The written part was in a sprawling moronic handwriting with a lot of fat curlicues and circles for dots.
I mixed myself another drink and sipped it and put the exhibit aside.
"Your conclusions?" the General asked.
"I haven't any yet.
Who is this Arthur Gwynn Geiger?"
"I haven't the faintest idea."
"What does Carmen say?"
"I haven't asked her.
I don't intend to.
If I did, she would suck her thumb and look coy." I said: "I met her in the hail. She did that to me.
Then she tried to sit in my lap."
Nothing changed in his expression.
His clasped hands rested peacefully on the edge of the rug, and the heat; which made me feel like a New England boiled dinner, didn't seem to make him even warm.
"Do I have to be polite?" I asked. "Or can I just be natural?"
"I haven't noticed that you suffer from many inhibitions, Mr. Marlowe."
"Do the two girls run around together?"
"I think not.
I think they go their separate and slightly divergent roads to perdition.
Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless.
Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies.
Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat.
Neither have I.
No Sternwood ever had.
Proceed."
"They're well educated, I suppose.
They know what they're doing."
"Vivian went to good schools of the snob type and to college.
Carmen went to half a dozen schools of greater and greater liberality, and ended up where she started.
I presume they both had, and still have, all the usual vices.
If I sound a little sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it is because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy." He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, then opened them again suddenly. "I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets."
I sipped my drink and nodded.
The pulse in his lean gray throat throbbed visibly and yet so slowly that it was hardly a pulse at all.
An old man two thirds dead and still determined to believe he could take it.
"Your conclusions?" he snapped suddenly.
"I'd pay him."
"Why?"
"It's a question of a little money against a lot of annoyance.
There has to be something behind it.
But nobody's going to break your heart, if it hasn't been done already.
And it would take an awful lot of chiselers an awful lot of time to rob you of enough so that you'd even notice it."
"I have pride, sir," he said coldly.
"Somebody's counting on that.
It's the easiest way to fool them.
That or the police.
Geiger can collect on these notes, unless you can show fraud.
Instead of that he makes you a present of them and admits they are gambling debts, which gives you a defense, even if he had kept the notes.
If he's a crook, he knows his onions, and if he's an honest man doing a little loan business on the side, he ought to have his money.
Who was this Joe Brody you paid the five thousand dollars to?"
"Some kind of gambler.
I hardly recall.