Driving back to Hollywood, I thought about all of this. Was Neville Valley Realty buying up water rights as representatives of the government? Were they buying the rights so they could resell them to the government at extortion-level prices? What was kindly old doctor Heal-all doing on the board of the Rancho Springs Development Corp.? And why did some employees of the Neville Valley Realty Trust come to Hollywood and pour it on me?
Back in my office I put in a call to the Bureau of Land Management’s Los Angeles office. It took about a half an hour, and most of that on hold, to get anyone who even knew about the Neville Valley project, and he didn’t know anything about the Neville Realty Trust. Which didn’t prove that they weren’t working for the government. It only proved what I already knew about the government.
I sat at my desk with the window open, smelling the fumes from the coffee shop downstairs and pushing the things I knew around in my head, hoping they’d form a pattern I could recognize. It was late afternoon. I looked out my window at the boulevard below me. Nobody was frying eggs on the sidewalk. Off on another street somewhere a police siren wailed. They’d be busy in this heat. People got a little crazy in heat like this. Husbands began to ball their fists and frown at their wives. Meek, mousy-haired wives began to look at the breadknife and eye their husbands taking a nap in their undershirts and snoring, their throats exposed. In the barrio the prowl car boys would keep their hands a little closer to their guns. And in the hills where the stars lived, people would sit on patios looking at the lights twinkle in the steamy evening below them in the basin, and the sweat that beaded on the sides of cocktail shakers would trickle off and make a wet spot in their linen slacks. The heat played no favorites.
It got slowly dark while I sat there looking out at the baking city and thinking and not getting anywhere. The end of another perfect day. Nobody called. Nobody came in. Nobody cared if I died or bought a house in Encino.
21
The Rancho Springs Development Corp. was on the second floor over a gas station in a pale beige stucco building with the rounded shape of the Spanish Southwest that everyone south of Oregon thought was authentic native Californian. The building was on the main street in Rancho Springs next to a place that sold tacos and across the street from a general store where three desert rats in bib overalls sat out front in the thick heat and rocked and spat occasionally out onto the street. A big yellow tomcat with a torn ear sprawled on the bottom stair leading up to the Rancho Springs Development office and I had to step over him when I went up.
Inside at the only desk in the place was a young woman with a bad sunburn. It was bad enough so that she moved a little stiffly as she turned toward me when I came in. The desk at which she sat and the chair on which she was sitting was all there was in the office for furniture. On the floor beside the desk was a cardboard carton and in the carton were a number of manila file folders. On the desk was a phone. That was it, there was nothing on the walls, no curtains on the windows. The room was as charming as a heap of coffee grounds.
I took off my sunglasses and smiled at the young woman. Her nose was peeling, and her pale hair was dry and bleached looking. She wore a flimsy white blouse with short sleeves and her thin arms were bright red.
“Dr. Bonsentir around?” I said.
She looked blank. She also looked pained and bored and tighter than a Methodist deacon.
“Who?”
“Dr. Claude Bonsentir,” I said. “I was hoping to find him here.”
“Never heard of him,” she said.
She was chewing gum and her jaws moved slowly and with iron regularity on it. Occasionally she would open her mouth to stretch some of the gum into a thin grayish membrane with her tongue. Then her lips would close and the gum would disappear.
“This is Rancho Springs Development Corporation?” I said.
“Ann huh.” She was busy with the gum.
“What exactly is it you develop?”
She tucked the gum away into some corner of her mouth and looked at me as if I had wriggled up from the kitchen drain.
“Listen, Jack,” she said, “they hire me to sit here and answer the phone and take messages and if they want something typed I type it. You want to leave a message?”
“Who’re ‘they’?”
“Guys that run this place. Vinnie and Chuck.”
“Vinnie and Chuck who?” I said.
She shook her head.
“You wanna leave a message?” she said.
“When you see Vinnie and Chuck,” I said.
She got out a little note pad and a pencil.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Give them a big kiss for me,” I said, and turned and went back out and down the stairs and over the cat and into the main street. The main street was maybe 100 yards long and didn’t need to be, it only supported about six buildings. Between the buildings were vacant lots, mostly sand and a few weeds and here and there tumbleweed resting still in the windless heat.
I strolled down toward a gray, weathered clapboard building where a sign out front read RANCHO SPRINGS GAZETTE AND CHRONICLE. It was a single-storied storefront with a wide front window and a screen door. Inside was a counter running across the room. Behind it was a printing press and two desks.
A big woman in a man’s white shirt and gabardine slacks smiled easily at me when I came in. She wore her white hair short, and her face had the dark-tanned look of a desert person who spends a lot of time outdoors. She seemed in excellent health and fine spirits.
“Hello, stranger,” she said. “Come to place an ad? Report something interesting? Either case this is the spot for it.”
“Information,” I said.
“Got that too,” she said. “Name’s Pauline Snow. Only thing in this godforsaken wasteland ain’t hot is my name.”
“Marlowe,” I said. Guile hadn’t done anything for me. I decided to try truth. “I’m a private detective from Los Angeles working on a case, and the name of the Rancho Springs Development Corporation has popped up in it.”
Pauline Snow said “Humph,” with a lot of feeling.
“I’ve been to the office and talked with the young woman who works there. I would have done better to talk with the cat, which doesn’t chew gum.”
“Rita,” Pauline Snow said with as much feeling as she’d said humph.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I thought.”
“Rancho Springs Development Corporation is a fancy name for a back-shanty operation in which two bozos come in and start buying up any land they can get,” she said. “You got a cigarette?”
I got the pack out and gave it to her, she shook one loose, put it in her mouth, gave me back the pack. I held a match for her. She took a long inhale and let the smoke out in two streams through her nostrils. She looked me over.
“Private eye, is it?”
I nodded modestly.
“Well, you got the build for it, I’ll give you that.”
“Why are they buying up land?” I said. “Is there something about Rancho Springs Fm missing?”
“Only thirty miles,” she said, “east of Pasadena.”
“Perfect for fans of the Rose Parade,” I said. “Anything else?”
“I don’t know, Marlowe. It doesn’t make any sense at all. This is hardscrabble dry land. No farming, no industry, damned little of anything. A few people still prospect out here, and a few damn fools like me and my husband come out here thinking about clean air and freedom. Then the son of a bitch up and died on me and left me to run this paper myself for the last seven years.”