The Big Sleep: Chapter 20

Captain Gregory and I looked at each other in some more heavy silence. The terminal flickered and beeped and Captain Gregory put a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his veined nose and browsed the pages in the file slowly. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers.

"He blew the 16th of September," he said. "The only thing important about that is it was the chauffeur's day off and nobody saw Regan take his car out. It was late afternoon, though. We found the car four days later in a garage belonging to a ritzy bungalow court near the Spinside Towers. A garage man reported it to the stolen car detail, said it didn't belong there. The place is called the Casa de Oro. There's an angle to that I'll tell you about in a minute. We couldn't find out anything about who put the car in there. We print the car but don't find any prints that are on file anywhere. The car in the garage don't jibe with foul play, although there's a reason to suspect foul play. It jibes with something else I'll tell you about in a minute."

I said: "That jibes with Eddie Mars's wife being on the missing list."

He looked annoyed. "Yeah. We investigate the tenants and find she's living there. Left about the time Regan did, within two days anyway. A guy who sounds a bit like Regan had been seen with her, but we don't get a positive identification. It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of her window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure."

"That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help," I said.

"Yeah. Eddie Mars and his wife didn't live together, but they were friendly, Eddie says. Here's some of the possibilities. First off Regan carried fifteen mill, packed it into his clothes all the time. Real money, they tell me. Not just a top card and a bunch of hay. That's a lot of jack but this Regan might be the boy to have it around so that he could take it out and look at it when somebody was looking at him. Then again maybe he wouldn't give a damn. His wife says he never made a dollar off old man Sternwood except room and board and a shiny car his wife gave him. Tie that for an ex-runner in the rich gravy."

"It beats me," I said.

"Well, here we are with a guy who ducks out and has fifteen mill in his pants and folks know it. Well, that's money. I might duck out myself, if I had fifteen mill, and me with two kids in high school. So the first thought is somebody rolls him for it and rolls him too hard, so they have to take him out of an airlock and plant him in gas-giant atmosphere. But I don't like that too well. Regan carried a gat and had plenty of experience using it, and not just in a greasy-faced gun-running mob. I understand he commanded a whole brigade in the Jovian troubles back in 2322 or whenever it was. A guy like that wouldn't be white meat to a heister. Then, his car being in that garage makes whoever rolled him know he was sweet on Eddie Mars's wife, which he was, I guess, but it ain't something every poolroom bum would know."

"Got a picture?" I asked.

"Him, not her. That's funny too. There's a lot of funny angles to this case. Here." He pushed a shiny printed hologram across the desk and I looked at a face that was more sad than merry and more reserved than brash. Not the face of a tough guy and not the face of a man who could be pushed around much by anybody. Straight dark brows with strong bone under them. A forehead wide rather than high, a mat of dark clustering hair, a thin short nose, a wide mouth. A chin that had strong lines but was small for the mouth. A face that looked a little taut, the face of a man who would move fast and play for keeps. I passed the print back. I would know that face, if I saw it.

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