The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 3

  I decided that in the morning I would do some digging around in the history of Mrs. Clare Cavendish née Langrishe. For now I had to content myself with placing a call to Sergeant Joe Green at Central Homicide. Joe had once briefly entertained the notion of charging me as an accessory to first-degree murder; that’s the kind of thing that will create a bond between two people. I wouldn’t say Joe was a friend, though—more a wary acquaintance.

  When Joe answered, I said I was impressed that he was working so late, but he only breathed hard into the receiver and asked what I wanted. I gave him Nico Peterson’s name and number and address. None of it was familiar to him. “Who is he?” he asked sourly. “Some playboy involved in one of your divorce cases?”

  “You know I don’t do divorce work, Sarge,” I said, keeping my tone light and easy. Joe had an unpredictable temper. “He’s just a guy I’m trying to trace.”

  “You got his address, don’t you? Why don’t you go knock on his door?”

  “I did that. No one home. And no one has been home for some time.”

  Joe did some more breathing. I considered telling him he shouldn’t smoke so much but thought better of it. “What’s he to you?” he asked.

  “A lady friend of his would like to know where he’s taken himself off to.”

  He made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a chuckle. “Sounds like divorce business to me.”

  You’ve got a one-track mind, Joe Green, I said, but only to myself. To him I repeated that I didn’t handle divorces and that this had nothing to do with one. “She just wants to know where he is,” I said. “Call her sentimental.”

  “Who is she, this dame?”

  “You know I’m not going to tell you that, Joe. There’s no crime involved. It’s a private matter.”

  I could hear him striking a match and drawing in smoke and blowing it out again. “I’ll have a look in the records,” he said at last. He was getting bored. Even the tale of a woman and her missing beau couldn’t hold his jaded interest for long. He was a good cop, Joe, but he’d been in the business a long time and his attention span was not broad. He said he would call me, and I thanked him and hung up.

  * * *

  He telephoned at eight the next morning, while I was frying up some nice slices of Canadian bacon to have with my toast and eggs. I was about to tell him again that I was impressed by the hours he kept, but he interrupted me. While he spoke I stood by the stove with the wall phone’s receiver in my hand, watching a little brown bird flitting about in the branches of the tecoma bush outside the window above the sink. There are moments like that when everything seems to go still, as if someone had just taken a photograph.

  “The guy you were asking about,” Joe said, “I hope his lady friend looks good in black.” He cleared his throat noisily. “He’s dead. Died on”—I heard him riffling through papers—“April nineteenth, over in the Palisades near that club they got there, what’s it called. Hit-and-run. He’s in Woodlawn. I’ve even got the plot number, if she’d like to go visit him.”

  4

  I don’t know why they call it Ocean Heights, since about the only thing high about it would be the maintenance costs. The house wasn’t all that big, if you consider Buckingham Palace a modest little abode. Langrishe Lodge, it was called, though I couldn’t imagine anything less like a lodge. It was made of pink and white stone, lots of it, and had turrets and towers, and a flag flying proudly on a flagpole on the roof, and about a thousand windows. It looked pretty ugly to me, but I’m no judge of architecture. Off to the side there were big green trees, some variety of oaks, I thought. The short drive led straight to an oval of gravel in front of the house that you could have run a chariot race on. It struck me that I was in the wrong trade, if a pile like this was what you got for making women smell nice.

  During the drive over I had been thinking of what Clare Cavendish had said about liking music. I hadn’t picked up on it, hadn’t asked her what kind of music she preferred, and she hadn’t offered to tell me, and somehow that was significant. I mean, it was significant that we had let it go. It wasn’t the most intimate thing she could have told me, not like her shoe size or what she wore or didn’t wear to bed at night. All the same, it had weight, the weight of something precious, a pearl or a diamond, that she had passed from her hand into mine. And the fact that I had taken it from her without comment, and that she had been content for me to say nothing, meant it was something held in secret between us, a token, a promise for the future. But then I decided that this was probably all hooey, just a case of wishful thinking on my part.

  When I had parked the Olds on the gravel, I noticed a sporty-looking young man coming toward me across the lawn. He was swinging a golf club and knocking the heads off daisies with it. He wore two-tone golf shoes and a white silk shirt with a floppy collar. His dark hair was floppy too, a wing of it falling over his brow so that he had to keep pushing it out of his eyes with a nervous flick of a pale and slender hand. He walked in a willowy sort of way, meandering a little, as if there were a weakness somewhere in the region of his knees. When he got close I saw with a shock that he had Clare Cavendish’s almond-shaped black eyes—they were much too pretty for him. I saw too that he wasn’t nearly as young as he’d seemed at a distance. I guessed he was in his late twenties, though with the light behind him he could have passed for nineteen. He stopped in front of me and looked me up and down with a faint sneer. “You the new chauffeur?” he asked.

  “Do I look like a chauffeur?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What do chauffeurs look like?”

  “Leggings, cap with a shiny peak, insolent stare of the proletarian.”

  “Well, you haven’t got the leggings or the cap.”

  He had, I noticed, an expensive smell, cologne and leather and something else, probably that perfumed tissue paper they pack Fabergé eggs in. Or maybe he liked to dab on a bit of his ma’s finest. He was a precious lad, all right. “I’m here to see Mrs. Cavendish,” I said.

  “Are you now.” He snickered. “Then you must be one of her beaux.”

  “What do they—?”

  “Rugged, blue-eyed types. On second thought, you’re not that kind of material either.” He glanced past me at the Olds. “They come in scarlet coupés”—he pronounced it the French way—“or the odd Silver Wraith. So who are you?”

  I took a bit of time to light a cigarette. For some reason this seemed to amuse him, and he did that mean little laugh again. It sounded forced; he so much wanted to be a tough guy. “You must be Mrs. Cavendish’s brother,” I said.

  He gave me a wide-eyed theatrical stare. “Must I?”

  “Some part of the family, anyway. Which are you, pampered pet or black sheep?”

  He lifted his nose a disdainful inch into the air. “My name,” he said, “is Edwards, Everett Edwards. Everett Edwards the Third, as it happens.”

  “You mean there’ve been two of you already?”

  He relented a bit then and grinned, rolling his shoulders in a boyish shrug. “Stupid name, isn’t it,” he said, biting his lip.

  I did my own kind of shrug. “We don’t get to choose what we’re called.”

  “What about you—what are you called?”

  “Marlowe.”

  “Marlowe? Like the playwright.” He struck a histrionic pose, leaning sideways from the hips and pointing toward the sky with a trembling hand. “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” he cried, making his lower lip quiver. I had to smile.

  “Tell me where I can find your sister, will you?” I said.

  He let his arm fall and straightened up to his former slouch. “She’s here somewhere,” he said. “Try the conservatory.” He pointed. “It’s around that way.”

  He couldn’t keep that sulky look out of his eyes. He was just an overgrown kid, spoiled and bored. “Thanks, Everett the Third,” I said.

  As I walked away he called after me, “If you’re selling insurance, you’re wastin
g your time.” He snickered again. I hoped for his sake it was something he would grow out of—when he got into his fifties, maybe, and started wearing three-piece suits and sporting a monocle.

  I crunched across the gravel and took the way he had pointed to, along by the side of the house. Stretching off to my left, the garden was the size of a small public park, only much better kept. The sweet smell of roses was carried to me on a breeze, along with the scent of cut grass and a briny whiff of the nearby ocean. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place like this. I glanced in through the windows as I walked past them. The rooms, what I could see of them, were large, lofty, and impeccably furnished. What if you wanted to flop in front of the television set with a bucket of popcorn and a couple of cans of beer and watch a ball game? Maybe they had specific places in the basement for that kind of thing, billiard rooms, romper rooms, dens, whatever. I suspected that in Langrishe Lodge, the real business of living would always be carried on somewhere else.

  The conservatory was an elaborate affair of curved glass and steel framing attached to the back of the house like a monstrous suction cup and reaching up two or three stories. There were giant palms inside, pressing their heavy fronds against the panes as if appealing to be let out. A pair of French doors stood wide, and in the opening a white gauze curtain undulated languidly in the gently stirring air. Summer in these parts isn’t harsh and punishing like it is over in the city; these folks have their own special season. I stepped across the threshold, batting the curtain aside. In here the air was heavy and dense and smelled like a fat man after a long, hot bath.

  At first I didn’t spot Clare Cavendish. Partly hidden by a low-leaning swath of palm leaves, she was sitting on a delicate little wrought-iron chair, before a matching wrought-iron table, writing in a leather-bound diary or notebook. She wrote with a fountain pen, I noticed. She was dressed for tennis, in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and skimpy white skirt with pleats, ankle socks, and pipe-clayed bucks. Her hair was pinned back with barrettes at both sides. I had not seen her ears before. They were very pretty ears, which is a rare thing, ears being in my estimation just a little less weird-looking than feet.

  She heard me approach, and when she glanced up a look came into her eyes that I couldn’t quite figure. Surprise, of course—I hadn’t called to say I was coming—but something else, too. Was it alarm, sudden dismay even, or did she just not recognize me for a second?

  “Good morning,” I said, as lightly as I could.

  She had shut her book quickly, and now, more slowly, she fitted the cap to her fountain pen and laid it on the table with slow deliberation, like a statesman who has just finished signing a peace treaty, or a declaration of war. “Mr. Marlowe,” she said. “You startled me.”

  “Sorry. I should have phoned.”

  She stood up and took a step backward, as if to put the table between her and me. Her cheeks were a little flushed, as they had been yesterday when I’d asked her to tell me her first name. People who blush easily have it tough, always being liable to give themselves away at the drop of a brick. Once again I had trouble not looking at her legs, though somehow I saw that they were slim, shapely, and honey-hued. A crystal jug containing a tobacco-colored drink stood on the table, and now she touched a fingertip to the handle. “Some iced tea?” she asked. “I can ring for a glass.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’d offer you something stronger, only it seems a little early…” She glanced down and bit her lip, in just the same way Everett the Third had. “Have you made some progress in your inquiries?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Cavendish, I think maybe you should sit down.”

  She gave her head a tiny shake, smiling faintly. “I don’t—” she began. She was looking past my shoulder. “Oh, there you are, darling,” she said, her voice sounding a shade too loud, with too much forced warmth in it.

  I turned. A man was standing in the open doorway, holding the curtain aside with a raised hand, and for a moment I thought that he, like Everett the Third, might be about to deliver a ringing line from some old play. Instead he dropped the curtain and ambled forward, smiling at nothing in particular. He was a well-built fellow, not tall, slightly bow-legged, with broad shoulders and large square hands. He was dressed in cream jodhpurs, calfskin boots, a shirt so white it glowed, and a yellow silk cravat. Another sporty type. It was beginning to look like they did nothing here but play games.

  “Hot,” he said. “Damned hot.” As yet he had not so much as glanced in my direction. Clare Cavendish began to reach toward the jug of iced tea, but the man got there first, picked up the glass, half filled it from the jug, and emptied it in one swallow, his head thrown back. His hair was fine and straight and the color of pale oak. Scott Fitzgerald would have found a place for him in one of his bittersweet romances. Come to think of it, he looked a bit like Fitzgerald: handsome, boyish, with something in him that was fatally weak.

  Clare Cavendish watched him. She was biting her lip again. That mouth of hers, it really was a thing of beauty. “This is Mr. Marlowe,” she said. The man gave a start of pretend surprise and looked this way and that, holding the empty glass in his hand. At last he fixed on me and frowned slightly, as if he hadn’t noticed me before, as if I had been indistinguishable from the palm leaves and the gleaming glass all around. “Mr. Marlowe,” Clare Cavendish went on, “this is my husband, Richard Cavendish.”

  He beamed at me with a mixture of indifference and disdain. “Marlowe,” he said, turning the name over and examining it, as if it were a small coin of scant value. His smile became brighter still. “Why don’t you put down your hat.”

  I had forgotten I was holding it. I glanced around. Mrs. Cavendish stepped forward and took the hat from me and laid it on the table beside the glass jug. Inside the triangle formed by the three of us, the air seemed to crackle soundlessly, as if a current of static electricity were passing back and forth in it. Yet Cavendish appeared to be entirely at ease. He turned to his wife. “Have you offered the man a drink?”

  Before she could reply, I said, “She did, and I declined.”

  “You declined, did you?” Cavendish chuckled. “You hear that, sweetheart? The gentleman declined.” He poured more tea into the glass and drank it off, then put the glass down, grimacing. I noticed he was an inch or two shorter than his wife. “What kind of business are you in, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.

  This time Clare got in ahead of me. “Mr. Marlowe finds things,” she said.

  Cavendish ducked his head and gave her a sly, upward glance, thrusting his tongue hard into his cheek. Then he looked at me again. “What kind of things do you find, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.

  “Pearls,” his wife said quickly, again meaning to cut me off, though I hadn’t yet thought of a reply. “I lost that necklace you gave me—misplaced it, I mean.”

  Cavendish considered this, looking at the floor now, smiling pensively. “What’s he going to do,” he asked, addressing his wife without looking at her, “crawl around the bedroom floor, peer under the bed, poke his finger into mouse holes?”

  “Dick,” his wife said, and there was a pleading note in her voice, “it’s not important, really.”

  He gave her an exaggerated stare. “Not important? If I weren’t a gentleman, like Mr. Marlowe here, I’d be tempted to tell you how much that little trinket cost. Of course”—he turned to me, his voice becoming a drawl—“if I did, she’d tell you it was her money I bought it with.” He glanced at his wife again. “Wouldn’t you, sweetie?”

  There was nothing to say to that, and she just looked at him, her head lowered a little and the soft plump apex of her upper lip thrust out, and for a second I saw what she must have looked like when she was very young.

  “It’s a matter of retracing your wife’s steps,” I said, in the plodding tone I’ve learned to mimic from all the years I’ve spent around cops. “Checking the places she went to over the past few days, the stores she was in, the restaurants she visited.” I could feel
Clare’s eyes on me, but I kept mine on Cavendish, who was looking off through the open doorway and nodding slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.” He glanced about the place again, blinking distractedly, touched the rim of the empty glass on the table with a fingertip, then sauntered out, whistling to himself.

  When he was gone, his wife and I just stood there for a while. I could hear her breathing. I imagined her lungs filling and emptying, the tender pinkness of them, in their frail cage of glistening white bone. She was the kind of woman to make a man think thoughts like that. “Thank you,” she said at last, the barest murmur.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She laid her right hand lightly on the back of the wrought-iron chair, as if she were feeling a little weak. She wasn’t looking at me. “Tell me what you’ve found out,” she said.

  I needed a cigarette but didn’t think I should light up in this lofty glass edifice. It would be like smoking in a cathedral. The urge reminded me of what I had brought with me. I took the ebony cigarette holder from my pocket and laid it on the table, next to my hat. “You left it at my office,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, of course. I don’t use it much, only for effect. I was nervous, coming to see you.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “It was myself I needed to fool.” She was watching me intently. “Tell me what you’ve found out, Mr. Marlowe,” she said again.

  “There’s no easy way to put this.” I looked at my hat on the table. “Nico Peterson is dead.”

  “I know.”