“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.
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. I’d 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 I’d 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, I’d 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.
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?”
“Yeah.”
“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.