“Marlowe,” 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 Brunette’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 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 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, Marlowe.”
“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, Marlowe. 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 woman 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, Marlowe, 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 damp 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 wet 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 vertiginous 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 the front seat of the Packard, 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 a little blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was a little 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.
I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Randall, a thin, somber, detached man in his midforties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well pressed. His green porkpie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased.
Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.
“You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.
“I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”
“And you were her bodyguard,” Randall said.
“Some bodyguard,” said the other man from homicide, Randall’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.
“I was her bodyguard,” I told Randall tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”
Randall nodded. He walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied Randall’s trip around the car, as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.
I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steamroom.
Randall found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage, lighting up my second Camel.
“It looks like suicide,” he said.
“Sure. It’s supposed to.”
He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”
“Car wasn’t running when I got here.”
“Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night . . . that is, early Sunday morning.”
I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”
“When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”
“Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”
&nbs
p; Randall’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”
“This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder—if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Randall nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”
“Perhaps.”
He pushed the porkpie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”
“I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”
Randall went to use the phone in old man Jones’s loft flat. I smoked my cigarette.
Randall’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.
“Ice-cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a couple of scoops of that myself.”
I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?” stupidly, and I smacked him. He went down like a building.
But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “You go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop.”
“You’d need a witness, first,” I said.
“I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.
I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Any time you want to pay me back, man to man, I won’t be hard to find.”
He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.
Randall came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.”
“Oh?”
He was nodding. “Yeah. He says he didn’t see her Saturday night after the party. Apparently he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments up top the Sidewalk Cafe. Said he thought Miss Dodd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”
“You mean, she couldn’t get in?”
“Right.”
“Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”
“Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”
I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”
“Well, when Miss Dodd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage, and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve have gotten cold and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”
I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”
“That’s still a possibility.”
“What about the traces of blood on her face and dress?”
He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth when she fell unconscious.”
“Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”
“I can’t answer that—yet.”
I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”
“I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and . . . ”
“Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”
“Huh?”
I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two hundred and eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”
Randall nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.
Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me. Then he said, “Have a look yourself.”
I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.
She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.
The coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that weekend would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”
The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her blood alcohol level was high—.13 percent—much higher than would have been accounted for by the three or four drinks she was seen to have at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out—several gallons. Yet the ignition switch was turned on. . . .
But the coroner’s final verdict was that Dolores had died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkeley’s drunk-driving fatalities.
I wasn’t buying the coroner’s verdict, either.
I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Dolores, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday, long after she had “officially” died.
Miranda Diamond, now Eastman’s ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Dolores, still dressed in her Trocadero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine on Sunday, midmorning. She had been, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.
Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Dolores around four Sunday afternoon. Dolores had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”
Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they had heard Eastman and Dolores quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow on Cabrillo, above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. When questioned on this point, Eastman revealed that he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).
“It was a lovers’ quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boyfriend—some Latin fellow from San Francisco—and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”
Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Dolores didn’t own any real interest in her Sidewalk Cafe; she had made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got fifty percent of the profits.
I called Randall after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.
“We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m going to hang up.”
And he did.
Randall was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business, and the film industry was it. And I was just a private detective with a dead client.
On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get s
omething for it, even if it was posthumous.
I went out on a Monday morning—four weeks to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage—and at the cafe, which still bore her name, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants.
He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy little mustache.
“What brings you around, Marlowe? I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.
He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.
“What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”
“I mean I know you murdered Dolores,” I said.
He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Marlowe. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”
“I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question . . . did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”
He put the paper down. He sipped the bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.
I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Dolores met her fate the next day—Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”
“Is it, really? Marlowe, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard . . . ”
“Exactly. They heard—but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member of Artie Lewis’s dance band, maybe? Let the cops and the papers wonder. Well, it won’t wash with me; I was with her for her last two months. She had no new serious love in her life, from San Francisco or elsewhere. Your ‘swarthy man’ is the little Latin lover who wasn’t there.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 3