The Big Sleep: Chapter 30

I leaned back and hung an arm over the back of the chair. I studied his face. It told me nothing. I didn't know the answer to his question - no satisfactory answer.

I said: "I was convinced you put those Geiger notes up to me chiefly as a test, and that you were a little afraid Regan might somehow be involved in an attempt to blackmail you. I didn't know anything about Regan then. It wasn't until I talked to Captain Gregory that I realised Regan wasn't that sort of guy in all probability."

"That is scarcely answering my question."

I nodded. "No. That is scarcely answering your question. I guess I just don't like to admit that I played a hunch. The morning I was here, after I left you, Mrs Regan sent out for me. She seemed to assume I was hired to look for her husband and she didn't seem to like it. She let drop however that 'they' had found his car in a certain garage. The 'they' could only be the police. Consequently the police must know something about it. If they did, the Missing Persons Bureau would be the department that would have the case."

"I didn't know whether you had reported it, of course, or somebody else, or whether they had found the car through somebody reporting it abandoned in a garage. But I know cops, and I knew that if they got that much, they would get a little more - especially as your pilot happened to have a police record. I didn't know how much more they would get."

"That started me thinking about the Missing Persons Bureau. What convinced me was something in Mr Wilde's manner the night we had the conference over at his house about Geiger and so on. We were alone for a minute and he asked me whether you had told me you were looking for Regan. I said you had told me you wished you knew where he was and that he was all right. Wilde pulled his lip in and looked funny. I knew just as plainly as though he had said that by 'looking for Regan' he meant using the machinery of the law to look for him. Even then I tried to go up against Captain Gregory in such a way that I wouldn't tell him anything he didn't already know."

"And you allowed Captain Gregory to think I had employed you to find Regan?"

"Yeah. I guess I did - when I was sure he had the case."

He closed his eyes. They twitched a little. He spoke with them closed. "And do you consider that ethical?"

"Yes," I said. "I do."

The eyes opened again. The piercing blackness of them was startling coming suddenly out of that dead face. "Perhaps I don't understand."

"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 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 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-washing robot 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 in my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favour. 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 robot Norris seemed to think when Geiger was eliminated the case was over. I don't see it that way. 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 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 the things that they overlook if they overlook anything."

I paused again, shivering, the silence broken only by the wheezing hiss of the life-support machinery.

"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 it 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 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 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 million 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 his own life. I don't blame him for walking out on my daughter, or 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, relaxed in the gentle grip of the casket's systems, 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 judgements of character. Find him for me, Marlowe. Just find him."

"I'll try," I said. "You'd better rest now. I've talked your ass off."

I got up quickly and walked across the cluttered floor and out. He had his eyes shut again before I opened the inner lock door. His hands lay limp. He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. I shut the door quietly, opened the outer door and went back to the main house.

Part 2

Chapter 31: Shoot to Kill