The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Benjamin Black

  “What cop?” I asked.

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall again. “I don’t know what cop. He was there, he asked me if this was my brother, I said yes, he nodded, I left. Cops are cops. They all look alike to me.”

  I half heard, very faintly, a car pulling up in the street out front. I took no notice of it, though I should have. “He didn’t give you his name?”

  “If he did, I’ve forgotten. Look, Marlowe, what’s this all about?”

  I looked away from her. I wondered if I should tell her what Clare Cavendish had told me, about seeing Nico hurrying through the crowds on Market Street up in San Francisco that day? Could I risk it? I was about to speak, not really knowing what I was going to say, when I noticed that she was looking past my shoulder with an odd expression. I turned, just as the back door opened and a guy with a gun in his hand stepped into the room. A Mexican guy. Behind him there was a second Mexican. He had no gun. He looked like he wouldn’t need one.

  11

  I never did find out their names. For the sake of convenience, in my mind I called them Gómez and López. Not that my convenience, or anyone else’s, was going to be high on their list of priorities; I knew that straight off. Gómez was the brains, such as they were, and López was the muscle. Gómez was short and squarely built, and on the heavy side, for a Mexican, while López was as lean as a rattlesnake. The old guy across the street had said they were stylish dressers, but his sartorial judgment, I could see, wasn’t to be trusted. Gómez wore a powder-blue double-breasted suit with boxy shoulders and a tie with a half-naked bathing beauty painted on it, not very expertly. López’s Hawaiian shirt was about the loudest I’ve ever seen. His white deck pants would have been clean when they were bought, a long time ago. He wore open-toed sandals, and his toes were filthy.

  Look, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Mexicans. They’re gentle, kindhearted people, most of them. I like their food and their beer and their architecture. I once spent a very pleasant weekend in Oaxaca, in a fine hotel there, in the company of a friendly lady of my acquaintance. The days were warm and the nights were cool, and at twilight we sat in the Zócalo drinking salty margaritas and listening to the mariachi bands. That’s my Mexico. Gómez and López came from a different place. I’d put them down to a barrio in one of the more raucous towns just south of the border. I heard Lynn Peterson catch her breath at the sight of them. I probably caught my own breath. They were quite a sight, after all.

  They came through the door in a big hurry. They were impatient fellows in general, as I was to find out. Gómez’s gun was a hefty silver-plated automatic that looked as if it would have the firepower of a small howitzer. A man with a gun like that in his paw is not a man to quibble with over petty details. From the negligent way he held it, I could see that he and the gun were chums from way back. López, though, would be a knife man; he had that nervy, wild-eyed look. I recalled Travis, the bartender at the Beanery, making a joke about this pair—it had to have been them—toying with their gun and knife. Some joke. He didn’t know how right he’d turn out to be.

  At first Gómez didn’t even look at Lynn Peterson or me. He stalked straight through the kitchen into the living room, was silent in there for a moment or two, checking the place out, I supposed, then came back. He was a twitchy type, like his partner, and kept sort of throwing himself around inside that roomy suit of his. López meanwhile stood in the open doorway eyeing Lynn Peterson. Gómez gave her his attention too, but it was me he spoke to. “Who are you?”

  It was a question I was getting tired of being asked. “Marlowe’s the name,” I said, then added, “I think there must be some mistake here.”

  “What kind of mistake?”

  “I’m sure we’re not who you think we are, Miss Cavendish and I.” I felt Lynn Peterson’s surprised stare. It was the only name I’d been able to come up with on the spot. “Miss Cavendish is a rental agent. She’s showing me the house.”

  “Why?” Gómez asked. I had the impression he was asking just for the sake of asking, while he thought up some sharper questions, ones with more point.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m thinking of renting.” This amused López, and he laughed. I noticed he had a harelip, badly stitched. “Are you detectives?” I asked. This made López laugh some more. When the gap opened in his lip, a yellowish tooth glinted in there.

  “Sure,” Gómez said, without even a smile, “we’re the cops.” He turned his attention to the woman beside me. “Cavendish,” he said. “That’s not your name. Am I right?” She began to protest, but he waved the barrel of his gun wearily in front of her face, like a huge reproving forefinger. “No, no, no, senorita. You don’t lie to me. You do, you pay for it. What’s your real name?” She said nothing. He shrugged, the padded shoulders of his jacket tilting to the left. “It don’t matter. I know who you are.”

  He moved away, and in his place López came forward and stood in front of the woman, smiling into her eyes. She flinched from him. His breath probably wasn’t the sweetest. Gómez said something in Spanish that I didn’t catch, and López scowled. “What’s your name, baby?” he crooned softly. “I bet you got a real nice name.”

  He put a hand under her right breast and hefted it, as if guessing its weight. She jerked herself back, out of his reach, but he followed her, still with his hand out. He wasn’t leaving me much choice. I got him by the wrist with one hand and by the elbow with the other and yanked both joints in different directions. It hurt, and he gave a yelp and tore his arm out of my grasp. Sure enough, a knife had appeared in his other hand, the left one. It was a small knife, with a short blade, but I wasn’t fool enough not to know what he’d be able to do with it.

  “Look, take it easy,” I said, letting my voice go high-pitched, trying to sound like a guy whose only interest was renting a house at a nice rate and staying out of trouble. “But keep your hands off the lady.”

  I could feel Lynn Peterson’s fear; it was in the air, like a fox’s scent. I happened to have my .38 Special in a spring-loaded holster on my belt at the side. I hoped the Mexicans wouldn’t notice it until I had figured out a way to get at it without being shot or sliced first. You see them in the movies, the quick-draw artists; their guns come out like greased lightning, spinning on their index fingers. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in real life.

  López was closing in again—on me, this time, not Lynn, his little knife at the ready. But his sidekick said something in Spanish that I didn’t catch and waved the automatic at him, and he held off.

  “Give me your wallet,” Gómez said to me. His English was good, though he spoke it with a Spanish lisp. I held up both my hands.

  “Look,” I said, “I told you, you’re making a—”

  That was as far as I got. I hardly saw the gun move before I felt the barrel of it land on my right cheekbone with a dull smack that made my teeth on that side shiver at their roots. Lynn Peterson, beside me, gave a little scream and put a hand to her mouth. I almost went down but caught myself in time and managed to stay on my feet. The skin of my cheek was broken, and I felt warm blood run down and form drops along the line of my jaw. I put up a hand, and it came away smeared with crimson.

  I began to speak, but Gómez interrupted again. “Shut up, hijo de la chingada!” he said, baring his front teeth but keeping them clenched together. They looked very white against his dark skin. He must have had Indian blood. That’s the kind of thought that crosses your mind when you’ve just been pistol-whipped. It was then or never, I decided. Pretending to reach toward my pocket for a handkerchief, I moved instead to my belt and got the flap of the holster up and my fingers on the spring. That was the last thing I was aware of doing for a long time.

  12

  It had to have been López who delivered the knockout blow. I don’t know what he hit me with—a blackjack, probably—but it got me right on that conveniently placed outcrop of bone at the base of the skull, on the right side. I must have gone down like a fell
ed steer. The kind of unconsciousness I entered was nothing like the kind you drop into when you fall asleep. It was dreamless, for one thing, and there was no sense of time passing—it started and ended at what seemed pretty much the same instant. It felt like a dummy run for death, and if that really is what being dead is like, then the prospect is not so bad. It was the waking up that hurt. I was lying on my face on the floor, the side of my mouth stuck to the linoleum by my own blood and drool. No point saying how my cheekbone felt. An ache is an ache, though this one was a whopper.

  I lay there for a while with my eyes open, hoping the room would stop wheeling like a carousel. The light was dim, and I thought it was maybe twilight, but then I heard the rain. My wristwatch had stopped working—I must have banged it on something when I fell. I wondered how long I’d been out for. A half hour or so, I thought. I put my hands to the floor and gave myself a heave. A woodpecker was working in energetic slow motion on that bone at the base of my skull. I felt around there with my fingertips. The swelling was hard and hot and as big as a boiled egg. I foresaw the necessity for cold compresses and repeated doses of aspirin: it was possible to be in pain and bored at the same time.

  I still had my wallet, but the holster at my hip was empty.

  Then I remembered Lynn Peterson. I looked around the kitchen, checked the living room. She was gone. I hadn’t really expected her to be here, after the way López had looked at her. I paused to take a deep breath before going into the bedroom, but she wasn’t there, either. The Mexicans had turned the house upside down, and it looked as if a tornado had torn through it. They had emptied every drawer, ransacked every closet. The sofa had been sliced open and its stuffing yanked out, likewise the mattress in the bedroom. They’d sure been keen to find whatever it was they were looking for. I had a hunch they hadn’t found it.

  Who was this guy Peterson? And where the hell was he, if he was anywhere?

  Wondering about Peterson and his whereabouts was a way of staving off thoughts of Peterson’s sister and her whereabouts. That the Mexicans had taken her with them I didn’t doubt. They’d known who she was and hadn’t been fooled by my fumbling attempt to cover up her identity. But where had they taken her? I had no idea. They could be well on the way to the border already.

  I felt weak suddenly and sat down on the disemboweled sofa, nursing my swollen and blood-caked cheek and trying to figure out what to do next. I had no leads on the Mexicans, none. I hadn’t even seen their car, the one with the canvas roof with the holes in it that Mr. Busybody across the way had described. I’d have to call the cops; there was nothing else to do. I picked up the phone that stood on a low table by the sofa, but it was dead—the service would have been cut off weeks ago. I got out a handkerchief and started to wipe off the receiver, then gave up. What was the point? My prints were all over the place, on the knob of the back door, in the kitchen, here in the living room, in the bedroom—everywhere except the attic, if there was an attic. Anyway, why try to hide? I’d already talked to Joe Green about Peterson, and I intended to talk to him again about Peterson’s sister, as soon as I worked up the energy to get myself off this sofa and back to the office.

  * * *

  I went out and around by the side of the house. How come it was raining again? It wasn’t supposed to rain in June. Seeing that my car wasn’t out front, I thought the Mexicans had stolen it, but then I remembered I had parked it down the street. When I got to it, I was wet already and smelled like a sheep—not that I’ve ever been near enough to a sheep to say what one smelled like. I made a U-turn and got on the boulevard. The rain was coming down now like polished steel rods, though the sky in the west was a cauldron of molten gold. The clock on the dashboard said it was six-fifteen, but that clock had never worked properly. Whatever time it was, the day had begun to end, or if not, my eyes were giving out.

  I decided not to go to the office and headed instead for Laurel Canyon. When I got there, the dark was really coming on. The redwood steps up to the front door of my house had never seemed so many or so steep. Inside, I changed my shirt and jacket and went into the bathroom to have a look at my face. There was a dark red gash on my cheekbone, and the skin around it was all the colors of the rainbow and more. I swabbed it with a wet face towel. The cool of the water was soothing. It was going to be a long time before that swelling abated. The good part was that the cut wasn’t deep enough to need stitching.

  I went into the kitchen and mixed myself an old-fashioned, with brandy and a twist of lime. It took effort, but the effort was good for me and helped me to get myself in some sort of focus. I sat on a straight-backed chair in the breakfast nook—yes, the damned house had a breakfast nook—and sipped my drink and smoked a couple of cigarettes. The pain in my cheekbone was jockeying for the lead with the pain in the back of my head; I was in no condition to judge, but it seemed to be a dead heat.

  I took down the receiver of the wall phone and dialed Central Homicide. Joe the Steadfast was at his desk. I told him what had happened at the house on Napier Street, or bits of it. He was skeptical.

  “You say two Mexes turned up out of nowhere and kidnapped this broad? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, Joe, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Why’d they take her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was silent for a while. I heard him light a cigarette, I heard him blow out the first draw of smoke. “This Peterson again,” he said in disgust. “Jesus Christ, Phil, I thought we’d cleared that one away?”

  “So did I, Joe, so did I.”

  “Then what were you doing at his house?”

  I took a second searching for the answer—any old answer. “There were some letters my client wanted collected.” I stopped. It was the kind of lie that could get me into worse trouble than I was already in.

  “You find them?”

  “No.”

  I knocked back a good hard swallow of my drink. The sugar in it would give me energy, while the brandy would stop me from trying to use that energy to do strenuous things.

  “And how come Peterson’s sister is involved now?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know. She arrived at the house just after I did.”

  “You knew her before?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Joe chewed on that for a while. “There’s an awful lot here you’re not telling me, Phil—that right?”

  “I’ve told you all I know,” I said, which we both knew was another lie. “The thing is, Joe, this business with Peterson’s sister, it’s got nothing to do with my end of things. This is other business, I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I just am. The Mexicans had been at Peterson’s place before—they’d been seen scouting around outside the house, looking in the windows, that kind of thing. My guess is Peterson owes them money. They had the look of men who are owed, and owed big.”

  Another silence. Then: “The Peterson broad, she give you any clue as to why the Mexes were looking for her brother?”

  “There wasn’t time. She was fixing us a drink when they came in the back door waving guns and looking mean.”

  “Ooh,” Joe cooed, “so the two of you was getting friendly, eh, even though it was the first time you met? Sounds real cozy.”

  “I got bopped, Joe, first with a gun barrel across the face, then with a blackjack or something on the back of the head. My eyes are still spinning in their sockets. These guys are for real.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. But listen, Phil, this ain’t my jurisdiction. I’m going to have to call in the Sheriff’s office. You understand? Maybe you should have a quiet word with your pal Bernie Ohls over there.”

  “He’s not exactly a pal, Joe.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re going to need any kind of pal you can get, even the not exactly kind.”

  “I’d rather you called him,” I said. “I’d appreciate it. I’m not at my best, and even at my best Bernie tends to get up my
nose—or I tend to get up his, depending on the weather and the time of day.”

  Joe sighed into the mouthpiece. It sounded like a freight train going past my ear. “All right, Phil. I’ll call him. But you better have your story straight when he comes knocking on your door. Bernie Ohls is no Joe Green.”

  You’re right, Joe, I wanted to say, you’re certainly right there. But all I did say was “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “You owe me more than that, you son of a bitch,” he said, laughing and coughing at the same time. Then he hung up. I lit another cigarette. It was the second time I’d been called a son of a bitch that day. It hadn’t sounded any less of an insult in Spanish.

  13

  I was lying on top of the covers on my bed, drifting in and out of a sort of sleep, when Bernie arrived at my front door. It was as hard to get my head up as it had been in Nico Peterson’s kitchen a few hours previously, though the bells that went off inside my skull didn’t make quite as bad a din as before. In fact, I’d mistaken the sound of the doorbell for them when Bernie first pressed it. He rang it again almost immediately, and didn’t take his finger off the button until he saw the light go on in the living room. “What the hell is all this, Marlowe?” he demanded, barging past me through the doorway.

  “Yeah, good evening to you, too, Bernie.”

  He turned his big livid face and glared at me. “Still the smart lip, eh, Marlowe?”

  “I try to keep it buttoned. But you know how lips are.”

  His face turned a darker shade still. I thought he might pop a gasket. “This feel like a joke to you?” he said in an ominously quiet voice.

  “Take it easy, Bernie,” I said, putting a hand gingerly to the back of my head. The swelling hadn’t gone down any, but the boiled egg had cooled off quite a bit. “Sit down, have a drink.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “It came in contact with the barrel of a gun. At least the gun wasn’t being fired at the time.”