“Gimme.”
“When you’re dressed. Not until you’re dressed.”
I put the two glasses down on the card table and sat down myself and lit another cigarette. “Go ahead. I won’t watch you.”
I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman’s eyes...
She had left finally, but she didn’t forget that I’d rejected her.
“You’ve seen her,” Vivian said. “She’s not right. Maybe, if she were drinking exotic things and mixing them, and thought it would be giggly fun...”
Vivian let the sentence hang.
“Yes,” I said.
“And the next day remember nothing,” Vivian said.
We were quiet.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably too hard a job, the simple physical labor of dismemberment, for a small girl to do alone. She might have been an accessory, though. No way to know.”
“You have to find her, Marlowe.”
“Yeah? Maybe if somebody would tell me something, I might just do that.”
“Tell you what?”
“Where she might be. How she got to Bonsentir. What the connection is with Randolph Simpson. Why you wanted me out of the thing and told me Eddie Mars was taking care of everything. What the hell you’re doing with Eddie Mars anyway. Things like that.”
She held my gaze angrily for a minute and then her face began to crumble. She started to cry. With the tears running down her face she said, “Hold me, damn you, Marlowe. Put your arms around me.”
I moved over onto the couch and put my arms around her. She arched up into my arms and buried her face against my chest and sobbed. Her body shook with every sob as if the sound was forced out of her against her will. After maybe five minutes that seemed no longer than the Thirty Years War she began to calm down. The sobs spaced out more and finally stopped. She lay still in my arms, her face against my chest, her arms locked around my neck, her body pressed against me hard. Finally she lifted her face and kissed me. There was no contrivance this time. I kissed her back. She opened her mouth.
Without taking her lips from mine she murmured “yes, yes.”
I didn’t hear anyone say “no.”
When it was over, we lay still, half dressed and breathless together on her couch, which was a little narrow for two people, one of whom weighed 190.
“I wonder sometimes,” Vivian said, “why it had to be me. Why I have to take care of this childish pervert.”
“I guess because there isn’t anyone else,” I said.
Vivian lay with her head in the crook of my arm.
“She was always... twisted. When we were little girls in polka-dot dresses, she was always, somehow, corrupt, as if she were born with something nasty infesting her soul.”
“Ever try to get her cured?” I said.
Vivian’s head stirred on my arm. She held the fingers of that arm in her right hand and pressed them occasionally against her cheek as she talked.
“I’ve taken her to Europe, sanitariums, private hospitals, the best analysts. She remains a depraved child. Maybe it’s my mother’s blood, or the mix of it with the Sternwoods’. My mother died when we were very young. My father would never speak of her.”
“So you finally gave up on Carmen and tried to find somewhere to keep her out of trouble.”
“I need a life, Marlowe. I need a chance to love someone, to get free of her.”
“So you shipped her off to Dr. Bonsentir, and his needles, and his pills, and his security.”
“Yes,” Vivian said. “I’m not ashamed of that. Resthaven is well regarded, and Dr. Bonsentir is a specialist in sexually related personality disorders.”
“I’ll bet he is,” I said. “How’d you find him?”
She said something I couldn’t hear.
“I didn’t get that,” I said.
“Randolph Simpson,” she said in a voice that came out too loud because she was forcing it.
“Ah yes,” I said. “The old family friend.”
“My father knew him. When my father was younger he did some business with his family.”
“The first time I asked, you said you didn’t know him.”
“He requires anonymity,” Vivian said.
“I’ll bet he does,” I said.
“In truth he frightens me. He told me to tell no one he’d helped me with Carmen, and when you asked I was afraid.”
“You think Carmen’s with him?”
“I don’t know.” I could hear her breath go in shakily and come out the same way. “I guess I don’t want to know.”
“So where’s Mars come in?”
“I asked Eddie to see if he could find out where Carmen was.”
“And he agreed?”
“Yes. He helped me with Carmen before. He knows about her.”
“What’s he get out of it?”
“Nothing. It’s just a favor to me.”
“Guys like Mars don’t do favors,” I said. “He gets something.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t understand,” Vivian said. “But Eddie Mars loves me.”
“I might understand that, but I’m not sure I understand it in a gee like Eddie.”
“I know. I know what Eddie is, but he is capable of love, Marlowe, and he loves me.”
“How about you?” I said.
“Do I love him?”
“Un huh.”
“No, I don’t suppose I do. But it would be easy to. Eddie’s a powerful man. He has money. He has influence. He’s tough and things don’t scare him.”
“And he’s crooked as a con man’s smile,” I said.
“Maybe, but if you’ve been alone and a woman and frightened, power and influence and money and tough looks like it might be enough.”
“What about me?” I said.
She paused, rubbing the back of my hand against her cheek.
“You’re different, Marlowe.”
I had nothing to add to that. I took a cigarette from her lacquered box and lit it and passed it to her and took another and lit it for myself. We lay quietly smoking.
“You think she’s with Simpson?” I said.
She took in some smoke. When she let it out it drifted up and hung wispily above us as we lay on our backs.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m afraid that she could be.”
“Tell me about him,” I said.
Again the slow inhale and the smoke drifting lazily up.
“He’s the... oddest man I know. He plays golf, for instance, on his own golf course, just him and his partner, and the bodyguards.”
“The boys in the dark suits,” I said. “I’ve met several of them.”
“They surround him wherever he goes.”
“Swell,” I said.
“He’s been married, but he’s not married now, and he likes girls, but never for very long. And they always have to be brought to his home. And, ah, they, ah, all have to have a medical examination.”
“See how easy I am,” I said. “Um.”
“You think Simpson got you to send Carmen to Bonsentir so Bonsentir could hand her along?”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said. “I’m afraid to know. I kept hoping maybe Eddie would somehow take care of it.”