"Only thirty miles," she said, "east of Pasadena."
"Perfect for fans of the Rose Parade," I said. "Anything else?"
"I don't know, Marlowe. It doesn't make any sense at all. This is hardscrabble dry land. No farming, no industry, damned little of anything. A few people still prospect out here, and a few damn fools like me and my husband come out here thinking about clean air and freedom. Then the son of a bitch up and died on me and left me to run this paper myself for the last seven years."
"Thoughtless," I said. "Maybe Vinnie and Chuck know something we don't."
"Vincent Tartabull and Charles Gardenia. They belter for their sake, because right now they're holding a passel of the most worthless acreage God ever made."
"They local people?" I said.
"Hell no," Pauline Snow said. "They come in here about six months ago and rented that hole up over the gas station, which is pretty much a damn hole itself if you think about it, and hired that idiot Rita. And started buying land. Easy enough to do, nobody wants it, everybody's happy as hell to sell and get out. Most folks are here 'cause they can't sell."
"Know where they came from?" "Los Angeles," she said.
"How do you know?"
"I used to be a reporter, Mr. Marlowe, for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now Imjust a fat old babe with no husband who runs a hicktown weekly in East Overshoe. But I haven't forgotten everything I used to know."
"I get the feeling, Mrs. Snow, that you haven't forgotten anything you used to know, and that you used to know a lot."
"You know how to make a girl feel right, Marlowe. You surely do."
"Anything else you can tell me about these guys?"
She shook her head. "Been trying to figure out their angle for a while," she said, "but I can't. It just doesn't make any sense."
"Know anybody named Bonsentir, Dr. Claude Bonsentir?"
"Sure. He's one of the names on the incorporation papers in the secretary of state's office."
I grinned at her. And nodded my head in mock homage.
"Happen to know his sock size?" I said. "Any identifying marks?"
"I'm not that good, Marlowe. I looked up the incorporation papers, like you probably did. Don't know more than that. They didn't tell me anything useful."
"No. They wouldn't. But I'm going to tell you something useful," I said. "There's some sort of connection between this outfit, the Rancho Springs Development Corp., and an outfit up in Neville Valley, called the Neville Valley Realty Trust."
"Neville Valley," she said. "Is that up north a ways, in the Mountains?"
"Yeah, about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevadas," I said. "And you know what they're doing?"
"How the hell would I know that?" she said.
"It was a rhetorical question, Mrs. Snow. They're buying up water rights."
She stared at me and opened her mouth and closed it and went and got a rolled-up map of California out of one of the file drawers near the printing press.
She unrolled it and spread it out on a desk top and bent over it, resting her hands on the desk, her head hanging as she pored over the map. After a few minutes she began to nod her head silently and kept nodding it as she rolled the map back up and put it away. When she returned to the counter she was still nodding.
"Gimme another smoke," she said.
I did. And a light. When she had her cigarette going and a lungful of smoke expelled she bent down behind the counter and rummaged around for a moment and came out with a bottle of rye whiskey and two glasses.
"We need to drink a little whiskey, I think, while we think about this."
I took the inch and a half she poured in one neat swallow.
So did she. She exhaled happily once and then poured two more drinks.
"You think they're going to run that water down from Neville Valley to here and make all that cheap desert land they bought worth a fortune?"
"They might," I said.
"Wouldn't that be something," she said.
"Problem is," I said, "the government's running some kind of land-reclamation project up there designed to do the same for Neville Valley."
"And you figure somebody's trying to steal it. The water."
"I don't know," I said. "I'm just trying to find one young woman, and everywhere I look things are peculiar and the case gets bigger and bigger."
"Well, maybe I can do some poking around at this end," she said. "You got someplace I can reach you?"
I gave her my card. She looked at the address. "Hollywood, isn't it?"
"Sure," I said. "Gumshoe to the stars."
"You know," she said, "what's funny. If we find out that everything is not, ah, kosher, in this deal. I mean, who the hell do you report a stolen river to?"
I drank the rest of my second drink and dried my mouth on the back of my first knuckle.
"Me, I guess," I said.
CHAPTER 22
I had parked my car on the street across from the gas station above which the Rancho Springs Development Corp. had its rathole. When I got back to my car it was blocked by a black and white police car with a big silver star on the side. Around the circumference of the star were the words rancho springs police.
Leaning against my car were two of Rancho Springs' finest. Probably all of Rancho Springs' finest. One was a long rangy leathery customer with a big walrus moustache. He wore a tan shirt and pants that had been laundered threadbare, and a big white ten-gallon hat with sweat stains around the base of the crown. There was a star pinned to his shirt, that said Chief, and he carried an old frontier-style.44 Colt in a scuffed leather holster which hung from a wide cartridge belt. The Colt must have had a barrel ten inches long. The other guy leaning on my car was probably six inches shorter than his chief and maybe a yard wider. He had no neck at all, his jowly red face rising directly from his shoulders, and his faded tan uniform shirt was stretched to its limit over his stomach, so that the buttonholes pulled, and in the gaps between the buttons the pallid skin showed through. He too wore a big hat and it succeeded in making him seem even squatter. Above his small eyes, his blond eyebrows were bleached pale and looked like white slashes against his red face. His silver badge said Sergeant on it. He had a government-issue.45 automatic in a military-style flap holster on a web belt that he wore tight, allowing his belly to hang over it.
"This your car?" the fat cop said.
"Nice huh?" I said. "You want to sit in it?"
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" the fat cop said.
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to talk so fast."
"You'll be talking fast in the back cell under the big lights in a little while," the fat cop said.
"The smaller the town, the tougher the buttons talk," I said.
The fat cop put his hand on his holster.
"You want to say that again, tough guy?" he said.
The chief put a hand like a catcher's mitt on the fat cop's shoulder.
"Now, Vern," he said mildly. "Got no call getting yourself into some sort of rutting contest with this fella. Just deliver our message and help him on his way."
"I figured there'd be a message," I said.
The fat cop continued to glower at me, hand poised on his holster flap. I could have shot off his nose and put the gun away by the time he got unbuttoned.
"Smart fella," the chief said easily. "Could tell you were a smart fella, minute you showed up in town. Lotta smart fellas in the city, I guess. Don't get a chance to see many of them out here eating sand with us cactus rats."
"You actually hire this guy as a cop?" I said, and jerked my head at the fat cop, "or do you just keep him around for shade?"
"Vern's a handy fella. Does good work with a blackjack. But he ain't always as polite as he should be, I guess. What's the purpose of your visit to our town, Mr. Marlowe?"
"Did you get it off the registration?" I said. "Or did Rita give it to you?"
"Registration," the chief said. "Rita couldn't remember if you give her a name."
I nodded. There was a moment of silence.
"We asked you a question, city boy."
"I'm a private detective on a case," I said.
"What case?" the chief said.
"Confidential," I said.
The chief made a little nod of his head and the fat cop hit me on the right shoulder with a blackjack. The pain went the length of my arm and up into my head. The fat cop was very quick with his blackjack, I hadn't seen him take it out.
"He makes another move with that sap," I said to the chief, "and I'm going to feed it to him."
The chief made a small move with his right hand and the frontier Colt was in it and pointing up under my chin.
"Let's just all stop fiddling around with this thing," he said. "You out here asking questions about Rancho Springs Development Corporation. We don't like that. We don't like big-time hotshot city private detectives come weasling into our town and asking questions about our businesses. Vern here, he hates that especially."
"I guessed that," I said. The muzzle of the Colt was pressing firmly into the soft area under my jawbone.
"So we don't want you to do it no more, smart boy. We want you to get in your car and haul it out of Rancho Springs and not come back. 'Cause if you do come back we got a cell, way down back with no windows and one bright light where you and Vern can sort of cha cha cha until everything's clear. Comprende?"
"Yeah," I said. "I can follow that."
The tall chief turned my head toward the car with the muzzle of his Colt.
"Dust," he said.
My right arm was numb and throbbing. I could barely move it. I tried not to let it show. I opened the car door with my left hand, just as if I always opened it with my left hand, and got in and started up. The two cops got in their car and pulled up and I went past them and headed out of town. They followed me all the way to the town line and then U-turned and headed back toward Rancho Springs, leaving a low pall of dust behind them as they dwindled in the rearview mirror. Every day some new friends.
CHAPTER 23
I woke up with an idea. I also woke up with one arm throbbing like a toothache, and some soreness left in my jaw, and a dull tenderness behind my ear. But mostly it was the idea. I remembered something Vivian had said about Simpson having a place in the desert. I rolled out of bed and called her while the coffee dripped.
"Oh, I don't know," she said sleepily. "Somewhere out past Pasadena."
"It got a name?"
"Springs, some kind of springs," she said. "I've never been there. I just know Daddy used to go out there when he was well."
"Rancho Springs?"
"That sounds right. Will I see you soon, Phil?"
"I hope so," I said, and hung up the phone. Phil?
I called Pauline Snow.
"Marlowe," I said. "Do you know if a guy named Randolph Simpson lives anywhere around Rancho Springs?"
"A guy named Randolph Simpson? Marlowe, where the hell have you been living the last thirty years? Randolph Simpson is not a 'guy.' That's like saying 'a guy named John D. Rockefeller,' for God's sake."
"Does he live there?"
"Sure. Everybody knows that."
"Do you have any access to him?"
"Of course not. No one has access to Randolph Simpson. Why?"
"I think he's hooked into the business with the water rights and the land development."
"Simpson?"
"Dr. Bonsentir is his doctor."
"That doesn't mean he is involved in some scheme."
"Few nights ago," I said, "a couple of hard numbers leaned on me pretty good on a rainy street in Hollywood. They told me to stay away from Randolph Simpson and Dr. Bonsentir."
"Because you were poking around in the water rights thing?"
"Because I have been looking for a young woman who went from Bonsentir's clinic to Simpson. The hard boys that poured it to me were driving a Buick sedan registered to the Neville Valley Realty Trust."
"The people buying water rights up north."
"Un huh."
"Doesn't prove Simpson's involved in it. Could be just about the girl."
"Why are they driving a car registered to the Neville Valley Trust? And how much of a coincidence is it that Neville Valley seems to be connected to Rancho Springs, and Simpson has a place in Rancho Springs, and his doctor is on the board of the development company buying land in Rancho Springs?"
"Okay," Pauline Snow said. "You got a point. It's not something you can take to court, or even something I can print-yet. But it's something."
"How about Chuck and Vinnie," I said. "You have anything on them?"
"Just addresses," she said. "You want them?"
I did. She rummaged off the phone for a couple of minutes while I put some cream and sugar in my coffee and sipped it. Then she came back and gave me an address in Los Angeles.
"Business address, I assume," she said. "I don't know L. A. that well, but that sounds like downtown."
"It is," I said. "I'll go call on them. Anything you can find out about Randolph Simpson is welcome."
"What are we trying to do, Marlowe? Exactly?"
"How the hell do I know?" I said. "I was hired to find the girl. I guess we're trying to do that."