'Randolph Simpson inherited an unspeakable fortune when he was twenty-one,' Wilde said. 'Oil mostly, which is how he knows the Sternwoods, and some manufacturing. He tripled it in ten years and doubled that in the next five years. He plays golf regularly with the speaker of the California State Assembly. He is a close associate of both the governor of this state and the mayor of this city. His cousin is the senior senator from California, and the president of the United States comes several times a year and spends time with him at a place Simpson has in the desert. He contributes heavily and often to all of these people's election campaigns and those of a hundred aldermen and assemblymen and ward heelers of all levels that you and I may never have heard of but who turn the cranks that move things in this city.'
Wilde inhaled a little smoke, savored it, let it out slowly in a thin blue stream and looked appreciatively at it as it hung in the close air of his office. Outside his window the evening was beginning to settle. Wilde continued.
'There have been a couple of marriages that didn't work out, which he settled with money, the way he settles everything else. One of the wives filed a complaint against him alleging abusive treatment, but it never went anywhere. Whether she was bought off or scared off or Simpson simply had it squelched, I don't know. Probably all three. There was a squabble in a restaurant in Bay City a few years back when some tourist tried to take his picture and a couple of Simpson's bodyguards got rough. But nothing came of that. I have heard it said that he has peculiar sexual preferences and that some of them tend to break the rules. But no one's ever gotten near to charging him with anything, let alone getting him into court.'
'What kind of sexual preferences?' I said.
Wilde took another satisfied puff on his cigar. He eased the smoke out carefully. He held the cigar out and looked at it as if to reassure himself that it was as good as it smoked. Then he said, 'Sadomasochistic.'
'Sounds to me like he'd suit little Carmen just fine,' Ohls said.
'Fine,' I said.
'He is a very dangerous man, Marlowe,' Wilde said. 'We can't help you unless you have evidence so unimpeachable that he can't buy it off or scare it off or cover it up or bury it.'
'Or you,' Ohls said.
'Stop trying to cheer me up, Bernie,' I said.
'You can't go up against him alone,' Wilde said. 'And neither Lieutenant Ohls nor I can help you until you have incontrovertible evidence against him of whatever he may have done.'
'It sounds to me like you want me to nail this guy for you,' I said.
Wilde smiled without speaking. I looked at Ohls. He had shaken one of his little cigars loose from the tin in which they came and was about to light up.
'Anyone say something like that, peeper?' Ohls said. 'I didn't hear anything like that said. What you got from us is permission to go ahead and look for the girl, like you was hired to do.'
'I don't need your permission,' I said.
'So, good,' Ohls said. 'So whyn't you get the hell out of here and start looking?'
I stood up.
'You guys are a scream,' I said. 'Thanks for nothing at all.'
'Go carefully, Marlowe,' Wilde said.
'Sure thing,' I said.
Ohls grinned humorlessly at me past his toy cigar.
'Call anytime, peeper,' he said.
I turned and left Wilde's office and went downstairs and caught a cab home.
CHAPTER 15
I was living that year in the Hobart Arms on Franklin just west of Kenmore. It was where I went after I picked up my car. I had found and then lost a dippy old lady trying to see her house, and parts of another lady. And Taggert Wilde and Ohls and Bonsentir-I'd found all of them. Fd even found Randolph Simpson, for all the good it did me. Unfortunately I wasn't supposed to find them. I was supposed to find Carmen Sternwood, and I was setting a record for not finding her.
The apartment had the closed-up smell that empty places get, the smell of nobody home. It was a smell I knew well, though Fd never gotten used to it. I went and opened the windows and let the hot air move vaguely around. It didn't do much to the atmosphere inside. It hadn't been doing a hell of a lot for the atmosphere outside. I got a bottle of Vat 69 out of the kitchen cabinet, and built myself a tall scotch and water, took it into the living room, and looked down onto Franklin Avenue. There were the usual cars parked along the sidewalk, Fd stared down at them a lot in the late afternoon with a drink in my hand and no one else around. The street was far enough below so that not much noise drifted up, mostly I heard the silence behind me in the room, almost tangible, shimmering in the late summer afternoon like the heat waves that miraged up from the surface of the avenue. After you're alone long enough you get used to it. Almost.
Parked across the street halfway down the block toward Alexandria was a car that didn't fit into the pattern my eyes automatically expected. It was bigger and newer than most cars that park in my neighborhood, and its motor was idling. I looked at it harder, but the sun glancing off the windows made it impossible to see inside. I watched it for a while and sipped my drink. When the drink was gone I went back in and bought myself another one and looked at the chess puzzle set up on the table. It didn't interest me. Kings and Queens and Knights seemed irrelevant. I did feel some kinship with the pawns. I sipped a little more of my drink and went and looked out the window again. The Buick was still there. That was okay. I was still here.
There had to be a reason a mutilated corpse showed up with the Sternwoods' phone number in her purse. Everyone was assuming it was Carmen's number but it was also Vivian's. Hell, it was also Norris's number and the horsefaced maid's. Still, Carmen was a good bet. It was at least one angle, and it would make sense if Carmen and the unnamed cut-up lady had crossed paths at the Resthaven Sanitarium, or maybe they were both palsy with Randolph Simpson, or maybe they met at the May Company, trying on aprons, and took an instant liking to each other.
