Роберт Паркер - Perchance to Dream

The gentle-eyed, horsefaced maid let me into the long gray and white upstairs sitting room with the ivory drapes tumbled extravagantly on the floor and the white carpet from wall to wall. A screen star’s boudoir, a place of charm and seduction, artificial as a wooden leg. It was empty at the moment. The door closed behind me with the unnatural softness of a hospital door. A breakfast table on wheels stood by the chaise lounge. Its silver glittered. There were cigarette ashes in the coffee cup. I sat down and waited. It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

She went past me in long smooth strides and sat down on the edge of the chaise longue. There was a cigarette in her lips at the corner of her mouth. Her nails were copper red from quick to tip, without half-moons.

“So you’re just a brute after all,” she said quietly, staring at me. “An utter callous brute. You killed a man last night. Never mind how I heard it. I heard it. And now you have to come out here and frighten my kid sister into a fit.”

I didn’t say a word. She began to fidget. She moved over to a slipper chair, put her head back against a white cushion that lay along the back of the chair against the wall. She blew pale gray smoke upward and watched it float toward the ceiling and come apart in wisps that were for a little while distinguishable from the air and then melted and were nothing. Then very slowly she lowered her eyes and gave me a cool hard glance.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I’m thankful as hell one of us kept his head the night before last It’s bad enough to have a bootlegger in my past Why don’t you for Christ’s sake say something?”

“How is she?”

“Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. Fast asleep. She always goes to sleep. What did you do to her?”

“Not a thing. I came out of the house after seeing your father and she was out in front. She had been throwing darts at a target on a tree. I went down to speak to her because I had something that belonged to her. A little revolver Owen Taylor gave her once. She took it over to Brody’s place the other evening, the evening he was killed. I had to take it away from her there. I didn’t mention it, so perhaps you didn’t know it.”

The black Sternwood eyes got large and empty. It was her turn not to say anything.

“She was pleased to get her little gun back and she wanted me to teach her how to shoot and she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money. So we went down there and the place was pretty creepy, all rusted metal and old wood and silent wells and greasy scummy sumps. Maybe that upset her. I guess you’ve been there yourself. It was kind of eerie.”

“Yes — it is.” It was a small breathless voice now.

“So we went in there and I stuck a can up in a bull wheel for her to pop at. She threw a wingding. Looked like a mild epileptic fit to me.”

“Yes.” The same minute voice. “She has them once in a while. Is that all you wanted to see me about?”

“I guess you still wouldn’t tell me what Eddie Mars has on you.”

“Nothing at all. And I’m getting a little tired of that question,” she said coldly.

“Do you know a man named Canino?”

She drew her fine black brows together in thought. “Vaguely. I seem to remember the name.”

“Eddie Mars’ triggerman. A tough hombre, they said. I guess he was. Without a little help from a lady I’d be where he is — in the morgue.”

“The ladies seem to—” She stopped dead and whitened. “I can’t joke about it,” she said simply.

“I’m not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it just seems that way. It all ties together — everything. Geiger and his cute little blackmail tricks, Brody and his pictures, Eddie Mars and his roulette tables, Canino and the girl Rusty Regan didn’t run away with. It all ties together...”

“You tire me,” she said in a dead exhausted voice. “God, how you tire me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not just fooling around trying to be clever. Your father offered me a thousand dollars this morning to find Regan. That’s a lot of money to me, but I can’t do it.”

Her mouth jumped open. Her breath was suddenly strained and harsh.

“Give me a cigarette,” she said thickly. “Why?” The pulse in her throat had begun to throb...

I stood up and took the smoking cigarette from between her fingers and killed it in an ashtray. Then I took Carmen’s little gun out of my pocket and laid it carefully, with exaggerated care, on her white satin knee. I balanced it there, and stepped back with my head on one side like a window-dresser getting the effect of a new twist of a scarf around a dummy’s neck.

I sat down again. She didn’t move. Her eyes came down millimeter by millimeter and looked at the gun.

“It’s harmless,” I said. “All five chambers empty. She fired them all She fired them all at me.”

The pulse jumped wildly in her throat Her voice tried to say something and couldn’t. She swallowed.

“From a distance of five or six feet,” I said. “Cute little thing isn’t she? Too bad I had loaded the gun with blanks.” I grinned nastily. “I had a hunch about what she would do — if she got the chance.”

She brought her voice back from a long way off. “You’re a horrible man,” she said. “Horrible.”

“Yeah. You’re her big sister. What are you going to do about it?”

“You can’t prove a word of it.”

“Can’t prove what?”

“That she fired at you. You said you were down there around the wells with her alone. You can’t prove a word of what you say.”

“Oh that,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of trying. I was thinking of another time — when the shells in the little gun had bullets in them.”

Her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness.

“I was thinking of the day Regan disappeared,” I said. “Late in the afternoon. When he took her down to those old wells to teach her to shoot and put up a can somewhere and told her to pop at it and stood near her while she shot. And she didn’t shoot at the can. She turned the gun and shot him, just the way she tried to shoot me today, and for the same reason.”

She moved a little and the gun slid off her knee and fell to the floor. It was one of the loudest sounds I have ever heard. Her eyes were riveted on my face. Her voice was a stretched whisper of agony. “Carmen! — Merciful God, Carmen! — Why?”

“Do I really have to tell you why she shot at me?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were still terrible. “I’m... I’m afraid you do.”

“Night before last when I got home she was in my apartment. She’d kidded the manager into letting her in to wait for me. She was in my bed — naked. I threw her out on her ear. I guess maybe Regan did the same thing to her sometime. But you can’t do that to Carmen.”

She drew her lips back and made a halfhearted attempt to lick them.

It made her, for a brief instant, look like a frightened child. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up slowly like an artificial hand worked by wires and its fingers closed slowly and stiffly around the white fur at her collar. They drew the fur tight against her throat. After that she just sat staring.