I called Vivian Regan. Her maid said she was resting. I said I’d be there in an hour. I washed my hands and face in the sink. Dried them, put my shoulder holster back on and my coat and went down to get my car. I drove over the Alta Brea Crescent with the top down and the hot wind blew some of the perspiration off my face. But my shirt was still wet under my jacket and my hat band was damp. I was early to the Sternwoods’ so I cruised a little in the hills, looking at all the sprinklers on all the lawns. Brown was the normal and permanent color of southern California, it was held at bay by regiments of lawn sprinklers.
At two I was at the front door of the Sternwood home. The maid opened the door for me and led me through the house to the patio beside the pool where Vivian lay on a pink chaise under a pink and white umbrella, wearing a gleaming white one-piece swim-suit. She had on oversized sunglasses and there was an ice bucket handy with a bottle of champagne in it. Vivian’s body was tanned the color of honey and all of it that I could see was smooth and resilient.
“My God, Marlowe,” she said to me. “Take off your coat in this beastly heat.”
“I’m wearing a gun,” I said.
“For goodness’ sake I should hope so,” Vivian said. “I don’t mind. I might rather like to see it, actually.”
I peeled my jacket off and folded it and put it on the ground. I took the chair she offered and tilted my hat brim forward so that the sun would stay out of my eyes.
“Would you care for champagne?” Vivian said. “On a day like this I find it helps take your mind off the heat.”
She took a sip of her champagne from a fluted glass.
Moisture had beaded on the side of the ice bucket and coursed down along the sides, making fine tracks in the condensation.
“When I drink champagne in the sun,” I said, “I get a walloping headache.”
“Well” — she laughed, showing teeth perfectly even and perfectly white — “why not get over here under the umbrella?”
She poured some champagne and handed it to me. I took it and turned the glass slowly in my hands. I watched her face closely.
“Know anyone named Simpson?” I said.
She didn’t choke on the champagne, but it was only ten generations of iron breeding that saved her. For a moment her face fell apart, and then she got it back together again and said very casually, “No, I don’t believe I do.”
I nodded, as if I believed her.
“Why do you ask?” she said even more casually than she had spoken before.
“I have information that Carmen may be with him.”
Vivian drank some champagne, maybe a little more quickly than she had previously.
“What was the name?” she said as if she were asking the time of day.
“Simpson,” I said.
Vivian shook her head vaguely and patted the upholstered chaise beside her.
“Come and sit over here and stop sweating so much,” she said.
I got up and moved into the shade and sat on the chaise. Vivian poured more champagne into my glass and some into hers. She drank. With one bright red fingernail she traced the outlines of my gun in its holster.
“Frightening things,” she said. “But somehow fascinating.”
She moved the tracing finger up from the gun, along my shoulder line and along the edge of my jaw.
“Like you,” she said, “a dark deadly brute of a thing.”
“You should see me in my teal robe,” I said.
Her lipstick was brilliant red and made a wide bright slash across her evenly tanned face. Her black eyes seemed hotter at close range. She rolled onto her side and put her arms around me. The champagne glass had disappeared somewhere on her side of the chaise. She slid her hands up my back and riffled the hair at the back of my neck. We were pressed together from knee to forehead.
“There’s not much between us,” she said with her lips fluttering against mine as she spoke.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. I was doing everything I could not to whinny like a stallion.
“Just a thin layer of bathing suit,” she whispered, “that zips down the back.”
I slid my hand down the line of her zipper. She arched her body hard against me and pressed her mouth against mine. We hung that way, balanced on the edge of the chaise, and of God knows what else. Finally she pulled her head back. Her lipstick was smeared.
“The zipper.” Her voice was hoarse.
I shook my head.
“Not like this,” I said. “Like a clotheshorse towel boy on the chaise by the pool. Do I get a tip afterwards?”
Her eyes widened.
“You don’t want me?” she said.
“I want you, but when it’s me and you, not you trying to distract me so I won’t keep asking about a guy named Simpson who may have your baby sister.”
Tears welled into her eyes. We were both sitting up on the chaise now, though in truth I couldn’t remember changing position. Her fists clenched.
“You terrible son of a bitch, Marlowe. You arrogant bastard. My baby sister. God, how can you know. How can you even imagine what it’s like to have to be in charge of that baby sister?”
“I’ve had a taste of it,” I said.
“A taste. I’ve had a lifetime. And now I have her alone. My father’s gone, which is just as well. She would break his heart if he were here.”
“Or she were,” I said.
Vivian seemed to be really crying now.
“You don’t know, Marlowe, what it is like, a woman alone, trying to manage Carmen, trying to keep the General’s memory so that his name isn’t dishonored, so that he can sleep in peace.”
“When I mentioned Simpson,” I said, “you acted like you’d swallowed a mouse.”
Vivian put her face in her hands and began to sob, her honey-colored shoulders hunched. Her whole body shook with the crying.
“Damn you, Marlowe, why can’t you leave me alone?”
“I’m a detective, lady. I work at it. I’ve got a client. He deserves my best effort.”
Without looking up, her face still pressed into her hands, she said, “The only Simpson I know is Randolph Simpson.”
“Is Carmen with him?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“Where does he live?”
“Above Malibu,” she said. “In the hills.”
“Thanks,” I said. “For the champagne too.”
“He’s too much for you, Marlowe. You can’t go against him.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I said. “I’m still around.”
She shook her head in her hands.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I gave her the gunman’s salute with my forefinger and turned and walked away.
Behind me I heard her call me a bastard. A lot of people had called me that. Could all of them be wrong?
10
There was no Randolph Simpson in the phone book. I went down to the library and looked in the collection of street directories. No listing. I went over to the hall of records and began digging through the real estate tax rolls, and after three very dusty hours I found him. Randolph Simpson, Sierra Verdugo Rd. I went back to my office and looked at my map. Sierra Verdugo Rd. was in the Santa Monica Mountains, west of Topanga Canyon and south of Mulholland. A guy that lived there and kept his name out of the city directory and had his phone number unlisted probably didn’t welcome a visit from a stranger.
I put on my hat and went to my car and drove right out to see him.
Sierra Verdugo Rd. cut through the parched hills that people out here called mountains between the Pacific Coast Highway and the San Fernando Valley.
They still shot Westerns out here, low-budget stuff with aging stars on tired horses, and as I wound through the narrow turns of the road I half expected to see a band of rampaging Indians round the bend. The hills were brown and barren except for the scrubby low growth of indeterminate species that clung to the otherwise eroding hillsides. Boulders the size of outhouses teetered near the rim of the highway, looking as if you could reach out as you drove by and push them over into the canyon. The road west off Topanga Canyon went slowly upward in a series of S turns until it widened into a graded turnaround in front of a large iron gate. The gate was set into a ten-foot fieldstone and mortar wall that circled slowly out of sight in both directions. The wall was topped with broken glass of many colors set sharply in the mortar. Beyond the gate was a plain of green grass highlighted with flower beds and flowering shrubs. In the middle of the sere hills it looked like a vision of Eden from the plains to the east.