We walked back to the truck. I put the saw and the scalpel behind the front seat and we went back out to the wagon ruts and headed east. In maybe twenty minutes we came to a paved highway.
'It's Simpson's,' Pauline said. 'Runs up and connects to the interstate. He had it built for him.'
'Anyone would,' I said.
We drove south on the highway for another fifteen minutes and there ahead of us rising from the desert was something from Scheherazade. Three stories with turret, made of stucco, surrounded by a high stone wall off of which the sun glittered.
'No moat?' I said.
'Maybe inside,' she said. 'I don't know.'
When we were close enough I could see the broken glass set in the top of it. There were the tops of trees showing above the walls, which meant there was water in there. The house and the walls were in a faded pink tone that probably looked rose in the hot desert sunset. Pauline parked a hundred yards or so away from the citadel and left the motor running. For the first time since I'd met her, including the trip down the mine-shaft, she looked frightened.
'Simpson doesn't welcome company,' I said.
'No.'
The complex of Simpson's desert retreat seemed to be the size of a medium city. Beyond the walls was a runway for, no doubt, Simpson's private plane. There was barbed wire around that, and around the cluster of outbuildings that gathered at the far end of the runway.
'It's best not to stay long,' Pauline said. She was unconsciously revving the truck motor as we sat.
'Hard to get in there,' I said.
'Hard? My God, Marlowe, it's impossible. You'd have to have an army.'
The walls were too high to see into the citadel. From where we were there was no sign of movement. But Carmen Sternwood was probably in there. Sucking her thumb, giggling, and maybe, now and again, for old times' sake, throwing a wingding.
For all I knew she liked it in there. For all I knew Randolph Simpson was her dream man. For all I knew he'd been Lola Monforte's dream man too.
'We got to get out of here, Marlowe,' Pauline said.
I said, 'Sure,' and she spun the truck in a gravel-spinning U-turn and headed back away from Simpson's bastion, faster than we'd come.
CHAPTER 28
We were back in Pauline Snow's office and I was on the phone with Bernie Ohls.
'That's San Bernardino County,' Ohls was saying. 'I'll get someone from the San Berdoo DA to go down and take a look.'
'And a blood sample?'
'Now there's an idea,' Ohls said. 'And we could even compare it to Lola Monforte's, see if they were the same type.'
'You're lucky to be dealing with a trained professional.'
'Come in and see me when you get back to Los Angeles,' Ohls said and hung up the phone.
'I left you out of it,' I said to Pauline Snow.
'I don't mind being in it.'
'You will if some of Simpson's boys stop by, or the Rancho Springs police force, which is probably saying the same thing.'
'I told you before, Marlowe. I'm too old and fat to be scared. Besides, they'll want to know how you found the mineshaft, and what I know about cops, they won't be satisfied with you not telling.'
'What I think is you should go stay with someone, away from here, until this is over.'
She shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'I'm in, and I'm here. For the duration.'
***
The someone from the San Berdoo DA's office turned out to be two plainclothes dicks and a technician type. We all trooped out to the shaft and the dicks talked to us while the technician meditated over the death scene. I gave them the saw and the scalpel and they told me that I shouldn't be tampering with evidence and I told them that I agreed. That it would have been better to leave them around and let someone take them away. And they said they didn't need a smart punk from Los Angeles to take care of evidence for them, and I said that it didn't matter where the smart punk came from as long as there was one, and we got along famously. One of the dicks was a big sandy-haired guy with freckles and humorous eyes who looked like he might have sampled a drink now and then.
'You going to coordinate with the Rancho Springs police?' I asked him.
He grinned and looked at his partner, a dark slender cop named Hernandez.
'We going to coordinate with Cecil, Manny?'
The dark cop shook his head. He didn't seem to have much to say, and his sandy-haired partner appeared to think he had to make up for that.
'Manny says no,' he said. 'Manny don't say, but probably thinks, that Cecil is some sort of cat vomit, and we don't coordinate parking violations with him, never mind maybe a homicide.'
