The eyes opened again. The piercing blackness of them was startling coming suddenly out of that dead face. 'Perhaps I don't understand,' he said.
'Maybe you don't. The head of a Missing Persons Bureau isn't a talker. He wouldn't be in that office if he was. This one is a very smart cagey guy who tries, with a lot of success at first, to give the impression he's a middle-aged hack fed up with his job. The game I play is not spillikins. There's always a large element of bluff connected with it. Whatever I might say to a cop, he would be apt to discount it. And to that cop it wouldn't make much difference what I said. When you hire a boy in my line of work it isn't like hiring a window-washer and showing him eight windows and saying: 'Wash those and you're through.' You don't know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor. The client comes first, unless he's crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut. After all you didn't tell me not to go to Captain Gregory.'
'That would have been rather difficult,' he said with a faint smile.
'Well, what have I done wrong? Your man Norris seemed to think when Geiger was eliminated the case was over. I don't see it that way. Geiger's method of approach puzzled me and still does. I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don't know much about cops. It's not things like that they overlook, if they overlook anything. I'm not saying they often overlook anything when they're really allowed to work. But if they do, it's apt to be something looser and vaguer, like a man of Geiger's type sending you his evidence of debt and asking you to pay like a gentleman — Geiger, a man in a shady racket, in a vulnerable position, protected by a racketeer and having at least some negative protection from some of the police. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to find out if there was anything putting pressure on you. If there was, you would pay him. If not, you would ignore him and wait for his next move. But there was something putting a pressure on you. Regan. You were afraid he was not what he had appeared to be, that he had stayed around and been nice to you just long enough to find out how to play games with your bank account.'
He started to say something but I interrupted him. 'Even at that it wasn't your money you cared about. It wasn't even your daughters. You've more or less written them off. It's that you're still too proud to be played for a sucker — and you really liked Regan.'
There was a silence. Then the General said quietly: 'You talk too damn much, Marlowe. Am I to understand you are still trying to solve that puzzle?'
'No. I've quit. I've been warned off. The boys think I play too rough. That's why I thought I should give you back your money — because it isn't a completed job by my standards.'
He smiled. 'Quit, nothing,' he said. 'I'll pay you another thousand dollars to find Rusty. He doesn't have to come back. I don't even have to know where he is. A man has a right to live his own life. I don't blame him for walking out on my daughter, nor even for going so abruptly. It was probably a sudden impulse. I want to know that he is all right wherever he is. I want to know it from him directly, and if he should happen to need money, I should want him to have that also. Am I clear?'
I said: 'Yes, General.'
He rested a little while, lax on the bed, his eyes closed and dark-lidded, his mouth tight and bloodless. He was used up. He was pretty nearly licked. He opened his eyes again and tried to grin at me.
'I guess I'm a sentimental old goat,' he said. 'And no soldier at all. I took a fancy to that boy. He seemed pretty clean to me. I must be a little too vain about my judgment of character. Find him for me, Marlowe. Just find him.'
'I'll try,' I said. 'You'd better rest now. I've talked your arm off.'
I got up quickly and walked across the wide floor and out. He had his eyes shut again before I opened the door. His hands lay limp on the sheet. He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. I shut the door quietly and went back along the upper hall and down the stairs.
31
The butler appeared with my hat. I put it on and said: 'What do you think of him?'
'He's not as weak as he looks, sir.'
'If he was, he'd be ready for burial. What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?'
The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. 'Youth, sir,' he said. 'And the soldier's eye.'
'Like yours,' I said.
'If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.'
'Thanks. How are the ladies this morning?'
He shrugged politely.
'Just what I thought,' I said, and he opened the door for me.
I stood outside on the step and looked down the vistas of grassed terraces and trimmed trees and flowerbeds to the tall metal railing at the bottom of the gardens. I saw Carmen about halfway down, sitting on a stone bench, with her head between her hands, looking forlorn and alone.
I went down the red brick steps that led from terrace to terrace. I was quite close before she heard me. She jumped up and whirled like a cat. She wore the light blue slacks she had worn the first time I saw her. Her blond hair was the same loose tawny wave. Her face was white. Red spots flared in her cheeks as she looked at me. Her eyes were slaty.
'Bored?' I said.
She smiled slowly, rather shyly, then nodded quickly. Then she whispered: 'You're not mad at me?'
'I thought you were mad at me.'
She put her thumb up and giggled. 'I'm not.' When she giggled I didn't like her any more. I looked around. A target hung on a tree about thirty feet away, with some darts sticking to it. There were three or four more on the stone bench where she had been sitting.
'For people with money you and your sister don't seem to have much fun,' I said.
She looked at me under her long lashes. This was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back. I said: 'You like throwing those darts?'
'Uh-huh.'
'That reminds me of something.' I looked back towards the house. By moving about three feet I made a tree hide me from it. I took her little pearl-handled gun out of my pocket. 'I brought you back your artillery. I cleaned it and loaded it up. Take my tip — don't shoot it at people, unless you get to be a better shot. Remember?'
Her face went paler and her thin thumb dropped. She looked at me, then at the gun I was holding. There was a fascination in her eyes. 'Yes,' she said, and nodded. Then suddenly: 'Teach me to shoot.'
'Huh?'
'Teach me how to shoot. I'd like that.'
'Here? It's against the law.'
She came close to me and took the gun out of my hand, cuddled her hand around the butt. Then she tucked it quickly inside her slacks, almost with a furtive movement, and looked around.
'I know where,' she said in a secret voice. 'Down by some of the old wells.' She pointed off down the hill. 'Teach me?'
I looked into her slaty blue eyes. I might as well have looked at a couple of bottle-tops. 'All right. Give me back the gun until I see if the place looks all right.'
She smiled and made a mouth, then handed it back with a secret naughty air, as if she was giving me a key to her room. We walked up the steps and around to my car. The gardens seemed deserted. The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter's smile. We got into the car and I drove down the sunken driveway and out through the gates.
'Where's Vivian?' I asked.
