Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  “Fine,” I said.

  So for the next two months, she was my only client. I worked six days a week for her—Monday through Saturday. Sundays God, Mallory and Dodd rested. I drove her in her candy-apple red Packard convertible, a car designed for blondes with windblown hair and pearls. She sat in back, of course. Most days I took her to the Hal Roach Studio where she was making a musical with Laurel and Hardy. I’d wait in some dark pocket of the sound stage and watch her every move out in the brightness. In a black wig, lacy bodice, and clinging, gypsy skirt, Dolores was the kind of girl you took home to mother, and if mother didn’t like her, to hell with mother.

  Evenings she hit the club circuit, the Trocadero and the El Mocambo chiefly. I’d sit in the cocktail lounges and quietly drink and wait for her and her various dates to head home. Some of these guys were swishy types that she was doing the studio a favor by appearing in public with; a couple others spent the night.

  I don’t mean to tell tales out of school, but this tale can’t be told at all unless I’m frank about that one thing: Dolores slept around. Later, when the gossip rags were spreading rumors about alcohol and drugs, that was all the bunk. But Dolores was a friendly girl. She had generous charms and she was generous with them.

  “Mallory,” she said, one night in early December when I was dropping her off, walking her up to the front door of the cafe like always, “I think I have a crush on you.”

  She was alone tonight, having played girlfriend to one of those Hollywood funny boys for the benefit of Louella Parsons and company. Alone but for me.

  She slipped an arm around my waist. She had booze on her breath, but then so did I, and neither one of us was drunk. She was bathed gently in moonlight and Chanel Number Five.

  She kissed me with those bee-stung lips, stinging so softly, so deeply.

  I moved away. “No. I’m sorry.”

  She winced. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m the hired help. You’re just lonely tonight.”

  Her eyes, which I seldom looked into because of the depth of the sadness there, hardened. “Don’t you ever get lonely, you bastard?”

  I swallowed. “Never,” I said.

  She drew her hand back to slap me, but then she just touched my face, instead. Gentle as the ocean breeze, and it was gentle tonight, the breeze, so gentle.

  “Goodnight, Mallory,” she said.

  And she slipped inside.

  “Goodnight,” I said, to nobody. Then to myself: “Goodnight, you goddamn sap.”

  I drove her Packard to the garage that was attached to the bungalow above the restaurant complex; to do that I had to take Montemar Vista Road to Seretto Way, turning right. The Mediterranean-style stucco bungalow on Cabrillo, like so many houses in Montemar Vista, climbed the side of the hill like a clinging vine. It was owned by Dolores Dodd’s partner in the Cafe, movie director/producer Warren Eastman. Eastman had an apartment next to Dolores’ above the restaurant, as well as the bungalow, and seemed to live back and forth between the two.

  I wondered what the deal was, with Eastman and my client, but I never asked, not directly. Eastman was a thin, dapper man in his late forties, with a pointed chin and a small mustache and a widow’s peak that his slick black hair was receding around, making his face look diamond-shaped. He often sat in the cocktail lounge with a Bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other. He was always talking deals with movie people.

  “Mallory,” he-said, one night, motioning me over to the bar. He was seated on the very stool that Dolores had been, that first morning. “This is Nick DeCiro, the talent agent. Nick, this is the gumshoe Dolores hired to protect her from the big bad gambling syndicate.”

  DeCiro was another darkly handsome man, a bit older than Eastman, though he lacked both the mustache and receding hairline of the director. DeCiro wore a white suit with a dark sportshirt, open at the neck to reveal a wealth of black chest hair.

  I shook DeCiro’s hand. His grip was firm, moist, like a fistful of topsoil.

  “Nicky here is your client’s ex-husband,” Eastman said, with a wag of his cigarette-in-holder, trying for an air of that effortless decadence that Hollywood works so hard at.

  “Dolores and me are still pals,” DeCiro said, lighting up a foreign cig with a shiny silver lighter that he then clicked shut with a meaningless flourish. “We broke up amicably.”

  “I heard it was over extreme cruelty,” I said.

  DeCiro frowned, and Eastman cut in glibly, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Mallory. Besides, you have to get a divorce over something.”

  “But then you’d know that in your line of work,” DeCiro said, an edge in his thin voice.

  “I don’t do divorce work,” I said.

  “Sure,” DeCiro said.

  “I don’t. If you gents will excuse me . . .”

  “Mallory, Mallory,” Eastman said, touching my arm, “don’t be so touchy.”

  I waited for him to remove his hand from my arm, then said, “Did you want something, Mr. Eastman? I’m not much for this Hollywood shit-chat.”

  “I don’t like your manner,” DeCiro said.

  “Nobody does,” I said. “But I don’t get paid well enough for it to matter.”

  “Mallory,” Eastman said, “I was just trying to convince Nicky here that my new film is perfect for a certain client of his. I’m doing a mystery. About the perfect crime. The perfect murder.”

  “No such animal,” I said.

  “Oh, really?” DeCiro said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Murder and crime are inexact sciences. All the planning in the world doesn’t account for the human element.”

  “Then how do you explain,” Eastman said archly, “the hundreds of murders that go unsolved in this country?”

  “Policework is a more exact science than crime or murder,” I admitted, “but we have a lot of corrupt cops in this world—and a lot of dumb ones.”

  “Then there are perfect crimes.”

  “No. Just unsolved ones. And imperfect detectives. Good evening, gentlemen.”

  That was the most extensive conversation I had with either Eastman or DeCiro during the time I was employed by Miss Dodd, though I said hello and they did the same, now and then, at the Cafe.

  But Eastman was married to an actress named Miranda Diamond, a fiery Latin whose parents were from Mexico City, even if she’d been raised in the Bronx. She fancied herself as the next Lupe Velez, and she was a similarly voluptuous dame, though her handsome features were as hard as a gravestone.

  She cornered me at the Cafe one night, in the cocktail lounge, where I was drinking on the job.

  “You’re a dick,” she said.

  We’d never spoken before.

  “I hope you mean that in the nicest way,” I said.

  “You’re bodyguarding that bitch,” she said, sitting next to me on a leather-and-chrome couch. Her nostrils flared; if I’d been holding a red cape, I’d have dropped it and run for the stands.

  “Miss Dodd is my client, yes, Miss Diamond.”

  She smiled. “You recognize me.”

  “Oh yes. And I also know enough to call you Mrs. Eastman, in certain company.”

  “My husband and I are separated.”

  “Ah.”

  “But I could use a little help in the divorce court.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Photographs of him and that bitch in the sack.” She said “the” like “thee.”

  “That would help you.”

  “Yes. You see . . . my husband has similar pictures of me, with a gentleman, in a compromising position.”

  “Even missionaries get caught in that position, I understand.” I offered her a cigarette, she took it, and I lit hers and mine. “And if you had similar photos, you could negotiate yourself a better settlement.”

  “Exactly. Interested?”

  “I don’t do divorce work. I don’t sell clients out. It’s a conflict of interests.”

>   She smiled; she put her hand on my leg. “I could make it worth your while. Financially and . . . otherwise.”

  It wasn’t even Christmas and already two screen goddesses wanted to hop in the sack with me. I must have really been something.

  “No thanks, senorita. I sleep alone . . . just me and my conscience.”

  Then she suggested I do to myself what she’d just offered to do for me. She was full of ideas.

  So was I. I was pretty sure Dolores and Eastman were indeed having an affair, but it was one of the on-again-off-again variety. One night they’d be affectionate, in that sickening Hollywood sweetie-baby way; the next night he would be cool to her; the next she would be cool to him. It was love, I recognized it, but the kind that sooner or later blows up like an overheated engine.

  Ten days before Christmas, Dolores was honored by a famous British comedian, so famous I’d never the hell heard of him, with a dinner at the Troc. At a table for twelve upstairs, in the swanky cream-and-gold dining room, Dolores was being feted by her show-biz friends, while I sat downstairs in the oak-paneled Cellar Lounge with other people not famous enough to sit upstairs, nursing a rye at the polished copper bar. I didn’t feel like a polished copper, that was for sure. I was just a chauffeur with a gun, and a beautiful client who didn’t need me.

  That much was clear to me: in the two months I’d worked for Dolores, I hadn’t spotted anybody following her except a few fans, and I couldn’t blame them. I think I was just a little bit in love with the ice-cream blonde myself. But she was a client, and she slept around, and neither of those things appealed to me in a girl.

  About half an hour into the evening, I heard a scream upstairs. A woman’s scream, a scream that might have belonged to Dolores.

  I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.

  Dolores was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Peters, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Dolores’ partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.

  I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Peters.

  “Miss Dodd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her arms from behind, “don’t do this.”

  She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Peter.”

  It was the only time she ever called me that.

  I let go of her.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Dolores Dodd and her ex-husband.

  “He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.

  And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”

  DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”

  “I’m uninviting you. Go.”

  His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her decolletage and took a powder.

  “Are you ready to go home?” I asked Dolores.

  “No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.

  Two hours, and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.

  “Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little starlet, which you may have noticed rhymes with harlot, and sat at another table, leaving me sitting next to an empty seat at a party in my honor. He sat there necking with that little tramp and I got up and went over and gave him a piece of my mind. It . . . got a little out of hand. Thanks for stepping in, Mallory.”

  “It’s what you pay me for.”

  She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the-top up on the convertible, but she said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.

  “Mallory,” she said, “someone’s following us.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Somebody’s following us, I tell you!”

  “I’m keeping an eye on the rearview mirror. We’re fine.”

  She leaned forward and clutched my shoulder. “Get moving! Do you want me to be kidnapped, or killed? It could be Luciano’s gangsters, for God’s sake!”

  She was the boss. I hit the pedal. At speeds up to seventy miles per, we sailed west around the curves of Sunset; there was a service station at the junction of the boulevard and the coast highway, and I pulled in.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  I turned and looked into the frightened blue eyes. “I’m going to get some gas, and keep watch. And see if anybody comes up on us, or anybody suspicious goes by. Don’t you worry. I’m armed.”

  I looked close at every car that passed by the station. I saw no one and nothing suspicious. Then I paid the attendant and we headed north on the coast highway. Going nice and slow.

  “I ought to fire you,” she said, pouting back there.

  “This is my last night, Miss Dodd,” I said. “I like to work for my money. I feel I’m taking yours.”

  She leaned forward, clutched my shoulder again. “No, no, I tell you, I’m frightened.”

  “Why?”

  “I. . . I just feel I still need you around. You give me a sense of security.”

  “Have you had any more threatening notes?”

  “No.” Her voice sounded very small, now.

  “If you do, call me, or the cops. Or both.”

  It was two a.m. when I slid the big car in in front of the sprawling Sidewalk Cafe. I was shivering with cold; a sea breeze was blowing, Old Man Winter taking his revenge on California. I turned and looked at her again. I smiled.

  “I’ll walk you to the door, Miss Dodd.”

  She smiled at me, too, but this time the smile didn’t light up her face, or the world, or me. This time the smile was as sad as her eyes. Sadder.

  “That won’t be necessary, Mallory.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Do me one favor. Work for me next week. Be my chauffeur one more week, while I decide whether or not to replace you with another bodyguard, or . . . what.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go home, Mallory. See you Monday.”

  “See you Monday,” I said, and I watched her go in the front door of the Cafe. Then I drove the Packard up to the garage above, on the Palisades, and got in my dusty inelegant 1925 Marmon and headed back to my apartment at the Berglund in Hollywood. I had a hunch Dolores Dodd wouldn’t be pulling down a wall bed in her apartment tonight.

  My hunch was right, but for the wrong reason.

  Monday morning, sunny but cool if no longer cold, I pulled into one of the parking places alongside the Sidewalk Cafe; it was around ten-thirty and mine was the only car. The big front door was locked. I knocked until the Spanish cleaning lady let me in.

  She said she hadn’t seen Miss Dodd yet this morning. I went up the private stairway off the kitchen that led up to the two apartments. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked; beyond it were the two facing apartment doors. I knocked on hers.

  “Miss Dodd?”

  No answer.

  I tried for a while, then went and found the cleaning woman again. “Maria, do you have any idea where Miss Dodd might be? She doesn’t seem to be in her room.”

  “She might be stay up at Meester Eastmon’s.”

  I nodded, started to
walk away, then looked back and added as an afterthought, “Did you see her yesterday?”

  “I no work Sunday.”

  I guess Maria, like God, Mallory and Dolores Dodd, rested on Sunday. Couldn’t blame her.

  I thought about taking the car up and around, then said to hell with it and began climbing the concrete steps beyond the pedestrian bridge that arched over the highway just past the Cafe. These steps, all two-hundred and eighty of them, straight up the steep hill, were the only direct access from the coast road to the bungalow on Cabrillo Street. Windblown sand had drifted over the steps and the galvanized handrail was as cold and wet as a liar’s handshake.

  I grunted my way to the top. I’d started out as a young man, had reached middle age by step one hundred and was now ready for the retirement home. I sat on the cold damp top step and poured sand out of my scuffed-up Florsheims, glad I hadn’t bothered with a shine in the last few weeks. Then I stood and looked past the claustrophobic drop of the steps, to where the sun was reflecting off the sand and sea. The beach was blinding, the ocean dazzling. It was beautiful, but it hurt to look at. A seagull was flailing with awkward grace against the breeze like a fighter losing the last round.

  Soon I was knocking on Eastman’s front door. No answer. Went to check to see if my client’s car was there, swinging up the black-studded blue garage door. The car was there, all right, the red Packard convertible, next to Eastman’s Lincoln sedan.

  My client was there, too.

  She was slumped in front, sprawled across the steering wheel. She was still in the mink, the mauve-and-silver gown, and the diamond necklace she’d worn to the Troc Saturday night. But her clothes were rumpled, in disarray, like an unmade bed; and there was blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was blood on her face, on her white, white face.

  She’d always had pale creamy skin, but now it was as white as a wedding dress. There was no pulse in her throat. She was cold. She’d been dead a while.

  I stood and looked at her and maybe I cried. That’s my business, isn’t it? Then I went out and up the side steps to the loft above the garage and roused the elderly fellow named Jones who lived there; he was the bookkeeper for the Sidewalk Cafe. I asked him if he had a phone, and he did, and I used it.