Ohls had the siren on all the way downtown through the rush-hour traffic.
'Corpse in a hurry?' I said.
'What's the point of being a cop if you can't use the siren?' Ohls said. 'It's the only fringe benefit.'
The L. A. County morgue was cool and dim and pleasant on a hot day. Our footsteps were loud as we followed the attendant along the stacked rows of pull-out storage drawers, like filing cabinets for the dead. The body the morgue attendant pulled out was an old woman, with white hair, and her head twisted at an odd angle. It was an old woman I knew. Maybe she could see her house now.
'Mrs. Swayze,' I said.
'She fit your description,' Ohls said.
'Broken neck?'
'ME hasn't seen her yet,' Ohls said. 'But that's what it looks like.'
'Where'd you find her?'
'Off the coast highway,' Ohls said.
'Figure she was killed elsewhere and dumped?' I said.
'We don't know she was killed,' Ohls said. 'She could have fallen.'
'Come on, Bernie,' I said, 'you been a cop too long to believe that. She's a patient at Resthaven, a witness in Carmen Sternwood's disappearance, when we want to question her she's gone. Now she turns up dead, the second person with a Sternwood connection to do so.'
'Sure,' Ohls said. 'But I also been a cop long enough to wait for the coroner to tell me what he knows.'
'And what about the sanitarium?'
'What about it? We got not one piece of evidence that Bonsentir's not clean as toothpaste. Two people he claims he discharged turn out to be problems-maybe. Can we close him down because of that?'
'He's dirty as hell,' I said.
'Sure,' Ohls said. 'You know it and I know it. Can you convince a DA? A judge? A jury? You know the answer to that, Marlowe.'
'Okay I put her away?' the morgue attendant said.
Ohls nodded. The drawer slid silently shut on an oiled track.
Ohls and I left her there and headed back outside where life was on going and the sun was the color of old brass in the late afternoon sky.
The traffic had thinned by then and Ohls left the siren off and let the car cruise with the traffic flow back toward Hollywood.
'Got something else for you to chew on, Marlowe,' Ohls said.
I had my hat tilted forward over my eyes to keep the setting sun out, and was leaning back against the seat feeling older than Mount Rainier.
'Yeah?'
'Lola Monforte,' Ohls said. 'The dismembered stiff in the canyon.'
'Yeah.'
'Told you she used to be an actress, we turned up a guy used to be her agent. Says she was trouble, a boozer and a nympho.'
'Something else?' I said.
'Said she spent some time at Resthaven, getting a few of the kinks straightened out.'
I stayed perfectly still under my hat brim. Ohls and I were both silent. Ohls bore left at the V where Hollywood runs off of Sunset.
'We figure that's the Sternwood connection,' Ohls said. 'Pals, a little girl talk about their mutual hobby, 'call me, honey, when you get out,' she writes the number in a matchbook.'
'I suppose she was cured and discharged too,' I said.
'Surprise, surprise,' Ohls said.
'And you're not going to close him down?' I said.
'We're kind of hoping you'll find us something, Marlowe, help us do that.'
I felt something icy move in the pit of my stomach. Where was Carmen?
'Sure,' I said from under my hat brim. 'Glad to.'
CHAPTER 26
My building was empty and my office was dark. I sat alone in it nursing a drink, staring out the open window at the hot California night. Below me on the boulevard fast cars roared up and down The Strip, double-clutching sometimes to make the engines roar. The neon splashed its bright colors upward and across my office, making bright shifting patterns in the unlit room. Some of the patterns were bright red like blood splattering on my walls.
Everywhere I looked in this case there was Dr. Bonsentir, and lurking behind him, getting more sinister each time his shadow fell, was Randolph Simpson. Randolph Simpson, the man with the money, the man with the power,
