'I got no argument with that,' I said.
They took down statements from us, and looked blank at the mention of Randolph Simpson, and told us to be available if they needed us. Then we went back to town and the San Berdoo boys went back to San Berdoo.
'Be very careful,' I said to Pauline Snow. 'This thing is bigger and uglier than any of us could have known.'
'I'm not in danger now,' she said. 'Too many people know what I know. No point to killing me. Hell, the San Bernardino DA knows it now.'
'True,' I said, 'but these are vicious people. And you're alone.'
She reached into a drawer in her desk and came out with an old frontier Colt.
'Not entirely,' she said.
***
I drove back to Los Angeles in the late afternoon with the sun in my eyes most of the way. To the north the mountains were sere and lifeless. As I drove through Pasadena I could see the Rose Bowl far down to my right. Ahead was the San Fernando Valley, green and precisely parceled. I knew Simpson had killed Lola Monforte. I didn't know it in ways that could be proved yet, but I knew it. I knew in the same way that Lola Monforte had been at Resthaven and been passed on to Simpson, just as, when he had tired of Lola, Carmen Sternwood had been passed on to Simpson. I was hoping that he hadn't tired of her yet. I knew Simpson and Bonsentir were partners in the Neville Valley water deal. Marlowe the super sleuth. Knows all, proves nothing.
I swung down on North Figueroa Street, through Highland Park, and on through Elysian Park onto Sunset, and west past hamburger stands and pink stucco places that sold hot dogs, and mortuaries made to look like mission churches, and fancy restaurants made to look like Greek temples or French country inns. Here and there a modest stucco house, or a shingle house, with a deep wide front porch, popped out among the rest of the junk and reminded me that people lived here too, not often, but just often enough to remind you of how it once was when Los Angeles was a comfortable sleepy place relaxing in the sun.
It was late in the day when I got to Hollywood and there was nothing left to do but go home and think about all the things I couldn't prove until I fell asleep. Which I did.
CHAPTER 29
I dreamed all night of a blood-red room and woke up in the morning feeling like I hadn't slept. The morning was barely brighter than the night had been. The heat was still oppressive and thunder made guttural sounds above me as I stared out my open window. In the Hollywood Hills to the north, lightning flickered, and I could feel the hard rain waiting behind the hills, out over the San Fernando Valley. Again the thunder, closer this time, and the shiver of hot lightning came more quickly behind it.
I went to the kitchen to make coffee and as I measured it into the filter the rain came like a heavy wind rushing down. I went to the open window but the rain was coming straight down in an unwavering cascade and there was no need to close the glass. Below me on Franklin Avenue the rain hitting the hot pavement made steam that hovered low over the street. Puddles were forming and the few people on foot on the street were running for cover, newspapers or purses held over their heads. The foliage was already greening, glistening darkly in the rain which hissed down from clouds that seemed piled just above the rooflines. I couldn't see the hills anymore. The rain was too dense and the sky too low, except when the lightning slashed, close now, nearly simultaneous with the thunder.
I had breakfast, put on a trench coat, and went to work. The temperature had dropped, probably thirty degrees, and the rain had settled into a steady downpour that promised to last the day and maybe more. At midmorning the headlights glowed on cars, and the lights in houses were on, showing bright through the windows in the general murk. I went west on Franklin, dropped down to Sunset on Highland, and took Laurel Canyon up to Mulholland, squinting as I went, through the rain that threatened to overmatch my wipers. The inside of my car was dense with humidity, but I didn't care. I had a plan. I couldn't get at Simpson, I couldn't prove he'd done anything illegal; though it's hard to get rich in this big wide wonderful country and not do something illegal. I didn't even know where Simpson was, inside which fortress, behind which wall. But I knew where Dr. Claude Bonsentir was, and I knew he was connected to Simpson and maybe if I watched Bonsentir long enough, the connection would show itself. Maybe he'd lead me to Simpson. Maybe Simpson would come to him. Maybe an MGM talent scout would see me sitting there and offer me a contract. It wasn't a hell of a plan, but it was the only one I could think of, and it was better then staying home and playing chess against myself from a book of problems.
I had to fight the car up Laurel Canyon, the road curved in a series of nearly hairpin turns as it rose up from the lowlands on the Hollywood side, and with the road slipperier than the pathway to damnation, and the traffic in the other direction crowding in to keep from sliding into the canyon, it was no drive for sissies.
I looped up over Mulholland Drive, carefully, and came back down Coldwater Canyon and parked on the road above Resthaven, partly shielded by a growth of azaleas, where I could look down at the sanitarium and watch. And watch. And take a nip from a pint of bonded rye I had in the glove compartment. And watch. And smoke a cigarette and take another nip of rye, and watch. And get my pipe loaded and burning just right and open my window a crack to let a little of the steam and smoke escape, and watch. That was the first day. The second day I did the same things. It still rained. I watched. They fought the Peloponnesian wars. They built the Acropolis, and the Roman forum, and I had another tap on the pint of rye and watched. In the afternoon things dragged. About midmorning on my third day of watching, the rain dwindled away and by noontime the sun had come out, but it was a gentle sun. The heat was gone, and the dripping landscape was being slowly dried by an easy breeze that moved in from the Pacific. My pint of rye was down to maybe an inch in the bottom of the bottle when Dr. Bonsentir came out of the front door of his sanitarium with the Mexican and the beachboy and went to a big black Cadillac that was parked there and got in the back. The Mexican got in the passenger's side in front and the beachboy got behind the wheel and off they went with me drifting along behind them. Tailing somebody alone is not easy, and if they are looking for a tail it's not really possible for long. But Bonsentir and friends seemed unconcerned and innocent as they headed down Coldwater and swung west on Sunset. I hung back two or three cars when I could and changed lanes frequently to put myself in different places in the rear-view mirror. If they made me they showed no sign of it. We went straight out Sunset past the mansions and the rolling lawns and the high ornamental fences. Past the lawn statuary and the private entrances with private security where movie stars and name directors hid behind the wealth their houses flaunted, and did the things that everyone does when they are alone and have no need for pretense.
We swung south along the coast highway through Bay City. The Pacific danced in toward us today. Scrubbed clean by the rain, it sparkled in the new sun and unrolled itself luxuriously on the clean white beach. Bay City loomed above us on the left, fresh washed after the recent rains but tawdry still in the way only beach towns can get tawdry, full of false promise with the paint peeling off it in the salt air. Ahead of me the Cadillac headed steadily south, and the beach towns slid by us. Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach. A little south of Redondo Beach, near Palos Verdes, we went off the highway at a slant and curved around some scrub cedar and beach growth toward the water. I dropped back and crept down behind them. As I came around the last curve I saw the Cadillac pull into a space on a concrete apron that fronted on a pier. There was a white painted shack on the pier. The pier itself
