The Big Sleep pm-1 Page 6

  There was no activity in front of Geiger's house or anywhere along the block. The box hedge looked green and peaceful and the shingles on the roof were still damp. I drove past slowly, gnawing at an idea. I hadn't looked in the garage the night before. Once Geiger's body slipped away I hadn't really wanted to find it. It would force my hand. But dragging him to the garage, to his own car and driving that off into one of the hundred odd lonely canyons around Los Angeles would be a good way to dispose of him for days or even for weeks. That supposed two things: a key to his car and two in the party. It would narrow the sector of search quite a lot, especially as I had had his personal keys in my pocket when it happened.

  I didn't get a chance to look at the garage. The doors were shut and padlocked and something moved behind the hedge as I drew level. A woman in a green and white check coat and a small button of a hat on soft blond hair stepped out of the maze and stood looking wild-eyed at my car, as if she hadn't heard it come up the hill. Then she turned swiftly and dodged back out of sight. It was Carmen Sternwood, of course.

  I went on up the street and parked and walked back. In the daylight it seemed an exposed and dangerous thing to do. I went in through the hedge. She stood there straight and silent against the locked front door. One hand went slowly up to her teeth and her teeth bit at her funny thumb. There were purple smears under her eyes and her face was gnawed white by nerves.

  She half smiled at me. She said: "Hello," in a thin, brittle voice. "Wha — what — ?" That tailed off and she went back to the thumb.

  "Remember me?" I said. "Doghouse Reilly, the man that grew too tall. Remember?"

  She nodded and a quick jerky smile played across her face.

  "Let's go in," I said. "I've got a key. Swell, huh?"

  "Wha — wha — ?"

  I pushed her to one side and put the key in the door and opened it and pushed her in through it. I shut the door again and stood there sniffing. The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamps, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum — all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.

  The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick. I rolled a cigarette in my fingers and pushed some books out of the way and sat on the end of the black desk. I lit my cigarette, puffed a plume of smoke and watched the thumb and tooth act for a while in silence. Carmen stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the principal's office.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked her finally.

  She picked at the cloth of her coat and didn't answer.

  "How much do you remember of last night?"

  She answered that — with a foxy glitter rising at the back of her eyes. "Remember what? I was sick last night. I was home." Her voice was a cautious throaty sound that just reached my ears.

  "Like hell you were."

  Her eyes flicked up and down very swiftly.

  "Before you went home," I said. "Before I took you home. Here. In that chair — " I pointed to it — "on that orange shawl. You remember all right."

  A slow flush crept up her throat. That was something. She could blush. A glint of white showed under the clogged gray irises. She chewed hard on her thumb.

  "You — were the one?" she breathed.

  "Me. How much of it stays with you?"

  She said vaguely: "Are you the police?"

  "No. I'm a friend of your father's."

  "You're not the police?"

  "No."

  She let out a thin sigh. "Wha — what do you want?"

  "Who killed him?"

  Her shoulders jerked, but nothing more moved in her face. "Who else — knows?"

  "About Geiger? I don't know. Not the police, or they'd be camping here. Maybe Joe Brody."

  It was a stab in the dark but it got a yelp out of her. "Joe Brody! Him!"

  Then we were both silent. I dragged at my cigarette and she ate her thumb.

  "Don't get clever, for God's sake," I urged her. "This is a spot for a little old-fashioned simplicity. Did Brody kill him?"

  "Kill who?"

  "Oh, Christ," I said.

  She looked hurt. Her chin came down an inch. "Yes," she said solemnly. "Joe did it."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know." She shook her head, persuading herself that she didn't know.

  "Seen much of him lately?"

  Her hands went down and made small white knots. "Just once or twice. I hate him."

  "Then you know where he lives."

  "Yes."

  "And you don't like him any more?"

  "I hate him!"

  "Then you'd like him for the spot."

  A little blank again. I was going too fast for her. It was hard not to. "Are you willing to tell the police it was Joe Brody?" I probed.

  Sudden panic flamed all over her face. "If I can kill the nude-photo angle, of course," I added soothingly.

  She giggled. That gave me a nasty feeling. If she had screeched or wept or even nosedived to the floor in a dead faint, that would have been all right. She just giggled. It was suddenly a lot of fun. She had had her photo taken as Isis and somebody had swiped it and somebody had bumped Geiger off in front of her and she was drunker than a Legion convention, and it was suddenly a lot of nice clean fun. So she giggled. Very cute. The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting. She started to go hysterical. I slid off the desk and stepped up close to her and gave her a smack on the side of the face.

  "Just like last night," I said. "We're a scream together. Reilly and Sternwood, two stooges in search of a comedian."

  The giggles stopped dead, but she didn't mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boy friends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might. I sat down on the end of the black desk again.

  "Your name isn't Reilly," she said seriously. "It's Philip Marlowe. You're a private detective. Viv told me. She showed me your card." She smoothed the cheek I had slapped. She smiled at me, as if I was nice to be with.

  "Well, you do remember," I said. "And you came back to look for that photo and you couldn't get into the house. Didn't you?"

  Her chin ducked down and up. She worked the smile. I was having the eye put on me. I was being brought into camp. I was going to yell "Yippee!" in a minute and ask her to go to Yuma.

  "The photo's gone," I said. "I looked last night, before I took you home. Probably Brody took it with him. You're not kidding me about Brody?"

  She shook her head earnestly.

  "It's a pushover," I said. "You don't have to give it another thought. Don't tell a soul you were here, last night or today. Not even Vivian. Just forget you were here. Leave it to Reilly."

  "Your name isn't — " she began, and then stopped and shook her head vigorously in agreement with what I had said or with what she had just thought of. Her eyes became narrow and almost black and as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray. She had had an idea. "I have to go home now," she said, as if we had been having a cup of tea.

  "Sure."

  I didn't move. She gave me another cute glance and went on towards the front door. She had her hand on the knob when we both heard a car coming. She looked at me with questions in her eyes. I shrugged. The car stopped, right in front of the house. Terror twisted her face. There were steps and the bell rang. Carmen stared back at me over her shoulder, her hand clutching the door knob, almost drooling with fear. The bell kept on ringing. Then the ringing stopped. A key tickled at the door and Carmen jumped
away from it and stood frozen. The door swung open. A man stepped through it briskly and stopped dead, staring at us quietly, with complete composure.

  13

  He was a gray man, an gray, except for his polished black shoes and two scarlet diamonds in his gray satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts. His shirt was gray and his double-breasted suit of soft, beautifully cut flannel. Seeing Carmen he took a gray hat off and his hair underneath it was gray and as fine as if it had been sifted through gauze. His thick gray eyebrows had that indefinably sporty look. He had a long chin, a nose with a hook to it, thoughtful gray eyes that had a slanted look because the fold of skin over his upper lid came down over the corner of the lid itself.

  He stood there politely, one hand touching the door at his back, the other holding the gray hat and flapping it gently against his thigh. He looked hard, not the hardness of the tough guy. More like the hardness of a well-weathered horseman. But he was no horseman. He was Eddie Mars.

  He pushed the door shut behind him and put that hand in the lap-seamed pocket of his coat and left the thumb outside to glisten in the rather dim light of the room. He smiled at Carmen. He had a nice easy smile. She licked her lips and stared at him. The fear went out of her face. She smiled back.

  "Excuse the casual entrance," he said. "The bell didn't seem to rouse anybody. Is Mr. Geiger around?"

  I said: "No. We don't know just where he is. We found the door a little open. We stepped inside."

  He nodded and touched his long chin with the brim of his hat. "You're friends of his, of course?"

  "Just business acquaintances. We dropped by for a book."

  "A book, eh?" He said that quickly and brightly and, I thought, a little slyly, as if he knew all about Geiger's books. Then he looked at Carmen again and shrugged.

  I moved towards the door. "We'll trot along now," I said. I took hold of her arm. She was staring at Eddie Mars. She liked him.

  "Any message — if Geiger comes back?" Eddie Mars asked gently.

  "We won't bother you."

  "That's too bad," he said, with too much meaning. His gray eyes twinkled and then hardened as I went past him to open the door. He added in a casual tone: "The girl can dust. I'd like to talk to you a little, soldier."

  I let go of her arm. I gave him a blank stare. "Kidder, eh?" he said nicely. "Don't waste it. I've got two boys outside in a car that always do just what I want them to."

  Carmen made a sound at my side and bolted through the door. Her steps faded rapidly down hill. I hadn't seen her car, so she must have left it down below. I started to say: "What the hell — !"

  "Oh, skip it," Eddie Mars sighed. "There's something wrong around here. I'm going to find out what it is. If you want to pick lead out of your belly, get in my way."

  "Well, well," I said, "a tough guy."

  "Only when necessary, soldier." He wasn't looking at me any more. He was walking around the room, frowning, not paying any attention to me. I looked out above the broken pane of the front window. The top of a car showed over the hedge. Its motor idled.

  Eddie Mars found the purple flagon and the two gold-veined glasses on the desk. He sniffed at one of the glasses, then at the flagon. A disgusted smile wrinkled his lips. "The lousy pimp," he said tonelessly.

  He looked at a couple of books, grunted, went on around the desk and stood in front of the little totem pole with the camera eye. He studied it, dropped his glance to the floor in front of it. He moved the small rug with his foot, then bent swiftly, his body tense. He went down on the floor with one gray knee. The desk hid him from me partly. There was a sharp exclamation and he came up again. His arm flashed under his coat and a black Luger appeared in his hand. He held it in long brown fingers, not pointing it at me me, not pointing it at anything.

  "Blood," he said. "Blood on the floor there, under the rug. Quite a lot of blood."

  "Is that so?" I said, looking interested.

  He slid into the chair behind the desk and hooked the mulberry-colored phone towards him and shifted the Luger to his left hand. He frowned sharply at the telephone, bringing his thick gray eyebrows close together and making a hard crease in the weathered skin at the top of his hooked nose. "I think we'll have some law," he said.

  I went over and kicked at the rug that lay where Geiger had lain. "It's old blood," I said. "Dried blood."

  "Just the same we'll have some law."

  "Why not?" I said.

  His eyes went narrow. The veneer had flaked off him, leaving a well-dressed hard boy with a Luger. He didn't like my agreeing with him.

  "Just who the hell are you, soldier?"

  "Marlowe is the name. I'm a sleuth."

  "Never heard of you. Who's the girl?"

  "Client. Geiger was trying to throw a loop on her with some blackmail. We came to talk it over. He wasn't here. The door being open we walked in to wait. Or did I tell you that?"

  "Convenient," he said. "The door being open. When you didn't have a key."

  "Yes. How come you had a key?"

  "Is that any of your business, soldier?"

  "I could make it my business."

  He smiled tightly and pushed his hat back on his gray hair. "And I could make your business my business."

  "You wouldn't like it. The pay's too small."

  "All right, bright eyes. I own this house. Geiger is my tenant. Now what do you think of that?"

  "You know such lovely people."

  "I take them as they come. They come all kinds."

  He glanced down at the Luger, shrugged and tucked it back under his arm. "Got any good ideas, soldier?"

  "Lots of them. Somebody gunned Geiger. Somebody got gunned by Geiger, who ran away. Or it was two other fellows. Or Geiger was running a cult and made blood sacrifices in front of that totem pole. Or he had chicken for dinner and liked to kill his chickens in the front parlor."

  The gray man scowled at me.

  "I give up," I said. "Better call your friends downtown."

  "I don't get it," he snapped. "I don't get your game here."

  "Go ahead, call the buttons. You'll get a big reaction from it."

  He thought that over without moving. His lips went back against his teeth. "I don't get that, either," he said tightly.

  "Maybe it just isn't your day. I know you, Mr. Mars. The Cypress Club at Las Olindas. Flash gambling for flash people. The local law in your pocket and a well-greased line into L.A. In other words, protection. Geiger was in a racket that needed that too. Perhaps you spared him a little now and then, seeing he's your tenant."

  His mouth became a hard white grimace. "Geiger was in what racket?"

  "The smut book racket."

  He stared at me for a long level minute. "Somebody got to him," he said softly. "You know something about it. He didn't show at the store today. They don't know where he is. He didn't answer the phone here. I came up to see about it. I find blood on the floor, under a rug. And you and a girl here."

  "A little weak," I said. "But maybe you can sell the story to a willing buyer. You missed a little something, though. Somebody moved his books out of the store today — the nice books he rented out."

  He snapped his fingers sharply and said: "I should have thought of that, soldier. You seem to get around. How do you figure it?"

  "I think Geiger was rubbed. I think that is his blood. And the books being moved out gives a motive for hiding the body for a while. Somebody is taking over the racket and wants a little time to organize."

  "They can't get away with it," Eddie Mars said grimly.

  "Who says so? You and a couple of gunmen in your car outside? This is a big town now, Eddie. Some very tough people have checked in here lately. The penalty of growth."

  "You talk too damned much," Eddie Mars said. He bared his teeth and whistled twice, sharply. A car slammed outside and running steps came through the hedge. Mars flicked the Luger out again and pointed it at my chest. "Open the door."

  The knob rattled and a voice c
alled out. I didn't move. The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.

  "Open it yourself, Eddie. Who the hell are you to give me orders? Be nice and I might help you out."

  He came to his feet rigidly and moved around the end of the desk and over to the door. He opened it without taking his eyes off me. Two men tumbled into the room, reaching busily under their arms. One was an obvious pug, a good-looking pale-faced boy with a bad nose and one ear like a club steak. The other man was slim, blond, deadpan, with close-set eyes and no color in them.

  Eddie Mars said: "See if this bird is wearing any iron."

  The blond flicked a short-barreled gun out and stood pointing it at me. The pug sidled over flatfooted and felt my pockets with care. I turned around for like a bored beauty modeling an evening gown.

  "No gun," he said in a burry voice.

  "Find out who he is."

  The pug slipped a hand into my breast pocket and drew out my wallet. He flipped it open and studied the contents. "Name's Philip Marlowe, Eddie. Lives at the Hobart Arms on Franklin. Private license, deputy's badge and all. A shamus." He slipped the wallet back in my pocket, slapped my face lightly and turned away.

  "Beat it," Eddie Mars said.

  The two gunmen went out again and closed the door. There was the sound of them getting back into the car. They started its motor and kept it idling once more.

  "All right. Talk," Eddie Mars snapped. The peaks of his eyebrows made sharp angles against his forehead.

  "I'm not ready to give out. Killing Geiger to grab his racket would be a dumb trick and I'm not sure it happened that way, assuming he has been killed. But I'm sure that whoever got the books knows what's what, and I'm sure that the blonde lady down at his store is scared batty about something or other. And I have a guess who got the books."

  "Who?"

  "That's the part I'm not ready to give out. I've got a client, you know."

  He wrinkled his nose. "That — " he chopped it off quickly.