The Big Sleep: Chapter 30

I went down out of the City Hall and got my rickshaw from the parking lot and drove home. I lay down on the bed with my coat on and stared at the ceiling and listened to the traffic sounds on the street outside and watched the sunlight move slowly across a corner of the ceiling. I tried to go to sleep, but sleep didn't come. I got up and took a drink, although it was the wrong time of day, and lay down again. I still couldn't go to sleep. My brain ticked like an antique clock. I sat up on the side of the bed and stuffed a pipe and said out loud:

"That old buzzard knows something."

The pipe tasted as bitter as lye. I put it aside and lay down again. My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the same people, say the same words to them, over and over again, and yet each time it seemed real, like something actually happening, and for the first time.

I was driving hard along the highway through the rain, with Silver-Wig in the corner of the rickshaw, saying nothing, so that by the time we reached the city we seemed to be utter strangers again. I was getting out at an all-night drugstore and phoning Bernie Ohls that I had killed a man at Realito and was on my way over to Wilde's house with Eddie Mars's wife, who had seen me do it. The bot was pulling the rickshaw along the silent, rain-polished streets and up under the porte-cochere of Wilde's big frame house and the porch light was already on, Ohls having called ahead that I was coming. I was in Wilde's study and he was behind his desk in a flowered dressing-gown and a tight hard smile and a dappled cigar moved in his fingers and up to the bitter smile on his lips. Ohls was there and a slim grey scholarly man from the Sheriff's office who looked and talked more like a professor of economics than a cop.

I was telling the story and they were listening quietly and Silver-Wig sat in a shadow with her hands folded in her lap, looking at nobody. There was a lot of telephoning. There were two men from the Homicide Bureau who looked at me as if I was some kind of strange beast escaped from the circus. I was riding again in the rickshaw, with one of them beside me, to the Fudwider Building. We were in the room where Harry Jones was still in the chair behind the desk, the twisted stiffness of his dead face and the sour-sweet smell in the room. There was a medical examiner, very young and husky, with red bristles on his neck. There was a fingerprint man fussing around and I was telling him not to forget the latch of the transom. (He found Canino's thumb print on it, the only print the brown man had left to back up my story.)

I was back again at Wilde's house, signing a printed statement his robot secretary had run off in another room. Then the door opened and Eddie Mars came in and an abrupt smile flashed to his face when he saw Silver-Wig, and he said: "Hello, Sugar," and she didn't look at him or answer him. Eddie Mars fresh and cheerful, in a dark business suit, with the fringed white scarf hanging outside his tweed overcoat. Then they were gone, everybody was gone out of the room but myself and Wilde, and Wilde was saying in a cold, angry voice: "This is the last time, Marlowe. The next fast one you pull I'll throw you to the lions, no matter whose heart it breaks."

It was like that, over and over again, lying on the bed and watching the patch of artificial sunlight slide down the corner of the wall. Then the phone rang and it was Norris, the Sternwood's robot butler, with his usual untouchable voice.

"Mr Marlowe? I telephoned your office without success, so I took the liberty of trying to reach you at home."

"I was out most of the night," I said. "I haven't been down."

"Yes, sir. The General would like to see you this morning, Mr Marlowe, if it's convenient."

"Half an hour or so," I said. "How is he?"

"He's warmed up, sir, but not doing badly."

"Wait until he sees me," I said, and hung up.

I shaved, changed clothes and started for the door. Then I went back and got Carmen's little pearl-handled revolver and dropped it into my pocket. The sunlamps were so bright that it danced. I got to the Sternwood place in twenty minutes and drove up under the arch at the side door. It was eleven-fifteen. The birds in the ornamental trees were crazy with song after the rain, the terraced lawns were as green as the Martian flag, and the whole estate looked as if it had been terraformed into existence about ten minutes before. I rang the bell. It was five days since I had rung it for the first time. It felt like a year.

A robot servitor opened the door and led me along a side hall to the main hallway and left me there, saying that Norris would be along in a moment. The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantle had the same hot black eyes and the spaceman in the animated display still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked alien from the tree.

In a few minutes Norris appeared, and he hadn't changed either. His silver carapace was as polished as ever and he moved as if he had been recently and carefully serviced. I followed him out of the french doors and along the smooth red-flagged path to the icehouse. We reached the outer lock door and Norris opened and shut it around me, and did the same for the inner door. Then he stood aside and I picked my way over the trailing cables and past the hulking cryogenic machines to the ancient deep-sleep casket.

General Sternwood was propped up on pillows. His bloodless hands were clasped on top of the cover. They looked grey against it. His black eyes were still full of fight and the rest of his face still looked like the face of a corpse. "Sit down, Mr Marlowe." His voice sounded weary and a little stiff.

I pulled a chair close to him and sat down. I ignored the cold seeping through my clothing. He stared at me silently for a long minute. He moved a hand, as if to prove to himself that he could still move it without the direct intervention of the medical machinery, then folded it back over the other. He said lifelessly:

"I didn't ask you to look for my son-in-law, Mr Marlowe."

"You wanted me to, though."

"I didn't ask you to. You assume a great deal. I usually ask for what I want."

I didn't say anything.

"You have been paid," he went on coldly. "The money is of no consequence one way or the other. I merely feel that you have, no doubt unintentionally, betrayed a trust."

He closed his eyes on that. I said: "Is that all you wanted to see me about?"

He opened his eyes again, very slowly, as if the lids were made of uranium. "I suppose you are angry at that remark," he said.

I shook my head. "You have an advantage over me, General. It's an advantage I wouldn't want to take away from you, not a hair of it. It's not much, considering what you have to put up with. You can say anything you like to me and I wouldn't think of getting angry. I'd like to offer you your money back. It may mean nothing to you. It might mean something to me."

"What does it mean to you?"

"It means I have refused payment for an unsatisfactory job. That's all."

"Do you do many unsatisfactory jobs?"

"A few. Everybody does."

Part 1

Part 3