'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
