Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  I smoked and thought. Bernie took my silence for something else.

  “You sure you couldn’t use some hospital time? I’d hate to have to visit you in Camarillo, help the attendant roll you out into the sunshine.”

  “I’m swell.” I put a hand on his shoulder and we got up together. Sky and ground traded places a couple of times, but I held on until they lost interest in the game. “I’ll need a lift home if my car’s gone.”

  “It’s there. I can’t speak for the radio.”

  “Never had one. What studio did Hovac work for, Mammoth?”

  “Yeah. How’d you guess?”

  I grinned in the darkness. “I’m a trained detective.”

  “Funny guy, Marlowe, You’re a regular Fred Allen. Here’s your bucket. The slanty pedal means go.” He put my hand on the door handle. “If you get any ideas, remember who gets them.”

  Greta, the German maid, answered the bell in curlers and a fuzzy bathrobe. “Missus is asleep,” she said through a space no wider than her face. “You come back tomorrow.” She started to close the door.

  I braced a shoulder against it. “It’s tomorrow now. I slept through most of last night. Tell Mrs. Bloom it’s me or the cops.”

  She left me there. I let myself in and smoked a cigarette. I smoked another and then Christa Vine came downstairs. She had on the robe I’d seen her in earlier. Her face was freshly made up. “What is it, Mr. Marlowe?”

  “I thought you might like to know there’s an all-points bulletin out by now for Stinkweed Hovac. When they get him he’ll talk to the D.A. Murder’s a little out of his league.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Sure you do. He’s the one you hired to take me down while somebody else picked up the ransom you conned out of Brock Valentine for Sonny’s release.”

  She looked at me, at the thread of blood that had crusted on my forehead and the grass stains on my suit. “You’re drunk. Sonny’s in New Jersey.”

  “Sonny’s in formaldehyde and you know it. You put him there. They found him right where Hovac dumped him, or maybe it was your chauffeur. Men like to do favors for you. Ask Carson Moldine.”

  “Greta, call the police.”

  The maid was watching from the staircase landing. She turned away.

  “Yeah, call them,” I said. “Find out what’s taking them so long. On the way here I left a message for a friend in the D.A.’s office. I was with him only a few minutes earlier and could have told him in person, but I wanted some time with you first.”

  “Maybe I’m the one who’s drunk. I can’t understand you.”

  “You should have ditched the gun after you shot Sonny, or at least cleaned it. Maybe that means you didn’t plan it. You planned everything else swell. My guess is when the cops dig back they’ll find out you did a picture with Hovac. You remembered him, kept track of the work he went into after he left movies. You needed him for the rough stuff. It doesn’t matter why you killed Sonny. The point is you made the most of it, stashed the stiff someplace while you convinced his partner he’d been kidnapped by a rival mob and that they’d told you to deliver the ransom alone, with just your chauffeur to drive. Valentine came through with the cash tonight and you went through the motions of a drop because you guessed I’d be watching. Hovac hung around the drop to keep me from seeing who picked up the briefcase and where it went. He hits hard, Hovac.”

  Her face was an obelisk. “That’s a lot to draw from a gun. I mean, without a laboratory.”

  “The gun didn’t fit in till later. The capper was just before Hovac hit me, when he said, ‘Too bad, shamus.’ The only way he could have known I was a shamus was if someone told him. And you and Carson were the only people who knew I was on the case.”

  “Yes.” It was just a word to fill the silence. Then the obelisk broke. A tear slicked her cheek. “I didn’t want him to hit me any more.”

  “Who, Sonny?”

  “He’d hit me so many times. I was so bruised I turned down work so I wouldn’t have to show my face on the set. I don’t even remember what it was we were fighting about this time. He came at me and I used this.” She drew the Browning .32 out of the pocket of her robe and pointed it at me. “He gave it to me to protect myself with.”

  “You don’t need protection now. You need a lawyer.” Keep her talking. The gun coming out now was something I hadn’t counted on. Sirens moaned in the distance.

  “I needed it then. You read what he had engraved on it. I shot him and he fell.” She held out the gun.

  I took it and started breathing again. “As anybody would, with two slugs in him.” I put the gun in my coat pocket.

  She said, “I only shot him once.”

  The basement office smelled of dust and stale perspiration, like a deserted locker-room or the wings of an old theater. The naked bulb in the ceiling shed dusty light over the big yellow oak desk and the boxes of rubber swords and false beards stacked in the corners. I found a bottle and a glass in one of the desk drawers, poured myself a shot, and made myself as comfortable as possible in the worn old seat. After a long time the door opened and I had company. He had covered his bald head with a hat that shadowed his brown face and snow-white handlebars, but his old plaid jacket and the big Colt he wore under it identified him well enough.

  He said, “Make yourself at home, Philip.”

  “You’re late or I wouldn’t have started without you,” I said. “Did the telephone wake you?”

  “I don’t sleep so good these days.” He stood just inside the door with his palms on his thighs.

  “Sonny was shot twice. Once with a thirty-two and once with a forty-five, an old one. Bernie Ohls told me that at Christa Vine’s house. He’ll be here in a little while.”

  “She okay?”

  “They took her in. Why’d you do it, Carson?”

  “You’re telling it.”

  “I figure you knew the situation and told her to call you the next time Sonny threatened to beat her. She did, but by the time you got there she’d plugged him once already. You finished the job.”

  “It wasn’t the first time I killed a man to protect a woman.”

  “I heard it was three men.”

  “No, that was another time. Can you blame me for this one?”

  “No. You shouldn’t have tried to make a buck off it, though.”

  “The s.o.b. left her one dollar in his will. The house and everything else went to his sister in Newark. He’d told Christa that. He owed her that ransom for putting up with him as long as she did. Did you really think I was going to take any of it?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think, Carson. If you’d left it alone, Christa would probably have gotten off on self-defense and you on justifiable homicide. The kidnapping gag makes it look like murder.”

  “Not from where I’m standing. Nor you either, if you’d see it my way.”

  I drank some of his liquor. “You used me, Carson. You needed a patsy to report to the cops he saw the ransom drop, so you hired me. You set me up for a sapping so I wouldn’t see too much. I can see it your way up to a point; then my head starts hurting.”

  “It had to be you, Philip,” he said. “You were the only one I could count on to take the case that far. I told Hovac to go easy.”

  “That’s why I’m giving you the chance to hand over that hogleg before the cops get here. It’ll look better at the trial.” I held out my hand.

  He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  “I didn’t think you could.” I started to get up. He set himself with feet spread and I stopped.

  “You go first,” he said.

  “Sitting down?”

  “That’s what I was doing when those three killers came for me in McAlester.”

  “That was thirty-seven years ago.”

  “Thirty-eight. I’m older and I need the edge.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way, Carson.”

  “Draw.”

  I took my Luger ou
t of the open top drawer of the desk and drilled him through the shoulder while he was still hauling at the Colt. His back hit the wall and he dropped it. He grasped his shoulder.

  “You had it out all along.”

  “It’s been a long night,” I said. “I needed an edge too.”

  “That’s how it starts.”

  For the second time that night I heard sirens.

  * * *

  * * *

  I came to Chandler fairly late, after I had published my first book, and was pleased to recognize a kindred spirit. Long before I read him I was experimenting with exotic similes and metaphors, and eight years of art training had convinced me of the importance of visuals, things closely associated with Chandler’s work. I continue to reread all his fiction, using it as sort of a lodestone to remind me where I came from and how far I have to go. He was, and remains, regardless of genre, the finest American stylist of this century.

  Loren D. Estleman

  SAVING GRACE

  * * *

  * * *

  JOYCE HARRINGTON

  1938

  THE PHONE CALL came in the middle of a dream of good, smoky Scotch and a laughing, green-eyed blonde just about to slip out of something a little more comfortable.

  The operator asked me if I was Philip Marlowe and against my better judgment I said I was guilty. Then she asked me if I would accept a collect call from Santa Rosa. I was too groggy to catch the name. I wasn’t dreaming the empty quart bottle that was giving me the glad eye from the windowsill. Despite the cement mixer between my ears and the sand dune in my mouth, I managed to sit up. It was the Santa Rosa part that had gotten my attention. I said, “Sure. Why not? Maybe I’ve been left a million simoleons by a long-lost relative.”

  The voice that came out of the phone’s earpiece sounded about ten years old. “Philip? Is that you? You probably don’t remember me. This is your cousin June.”

  “Who died?” I said. “And when do I collect my million?”

  She giggled—a high-pitched titter that made me think of the automatic fun-house crone that tells penny fortunes and cackles mindlessly in her glass cage. “You always were a joker, Philip,” she chirped. “Nobody died. Not yet, anyway. But that’s what I’ve got to see you about.”

  “You don’t got to see me about anything, lady. I never had a cousin June, or Moon, or even Spoon. And much as I hate to hang up on a sweet young thing like you, I suggest you go find somebody else to play telephone games with.” I slammed the receiver down, stubbed out my butt in an ashtray overflowing with dead gaspers, and tried to catch up with the dream.

  No such luck. Cousin or no, Santa Rosa June had started up a train of thought that I usually manage to keep shunted off on a siding. There is nothing stupider than a chicken, unless it’s an egg. I came by this profound piece of folk wisdom honestly. I was born in Santa Rosa and my first job, while I was still in high school, was packing eggs at one of the local chicken ranches. Those eggs went off to places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I stayed put in Santa Rosa among the feathers and the smell of chicken dung. But not for long.

  The phone rang again. I grabbed it and shouted, “No!”

  This time it wasn’t the operator. June said, “Well, you don’t have to get so huffy. Even if you don’t remember me, I remember you. Sometimes I read about you in the newspapers. Once they even had a picture of you. So, would you drive up to Santa Rosa so I could talk to you about this problem I have?”

  “No.”

  She sighed. “I didn’t think so. That’s why I’m here in Hollywood. Me and my sister, January. She was pretending to be the operator before. Now do you remember us? We were the Abbott twins. Now she’s married and I’m not, but we’re still twins. And I know we’re not really cousins, but after you kissed me behind the gymnasium you said we could be ‘kissing cousins.’ ”

  “I said that?”

  “It was the nicest thing anybody’d ever said to me.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, it must be fifteen years ago. Maybe sixteen.”

  “And you remembered.”

  “Yes. But you didn’t.”

  “I guess I owe you something for that. Where did you say you were staying?”

  She named a fleabag over on Melrose. “But I could come to your place. My sister and I. We’ve been driving all night, but we’re not a bit tired.”

  “Well, I am. Suppose you come to my office in the morning.”

  “It is morning, silly.”

  “I mean later this morning. Make it . . . ” I squinted at the alarm clock that never yet had been able to wake me up. It was nine-thirty. I had to assume it was morning. Venetian blinds and dark brown monk’s cloth draperies kept whatever sunlight there was outside the single window of my bedroom. “Make it eleven-thirty.” I gave her my office address and hauled myself under a cold shower.

  I recognized them the minute I saw them. They were sitting side by side on the two straight chairs I keep in my waiting room just in case I should have more than one customer at a time. Or even in a day. My waiting room is never locked. There’s nothing in it worth lifting and I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from waiting around for me to finish a case or a hangover.

  June had been dead right about Santa Rosa and even about the kiss behind the gymnasium. She and her sister were identical twins. Every high school has an ugly girl. The girl no one likes or wants for a friend. Santa Rosa was lucky. We had two ugly girls. The Abbott twins, June and January. I had kissed June behind the gymnasium in a pouring rainstorm because the other girls had stolen all her clothes and then pushed her down a ravine into the world’s biggest mud puddle. It was December and cold and it had been raining for about three weeks the way it does in northern California.

  I gave her my slicker, kissed her muddy forehead, and drove her home in my junkmobile. Then I went back to the school, found the girls who’d done it to her, took them out to the chicken ranch to sample some bootleg hooch I had tucked away out there, and locked all four of them up in one of the chicken coops for the night. They were dead drunk when I snapped the padlock on them so they didn’t mind very much. Not right then.

  Fifteen years hadn’t done much for the twins. They were still ugly. Ugly isn’t so bad if you’ve got something else to take your mind off of what you see in the mirror every morning. Look at Eleanor Roosevelt.

  But the twins were trying to convince the world and themselves that roly-poly platinum blondes with bright magenta cupid’s-bow lips and eyebrows plucked to extinction were the cat’s pajamas. On Harlow it had worked, but she died. On them, it was grotesque and pathetic.

  One of them got up and flung herself at me. The other one lolled in the rickety wooden chair and crossed her beefy legs in my direction. They were dressed identically, in green and white polka dot chiffon with lots of ruffles and flourishes, and they reeked of Evening in Paris. Their fat little feet were crammed into white kid T-straps that raised four pairs of hurtful looking bulges across their insteps.

  The one who was leaning on me smirked up at my chin and tried for a husky whisper. “Remember me now? I remember you, but you’re a lot taller. And handsomer.”

  The other one piped up in a voice that bore a striking resemblance to the squawking hens of Santa Rosa. “Quit the lollygagging, June. This was your idea. I still think it stinks, but let’s get on with it now that we’re here.”

  “Good thinking,” I told her as I unlocked my office door. “Please step into my parlor and tell me all about it.” My parlor hadn’t changed much since I’d left it the night before. Even the air in it was the same, thick and stale with too much cigarette smoke and not enough ozone. I opened the window to liven the mix with an injection of exhaust fumes from the traffic on Cahuenga Boulevard.

  The twins sorted themselves out, January flopping into the visitor’s chair and June draping herself against the bank of five green metal file cabinets I’d picked up at a flea market. If business didn’t improve, I’d have to return t
hem emptier than I got them.

  It was easy to tell them apart, even though they were identical. January oozed an attitude of sullen discontent, the bitter aura of gin battling it out with her perfume. June, at least, had kept a spark of vitality alive in her little shoe-button eyes.

  She twinkled at me and said, “I hardly know where to begin.”

  “How about the beginning,” I suggested. I sat down in the lopsided swivel chair behind my desk and parked my hat on top of the telephone. It wouldn’t keep it from ringing if it had a mind to, but the way business had been going lately, there wasn’t much danger of that.

  June sighed and opened up her white leather pocketbook, a twin of the one that lay sprawled on January’s lap. She pulled out a deckle-edged snapshot and pressed it to her far from inconsequential bosom. January sat up a little straighter and flashed her sister a malevolent glance.

  “Well, we are looking for him, aren’t we?” June pleaded.

  “I don’t care if I never see the son of a sea cook again!” January’s carefully painted lips twisted in a vicious snarl. It almost made her look good.

  “But Jan, he’s got Baby Grace with him. We want to get her back, don’t we?”

  “If he hurts that kid, I’ll kill him. I swear to God, I’ll twist his crown jewels off and stuff them down his throat.”

  The party was getting a little rough for my delicate sensibilities. “Ladies, ladies,” I soothed. “Your sisterly affection is touching, but if we’re going to get anywhere with this we have to take the unemotional approach. Is there a missing person?”

  “No!” January shouted.

  “Two,” June outshouted her. “Jan’s husband, Walter, and their daughter, Baby Grace.”