She shook her head. “Not really,” she said. “They’re not Neville Valley people. They came in a year or so ago and opened the office. It used to be a feed store in there before. But business was so bad that they had to sell out. Everybody’s hoping this land-reclamation water project will change everything.”
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Wendy,” she said. “Wendy Clausen.”
I put out my hand.
“It’s nice to meet you, Wendy,” I said. She shook my hand and smiled her wide smile.
“A pleasure, Mr. Marlowe.”
I thanked her for the drink and the talk and got up and went out to visit the Neville Realty Trust. The heat, when I came out of the dim hotel lobby, was something to wade through, unyielding, implacable, and inhumane. There was almost no one on the drowsy main street as I turned left, walked a block and turned right. The only life I saw was a black and tan collie with a white chest sleeping on the front steps of a hardware store.
There was a little gravel parking lot next to the office of Neville Realty Trust. There was a Ford pickup truck parked there and a gray Mercury sedan. No black Buick. There was a big storefront-style window across the front with a black and gold sign in ornate Gothic lettering. There was a little bell on the glass-paneled front door, and when I walked in, the bell tinkled pleasantly. There were two people in the room: a fat woman with a very red face whose flowered blouse stuck to her in the heat, and a sharp-featured guy with a long chin and slick black hair. He looked happy in the heat, like one of those reptiles who need it to loosen up and come awake. A big floor fan was wasting its time in the corner of the room.
I stopped in front of the fat woman’s desk. She wiped her face with a lace-embroidered handkerchief and looked up at me from the ledger that was open on her desk.
“Help you?” she said in a voice that didn’t mean it.
“Like to buy some land,” I said.
She shook her head, heavily, and wiped her face again. The handkerchief looked wetter than her blouse.
“Got none for sale right now,” she said. “Sorry.”
“How about some water rights?” I wasn’t exactly sure what a water right was, but it seemed like the thing to ask.
“We got no water rights,” she said. The sharpster at the other desk was concentrating on something that looked like a plot plan on his desk. He was concentrating all right, except his ears were out maybe a foot toward our conversation.
I looked surprised. “Really?” I said. “I heard you had been acquiring water rights all over the valley.”
“We got none for sale,” she said. The effort of talking to me seemed to be making her hotter.
“I see,” I said. “Well is the, ah, owner of the firm available?”
The sharpster at the other desk leaned back in his chair and swiveled halfway around to look at me.
“We got nothing to sell, bub. Maybe you didn’t quite get that.”
“How surprising,” I said. I was trying to sound like the kind of tycoon who would sweep in and buy up thirty trillion dollars’ worth of almost anything.
“Yeah,” the sharpster said, “ain’t it? Now, why don’t you kinda drift.”
I looked puzzled. “Drift?”
“Yeah. You know — take a hike, breeze, it’s a hot day and we got things to do.”
“Well,” I said. “I must say, I wonder how you stay in business.”
I turned on my heel and stomped out. Across the street was a barbershop and next to it a drugstore. Through the front window of the drugstore I could see the corner of a soda fountain. I went across and into the drugstore. It had a marble counter and a big fountain with spigots, and spouts for syrup, in a glistening row behind it. A ceiling fan moved slowly and with little effect above me. The pharmacist was behind the fountain with his arms folded, gazing silently out at the street. He was short and slight with a bald head across which he’d plastered two or three wisps of hair. I ordered a lime rickey. He made it in a tall fluted glass and put it in front of me on top of a little paper doily. He shoved a round container of straws toward me and went back to leaning against the back counter and staring out the window. From where I sat I could look straight out at the Neville Realty Trust.
I nodded at the office across the street. “New business in town?”
The pharmacist nodded.
“Successful?” I said.
The pharmacist nodded again.
“I understand they’re buying water rights up around here.”
The pharmacist became talkative. “Yep,” he said.
“You done any business with them?”
“Nope.” “Know who owns the company?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t talk much, do you?” I said.
“Nope. Don’t need to. City fella like you comes in, does all the talking anyway.”
“See a lot of city people up here, do you?” I said.
“Since the government project.”
“From Los Angeles?”
“Guess so.”
Across the street a black Buick sedan swung into the parking lot of the Neville Realty Trust. It had the right license tags. Two men got out of the front, and the one on the passenger’s side held open the rear door for a third man. All I could see of him was that he wore a seersucker suit and would be a perfect mate for the fat woman in the office. He had trouble getting out of the car, and when he did finally manage it, he paused to wipe his face with a big white handkerchief before he waddled into the office.
“Who’s the fat guy?” I said.
“Don’t know,” the pharmacist said. “You want some more lime rickey?”
I said no, and he swooped the glass away and washed it in the little sink back there, and put it upside down on the shelf behind him. He and I sat in silence for a while.
Nothing moved across the street. Finally I got up and paid for my lime rickey.
“I’m going where I can get a little peace and quiet,” I said. And went out and walked back to the River Run Inn.
20
It cooled off after midnight and I got to sleep. Showered, shaved and breakfasted, I was in my car heading back to L. A. by nine A. M. Except for the green strip along the Neville River, the land was brown and still under heat that made the landscape shimmer.
Back in my office I called Ohls and gave him the license numbers for the pickup, and the gray Mercury I had seen parked in the Neville Valley Realty Trust parking lot. Then I went downstairs to the coffee shop and had a ham sandwich and some coffee and came back upstairs and sat and dangled my feet until Ohls called back. The truck was registered to Neville Valley Realty Trust. The gray Mercury belonged to the Rancho Springs Development Corporation in Rancho Springs, California.
“You need anything else, Hawkshaw?” Ohls said.
“You show me how this all ties into Carmen Sternwood,” I said.
“Be good for you,” Ohls said, “to work it out yourself.”
I went straight downtown to the hall of records and spent maybe an hour and a half looking up the incorporation papers that the California secretary of state’s office requires of all new companies. Neville Valley Trust was in there, and the Rancho Springs Development Corp. Everything was written in the conventional language of lawyers, which is why it took me an hour and a half. But when I was through I knew that the Neville Valley Realty Trust and Rancho Springs Development Corporation were legal corporations in the State of California. And I knew that a member of the incorporating board of Rancho Springs was Claude Bonsentir.
Then I went to the library and spent another couple of hours in the periodical room reading up on the Neville Valley Land Reclamation Project. It was almost as boring as the documents of incorporation, but basically I learned that it was a part of a federal effort to reclaim barren land in the West and Southwest. The plan in Neville Valley was to use the spill from the Neville River to irrigate land all over the valley and turn it into rich farming country. There was no mention of the Neville Valley Trust in anything I read.