The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 6

“I don’t know what to think,” I said.

  Our fresh beers arrived. Joe was still thinking hard. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” I said.

  “I can’t just do nothing. Can I?”

  “You could maybe have the body exhumed.”

  “Dug up?” He shook his head. “It was cremated.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but I should have, of course. “Who identified Peterson?” I asked.

  “Dunno. I can check.” He picked up his glass, then put it down again. “Christ, Marlowe,” he said, more rueful than angry, “every time I talk to you, it’s nothing but trouble.”

  “Trouble’s my middle name.”

  “Ho ho.”

  I moved my beer glass an inch to the side and then back again to where it had been, standing in its own ring of froth. I thought of Clare Cavendish doing the same thing a couple of hours before. When a woman gets into your head, there’s nothing that won’t remind you of her. “Look, Joe, I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe none of this is for real. Maybe my client only imagined it was Peterson she saw. Maybe it was a trick of the light or she’d had one martini too many.”

  “You going to tell me who she is?”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “If it turns out she’s right, and this guy ain’t dead, you’ll have to name her.”

  “Maybe so. But for now there’s no case, so I don’t need to tell you anything.”

  Joe sat way back on his stool and gave me a long look. “Listen, Marlowe, you called me, remember? I was having a nice peaceful morning, nothing on my desk ’cept a schoolgirl that’s been missing for three days, a gun heist at a filling station, and a double murder over in Bay City. It was going to be a breeze of a day. Now I have to worry whether this guy Peterson arranged for some poor schmuck to be run over so he could vamoose.”

  “You could forget I told you anything. Like I say, there may be nothing in it.”

  “Yeah—like that high school kid may be visiting her grandma in Poughkeepsie, and it may be by accident those two guineas in Bay City got a slug each in the noggin. Sure. The world is full of things that only look serious on the surface.”

  He slid down from the stool and took his straw hat from where it had been sitting on the bar. Joe’s face turns the color of liver when he’s annoyed. “I’ll run some more checks on Peterson’s death, or whoever it was that died, and let you know. In the meantime, you go and hold your lady client’s hand and tell her not to worry about her boyfriend Lazarus, that if he’s alive you’ll track him down or your name ain’t Doghouse Reilly.”

  He turned and strode off, whacking his hat against his thigh. That went well, Marlowe, I told myself. Nice work. The bartender came and asked mildly if everything was all right. Oh, sure, I told him, everything’s fine.

  * * *

  I drove back to the office, bought a hot dog from a stand at the corner of Vine, and ate it at my desk with a bottle of soda. Then I sat for a long time with my feet up and my hat on the back of my head, smoking. Anyone looking in at me would have said I was engaged in some hard thinking, but I wasn’t. In fact, I was trying not to think. How much I might have loused things up by calling Joe Green I couldn’t say, mostly because I didn’t want to say. Had I betrayed Clare Cavendish’s trust in me by telling Joe about her spotting Peterson when he was supposed to be dead? It was hard to see it otherwise. But sometimes, when you’re getting nowhere, you have to give the wasps’ nest a wallop. But shouldn’t I have waited, shouldn’t I have followed Peterson’s trail further before I brought Joe in on the affair?

  I put a hand to my forehead and gave little groan. Then I opened the drawer in my desk that’s supposed to hold document files and got out the office bottle and poured myself a stiffish one into a paper cup. When you know you’ve goofed, there’s nothing for it but to blitz a few million brain cells.

  I was contemplating another belt from the bottle when the telephone rang. How is it that, after all these years, the damned machine can still make me jump? I expected it would be Joe, and I was right. “That stiff had Peterson’s wallet in his pocket,” he said. “Plus he was identified at the scene by the manager of—what did you say that club is called?”

  “The Cahuilla.”

  “Don’t know why I keep forgetting it. The manager is a Floyd Hanson.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “If you mean have we got anything on him, we don’t. The Cahuilla is a hoity-toity outfit and wouldn’t hire anyone with a record to head it up. You know the Sheriff’s a member there, plus a couple of judges and half the business bigwigs in town. You poke a finger in there, you’re liable to get the end of it bitten off.”

  “Anything in the file about a disturbance there the night Peterson, or whoever he was, got run over?”

  “No. Why?” I could hear Joe getting suspicious again.

  “I heard Peterson was tanked that night and kicked up a fuss in the bar,” I said. “It got so bad they threw him out. Next thing, someone found him on the side of the road as dead as a side of mutton.”

  “The someone being one of the hat-check girls on her way home with her boyfriend. The boyfriend had picked her up at the end of her shift.”

  “Anything there?” I asked.

  “Naw. Couple of kids. They went back and got Hanson, the manager. He called us.”

  I thought about this for a while.

  “You there?” Joe said.

  “I’m here. I’m thinking.”

  “You’re thinking you’re wasting your time on this, right?”

  “I’ll call my client.”

  “You do that.” He was chuckling when he hung up.

  I drank another little drink from my trusty bottle, but it didn’t go down well. It was too hot for bourbon. I took my hat and left the office and went down in the elevator and out onto the street. The idea was to clear my head, but how do you do that when the air is as hot as the inside of a furnace and tastes like iron filings? I walked up the sidewalk a ways, keeping in the shade, then back again. The whiskey was making my head feel like it was full of putty. I went back up to the office and lit a cigarette and sat staring at the phone. Then I called Joe Green again and told him I had spoken to my client and convinced her she was wrong about having seen Peterson.

  Joe laughed. “That’s frails for you,” he said. “They get a notion in their pretty little heads and make you run in circles for a while, then it’s Oh, I’m tow towwy, Mr. Marwo, I must have been wong.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s it,” I said.

  I could hear Joe not believing a word I was telling him. He didn’t care. All he wanted was to close the file on Nico Peterson and put it back on the dusty shelf he’d taken it down from.

  “She pay you anyway?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I lied.

  “So everybody’s happy.”

  “Don’t know if that’s the word, Joe.”

  He laughed again. “Keep your nose clean, Marlowe,” he said and hung up. Joe is an all-right guy, despite his temper.

  7

  I could have left it there. I could have done what I’d said to Joe I’d done, could have phoned Clare Cavendish and told her she must have been mistaken, that it couldn’t have been Nico Peterson she had seen up in San Francisco that day. But why would that convince her? I had nothing new to give her. She was already aware that the dead man on Latimer Road had been wearing Peterson’s clothes and had Peterson’s wallet in his breast pocket. She knew, too, as she had told me before I’d parted from her in the leafy shade of Langrishe Lodge, that this fellow Floyd Hanson had identified the body. She had been at the Cahuilla that night, she had seen Peterson, drunk and loud, being escorted off the premises by a couple of Hanson’s goons, and she’d still been there an hour later when the hat-check girl and her boyfriend came in to tell everybody about finding Peterson dead at the side of the road. She had even gone out and seen the body being loaded into the meat wagon. Despite all that
, she was certain it was Peterson she had spotted on Market Street a couple of months after he was supposed to have died. What could I say that would make her change her mind?

  I still had the feeling there was something wrong with all this, that there was something I wasn’t being told. Being suspicious becomes a habit, like everything else.

  * * *

  I was pretty idle for the rest of that day, but I couldn’t get the Peterson business out of my head. Next morning I went to the office and made a few telephone calls, checking on the Langrishes and the Cavendishes. I didn’t turn up much. About the most interesting thing I found out about them was that despite their money, there were no skeletons in their closets, at least none that anyone had ever heard rattling. But it couldn’t be that straightforward, could it?

  I went down in the elevator and crossed the road to where I’d parked the Olds. I had left it in the shade, but the sun had fooled me and angled around the corner of the Permanent Insurance Company building and was shining full on the windshield and, of course, the steering wheel. I opened all four windows and drove off fast to get a breeze going, but it didn’t help. What would have happened, I wondered, if somehow the English Pilgrims and not the Spaniards had landed first on this coast? I guess they’d have prayed for rain and low temperatures and the Lord would have heeded them.

  It was cooler at the Palisades, where the ocean was close. I had to ask directions a couple of times before I found the Cahuilla Club. The entrance was up a leafy road at the end of a long high wall with bougainvillea blossoms spilling over it. The gates weren’t electrified, as I’d expected they would be. They were tall, ornate, and gilded. They were open, too, but just inside them a striped wooden pole blocked the way. The gatekeeper stepped out of his little hut and gave me a cheesy look. He was a young fellow in a spiffy beige uniform and a cap with braid on the peak. He had a pin head on top of a long neck and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a Ping-Pong ball when he swallowed.

  I said I was there to see the manager.

  “You got an appointment?” I told him no, and he screwed up his mouth in a funny way and asked my name. I showed him my card. He frowned at it for a long time, as if the information it contained was written in hieroglyphics. He did that thing with his mouth again—it was a kind of soundless gagging—and went into the lodge and spoke briefly on the phone, reading from my card, then came back and pressed a button and the barrier came up. “Keep to the left, where it says ‘Reception,’” he said. “Mr. Hanson will be waiting for you.”

  The drive wound its way beside a long, high wall with hanging masses of bougainvillea. The blossoms here came in a variety of shades, pink, crimson, a delicate mauve. Someone sure was fond of the stuff. There were other things growing, gardenias, and honeysuckle, the odd jacaranda, and orange trees filled the air with their sweet-sharp fragrance.

  The reception area was a log cabin affair with lots of squinty little windows and a red carpet in front of the door. I stepped inside. The air had a piney tang, and flute music was playing softly through hidden speakers in the ceiling. There was no one at the desk, a large and venerable item with stacks of drawers with brass handles and a rectangle of green leather set into the top, the kind of thing an Indian chief might have signed away his tribal lands on. Various items of Americana stood about: a full-length Indian headdress on a special stand, an antique silver spittoon, an ornate saddle on another stand. On the walls were mounted bows and arrows of various designs and sizes, a pair of ivory-handled pistols, and framed photographs by Edward Curtis of noble-looking braves and their dreamy-eyed squaws. I was having a close-up gander at one of these studies—tepees, a campfire, a circle of women with papooses—when I heard a soft step behind me.

  “Mr. Marlowe?”

  Floyd Hanson was tall and slim, with a long, narrow head and oiled black hair brushed smoothly back and with a fetching touch of gray at each temple. He wore high-waisted white slacks with a crease you could cut your finger on, tasseled loafers, a white shirt with a laid-back collar, and a sleeveless sweater in a pattern of big gray diamonds. He stood with his left hand in the side pocket of his slacks and regarded me with a quizzical eye, as if there was something faintly comical about me that he was too polite to laugh at. I suspected it wasn’t personal, that this was how he looked at most things that came under his careful scrutiny.

  “That’s me,” I said. “Philip Marlowe.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe? Marvin, our gateman, tells me you’re a private investigator—is that so?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I used to work for the DA’s office, a long time ago. I’m freelance now.”

  “Are you. I see.”

  He waited another moment, calmly regarding me, then put out his right hand for me to shake. It was like being given a sleek, cool-skinned animal to hold for a moment or two. The most striking thing about him was a quality of stillness. When he wasn’t moving or speaking, something inside him seemed to switch off automatically, as if to conserve energy. I had the feeling that nothing the world could come up with would surprise or impress him. As he stood there looking at me, I found it hard not to fidget. “It’s about an accident that occurred around here a couple months ago,” I said. “A fatal accident.”

  “Oh?” He waited.

  “Fellow called Peterson got run down by a hit-and-run driver.”

  He nodded. “That’s right. Nico Peterson.”

  “Was he a member of the club?”

  This brought on a cold smile. “No. Mr. Peterson wasn’t a member.”

  “But you knew him—I mean, enough to identify him.”

  “He came here often, with friends. Mr. Peterson was a gregarious type.”

  “Must have been a shock for you, seeing him on the road like that, all bashed up.”

  “Yes, it was.” His gaze seemed to roam over my face; I could almost feel it, like the touch of a blind man’s fingers exploring my features, fixing me in his mind. I started to say something, but he interrupted me. “Let’s take a stroll, Mr. Marlowe,” he said. “It’s a pleasant morning.”

  He moved to the door and stood to one side of it, ushering me through with an upturned palm. As I stepped past him, I thought I caught him giving me another faint smile, amused and mocking.

  He was right about the morning. The sky was a vault of clear blue shading to purple at the zenith. The air was laden with mingled fragrances of tree and shrub and blossom. A mockingbird somewhere was going through its repertoire, and among the shrubbery there was the soft hushed hiss of water sprinklers at work. Los Angeles has its moments, if you’re rich and privileged enough to be in the places where they happen.

  From the clubhouse we walked down a smooth, curved path that led past yet more hanging clusters of bougainvillea. Here the profusion of colors was dazzling, and though they didn’t seem to have much of a scent the air was heavy with the damp presence of the blossoms. “These flowers,” I said, “they seem to be the signature of the place.”

  Hanson gave this a moment or two of judicious consideration. “Yes, I suppose you could say that. It’s a very popular plant, as I’m sure you know. In fact, it’s the official flower of San Clemente, and of Laguna Niguel, too.”

  “You don’t say.”

  I could see him deciding to ignore the sarcasm. “Bougainvillea has an interesting history,” he said. “I wonder if you know it?”

  “If I did, I’ve forgotten.”

  “It’s native to South America. It was first described by one Philibert Commerçon, a botanist accompanying the French admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville on an around-the-world voyage of exploration. However, it’s thought that the first European to see it was Commerçon’s mistress, Jeanne Baret. He had smuggled her aboard dressed as a man.”

  “I thought that kind of thing only happened in swashbuckling novels.”

  “No, it was quite common in those days, when sailors and passengers could be away from home for years on end.”

  “So this J
eanne—what did you say her last name was?”

  “Baret. With a t.”

  “Right.” I couldn’t hope to match his French pronunciation, and so I didn’t try. “This girl discovers the plant, her boyfriend writes it up, yet it gets called after the admiral. Seems less than fair.”

  “I suppose you’re right. The world in general does tend to be a little on the unfair side, don’t you find?”

  I said nothing to that. His affected, phony British accent was beginning to get on my nerves.

  We came into a clearing shaded by eucalyptus trees. I happened to know a bit about the eucalyptus—unranked angiosperm, species of myrtle, native to Australia—but I didn’t think it worth parading my knowledge before this cool customer. He would probably just do another of his twitchy, dismissive little smiles. He pointed beyond the trees. “The polo grounds are over there. You can’t see them from here.” I tried to look impressed.

  “About Peterson,” I said. “Can you tell me something of what happened that night?”

  He continued to walk along beside me, without saying anything or even registering that he had heard the question, and looking at the ground ahead of him, the way Clare Cavendish did when we were strolling together across the lawn at Langrishe Lodge. His silence left me with the dilemma of whether to ask the question again and probably make a fool of myself. There are people who can do that, who can put you on edge just by staying quiet.

  At last he spoke. “I’m not sure what you want me to tell you, Mr. Marlowe.” He stopped and turned to me. “In fact, I’m wondering what exactly is your interest in this unfortunate business.”

  I stopped too, and scuffed the dirt of the pathway with the toe of my shoe. Hanson and I were facing each other now, but not in any confrontational way. Generally he seemed not to be the confrontational type; neither, for that matter, am I, unless I’m pushed.

  “Let’s say there are concerned parties who’ve asked me to look into it,” I said.

  “The police have already done that pretty thoroughly.”

  “Yes, I know. The problem is, Mr. Hanson, people tend to have a wrong idea of the police. They go to the movies and see these cops with slouch hats and guns in their hands relentlessly pursuing bad guys. But the fact is, the police want a quiet life just like the rest of us. Mostly their aim is to get things cleared up and squared away, to write a neat report and file it along with stacks and stacks of other neat reports and forget all about it. The bad guys know this and make their arrangements accordingly.”