The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Benjamin Black

  When the two women had gone, Terry blew air out through pursed lips and then laughed softly. “Quite a lady,” he said. “She had me terrified.”

  “You didn’t look too scared to me,” I said.

  “Oh, well, you know me—a master of disguise.” He went to where I’d been sitting and leaned down and crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the floor, then slipped his hands into his pockets and strolled over to the sofa and stood looking down at Cavendish where he lay sprawled like a cartoon image of a drunkard. “Poor Dick,” he said. “Clare’s mother was right: he shouldn’t drink.”

  “Did you know him?” I asked. “I mean, before now?”

  “Oh, yes. He and Clare often came down to Mexico. We all knew each other—Nico, our friend Mendy, some others. There’s a bar on the waterfront where we used to gather of an evening for cocktails. Nice place.” He turned to look at me over his shoulder. “You should come visit, one day. You look like you could do with some sun and relaxation. You push yourself too hard, Phil, you always did.”

  On the day after his wife was murdered, I had driven Terry down to Tijuana, to the airport there, where he’d caught a flight south. When I got back, Joe Green was waiting for me. They knew Terry had skipped and took me in as an accessory. I got roughed up by Joe’s boss, a bruiser called Gregorius, and spent a couple of nights in the cooler before they let me go, after hearing of Terry’s oh-so-convenient suicide. It was a close one, for me and my so-called reputation. Yes, Terry owed me.

  He walked back now and stood in front of me, his hands still in his pockets. He had on his most cajoling smile. “You bring the suitcase, by any chance?” he asked. “I’m guessing that’s why Nico wanted to see you, to hand it over. Nico never had much tenacity. He scares too easily. I have to admit, I always despised him a little.”

  “Not enough to stop you using him as your mule.”

  He widened his eyes. “My mule? Oh, now, sport, you don’t think I’m in this business, do you? Too dirty for me.”

  “I’d have agreed with you once,” I said. “But you’ve changed, Terry. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “You’re wrong, Phil.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Sure, I’ve changed—I’ve had to. Life down there isn’t all guitar bands and margaritas and chicken mole. I’ve had to do some things I’d never have dreamed of doing up here.”

  “You saying you ran through the money you inherited from Sylvia? That was Harlan Potter’s money, left to her. There had to be a lot of it.”

  He pursed his lips again, I think to stop himself from smiling. “Let’s say I made some ill-judged investments.”

  “With Mendy Menendez?”

  He said nothing, but I could see I was right. “So you’re in hock to Mendy, and owe him big-time. That’s why you sent Clare to me—it was on behalf of Mendy. I’m right, yes?”

  Terry turned and paced away from me stiff-legged, looking at the floor, then turned and paced back the way he had come and stopped in front of me again. “As I say, you know Mendy. He doesn’t give much quarter when it comes to money, debts, things like that.”

  “I thought you were his buddy and his hero,” I said, “on account of you having saved him and Randy Starr from a bloody death on the battlefield.”

  Terry chuckled. “Heroes get tarnished, after a while,” he said. “And then, you know as well as I do what people are like—they tire of being grateful. They even start resenting that they have to feel beholden to you.”

  I thought that one over. He was right. It had always surprised me that Mendy had helped him in the first place. I had suspected that Terry must have had some kind of hold on him. I thought of asking now if that had been the case, but I couldn’t work up the interest.

  “Of course,” he went on, “Clare would have been happy to help me out. She has a lot of money of her own, you know. She wanted to give me some to pay off Mendy, but”—he flashed that apologetic, self-excusing smile—“I have a few shreds of honor still intact.”

  “What about the two Mexicans?” I said.

  “Yes,” Terry said, and a wrinkle formed between his eyebrows, “that was a bad business. Nico’s sister—I never met her, but I’m sure she didn’t deserve to die.”

  “She was in it with Nico,” I said. “She identified the body.”

  “Yes, but all the same, to be murdered like that—” He made a grimace. “I swear I didn’t know Mendy was sending the Mexicans after Nico. I thought he would wait until Clare had—had talked to you, until you’d had time to find Nico, as I had no doubt you would have, if Mendy had waited a while longer. But Mendy is an unfortunate blend of impatience and distrust. So he sent those two heavies up here to begin their own search for Nico. A sad mistake.”

  “Thing is, of course,” I said, “no one, not you or Mendy or anyone else, would have known about Nico’s disappearing act if Clare hadn’t spotted him on the street that day in San Francisco.”

  “Yes, that’s true. You know”—he swiveled on his heel and did another bit of stiff-legged pacing, his hands clasped behind his back now—“I can’t help but wish she hadn’t seen him. Everything would have been so much simpler.”

  “That’s probably true. But was it her fault? She didn’t tell Mendy she’d seen him, did she. I’m guessing she told you, and you told Mendy. And that’s how the machine got rolling. Am I right?”

  “I can’t lie to you.” That made me laugh, and when I did, Terry looked hurt—he really did. “Anyway, I’m not lying now,” he said, in an offended tone. “Yes, I told Mendy. I shouldn’t have, I know. But like I said, I have reasons to be grateful to him—”

  “And also you needed to make yourself look good with him, by bringing him the choice snippet of news that Peterson was only playing dead and was still at large, with Mendy’s suitcase full of junk in his possession.”

  “Ah, yes,” Terry said. “That suitcase.”

  “You gave it to me to keep for you, one day.”

  “That’s right, so I did. Was that the night you drove me to Tijuana, after poor Sylvia had died? I can’t remember. When you saw Peterson with it you recognized it, of course.”

  “It sure has had a life.”

  “English-made, you see. The English build to last.”

  He stopped pacing and sat down on the piano stool and crossed one knee over the other and put a hand to his chin, like Rodin’s Thinker. Terry had the spindliest legs I’d ever seen on anybody. Like a stork, he was.

  He started to say something, but just then Richard Cavendish sat upright on the sofa and looked at us, licking his lips and blinking. “Wha’s going on?” he said thickly.

  Terry hardly gave him a glance. “It’s all right, Dick,” he said. “You go back to sleep.”

  “Oh, all right,” Cavendish muttered and flopped down the way he had been before, with his arms and legs thrown out to either side. After a second or two he began to snore softly.

  Terry was patting his pockets. I don’t know what he expected to find there. “I’d ask you for another cigarette,” he said, “only I don’t want to start up again full-time.” He looked up at me sideways. “You going to tell me where the suitcase is?” he asked.

  “Sure. It’s in a locker at Union Station, and the key to the locker is in an envelope on the way to a pal of mine—well, sort of a pal—named Bernie Ohls. He’s assistant chief of homicide, works out of the Sheriff’s office.”

  The room was suddenly very still. Terry sat there, all twisted up on himself, with his knees crossed and that hand to his chin and the other supporting his elbow. I went to the window and stepped into the opening between the drapes and looked out. There was nothing to see, only darkness and my own shadowy reflection in the glass.

  “I don’t think,” Terry said behind me, “I don’t think that was wise, old chum. I don’t think that was wise at all.” He didn’t sound angry, or menacing, or anything much, really, except maybe wistful—yes, that’s the word: wistful.

  Then he spoke again an
d his voice had changed. “Ah,” he said, “it’s you. What’s that you’ve got there?”

  I turned from the window. Terry was still sitting on the piano stool with his back to me. Beyond him, Clare’s brother, Everett, was standing in the open doorway, that floppy lock of hair hanging down across his forehead. He didn’t look in much better shape than when I’d seen him last, but at least he was conscious. He wore pajamas and a silk dressing gown with dragons embroidered on it. He had on penny loafers—they looked odd with the pajamas—and he had a pistol in his hand. It was a dainty little thing, some kind of a Colt, I thought. I could see it had a pearl handle. It didn’t look serious at all, but all guns, even the daintiest of them, can knock a hole in the toughest heart.

  He looked at me as I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the drapes, and his eyes grew uncertain. I was what he hadn’t expected.

  “Hello, Everett,” I said. “Did we wake you? Your mother was here just now.” He stared at me. He looked younger than he was because his face was weak. And, I suppose, because his mother spoiled and cosseted him and protected him from the big bad world. At least, that’s what she thought she was doing.

  “Who are you?” he said. His eyes were sunken, ringed with dark purple shadows.

  “Name’s Marlowe,” I said. “We met before, on a couple of occasions. The first time you were awake, and we talked on the lawn—you remember? You thought maybe I was the new chauffeur. The second time, you didn’t know I was there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You asked me who I was,” I said, “and I was explaining.”

  I made myself smile. I was playing for time. Everett Edwards the Third might have been a milksop, as Wilber Canning would have said, but he was also a heroin addict, and he had a gun in his hand.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, in a tone of disgust. “I remember now: you’re the fellow who was looking for Clare that day. Some kind of a detective, aren’t you?” He giggled suddenly. “A detective! That’s rich. I have a gun, and you’re a detective. That’s really rich.”

  He turned his attention to Terry. “You,” he said, not giggling now, “why are you here?”

  Terry considered. “Well, I’m sort of a friend of the family, Rett. You know me.” I could still only see Terry’s back, and the back of his head, but he seemed pretty calm. I was glad. Everyone was going to have to be very, very calm for the next few minutes.

  Terry went on: “Remember the good times we had, down in Acapulco? Remember the day I taught you to water-ski? That was a good day, wasn’t it? And then we all had dinner at that place on the beach, Pedro’s, it’s called. It’s still there. I often go, and when I do I think of you, and the fine times we had.”

  “You bastard,” Everett said quietly. “You were the one who got me started. You were the one who gave me that stuff in the first place.” His hand was quivering and the gun in it was quivering too. That wasn’t a good thing. A quivering gun can easily go off; I’ve seen it happen. Everett was close to tears, but they would be tears of rage. “You were the one.”

  “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic, Rett,” Terry said with a little laugh. “You were a very nervous boy in those days, and I thought an occasional pinch of happy powder would do you good. I’m sorry if I was wrong.”

  “How dare you come here, to this house,” Everett said, and his hand shook even more and the gun barrel yawed in a way that made me clench my teeth.

  “Listen,” I said, “listen, Rett, why don’t you give me the gun?”

  The young man stared at me for a moment, then let out a high-pitched squeal of laughter. “Is that how detectives talk,” he said, “is it really? I thought that only happened in the movies.” He put on a mock-serious face and deepened his voice so that it sounded something like mine: “Why don’t you give me the gun, Everett, before someone gets hurt.” He threw his eyes to the ceiling. “Don’t you get it, you stupid man? That’s the whole point—someone is going to get hurt. Someone is going to get hurt very badly. Isn’t that so, Terry? Isn’t that so, my old playmate from Acapulco days?”

  That was when Terry made his mistake. In situations like that, someone always does; someone always makes the wrong, the stupid move, and all hell follows. He suddenly propelled himself off the piano stool and lunged forward, like a swimmer making a shallow dive into an oncoming wave, landed on his stomach, and snatched up the glass ashtray that was on the floor there, beside the chair where I had been sitting. He meant to fling it at Everett, a lethal discus. He didn’t realize that when you’re lying on your front like that, you can’t get much force into a throw. Besides, Everett was too quick for him, and Terry was still drawing back his arm when Everett took a step forward, the gun held out at arm’s length, and pointed it at Terry’s head and pulled the trigger.

  The slug caught Terry in the forehead, just below the hairline. He stayed as he was for a moment, lying flat-out with the ashtray in one hand and the other braced beside him on the floor as he tried to get himself up. But he wasn’t going to get up, not ever again. There were two holes in his head, the one in his forehead and another, bigger one at the back, at the base of his skull. There was a lot of blood coming out of this second hole, and some sticky-looking gray stuff, too. His head dropped and his face slammed onto the carpet.

  Everett looked like he was going to fire again, but I reached him before he could get off a second shot. I didn’t have much trouble taking the gun away from him. In fact, he as good as handed it to me. He had gone as limp as a girl, and he stood there, his lower lip trembling, staring down at Terry where he lay bleeding on the floor. One of Terry’s feet, the right one, twitched a few times and then went still. I noticed, as I’ve had occasion to notice before, how much like fried bacon gunpowder smells.

  Behind Everett the door opened again, and this time Clare came in. She stopped in the doorway and looked at the scene before her with an expression of horror and disbelief. Then she strode forward and pushed her brother aside and fell to her knees. She lifted Terry’s head and cradled it in her lap. She said nothing. She didn’t even weep. She really had loved him; I saw that clearly now. How could I not?

  She looked up at me, at the gun in my hand. “Did you—?”

  I shook my head.

  She turned to her brother. “Was it you?” He would not look at her. “I’ll never forgive you,” she said to him, in a calm, almost formal-sounding voice. “I’ll never forgive you, and I hope you die. I hope you give yourself an overdose, very soon, and go into a coma and never come out of it. I always hated you, and now I know why. I knew someday you’d ruin my life.”

  Everett still didn’t look at her, didn’t reply, didn’t say a word. After all, there wasn’t much to say.

  Behind us, Richard Cavendish got to his feet and shambled forward. Seeing Terry, and the bright blood soaking into the front of his wife’s blue gown, he stopped. Nothing happened for a few seconds; then Cavendish suddenly laughed. “Well, well,” he said. “Man down, eh?” And he laughed again. I figured he thought he was having a dream, that none of what he was seeing was real. He advanced again and, stepping over Terry’s body, put out a hand and patted Clare on the head and then reeled on through the doorway, humming to himself, and was gone.

  At last, Clare began to cry. I thought of going to her, but what would I have done? It was too late for me to do anything.

  25

  I didn’t call Bernie. I reckoned he’d had enough of me for a while, and I’d sure had enough of him—I didn’t want him shouting down the line at me again, and calling me names, and telling me to do things to myself that the greatest contortionist in the world couldn’t have managed. So I phoned Joe Green instead, good old Joe, who’d drink a beer with you and share a joke and yap about the ball game, and whose underpants got all balled up in his crotch when the weather was hot.

  Joe was on duty, as always, and twenty minutes after he got my call he arrived at Langrishe Lodge with a couple of squad cars yowling in his wake. By then Everett
Edwards was curled up like a hedgehog on the sofa his drunken brother-in-law had earlier vacated. He was weeping bitter tears, not of remorse, it seemed. but some kind of frustration, though why he should feel frustrated I couldn’t say. Maybe he thought Terry had died too quickly, with not enough pain. Or maybe he was disappointed by the banality of what had happened; maybe he’d wanted some grand scene with swordplay and speeches and corpses strewn all over the place, like something that other Marlowe, the one who saw Christ’s blood streaming in the what’s-it, might have written for him.

  Joe stood in the middle of the room and looked around with a worried scowl. He was out of his depth here. He was used to pounding up tenement stairs and kicking in doors and backing punks in sweat-stained undershirts up against walls and jamming the barrel of his .38 Special into their mouths to make them stop yelling. That was Joe’s world. What he had here looked like a parlor game among the country club set that had gone spectacularly wrong.

  He hunkered down and squinted at the bullet holes in Terry’s skull, looked across at Everett Edwards cowering on the sofa, then at me. “Jesus Christ, Phil,” he said in an undertone, “what the hell is all this?”

  I held out my hands and shrugged. Where to begin?

  Joe got to his feet with a grunt and turned to Clare Cavendish. Clare, with her stricken face and her bloodstained hands hanging by her sides and the front of her blue gown soaked and glistening with gore, was a figure from an older type of play, one written long ago, by an ancient Greek. Joe began by calling her Mrs. Langrishe, which was my cue to step in and correct him. “Cavendish is the name, Joe,” I said. “Mrs. Clare Cavendish.”

  Clare seemed to register nothing, just stood there like a statue. She was in shock. Her brother, on the sofa, let fall a juicy sob. Joe looked at me again, shaking his head. He was lost.