Eddie Mars—Mrs. Mars

Eddie Mars—Mrs. Mars is a marriage defined by distance and uncertainty: they do not live together, though Eddie says they remain friendly, and her disappearance becomes entangled with the unresolved disappearance of Rusty Regan. The apparent flight gives the investigation a compelling story, but not a verified account of Regan’s fate.

The Marriage and the Rumored Flight

Vivian Regan supplies the relationship’s most pointed version. While discussing the five thousand dollars she expects Eddie Mars to provide, she tells Philip Marlowe that Eddie has another reason to be obliging: his blonde wife is the woman Rusty ran away with. Marlowe does not treat the claim as proof that Regan is in the current trouble; he notes that it would make Regan easier to find if he were looking for him, then asks whether Vivian thinks he is involved. Her disclosure connects the marriage to the central missing-person case, but leaves both the alleged affair and the couple’s destination unconfirmed.

The police inquiry offers circumstantial support for a departure. Regan disappeared on September 16, when the chauffeur was off duty, and no one saw him take his car. Four days later, the car was found in a garage at Casa de Oro, a bungalow-court residence near the Sunset Towers. Investigators could not establish who had left it there, and its presence did not, by itself, settle whether Regan had been harmed or had left voluntarily.

The Investigation’s Competing Explanations

Captain Gregory reports that investigators found Mrs. Mars living among Casa de Oro’s tenants. She had left within two days of Regan, and a man resembling Regan had reportedly been seen with her, but no witness could identify him positively. The chronology, the car, and the uncertain sighting create a pattern suggestive of a joint departure without turning suggestion into certainty.

Gregory says Eddie and his wife lived apart but were friendly, according to Eddie. He considers whether Regan’s fifteen thousand dollars might have made him a robbery target, yet doubts that explanation: Regan carried a gun, had experience using it, and had commanded a brigade during the Irish troubles. The abandoned car, moreover, links whoever left it to the possibility that Regan was involved with Mrs. Mars—knowledge Gregory thinks an ordinary thief would be unlikely to possess. He rejects Eddie as the likely killer, reasoning that a racketeer with business sense would not invite police scrutiny through a conspicuous, deliberately foolish scheme.

Gregory therefore narrows his working theory to Mrs. Mars and Regan themselves. He supposes they probably left in her car, had gained a fourteen-day head start, and might surface when their money ran short and they had to use familiar financial channels. This is an investigative hypothesis, not a confirmed resolution: Gregory has readers searching, but expects results to take time.

Distance, Secrecy, and the Case’s Ending

The proposed elopement is an especially useful account because it gives an orderly shape to missing evidence: two people leave close together, a car turns up at a location associated with the wife, and an uncertain witness remembers a man who resembles Regan. Yet the book preserves the gaps in that story. The sighting is not a positive identification, investigators cannot determine who put Regan’s car in the garage, and Gregory’s theory remains a theory. The marriage supplies a plausible route out of the case while also distracting from the possibility of foul play.

That uncertainty acquires a darker significance when Vivian later admits that Regan is dead and that Carmen killed him. She had concealed the truth to spare her dying father the knowledge, relying on Eddie Mars for help and saying she had played for time. Her admission overturns the apparent elopement: Mrs. Mars’s departure and Regan’s disappearance had been drawn together into a story that could explain his absence, but it did not reveal what happened to him. Marlowe tells Vivian to take Carmen somewhere she can be cared for and gives her three days to leave with her; otherwise, he will disclose the truth. The marriage remains part of the trail and its misdirection, while the final revelation relocates the case’s moral weight to family loyalty, concealment, and the cost of protecting the Sternwoods.