The Big Sleep: Chapter 23

We sipped our loaded coffee. I looked at Vivian's face in the mirror back of the coffee urn. It was taut, pale, beautiful and wild. Her lips were red and harsh.

"You have wicked eyes," I said. "What's Eddie Mars got on you?"

She looked at me in the mirror. "I took plenty away from him tonight at roulette, starting with five mill I borrowed from him yesterday and didn't have to use."

"That might make him sore. You think he sent that loogan after you?"

"What's a loogan?"

"A guy with a gun."

"Are you a loogan?"

"Sure," I laughed. "But strictly speaking a loogan is on the wrong side of the fence."

"I often wonder if there is a wrong side."

"We're losing the subject. What has Eddie Mars got on you?"

"You mean a hold on me of some sort?"

"Yes."

Her lip curled. "Wittier, please, Marlowe. Much wittier."

"How's the General? I don't pretend to be witty."

"None too well. He didn't get warmed up today. You could at least stop questioning me."

"I remember a time when I thought the same about you. How much does the General know?"

"He probably knows everything."

"Norris would tell him?"

"No, Wilde, the Habitat Attorney, was out to see him. Did you destroy those pictures?"

"Sure. You worry about your little sister, don't you - from time to time."

"I think she's all I do worry about. I worry about Dad in a way, to keep things from him."

"He hasn't many illusions," I said, "but I suppose he still has pride."

"We're his blood. That's the hell of it." She stared at me in the mirror with deep, distant eyes. "I don't want him to die despising his own blood. It was always wild blood, but it wasn't always rotten blood."

"Is it now?"

"I guess you think so."

"Not yours. You're just playing the part."

She looked down. I sipped some more coffee and lit another cigarette for us. "So you shoot people," she said quietly, "You're a killer."

"Me? How?"

"The news reports and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read."

"Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody - or both of them?"

She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said, "I might have, I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at me."

"That makes you just a killer at heart, like all cops."

"Oh, nuts."

"One of those dark deadly quiet men who have no more feelings than a butcher has for slaughtered meat. I knew it the first time I saw you."

"You've got enough shady friends to know different."

"They're all soft compared with you."

"Thanks lady. You're no sweet muffin yourself."

"Let's get out of this rotten little place."

I paid the check, put the bottle of rye in my pocket, and we left. The clerk still didn't like me.

We drove away through a series of little dank suburbs that backed up on the foundations of the dome. A yellow window shone here and there but most of the houses were dark. The tyres sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard, offset by the slap of the robot's feet. The world was a wet emptiness.

We were close to a major stanchion before she spoke to me for the first time since we left the drugstore. Her voice had a muffled sound, as if something was throbbing deep underneath it.

"Drive down by the column. I want to look at the stars. It's the next street on the right."

I nodded to the bot and we slid up a slope with a high bluff on one side. That way the fog was almost gone. There was a paved strip of highway that bordered the Plexiglas of the dome. Cars were parked along the pavement, facing out of the habitat, dark.

The rickshaw braked against the kerb and the bot turned itself off with a click.

Part 2

Part 4