I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole.
I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door.
I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged.
Whoever had done it had meant business.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
It wasn't the law.
They would have been there still, just about getting warmed up with their pieces of string and chalk and their cameras and dusting powders and their nickel cigars. They would have been very much there.
It wasn't the killer.
He had left too fast.
He must have seen the girl. He couldn't be sure she was too batty to see him.
He would be on his way to distant places.
I couldn't guess the answer, but it was all right with me if somebody wanted Geiger missing instead of just murdered.
It gave me a chance to find out if I could tell it leaving Carmen Sternwood out.
I locked up again, choked my car to life and rode off home to a shower, dry clothes and a late dinner.
After that I sat around in the apartment and drank too much hot toddy trying to crack the code in Geiger's blue indexed notebook.
All I could be sure of was that it was a list of names and addresses, probably of the customers.
There were over four hundred of them.
That made it a nice racket, not to mention any blackmail angles, and there were probably plenty of those.
Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer.
I didn't envy the police their job when it was handed to them.
I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.
9
The next morning was bright, clear and sunny.
I woke up with a motorman's glove in my mouth, drank two cups of coffee and went through the morning papers.
I didn't find any reference to Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger in either of them.
I was shaking the wrinkles out of my damp suit when the phone rang.
It was Bernie Ohls, the D.A.'s chief investigator, who had given me the lead to General Sternwood.
"Well, how's the boy?" he began. He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
"I've got a hangover," I said.
"Tsk, tsk." He laughed absently and then his voice became a shade too casual, a cagey cop voice. "Seen General Sternwood yet?"
"Uh-huh."
"Done anything for him?"
"Too much rain," I answered, if that was an answer.
"They seem to be a family things happen to.
A big Buick belonging to one of them is washing about in the surf off Lido fish pier."
I held the telephone tight enough to crack it. I also held my breath.
"Yeah," Ohls said cheerfully. "A nice new Buick sedan all messed up with sand and sea water . . .
Oh, I almost forgot.
There's a guy inside it." I let my breath out so slowly that it hung on my lip.
"Regan?" I asked.
"Huh?
Who?
Oh, you mean the ex-legger the eldest girl picked up and went and married.
I never saw him.
What would he be doing down there?"
"Quit stalling.
What would anybody be doing down there?"
"I don't know, pal.
I'm dropping down to look see.
Want to go along?"