“And you can afford me?”
“The General was very generous to me in his will, sir.”
I took a lungful of smoke and let it out slowly and tilted my chair on its back legs.
“But still you’re working here,” I said.
“I believe the General would have wished that, sir. His daughters...” Norris let the rest of the sentence disappear into an eloquent servant’s self-effacement.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure he would have. When did Carmen disappear?”
“A week ago. I went on my weekly visit and found that she was gone. The staff was somewhat reticent about her disappearance, but I was able to ascertain that she had in fact been gone for at least two nights.”
“And no one had reported it?”
“Apparently not, sir. I informed Miss Vivian Sternwood, of course, and took the liberty of speaking on the telephone with Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau.”
“And?” I said.
“And it was, as I remember his words, ‘the first I’d heard of it.’ ”
“And Vivian?” I said.
“Miss Vivian said that I was not to worry about it. That she had resources and that Carmen would turn up.”
“And by ‘resources’ you understood her to mean Eddie Mars?” I said.
“I did, sir.”
“How does she feel about you calling me?” I said.
“I have not yet informed her of that, sir.”
I drank the rest of the coffee laced with brandy. It had cooled enough to go down softly. I nodded more to myself than to Norris.
“What is the name of this sanitarium?” I said.
“Resthaven, sir. It is supervised by a Dr. Bonsentir.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll take a run out there.”
“Yes, sir,” Norris said. “Thank you very much, sir. May I give you a retainer?”
“A dollar will do for now,” I said. “Make it official. We’ll talk about the rest of it later.”
“That’s very kind indeed, sir,” Norris said. He took a long pale leather wallet out of his inside pocket and extracted a dollar bill and gave it to me. I wrote him out a receipt, took the bill, and put it in my pocket, negligently, like there were many more in there and I had no need to think about it.
“May I call you here?” I said.
“Indeed, sir. I often receive calls here. Answering the phone is normally among my duties.”
“And how is Vivian?” I said.
“She is still very beautiful, sir, if I may be so bold.”
“And still dating a loonigan,” I said.
“If you mean Mr. Mars, sir, I’m afraid that is the case.”
2
I came out of the Sternwood house and stood on the front stoop with my hat in my hand, holding it by the brim against my right thigh. Below me, many terraced levels down the hill, was the big spiked fence that separated the Sternwoods, or what was left of them, from the people who still worked for a living. The sun glinted off the gilt spear points of the fence. To the north it shone on the snow in the San Gabriel Mountains. I looked back down the lawn the other way, at the few creaking oil derricks still tiredly pumping five or six barrels a day. It was hard to see them from here, and impossible to see beyond them to the stinking sump where Rusty Regan lay dreamless, sleeping the big sleep.
Behind me the door opened.
“Marlowe?”
I turned and looked at Vivian Regan, the General’s older daughter, the one with the hot eyes and the sulky mouth and the great legs. She was in some kind of white silk lounging outfit today; a bell-sleeved silk top with a plunging neckline and wide floppy silk pants that hid the great legs but hinted to you that if you got a look they would indeed be great. She had an unlighted cigarette in her mouth.
“Got a match?” she said and leaned a little toward me through the open door.
I dug out a kitchen match and snapped it on my thumbnail and lit her cigarette.
“Still a masterful brute, aren’t you,” she said.
I didn’t want to say I wasn’t, so I let it drift with the aimless current of Sternwood life.
“Still sitting in the window,” I said, “peeking through the curtains?”
“I live here, Marlowe, or had you forgotten? I like to know who’s going in and out.”
“I came in a while ago,” I said. “Now I’m going out.”
Vivian stepped through the door and closed it behind her. She took in some smoke and held it a long time and then let it trail out slowly as she stared down at the distant line of derricks.
“A walk down memory lane, Mr. Marlowe? Or perhaps you came courting and lost your nerve?”
I shook my head.
“Still the strong silent type, aren’t you?”
I grinned at her and nodded and put my hat on with the brim tipped forward over my forehead. I moved off the front step and began to move along down the slope toward my car. Vivian came along with me. I could feel the tension in her. Her movements were jagged with it.
“You talked with Eddie Mars,” she said.
“Sure, after the Regan thing. I said I would.”
“How’d he take it?”
“You know I talked with him,” I said. “You probably know how he took it.”
“You told him to stay away from me, and from Carmen. You said my father was never to know and if he found out, you, personally, would find a way to put Eddie upstate for a long time.”
“Just making small talk,” I said. “I hope I didn’t upset him.”
“Eddie Mars? It would take more than a cut-rate gumshoe to scare Eddie Mars.”
“I charge full rates,” I said. “And your father died without knowing.”
“Yes,” she said. “He did.”
The tight planes of her face softened for a moment. She put her hand on my arm as we walked along the brick pathway toward the gate.
“I’m grateful for that, Marlowe.”
I said, “Uh huh.”
We were almost at the gate. I had parked my car under a pepper tree on the street, the same way I had the first time, that October when I’d come to call with the look of hard rain in the foothills, because Bernie Ohls, the DA’s chief investigator, had told me that General Sternwood needed a gumshoe.
“Why are you here, Marlowe?”
“I came to call on your butler,” I said.
“Without consulting me?”
“This is southern California, Mrs. Regan, in the twentieth century. Servants are now employees, not slaves. I know you don’t like that, but you’ll have to face it sooner or later.”
She tried to slap me, but I got a forearm up between my face and her hand.
“Bastard,” she said.
“How’s Carmen?” I said.
“Fine,” Vivian said.
“I doubt that,” I said. “She wasn’t fine the last time I saw her, when she tried to put five bullets in me like she did Regan.”
“I did what you said, you know that. I took her away. We went to Switzerland, she took some treatments.”
“And now you’re back,” I said. “And where’s Carmen?”
“In a sanitarium,” Vivian said.
“Resthaven?”
Vivian gave me a sharp look. The skin seemed to be stretched too tight over her cheekbones.
“What has Norris told you?” she said.
“Privileged communication,” I said. “What are you doing to find her?”
“That bastard,” Vivian said. “He told you, didn’t he?”
“She shouldn’t be running around loose,” I said.
“She’s all right. I’ve got people looking for her.”
“Mars?” I said.
“Eddie has promised to find her. She’s probably just run off with some man. You know how Carmen is.”
Vivian was as casually unconcerned as a butterfly on a tulip.
“She met this guy she must have run off with at a party at the sanitarium?”