“No. You have to protect your father and your sister. You don’t know what the police might turn up. It might be something they couldn’t sit on. Though they usually try in blackmail cases.”
“Can you do anything?”
“I think I can. But I can’t tell you why or how.”
“I like you,” she said suddenly. “You believe in miracles. Would you have a drink in the office?”
I unlocked my deep drawer and got out my office bottle and two pony glasses. I filled them and we drank. She snapped her bag shut and pushed the chair back.
“I’ll get the five grand,” she said. “I’ve been a good customer of Eddie Mars. There’s another reason why he should be nice to me, which you may not know.” She gave me one of those smiles the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes. “Eddie’s blonde wife is the lady Rusty ran away with.”
I didn’t say anything. She stared tightly at me and added: “That doesn’t interest you?”
“It ought to make it easier to find him—if I was looking for him. You don’t think he’s in this mess, do you?”
She pushed her empty glass at me. “Give me another drink. You’re the hardest guy to get anything out of. You don’t even move your ears.”
I filled the little glass. “You’ve got all you wanted out of me—a pretty good idea I’m not looking for your husband.”
She put the drink down very quickly. It made her gasp—or gave her an opportunity to gasp. She let a breath out slowly.
“Rusty was no crook. If he had been, it wouldn’t have been for nickles. He carried fifteen thousand dollars, in bills. He called it his mad money. He had it when I married him and he had it when he left me. No—Rusty’s not in on any cheap blackmail racket.”
She reached for the envelope and stood up. “I’ll keep in touch with you,” I said. “If you want to leave me a message, the phone girl at my apartment house will take care of it.”
We walked over to the door. Tapping the white envelope against her knuckles, she said: “You still feel you can’t tell me what Dad—”
“I’d have to see him first.”
She took the photo out and stood looking at it, just inside the door. “She has a beautiful little body, hasn’t she?”
“Uh-huh.”
She leaned a little towards me. “You ought to see mine,” she said gravely.
“Can it be arranged?”
She laughed suddenly and sharply and went halfway through the door, then turned her head to say coolly: “You’re as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?”
“Sure.”
“You can can me Vivian.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Regan.”
“Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.” She went on out and didn’t look back.
I let the door shut and stood with my hand on it, staring at the hand. My face felt a little hot. I went back to the desk and put the whiskey away and rinsed out the two pony glasses and put them away.
I took my hat off the phone and called the D.A.’s office and asked for Bernie Ohls.
He was back in his cubbyhole. “Well, I let the old man alone,” he said. “The butler said he or one of the girls would tell him. This Owen Taylor lived over the garage and I went through his stuff. Parents at Dubuque, Iowa. I wired the Chief of Police there to find out what they want done. The Sternwood family will pay for it.”
“Suicide?” I asked.
“No can tell. He didn’t leave any notes. He had no leave to take the car. Everybody was home last night but Mrs. Regan. She was down at Las Olindas with a playboy named Larry Cobb. I checked on that. I know a lad on one of the tables.”
“You ought to stop some of that flash gambling,” I said.
“With the syndicate we got in this county? Be your age, Marlow. That sap mark on the boy’s head bothers me. Sure you can’t help me on this?”
I liked his putting it that way. It let me say no without actually lying. We said good-by and I left the office, bought all three afternoon papers and rode a taxi down to the Hall of Justice to get my car out of the lot. There was nothing in any of the papers about Geiger. I took another look at his blue notebook, but the code was just as stubborn as it had been the night before.
12
The trees on the upper side of Laverne Terrace had fresh green leaves after the rain. In the cool afternoon sunlight I could see the steep drop of the hill and the flight of steps down which the killer had run after his three shots in the darkness. Two small houses fronted on the street below. They might or might not have heard the shots.
There was no activity in front of Geiger’s house or anywhere along the block. The box hedge looked green and peaceful and the shingles on the roof were still damp. I drove past slowly, gnawing at an idea. I hadn’t looked in the garage the night before. Once Geiger’s body slipped away I hadn’t really wanted to find it. It would force my hand. But dragging him to the garage, to his own car and driving that off into one of the hundred odd lonely canyons around Los Angeles would be a good way to dispose of him for days or even for weeks. That supposed two things: a key to his car and two in the party. It would narrow the sector of search quite a lot, especially as I had had his personal keys in my pocket when it happened.
I didn’t get a chance to look at the garage. The doors were shut and padlocked and something moved behind the hedge as I drew level. A woman in a green and white check coat and a small button of a hat on soft blond hair stepped out of the maze and stood looking wild-eyed at my car, as if she hadn’t heard it come up the hill. Then she turned swiftly and dodged back out of sight. It was Carmen Sternwood, of course.
I went on up the street and parked and walked back. In the daylight it seemed an exposed and dangerous thing to do. I went in through the hedge. She stood there straight and silent against the locked front door. One hand went slowly up to her teeth and her teeth bit at her funny thumb. There were purple smears under her eyes and her face was gnawed white by nerves.
She half smiled at me. She said: “Hello,” in a thin, brittle voice. “Wha—what–?” That tailed off and she went back to the thumb.
“Remember me?” I said. “Doghouse Reilly, the man that grew too tall. Remember?”
She nodded and a quick jerky smile played across her face.
“Let’s go in,” I said. “I’ve got a key. Swell, huh?”
“Wha—wha–?”
I pushed her to one side and put the key in the door and opened it and pushed her in through it. I shut the door again and stood there sniffing. The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamps, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum—all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.
The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick. I rolled a cigarette in my fingers and pushed some books out of the way and sat on the end of the black desk. I lit my cigarette, puffed a plume of smoke and watched the thumb and tooth act for a while in silence. Carmen stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the principal’s office.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her finally.
She picked at the cloth of her coat and didn’t answer.
“How much do you remember of last night?”
She answered that—with a foxy glitter rising at the back of her eyes. “Remember what? I was sick last night. I was home.” Her voice was a cautious throaty sound that just reached my ears.
“Like hell you were.”
Her eyes flicked up and down very swiftly.
“Before you went home,” I said. “Before I took you home. Here. In that chair—” I pointed to it—”on that orange shawl. You remember all right.”
A slow flush crept up her throat. That was something. She could blush. A glint of white showed under the clogged gray irises. She chewed hard on her thumb.
“You—were the one?” she breathed.
“Me. How much of it stays with you?”
She said vaguely: “Are you the police?”
“No. I’m a friend of your father’s.”
“You’re not the police?”
“No.”
She let out a thin sigh. “Wha—what do you want?”
“Who killed him?”
Her shoulders jerked, but nothing more moved in her face. “Who else—knows?”
“About Geiger? I don’t know. Not the police, or they’d be camping here. Maybe Joe Brody.”
It was a stab in the dark but it got a yelp out of her. “Joe Brody! Him!”
Then we were both silent. I dragged at my cigarette and she ate her thumb.