In the end he handed Clare over to one of the patrolmen, a big Irish lump with carroty hair and freckles, who gave her a Barry Fitzgerald smile and said she wasn’t to worry at all, at all. He had found a blanket somewhere, and he draped it over her shoulders and led her solicitously from the room. She went without the least resistance, gliding to the door in her bloodied dress, graceful as ever, straight-backed, expressionless, showing us all her lovely profile.
They clamped the cuffs on Everett and led him away, too, in his pj’s and his loafers. He looked at no one. His eyes were red from weeping and there were smears of snot on his cheeks. I wondered if he realized what was waiting for him in the coming weeks and months, not to mention in the years afterward that he was going to have to spend up at San Quentin, unless his mother bought a lawyer tough and clever enough to get him out through some legal loophole that no one had thought to plug. It wouldn’t be the first time the son of a rich family got away with murder.
Next thing, when her son and her daughter were gone, who should come wandering in again but Ma Langrishe, in her hairnet and her mask of white mud. She looked at the body on the floor, which someone had thrown a blanket over, but seemed not to know what it was. She looked at me, and then at Joe. She couldn’t understand any of it. She was just a sad, old woman, confused and lost.
* * *
When it was all over and the squad cars had left, Joe and I stood outside on the gravel beside his car and had a smoke together.
“Christ, Phil,” Joe said, “you ever think of going into some other line of work?”
“All the time,” I said. “All the time.”
“You know you’re going to have to come downtown and file a statement.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know. But listen, Joe, do me a favor. Let me go home now and sleep, and I’ll come in first thing tomorrow.”
“I dunno, Phil,” he said, rubbing his chin in his worried way.
“First thing, Joe—I give you my word.”
“Oh, go on, then.”
“You’re a pal.”
“I’m a pushover, is what I am.”
“No, Joe,” I said, dropping my cigarette on the gravel and grinding it in with my heel, “I’m the pushover.”
I went home and had a shower and fell into bed and slept for whatever there was left of the night. At seven my alarm sounded. I got myself up somehow and drank a cup of scalding coffee and drove down to the station, as I’d promised Joe I would, and gave my statement to the desk man on duty.
I didn’t say much, just enough to keep Joe happy and to satisfy the court when the case of State of California vs. Everett Edwards III came around. I’d be called as a witness, of course, but I didn’t mind that. What I did mind was the prospect of testifying in the witness box and seeing Clare Cavendish sitting there in the front row of the court, gazing at her brother, known now as the accused, the one who had murdered her lover. No, that was a prospect I didn’t relish. I recalled her mother, that day at the Ritz-Beverly, saying how people could get damaged in this affair. I had thought she meant that I might hurt her daughter, but that wasn’t what she was talking about. It was me she meant; I was the one who was going to end up with the scars, and somehow she’d known it then. I should have listened to her.
When I came out of the station the Olds was standing in the sun, the heat humming off the hood. That steering wheel was going to be awful hot.
You think I’m going to say that later that day I went over to Victor’s and drank a gimlet in memory of my dead friend. But I didn’t. The Terry I knew had died a long time before Everett Edwards put a bullet through his brain. I wouldn’t ever have said it to him, but Terry Lennox had been my idea of a gentleman. Yes, despite the drinking and the women and the people he hung around with, like Mendy Menendez, despite the fact that when it came down to it he cared for no one but himself, Terry was, in some unlikely way, a man of honor.
That was the Terry I had known, or thought I knew, anyway. What happened to him, what was it that stopped him from being decent and upright and loyal? He used to blame the war, used to tap himself on the chest and say how since he’d come back from the fighting there was nothing alive left inside him. I didn’t buy that; it had too much of a doomed-romantic ring to it. Maybe life down there in sunny Mexico, with the waterskiing and the cocktails on the waterfront and having to be Mendy Menendez’s legman and fixer, had destroyed something in him, so that the style, the fine high polish, remained, while the metal underneath was all eaten away by acid and rust and canker. The Terry I knew would never have hooked a kid like Everett Edwards on heroin. He’d never have tied himself to a hood like Mendy Menendez. Above all, he’d never have gotten the woman who loved him to seduce another man for his own convenience.
That last bit of treachery I’ve decided to cancel. I’m going to believe Clare Cavendish fell into my bed of her own choice—I think of her that night, with Terry still behind the curtains, lowering her voice and putting a finger to her lips to stop me saying how we had been in bed together. And even if it wasn’t me she wanted, even if she slept with me only to get me involved in the search for Nico Peterson, I’m going to believe it was all her own work, and that Terry didn’t put her up to it. Some things you have to force yourself to believe. What was it she’d said? Make a Pascalian wager. Well, that’s what I’ve done. I’m still not too sure what Pascal was betting on, but I’m thinking it must have been something pretty significant.
Just now I opened my desk drawer and searched around until I found an old airlines timetable and started looking up flights to Paris. There’s no chance of my going there, but it’s a nice thing to dream about. Except I keep remembering that wedding band on the bottom of the swimming pool at the Cahuilla Club and wondering if maybe it was some kind of warning.
I did make one symbolic gesture, when I took the lamp with the painted roses on it from the table beside my bed and carried it out to the backyard and dropped it in the garbage can, then went inside again and filled a pipe. That was, for me, the last of Clare Cavendish. She’d walked into my life and made me love her—well, maybe she didn’t make me, but she knew what she was doing, all the same—and now she was gone.
I can’t say I didn’t, don’t, miss her. Her kind of beauty doesn’t slip through your fingers without leaving them singed. I know I’m better off without her. It’s what I keep telling myself. I know it, and someday I’ll believe it, too.
She was playing the piano for Terry that night when I arrived at the house. I guess it’s not vulgar to play for someone when you love him.
She never did pay me, for what she hired me to do.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In his files, Raymond Chandler kept a list of possible titles for future books and stories. Among them were The Diary of a Loud Check Suit, The Man with the Shredded Ear, and Stop Screaming—It’s Me. Also on the list was The Black-Eyed Blonde.
In all the Marlowe novels his creator played fast and loose with the topography of Southern California, and I have allowed myself the same license. Yet there were many details that had to be accurate and of which I was unsure. I therefore depended heavily on advice from a quintet of informants who know the area intimately. These are Candice Bergen, Brian Siberell, Robert Bookman, and my agents Ed Victor and Geoffrey Sanford. For their expertise, generosity, patience, and good humor I wish to express my deepest gratitude. I am especially appreciative of the care, thought, and inventiveness that Candice Bergen devoted to the text, and of the numerous pitfalls she steered me past. And I am sorry that the peacock made only a fleeting appearance.
Others to whom I owe warm thanks are: María Fasce Ferri, Rodrigo Fresan, Graham C. Greene and the Estate of Raymond Chandler, Dr. Gregory Page, Maria Rejt, Fiona Ruane, John Sterling, and my manuscript editor nonpareil, Bonnie Thompson.
Finally, warm thanks to my brother, Vincent Banville, who introduced me to Marlowe, and whose own crime novels showed me how it could be done.
ALSO BY BENJAMIN BLACK
Vengeance
A Death in Summer
Elegy for April
The Silver Swan
Christine Falls
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BENJAMIN BLACK is the pen name of the Man Booker Prize–winning novelist John Banville. The author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed series of Quirke novels—including Christine Falls, Vengeance, and Holy Orders—he lives in Dublin.
THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE. Copyright © 2014 by John Banville Inc. and Raymond Chandler Limited. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover art © Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Black, Benjamin, 1945–
The black-eyed blonde: a Philip Marlowe novel / Benjamin Black. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9814-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8050-9815-0 (electronic copy) 1. Marlowe, Philip (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Social classes—Fiction. 4. California—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A57B59 2014
823’.914—dc23
2013026790
First Edition: March 2014
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 27