Perchance to Dream

3

The first time I had met Vivian Regan I had come to see her father, who wanted me to take a blackmailer off his back. She was still married to Rusty Regan who, it was said, used to command a brigade in the Irish Republican Army. But Rusty had disappeared, and the General missed him. I thought at the time, and still think, that the General hired me to make sure the blackmailer wasn’t Rusty Regan. If it had been, which it wasn’t, it would have broken his heart. When I left the General that day with my shirt sticking to my back and the sweat soaking my collar, Norris told me that Mrs. Regan wanted to see me.

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full...

She had wanted to know if her father had hired me to find Rusty Regan. Since she hadn’t hired me it was none of her business. I wouldn’t tell her. She didn’t like that.

She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. “I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,” she snapped. “And I don’t like your manners.”

“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind you ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a scotch bottle. I don’t mind you showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don Y mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

She slammed her glass down so hard it slopped over on an ivory cushion. She swung her legs to the floor and stood up with her eyes sparking fire and her nostrils wide. Her mouth was open and her bright teeth glared at me. Her knuckles were white. “People don’t talk like that to me,” she said thickly.

I sat and grinned at her. Very slowly she closed her mouth and looked down at the spilled liquor. She sat down on the edge of the chaise longue and cupped her chin in one hand.

“My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you...”

The rain had come hard that day, and it would come again another day. But today, thinking about Vivian, I drove in hot sunlight back toward Hollywood.

There had always been that between us, the harsh edge of wilfulness, grating against the insistent push of desire. It had obsessed us then, and I could feel it now, the push and pull of it between us.

The blackmailing wasn’t much, some uncollectable IOUs to a man named Geiger. I could have cleaned that up in an afternoon if I could have gotten to Geiger. But I couldn’t until it was too late, and then it was really too late.

On a sort of low dais at one end of the room was a high-backed teakwood chair in which Miss Carmen Sternwood was sitting on a fringed orange shawl She was sitting very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, her chin level, her small white teeth shining between her parted lips. Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious. She looked as if in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn’t fit her expression or even move her lips.

She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else...

I stopped looking at her and looked at Geiger. He was on his back on the floor, beyond the fringe of the Chinese rug, in front of a thing that looked like a totem pole. It had a profile like an eagle and in its wide round eye was a camera lens. The lens was aimed at the naked girl in the chair. There was a blackened flash bulb clipped to the side of the totem pole. Geiger was wearing Chinese slippers with thick felt soles, and his legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him wore a Chinese embroidered coat, the front of which was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots I heard had missed. He was very dead...

A lot of people had died since then. And here we were, the survivors, circling still in some sort of aimless ritual around little Carmen. The thought made me need a drink and when I got to my office I sat alone at my desk and had one. It didn’t do any good. On the other hand it did no great harm either.