Perchance to Dream

10

There was no Randolph Simpson in the phone book. I went down to the library and looked in the collection of street directories. No listing. I went over to the hall of records and began digging through the real estate tax rolls, and after three very dusty hours I found him. Randolph Simpson, Sierra Verdugo Rd. I went back to my office and looked at my map. Sierra Verdugo Rd. was in the Santa Monica Mountains, west of Topanga Canyon and south of Mulholland. A guy that lived there and kept his name out of the city directory and had his phone number unlisted probably didn’t welcome a visit from a stranger.

I put on my hat and went to my car and drove right out to see him.

Sierra Verdugo Rd. cut through the parched hills that people out here called mountains between the Pacific Coast Highway and the San Fernando Valley.

They still shot Westerns out here, low-budget stuff with aging stars on tired horses, and as I wound through the narrow turns of the road I half expected to see a band of rampaging Indians round the bend. The hills were brown and barren except for the scrubby low growth of indeterminate species that clung to the otherwise eroding hillsides. Boulders the size of outhouses teetered near the rim of the highway, looking as if you could reach out as you drove by and push them over into the canyon. The road west off Topanga Canyon went slowly upward in a series of S turns until it widened into a graded turnaround in front of a large iron gate. The gate was set into a ten-foot fieldstone and mortar wall that circled slowly out of sight in both directions. The wall was topped with broken glass of many colors set sharply in the mortar. Beyond the gate was a plain of green grass highlighted with flower beds and flowering shrubs. In the middle of the sere hills it looked like a vision of Eden from the plains to the east.

I parked my car near the gate and got out and walked to it. Beyond the gate was a small guard shack that looked like a miniature castle. A man came out and walked to the gate. He looked like a tough accountant. Dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, sunglasses.

“What can I do for you?” he said. His hair was cut short and very neatly trimmed around the ears.

“Looking for Randolph Simpson,” I said.

He smiled politely and nodded encouragingly.

“I had the impression he lived here,” I said.

“Really,” he said.

“I wish to talk with him about Carmen Sternwood.”

“I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake, sir,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d drive all the way up here without knowing that Simpson lived here. In fact I just drive around L. A. in my spare time knocking on doors at random and asking for Randolph Simpson.”

The gate guard smiled as politely as a tax collector, but not as warmly.

“Mr. Simpson doesn’t accept callers,” he said.

“He might make an exception for me,” I said. “Call the house, check it out. Tell him it’s Marlowe about Carmen Sternwood.”

The guard looked silently at me for a moment. Hard to be sure. I could be important, and it could be that turning me away without checking would get him in trouble. Maybe Carmen Sternwood was important. He made up his mind.

“Wait here, please,” he said, and went back into the little guard castle.

He was gone maybe five minutes and when he came out another guard came with him. The other guard was dressed the same, including the sunglasses, but he was nearly bald and what hair he had left he’d plastered in wispy strips across the otherwise hairless skin of his head.

“Step out of the car, please,” the first guard said. “Place your hands on the roof.”

I did and the bald guard patted me down and took my gun from under my left arm.

“Calling card?” he said.

“You never know,” I said. “I’ve heard they have jack-rabbits up here as big as bears. There’s ID in my wallet.”

“I was getting to that,” the bald guard said.

He looked at the photostat of my license in the glassine window of my wallet.

“Private creeper,” he said to his partner, “outta Hollywood.”

His partner nodded, looked at the wallet and passed it back to me.

“Follow the drive,” he said. “Don’t stop the car. Don’t get out. Somebody will meet you at the front door.” He dropped my gun in the side pocket of his dark suit coat.

“We’ll hold the rod till you come down,” he said. “So you don’t hurt yourself.”

I got back in my car and cranked the starter. The big gates swung slowly back and I drove slowly through them. Inside it was greener and brighter than a movie star’s dreams. There were fountains and flowers in profusion and the grass under the steady arc of the sprinklers gleamed like the top of a pool table under the unwavering southern California sun. The drive was done in some kind of crushed shell, and curved, white and still, through the intense landscape until it reached the main building. The place looked like a Moorish fortress in a pale gray stucco with turrets on the corners and gunports every few feet across the top.

Another guy in a dark suit and hard face opened the door for me and turned me over to a Chinese houseman who led me through a series of darkly paneled rooms to a long room with a gas fire in the oversized, tile-inlaid fireplace. In a huge oak chair with elaborately carved arms a woman sat, with her hands folded in her lap. She had steel-gray hair, and eyes to match.

“I’m Jean Rudnick,” she said. “Kindly tell me the purpose of your visit.”

She was wearing a mannish gray suit with a pinstripe, and a white shirt and a little gray and white striped tie. Her nails were painted lavender, and her gold-rimmed glasses enlarged her eyes so that they dominated her face.

“My name is Philip Marlowe,” I said. “I’m a private detective and I’ve been hired to find Carmen Sternwood, who is missing from a sanitarium in Beverly Hills.”

“And why do you wish to see Mr. Simpson?” she said.

“I have information that Carmen’s here.”

“From whom?”

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said and her voice was full of the tiredness and superiority that people’s voices get full of when they have too much power and wield it much too often, “I don’t know if you know who I am, but I am Mr. Simpson’s personal assistant and if someone is making ludicrous charges involving some girl and Mr. Simpson, then I must insist on knowing who that person is.”

“How’d you know Carmen is a girl?” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said charges involving Mr. Simpson and some girl. Why do you think it’s a girl? There’s lots of men named Carmen. Carmen Lombardo, Carmen Cavallaro, Carmen...”

“Mr. Marlowe, please, I have no time for cheap parlor games.”

“Then don’t play them with me, Miss Rudnick.”

“Mrs.”

“My congratulations to Mr.,” I said.

“Mr. Rudnick is deceased,” she said. “Are you actually aware of who Mr. Simpson is?”

“Looking around,” I said, “I’d guess he was Ali Baba.”

“My God — how stupid can you be. You are entirely over your head and you haven’t any idea. You really don’t know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes I weep softly into my pillow just thinking about it. How about Simpson, do I see him?”

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Rudnick said. The thought seemed to cause her chest pains.

“Does Simpson know anyone named Sternwood?” I said.

“He certainly does not,” Mrs. Rudnick said.

Throughout our conversation she sat perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap, like a picture of Queen Victoria.

“Maybe he knows them and hasn’t told you,” I said.

That seemed to give her more chest pains.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said, “I am Mr. Simpson’s personal assistant! I have the pleasure of his full confidence. If he knew anyone named Sternwood, I too would know of it.”

“Vivian Sternwood knows him,” I said.

“Mr. Marlowe, I’m afraid this conversation is at an end.”

She picked up a small brass bell on the side table and jingled it discreetly.

The door behind me opened and two of the suits came through it.

“I want you to pay attention to me,” Mrs. Rudnick said, “and not dismiss what I tell you simply because I am a woman. If you persist in annoying Mr. Simpson on this, or any matter, you will regret it for whatever is left of your life.”

“I’m not dismissing it because you’re a woman, Mrs. Rudnick,” I said. “I’m dismissing it because it doesn’t scare me. The boys in the dark suits don’t scare me. Randolph Simpson, whoever the hell he is, doesn’t scare me. And if you think I’ve been annoying so far, wait until I shift into third.”

“You’ve been warned, Mr. Marlowe,” Jean Rudnick said coldly. Her hands were still folded in her lap and her steely eyes never blinked as she watched me leave.

The two suits walked me to rny car and stood looking at me blankly as I got in.

I started up and let out the clutch and started down the driveway. As I left, I thought, for a moment, that I saw something stir in a second-floor window, a face for only a moment, then nothing. I drove on down the curving roadway and out through the ornate iron gate that closed silently behind me.