The lawn had gone to hell in front of the place. The grass was so high it had gone to seed. The house needed paint and the screen had pulled loose in the front screen door in several places and the screening had curled up like the collar points on an old shirt. The front door was locked, but the frame had shrunk up so that it didn't take much to get in. I put my shoulder against the frame and the flat of my hand against the door and pushed in both directions at once and I was in.
The place smelled like places do that have been closed up empty for a while. To the right through an archway was the sitting room. There was a couch there, half sprung, with a crocheted throw on it, turned back as if someone had been under it and just gotten up. Opposite was a big old television set on legs. On top was a square apothecary jar full of small colorful hard candies, individually wrapped in cellophane. The thin blue Navaho rug on the floor was worn threadbare, and a coffee table made of bent bamboo was shoved over near the head of the couch. There were some movie magazines and a true romance magazine and an ashtray full of filter-tipped cigarette butts. The late afternoon light as it sifted through the dusty muslin curtains picked up dust motes in the air.
The cops would have seen all this. They'd have looked at everything like they do, and anything that mattered would be down in a box in property storage with a case tag on it. Still, they didn't know all the things I knew, and I was hoping I might see something that wouldn't have meant anything to them. It wasn't in the sitting room. I moved to the kitchen. It had gotten dark. I snapped on a light. If the cops had a watch on the place they'd have seen me come in and would be here by now. The neighbors would just think I was another cop.
There was a half loaf of bread and an unwrapped stick of butter sitting on a saucer, in the refrigerator. In the freezer was a bottle of vodka. There were three or four limes turning yellow in a Pyrex dish on the kitchen counter, and some instant coffee in a jar in the cupboard. There was a shrunken bar of hand soap on the rim of the sink. That was it. No flour, no salt, no meat, no potatoes. Just bread and butter and vodka and instant coffee. The limes were probably for scurvy. I looked behind the refrigerator and under the sink and inside the empty cabinets. I took the strainer out of the sink and looked down into the drain as best I could. I checked the oven, examined the linoleum around the edges to see if anything had been slipped down underneath. I unrolled the window shades and pulled over a chair and climbed up and looked inside the glass globe on the kitchen light.
While I was doing that a voice behind me said, "Hold that pose, Sailor."
I had a gun in a shoulder rig but it might as well have been in the trunk of my car for all the good it did me standing on a chair with my hands over my head. I stood still.
"Now put your hands on top of your head and step down off of there," the voice said. It was a soft voice with no accent but a faint foreign lilt in it.
I managed to keep my hands on my head and get off the chair without dislocating a kneecap.
"Turn around," the voice said. There was nothing gentle in the softness; it was the softness of a snake's hiss. I turned around.
There were two of them. One was a California Beach Boy, lots of tan, lots of muscle, just enough brains to know the handle end of a blackjack. He had on white pants and a flowered shirt and he was holding a Colt .45 automatic like the army used to issue. He held it Southern California casual, half turned over on his palm, not aimed at anything special, but generally toward me. The other guy was shorter and slimmer. He wore a black suit, black shirt and narrow black tie and his movements were very graceful. Merely standing still he looked like a dancer. He had a thick black moustache and longish black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes had no feeling in them at all. The voice belonged to him.
"So, Sailor, why don't you sort of tell me about who you are and how come you're standing on a chair in the kitchen here. Stuff like that."
"Who's asking?" I said.
He smiled without any feeling at all and pointed at the beach boy's automatic.
"Oh," I said, "him. I've met him before. He doesn't impress me."
"Tough," he said. He looked at the beach boy. "Everybody's tough," he said. He'd have been more impressed if I wiggled my ears.
"You want me to shoot some corner of him, Eddie? So he'll know we mean it?"
Eddie shook his head.
"My name's Garcia," he said, "Eddie Garcia." He nodded at the beach boy. "This is J.D. Pretty, isn't he?"
"Beautiful," I said. "If he pulls the trigger on that thing can he hit what it's pointed at?"
"From this close?" Eddie smiled. The effect was of light passing over a flat stone surface for a moment. The surface never changed.
"We represent a very important person who has an interest in this house and its occupant and we wish to report to him what you were doing in here, and why. We would rather do that than deliver your body to him in the trunk of our car."
I nodded. "Who's your man?" I said.
Garcia shook his head. J.D. thumbed the hammer back on the Colt. I looked at Garcia. J.D. didn't matter. Garcia's empty obsidian eyes gazed blankly back at me. I knew he'd do it.
"My name's Marlowe," I said. "I'm a private eye working on a case. How about you take me to your VIP and I tell him the rest. Maybe our interests would mesh."
"You know who owns this house?" Garcia said.
"Woman named Lola," I said. "She's dead."
Garcia nodded. He looked at me. There was no expression. I assumed he was thinking.
"Okay," he said. "You got a piece under your left arm. I'll have to take it. And I want to see some ID."
"Wallet's in my left hip pocket," I said.
Garcia drifted in, took the gun out of my shoulder holster, lifted the wallet off the hip and drifted out, all it seemed in one seamless motion. He dropped the gun in his side pocket and flipped open my wallet. He looked at the photostat of my license for a moment and then shut my wallet and handed it back to me. I took my hands off my head and took the wallet and slipped it in my hip pocket.
"Okay, Sailor," he said. "You ride with us."
We went out in single file: Garcia, me, and J.D. Garcia got in behind the wheel of a Lincoln. J.D. and I got in the back. We rolled west on Franklin with the windows up and the air conditioning on. No one spoke. At Laurel Canyon we went down to Sunset and continued on Sunset as the houses got bigger and the lawns more empty through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills to Bel Air. We went in past the Bel Air gate and the private police booth and wound along into Bel Air until Garcia stopped the Lincoln in front of a pair of ten-foot spiked iron gates with gilded points. He rolled down the window as a guy in a blue blazer and grey slacks stepped out of the sentry box next to the gate. The guy looked in, saw Garcia and went back in the sentry box. I could see him pick up a phone, and in a moment the gates opened slowly and Garcia drove us through. There was no house in sight yet. Just a winding driveway paved in some sort of white material that might have been crushed oyster shells. The headlights played over a forest of flowering shrubs and short trees that I couldn't identify in the dark. We went down a small hill, wound up a somewhat higher one and turned a corner. The house that rose up in front of us wasn't anywhere near big enough to hold all of California. Probably not more than the entire population of Los Angeles comfortably. It was lit from the outside with spotlights: white masonry with gables and towers and narrow Tudor windows with diamond panes. There was a vast porte-cochere in front, and when we pulled in under it and stopped, two more guys in blazers appeared to open the doors.