There were five in the little gun. She had fired four. I rushed her.
I didn’t want the last one in my face, so I swerved to one side. She gave it to me quite carefully, not worried at all. I think I felt the hot breath of the powder blast a little.
I straightened up. “My, but you’re cute,” I said.
Her hand holding the empty gun began to shake violently. The gun fell out of it. Her mouth began to shake violently. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up toward her left ear and froth showed on her lips. Her breath made a whining sound. She swayed.
I caught her as she fell. She was already unconscious. I pried her teeth open with both hands and stuffed a wadded handkerchief in between them. It took all my strength to do it. I lifted her and got her into the car, then went back for the gun and dropped it in my pocket. I climbed in under the wheel, backed the car, and drove back the way we had come along the rutted road, out of the gateway, back up the hill and so home.
Carmen lay crumpled in the corner of the car, without motion. I was halfway up the drive to the house before she stirred. Then her eyes suddenly opened wide and wild. She sat up.
“What happened?” she gasped.
“Nothing. Why?”
“Oh, yes it did,” she giggled. “I wet myself.”
“They always do,” I said...
I got up and poured the rest of my drink down the sink and rinsed the glass. I turned back my cuffs and splashed cold water on my face and toweled dry. I went to the window and shut it and turned and left the office and went home to the Hobart Arms to try and sleep.
If I dreamed I don’t remember.
27
When I got to my office in the morning, my phone was ringing. When I answered, it was Pauline Snow.
“Marlowe,” she said. “I don’t know if it means anything but there’s a desert rat out here, says he’s found a murder site near Randolph Simpson’s place. The old fool’s drunk most of the time, and I’m not sure but what he sees things.”
“What makes him think it’s a murder site?” I said.
“He says there’s blood all over the place.”
“Hang up and look out the window,” I said. “You’ll see me parking my car.”
When I got there, Pauline Snow had made a pitcher of iced tea and we sat in the newspaper office and had some while she talked.
“I started looking into the Rancho Springs Development Corporation, and into Randolph Simpson, since you seemed to think he was involved somehow.”
The tea had a wedge of lemon in it, and a lot of ice. I added some sugar and waited for it to dissolve and for the tea to become clear again. The desert heat was like a substance that pervaded everything.
“So I asked around, just casual, you know. Anybody know anything about the Rancho Springs company? Anybody know anything unusual about Randolph Simpson? I have a lot of contacts in this town, ought to, been here half my damned life, and the word spread. First thing happened was Cecil came around. Cecil Coleman’s the chief of police here. He wanted to know why I was asking questions, and I told him it was because I was in the newspaper business and that’s what you did in the newspaper business. And he said he thought I better not ask any more questions. And I said I was thinking about doing an editorial about how the local police don’t seem to arrest anybody except occasional speeders passing through. And he said I better not do that either. And we sort of jawed at each other for a while and then he left and said I’d be hearing from him.”
“He’s a bad enemy,” I said.
“Marlowe, at my age, even an enemy is better than boredom.”
“How about the murder site?” I said.
“Well, Shorty, that’s the desert rat, he heard from somebody I was interested and he came in here and said he could tell me a story to put in the paper. So I gave him a shot of whiskey and he sat and told me that he was nosing around in an old deserted mineshaft — lot of desert rats do that, see if there might be a little dust left that got overlooked — and he found a sort of room a little ways in, really just a widening of the shaft, probably, that was splashed all over, he says, with blood. According to Shorty the whole room was covered with dried blood. So I thought I better let you know. As I say, it may be nothing...”
“Shorty talk to the cops?” I said.
“He says no, and I believe him. People like Shorty get pretty short shrift from Cecil.”
“And Vern,” I said.
“You’ve met them?”
“Yeah. Where is this mineshaft?”
“Southeast of town,” Pauline said. “I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t need to,” I said.
“I used to be a crime reporter, Marlowe. I’ve seen blood. It doesn’t scare me.”
“Scares me,” I said.
She had a Ford pickup and she drove it far too fast for the roads. Or maybe it was right for the roads and too fast for me. I decided it didn’t matter. We went southeast out of town through the flat hot land. There was tumbleweed, and occasionally a saguaro cactus looking somehow regal in the still desert air. The road was unpaved and soon became merely two wheel ruts as the pickup jounced and rattled along.
The mineshaft went horizontally into a low rise about two hundred yards off the road. The entrance was shored with timbers and the rubble of mine dross fanned out from the entrance for maybe fifty yards. There were the faint indentations of wagon wheels leading from the mine entrance toward the road, and the only sound I heard as we walked toward the mine was the desert wind that swept almost unimpeded over hundreds of miles and scattered the grit around the entrance, and pushed the tumbleweed along. Inside the mine entrance the sound of the wind turned into a hollow tone a little like a train whistle, but nowhere near as loud. Pauline Snow turned on the big battery lantern she’d brought and we walked, our feet crunching, through the litter of the shaft floor for maybe twenty feet where it turned a little and widened before it started to descend. The walls and gravel floor were crusted with blackened blood. I could smell it, no longer rich as it must have been when it was fresh, but still the lingering unmistakable scent of it. Blood had splashed on the walls, and ran in thick puddles on the floor where it had coagulated around the small scatter of stones. I heard Pauline’s breath go in.
“Maybe you should stay with the truck,” I said.
“No.”
The light moved slowly as she panned the room. On one wall at about shoulder height a bloody handprint stood in black outline to the reddish stone of the shaft. There were drip lines where blood had spattered and run slowly down the walls.
I squatted on my haunches and looked closely at the dried pools, the surface faintly glossy in the lantern light. I was always amazed at the amount of blood there was in a human body. Among some rocks the size of footballs something metallic gleamed.
“Over there,” I said, and Pauline flashed the light where I pointed. I went over and picked up a surgical saw. I handled it carefully, although the chance of useful fingerprints was about equal to the chance of a genie popping out of the mineshaft and telling us what happened. I moved slowly over the floor of the room. Among some other rocks, further back in the shaft, I found a scalpel. I was careful with it, too. There was nothing else to find in the murder room, we went a little further down the shaft and saw no sign of anything having been before us. We went back to the blood room.
“What do you think?” Pauline Snow said.