“Thoughtless,” I said. “Maybe Vinnie and Chuck know something we don’t.”
“Vincent Tartabull and Charles Gardenia. They better for their sake, because right now they’re holding a passel of the most worthless acreage God ever made.”
“They local people?” I said.
“Hell no,” Pauline Snow said. “They come in here about six months ago and rented that hole up over the gas station, which is pretty much a damn hole itself if you think about it, and hired that idiot Rita. And started buying land. Easy enough to do, nobody wants it, everybody’s happy as hell to sell and get out. Most folks are here ’cause they can’t sell.”
“Know where they came from?” “Los Angeles,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I used to be a reporter, Mr. Marlowe, for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now I’m just a fat old babe with no husband who runs a hicktown weekly in East Overshoe. But I haven’t forgotten everything I used to know.”
“I get the feeling, Mrs. Snow, that you haven’t forgotten anything you used to know, and that you used to know a lot.”
“You know how to make a girl feel right, Marlowe. You surely do.”
“Anything else you can tell me about these guys?”
She shook her head. “Been trying to figure out their angle for a while,” she said, “but I can’t. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Know anybody named Bonsentir, Dr. Claude Bonsentir?”
“Sure. He’s one of the names on the incorporation papers in the secretary of state’s office.”
I grinned at her. And nodded my head in mock homage.
“Happen to know his sock size?” I said. “Any identifying marks?”
“I’m not that good, Marlowe. I looked up the incorporation papers, like you probably did. Don’t know more than that. They didn’t tell me anything useful.”
“No. They wouldn’t. But I’m going to tell you something useful,” I said. “There’s some sort of connection between this outfit, the Rancho Springs Development Corp., and an outfit up in Neville Valley, called the Neville Valley Realty Trust.”
“Neville Valley,” she said. “Is that up north a ways, in the Mountains?”
“Yeah, about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevadas,” I said. “And you know what they’re doing?”
“How the hell would I know that?” she said.
“It was a rhetorical question, Mrs. Snow. They’re buying up water rights.”
She stared at me and opened her mouth and closed it and went and got a rolled-up map of California out of one of the file drawers near the printing press.
She unrolled it and spread it out on a desk top and bent over it, resting her hands on the desk, her head hanging as she pored over the map. After a few minutes she began to nod her head silently and kept nodding it as she rolled the map back up and put it away. When she returned to the counter she was still nodding.
“Gimme another smoke,” she said.
I did. And a light. When she had her cigarette going and a lungful of smoke expelled she bent down behind the counter and rummaged around for a moment and came out with a bottle of rye whiskey and two glasses.
“We need to drink a little whiskey, I think, while we think about this.”
I took the inch and a half she poured in one neat swallow.
So did she. She exhaled happily once and then poured two more drinks.
“You think they’re going to run that water down from Neville Valley to here and make all that cheap desert land they bought worth a fortune?”
“They might,” I said.
“Wouldn’t that be something,” she said.
“Problem is,” I said, “the government’s running some kind of land-reclamation project up there designed to do the same for Neville Valley.”
“And you figure somebody’s trying to steal it. The water.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just trying to find one young woman, and everywhere I look things are peculiar and the case gets bigger and bigger.”
“Well, maybe I can do some poking around at this end,” she said. “You got someplace I can reach you?”
I gave her my card. She looked at the address. “Hollywood, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Gumshoe to the stars.”
“You know,” she said, “what’s funny. If we find out that everything is not, ah, kosher, in this deal. I mean, who the hell do you report a stolen river to?”
I drank the rest of my second drink and dried my mouth on the back of my first knuckle.
“Me, I guess,” I said.
22
I had parked my car on the street across from the gas station above which the Rancho Springs Development Corp. had its rathole. When I got back to my car it was blocked by a black and white police car with a big silver star on the side. Around the circumference of the star were the words RANCHO SPRINGS POLICE.
Leaning against my car were two of Rancho Springs’ finest. Probably all of Rancho Springs’ finest. One was a long rangy leathery customer with a big walrus moustache. He wore a tan shirt and pants that had been laundered threadbare, and a big white ten-gallon hat with sweat stains around the base of the crown. There was a star pinned to his shirt, that said Chief, and he carried an old frontier-style .44 Colt in a scuffed leather holster which hung from a wide cartridge belt. The Colt must have had a barrel ten inches long. The other guy leaning on my car was probably six inches shorter than his chief and maybe a yard wider. He had no neck at all, his jowly red face rising directly from his shoulders, and his faded tan uniform shirt was stretched to its limit over his stomach, so that the buttonholes pulled, and in the gaps between the buttons the pallid skin showed through. He too wore a big hat and it succeeded in making him seem even squatter. Above his small eyes, his blond eyebrows were bleached pale and looked like white slashes against his red face. His silver badge said Sergeant on it. He had a government-issue .45 automatic in a military-style flap holster on a web belt that he wore tight, allowing his belly to hang over it.
“This your car?” the fat cop said.
“Nice huh?” I said. “You want to sit in it?”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” the fat cop said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to talk so fast.”
“You’ll be talking fast in the back cell under the big lights in a little while,” the fat cop said.
“The smaller the town, the tougher the buttons talk,” I said.
The fat cop put his hand on his holster.
“You want to say that again, tough guy?” he said.
The chief put a hand like a catcher’s mitt on the fat cop’s shoulder.
“Now, Vern,” he said mildly. “Got no call getting yourself into some sort of rutting contest with this fella. Just deliver our message and help him on his way.”
“I figured there’d be a message,” I said.
The fat cop continued to glower at me, hand poised on his holster flap. I could have shot off his nose and put the gun away by the time he got unbuttoned.
“Smart fella,” the chief said easily. “Could tell you were a smart fella, minute you showed up in town. Lotta smart fellas in the city, I guess. Don’t get a chance to see many of them out here eating sand with us cactus rats.”
“You actually hire this guy as a cop?” I said, and jerked my head at the fat cop, “or do you just keep him around for shade?”
“Vern’s a handy fella. Does good work with a blackjack. But he ain’t always as polite as he should be, I guess. What’s the purpose of your visit to our town, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Did you get it off the registration?” I said. “Or did Rita give it to you?”