Perchance to Dream

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?”

“Don’t be sarcastic, darling. It’s so trite. They have sheltered social activity at the sanitarium. Dr. Bonsentir is very progressive.”

“I’ll bet he is,” I said. “How did you find him?”

“He came highly recommended,” Vivian said.

“By who?” I said. “Eddie Mars?”

“Damn you, Marlowe, why are you so down on Eddie? Since Father died he has been a good friend.”

“Mars is a gambler, a thug, a murderer by proxy, a thief, probably a pimp. If he’s a good friend to anyone it’s Eddie Mars, anyone else is just raw material,” I said.

Vivian dropped the cigarette I’d lit for her and ground it into the brick walk with the toe of a pink slipper. She looked up at me and her eyes had the hot look I remembered. The look was probably part of the Sternwood blood and made for heroism at its best and debauchery on a gaudy scale at its worst.

“I’m sick of you, Marlowe. I’m sick of your face. I’m sick of you in my life. I’m sick of you preaching at me, and moralizing, and acting like you were something better than I am, when all you are is a second-rate shoofly with a lousy office in a crummy section of town and two suits of clothes. I could buy fifty of you and use you around the house for bookends.”

She turned and stamped back up the brick walk, looking for a door to slam. She didn’t find one until she reached the house, and when she did she went inside and slammed it.

A hummingbird hovered in frantic suspension over a flowering azalea near the gate.

“Probably doesn’t have enough books,” I said to the hummingbird.

He paid no attention to me. I shrugged and went out and got in my car and headed back toward my lousy office, in the crummy part of town.