I stopped in front of the fat woman's desk. She wiped her face with a lace-embroidered handkerchief and looked up at me from the ledger that was open on her desk.
"Help you?" she said in a voice that didn't mean it.
"Like to buy some land," I said.
She shook her head, heavily, and wiped her face again. The handkerchief looked wetter than her blouse.
"Got none for sale right now," she said. "Sorry."
"How about some water rights?" I wasn't exactly sure what a water right was, but it seemed like the thing to ask.
"We got no water rights," she said. The sharpster at the other desk was concentrating on something that looked like a plot plan on his desk. He was concentrating all right, except his ears were out maybe a foot toward our conversation.
I looked surprised. "Really?" I said. "I heard you had been acquiring water rights all over the valley."
"We got none for sale," she said. The effort of talking to me seemed to be making her hotter.
"I see," I said. "Well is the, ah, owner of the firm available?"
The sharpster at the other desk leaned back in his chair and swiveled halfway around to look at me.
"We got nothing to sell, bub. Maybe you didn't quite get that."
"How surprising," I said. I was trying to sound like the kind of tycoon who would sweep in and buy up thirty trillion dollars' worth of almost anything.
"Yeah," the sharpster said, "ain't it? Now, why don't you kinda drift."
I looked puzzled. "Drift?"
"Yeah. You know-take a hike, breeze, it's a hot day and we got things to do."
"Well," I said. "I must say, I wonder how you stay in business."
I turned on my heel and stomped out. Across the street was a barbershop and next to it a drugstore. Through the front window of the drugstore I could see the corner of a soda fountain. I went across and into the drugstore. It had a marble counter and a big fountain with spigots, and spouts for syrup, in a glistening row behind it. A ceiling fan moved slowly and with little effect above me. The pharmacist was behind the fountain with his arms folded, gazing silently out at the street. He was short and slight with a bald head across which he'd plastered two or three wisps of hair. I ordered a lime rickey. He made it in a tall fluted glass and put it in front of me on top of a little paper doily. He shoved a round container of straws toward me and went back to leaning against the back counter and staring out the window. From where I sat I could look straight out at the Neville Realty Trust.
I nodded at the office across the street. "New business in town?"
The pharmacist nodded.
"Successful?" I said.
The pharmacist nodded again.
"I understand they're buying water rights up around here."
The pharmacist became talkative. "Yep," he said.
"You done any business with them?"
"Nope." "Know who owns the company?"
"Nope."
"Don't talk much, do you?" I said.
"Nope. Don't need to. City fella like you comes in, does all the talking anyway."
"See a lot of city people up here, do you?" I said.
"Since the government project."
"From Los Angeles?"
"Guess so."
Across the street a black Buick sedan swung into the parking lot of the Neville Realty Trust. It had the right license tags. Two men got out of the front, and the one on the passenger's side held open the rear door for a third man. All I could see of him was that he wore a seersucker suit and would be a perfect mate for the fat woman in the office. He had trouble getting out of the car, and when he did finally manage it, he paused to wipe his face with a big white handkerchief before he waddled into the office.
"Who's the fat guy?" I said.
"Don't know," the pharmacist said. "You want some more lime rickey?"
I said no, and he swooped the glass away and washed it in the little sink back there, and put it upside down on the shelf behind him. He and I sat in silence for a while.
Nothing moved across the street. Finally I got up and paid for my lime rickey.
"I'm going where I can get a little peace and quiet," I said. And went out and walked back to the River Run Inn.
CHAPTER 20
It cooled off after midnight and I got to sleep. Showered, shaved and breakfasted, I was in my car heading back to L. A. by nine A. M. Except for the green strip along the Neville River, the land was brown and still under heat that made the landscape shimmer.
***
Back in my office I called Ohls and gave him the license numbers for the pickup, and the gray Mercury I had seen parked in the Neville Valley Realty Trust parking lot. Then I went downstairs to the coffee shop and had a ham sandwich and some coffee and came back upstairs and sat and dangled my feet until Ohls called back. The truck was registered to Neville Valley Realty Trust. The gray Mercury belonged to the Rancho Springs Development Corporation in Rancho Springs, California.
"You need anything else, Hawkshaw?" Ohls said.
"You show me how this all ties into Carmen Sternwood," I said.
"Be good for you," Ohls said, "to work it out yourself."
I went straight downtown to the hall of records and spent maybe an hour and a half looking up the incorporation papers that the California secretary of state's office requires of all new companies. Neville Valley Trust was in there, and the Rancho Springs Development Corp. Everything was written in the conventional language of lawyers, which is why it took me an hour and a half. But when I was through I knew that the Neville Valley Realty Trust and Rancho Springs Development Corporation were legal corporations in the State of California. And I knew that a member of the incorporating board of Rancho Springs was Claude Bonsentir.
Then I went to the library and spent another couple of hours in the periodical room reading up on the Neville Valley Land Reclamation Project. It was almost as boring as the documents of incorporation, but basically I learned that it was a part of a federal effort to reclaim barren land in the West and Southwest. The plan in Neville Valley was to use the spill from the Neville River to irrigate land all over the valley and turn it into rich farming country. There was no mention of the Neville Valley Trust in anything I read.
Driving back to Hollywood, I thought about all of this. Was Neville Valley Realty buying up water rights as representatives of the government? Were they buying the rights so they could resell them to the government at extortion-level prices? What was kindly old doctor Heal-all doing on the board of the Rancho Springs Development Corp.? And why did some employees of the Neville Valley Realty Trust come to Hollywood and pour it on me?
***
Back in my office I put in a call to the Bureau of Land Management's Los Angeles office. It took about a half an hour, and most of that on hold, to get anyone who even knew about the Neville Valley project, and he didn't know anything about the Neville Realty Trust. Which didn't prove that they weren't working for the government. It only proved what I already knew about the government.
I sat at my desk with the window open, smelling the fumes from the coffee shop downstairs and pushing the things I knew around in my head, hoping they'd form a pattern I could recognize. It was late afternoon. I looked out my window at the boulevard below me. Nobody was frying eggs on the sidewalk. Off on another street somewhere a police siren wailed. They'd be busy in this heat. People got a little crazy in heat like this. Husbands began to ball their fists and frown at their wives. Meek, mousy-haired wives began to look at the breadknife and eye their husbands taking a nap in their undershirts and snoring, their throats exposed. In the barrio the prowl car boys would keep their hands a little closer to their guns. And in the hills where the stars lived, people would sit on patios looking at the lights twinkle in the steamy evening below them in the basin, and the sweat that beaded on the sides of cocktail shakers would trickle off and make a wet spot in their linen slacks. The heat played no favorites.
It got slowly dark while I sat there looking out at the baking city and thinking and not getting anywhere. The end of another perfect day. Nobody called. Nobody came in. Nobody cared if I died or bought a house in Encino.
CHAPTER 21
The Rancho Springs Development Corp. was on the second floor over a gas station in a pale beige stucco building with the rounded shape of the Spanish Southwest that everyone south of Oregon thought was authentic native Californian. The building was on the main street in Rancho Springs next to a place that sold tacos and across the street from a general store where three desert rats in bib overalls sat out front in the thick heat and rocked and spat occasionally out onto the street. A big yellow tomcat with a torn ear sprawled on the bottom stair leading up to the Rancho Springs Development oflBce and I had to step over him when I went up.
Inside at the only desk in the place was a young woman with a bad sunburn. It was bad enough so that she moved a little stiffly as she turned toward me when I came in. The desk at which she sat and the chair on which she was sitting was all there was in the office for furniture. On the floor beside the desk was a cardboard carton and in the carton were a number of manila file folders. On the desk was a phone. That was it, there was nothing on the walls, no curtains on the windows. The room was as charming as a heap of coffee grounds.
I took off my sunglasses and smiled at the young woman. Her nose was peeling, and her pale hair was dry and bleached looking. She wore a flimsy white blouse with short sleeves and her thin arms were bright red.
"Dr. Bonsentir around?" I said.
She looked blank. She also looked pained and bored and tighter than a Methodist deacon.
"Who?"
"Dr. Claude Bonsentir," I said. "I was hoping to find him here."
"Never heard of him," she said.
She was chewing gum and her jaws moved slowly and with iron regularity on it. Occasionally she would open her mouth to stretch some of the gum into a thin grayish membrane with her tongue. Then her lips would close and the gum would disappear.
"This is Rancho Springs Development Corporation?" I said.
"Ann huh." She was busy with the gum.
"What exactly is it you develop?"
She tucked the gum away into some corner of her mouth and looked at me as if I had wriggled up from the kitchen drain.
"Listen, Jack," she said, "they hire me to sit here and answer the phone and take messages and if they want something typed I type it. You want to leave a message?"
"Who're 'they'?"
"Guys that run this place. Vinnie and Chuck."
"Vinnie and Chuck who?" I said.
She shook her head.
"You wanna leave a message?" she said.
"When you see Vinnie and Chuck," I said.
She got out a little note pad and a pencil.
"Yeah?" she said.
"Give them a big kiss for me," I said, and turned and went back out and down the stairs and over the cat and into the main street. The main street was maybe 100 yards long and didn't need to be, it only supported about six buildings. Between the buildings were vacant lots, mostly sand and a few weeds and here and there tumbleweed resting still in the windless heat.
I strolled down toward a gray, weathered clapboard building where a sign out front read rancho springs gazette and chronicle. It was a single-storied storefront with a wide front window and a screen door. Inside was a counter running across the room. Behind it was a printing press and two desks.
A big woman in a man's white shirt and gabardine slacks smiled easily at me when I came in. She wore her white hair short, and her face had the dark-tanned look of a desert person who spends a lot of time outdoors. She seemed in excellent health and fine spirits.
"Hello, stranger," she said. "Come to place an ad? Report something interesting? Either case this is the spot for it."
"Information," I said.
"Got that too," she said. "Name's Pauline Snow. Only thing in this godforsaken wasteland ain't hot is my name."
"Marlowe," I said. Guile hadn't done anything for me. I decided to try truth. "I'm a private detective from Los Angeles working on a case, and the name of the Rancho Springs Development Corporation has popped up in it."
Pauline Snow said "Humph," with a lot of feeling.
"I've been to the office and talked with the young woman who works there. I would have done better to talk with the cat, which doesn't chew gum."
"Rita," Pauline Snow said with as much feeling as she'd said humph.
"Yes," I said, "that's what I thought."
"Rancho Springs Development Corporation is a fancy name for a back-shanty operation in which two bozos come in and start buying up any land they can get," she said. "You got a cigarette?"
I got the pack out and gave it to her, she shook one loose, put it in her mouth, gave me back the pack. I held a match for her. She took a long inhale and let the smoke out in two streams through her nostrils. She looked me over.
"Private eye, is it?"
I nodded modestly.
"Well, you got the build for it, I'll give you that."
"Why are they buying up land?" I said. "Is there something about Rancho Springs Fm missing?"