“The ransom ate up most of the retainer. A C-note ought to do it.”
“Hell.” He drew a disreputable-looking leather wallet from his hip pocket, separated three fifties from the wad inside, and held them out. “The extra fifty’s for the whiskey,” he said.
“What whiskey?”
“The whiskey it’ll take to wash the stink off your hands. I’d rather dress out a steer in the dark than shake hands with that crew.”
“Who said I shook hands?” I gave him back one of the bills. “Mammoth doesn’t pay bonuses to private stars. Put it in your retirement fund.”
“Who’s retiring?”
I started to go. When I was at the door he called to me. His weathered old face was unreadable. “If you won’t take tips, maybe you’ll accept work. There’s a girl on this lot could do with a break.”
“What kind of a break?”
“I don’t know exactly. She turned down one picture too many and they put her on suspension. Before that she started showing up late for shootings, fluffing lines, things she never did before. She’s got trouble but she won’t say what kind.”
“Who’s got her contract?”
“Sam Whiteside.”
I spat smoke. “She’s got trouble.”
“Whiteside’s okay, if you don’t work for him and never lost money on one of his pictures. That’s one kind of trouble. Hers is another kind. I think she needs a shamus.”
“What’s she to you?”
The old head came up. “That means what?”
“It means what it means, Carson. If she’s your daughter, okay. If she’s your mistress, that’s okay, too, but it makes a difference in the way I approach her. You know that.”
“I guess. Maybe I should retire. I’ve been around these glorified pimps so long I’m starting to think people will take me for one. Christa’s just someone in trouble to me. Whiteside asked me to talk to her when it started, but all I could get out of her is she doesn’t belong in this town. A young swain like you could get more, probably.”
“Christa’s her name?”
“Christa Vine. She’s a singer and a good one. She should be doing Carmen but they put her in musicals. You know, with Dick Powell and a bunch of fairies in tails. I like westerns myself.”
“Where do I find her?”
“Laurel Canyon.” He scribbled an address on a studio pad and held it out. “She’s married to Sonny Bloom.”
“The gangster?”
“Please. The Hollywood entrepreneur. He financed two of her pictures.”
“He can afford to. When his boys wiped out Frank Nunzio’s boys in New Jersey he inherited Atlantic City.”
“So what are you, anti-Semitic? A girl can’t help who she falls in love with. Nothing in Hollywood is what it seems.” He was still holding the address.
I took it. “Who pays?”
“The studio, who else?”
“You mean you.”
He sat back. His jacket fell open, exposing the big revolver. “They pay me too much to sit behind this desk, and I’m too old to leave it.”
“Like hell you are.” I left.
Sonny Bloom, right name Nathaniel Goldblume, would have been at home in a Horatio Alger story if it were filmed by Warner Brothers. Born to immigrant Jews in Newark in 1907, he had graduated while still in short pants from petty thievery to grand theft auto, spent two years in a reformatory, and landed a job driving a beer truck for Big Frank Nunzio when he was twenty-four. A couple of scrapes with rival bootleggers brought him to the attention of Nunzio, who promoted him to bodyguard, but he wasn’t so good at that, because eighteen months later Big Frank was gunned down by persons unknown while strolling the Boardwalk. A beer war raged for months afterward. At its end, Sonny Bloom found himself, at age twenty-six, the vice king of New Jersey, with interests ranging from illegal alcohol to numbers to labor racketeering among the Atlantic City dock unions. After two years of that he had moved his operation to the West Coast, where his good looks, streetwise charm, and marijuana connections in Mexico soon made him the darling of the Hollywood community. At thirty, the tough-talking easterner with the slicked-back hair and knock-your-eye-out neckties was as much a fixture around the pools and tennis courts of Beverly Hills as an iron jockey. The American Dream is hard to overlook in Southern California.
The house he shared with Christa Vine had been built by some forgotten star back when heroines danced with roses in their teeth. It was Hollywood hacienda style, with red tile roofs on all the wings, arches everywhere, and outside staircases that curved between roses and cypresses growing in perfect harmony. Where the composition driveway swept past the front door a chauffeur in shirtsleeves and Erich von Stroheims’s riding breeches was busy waxing the hood of a blue-black Auburn with hubcaps the size of cocktail tables. I pulled my crate up behind it and climbed the steps to the door.
The doorbell chimed “Juanita.” A maid whose German ironclad features told me her name wasn’t carried my card back into the shade of the house and returned five minutes later. “Mrs. Bloom will see you.” She let me into the entryway, took my hat, and went home to the suburbs.
I waited. The floor tiles in the room were Spanish. Spanish needles grew in Mexican pots on either side of a curving staircase like the ones outside. A framed poster advertising a bullfight in Spanish hung on one wall. Inside the curve of the staircase stood a suit of English armor, looking abashed.
“Awful, isn’t it? Sonny insisted on buying it and putting it there. I told him it wouldn’t go with the rest of the house. But you don’t tell Sonny anything.”
She had come up on me while I was looking at the armor. She was a blonde, no rare commodity in that part of the world, but the shade wasn’t Harlow’s or Joan Bennett’s or any of the thousands that come between; it was hers alone. It fell in waves to her shoulders, framing a face with slightly Oriental eyes and a chin that came almost too close to a point. She had a light tan, unusual in that pale picture crowd. The robe she wore was silk with a frosty gold cast. Belted at the waist, it left her collarbone bare and covered her feet.
“Maybe he thinks he needs a tin suit,” I said when I came down from the clouds. “They’d sell big in Jersey.”
She held out a hand that felt too light for the rock it was wearing. “I’m Christa Vine. Did Carson really send you, Mr. Marlowe?” I’d written “Carson Moldine” on the back of my card.
“He never got a chance to save the banker’s daughter from a runaway horse and it’s been killing him ever since.” I gave her back the hand, one of the more difficult jobs I’d had lately. “He thinks you’re in some kind of jam.”
“Really, I’m not. He’s such a dear old uncle. But I’d be no kind of hostess if I let you get away without a drink. Or are you on duty?”
“I’m not that kind of detective.”
“Does that mean you’ll have a drink?”
“Only if it comes in a glass.”
She laughed a way only singers can, turned, and, lifting her robe the way they do in the costume pictures, led the way into what I guessed they called the parlor. It was done in blue and white, with French doors looking out on a garden that wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the one at Versailles. There was a small bar in one corner and a cabinet phonograph that had cost about as much as my car.
Behind the bar Christa Vine said, “This is the one thing I never let Greta—that’s the maid—do for Sonny. I like mixing drinks. Which one can I mix for you?”
“Scotch and glass.”
She poured it from a crystal decanter, fixed herself something in a tall glass whose color matched her robe, and brought them over to a blue chintz sofa. I accepted mine and we sat down. She crossed a country block of silken leg over the other and showed me a golden sandal and pink polish on her toenails. “I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time,” she said. “Carson’s a mother hen.”
“That mother hen shot down three armed men in a bar in McAlester that wasn’t quite as nice as yours in nine
ty-nine.” I drank Scotch. “Where’s your husband, Miss Vine?”
“In this house I’m Mrs. Bloom. He’s back East on business. What did Carson tell you?”
“He said you’ve been turning down work and forgetting your lines.”
“I’m a singer, not an actress. I remember words better if they’re set to music. And you haven’t seen the scripts they offer me.”
“How do you get on with Sam Whiteside?”
“Sam’s a dear.”
“That’s one I never heard anyone call him.”
“Well, he has been to me. He didn’t want to place me on suspension, but those are the rules. Sooner or later he’ll want me for a part that’s right for me, and that will be the end of it. Yes, Greta.”
Some detective. I hadn’t heard the German maid entering the room behind me. She stood with her hands folded in front of her apron. “Telephone, missus.”
“Who is it?”
“He would not say. He said it is important.”
“I’ll take it upstairs.” She set her drink down untasted on the white coffee table and rose. “Please excuse me, Mr. Marlowe. Make yourself comfortable. Put on a record if you like.” She went out, followed by Greta.
Several of the records in the cabinet were Christa Vine’s. I put on one, “The Man I Love.” Her voice was heavy silk with a velvet lining, too good for a motion picture soundtrack, which made brass of everything. I stood looking out at the garden for a while, and then the detective in me kicked in. The bar was stocked with wines and liquors bottled before Prohibition. The carpet and drapes had been bought in Paris. And she had an automatic pistol in the drawer of a blue lamp table.
It was a .32 Browning with nickel plating and mother-of-pearl grips. The engraving on the backstrap read: “Something to watch over you. Sonny.” One of Christa Vine’s most popular recordings had been “Someone to Watch Over Me.” I sniffed at the barrel and wrinkled my nose. The women never think to clean them after firing.
By the time the maid returned alone, the pistol was back in its drawer. She had my hat.
“Missus said she’s sorry. She was called away.”
“Has she left?”
“She is dressing. Call later, she said.”
The chauffeur had gotten the word. He had put on his uniform coat and was sitting behind the wheel. The Auburn gleamed like oiled steel in the late afternoon sunlight.
I drove around the corner and parked next to a bougainvillea in a planter. Through its branches I had a view of the entrance to the Bloom estate. It was surrounded by a four-foot stone wall and that was the only way in or out. I killed the time fooling around with a portable chess set I keep in the glove compartment next to the Luger.
Bishop was working itself up to take Queen’s pawn when the Auburn came purring out into the street and turned left, crossing directly in front of me. I slumped down until it passed, then lay aside the chess set, started the motor, and swung out behind it. There was no traffic on the shady street and I gave it two blocks.
We took the scenic route past orange groves and wooden oil derricks into Hollywood, where a really first-rate sunset was having a hard go at the neon. There the traffic was brisk and I closed up. On Sunset the Auburn glided into the curb in front of a coffee shop and the chauffeur got out to open Christa Vine’s door, but he wasn’t fast enough; she was halfway across the sidewalk before he reached it. She had on a yellow cotton shift that had sent some fairy designer’s boyfriend to drafting school and dark glasses with a scarf covering her hair. She went inside the coffee shop and the chauffeur got back behind the wheel.
I found a space half a block up and adjusted my rearview mirror to include the coffee shop door. I didn’t touch the chess set.
After about five minutes a burly party in a blue silk suit and a gray felt hat walked past my car carrying a leather briefcase. I slumped down again, straightening just as he stepped into the coffee shop.
Things were getting interesting. A thousand years ago when I was with the District Attorney’s office, I had questioned Brock Valentine in connection with some slot machines that had been dynamited in West Hollywood. He had put on weight, but the bulldog features and natty little black patent-leather moustache hadn’t changed. Two minutes after he went inside he came out and walked back the way he had come, without the briefcase.
Christa Vine had it. She came clicking back across the sidewalk, threw the item into the back seat, and followed it in. She was still closing the door when the Auburn took off with a chirp of rubber. Of course I followed.
In a little while we left the city and headed up Mulholland Drive into the hills. Here and there a lighted window hung like an orange overlooked during harvest, but after a few blocks the trees covered them. Ours were the only cars on the street. I killed my lights and used the moon. Finally, at the top of Mulholland, the Auburn’s brake lamps came on. I turned off the pavement, cut the motor, and coasted to a stop on the grass.
The dome light glowed in the Auburn and someone got out. I waited a minute, considering the possibility of checking out the situation on foot. Then whoever it was got back into the car and it swung around. Once again I made myself insignificant in the seat while the big racer tore past. When its tires wailed on the curves down below I got the Luger and the big flashlight out of my glove compartment and climbed out. It was a warm night even for Southern California. Tree frogs were singing far back from the road.
I found the briefcase without having to use the flash. Leaning against a frangipani, it gleamed softly in the reflected glow of Hollywood glittering at the base of the hill. I didn’t go near it. I had a pretty good idea what it contained.
The County of Los Angeles had installed a telephone booth at the top of the hill, where Daddy’s girl could call for a tow when Romeo pulled the busted-starter routine on a nice warm night like this one. I opened the door far enough to reach in and unscrew the light bulb, then opened it the rest of the way and called Bernie Ohls’s number at the District Attorney’s office. He recognized my voice.
“Phil, how’s the boy? I thought you’d be washing about in the surf off Palisades by now, wearing cement argyles.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Still working the afternoon shift, I see.”
“You, too. Unless this call’s social.”
“What do you hear lately about Brock Valentine?”
“Nothing good, and I read the obituaries every day. Word is he’s partnered up with that big eastern money. He don’t hardly carry powder for nobody no more. What about him?”
“Would any of that big eastern money belong to Sonny Bloom?”
“That’s the name I heard. The D.A.’s looking for Sonny, by the by. He forgot to show up for an appointment.”
“A hearing?”
“Prelim. Nobody’s seen him in a month. What’s Brock up to?”
I couldn’t answer the question. I probably wouldn’t have, anyway. At that point someone jerked open the door to the booth. A shadow blocked out the moon.
“Too bad, shamus,” said the shadow. I smelled garlic on its breath. Then something swished, a black light exploded in my skull, and I tasted salt and iron on my tongue, just before I ceased to care about such things.
I woke up with light in my face, but it wasn’t from the sun; it was too bright and I thought I could read G.E. at its core. It was my own flashlight. I said, “Turn that off or I’ll make you eat it.” That’s what I meant to say. It came out in some other language. I was lying on my back on something damp. I hoped it was anybody else’s blood but mine. My head felt like a smashed Thermos. I knew if I moved it the shattered pieces would shift around inside.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Phil?”
I looked. I thought there were two. “October,” I said. “Nineteen thirty-seven.”
The man chuckled. I knew then it was Bernie. He snapped off the flash. As the purple spots faded from my vision I heard tree frogs singing nearby. I was lying on the dewy grass next to the telephone booth on M
ulholland. “I had your call traced,” he said. “That was as sweet a sap job as ever I saw. You always were hard-headed.”
I said, “The briefcase.”
“What briefcase?”
“Never mind. You answered the question. Got a light?” I patted my pockets for a Camel.
Supporting my head with one hand, he speared one between my lips and lit it from a match he struck off his thumbnail. The smoke tasted like a chocolate sundae.
“Care to share what’s new with the guy that saved you from the pigeons?” Bernie asked.
I sat up. An invisible elf swung a shovel at the back of my head but I brushed him off. “I make it Sonny Bloom’s been kidnapped. Christa Vine told me he was back in Jersey, but someone called the house and she was in a lather to leave after that. She met Brock Valentine in a coffee house on Sunset after that and he gave her a briefcase. She took it up here and left it. That’s when I called you. After that the lights went out.”
Bernie said, “Sonny Bloom’s dead.”
I looked at him. His pale bristly brows were just visible against the dark oval of his face.
“It came across my desk just as I was leaving to come here,” he said. “Somebody put two in him and dumped him behind a restaurant in Bay City early this evening.”
“That was just about the time his wife came here.”
“I guess whoever it was was pretty sure she’d deliver.”
“Who do you like for it?” I asked.
“The guy was a gangster. Tomorrow morning I’ll sit down with the L.A. directory and check off the names of the ones I don’t like for it. You okay? Maybe I should have called the croakers.”
“It was just my head.”
“Get a look at the sapper?”
“No, but I’d recognize him in a dark room. He must have had a clove of garlic for supper.”
“Was his voice kind of raspy, like he gargled number five sandpaper?”
“You know him?”
“Stinkweed Hovac. He used to be in pictures, went from grip to character parts. Might’ve made a career of it, too, if he didn’t think garlic prevented everything from boils to cirrhosis of the liver. Nobody’d work with him after a while and he got canned. He was freelancing strongarm work last I heard. You’re lucky you’ve still got a skull. He’s bigger than the Depression.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 6