Perchance to Dream

    

    

    The gentle-eyed, horsefaced maid let me into the long gray and white upstairs sitting room with the ivory drapes tumbled extravagantly on the floor and the white carpet from wall to wall. A screen star's boudoir, a place of charm and seduction, artificial as a wooden leg. It was empty at the moment. The door closed behind me with the unnatural softness of a hospital door. A breakfast table on wheels stood by the chaise lounge. Its silver glittered. There were cigarette ashes in the coffee cup. I sat down and waited. It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

    She went past me in long smooth strides and sat down on the edge of the chaise longue. There was a cigarette in her lips at the corner of her mouth. Her nails were copper red from quick to tip, without half-moons.

    "So you're just a brute after all," she said quietly, staring at me. "An utter callous brute. You killed a man last night. Never mind how I heard it. I heard it. And now you have to come out here and frighten my kid sister into a fit."

    I didn't say a word. She began to fidget. She moved over to a slipper chair, put her head back against a white cushion that lay along the back of the chair against the wall. She blew pale gray smoke upward and watched it float toward the ceiling and come apart in wisps that were for a little while distinguishable from the air and then melted and were nothing. Then very slowly she lowered her eyes and gave me a cool hard glance.

    "I don 't understand you," she said. "I'm thankful as hell one of us kept his head the night before last It's bad enough to have a bootlegger in my past Why don't you for Christ's sake say something?"

    "How is she?"

    "Oh, she's all right, I suppose. Fast asleep. She always goes to sleep. What did you do to her?"

    "Not a thing. I came out of the house after seeing your father and she was out in front. She had been throwing darts at a target on a tree. I went down to speak to her because I had something that belonged to her. A little revolver Owen Taylor gave her once. She took it over to Brody's place the other evening, the evening he was killed. I had to take it away from her there. I didn't mention it, so perhaps you didn't know it."

    The black Sternwood eyes got large and empty. It was her turn not to say anything.

    "She was pleased to get her little gun back and she wanted me to teach her how to shoot and she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money. So we went down there and the place was pretty creepy, all rusted metal and old wood and silent wells and greasy scummy sumps. Maybe that upset her. I guess you've been there yourself. It was kind of eerie."

    "Yes-it is." It was a small breathless voice now.

    "So we went in there and I stuck a can up in a bull wheel for her to pop at. She threw a wingding. Looked like a mild epileptic fit to me. "

    "Yes." The same minute voice. "She has them once in a while. Is that all you wanted to see me about?"

    "I guess you still wouldn't tell me what Eddie Mars has on you."

    "Nothing at all. And I'm getting a little tired of that question," she said coldly.

    "Do you know a man named Canino?"

    She drew her fine black brows together in thought. "Vaguely. I seem to remember the name."

    "Eddie Mars' triggerman. A tough hombre, they said. I guess he was. Without a little help from a lady I'd be where he is-in the morgue. "

    "The ladies seem to-" She stopped dead and whitened. "I can't joke about it," she said simply.

    "I'm not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it just seems that way. It all ties together-everything. Geiger and his cute little blackmail tricks, Brody and his pictures, Eddie Mars and his roulette tables, Canino and the girl Rusty Regan didn't run away with. It all ties together…"

    "You tire me," she said in a dead exhausted voice. "God, how you tire me."

    "I'm sorry. I'm not just fooling around trying to be clever. Your father offered me a thousand dollars this morning to find Regan. That's a lot of money to me, but I can't do it."

    Her mouth jumped open. Her breath was suddenly strained and harsh.

    "Give me a cigarette," she said thickly. "Why?" The pulse in her throat had begun to throb…

    I stood up and took the smoking cigarette from between her fingers and killed it in an ashtray. Then I took Carmen's little gun out of my pocket and laid it carefully, with exaggerated care, on her white satin knee. I balanced it there, and stepped back with my head on one side like a window-dresser getting the effect of a new twist of a scarf around a dummy's neck.

    I sat down again. She didn't move. Her eyes came down millimeter by millimeter and looked at the gun.

    "It's harmless," I said. "All five chambers empty. She fired them all She fired them all at me."

    The pulse jumped wildly in her throat Her voice tried to say something and couldn't. She swallowed.

    "From a distance of five or six feet," I said. "Cute little thing isn't she? Too bad I had loaded the gun with blanks." I grinned nastily. "I had a hunch about what she would do-if she got the chance. "

    She brought her voice back from a long way off. "You're a horrible man," she said. "Horrible."

    "Yeah. You're her big sister. What are you going to do about it?"

    "You can't prove a word of it."

    "Can't prove what?"

    "That she fired at you. You said you were down there around the wells with her alone. You can't prove a word of what you say. "

    "Oh that," I said. "I wasn't thinking of trying. I was thinking of another time-when the shells in the little gun had bullets in them."

    Her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness.

    "I was thinking of the day Regan disappeared," I said. "Late in the afternoon. When he took her down to those old wells to teach her to shoot and put up a can somewhere and told her to pop at it and stood near her while she shot. And she didn't shoot at the can. She turned the gun and shot him, just the way she tried to shoot me today, and for the same reason. "

    She moved a little and the gun slid off her knee and fell to the floor. It was one of the loudest sounds I have ever heard. Her eyes were riveted on my face. Her voice was a stretched whisper of agony. "Carmen!-
Merciful God, Carmen!
-Why?"

    "Do I really have to tell you why she shot at me?"

    "Yes." Her eyes were still terrible. "I'm-I'm afraid you do."

    "Night before last when I got home she was in my apartment. She'd kidded the manager into letting her in to wait for me. She was in my bed-naked. I threw her out on her ear. I guess maybe Regan did the same thing to her sometime. But you can't do that to Carmen. "

    She drew her lips back and made a halfhearted attempt to lick them.

    It made her, for a brief instant, look like a frightened child. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up slowly like an artificial hand worked by wires and its fingers closed slowly and stiffly around the white fur at her collar. They drew the fur tight against her throat. After that she just sat staring.

    "Money, "she croaked. "I suppose you want money. "

    "How much money?" I tried not to sneer.

    "Fifteen thousand dollars."

    I nodded. "That would be about right. That would be the established fee. That was what he had in his pockets when she shot him. That would be what Mr. Canino got for disposing of the body when you went to Eddie Mars for help. But that would be small change to what Eddie expects to collect one of these days, wouldn't it?"

    She was as silent as a stone woman.

    "All right," I went on heavily. "Will you take her away? Somewhere far off from here where they can handle her type, where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her? Hell, she might even get herself cured, you know. It's been done."

    She got up slowly and walked to the windows. The drapes lay in heavy ivory folds beside her feet. She stood among the folds and looked out toward the quiet darkish foothills. She stood motionless, almost blending into the drapes. Her hands hung loose at her sides. Utterly motionless hands. She turned and came back along the room and walked past me blindly. She was behind me when she caught her breath sharply and spoke.

    "He's in the sump," she said. "A horrible decayed thing. I did it. I did just what you said. I went to Eddie Mars. She came home and told me about it, just like a child. She's not normal. I knew the police would get it all out of her. In a little while she would even brag about it. And if Dad knew, he would call them instantly and tell them the whole story. And sometime in that night he would die. It's not his dying-it's what he would be thinking just before he died. Rusty wasn't a bad fellow. I didn't love him. He was all right, I guess. He just didn't mean anything to me, one way or another, alive or dead, compared with keeping it from Dad."

    "So you let her run around loose," I said, "getting into other jams."

    "I was playing for time. Just for time. I played the wrong way, of course. I thought she might even forget it herself. I've heard they do forget what happens in those fits. Maybe she has forgotten it. I knew Eddie Mars would bleed me white, but I didn't care. I had to have help and I could only get it from somebody like him.-There have been times when I hardly believed it all myself. And other times when I had to get drunk quickly-whatever time of day it was. Awfully damned quickly."

    "You'll take her away/' I said. "And do that awfully damned quickly."

    She still had her back to me. She said softly now, "What about you?"

    "Nothing about me. I'm leaving. I'll give you three days. If you're gone by then-okay. If you're not, out it comes. And don't think I don't mean that. "

    She turned suddenly. "I don't know what to say to you. I don't know how to begin…"

    "Yeah. Get her out of here and see that she's watched every minute. Promise?"

    "I promise…"

    "Does Norris know?"

    "He'll never tell."

    "I thought he knew. "

    I went quickly away from her down the room and out and down the tiled staircase to the front hall I didn't see anybody when I left I found my hat alone this time. Outside, the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had something mysterious in its light. I got in my car and drove off down the hill What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep…

    

    

    The water looped out of the hose in a long lazy silver sluice as the Japanese gardener played it over the emerald lawn. The Sternwood house looked the same.

    The general had died. Which was too bad. And Eddie Mars hadn't died, which was also too bad. And Carmen had been put away. But Vivian was still there. And Norris the butler was still there. He had called me and asked me to come out.

    The place was full of remembrance. The same low solid foothills rose behind the house. The same terraced lawn dropped the long easy drop down to the barely visible oil derricks where a few barrels a day still creaked out of the ground. The sun shone on the olive trees and vivified the birds that fluttered among the leaves. The birds sang as if the world were still young.

    Which it wasn't.

    Norris answered my ring. He was tall and silver-haired, a vigorous sixty with the pink skin of a man whose circulation was good.

    "Mr. Marlowe," he said. "Good of you to come."

    The hallway was the same as it had been the first time I saw it. The portrait of the hot-eyed ancestor over the mantel. The knight and the lady forever still in the stained-glass window. The knight always trying to untie her. The lady always captive. The lady was still naked. The hair still conveniently long. It had been a while since I had first stood here and Carmen Sternwood had told me I was tall and pitched into my arms. Only yesterday.