His eyes were heavy and motionless like his hand.
The bell tinkled and he reached for my card with his left hand. "Ohls?. . .
Al Gregory at headquarters.
A guy named Philip Marlowe is in my office.
His card says he's a private investigator.
He wants information from me. . . .
Yeah?
What does he look like? . . .
Okey, thanks."
He dropped the phone and took his pipe out of his mouth and tamped the tobacco with the brass cap of a heavy pencil.
He did it carefully and solemnly, as if that was as important as anything he would have to do that day.
He leaned back and stared at me some more.
"What you want?"
"An idea of what progress you're making, if any."
He thought that over.
"Regan?" he asked finally.
"Sure."
"Know him?"
"I never saw him.
I hear he's a good-looking Irishman in his late thirties, that he was once in the liquor racket, that he married General Sternwood's older daughter and that they didn't click.
I'm told he disappeared about a month back."
"Sternwood oughta think himself lucky instead of hiring private talent to beat around in the tall grass."
"The General took a big fancy to him.
Such things happen.
The old man is crippled and lonely.
Regan used to sit around with him and keep him company."
"What you think you can do that we can't do?"
"Nothing at all, in so far as finding Regan goes.
But there's a rather mysterious blackmail angle.
I want to make sure Regan isn't involved.
Knowing where he is or isn't might help."
"Brother, I'd like to help you, but I don't know where he is.
He pulled down the curtain and that's that."
"Pretty hard to do against your organization, isn't it, Captain?"
"Yeah — but it can be done — for a while."
He touched a bell button on the side of his desk.
A middle-aged woman put her head in at a side door. "Get me the file on Terence Regan, Abba."
The door closed.
Captain Gregory and I looked at each other in some more heavy silence.
The door opened again and the woman put a tabbed green file on his desk.
Captain Gregory nodded her out, put a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his veined nose and turned the papers in the file over slowly.
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers.
"He blew on the 16th of September," he said. "The only thing important about that is it was the chauffeur's day off and nobody saw Regan take his car out.
It was late afternoon, though.
We found the car four days later in a garage belonging to a ritzy bungalow court place near the Sunset Towers.
A garage man reported it to the stolen car detail, said it didn't belong there.
The place is called the Casa de Oro.
There's an angle to that I'll tell you about in a minute.
We couldn't find out anything about who put the car in there.
We print the car but don't find any prints that are on file anywhere.