“All right,” I said. “I’m going to step outside the door here and wait for a certain time—you won’t know for how long—and in that time if I hear one of you climbing out of the pool, I’ll come back in and shoot whichever of you it is. You got that?” I pointed the gun at Canning. “You got that, old man?”
“You think you’ll get away with this?” he said. “Wherever you run, I’ll hunt you down.”
“You’re not going to be doing any hunting for a while, Mr. Canning,” I said. “Not when you’re in the slammer wearing a suit with stripes on it and making your own bed at night.”
“To hell with you, Marlowe,” he said. He was breathing hard already, floating and kicking there. If he had to stay in for much longer, he might drown. I didn’t really care if he did.
Of course, once I was out the door, I didn’t hang around. Canning probably hadn’t believed that I would, anyway. I decided not to risk leaving by the front door—there might be a button the receptionist could push that would summon a whole pack of goons—so I looked for a side exit instead. I found one straight off, and one that I knew, at that. I had opened a couple of doors and hurried through a couple of rooms when I turned into a corridor that looked familiar and pushed open another door—at random, I thought—and there I was in the drawing room with the chintz armchairs and the head-high fireplace, where that other time Hanson had brought me after our walk and where Bartlett, in his role as venerable retainer, had served us tea. I crossed the room and opened the glass-paneled door and stumbled out into sunlight and the delicate perfume of orange trees.
The Shriners were still staggering around the grounds. Half of them were drunk and the other half were well on the way. Their fezzes sat askew now, and their voices sounded more raucous. In my drug-heightened state, I thought for a minute I’d barged into a scene from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I set off along the path beside the hanging bougainvillea in all its exaggerated glory.
I had a vague notion of how to get to where I had parked my car, and I was headed in that direction when, at a bend in the path, I found my way blocked by a redheaded, red-faced fellow in a slightly battered fez, who was built on the scale of a family-sized refrigerator. He was wearing a lime-green shirt and purple shorts and clutching a highball glass in his big pink paw. He looked at me with a broad, happy grin, then frowned in mock disapproval and pointed at my head. “You’re bare up there, brother,” he said. “That’s not allowed. Where’s your fez?”
“A monkey stole it and ran off with it into the trees,” I said.
This caused the fat man to laugh heartily, and his belly shook under his blindingly bright green shirt. I realized I was still carrying the Weihrauch, and now he spotted it. “Why, lookee here!” he said. “Ain’t that a dandy weapon you’re packing. Where’d you get it from?”
“They’re handing them out at the clubhouse,” I said. “The manager embezzled the club funds, and there’s a posse being formed to go after him. Hurry up and you might get to join.”
He looked at me open-mouthed; then a sly grin spread over his face, which was the color and glistening texture of a Christmas ham. He wagged a roguish finger at me. “You’re teasing me, brother,” he said. “Ain’t you? I know you are.”
“You’re right,” I said and hefted the gun in my hand. “This thing is just a model of the real item. The big chief here, man by the name of Canning, collects ’em—model guns, that is. You should ask him to let you see his gun room. It’s quite something.”
The fat man put his head back and squinted at me. “Why,” he said broadly, “I might just do that. Where can I find him?”
“He’s in the swimming pool,” I said.
“He’s where?”
“In the pool. Cooling off. Go along that way”—I jerked a thumb over my shoulder—“and you’ll find him. He’ll be happy to see you.”
“Well, thank you, brother. That’s mighty friendly of you.”
And he waddled off happily in the direction of the clubhouse.
When he had rounded the bend and was out of sight, I looked about—a bit wildly, I imagine. I was wondering what to do with the gun. My brain still wasn’t working so well, given all the insults it had suffered in the past few days and hours. I was standing beside a high wall with heavy hangings of the official flower of San Clemente, and now I just heaved the weapon away from me. I heard it strike the wall and fall into the dirt at the base of it with a soft thud. Later, it would take Bernie Ohls’s men nearly two days to find it.
The sun was shining full on the car, of course, and inside it was as hot as a steam oven. I didn’t care—the steering wheel could sear my palms to the bone and I’d hardly feel it. I drove in the direction of the front gate. On one of the turns in the roadway I felt suddenly woozy, and the car nearly slammed into a tree. My arms still ached from those ropes. Marvin the gatekeeper gave me a leery look and pulled a gargoyle face, but he raised the barrier without a challenge. I stopped at the first phone booth I spotted and called Bernie. My voice wasn’t working so well, and at first he couldn’t make out what I was saying. Then he did.
20
What followed was kind of downbeat, or so it seemed to me, given all the colorful and exciting events that had taken place earlier. Bernie and his cohorts raided the Cahuilla Club and found Bartlett still there by the pool, passed out from loss of blood. They’d had some trouble making their way through the crowd of drunken Shriners wandering about the grounds. Floyd Hanson they nabbed at his apartment down by the ocean in Bay City. He had been in the middle of packing his bags. Bernie said that if Hanson hadn’t tried to take so many of his things with him, there might have been just enough time for him to have made the skip.
“Jeez, you should have seen his place,” Bernie said. “These big framed photos of musclemen on the walls and purple silk dressing gowns in the closets.” He flapped a limp-wristed hand and whistled softly. “Whoo-whoo!”
I wanted to know about Canning, of course. Why wasn’t I surprised to hear that he, unlike Hanson, had gotten away? That evening Bernie had led a squad over to Canning’s house in Hancock Park, but the bird had already flown. The help couldn’t say where he’d gone; all they knew was that he’d arrived home in a great hurry, his clothes looking as if he’d been caught in a flash flood, and ordered for a bag to be packed and the car to be brought around immediately to take him to the airport. The Sheriff’s office set to work on combing through the passenger lists for departing flights, while Bernie’s men went out to the airport and showed Canning’s picture around among the airline staff. One check-in girl thought she recognized him, but the name he had given hadn’t been Canning. As to what he had called himself, she couldn’t remember. The flight he had taken was a direct shot to Toronto, with an onward leg to London, England, but she didn’t know which destination had been on his ticket. Bernie called the office and told his men to concentrate on the passenger manifest for the Air Canada night flight to Toronto and see what they came up with.
Bernie and I took ourselves out for a drink. I suggested Victor’s, and Bernie drove us over there. I ordered us both a gimlet. Victor’s is the only bar I know where they make a proper gimlet—that is, half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice tossed in some crushed ice. Other places put in sugar and bitters and stuff like that, but that’s all wrong. It was Terry Lennox who introduced me to Victor’s, and every so often I go over there and lift a glass to the memory of an old friendship. Bernie had known about Terry, but not in the way I did.
I asked where Floyd Hanson was now, and Bernie told me they’d taken him downtown, where the boys in the back room had got to work on him right away. They didn’t have to work hard. When they asked where the blood by the swimming pool had come from, he told them all about the Mexicans and how Bartlett, on Canning’s orders, had tortured them for information and then finished them off. Hanson even offered to take them to the Cahuilla Club and show them the lime pit, off in a far corner of the club grounds, where he and Bartlett had dumped th
e two bodies. “Seems the soil is real acid out there,” Bernie said.
“Hence the lime? Handy, having a pit full of it, when you need to get rid of a couple of stiffs.”
Bernie made no comment on that. “This is a good drink,” he said, taking a sip of his gimlet and smacking his lips. “Refreshing.” He wasn’t looking at me; even with his eyes wide open, Bernie has a way of seeming not to look at anything at all. “I can guess what Canning wanted information about, from you and the Mexicans,” he said. “Our old pal Peterson, right? Talk about a bad penny.”
I got out my cigarette case and offered it to him. He shook his head. “You still off them?” I asked.
“It ain’t easy.”
I put the case and my matchbook down on the bar. Bernie is not the type who should give up smoking; it just made him more irritable. I lit up and blew three smoke rings, all three of them perfectly formed—I hadn’t thought I was that good.
Bernie was scowling. He really wanted a cigarette. His face darkened and he gave me his spill-the-beans-or-else look. “All right, Marlowe,” he said, “let’s hear it.”
“Bernie,” I said, “would it kill you to call me by my first name once in a while?”
“Why?”
“Because all day, people have been calling me Marlowe, followed by menaces and threats and then a lot of violence. I’m sick of it.”
“So you want me to call you Phil—”
“‘Philip’ would do.”
“—and then we’d be pals and all, that right?”
I turned away from him. “Forget it,” I said.
The barkeep was passing by and raised an inquiring eyebrow, but I waved him on. With gimlets you have to pace yourself, unless you want to wake up the next morning with a head like a cageful of cockatoos. I could hear Bernie beside me breathing heavily. You always know it’s getting dangerous when Bernie starts snorting down his trunk like that.
“Let me lay it out for you, Marlowe,” he said and started ticking off items on his big, meaty fingers. “First, this guy Peterson gets dead, then maybe he’s not dead. Someone hires you to look into it. In the course of your investigations, you run into Peterson’s sister. Next thing, Peterson’s sister is dead, and in this case there’s no doubt at all, since we saw her with her throat slit from ear to ear. I invite you to the scene of the crime and ask you, nicely, to let me know what you know. You tell me where to go and what I can do with myself—”
“Come on!” I protested. “I was perfectly polite!”
“—and then I get another call from you, and this time there’s two corpses, and some kind of flunky lying beside a swimming pool with a slug in his leg, and a rich guy on the lam, and another guy attempting to be. I say to myself, Bernie, this is one hell of a business. The kind of business, Marlowe, that the Sheriff, when he hears about it any minute now, is going to expect me to clear up double quick. This Canning guy, you know who he is?”
“No, not really. But you’re going to tell me.”
“He’s one of the biggest real estate investors in these parts. He owns department stores, factories, housing tracts—you name it.”
“He’s also the Petersons’ father,” I said. “Lynn and Nico, that is.”
That shut him up for a second or two. He thrust his head forward and drew his eyebrows together so that he looked like a bull about to charge a particularly annoying matador. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“Would I kid you, Bernie?”
He sat there thinking. It was an awesome thing, the sight of Bernie deep in thought. Suddenly he reached out and grabbed my cigarette case, extracted a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and lit a match. He held the flame suspended for a second or two, with the look in his eye, sorrowing but defiant, of a sinner about to give in to his sin, Then he applied the light to the business end of the pill and took a long, slow drag. “Ah,” he sighed, expelling smoke. “Jesus, that tastes good.”
I caught the barkeep’s eye and held up two fingers. He nodded. His name was Jake. It was here, at Victor’s, that I first met Linda Loring, and Jake still remembers her. It’s not surprising. Linda is the kind of woman you remember. Maybe I should marry her, if she’s still interested, which maybe she’s not. Did I mention that she’s Terry Lennox’s sister-in-law? Sylvia Lennox, Terry’s missus, was the one who was murdered, which Terry took the rap for. In fact, Sylvia was killed by a woman crazy with jealousy—her husband and Sylvia had been lovers—and also just plain crazy. Terry wanted to disappear anyway, which is why he faked his suicide down in a flyblown nowhere town in Mexico called Otatoclán—though not many people know it was a fake, including Bernie. Why should I tell him? Terry was a heel, but I liked him anyway. He was a heel with style, and style is something I appreciate.
Jake brought the two fresh gimlets. Bernie was now thinking and smoking at the same time, and breathing hard between drags. I needed this drink, and maybe even another one after it.
“Listen, Bernie,” I said, “before you get going again and start counting things off on your fingers and so on, let me repeat what I already told you: my involvement in the Peterson business is accidental. It has nothing to do with Canning and the Mexicans and Lynn Peterson’s murder and—”
“Whoa there, smart guy!” Bernie said, holding up a hand that would have stopped the traffic on Bay City Boulevard. “Just back up a bit. You’re telling me Canning is this guy Peterson’s old man?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“But how—?”
“Because Canning told me. He’d heard I was on the trail of his son—that’s why he hauled me round and had his man dunk me in the swimming pool.”
“And what about the two Mexes that he had ‘his man’ stomp to death? Where the hell do they come in?”
“They come in because they killed his daughter—they killed Lynn Peterson.”
“I know that—but why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did they kill her? Why did they snatch her at Nico Peterson’s house? Why were they at Peterson’s house in the first place?” He stopped, and sighed, and leaned his forehead on his hand. “Tell me I’m stupid, Marlowe, tell me my brain is fried after all these years of being a cop, but I just don’t get it.”
“Drink your drink, Bernie,” I said. “Have another cigarette. Relax.”
He snapped his head up and glowered at me. “I’ll relax,” he said, “when you quit stonewalling and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. I got caught up in the works of this thing by accident. Let me say it again: I was hired to look for a guy who was supposed to be dead. Next thing I know I’m up to my knees in corpses, and I damn near became a corpse myself. But listen to me, Bernie, please, listen when I say it once more. I don’t know, just as you don’t, what’s going on here. I feel like I stepped out one fine morning to take a little stroll and at the first street corner found myself involved in a ten-car pileup. Blood and bodies everywhere, burning vehicles, ambulance sirens wailing, the whole schlamozzle. And I’m standing in the middle of it, scratching my head like Stan Laurel. It’s a fine mess, all right, Bernie—but it ain’t my mess. Will you please believe me?”
Bernie swore and, in his agitation, picked up his nearly new drink and knocked it back in one short gulp. I winced. You don’t do that to a gimlet, one of the world’s most sophisticated drinks—simple, but sophisticated. Also, one of the world’s most sophisticated drinks has to be sipped nice and slow or it will hit you like a depth charge.
Bernie blinked a few times as the gin sank and found its target; then he got at my cigarette case again and lit up another cancer stick. I watched him and thought how I wouldn’t want to be Bernie’s wife, later on, or Bernie’s cat, since there was likely to be a lot of shouting and kicking going on in the Ohls residence tonight. “You got to tell me,” he said, in a voice made raspy by cigarette smoke and the liquor he had just flushed over his vocal co
rds, “you got to tell me who it was that hired you to find Peterson.” I had taken out my pipe, but he clamped a hand on my wrist. “And don’t start playing with that goddamned thing!”
“All right, Bernie,” I said soothingly, “all right.” I put the pipe back in my pocket and took a cigarette instead, figuring I might as well get one before Bernie smoked them all. I was searching around for another diversionary tactic. “Tell me what Hanson had to say,” I said.
“What do you mean, what he had to say?”
“I mean, what did he tell your boys when they went at him with the thumbscrews? What goods did he cough up?”
Bernie turned aside as if to spit, then turned back again. “Nothing worthwhile,” he said disgustedly. “He didn’t have anything. My guess is Canning didn’t trust him, not with the sensitive stuff, anyway. He said Canning wanted to find out what you knew about Nico Peterson, whether he might be alive and, if so, where he could be found. That was hardly news. As for the Mexicans, Canning knew they’d killed the girl, and took his revenge.”
“How did Canning get hold of the Mexicans? Did Hanson say?”
“He has associates south of the border. They nabbed the Mexes and shipped them up here. Pays to have influential friends, eh?” He picked up his empty glass and looked into it mournfully. “What a mess,” he said. “What an all-time, rip-roaring, Empire State Building of a mess.” He lifted his sad gaze and fixed it on me. “You know why I’m here, Marlowe? You know why I’m here, drinking with you and smoking? Because when I go home, my boss will have been on the telephone half a dozen times already, wanting to know if I’ve apprehended the miscreants yet, and if I’ve got you safely locked up in the sneezer, and how he’s going to explain to Canning’s fancy pals in city hall and elsewhere, who are his associates, too, most of them, how come we conducted a raid on this club of his—what’s it called?”
The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 19