Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  “Miranda saw him with her, Marlowe . . . ”

  “No. Miranda didn’t see anything. She told the story you wanted her to tell; she went along with you, and you treated her right in the divorce settlement. You can afford to. You’re sole owner of Dolores Dodd’s Sidewalk Cafe, now. Lock, stock, and barrel, with no messy interference from the star on the marquee. And now you’re free to accept Laird Brunette’s offer, aren’t you?”

  That rocked him, like a physical blow. “What?”

  “That’s why you killed Dolores. She was standing in your way. You wanted to put a casino in upstairs; it would mean big money, very big money.”

  “I have money.”

  “Yes, and you spend it. You live very lavishly. I’ve been checking up on you. I know you intimately already, and I’m going to know you even better.”

  His eyes quivered in the diamond mask of his face. “What are you talking about?”

  “You tried to scare her at first—extortion notes, having her followed; maybe you did this with Brunette’s help, maybe you did it on your own. I don’t know. But then she hired me, and you scurried off into the darkness to think up something new.”

  He sneered and gestured archly with his cigarette holder, the cigarette in which he was about to light up. “I’m breathlessly awaiting just what evil thing it was I conjured up next.”

  “You decided to commit the perfect crime. Just like in the movies. You would kill Dolores one cold night, knocking her out, shoving booze down her, leaving her to die in that garage with the car running. Then you would set out to make it seem that she was still alive—during a day when you were very handsomely, unquestionably alibied.”

  “You’re not making any sense. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death . . . ”

  “Yes. But the time of death is assumed to have been the night before you said you saw her last. Your melodrama was too involved for the simple-minded authorities, who only wanted to hush things up. They went with the more basic, obvious, tidy solution that Dolores died an accidental death early Saturday morning.” I laughed, once. “You were so cute in pursuit of the ‘perfect crime’ you tripped yourself, Eastman.”

  “Did I really,” he said dryly. It wasn’t a question.

  “Your scenario needed one more rewrite. First you told the cops you slept at the apartment over the cafe Saturday night, bolting the door around midnight, accidentally locking Dolores out. But later you admitted seeing Dolores the next morning, around breakfast time—at the bungalow.”

  His smile quivered. “Perhaps I slept at the apartment, and went up for breakfast at the bungalow.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you killed her.”

  “No charges have been brought against me. And none will.”

  I looked at him hard, like a hanging judge passing sentence. “I’m bringing a charge against you now. I’m charging you with murder in the first degree.”

  His smile turned crinkly; he stared into the redness of his drink. Smoke from his cigarette-in-holder curled upward like a wreath. “Ha. A citizen’s arrest, is it?”

  “No. Marlowe’s law. I’m going to kill you myself.”

  He looked at me sharply. “What? Are you mad . . . ”

  “Yes, I’m mad. In the sense of being angry, that is. Sometime, within the next year, or two, I’m going to kill you. Just how, I’m not just sure. Just when, well . . . perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps a month from tomorrow. Maybe next Christmas. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m deadly serious. I’ll be seeing you.”

  And I left him there at the bar, the glass of bloody Mary mixing itself in his hand.

  Here’s what I did to Warren Eastman: I spent two weeks shadowing him. Letting him see me. Letting him know I was watching his every move. Making him jump at the shadow that was me, and all the other shadows, too.

  Then I stopped. I slept with my gun under my pillow for a while, in case he got ambitious. But I didn’t bother him any further.

  The word in Hollywood was that Eastman was somehow—no one knew exactly how, but somehow—dirty in the Dodd murder. And nobody in town thought it was anything but a murder. Eastman never got another picture. He went from one of the hottest directors in town to the coldest. As cold as the weekend Dolores Dodd died.

  The Sidewalk Cafe stopped drawing a monied, celebrity crowd, but it did all right from regular-folks curiosity seekers. Eastman made some dough there, all right; but the casino never happened. A combination of the wrong kind of publicity and the drifting away of the high-class clientele must have changed Laird Brunette’s mind.

  Within a year of Dolores Dodd’s death, Eastman was committed to a rest home, which is a polite way of saying insane asylum or madhouse. He was in and out of such places for the next four years, and then, one very cold, windy night, he died of a heart attack.

  Did I keep my promise? Did I kill him?

  I like to think I did, indirectly. I like to think that Dolores Dodd got her money’s worth from her chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, who had not been there when she took that last long drive, on the night her sad blue eyes closed forever.

  I like to think, in my imperfect way, that I committed the perfect crime.

  * * *

  * * *

  This story is based on a real case, specifically the probable murder of actress Thelma Todd. I have taken liberties, changing names and fictionalizing extensively, substituting characters from Chandler at times (Laird Brunette coming in for Lucky Luciano, for example) and, while there is an underpinning of history here, “The Perfect Crime” must be viewed as a fanciful work. A number of books dealing with the death of Thelma Todd were consulted, but I wish in particular to cite Marvin J. Wolf and Katherine Mader, the authors of Fallen Angels (1986).

  In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Marlowe visits, briefly, the sidewalk cafe that had been Thelma Todd’s, and climbs the two hundred and eighty steps to Cabrillo Street. (The wonderful 1987 book Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver, includes several photos of the hillside stairway—in reality a mere two hundred and seventy steps—as well as a photo of the still-standing structure that housed the cafe, now home to Paulist Productions, a Catholic TV and film production group.)

  My novels about Chicago detective Nathan Heller focus on real crimes and the real people involved therein, and are set in the 1930s and ’40s. It seemed fitting for me, then, to do my Marlowe story in the historical Heller manner. This does not mean that I have done a Heller story and substituted Marlowe’s name. Heller does to divorce work, would surely have slept with Dolores Dodd and would have taken money from just about anybody who offered it to him; and he might have flat-out killed Warren Eastman. Heller has lines he won’t cross, but they are drastically different from those Marlowe won’t cross.

  I owe Chandler a great debt. (“Mallory,” the protagonist of several novels of mine, is named after an early incarnation of Marlowe.) In my Heller novels, the idea has always been to bring a first-person Marlowe-style voice—complete with his keen wit and sharp sense of observation—to a larger landscape than the traditional mystery allows. Chandler himself experimented with an expanded landscape in The Long Goodbye (1954), which was the longest first-person private-eye novel written until my True Detective (1983). In Nathan Heller’s “memoirs,” the expanded landscape is a historical one, as reported by a private-eye witness in the Marlowe/ Chandler tradition.

  Chandler has had, and continues to have, many followers. We who follow him have a responsibility to honor his memory and his achievement, not by mimicking him, but by attempting to do what he did—break new ground in an rich old field.

  Max Allan Collins

  THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE

  * * *

  * * *

  BENJAMIN M. SCHUTZ

  1936

  I WOKE UP WITH my nose in the newsprint and a telephone inside my head. I shook my head and the phone fell out onto my desk. My hand spider walked over
to it, grabbed it around the throat, and silenced it.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice fluttered all through both of those syllables.

  When I didn’t answer, she tried again. “Hello, Mr. Marlowe, are you there?”

  I checked the inside of my jacket to be sure and said, “Yes, this is Philip Marlowe.”

  “Oh, thank goodness, Mr. Marlowe. My name is Francine Ley De Ruse. My husband is Johnny De Ruse. Do you know him?”

  I knew Johnny De Ruse. He was a gambler out of Vegas. He’d taken over Benny Cyrano’s place. I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to know.

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “I’d like you to follow him, Mr. Marlowe. I think he’s seeing another woman. If he is, I want you to get pictures.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. De Ruse, but I don’t do divorce work.”

  “But Mr. Carmady said you were the best. You were the man I should talk to.”

  Good old Ted Carmady, throwing some work my way. Ever since he’d hooked up with Jean Adrian, he’d become Santa Claus to the rest of us working stiffs. And here it wasn’t even November.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. De Ruse. Ted has me mixed up with another Philip Marlowe. Like I said, I don’t do divorce work.”

  “Well, do you know where this other Philip Marlowe is?”

  “No, Mrs. De Ruse, I haven’t a clue.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Mr. Marlowe, if that’s even your name.” She replaced the receiver indelicately.

  “No problem at all,” I said to myself.

  I rubbed my eyes and stared at the top of my desk. So this was as far as I’d gotten. I was just going to stop by and type up my notes before I went home. Guess I didn’t make it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my notebook and the novel I had been reading. Fast One, by a guy named Paul Cain. Rumor had it that Cain was a screenwriter in town whose real name was Ruric. Rumor had it that even Ruric wasn’t his real name. Maybe it was Marlowe.

  I flipped open my notebook. I’d spent all night watching a cop as a favor for a friend of mine from the D.A.’s office. Seems that the D.A. wasn’t happy with the police investigation of a recent murder. They’d asked me to shadow the cop because he wouldn’t know my face. He’d spent a long time over dinner with the decidedly ungrieving widow at Musso and Frank’s before dropping her off at her house. I spent the next two hours following him as he drove aimlessly through our host, the City of Angels.

  I went over to the sink in the corner, ran some water, and splashed it on my face. Toweling dry, I looked at the face in the mirror. We looked like the same guy, but we weren’t. I did know where that other Philip Marlowe had gone. He’d disappeared soon after that visit from Delano Stiles.

  I went back to my desk, spun the chair around so it faced east, and looked out over Cahuenga Boulevard. I closed my eyes and it was spring again. The late afternoon sunlight was streaming in so heavily it looked pooled, like butter, on the floor. And Delano Stiles was telling me about his wife.

  He’d marched right into my office, sat down, leaned forward, and told me, “I need you to find my wife, Mr. Marlowe.”

  I looked up from a chess diagram I had been studying and asked, “And why is that?”

  “Because she’s gone. She’s run away, Mr. Marlowe, and she’s taken my son with her.”

  I took a moment to see what she was running away from. He was tall, slim, and well dressed in a pin-striped suit. His black hair was swept back and had a touch of gray at the temples. His strong, even features were marred by the presence of a ridiculous, pencil-thin moustache.

  “Let’s back up a step,” I said. “What’s your name, your wife’s, and your son’s?”

  “I’m Delano Stiles.” He stopped to take a deep breath. He sounded like he’d run up all six flights of stairs to my office. “My wife is Monica and our son’s name is Brandon. He’s five years old.”

  “How long has your wife been missing, Mr. Stiles?”

  “A couple of hours, maybe. I got a call from a car dealer over on Wilcox. He said that she had come in and tried to sell her car. When he found out that the car was in my name he told her she couldn’t sell it. He was calling me when she grabbed some suitcases out of the car and ran out of the showroom, dragging Brandon with her. As soon as I got the message, I drove right over and questioned the man. Then I went looking for them myself. But frankly, Mr. Marlowe, I’m not the kind of man who can make people answer my questions. So I looked up detectives in the phone book, saw that your office was nearby, and came right over to see if I could retain your services.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Stiles, but I haven’t any experience in divorce work. My background has been in insurance and criminal investigations.”

  “This isn’t really a divorce case, Mr. Marlowe. It’s Brandon I want back, not my wife. He’s only five, Mr. Marlowe, just a little boy. It must be terrifying for him to be dragged all over strange parts of this city by a woman who’s no longer thinking clearly.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there’s no reason for her to do something like this.”

  “Has she ever taken it on the lam before?”

  “No. She’s never done anything like this before. It’s so . . . so impulsive.”

  Nothing Stiles had said so far had overcome my aversion to divorce work. Besides that, I still had seven bucks in the bank.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Stiles. Domestic stuff really isn’t my line.”

  That’s because it always seemed like legitimized blackmail. Two people trying to dig up as much dirt as possible so they could hold each other’s noses in it until one of them cried, “Enough!” I was not about to be anyone’s spade. But then again, maybe this one was different. I waited to find out.

  “Are you married, Mr. Marlowe?”

  “No.”

  “Any children?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t know what it’s like to lose one, can you? I love my son, Mr. Marlowe. I need him with me. I don’t want Monica back. I’ll offer her a fair settlement. You won’t have to be peeping at keyholes, I assure you.

  I thought it over. He just wanted his kid found. I wasn’t being asked to prove that the mother wasn’t fit to walk among decent, god-fearing people, let alone marry or raise one.

  “All right, Mr. Stiles, I’ll take the case. If she’s trying to skip town, she’ll need money. Did she tap the bank accounts?”

  “No, I called the bank before I came over here. The accounts are all in my name anyway.”

  “Does she have any money of her own?”

  “You mean family money? No, her people are farmers, I believe. They’re not even from around here. They’re in Arkansas, Little Rock, I think.”

  “How did you meet her? It doesn’t sound like you two traveled in the same circles.”

  “That’s true. But out here in Hollywood all the circles seem to overlap, don’t you think? Anyway it seems that way to me. Monica was a showgirl at Cyrano’s. That’s where I met her. She wanted to be an actress. I admit I was quite taken with her, Mr. Marlowe. She’s a stunning girl. These days I think she was more taken with my connections than with me.”

  As Hollywood marriages went this was no worse than most. It would last as long as her looks and his money made each other feel good. When that didn’t work anymore they’d finally realize that they were strangers, get divorced, and go do the same damn thing again.

  “Has she appeared in any movies? That might make it easier to track her down. People in this town are crazy about identifying actors and actresses. It brightens their days just being in the same city with them.”

  “No, she hasn’t been in any pictures. Monica’s dreams exceed her talents. Even my intercessions on her behalf can’t change that. She seems to blame me for her failure. I tried to provide for her every need and want, and this is how she repays me.”

  Stiles was wandering off into his own melancholy reverie. I retrieved him with a question. “Does your wife ha
ve any friends she might turn to at a time like this?”

  “No. Monica was, as they say, ‘right off the bus,’ when I met her at Cyrano’s. We married shortly thereafter. She never made any effort to get along with my friends. She just stayed at home and doted on Brandon.”

  I pulled out my notebook, flipped it open, and prepared to write. “What things did she take with her?”

  “I asked the maid to check the house when I got the call about the car. She said that Monica took two suitcases filled with clothes for her and Brandon, some makeup, her jewelry, Brandon’s teddy bear, and his favorite blanket.”

  “What were she and Brandon wearing?”

  “Roxana, that’s our maid, says she was wearing a teal blue skirt and a cream-colored silk blouse. Brandon had on white knee-high socks, khaki shorts, and a green and white striped shirt.”

  “Good. Do you have a picture of either of them?”

  “Yes, I do.” He pulled out his wallet, slid the photo out, and handed it to me. Monica Stiles was sitting in a chair with her arms around her son. He was leaning back against her so that their cheeks touched. Brandon was a little towhead with deep dimples and the assured smile of a well-loved child.

  A billowing tangle of blonde hair framed his mother’s face. I studied that face. A broad, high forehead tapered past prominent cheekbones to a small square chin. Her full upper lip was wide and downswept. She would smile and pout magnificently. Her eyes were hidden behind large sunglasses.