Read Online Perchance to Dream by Robert B. Parker - Free Book Online Page B

could be important, and it could be that turning me away without checking would get him in trouble. Maybe Carmen Sternwood was important. He made up his mind.
        "Wait here, please," he said, and went back into the little guard castle.
        He was gone maybe five minutes and when he came out another guard came with him. The other guard was dressed the same, including the sunglasses, but he was nearly bald and what hair he had left he'd plastered in wispy strips across the otherwise hairless skin of his head.
        "Step out of the car, please," the first guard said. "Place your hands on the roof."
        I did and the bald guard patted me down and took my gun from under my left arm.
        "Calling card?" he said.
        "You never know," I said. "I've heard they have jack-rabbits up here as big as bears. There's ID in my wallet."
        I was getting to that," the bald guard said.
        He looked at the photostat of my license in the glassine window of my wallet.
        "Private creeper," he said to his partner, "outta Hollywood."
        His partner nodded, looked at the wallet and passed it back to me.
        "Follow the drive," he said. "Don't stop the car. Don't get out. Somebody will meet you at the front door." He dropped my gun in the side pocket of his dark suit coat.
        "We'll hold the rod till you come down," he said. "So you don't hurt yourself."
        I got back in my car and cranked the starter. The big gates swung slowly back and I drove slowly through them. Inside it was greener and brighter than a movie star's dreams. There were fountains and flowers in profusion and the grass under the steady arc of the sprinklers gleamed like the top of a pool table under the unwavering southern California sun. The drive was done in some kind of crushed shell, and curved, white and still, through the intense landscape until it reached the main building. The place looked like a Moorish fortress in a pale gray stucco with turrets on the corners and gunports every few feet across the top.
        Another guy in a dark suit and hard face opened the door for me and turned me over to a Chinese houseman who led me through a series of darkly paneled rooms to a long room with a gas fire in the oversized, tile-inlaid fireplace. In a huge oak chair with elaborately carved arms a woman sat, with her hands folded in her lap. She had steel-gray hair, and eyes to match.
        "I'm Jean Rudnick," she said. "Kindly tell me the purpose of your visit."
        She was wearing a mannish gray suit with a pinstripe, and a white shirt and a little gray and white striped tie. Her nails were painted lavender, and her gold-rimmed glasses enlarged her eyes so that they dominated her face.
        "My name is Philip Marlowe," I said. "I'm a private detective and I've been hired to find Carmen Sternwood, who is missing from a sanitarium in Beverly Hills."
        "And why do you wish to see Mr. Simpson?" she said.
        "I have information that Carmen's here."
        "From whom?"
        I shook my head. "Sorry," I said.
        "Mr. Marlowe," she said and her voice was full of the tiredness and superiority that people's voices get full of when they have too much power and wield it much too often, "I don't know if you know who I am, but I am Mr. Simpson's personal assistant and if someone is making ludicrous charges involving some girl and Mr. Simpson, then I must insist on knowing who that person is."
        "How'd you know Carmen is a girl?" I said.
        "I beg your pardon?"
        "You said charges involving Mr. Simpson and some girl. Why do you think it's a girl? There's lots of men named Carmen. Carmen Lombardo, Carmen Cavallaro, Carmen…"
        "Mr. Marlowe, please, I have no time for cheap parlor games."
        "Then don't play them with me, Miss Rudnick."
        "Mrs."
        "My congratulations to Mr.," I said.
        "Mr. Rudnick is deceased," she said. "Are you actually