It isn't so silly, really.
He had another motive.
He was playing for a million or so.
He knew where Regan had gone and why and he didn't want the police to have to find out.
He wanted them to have an explanation of the disappearance that would keep them satisfied.
Am I boring you?" "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 gave her a cigarette and lit a match and held it for her.
She drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out raggedly and then the cigarette seemed to be forgotten between her fingers.
She never drew on it again.
"Well, the Missing Persons Bureau can't find him," I said. "It's not so easy.
What they can't do it's not likely that I can do."
"Oh." There was a shade of relief in her voice.
"That's one reason. The Missing Persons people think he just disappeared on purpose, pulled down the curtain, as they call it.
They don't think Eddie Mars did away with him."
"Who said anybody did away with him?"
"We're coming to it," I said.
For a brief instant her face seemed to come to pieces, to become merely a set of features without form or control. Her mouth looked like the prelude to a scream.
But only for an instant.
The Sternwood blood had to be good for something more than her black eyes and her recklessness.
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.