The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 5

  “Do I?” She seemed amused. “Why is that?”

  “I said already—I’m the hired help, but you’re talking to me like someone you’ve known all your life, or someone you’d like to know for the rest of it. What gives?”

  She pondered this for a while, her eyes lowered; then she looked at me from under her lashes. “I suppose it’s that you’re not at all what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Someone hard and smart-mouthed, like Nico. But you’re not like that at all.”

  “How do you know? Maybe I’m just putting on a show for you, pretending to be a pussycat when really I’m a skunk.”

  She shook her head, closing her eyes briefly. “I’m not that poor a judge of men, despite evidence to the contrary.”

  She had not moved at all, not that I’d noticed, yet somehow her face was closer to mine than it had been. There seemed nothing for it but to kiss her. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t respond, either. She just sat there and took it, and when I drew back she smiled a little and looked wistful. I was suddenly very conscious of the sound of the waves, of the pebbles hissing and the gulls crying. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why not?” She spoke very softly, almost in a whisper.

  I got to my feet and dropped the cigarette on the sand and put my heel on it. “I think we should go back,” I said.

  As we returned through the trees, she took my arm again. She seemed quite at ease, and I had to wonder if that kiss had really happened. We came out onto the lawn, and there was the house before us in all its ghastly grandeur. “Hideous, isn’t it,” Clare said, reading my thoughts again. “It’s my mother’s house, you know, not mine and Richard’s. That’s another reason for Richard’s moroseness.”

  “Because he has to live with his mother-in-law?”

  “Can’t be pleasant for a man, or for a man like Richard, anyway.”

  I stopped and made her stop with me. I had sand in my shoes and salt grit in my eyes. “Mrs. Cavendish, why are you telling me these things? Why are you treating me like we’re on the most intimate of terms?”

  “Why did I let you kiss me, you mean?” Her eyes sparkled; she was laughing at me, though not unkindly.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Why did you let me kiss you?”

  “I suppose I wanted to see what it would be like.”

  “And what was it like?”

  She thought for a moment. “Nice. I liked it. I’d like you to do it again, sometime.”

  “I’m sure that could be arranged.”

  We walked on, her arm in mine. She was humming to herself. She seemed happy. This, I thought, is not the woman who walked into my office yesterday and examined me coldly from behind her veil, sizing me up; this is someone else.

  “One of the movie people built it,” she said. She was talking about the house again. “Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer—one of those moguls, I forget which one. They shipped the stone in from Italy, somewhere in the Apennines. Good thing the Italians can’t see what was done with it.”

  “Why do you live here?” I asked. “You told me you’re rich—you could move somewhere else.”

  I glanced at her. A little shadow had settled on her smooth brow. “I don’t know,” she said. She was silent for a few paces, then spoke again: “Maybe I can’t face the prospect of being alone with my husband. He’s not particularly good company.”

  It wasn’t for me to comment on that, so I didn’t.

  We were approaching the conservatory. She asked if I would come in. “Maybe you’d like a drink now?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m a working man, with a job to do. Is there anything else you want to tell me about Nico Peterson before I apply my bloodhound nose to his trail?”

  “I can’t think of anything.” She picked a fragment of leaf from the sleeve of her linen jacket. “I’d just like you to trace him for me,” she said. “I don’t want him back. I’m not sure I wanted him in the first place.”

  “Why did you get him, then?”

  She made a clown’s lugubrious face. I liked the way she did it, making fun of herself. “He represented danger, I suppose,” she said. “As I told you, I get bored easily. He made me feel alive for a while, in a slightly soiled sort of way.” She gave me a level look. “Can you understand that?”

  “I can understand it.”

  She laughed. “But you don’t approve.”

  “It’s not for me to approve or otherwise, Mrs. Cavendish.”

  “Clare,” she said, again in that breathy whisper. I just stood there, feeling stolid and craggy-faced, like a cigar-store Indian. She gave a sad little shrug, then shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and drew in her shoulders. “I’d like you to find out where Nico is,” she said, “what he’s doing, why he pretended to be dead.” She looked off across the smooth green lawn, toward the trees. Behind her there was another, ghostly version of the two of us reflected in the glass of the conservatory. She said, “It’s strange to think of him, you know, being somewhere right now, doing something. I’d got used to believing he was dead, and I find it hard to adjust.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too difficult to trace. He doesn’t sound like a professional, and I doubt he’ll have covered his tracks too well, especially since he won’t be expecting anyone to be looking for him, him being dead, supposedly.”

  “What will you do? How will you go about it?”

  “I’ll have a look at the coroner’s report. Then I’ll talk to some people.”

  “What kind of people? The police?”

  “The cops tend not to be very helpful to someone who’s not one of their own. But I know one or two guys down at headquarters.”

  “I wouldn’t like to think of it being generally known that it’s me who’s looking for him.”

  “You mean you don’t want your mother to find out.”

  Her face went hard, which was not an easy thing for that face to do. “I’m thinking more of the business,” she said. “Any kind of scandal would be very bad for us—for Langrishe Fragrances. I hope you understand.”

  “Oh, I understand, all right, Mrs. Cavendish.”

  From somewhere nearby there came a scream, eerily thin and piercing. I stared at Clare. “A peacock,” she said. Of course: there had to be a peacock. “We call him Liberace.”

  “Does he do that often? Scream like that?”

  “Only when he’s bored.”

  I turned to go, then stopped. How beautiful she was, standing in the sun in her cool white linen, with all that shining glass and candy-pink stone behind her. I could still feel the softness of her mouth on mine. “Tell me,” I said, “how did you hear about Peterson’s death?”

  “Oh,” she said, perfectly casual, “I was there when it happened.”

  6

  I was almost at the gate when I met Richard Cavendish walking a big chestnut stallion up the drive. I drew the car to a stop and rolled down the window.

  “Hello there, sport,” Cavendish said. “Leaving us already?” He didn’t look like a man who had been riding hard for the past hour. His oaken hair was untousled, and his jodhpurs were as pristine as when he’d first walked into the conservatory. He wasn’t even sweating, not so you’d notice. The horse was the one that looked frazzled; it kept rolling its eyes and tossing its head and tugging at the reins, which rested in its master’s hand as lightly as a child’s jump rope. Excitable creatures, horses.

  Cavendish leaned down toward the window and rested a forearm on the door frame and smiled broadly at me, showing two rows of small white even teeth. It was one of the emptiest smiles I’d ever had flashed at me. “Pearls, eh?” he said.

  “That’s what the lady said.”

  “That’s what she said, yes, I heard her.” The horse was nuzzling at his shoulder now, but he took no notice. “They’re not as valuable as she thinks they are. Still, I imagine she’s attached to them. You
know what women are like.”

  “Not sure that I do, where pearls are concerned.”

  He was still smiling. He hadn’t believed the story of the lost necklace for a second. I didn’t much care. I knew Cavendish—he was a type I was familiar with: the handsome, polo-playing smoothie who marries a rich girl and then proceeds to make her life hell whining about what a tough time he has spending her money and how wounding it is to his pride.

  “Nice horse,” I said, and as if it had heard me, the animal rolled an eye my way.

  Cavendish nodded. “Spitfire,” he said. “Seventeen hands, strong as a tank.”

  I made a funnel of my lips as if to whistle, but didn’t. “Impressive,” I said. “You play polo on him?”

  He gave a little laugh. “Polo is played on ponies,” he said. “Can you imagine trying to get at a ball on the ground from this guy’s back?” He rubbed his chin with a forefinger. “You don’t play, I take it.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Where I come from, the polo stick is never out of our hands.”

  He studied me, letting his smile dismantle itself in lazy stages. “You’re quite a joker, aren’t you, Marlowe.”

  “Am I? What did I say?”

  He went on looking at me for a while. When he narrowed his eyes, a fan of fine wrinkles opened at the outer corner on each side. Then he straightened, smacked a palm on the door frame, and stepped back. “Good luck with the pearls,” he said. “Hope you find them.”

  The horse tossed its head and flapped its lips in that funny way they do. The sound it made was very like a sarcastic laugh. I put the car in gear and let out the clutch. “Tally ho,” I said and drove off.

  * * *

  Half an hour later I was in Boyle Heights, parking outside the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. I wondered how many times I’d plodded up those steps. The building was a wild piece of art nouveau architecture and looked more like a gin palace than a government building. It was cool inside, though, and restfully quiet. About the only sound to be heard was the clicking of an unseen lady clerk’s high heels as she walked down a corridor on one of the floors somewhere above me.

  The public desk was manned, if that was the word, by a bouncy little brunette in an unignorably tight sweater. I passed my detective’s license in front of her like a magician showing the playing card he’s about to palm. Most of the time they don’t bother to look and assume I’m from police headquarters, which is fine by me. She said it would take an hour to call up the file on Nico Peterson. I said in an hour I’d be watering my cactuses. She gave me an uncertain smile and said she’d see if the process could be speeded up.

  I paced the corridor for a while, smoked a cigarette, then stood at a window with my hands in my pockets and watched the traffic on Mission Road. It’s an exciting life, being a private detective.

  The sweater girl was as good as her word and came back in under fifteen minutes with the file. I took it to a bench by the window and flipped through the papers. I hadn’t expected them to tell me much, and I wasn’t wrong, but you have to start somewhere. The deceased had been struck by a vehicle, driver unknown, on Latimer Road, Pacific Palisades, in the County of Los Angeles, at some time between eleven P.M. and midnight on the night of April 19. He had suffered numerous injuries with long names, including a “gross comminuted fracture of the right side of the skull” and multiple lacerations of the face. The cause of death was our old friend blunt force trauma—pathologists love blunt force trauma; the very sound of it makes them rub their hands. There was a photograph taken at the scene of the accident. How black and glossy blood looks in the light of a flashbulb. Driver Unknown had done some job on Nico Peterson. He resembled an ill-used side of beef trussed up in a sharkskin suit. I heard myself heave a little sigh. Death be not proud, said the poet, but I don’t see why the Reaper shouldn’t feel a certain sense of accomplishment, given the thoroughness of his work and his unchallenged record of successes.

  I handed the file back to the little lady and thanked her nicely, though all I got in return was a distracted smile; she had other things to think about. It crossed my mind to ask her if she had plans for lunch, but no sooner had the notion formed than I dropped it. Thoughts of Clare Cavendish weren’t going to be neutralized that easily.

  On the street, I stepped into a phone booth and called Joe Green at Central Homicide. He answered on the first ring. “Joe,” I asked, “don’t they ever give you time off?”

  He let out his rattly sigh. Joe reminds me of one of the larger seagoing mammals—a porpoise, maybe, or a big old elephant seal. After twenty years on the force, dealing every day with murderers, drug pushers, kiddie rapists, what have you, he’s become a shapeless wad of weariness and melancholy and the occasional sudden rage. I asked if I could buy him a beer. I could hear him turning suspicious. “Why?” he growled.

  “I don’t know, Joe,” I said. An angry-looking young woman wearing ski pants and a scarlet halter, with a kid in a stroller, was waiting outside the booth, glaring at me to finish my call and let her have the phone. “Because it’s summer,” I said, “and it’s lunchtime, and it’s hotter’n hell, and besides, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “More about the Peterson stiff?”

  “That’s right.”

  He waited a moment, then said, “Yeah, why not. Meet me at Lanigan’s.”

  When I opened the door of the booth, the air from inside met the outside heat with a soundless thump. As I stepped out, the young mother swore at me and pushed past and grabbed the receiver. “Don’t mention it,” I said. She was too busy dialing to swear at me again.

  * * *

  Lanigan’s was one of those pretend-Irish places with shamrocks painted on the mirror behind the bar and photographs of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in glowing Technicolor framed on the walls. Among a shelf of bottles there was a quart of Bushmills wearing a tam-o’-shanter. Scotland, Ireland—what’s the difference? The bartender seemed the genuine article, though, short and gnarled, with a head like an oversized potato and hair that had once been red. “What’ll yiz have, boys?” he said.

  Joe Green was wearing a wrung-out suit of gray linen that at some time in the past had probably been white. When he took off his straw hat, the rim of it left a livid groove across his forehead. He yanked a big red handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and mopped his brow. This brow had by now extended so far up his skull that he would very soon be officially bald.

  We sat slumped in front of our beers with our elbows on the bar. “Jesus,” Joe said, “how I hate summer in this town.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s bad.”

  “You know what gets me?” He lowered his voice. “You know the way your boxer shorts bunch up in your crotch, hot and damp, like some damn poultice?”

  “Maybe you’re wearing the wrong kind,” I said. “Consult Mrs. Green. Wives know about these things.”

  He threw me a sidelong look. “Oh, yeah?” He had the eyes of a bloodhound, loose-lidded and mournful and deceptively stupid-looking.

  “So I’m told, Joe,” I said. “So I’m told.”

  We drank our beers in silence for a while, avoiding our own eyes in the mirror in front of us. Pat the bartender was whistling the tune of “Mother Machree”—he was, I could hardly believe it. Maybe he was paid to do it, bringing the true lilt of the Old Sod to the City of the Angels.

  “What you dig up on the Peterson bird?” Joe asked.

  “Not much. I had a peek at the coroner’s report. Mr. P. took some pounding that night. You ever get a lead on who it was that ran him down?”

  Joe laughed. His laugh sounded like a plunger being pulled out of a toilet. “What do you think?” he said.

  “Latimer Road wouldn’t have been busy at that hour.”

  “It was a Saturday night,” Joe said. “They come and go at that club there like rats at the back of a diner.”

  “The Cahuilla?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s what it�
��s called. Could have been one of a hundred cars that flattened him. And of course nobody saw nothing. You been to that place?”

  “The Cahuilla Club is not my kind of spot, Joe.”

  “Guess not.” He chuckled; this time it was a smaller plunger coming out of a smaller toilet. “This mystery broad you’re working for—she go there?”

  “Probably.” I put my teeth together and gave them a grind; it’s a bad habit I have when I’m working up the nerve to do something I think I shouldn’t do. But there comes a moment when you have to level with a cop, if he’s going to be of any use to you. Sort of level, anyway. “She thinks he’s still alive,” I said.

  “Who, Peterson?”

  “Yes. She thinks he didn’t die, that it wasn’t him who got mashed on Latimer Road that night.”

  That made him sit up. He swivelled his big pink head and stared at me. “Jeez,” he said. “What gives her that idea?”

  “She saw him, the other day, she says.”

  “She saw him? Where?”

  “In San Francisco. She was in a taxi on Market Street and there he was, large as life.”

  “Did she talk to him?”

  “They were going in opposite directions. By the time she got over the surprise, she was way past.”

  “Jeez,” Joe said again, in a tone of happy wonderment. Cops love it when things get turned on their head; it adds a pinch of spice to their dull working day.

  “You know what that means,” I said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “You may have a homicide on your hands.”

  “You figure?”

  Mrs. Machree’s boy was standing by the cash register dreamily poking a matchstick in one of his ears. I signaled him for another couple of glasses.

  “Think about it,” I said to Joe. “If Peterson didn’t die, who did? And was it really an accident?”

  Joe turned this over for a minute, paying special attention to the dirty underside of it. “You think Peterson set it up so he could disappear?”