Carmen Sternwood—Rusty Regan

Carmen Sternwood and Rusty Regan’s relationship began as a bond of instruction and ended in murder. Regan took Carmen to the old oil wells to teach her to shoot; there, rather than fire at the target, she shot him. The truth emerges only after she makes a similar attempt on Philip Marlowe, connecting the earlier lesson to the present violence and explaining why Vivian Regan concealed what happened.

The Lesson at the Wells

On the day Regan disappeared, he brought Carmen to the old wells late in the afternoon to teach her to shoot. He set up a can as a target and stood near her while she tried the gun. But Carmen turned it away from the can and shot Regan. The lesson’s ordinary arrangement—a teacher, a pupil, and a target—became the means of his death.

The setting is part of the revelation. The wells are a neglected remnant of the oilfield that made the Sternwoods wealthy. By the time Marlowe reaches them, the derricks are motionless, the equipment rusted, and an old sump lies beside the track. The family’s present comfort and its fortune’s industrial past are joined at this remote site, where Carmen’s private act has remained concealed.

A Repeated Attempt

Marlowe reconstructs Regan’s death after Carmen tries to shoot him at the old wells. He identifies the earlier shooting as the source of the resemblance: Carmen had turned the gun on Regan as she later turned it on Marlowe, and, Marlowe says, for the same reason. The repetition makes the past legible through a new threat, converting the concealed disappearance into a murder that can be named.

Marlowe also tells Vivian that Carmen had come to his apartment two nights earlier and that he had sent her away. He suggests that Regan may once have rejected her in the same way. The account links Carmen’s actions toward both men, but the evidence does not establish that Regan’s response was identical to Marlowe’s; it is Marlowe’s explanation of the parallel.

Concealment and Consequence

Vivian reacts to the disclosure by asking why Carmen shot Regan. When Marlowe connects the murder to her later attempt on him, Vivian’s response shifts from demanding an explanation to asking whether he wants money. Her reaction follows the exposure of a family secret that had remained entangled with Regan’s disappearance.

The relationship’s truth also changes the meaning of Regan’s absence. He was not secretly living with Mona Mars, as the disappearance had led others to suppose; Carmen killed him, and Vivian concealed the fact. Marlowe leaves Vivian with knowledge of the murder and reflects on Regan’s death as a final sleep, while acknowledging that his own work has made him part of the surrounding corruption. The teacher-pupil bond therefore survives in the plot not as a continuing relationship, but as the hidden circumstance through which the disappearance is finally understood.