“Are you a prizefighter?” she asked, when I didn’t.
“Not exactly. I’m a sleuth.”
“A... a—” She tossed her head angrily, and the rich color of it glistened in the rather dim light of the big hall. “You’re making fun of me.”
“Uh-uh.”
“What?”
“Get on with you,” I said. “You heard me.”
“You didn’t say anything. You’re just a big tease.” She put a thumb up and bit it. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.
“You’re awfully tall,” she said. Then she giggled with secret merriment. Then she turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet. Her hands dropped limp at her sides. She tilted herself toward me on her toes. She fell straight back into my arms. I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor. I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up. When her head was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me.
“You’re cute,” she giggled. “I’m cute too.”
I didn’t say anything. So the butler chose that convenient moment to come back through the French doors and see me holding her.
Well, maybe not quite yesterday.
I followed Norris’s straight back down the same corridor toward the French doors. The house seemed quieter now. Probably my imagination. It was too big a house and too chilled with sadness ever to have been noisy. This time, we turned under the stairs and went down some stairs to the kitchen. The horsefaced maid was there. She smiled and bobbed her head at me. Norris glanced at her and she bobbed her head again and went out of the kitchen.
The kitchen was big and opened out onto the back lawn as it dropped away from the house. Like so many hillside mansions in Los Angeles the first floor in front was the second floor in back. The floors were a polished brown Mexican tile. There was a large wooden work-table in the center of the room, a big professional-looking cook-stove against the far wall, two refrigerators to the right, and a long counter with two sinks and a set tub along the left wall.
“Will you have coffee, sir?” Norris said.
I said I would and Norris disappeared into a pantry off the kitchen and returned in a moment with a silver coffee service and a bone china cup and saucer. He poured the coffee into the cup in front of me. And placed an ashtray nearby.
“Please smoke if you wish to, Mr. Marlowe,” Norris said.
I sipped the coffee, got out a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match.
“How are the girls?” I said.
Norris smiled. “The very subject I wished to discuss, sir.”
Norris stood erect beside the table. I waited.
“The General used to like brandy in his coffee, sir,” Norris said. “Would you care for some?”
“Join me,” I said.
Norris started to shake his head.
“For the General,” I said.
Norris nodded, got another cup, put brandy in my cup and a splash, straight, in his cup. He raised his cup toward me.
“To General Guy Sternwood,” he said, giving “Guy” the French pronunciation.
I raised my cup back.
“General Sternwood,” I said. I had first met him in the greenhouse, at the foot of the velvet lawn.
The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom... after a while we came to a clearing in the middle of the jungle, under the domed roof. Here, in a space of hexagonal flags, an old red Turkish rug was laid down and on the rug was a wheelchair, and in the wheelchair an old and obviously dying man watched us come with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago, but which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes in the portrait that hung over the mantel in the hall. The rest of his face was a leaden mask, with the bloodless lips and the sharp nose and the sunken temples and the outward-turning earlobes of approaching dissolution. His long narrow body was wrapped — in that heat — in a traveling rug and a faded red bathrobe. His thin clawlike hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
I sipped my coffee. Norris took a discreet drink of his brandy. There was no sound in the big kitchen. The General’s ghost was with us, and both of us were quiet in its presence.
“What do you know about my family?”
“I’m told you are a widower and have two young daughters, both pretty and both wild. One of them has been married three times, the last time to an ex-bootlegger who went in the trade by the name of Rusty Regan. That’s all I heard, General...”
“I’m afraid Miss Carmen has disappeared,” Norris said, interrupting my thoughts.
“From where?” I said.
“After that, ah, misfortune with Rusty Regan,” Norris said, “Miss Vivian placed her in a sanitarium as, I believe, you advised her to.”
I nodded. The coffee was strong and too hot to drink except in small sips. The brandy lay atop the coffee and made a different kind of warmth when I sipped it. I could hear the General’s voice thin with age, taut with feeling long denied.
“Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart, and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat. Neither have I...”
There was another sound in the voice. Besides the tiredness and the iron self-control, there was a wistful sound, a sound of what might have been, a sound of sins revisited but irredeemable. And it was that sound which held me, as I knew it held Norris, if only in memory, long after the speaker had fallen silent.
“Vivian went to good schools of the snob type and to college. Carmen went to half a dozen schools of greater and greater liberality, and ended up where she started. I presume they both had, and still have, all the usual vices. If I sound a little sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it is because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, then opened them again suddenly. “I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets...”
“She was doing very well at the sanitarium,” Norris said. “I myself had the privilege of visiting her every week.”
“And Vivian?” I said. The daughters’ names seemed to dispel the father’s ghost.
“Miss Vivian visited whenever she was, ah, able.” Norris turned the cup slowly in his clean strong hands. “Her father’s death was difficult for her. And she is still seeing Mr. Mars.”
Norris’s voice was careful when he said it, empty of any evaluation. The voice of the perfect servant, not thinking, merely recording.
“How nice for her,” I said. “Did she tell you to call me?”
“No, sir. I took that liberty. Miss Vivian feels that Mr. Mars will find Miss Carmen and return her to the sanitarium.”
“His price will be higher than mine,” I said.
“Exactly so, sir.”
“And you know what I charge?”
“Yes, sir. You’ll recall that I handled the General’s checkbook for him when he employed you previously.”