Perchance to Dream

    I stopped looking at her and looked at Geiger. He was on his back on the floor, beyond the fringe of the Chinese rug, in front of a thing that looked like a totem pole. It had a profile like an eagle and in its wide round eye was a camera lens. The lens was aimed at the naked girl in the chair. There was a blackened flash bulb clipped to the side of the totem pole. Geiger was wearing Chinese slippers with thick felt soles, and his legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him wore a Chinese embroidered coat, the front of which was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots I heard had missed. He was very dead…

    A lot of people had died since then. And here we were, the survivors, circling still in some sort of aimless ritual around little Carmen. The thought made me need a drink and when I got to my office I sat alone at my desk and had one. It didn't do any good. On the other hand it did no great harm either.

CHAPTER 4

    Resthaven sprawled in a small canyon that ran laterally off of Coldwater Canyon, just below Mulholland Drive. Some movie magnate had built it once in the late twenties, probably with the first big wad of pre-income tax money that he'd made filming two-reelers in Topanga Canyon. It might have been a ranch if you could picture a ranch built to specification for a Middle European peddler who'd struck it rich. It had a main building made of peeled redwood logs, squared and notched and fitted as snug as wallpaper. There was the bunkhouse, a longer lower echo of the main house, and there were three or four outbuildings which followed the same motif.

    Like most of southern California, the land, if left to its own devices, would have been dry and ugly. But it hadn't been left to its own devices. It had been watered and planted and pruned and fertilized and a profusion of flowering shrubs splashed across the green lawn and flanked the crushed shell driveway that curved up to the main entrance. There was no one in sight. And only a discreet sign burned into a polished square of redwood said RESTHAVEN. I parked under a big old eucalyptus tree that the wind had tortured into a posture of contorted abandon, and crunched across the driveway to ring the bell.

    The bell was soft, a lilting little chime deep somewhere in the house. Out of sight, maybe around the corner, I could hear dimly the sound of a sprinkler clicking in slow cadence as it arched back and forth. There was a trumpet vine curling up around the support pillars on the rustic porch. I waited, listening for footsteps and heard none, and then the door opened and a pale man with thin shoulders and very slick black hair combed straight back stood there.

    "Marlowe," I said. "To see Dr. Bonsentir."

    I handed him my card. The quiet one, name, address, profession. The one with the crossed sabers I saved for impressing other clients. The guy in the white coat ushered me into a hallway that was dark and cool. There were Navaho rugs strewn on the polished wide board floors. Framed on the walls were a variety of important-looking medical documents, some plaques honoring various civic achievements and a head shot of Dr. Bonsentir himself with a lot of uplighting, and some artful air brushing. A small brass plaque under the photograph said OUR FOUNDER, DR. CLAUDE BONSENTIR.

    The servant left me there to admire Dr. Claude and returned in maybe two minutes.

    "This way, sir," he said with the faint hint of an accent, though I couldn't identify it.

    I followed him through a door to the right. We went through a room that was probably a library, with books in shelves along all of the paneled walls and a vast stone fireplace against the far end of the room. There were drapes on all the windows in some sort of turquoise coloration that reached the floor and gathered in an overabundant pile at the baseboard. Beyond the library was an office, smaller than the library but done in the same motif and complete with a slightly scaled-down version of the same fieldstone fireplace on the near end wall where it could share the same chimney shaft. In here the turquoise drapes were drawn and the room was dim. In front of the windows was a desk that could have been a basketball court for midgets. And behind it was Claude Bonsentir.