The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler Read Free Book Online Page B

he was or what he had come for.
    Ohls said: “There’s your customer, Doc. Dove off the pier last night. Around nine to ten. That’s all we know.”
    The small man looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, peered at the bruise on the temple, moved the head around with both hands, felt the man’s ribs. He lifted a lax dead hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall and watched it fall. He stepped back and opened his bag and took out a printed pad of D.O.A. forms and began to write over a carbon.
    “Broken neck’s the apparent cause of death,” he said, writing. “Which means there won’t be much water in him. Which means he’s due to start getting stiff pretty quick now he’s out in the air. Better get him out of the car before he does. You won’t like doing it after.”
    Ohls nodded. “How long dead, Doc?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    Ohls looked at him sharply and took the little cigar out of his mouth and looked at that sharply. “Pleased to know you, Doc. A coroner’s man that can’t guess within five minutes has me beat.”
    The little man grinned sourly and put his pad in his bag and clipped his pencil back on his vest. “If he ate dinner last night, I’ll tell you—if I know what time he ate it. But not within five minutes.”
    “How would he get that bruise—falling?”
    The little man looked at the bruise again. “I don’t think so. That blow came from something covered. And it had already bled subcutaneously while he was alive.”
    “Blackjack, huh?”
    “Very likely.”
    The little M.E.’s man nodded, picked his bag off the deck and went back up the steps to the pier. An ambulance was backing into position outside the stucco arch. Ohls looked at me and said: “Let’s go. Hardly worth the ride, was it?”
    We went back along the pier and got into Ohls’ sedan again. He wrestled it around on the highway and drove back towards town along a three-lane highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with pink moss. Seaward a few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf and far out a white yacht looked as if it was hanging in the sky.
    Ohls cocked his chin at me and said: “Know him?”
    “Sure. The Sternwood chauffeur. I saw him dusting that very car out there yesterday.”
    “I don’t want to crowd you, Marlowe. Just tell me, did the job have anything to do with him?”
    “No. I don’t even know his name.”
    “Owen Taylor. How do I know? Funny about that. About a year or so back we had him in the cooler on a Mann Act rap. It seems he run Sternwood’s hotcha daughter, the young one, off to Yuma. The sister ran after them and brought them back and had Owen heaved into the icebox. Then next day she comes down to the D.A. and gets him to beg the kid off with the U. S. ’cutor. She says the kid meant to marry her sister and wanted to, only the sister can’t see it. All
she
wanted was to kick a few high ones off the bar and have herself a party. So we let the kid go and then darned if they don’t have him come back to work. And a little later we get the routine report on his prints from Washington, and he’s got a prior back in Indiana, attempted hold-up six years ago. He got off with six months in the county jail, the very one Dillinger bust out of. We hand that to the Sternwoods and they keep him on just the same. What do you think of that?”
    “They seem to be a screwy family,” I said. “Do they know about last night?”
    “No. I gotta go up against them now.”
    “Leave the old man out of it, if you can.”
    “Why?”
    “He has enough troubles and he’s sick.”
    “You mean Regan?”
    I scowled. “I don’t know anything about Regan, I told you. I’m not looking for Regan. Regan hasn’t bothered anybody that I know of.”
    Ohls said: “Oh,” and stared thoughtfully out to sea and the sedan nearly went off the road. For the rest of the drive back to town he hardly spoke. He dropped me off in