TWENTY
Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau laid my card down on his wide flat desk and arranged it so that its edges exactly paralleled the edges of the desk. He studied it with his head on one side, grunted, swung around in his swivel chair and looked out of his window at the barred top floor of the Hall of Justice half a block away. He was a burly man with tired eyes and the slow deliberate movements of a night watchman. His voice was toneless, flat and uninterested.
“Private dick, eh?” he said, not looking at me at all, but looking out of his window. Smoke wisped from the blackened bowl of a briar that hung on his eye tooth. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m working for General Guy Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood.”
Captain Gregory blew a little smoke from the corner of his mouth without removing the pipe. “On what?”
“Not exactly on what you’re working on, but I’m interested. I thought you could help me.”
“Help you on what?”
“General Sternwood’s a rich man,” I said. “He’s an old friend of the D.A.’s father. If he wants to hire a full-time boy to run errands for him, that’s no reflection on the police. It’s just a luxury he is able to afford himself.”
“What makes you think I’m doing anything for him?”
I didn’t answer that. He swung around slowly and heavily in his swivel chair and put his large feet flat on the bare linoleum that covered his floor. His office had the musty smell of years of routine. He stared at me bleakly.
“I don’t want to waste your time, Captain,” I said and pushed my chair back—about four inches.
He didn’t move. He kept on staring at me out of his washed-out tired eyes. “You know the D.A.?”
“I’ve met him. I worked for him once. I know Bernie Ohls, his chief investigator, pretty well.”
Captain Gregory reached for a phone and mumbled into it: “Get me Ohls at the D.A.’s office.”
He sat holding the phone down on its cradle. Moments passed. Smoke drifted from his pipe. His eyes were heavy and motionless like his hand. The bell tinkled and he reached for my card with his left hand. “Ohls? . . . Al Gregory at headquarters. A guy named Philip Marlowe is in my office. His card says he’s a private investigator. He wants information from me . . . Yeah? What does he look like? . . . Okey, thanks.”
He dropped the phone and took his pipe out of his mouth and tamped the tobacco with the brass cap of a heavy pencil. He did it carefully and solemnly, as if that was as important as anything he would have to do that day. He leaned back and stared at me some more.
“What you want?”
“An idea of what progress you’re making, if any.”
He thought that over. “Regan?” he asked finally.
“Sure.”
“Know him?”
“I never saw him. I hear he’s a good-looking Irishman in his late thirties, that he was once in the liquor racket, that he married General Sternwood’s older daughter and that they didn’t click. I’m told he disappeared about a month back.”
“Sternwood oughta think himself lucky instead of hiring private talent to beat around in the tall grass.”
“The General took a big fancy to him. Such things happen. The old man is crippled and lonely. Regan used to sit around with him and keep him company.”
“What you think you can do that we can’t do?”
“Nothing at all, in so far as finding Regan goes. But there’s a rather mysterious blackmail angle. I want to make sure Regan isn’t involved. Knowing where he is or isn’t might help.”
“Brother, I’d like to help you, but I don’t know where he is. He pulled down the curtain and that’s that.”
“Pretty hard to do against your organization, isn’t it, Captain?”
“Yeah—but it can be done—for a while.” He touched a bell button on the side of his desk. A middle-aged woman put her head in at a side door. “Get me the file on Terence Regan, Abba.”
The door closed. Captain Gregory and I looked at each other in some more heavy silence. The door opened again and the woman put a tabbed green file on his desk. Captain Gregory nodded her out, put a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his veined nose and turned the papers in the file over slowly. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers.
“He blew on the sixteenth of September,” he said. “The only thing important about that is it was the chauffeur’s day off and nobody saw Regan take his car out. It was late afternoon, though. We found the car four days later in a garage belonging to a ritzy bungalow court place near the Sunset Towers. A garage man reported it to the stolen car detail, said it didn’t belong there. The place is called the Casa de Oro. There’s an angle to that I’ll tell you about in a minute. We couldn’t find out anything about who put the car in there. We print the car but don’t find any prints that are on file anywhere. The car in that garage don’t jibe with foul play, although there’s a reason to suspect foul play. It jibes with something else I’ll tell you about in a minute.”
I said: “That jibes with Eddie Mars’ wife being on the missing list.”
He looked annoyed. “Yeah. We investigate the tenants and find she’s living there. Left about the time Regan did, within two days anyway. A guy who sounds a bit like Regan had been seen with her, but we don’t get a positive identification. It’s goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can’t be sure.”
“That’s one of the qualifications for good hotel help,” said.
“Yeah. Eddie Mars and his wife didn’t live together, but they were friendly, Eddie says. Here’s some of the possibilities. First off Regan carried fifteen grand, packed it in his clothes all the time. Real money, they tell me. Not just a top card and a bunch of hay. That’s a lot of jack but this Regan might be the boy to have it around so he could take it out and look at it when somebody was looking at him. Then again maybe he wouldn’t give a damn. His wife says he never made a nickel off of old man Sternwood except room and board and a Packard one-twenty his wife gave him. Tie that for an ex-legger in the rich gravy.”
“It beats me,” I said.
“Well, here we are with a guy who ducks out and has fifteen grand in his pants and folks know it. Well, that’s money. I might duck out myself, if I had fifteen grand, and me with two kids in high school. So the first thought is somebody rolls him for it and rolls him too hard, so they have to take him out in the desert and plant him among the cactuses. But I don’t like that too well. Regan carried a gat and had plenty of experience using it, and not just in a greasy-faced liquor mob. I understand he commanded a whole brigade in the Irish troubles back in 1922 or whenever it was. A guy like that wouldn’t be white meat to a heister. Then, his car being in that garage makes whoever rolled him know he was sweet on Eddie Mars’ wife, which he was, I guess, but it ain’t something every poolroom bum would know.”
“Got a photo?” I asked.
“Him, not her. That’s funny too. There’s a lot of funny angles to this case. Here.” He pushed a shiny print across the desk and I looked at an Irish face that was more sad than merry and more reserved than brash. Not the face of a tough guy and not the face of a man who could be pushed around much by anybody. Straight dark brows with strong bone under them. A forehead wide rather than high, a mat of dark clustering hair, a thin short nose, a wide mouth. A chin that had strong lines but was small for the mouth. A face that looked a little taut, the face of a man who would move fast and play for keeps. I passed the print back. I would know that face, if I saw it.
Captain Gregory knocked his pipe out and refilled it and tamped the tobacco down with his thumb. He lit it, blew smoke and began to talk again.
“Well, there could be people who would know he was sweet on Eddie Mars’ frau. Besides Eddie himself. For a wonder he knew it. But he don’t seem to give a damn. We check him pretty th
oroughly around that time. Of course Eddie wouldn’t have knocked him off out of jealousy. The set-up would point to him too obvious.”
“It depends how smart he is,” I said. “He might try the double bluff.”
Captain Gregory shook his head. “If he’s smart enough to get by in his racket, he’s too smart for that. I get your idea. He pulls the dumb play because he thinks we wouldn’t expect him to pull the dumb play. From a police angle that’s wrong. Because he’d have us in his hair so much it would interfere with his business. You might think a dumb play would be smart. I might think so. The rank and file wouldn’t. They’d make his life miserable. I’ve ruled it out. If I’m wrong, you can prove it on me and I’ll eat my chair cushion. Till then I’m leaving Eddie in the clear. Jealousy is a bad motive for his type. Top-flight racketeers have business brains. They learn to do things that are good policy and let their personal feelings take care of themselves. I’m leaving that out.”
“What are you leaving in?”
“The dame and Regan himself. Nobody else. She was a blonde then, but she won’t be now. We don’t find her car, so they probably left in it. They had a long start on us—fourteen days. Except for that car of Regan’s I don’t figure we’d have got the case at all. Of course I’m used to them that way, especially in good-class families. And of course everything I’ve done has had to be under the hat.”
He leaned back and thumped the arms of his chair with the heels of his large heavy hands.
“I don’t see nothing to do but wait,” he said. “We’ve got readers out, but it’s too soon to look for results. Regan had fifteen grand we know of. The girl had some, maybe a lot in rocks. But they’ll run out of dough some day. Regan will cash a check, drop a marker, write a letter. They’re in a strange town and they’ve got new names, but they’ve got the same old appetites. They got to get back in the fiscal system.”
“What did the girl do before she married Eddie Mars?”
“Torcher.”
“Can’t you get any old professional photos?”
“No. Eddie must of had some, but he won’t loosen up. He wants her let alone. I can’t make him. He’s got friends in town, or he wouldn’t be what he is.” He grunted. “Any of this do you any good?”
I said: “You’ll never find either of them. The Pacific Ocean is too close.”
“What I said about my chair cushion still goes. We’ll find him. It may take time. It could take a year or two.”
“General Sternwood may not live that long,” I said.
“We’ve done all we could, brother. If he wants to put out a reward and spend some money, we might get results. The city don’t give me the kind of money it takes.” His large eyes peered at me and his scratchy eyebrows moved. “You serious about thinking Eddie put them both down?”
I laughed. “No. I was just kidding. I think what you think, Captain. That Regan ran away with a woman who meant more to him than a rich wife he didn’t get along with. Besides, she isn’t rich yet.”
“You met her, I suppose?”
“Yes. She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet.”
He grunted and I thanked him for his time and information and left. A gray Plymouth sedan tailed me away from the City Hall. I gave it a chance to catch up with me on a quiet street. It refused the offer, so I shook it off and went about my business.
TWENTY-ONE
I didn’t go near the Sternwood family. I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. There was a gusty wind blowing in at the windows and the soot from the oil burners of the hotel next door was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot. I was thinking about going out to lunch and that life was pretty flat and that it would probably be just as flat if I took a drink and that taking a drink all alone at that time of day wouldn’t be any fun anyway. I was thinking this when Norris called up. In his carefully polite manner he said that General Sternwood was not feeling very well and that certain items in the newspaper had been read to him and he assumed that my investigation was now completed.
“Yes, as regards Geiger,” I said. “I didn’t shoot him, you know.”
“The General didn’t suppose you did, Mr. Marlowe.”
“Does the General know anything about those photographs Mrs. Regan was worrying about?”
“No, sir. Decidedly not.”
“Did you know what the General gave me?”
“Yes, sir. Three notes and a card, I believe.”
“Right. I’ll return them. As to the photos I think I’d better just destroy them.”
“Very good, sir. Mrs. Regan tried to reach you a number of times last night—”
“I was out getting drunk,” I said.
“Yes. Very necessary, sir, I’m sure. The General has instructed me to send you a check for five hundred dollars. Will that be satisfactory?”
“More than generous,” I said.
“And I presume we may now consider the incident closed?”
“Oh sure. Tight as a vault with a busted time lock.”
“Thank you, sir. I am sure we all appreciate it. When the General is feeling a little better—possibly tomorrow—he would like to thank you in person.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come out and drink some more of his brandy, maybe with champagne.”
“I shall see that some is properly iced,” the old boy said, almost with a smirk in his voice.
That was that. We said good-bye and hung up. The coffee shop smell from next door came in at the windows with the soot but failed to make me hungry. So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.
I counted it up on my fingers. Rusty Regan had run away from a lot of money and a handsome wife to go wandering with a vague blonde who was more or less married to a racketeer named Eddie Mars. He had gone suddenly without good-byes and there might be any number of reasons for that. The General had been too proud, or, at the first interview he gave me, too careful, to tell me the Missing Persons Bureau had the matter in hand. The Missing Persons people were dead on their feet on it and evidently didn’t think it worth bothering over. Regan had done what he had done and that was his business. I agreed with Captain Gregory that Eddie Mars would have been very unlikely to involve himself in a double murder just because another man had gone to town with the blonde he was not even living with. It might have annoyed him, but business is business, and you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes. If there had been a lot of money involved, that would be different. But fifteen grand wouldn’t be a lot of money to Eddie Mars. He was no two-bit chiseler like Brody.
Geiger was dead and Carmen would have to find some other shady character to drink exotic blends of hootch with. I didn’t suppose she would have any trouble. All she would have to do would be to stand on the corner for five minutes and look coy. I hoped that the next grifter who dropped the hook on her would play her a little more smoothly, a little more for the long haul rather than the quick touch.
Mrs. Regan knew Eddie Mars well enough to borrow money from him. That was natural, if she played roulette and was a good loser. Any gambling house owner would lend a good client money in a pinch. Apart from this they had an added bond of interest in Regan. He was her husband and he had gone off with Eddie Mars’ wife.
Carol Lundgren, the boy killer with the limited vocabulary, was out of circulation for a long, long time, even if they didn’t strap him in a chair over a bucket of acid. They wouldn’t, because he would take a plea and save the county money. They all do when they don’t have the price of a big lawyer. Agnes Lozelle was in custody as a material witness. They wouldn’t need her for that, if Carol took a plea, and if he pleaded guilty on arraignment, they would turn her loose. They wouldn’t want to open up any angles on Geiger’s business, apart from which they had nothing on her.
That left me. I ha
d concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar check coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.
That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming down to Las Olindas that evening to talk to him. That was how smart I was.
I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog. The Cypress Club was at the far end of the town, a rambling frame mansion that had once been the summer residence of a rich man named De Cazens, and later had been a hotel. It was now a big dark outwardly shabby place in a thick grove of wind-twisted Monterey cypresses, which gave it its name. It had enormous scrolled porches, turrets all over the place, stained-glass trims around the big windows, big empty stables at the back, a general air of nostalgic decay. Eddie Mars had left the outside much as he had found it, instead of making it over to look like an MGM set. I left my car on a street with sputtering arc lights and walked into the grounds along a damp gravel path to the main entrance. A doorman in a double-breasted guard’s coat let me into a huge dim silent lobby from which a white oak staircase curved majestically up to the darkness of an upper floor. I checked my hat and coat and waited, listening to music and confused voices behind heavy double doors. They seemed a long way off, and not quite of the same world as the building itself. Then the slim pasty-faced blond man who had been with Eddie Mars and the pug at Geiger’s place came through a door under the staircase, smiled at me bleakly and took me back with him along a carpeted hall to the boss’s office.
This was a square room with a deep old bay window and a stone fireplace in which a fire of juniper logs burned lazily. It was wainscoted in walnut and had a frieze of faded damask above the paneling. The ceiling was high and remote. There was a smell of cold sea.