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Marlowe," she said.
        "Sure," I said. "I'm sorry too."
        She turned and headed for the door. She opened it and turned for a moment and looked back as if she were going to say something. Then she shook her head and turned away.
        "Vivian," I said.
        She paused and looked back.
        "I enjoyed the kiss," I said.
        She stared at me for a moment and then shook her head again.
        "That's the hell of it," she said. "I did too."
        Then she turned and closed the door behind her. I sat and looked at it and sipped the rest of the rye. She must have left the outside door open. Because I didn't hear it close.
        

CHAPTER 7
        
        After Vivian left I corked the office bottle and put it back in the drawer. I went to the sink, rinsed out the glasses, washed my hands and face, and went back to my desk. I got out the phone book and looked up some numbers and made some calls. The L. A. County medical board had no registration of Dr. Claude Bonsentir.
        The licensing board had never heard of him.
        That taken care of, I went down on the boulevard and sat at a counter and had some late lunch. Never-at-a-loss Marlowe, the hungry detective. After lunch I strolled back up the boulevard toward my office. The movie executives were coming out of Musso & Frank's, telling each other how much they loved each other's last picture. The tourists walked along the sidewalk, heads down, staring at the stars in the pavement. If a real star had happened by they'd have never seen him. Near the Chinese theater a group of tourists stood and looked at the footprints in the concrete and listened to some sort of guide telling them about it. Outside the Roosevelt Hotel the prostitutes waited. They'd come from Keokuk and Great Falls, planning to start as starlets and become stars. It hadn't worked out. Some had started maybe as starlets, but they'd ended up as whores and as the afternoon began to wane, with its promise of evening, they gathered with the desperation in their eyes. Hollywood the town of sex and money and hokum for the tourists. A town where guys like Bonsentir could make a handsome living without a license, without any trace in the medical board records, without any interference from the buttons. Hooray.
        Having been told by everyone but Daisy Duck to butt out, and having earned a total of one dollar on the case so far, the smart thing to do would have been to go back to the office and have another couple of pulls at my bottle of rye and think long thoughts about how glamorous it was to be in Hollywood. That being the smart thing to do, I got in my car and drove down to Las Olindas to see Eddie Mars. Which is how smart I am.
        The Cypress Club was half hidden by a grove of wind-twisted cypress trees, which is probably why they called it the Cypress Club. It had once been a hotel and before that a rich man's house. It still looked like a rich man's house, grown a little shabby, and tarnished a bit by the beach fog that hung over it much of the time.
        There was no doorman when I arrived, too early. The big double doors that separated the main room from the entry foyer were open. Inside there was only a barman setting up for the evening, and a Filipino in a white coat dry-mopping the old parquet floor. From somewhere in the dimness to my right a pasty-faced blond man appeared. He was slim and there was no expression in his face. I remembered him from when I first saw him in Arthur Gwynne Geiger's house with the smell of ether still in the air, and blood still on the rug.
        If he remembered me he didn't show it.
        "Place is closed for another couple of hours, bub."
        "I know," I said. "I'm here to see Eddie."
        "He know you're coming?"
        "No."
        "Then you probably aren't going to see him."
        "It's the movies," I said. "All you hard guys think you have to act like some ham you saw in the movies. But he