"He had a police record."
She shrugged. She said negligently: "He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country." "I wouldn't go that far."
She peeled her right glove off and bit her index finger at the first joint, looking at me with steady eyes.
"I didn't come to see you about Owen.
Do you feel yet that you can tell me what my father wanted to see you about?"
"Not without his permission."
"Was it about Carmen?"
"I can't even say that." I finished filling a pipe and put a match to it.
She watched the smoke for a moment. Then her hand went into her open bag and came out with a thick white envelope. She tossed it across the desk.
"You'd better look at it anyway," she said.
I picked it up.
The address was typewritten to Mrs. Vivian Regan, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood.
Delivery had been by messenger service and the office stamp showed 8.35 a.m. as the time out.
I opened the envelope and drew out the shiny 4 1/4 by 3 1/4 photo that was all there was inside.
It was Carmen sitting in Geiger's high-backed teakwood chair on the dais, in her earrings and her birthday suit.
Her eyes looked even a little crazier than as I remembered them.
The back of the photo was blank.
I put it back in the envelope.
"How much do they want?" I asked.
"Five thousand — for the negative and the rest of the prints.
The deal has to be closed tonight, or they give the stuff to some scandal sheet."
"The demand came how?"
"A woman telephoned me, about half an hour after this thing was delivered."
"There's nothing in the scandal sheet angle.
Juries convict without leaving the box on that stuff nowadays.
What else is there?"
"Does there have to be something else?"
"Yes."
She stared at me, a little puzzled.
"There is.
The woman said there was a police jam connected with it and I'd better lay it on the line fast, or I'd be talking to my little sister through a wire screen."
"Better," I said. "What kind of jam?"
"I don't know."
"Where is Carmen now?"
"She's at home.
She was sick last night.
She's still in bed, I think."
"Did she go out last night?"
"No.
I was out, but the servants say she wasn't.
I was down at Las Olindas, playing roulette at Eddie Mars' Cypress Club.
I lost my shirt."
"So you like roulette.
You would."
She crossed her legs and lit another cigarette.
"Yes. I like roulette.
All Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life.
The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check."
"What was Owen doing last night with your car?"
"Nobody knows.