CHAPTER 21

    

    The Rancho Springs Development Corp. was on the second floor over a gas station in a pale beige stucco building with the rounded shape of the Spanish Southwest that everyone south of Oregon thought was authentic native Californian. The building was on the main street in Rancho Springs next to a place that sold tacos and across the street from a general store where three desert rats in bib overalls sat out front in the thick heat and rocked and spat occasionally out onto the street. A big yellow tomcat with a torn ear sprawled on the bottom stair leading up to the Rancho Springs Development oflBce and I had to step over him when I went up.

    Inside at the only desk in the place was a young woman with a bad sunburn. It was bad enough so that she moved a little stiffly as she turned toward me when I came in. The desk at which she sat and the chair on which she was sitting was all there was in the office for furniture. On the floor beside the desk was a cardboard carton and in the carton were a number of manila file folders. On the desk was a phone. That was it, there was nothing on the walls, no curtains on the windows. The room was as charming as a heap of coffee grounds.

    I took off my sunglasses and smiled at the young woman. Her nose was peeling, and her pale hair was dry and bleached looking. She wore a flimsy white blouse with short sleeves and her thin arms were bright red.

    "Dr. Bonsentir around?" I said.

    She looked blank. She also looked pained and bored and tighter than a Methodist deacon.

    "Who?"

    "Dr. Claude Bonsentir," I said. "I was hoping to find him here."

    "Never heard of him," she said.

    She was chewing gum and her jaws moved slowly and with iron regularity on it. Occasionally she would open her mouth to stretch some of the gum into a thin grayish membrane with her tongue. Then her lips would close and the gum would disappear.

    "This is Rancho Springs Development Corporation?" I said.

    "Ann huh." She was busy with the gum.

    "What exactly is it you develop?"

    She tucked the gum away into some corner of her mouth and looked at me as if I had wriggled up from the kitchen drain.

    "Listen, Jack," she said, "they hire me to sit here and answer the phone and take messages and if they want something typed I type it. You want to leave a message?"

    "Who're 'they'?"

    "Guys that run this place. Vinnie and Chuck."

    "Vinnie and Chuck who?" I said.

    She shook her head.

    "You wanna leave a message?" she said.

    "When you see Vinnie and Chuck," I said.

    She got out a little note pad and a pencil.

    "Yeah?" she said.

    "Give them a big kiss for me," I said, and turned and went back out and down the stairs and over the cat and into the main street. The main street was maybe 100 yards long and didn't need to be, it only supported about six buildings. Between the buildings were vacant lots, mostly sand and a few weeds and here and there tumbleweed resting still in the windless heat.

    I strolled down toward a gray, weathered clapboard building where a sign out front read rancho springs gazette and chronicle. It was a single-storied storefront with a wide front window and a screen door. Inside was a counter running across the room. Behind it was a printing press and two desks.

    A big woman in a man's white shirt and gabardine slacks smiled easily at me when I came in. She wore her white hair short, and her face had the dark-tanned look of a desert person who spends a lot of time outdoors. She seemed in excellent health and fine spirits.

    "Hello, stranger," she said. "Come to place an ad? Report something interesting? Either case this is the spot for it."

    "Information," I said.

    "Got that too," she said. "Name's Pauline Snow. Only thing in this godforsaken wasteland ain't hot is my name."

    "Marlowe," I said. Guile hadn't done anything for me. I decided to try truth. "I'm a private detective from Los Angeles working on a case, and the name of the Rancho Springs Development Corporation has popped up in it."

    Pauline Snow said "Humph," with a lot of feeling.

    "I've been to the office and talked with the young woman who works there. I would have done better to talk with the cat, which doesn't chew gum."

    "Rita," Pauline Snow said with as much feeling as she'd said humph.

    "Yes," I said, "that's what I thought."

    "Rancho Springs Development Corporation is a fancy name for a back-shanty operation in which two bozos come in and start buying up any land they can get," she said. "You got a cigarette?"

    I got the pack out and gave it to her, she shook one loose, put it in her mouth, gave me back the pack. I held a match for her. She took a long inhale and let the smoke out in two streams through her nostrils. She looked me over.

    "Private eye, is it?"

    I nodded modestly.

    "Well, you got the build for it, I'll give you that."

    "Why are they buying up land?" I said. "Is there something about Rancho Springs Fm missing?"

    "Only thirty miles," she said, "east of Pasadena."

    "Perfect for fans of the Rose Parade," I said. "Anything else?"

    "I don't know, Marlowe. It doesn't make any sense at all. This is hardscrabble dry land. No farming, no industry, damned little of anything. A few people still prospect out here, and a few damn fools like me and my husband come out here thinking about clean air and freedom. Then the son of a bitch up and died on me and left me to run this paper myself for the last seven years."

    "Thoughtless," I said. "Maybe Vinnie and Chuck know something we don't."

    "Vincent Tartabull and Charles Gardenia. They belter for their sake, because right now they're holding a passel of the most worthless acreage God ever made."

    "They local people?" I said.

    "Hell no," Pauline Snow said. "They come in here about six months ago and rented that hole up over the gas station, which is pretty much a damn hole itself if you think about it, and hired that idiot Rita. And started buying land. Easy enough to do, nobody wants it, everybody's happy as hell to sell and get out. Most folks are here 'cause they can't sell."

    "Know where they came from?" "Los Angeles," she said.

    "How do you know?"

    "I used to be a reporter, Mr. Marlowe, for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now Imjust a fat old babe with no husband who runs a hicktown weekly in East Overshoe. But I haven't forgotten everything I used to know."

    "I get the feeling, Mrs. Snow, that you haven't forgotten anything you used to know, and that you used to know a lot."

    "You know how to make a girl feel right, Marlowe. You surely do."

    "Anything else you can tell me about these guys?"

    She shook her head. "Been trying to figure out their angle for a while," she said, "but I can't. It just doesn't make any sense."

    "Know anybody named Bonsentir, Dr. Claude Bonsentir?"

    "Sure. He's one of the names on the incorporation papers in the secretary of state's office."

    I grinned at her. And nodded my head in mock homage.

    "Happen to know his sock size?" I said. "Any identifying marks?"

    "I'm not that good, Marlowe. I looked up the incorporation papers, like you probably did. Don't know more than that. They didn't tell me anything useful."

    "No. They wouldn't. But I'm going to tell you something useful," I said. "There's some sort of connection between this outfit, the Rancho Springs Development Corp., and an outfit up in Neville Valley, called the Neville Valley Realty Trust."

    "Neville Valley," she said. "Is that up north a ways, in the Mountains?"

    "Yeah, about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevadas," I said. "And you know what they're doing?"

    "How the hell would I know that?" she said.

    "It was a rhetorical question, Mrs. Snow. They're buying up water rights."

    She stared at me and opened her mouth and closed it and went and got a rolled-up map of California out of one of the file drawers near the printing press.

    She unrolled it and spread it out on a desk top and bent over it, resting her hands on the desk, her head hanging as she pored over the map. After a few minutes she began to nod her head silently and kept nodding it as she rolled the map back up and put it away. When she returned to the counter she was still nodding.

    "Gimme another smoke," she said.

    I did. And a light. When she had her cigarette going and a lungful of smoke expelled she bent down behind the counter and rummaged around for a moment and came out with a bottle of rye whiskey and two glasses.

    "We need to drink a little whiskey, I think, while we think about this."

    I took the inch and a half she poured in one neat swallow.

    So did she. She exhaled happily once and then poured two more drinks.

    "You think they're going to run that water down from Neville Valley to here and make all that cheap desert land they bought worth a fortune?"

    "They might," I said.

    "Wouldn't that be something," she said.

    "Problem is," I said, "the government's running some kind of land-reclamation project up there designed to do the same for Neville Valley."

    "And you figure somebody's trying to steal it. The water."

    "I don't know," I said. "I'm just trying to find one young woman, and everywhere I look things are peculiar and the case gets bigger and bigger."

    "Well, maybe I can do some poking around at this end," she said. "You got someplace I can reach you?"

    I gave her my card. She looked at the address. "Hollywood, isn't it?"

    "Sure," I said. "Gumshoe to the stars."

    "You know," she said, "what's funny. If we find out that everything is not, ah, kosher, in this deal. I mean, who the hell do you report a stolen river to?"

    I drank the rest of my second drink and dried my mouth on the back of my first knuckle.

    "Me, I guess," I said.