I got up quickly and walked across the wide floor and out. He had his eyes shut again before I opened the door. His hands lay limp on the sheet. He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. I shut the door quietly and went back along the upper hall and down the stairs.
31
The butler appeared with my hat. I put it on and said: “What do you think of him?”
“He’s not as weak as he looks, sir.”
“If he was, he’d be ready for burial. What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”
The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”
“Like yours,” I said.
“If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”
“Thanks. How are the ladies this morning?”
He shrugged politely.
“Just what I thought,” I said, and he opened the door for me.
I stood outside on the step and looked down the vistas of grassed terraces and trimmed trees and flowerbeds to the tall metal railing at the bottom of the gardens. I saw Carmen about halfway down, sitting on a stone bench, with her head between her hands, looking forlorn and alone.
I went down the red brick steps that led from terrace to terrace. I was quite close before she heard me. She jumped up and whirled like a cat. She wore the light blue slacks she had worn the first time I saw her. Her blond hair was the same loose tawny wave. Her face was white. Red spots flared in her cheeks as she looked at me. Her eyes were slaty.
“Bored?” I said.
She smiled slowly, rather shyly, then nodded quickly. Then she whispered: “You’re not mad at me?”
“I thought you were mad at me.”
She put her thumb up and giggled. “I’m not.” When she giggled I didn’t like her any more. I looked around. A target hung on a tree about thirty feet away, with some darts sticking to it. There were three or four more on the stone bench where she had been sitting.
“For people with money you and your sister don’t seem to have much fun,” I said.
She looked at me under her long lashes. This was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back. I said: “You like throwing those darts?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That reminds me of something.” I looked back towards the house. By moving about three feet I made a tree hide me from it. I took her little pearl-handled gun out of my pocket. “I brought you back your artillery. I cleaned it and loaded it up. Take my tip—don’t shoot it at people, unless you get to be a better shot. Remember?”
Her face went paler and her thin thumb dropped. She looked at me, then at the gun I was holding. There was a fascination in her eyes. “Yes,” she said, and nodded. Then suddenly: “Teach me to shoot.”
“Huh?”
“Teach me how to shoot. I’d like that.”
“Here? It’s against the law.”
She came close to me and took the gun out of my hand, cuddled her hand around the butt. Then she tucked it quickly inside her slacks, almost with a furtive movement, and looked around.
“I know where,” she said in a secret voice. “Down by some of the old wells.” She pointed off down the hill. “Teach me?”
I looked into her slaty blue eyes. I might as well have looked at a couple of bottle-tops. “All right. Give me back the gun until I see if the place looks all right.”
She smiled and made a mouth, then handed it back with a secret naughty air, as if she was giving me a key to her room. We walked up the steps and around to my car. The gardens seemed deserted. The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile. We got into the car and I drove down the sunken driveway and out through the gates.
“Where’s Vivian?” I asked.
“Not up yet.” She giggled.
I drove on down the hill through the quiet opulent streets with their faces washed by the rain, bore east to La Brea, then south. We reached the place she meant in about ten minutes.
“In there.” She leaned out of the window and pointed.
It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. A wide five-barred gate was folded back against a stump and looked as if it hadn’t been shut in years. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. It was empty and sunny now, but not yet dusty. The rain had been too hard and too recent. I followed the ruts along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained, motionless walkingbeam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over a branch. I could see the rusty old steel cable that connected this walking-beam with a half a dozen others. The beams didn’t move, probably hadn’t moved for a year. The wells were no longer pumping. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight.
“Are they going to make a park of all this?” I asked.
She dipped her chin down and gleamed at me.
“It’s about time. The smell of that sump would poison a herd of goats. This the place you had in mind?”
“Uh-huh. Like it?”
“It’s beautiful.” I pulled up beside the loading platform. We got out. I listened. The hum of the traffic was a distant web of sound, like the buzzing of bees. The place was as lonely as a churchyard. Even after the rain the tall eucalyptus trees still looked dusty. They always look dusty. A branch broken off by the wind had fallen over the edge of the sump and the flat leathery leaves dangled in the water.
I walked around the sump and looked into the pumphouse. There was some junk in it, nothing that looked like recent activity. Outside a big wooden bull wheel was tilted against the wall. It looked like a good place all right.
I went back to the car. The girl stood beside it preening her hair and holding it out in the sun. “Gimme,” she said, and held her hand out.
I took the gun out and put it in her palm. I bent down and picked up a rusty can.
“Take it easy now,” I said. “It’s loaded in all five. I’ll go over and set this can in that square opening in the middle of that big wooden wheel. See?” I pointed. She ducked her head, delighted. “That’s about thirty feet. Don’t start shooting until I get back beside you. Okey?”
“Okey,” she giggled.
I went back around the sump and set the can up in the middle of the bull wheel. It made a swell target. If she missed the can, which she was certain to do, she would probably hit the wheel. That would stop a small slug completely. However, she wasn’t going to hit even that.
I went back towards her around the sump. When I was about ten feet from her, at the edge of the sump, she showed me all her sharp little teeth and brought the gun up and started to hiss.
I stopped dead, the sump water stagnant and stinking at my back.
“Stand there, you son of a bitch,” she said.
The gun pointed at my chest. Her hand seemed to be quite steady. The hissing sound grew louder and her face had the scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.
I laughed at her. I started to walk towards her. I saw her small finger tighten on the trigger and grow white at the tip. I was about six feet away from her when she started to shoot.
The sound of the gun made a sharp slap, without body, a brittle crack in the sunlight. I didn’t see any smoke. I stopped again and grinned at her.
She fired twice more, very quickly. I don’t think any of the shots would have missed. 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. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up towards 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 up and got her into the car, then went back for the gun and dropped it into 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.
She looked at me with a sudden sick speculation and began to moan.