CHAPTER 14

    

    Taggert Wilde, the DA for whom I had once worked, was a plump man with clear blue eyes that managed to look at the same time friendly and expressionless. He was from an old Los Angeles family and had been DA for quite some time now. Ohls and I sat in his office while Wilde lit a thin, dappled cigar and got his feet in just the right position on the pulled-out lower drawer of his massive oak desk. On the walls around the office were muted paintings of serious-looking men in suits. Probably Wilde's predecessors in office, though they might have been his relatives.

    "Doesn't mean that Bonsentir is untouchable, Bernie," Wilde said. "There are ways of handling things. But it does mean you can't go up there and roust him whenever you feel like it. None of this should surprise you."

    "It doesn't surprise me," Ohls said calmly. "But I don't have to like it."

    "No, you don't," Wilde said. "Hell, Bernie, I don't like it all that terribly much either. But it's a big rough wide open country, and it's the way cities are run these days."

    "Who supplies the juice?" I said.

    Wilde shook his head.

    "You know better, Marlowe," he said. "It's not that simple."

    "What do you know about Randolph Simpson?" I said.

    Wilde's face got very still. "What about Randolph Simpson?" he said.

    "Mrs. Swayze, who's now supposed to have been discharged, told me that Carmen was with him," I said. "Vivian told me she knew him. I went up there and couldn't get in. Every time I mention his name the people I mention his name to get the same look you've got."

    Wilde took his cigar out and looked at the tip and put it back in his mouth. He clasped both hands back of his head and looked up at the ceiling, balancing his spring swivel chair with one oxford shoe tip on the desk drawer, his other leg crossed over it. He allowed himself to teeter back and forth like that.

    "Randolph Simpson is Bonsentir's clout," Wilde said finally.

    "I knew that," I said. "He lives in some kind of castle up in the Santa Monica Mountains."

    Wilde nodded slowly, still gazing up at the ceiling.

    "It doesn't make any sense to say that Simpson is rich," Wilde said. "It's a meaningless phrase when you're talking about a man like Simpson. He has more wealth than many countries. He has resources that go with having that kind of money. He can literally buy anything."

    "And has," I said.

    "I'm an elected official, Marlowe. I try to do the job as decently as I'm permitted. But I am also part of a larger government and social entity, and as such am not an entirely free agent."

    "Sure," I said.

    "When you worked here you couldn't tolerate that," Wilde went on. "I understand that and I can respect it. But if the community is to function there must also be people who can tolerate working inside a system, however compromised."

    "Do I salute?" I said. "Maybe stand at attention and sing 'Yankee Doodle'?"

    Wilde's feet came off the desk drawer and his chair snapped forward and his eyes came level with mine.

    "No," he snapped, "but you might sit still and listen and learn whatever there is to learn about Simpson. Lieutenant Ohls is bound by many of the constraints that bind me. But you are not."

    I sat back in my chair and got out a cigarette and got it burning. Ohls grinned at me.

    "Randolph Simpson inherited an unspeakable fortune when he was twenty-one," Wilde said. "Oil mostly, which is how he knows the Sternwoods, and some manufacturing. He tripled it in ten years and doubled that in the next five years. He plays golf regularly with the speaker of the California State Assembly. He is a close associate of both the governor of this state and the mayor of this city. His cousin is the senior senator from California, and the president of the United States comes several times a year and spends time with him at a place Simpson has in the desert. He contributes heavily and often to all of these people's election campaigns and those of a hundred aldermen and assemblymen and ward heelers of all levels that you and I may never have heard of but who turn the cranks that move things in this city."

    Wilde inhaled a little smoke, savored it, let it out slowly in a thin blue stream and looked appreciatively at it as it hung in the close air of his office. Outside his window the evening was beginning to settle. Wilde continued.

    "There have been a couple of marriages that didn't work out, which he settled with money, the way he settles everything else. One of the wives filed a complaint against him alleging abusive treatment, but it never went anywhere. Whether she was bought off or scared off or Simpson simply had it squelched, I don't know. Probably all three. There was a squabble in a restaurant in Bay City a few years back when some tourist tried to take his picture and a couple of Simpson's bodyguards got rough. But nothing came of that. I have heard it said that he has peculiar sexual preferences and that some of them tend to break the rules. But no one's ever gotten near to charging him with anything, let alone getting him into court."

    "What kind of sexual preferences?" I said.

    Wilde took another satisfied puff on his cigar. He eased the smoke out carefully. He held the cigar out and looked at it as if to reassure himself that it was as good as it smoked. Then he said, "Sadomasochistic."

    "Sounds to me like he'd suit little Carmen just fine," Ohls said.

    "Fine," I said.

    "He is a very dangerous man, Marlowe," Wilde said. "We can't help you unless you have evidence so unimpeachable that he can't buy it off or scare it off or cover it up or bury it."

    "Or you," Ohls said.

    "Stop trying to cheer me up, Bernie," I said.

    "You can't go up against him alone," Wilde said. "And neither Lieutenant Ohls nor I can help you until you have incontrovertible evidence against him of whatever he may have done."

    "It sounds to me like you want me to nail this guy for you," I said.

    Wilde smiled without speaking. I looked at Ohls. He had shaken one of his little cigars loose from the tin in which they came and was about to light up.

    "Anyone say something like that, peeper?" Ohls said. "I didn't hear anything like that said. What you got from us is permission to go ahead and look for the girl, like you was hired to do."

    "I don't need your permission," I said.

    "So, good," Ohls said. "So whyn't you get the hell out of here and start looking?"

    I stood up.

    "You guys are a scream," I said. "Thanks for nothing at all."

    "Go carefully, Marlowe," Wilde said.

    "Sure thing," I said.

    Ohls grinned humorlessly at me past his toy cigar.

    "Call anytime, peeper," he said.

    I turned and left Wilde's office and went downstairs and caught a cab home.