“The Cahuilla.”
“—how come we conducted a full-scale raid on the Cahuilla Club, where they’re all members, before I consulted him and got his permission.”
“What?” I said. “You went out there without telling the big man?”
Sheriff Donnelly had been elected just recently, beating his predecessor by a couple thousand votes in an election upset that had surprised everyone, including Donnelly himself, I imagine. The guy he’d ousted had been in the job since before World War I, or so it felt like, and Donnelly had a lot to prove. The Sheriff’s chair was still warm when he put his backside on it, and from day one he’d been throwing his considerable weight around and leaning heavily on Bernie and the other officers in his command. Maybe they deserved it—they’d probably gotten soft under the old regime.
“It seemed urgent,” Bernie said, “from the way you described the shenanigans out there at the club. If I’d involved Donnelly, there’d have been so many hoops to jump through before we moved that everyone in the joint, including the bar staff and the gardeners, would have vamoosed long before we got there.” He stopped and looked at me. “What’s the matter now?”
I must have given what they call an involuntary start. A thought had struck me, a big, dirty, nasty, obvious thought.
“Is there a list of the people who work out there, at the club?” I asked.
“A list? Whaddya mean?”
“There must be some kind of record of who’s on the staff,” I said, talking more to myself than to Bernie, “a personnel or a payroll list, something like that.”
“What are you talking about?”
I took a little of my drink, noticing yet again how the lime juice perfectly complemented the juniper-berry tang of the gin. Good old Terry—if he’d done nothing else, he’d certainly introduced me to a great cocktail. “When I was out there, at the club,” I said, “this guy, his name is Lamarr, came up and started talking to me. He’s a bit, you know”—I touched a finger to my temple—“but not crazy crazy, and harmless, I’d guess. He said he’d seen me talking to Captain Hook and that he was one of the Lost Boys.”
“Captain Hook,” Bernie repeated in a flat voice, nodding. “The Lost Boys. What’s this, for Christ’s sake?”
“Floyd Hanson told me that the club has a policy of hiring the likes of Lamarr, loners, drifters, people with no past and not much future. Kind of a philanthropic thing, though I can’t see Wilber Canning as a philanthropist—that would have been his father.”
I stopped. Bernie waited, then said impatiently, “So? What’s the deal?”
“If Nico Peterson is alive and his death was faked, there had to be a body—Lynn Peterson was shown a stiff in the morgue and identified him as her brother. Maybe she was lying, to cover up the fact that Nico was alive and the whole thing was a setup.”
Bernie thought it over. “You’re saying the body in the morgue could have been one of the hobos working at the club? That Nico killed someone there, changed clothes with him, ran over the body enough times to make it unrecognizable, then dumped it at the roadside and hightailed it?”
I nodded slowly. I was still thinking it out myself. “‘The Lost Boys,’ Lamarr said. ‘We’re the Lost Boys.’”
“Who the hell are the Lost Boys? And who’s Captain Hook?”
“He’s a character in Peter Pan. You know—by J. M. Barrie?”
“Crazy but well-read, then, this Lamarr.”
“He was talking about Floyd Hanson. Hanson was Captain Hook. And the night Nico Peterson is supposed to have died, Hanson was one of the first on the scene and gave a preliminary identification. You bring Hanson back in and sweat him properly this time, I’ll bet you’ll get the whole story out of him.”
Bernie was silent for a while, playing with my matchbook, turning it in his fingers edge over edge on the bar. “You still saying you know nothing about all this except what the rest of us know?”
“I am saying that, Bernie, yes. You might notice I’ve said it a few times. It give you the idea that maybe I’m telling the truth?”
“It all started with you, Marlowe,” Bernie said with his eyes downcast, watching the matchbook, his tone almost gentle. “You’re the key to it all, somehow, I know that.”
“How could I—?”
“Shut up. Peterson I don’t care about, or even his sister. The Mexes, too—what’s a couple of dead wetbacks? That fairy Hanson I can live without, also Canning’s pin-striped blackjack artist. But Canning—Canning’s a different matter. He’s the name that’s going to be splashed all over the papers tomorrow, unless someone steps in and applies a gag.”
“Oh?” I said. “Who might that someone be?” I was asking, but I had a sudden idea what the answer was, and my heart began to sink in anticipation.
“I guess one of the many things you didn’t know,” Bernie said, in that half-angry, half-smug way of his, “is that Wilber Canning is a close business associate of Harlan Potter’s.”
He’d been saving that one up. I looked into my glass. I wondered who invented the gimlet. And how had he thought up the name? The world is full of little questions like that, and only Ripley knows the answers to them all.
“Ah,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘Ah.’”
Harlan Potter owned a large chunk of this strip of the California coast, along with about a dozen major newspapers, last count. He also happened to be the father of Linda Loring and of the late Mrs. Sylvia Lennox, which of course made him Terry Lennox’s father-in-law. At every turn in my life, it seemed, there was Terry, smiling his rueful smile and twirling a gimlet glass in his bone-white fingers. Funny—most people thought he was dead, like they thought Nico Peterson was dead, but he wasn’t, though he kept haunting me as if he were.
If I marry Linda Loring, I thought, Harlan Potter will be my father-in-law. That was a three-gimlet prospect. I gave the sign to Jake the barkeep, and he replied with his nod that was so understated it was hardly a nod at all.
“So,” I said, releasing a slow breath. “Harlan Potter. Well, well. Citizen Kane himself.”
“Have some respect!” Bernie said, trying not to snigger. “You’re almost one of the family—I hear Potter’s daughter is still carrying a torch for you. You going to let her light up your gray little life?”
“Don’t push it, Bernie,” I said evenly.
He lifted his hands in the sign of peace. “Hey, calm down. You’re losing your sense of humor, Marlowe.”
I swiveled on the bar stool so I was facing him. His eyes moved away from mine. He knew he’d overstepped the mark, but I kept going anyway. “Listen, Bernie, you can pummel me all you like about stuff that’s of legitimate interest to you, but stay out of my private life.”
“All right, all right,” he mumbled, looking sheepish and still frowning at the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
I turned back to the bar, not wanting him to see the shadow of a smirk I couldn’t keep off my face. I didn’t often get the chance to make Bernie blush, and when I did, I milked it for all it was worth.
Jake brought our drinks. I could see that Bernie didn’t really want another one, but given the fact that his size eleven foot was still in his mouth, he couldn’t very well refuse.
“Anyway, you’re probably right,” I said, cutting him some slack.
“About what?”
“About Potter making sure that his pal Canning doesn’t get completely roasted in tomorrow’s editions.”
“Uh-huh.” He took a sip of his drink and replaced the glass on the bar with a worried grimace. He was probably going to have to see Donnelly before long, and it wouldn’t go down too well if he stank of gin, which he would now anyway, since he’d put away two gimlets already. “This town,” he said, clicking his tongue. “I’ve about had it up to here with it.” He put a hand horizontally under his chin. “You know I been on the force nearly a quarter century? Think of that. It’s a meat grinder,
and I’m not even prime chuck steak.”
“Come on, Bernie,” I said, “you’ll have me weeping in a minute.”
He looked at me morosely. “And what about you?” he said. “You going to pretend your world is any cleaner than the one I’m stuck in?”
“It’s the same all around,” I said. “But look at it this way. With guys like you and me on one side of the scale, it’s not going to go down the whole way on the other side, where the Cannings and the Potters sit with their bags of gold in their laps.”
“Yeah, sure,” Bernie said. “You’re a regular Pollyanna this evening, ain’t you.”
I shut up then, not because of Bernie’s taunt but because I had a misgiving over putting Harlan Potter in the same league as Wilber Canning. Potter was tough, and you didn’t make his kind of money—they say he’s worth a hundred million—without cutting a few corners, and maybe a few throats, too. But a man who’d fathered a girl like Linda Loring couldn’t be all bad. I’d had a talk with him once. He started off by threatening me, went on to give me a lecture about what a dismal lot the rest of us were, then threatened me again, and ended up with the casual suggestion that he might think of putting some business my way, if I kept my nose clean. I said thanks but no thanks. At least, I thought I did.
Bernie looked at his watch. It was the size of a potato, but it still looked small on that arm of his. “I gotta blow,” he said and began shifting off the stool.
“You haven’t finished your drink,” I said. “Cocktails don’t come cheap, you know.”
“Listen, I’m officially on duty. Here”—he brought out his billfold and threw a five-spot on the bar—“have it on me.”
I gave him a look, then picked up the bill, folded it, and stuffed it in the top pocket of his blue serge suit. “Don’t insult me, Bernie,” I said. “I ask you to come for a drink, I pay. That’s part of what they call the social contract.”
“Yeah. I’m not so good on society rules.” He smiled, and I smiled back. “I’ll be seeing you, Phil,” he said.
“Do you have to?”
“It’s my job.” He put on his hat, adjusted it, and flicked the brim with a fingertip in a sort of salute. “So long, for now.”
I finished my drink and thought of finishing the one Bernie had left undrunk, but there are some limits us Marlowes just won’t cross. Instead I paid the bill and took up my own hat. I could see Jake getting ready to ask me how my lady friend was doing these days, meaning Linda Loring. To cut him off, I pretended to remember an urgent appointment elsewhere and made my escape.
* * *
It was a clear, cool night, and one big star was hanging low in the sky and throwing a long stiletto of light down into the heart of the Hollywood Hills. Bats were out too, squeaking and flickering like scraps of charred paper from a fire. I looked for a moon but couldn’t see one. Just as well—the moon always makes me feel melancholy. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I remembered that I didn’t have the car with me and flagged a taxi and told the driver to take me home. He was an Italian, as big as Bernie Ohls and about as good-humored. Every time a light turned red, he swore under his breath. The swear words were Italian, but I didn’t need a translation to know what they meant.
In the house the air was stuffy, as if a gang of people had been squatting in here all day with the windows sealed. I set up a chess game out of a book, Lasker vs. Capablanca, in which Capablanca demolished the German master with one of his sweetest and most deadly endgames. Chess doesn’t come any better. All the same, I wasn’t in the mood. I still had a buzz on from all the gin I’d put away, and I didn’t want it to fade. There are times when you wish your mind would stop working, and tonight mine was being much too busy for comfort. Some thoughts you try to keep out, but they get in anyway.
I hopped in the Olds and drove over to Barney’s Beanery, where I drank six straight bourbons and would have kept going only good old Travis, my guardian angel behind the bar, refused to serve me any more. Instead he made me give him my car keys and helped me out to the street and poured me into a cab. After that I don’t remember much. Somehow I got myself up the redwood steps and through the front door and even made it into the bedroom, where I woke around midnight, sprawled diagonally across the bed, on my face, with all my clothes on. I smelled like a raccoon and was as thirsty as a camel.
I stumbled into the kitchen and leaned over the sink and drank a quart or so of water straight from the faucet, then straightaway I stumbled into the bathroom and leaned over the toilet and threw up a couple of quarts. The first quart was water, followed by another quart of pale green liquid composed, I figured, half of gimlet and half of bile. It had been a long day.
And it wasn’t over yet. In the middle of the night, the phone woke me. At first I thought it was a fire alarm, and I would have run out into the night except that, for some reason, I couldn’t get the front door to open. I picked up the receiver as if it were the head of a rattlesnake. It was Bernie, calling to tell me that Floyd Hanson had just been found in his cell, hanging from one of the bars in the window. He had torn the bedsheet into strips and wound them together into a makeshift rope. The window hadn’t been high enough, and he’d had to let himself hang there with his feet on the floor and his knees flexed. It would have taken him a long time to die.
“So that’s one canary that won’t be singing,” Bernie said. I told him he was all heart. He laughed, without enjoying it. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You sound like you’re wearing a gag.”
“I’m drunk,” I told him.
“You’re what? I can’t make out what you’re saying.”
“I said I’m drunk. Iced. Soused. Spifflicated.”
He laughed again, with conviction this time. I supposed it must have been funny, hearing someone as far gone as I was trying to pronounce those words, especially the last one.
I took a deep breath, which made me feel dizzy, but then my head cleared enough for me to ask about Bartlett.
“Who’s Bartlett?” Bernie said.
“Jesus, Bernie, don’t shout,” I said, holding the receiver away from my ear. “Bartlett is the butler—the old guy with the blackjack, the one I shot in the knee.”
“Oh, him. He’s not so good. In a coma, last I heard. Lost a barrel of blood. They’re giving him transfusions. Maybe he’ll pull through, maybe not. You proud of yourself, Wild Bill?”
“He damn near drowned me,” I growled.
“That old guy? You’re losing it, Marlowe.”
“There you go, calling me Marlowe again.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot worse things I could call you. And just because you buy me a couple of drinks don’t mean I got to be your best friend and playmate. And the booze wore off as soon as I got into the office—Donnelly had been at some fancy fund-raiser, and he came in in a tuxedo and black tie, stinking of cologne and high-toned women. You ever notice how the smell of women is everywhere on that kind of evening?”
“Have I ever been to that kind of evening?”
“Makes your head swim. Has effects lower down, too. Anyway, Donnelly was pretty sore at being dragged away from the ball, but that was nothing compared to what he was like when he heard what had happened out at the Cahuilla Club, what with you shooting butlers and Canning doing the Indian rope trick and vanishing into thin air.”
“Bernie,” I said, in the voice of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, as the poet writes, “Bernie, I’m drunk and I’m sick and there’s a guy with a jackhammer hard at work on the back of my skull. I was almost drowned today. I also shot a guy who’s maybe not going to make it and probably doesn’t deserve to, but still, even popping bad guys takes it out of you. So can I please go back to bed?”
“Yeah, you go and sleep it off, Marlowe, while the rest of us stay up all night trying to sort out a mess that, as far as I can see, you started.”
“I’m sorry you’re in the wrong job, Bernie. What did you want to be, a kindergarten teacher?”
He exploded then into the kind of language the likes of which you wouldn’t find in one of those books you buy in a plain brown wrapper from a shop where the shades are always pulled and there’s no sign over the door. I let him rant, and eventually he ran out of steam and shut up, though I could hear him breathing angrily into the mouthpiece. Then he asked what I’d done with the gun.
“What gun?”
“What gun? The gun you shot Bartleby with.”
“Bartlett. I threw it away.”
“Where?”
“Into the bougainvillea.”
“Into the what?”
“The bushes. At the Cahuilla Club.”
“You dumb bastard. What were you thinking of?”
“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” I said. “I was operating on instinct. You remember what instinct is, Bernie? It’s what mostly guides the behavior of ordinary human beings, people who haven’t been on the police force for a quarter of a century.”
Then I hung up on him.
21
I slept till noon. What did I feel like like when I woke up? There was a stray cat in the neighborhood that kept cozying up to me in the hope that I’d take her in and let her run my life for me. She was a moth-eaten Siamese, but of course she thought she was the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. The other day I opened my back door and there was Pharaoh’s daughter, sitting on the stoop holding in her mouth the remains of what had been some kind of bird. She gave me a winsome look and delicately laid the corpse down at my feet. I guess it was meant as a present for me, sort of a down payment prior to her moving in.
Well, that bird was me, glazed of eye and feeling chewed all over, as I lay there in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and watched the light fixture in the ceiling, which seemed to be spinning slowly around and around in an elliptical orbit. Take my advice: never drink six bourbons on top of a trio of gimlets. When I had unsealed my lips sufficiently to open my mouth, I was surprised that heavy green smoke didn’t come pouring out of it.
I got up and dragged myself into the kitchen, moving very carefully, like a very old man, brittle and frail. I spooned some coffee into the percolator and put it on the stove and set a flame going under it. Then I stood for a long time leaning on the edge of the sink and gazing vacantly into the backyard. The sunlight out there was as acid as lemon juice. The recent rain had livened things up greatly, though. Most of the blossoms on Mrs. Paloosa’s potato vine were starting to turn to berries by now, but the oleander bush behind the garbage can was a mass of pink flowers, where half a dozen tiny hummingbirds were busy about their work of pollination. Ah, nature, and hungover me the only blot on the landscape.
The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 20