?”

“What’s your hurry? Have a drink and sit down.”

“No hurry at all. You and I haven’t anything to talk about but business.”

“You’ll have the drink and like it,” he said. He mixed a couple and put mine down beside a red leather chair and stood crosslegged against the desk himself, one hand in the side pocket of his midnight-blue dinner jacket, the thumb outside and the nail glistening. In dinner clothes he looked a little harder than in gray flannel, but he still looked like a horseman. We drank and nodded at each other.

“Ever been here before?” he asked.

“During prohibition. I don’t get any kick out of gambling.”

“Not with money,” he smiled. “You ought to look in tonight. One of your friends is outside betting the wheels. I hear she’s doing pretty well. Vivian Regan.”

I sipped my drink and took one of his monogrammed cigarettes.

“I kind of liked the way you handled that yesterday,” he said. “You made me sore at the time but I could see afterwards how right you were. You and I ought to get along. How much do I owe you?”

“For doing what?”

“Still careful, eh? I have my pipe line into headquarters, or I wouldn’t be here. I get them the way they happen, not the way you read them in the papers.” He showed me his large white teeth.

“How much have you got?” I asked.

“You’re not talking money?”

“Information was the way I understood it.”

“Information about what?”

“You have a short memory, Regan.”

“Oh, that.” He waved his glistening nails in the quiet light from one of those bronze lamps that shoot a beam at the ceiling. “I hear you got the information already. I felt I owed you a fee. I’m used to paying for nice treatment.”

“I didn’t drive down here to make a touch. I get paid for what I do. Not much by your standards, but I make out. One customer at a time is a good rule. You didn’t bump Regan off, did you?”

“No. Did you think I did?”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

He laughed. “You’re kidding.”

I laughed. “Sure, I’m kidding. I never saw Regan, but I saw his photo. You haven’t got the men for the work. And while we’re on that subject don’t send me any more gun punks with orders. I might get hysterical and blow one down.”

He looked through his glass at the fire, set it down on the end of the desk and wiped his lips with a sheer lawn handkerchief.

“You talk a good game,” he said. “But I dare say you can break a hundred and ten. You’re not really interested in Regan, are you?”

“No, not professionally. I haven’t been asked to be. But I know somebody who would like to know where he is.”

“She doesn’t give a damn,” he said.

“I mean her father.”

He wiped his lips again and looked at the handkerchief almost as if he expected to find blood on it. He drew his thick gray eyebrows close together and fingered the side of his weatherbeaten nose.

“Geiger was trying to blackmail the General,” I said. “The General wouldn’t say so, but I figure he was at least half scared Regan might be behind it.”

Eddie Mars laughed. “Uh-uh. Geiger worked that one on everybody. It was strictly his own idea. He’d get notes from people that looked legal—were legal, I dare say, except that he wouldn’t have dared sue on them. He’d present the notes, with a nice flourish, leaving himself empty-handed. If he drew an ace, he had a prospect that scared and he went to work. If he didn’t draw an ace, he just dropped the whole thing.”

“Clever guy,” I said. “He dropped it all right. Dropped it and fell on it. How come
you
know all this?”

He shrugged impatiently. “I wish to Christ I didn’t know half the stuff that’s brought to me. Knowing other people’s business is the worst investment a man can make in my circle. Then if it was just Geiger you were after, you’re washed up on that angle.”

“Washed up and paid off.”

“I’m sorry about that. I wish old Sternwood would hire himself a soldier like you on a straight salary, to keep those girls of his home at least a few nights a week.”

“Why?”

His mouth looked sulky. “They’re plain trouble. Take the dark one. She’s a pain in the neck around here. If she loses, she plunges and I end up with a fistful of paper which nobody will discount at any price. She has no money of her own except an allowance and what’s in the old man’s will is a secret. If she wins, she takes my money home with her.”

“You get it back the next night,” I said.

“I get some of it back. But over a period of time I’m loser.”

He looked earnestly at me, as if that was important to me. I wondered why he thought it necessary to tell me at all. I yawned and finished my drink.

“I’m going out and look the joint over,” I said.

“Yes, do.” He pointed to a door near the vault door. “That leads to a door behind the tables.”

“I’d rather go in the way the suckers enter.”

“Okey. As you please. We’re friends, aren’t we, soldier?”

“Sure.” I stood up and we shook hands.

“Maybe I can do you a real favor some day,” he said. “You got it all from Gregory this time.”

“So you own a piece of him too.”

“Oh not that bad. We’re just friends.”

I stared at him for a moment, then went over to the door I had come in at. I looked back at him when I had it open.

“You don’t have anybody tailing me around in a gray Plymouth sedan, do you?”

His eyes widened sharply. He looked jarred. “Hell, no. Why should I?”

“I couldn’t imagine,” I said, and went on out. I thought his surprise looked genuine enough to be believed. I thought he even looked a little worried. I couldn’t think of any reason for that.

TWENTY-TWO

It was about ten-thirty when the little yellow-sashed Mexican orchestra got tired of playing a low-voiced, prettied-up rhumba that nobody was dancing to. The gourd player rubbed his finger tips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water. The pretense was as wasted as the music. Nobody was looking at them.

The room had been a ballroom once and Eddie Mars had changed it only as much as his business compelled him. No chromium glitter, no indirect lighting from behind angular cornices, no fused glass pictures, or chairs in violent leather and polished metal tubing, none of the pseudomodernistic circus of the typical Hollywood night trap. The light was from heavy crystal chandeliers and the rose-damask panels of the wall were still the same rose damask, a little faded by time and darkened by dust, that had been matched long ago against the parquetry floor, of which only a small glass-smooth space in front of the little Mexican orchestra showed bare. The rest was covered by a heavy old-rose carpeting that must have cost plenty. The parquetry was made of a dozen kinds of hardwood, from Burma teak through half a dozen shades of oak and ruddy wood that looked like mahogany, and fading out to the hard pale wild lilac of the California hills, all laid in elaborate patterns, with the accuracy of a transit.

It was still a beautiful room and now there was roulette in it instead of measured, old-fashioned dancing. There were three tables close to the far wall. A low bronze railing joined them and made a fence around the croupiers. All three tables were working, but the crowd was at the middle one. I could see Vivian Regan’s black head close to it, from across the room where I was leaning against the bar and turning a small glass of bacardi around on the mahogany.

The bartender leaned beside me watching the cluster of well-dressed people at the middle table. “She’s pickin’ ’em tonight, right on the nose,” he said. “That tall black-headed frail.”

“Who is she?”

“I wouldn’t know her name. She comes here a lot though.”

“The hell you wouldn’t know her name.”

“I just work here, mister,” he said without any animosity. “She’s all alone too. The guy was with her passed out. They took him out to his car.”

“I’ll take her home,” I said.

“The hell you will. Well, I wish you luck anyways. Should I gentle up that bacardi or do you like it the way it is?”

“I like it the way it is as well as I like it at all,” I said.

“Me, I’d just as leave drink croup medicine,” he said.

The crowd parted and two men in evening clothes pushed their way out and I saw the back of her neck and her bare shoulders in the opening. She wore a low-cut dress of dull green velvet. It looked too dressy for the occasion. The crowd closed and hid all but her black head. The two men came across the room and leaned against the bar and asked for Scotch and soda. One of them was flushed and excited. He was mopping his face with a black-bordered handkerchief. The double satin stripes down the side of his trousers were wide enough for tire tracks.

“Boy, I never saw such a run,” he said in a jittery voice. “Eight wins and two stand-offs in a row on that red. That’s roulette, boy, that’s roulette.”

“It gives me the itch,” the other one said. “She’s betting a grand at a crack. She can’t lose.” They put their beaks in their drinks, gurgled swiftly and went back.

“So wise the little men are,” the barkeep drawled. “A grand a crack, huh. I saw an old horseface in Havana once—”

The noise swelled over at the middle table and a chiseled foreign voice rose above it saying: “If you will just be patient a moment, madam. The table cannot cover your bet. Mr. Mars will be here in a moment.”

I left my bacardi and padded across the carpet. The little orchestra started to play a tango, rather loud. No one was dancing or intending to dance. I moved through a scattering of people in dinner clothes and full evening dress and sports clothes and business suits to the end table at the left. It had gone dead. Two croupiers stood behind it with their heads together and their eyes sideways. One moved a rake back and forth aimlessly over the empty layout. They were both staring at Vivian Regan.

Her long lashes twitched and her face looked unnaturally white. She was at the middle table, exactly opposite the wheel. There was a disordered pile of money and chips in front of her. It looked like a lot of money. She spoke to the croupier with a cool, insolent, ill-tempered drawl.

“What kind of a cheap outfit is this, I’d like to know. Get busy and spin that wheel, highpockets. I want one more play and I’m playing table stakes. You take it away fast enough I’ve noticed, but when it comes to dishing it out you start to whine.”

The croupier smiled a cold polite smile that had looked at thousands of boors and millions of fools. His tall dark disinterested manner was flawless. He said gravely: “The table cannot cover your bet, madam. You have over sixteen thousand dollars there.”

“It’s your money,” the girl jeered. “Don’t you want it back?”

A man beside her tried to tell her something. She turned swiftly and spat something at him and he faded back into the crowd red-faced. A door opened in the paneling at the far end of the enclosed place made by the bronze railing. Eddie Mars came through the door with a set indifferent smile on his face, his hands thrust into the pockets of his dinner jacket, both thumbnails glistening outside. He seemed to like that pose. He strolled behind the croupiers and stopped at the corner of the middle table. He spoke with lazy calm, less politely than the croupier.

“Something the matter, Mrs. Regan?”

She turned her face to him with a sort of lunge. I saw the curve of her cheek stiffen, as if with an almost unbearable inner tautness. She didn’t answer him.

Eddie Mars said gravely: “If you’re not playing any more, you must let me send someone home with you.”

The girl flushed. Her cheekbones stood out white in her face. Then she laughed off-key. She said bitterly:

“One more play, Eddie. Everything I have on the red. I like red. It’s the color of blood.”

Eddie Mars smiled faintly, then nodded and reached into his inner breast pocket. He drew out a large pinseal wallet with gold corners and tossed it carelessly along the table to the croupier. “Cover her bet in even thousands,” he said, “if no one objects to this turn of the wheel being just for the lady.”

No one objected, Vivian Regan leaned down and pushed all her winnings savagely with both hands on to the large red diamond on the layout.

The croupier leaned over the table without haste. He counted and stacked her money and chips, placed all but a few chips and bills in a neat pile and pushed the rest back off the layout with his rake. He opened Eddie Mars’ wallet and drew out two flat packets of thousand-dollar bills. He broke one, counted six bills out, added them to the unbroken packet, put the four loose bills in the wallet and laid it aside as carelessly as if it had been a packet of matches. Eddie Mars didn’t touch the wallet. Nobody moved except the croupier. He spun the wheel left-handed and sent the ivory ball skittering along the upper edge with a casual flirt of his wrist. Then he drew his hands back and folded his arms.

Vivian’s lips parted slowly until her teeth caught the light and glittered like knives. The ball drifted lazily down the slope of the wheel and bounced on the chromium ridges above the numbers. After a long time and then very suddenly motion left it with a dry click. The wheel slowed, carrying the ball around with it. The croupier didn’t unfold his arms until the wheel had entirely ceased to revolve.

“The red wins,” he said formally, without interest. The little ivory ball lay in Red 25, the third number from the Double Zero. Vivian Regan put her head back and laughed triumphantly.

The croupier lifted his rake and slowly pushed the stack of thousand-dollar bills across the layout, added them to the stake, pushed everything slowly out of the field of play.

Eddie Mars smiled, put his wallet back in his pocket, turned on his heel and left the room through the door in the paneling.

A dozen people let their breath out at the same time and broke for the bar. I broke with them and got to the far end of the room before Vivian had gathered up her winnings and turned away from the table. I went out into the large quiet lobby, got my hat and coat from the check girl, dropped a quarter in her tray and went out on the porch. The doorman loomed up beside me and said: “Can I get your car for you, sir?”

I said: “I’m just going for a walk.”

The scrollwork along the edge of the porch was wet with the fog. The fog dripped from the Monterey cypresses that shadowed off into nothing towards the cliff above the Ocean. You could see a scant dozen feet in any direction. I went down the porch steps and drifted off through the trees, following an indistinct path until I could hear the wash of the surf licking at the fog, low down at the bottom of the cliff. There wasn’t a gleam of light anywhere. I could see a dozen trees clearly at one time, another dozen dimly, then nothing at all but the fog. I circled to the left and drifted back towards the gravel path that went around to the stables where they parked the cars. When I could make out the outlines of the house I stopped. A little in front of me I had heard a man cough.

My steps hadn’t made any sound on the soft moist turf. The man coughed again, then stifled the cough with a handkerchief or a sleeve. While he was still doing that I moved forward closer to him. I made him out, a vague shadow close to the path. Something made me step behind a tree and crouch down. The man turned his head. His face should have been a white blur when he did that. It wasn’t. It remained dark. There was a mask over it.

I waited, behind the tree.