“They’re not just missing,” January rasped between teeth that kept trying to grit themselves into tooth powder. “He’s kidnapped her. When I get my hands on him, he’s dead. And I don’t care who knows it.” She snapped open her pocketbook and hauled out the smallest gun I’d ever seen. It almost got lost in her pudgy pink paw, but there was no doubt in my mind it could do the job.
“You know how to use that?” I asked her in my softest, most reasonable voice.
“You damn betcha! Right between the eyes for old Walter Watson when I find him.” She pointed the gun at me to show me how well she could aim.
“Well, that’s just swell. But in the meantime, would you mind putting it away? If you shoot me, accidentally, of course, I won’t be able to help you find Walter, will I?”
She swung the gun around to point it at her sister. “You might as well tell him. I just hate to tell anybody. It’s all so disgusting.”
“There, there, honey,” said June. “You don’t have to say a word. I know how it upsets you.” She sidled over to her sister and held her hand out, palm up. “Why don’t you just give me that. It’s not polite to point a gun at somebody who’s trying to help you.”
While they pondered the intricacies of pistol-packing etiquette, I slid open my desk drawer and slyly let my hand fall to rest on the .38 I kept there for just such social occasions.
But January stuffed her deadly toy back into her pocketbook and dragged out a brown glass medicine bottle instead. “It’s for my nerves,” she muttered as she twisted off the cap. “I got terrible nerves.” She swigged at the bottle, smacked her lips and put the lid back on without offering a dainty sip to anybody else. Emily Post would not have approved.
June waddled over and laid the snapshot down on my desk. “That’s him,” she said, “with Baby Grace on his shoulders.”
I stared down at a tall, narrow gent in a bathing suit. He was squinting into the sun over an eagle beak and a broad grin full of snaggles. The kid on his shoulders looked to be about five or six years old. Her light hair was crimped into the obligatory moppet curls and her little hands were clamped onto the guy’s ears. Her legs and bare feet hung down against his chest, and her toes were curled. But it was her face that told me she didn’t like being where she was, up above the world so high. Her eyes were big and scared and her mouth was small and pinched. A vague stretch of water shone in the sunlight behind them.
“We took that at Clear Lake about three weeks ago,” said June. “Walter was trying to teach her how to swim.”
“Forget the swimming,” January mumbled. “You should see her tapdance. She could make a fortune in the movies before she gets too old. She’s just the cutest little number in the world. Walter had no right . . . ” She trailed off into a cascade of gin-soaked blubbers.
Mother love. Hollywood was full of it these days. They came from Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas. Hard-eyed hungry women and their primped and painted Kewpie doll daughters. All trying to be the next Shirley Temple. The way I read this one, the twins were hot on the trail of Walter, who either was trying to save his little girl from breaking her heart against the movies’ indifference or had beaten Mommie Jan and Auntie June to the draw in selling their piece of merchandise. Either way, it wasn’t my kind of case.
I pushed the snapshot back across my desk. “Don’t they have police in Santa Rosa anymore?” I asked.
“Bunch of fatheads,” January snapped. “I wouldn’t ask them to find Jimmy Durante’s nose. Besides, we think Walter’s somewhere in L.A. His sister Lucille’s a seamstress at one of the studios. I called her yesterday and she sounded nastier than usual. She said she hadn’t seen or heard from Walter in months. But I don’t believe her. She hates me and she’d just love it if Walter left me and took Baby Grace with him.”
June had been perched on the edge of my desk while all this was going on. Now she leaned over and picked up one of my hands, which had just been lying there minding its own business. “Philip, you’ve got to help us,” she breathed. “There’s something more. We think . . . I mean, we have good reason to believe that Walter does things to Baby Grace.” Her round face had turned the color of dried phlegm, making the rouge spots on her cheeks stand out like traffic lights in the Mojave.
“What kind of things?” I asked demurely. I know, I know, I’m not a nice guy, forcing her to name the unnameable.
“You know what I mean,” she hedged. “He’s always picking her up and kissing and hugging her. We’ve never caught him doing anything more than that. But he’s home alone with her a lot. He takes cares of her while Jan and I work at the beauty parlor.”
“Great balls of fire, girls! He’s her father. What’s he supposed to do? Treat her like a piece of furniture?”
June lifted her hand off of mine, leaving behind a sticky film of sweat. She heaved a hopeless sigh and drooped like a deflated rubber swimming pool raft. “I should have known,” she said. “No one likes to believe that sort of thing. It took us a long time to even let ourselves think it. Now you know why Jan’s so upset. And why we don’t feel right about going to the police. If this got out, it could just ruin poor Baby Grace for life.”
There was some truth in what she said. Small town gossip is deadly. The natural inborn American killer instinct isn’t confined to gunsels and lowlifes. Character assassination is one of the greatest pastimes of the village righteous and, as I recalled, Santa Rosa had more than its share of sanctimony.
After her outburst, Jan had been nodding drowsily in her chair, whether in agreement with June’s accusation or in a gin stupor, I couldn’t tell. Now, she rose majestically to her tiny feet. “Let’s get out of here,” she rasped. “This guy turns my stomach.” She rested her flippers on top of it as if to hold it in place. “He’s a washout. He doesn’t want to help us, so let’s go find Baby Grace on our own.” She marched to the office door and flung it open. Then she turned and mustered up all the scorn accumulated throughout her twenty-eight or thirty years of being one of the Abbott twins.
“I hope you rot,” she told me sweetly. “I hope you die slowly and it hurts a lot. You’re in a crummy business in a crummy town and it suits you. I wouldn’t even hire you to haul garbage. You’re too . . . too . . . loathsome for that.”
I was beginning to like her. There was a kind of raw honesty about her that made up for the phony veneer of bottle-blonde hair and too much makeup.
“Hold on, ladies,” I said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take the case. Happens I don’t have anything else on right now. I can give it a day or two.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” burbled June, reinflating herself to full size. “I just knew you’d do it.”
“But your sister has to stop calling me loathsome. I’m a very sensitive guy. I’ll admit to crummy, but that’s as far as I’ll go.”
After I got the particulars about color of hair, eyes, and so forth, what the missing persons were wearing when last seen, and what kind of car Walter was driving, I asked for his sister’s address.
“Miss High-and-Mighty Lucille Watson lives in Bay City,” said January, and she gave me a street number in the run-down area behind the amusement pier. “Do you have to talk to her? She’ll say nasty things about me.”
“I promise not to listen any more than I have to. Which studio does she work at?”
January named one of the big ones, a fantasy factory where an army of poor slobs thought they were lucky to hammer and saw and stitch and paint their lives away. I guess they were. They got paid every week.
There wasn’t much else they could tell me, so I rode down in the elevator with them, a risky ride given the combined tonnage of the twins and the decrepit state of the mechanism.
After tucking them into their dented Dodge roadster and pointing them in the direction of lunch, I went back up to the office and started working the phone.
None of the bigger studios had casting calls out for moppets and only one had seen any new meat under sixteen in the past week, a pet Li
mey boy wonder brought in by the studio boss for not so obscure reasons of his own. That left the sad remnants of the independents over on Gower Gulch, but not even superannuated cowboys could get any work there these days.
On the other hand, Walter Watson did have a connection of a sort. It was time to pay a call on Miss Lucille Watson.
I drove over to the studio where she worked. One of the guards was a retired cop who knew the inside story of why I’d been fired from the D.A.’s office a few years ago. He was glad to see me.
“Ah, Philly,” he groaned, “ain’t it terrible what this town does to you. Here I should be tending to my fishing at some lake in the mountains, but try to do that on a cop’s pension, and you should be making a hero’s name for yourself on the side of the law. Instead, look at the both of us. Patsies from the word go.”
“It’s the law that’s the patsy,” I told him. “Whores are always patsies. They sell themselves to anybody who flashes a wad and forget what it feels like to be clean. I need your help, Ralph. Nothing that’ll get you in trouble.”
“You name it, you got it,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder with a grip reminiscent of the way he used to haul felons into the wagon. I tried not to wince; he meant it to be friendly.
“I need to talk to Miss Lucille Watson. She works here as a seamstress.”
“Sure,” he said, “I know Lucille. A tall, skinny sourpuss with goggles like the bottom of a shotglass. But I didn’t see her today. Nor yesterday, come to think of it. Lemme just check the sheet.”
He ducked into the little two-by-four office beside the gate and came out moments later shaking his head. “On sick leave since last week,” he said. “I don’t know where she lives.”
“That’s jake,” I told him. “She’s in Bay City, but I was hoping to catch her here. They’re not too fond of me in Bay City.”
He laughed a big haw-haw and roared, “Give ’em hell, Philly! You make those bozos look like the clowns they are.”
I drove away from the studio with the sun in my eyes and the heat pressing in through the open windows like the blast from a steel mill.
As as soon as I reached Bay City, I stopped at a drugstore and bought a box of chocolates from a small, clean old gent in a white pharmacist’s coat. He smiled as he wrapped the box in green paper and tied it with yellow string. “A present for your sweetie pie,” he murmured. “That’s nice. She’s a lucky girl.”
“Thanks, pop,” I said, pocketing my change. “I’ll tell her you said so. She may not agree.”
I found Miss Lucille Watson’s dirty white stucco bungalow in a row of other bungalows exactly like it. Hers was different by virtue of the white picket fence around the front yard and the enormous hydrangea bush that it guarded.
I rang the doorbell and heard it clang somewhere inside the house. The red painted door regarded me with wooden indifference and stayed closed. I rang again and turned to look back at the front yard. There was a Charlie McCarthy doll lying under the hydrangea. His mouth was open but he didn’t say anything.
The door creaked open about an inch and a watery eye peered out at me. A voice croaked, “I’m not buying any. Go away.”
“I’m not selling any. I’m giving it away this week.” I took my hat off like a good boy. “Are you Lucille Watson? If you are, you’ve just won the Blue Network’s Radio Sweetheart of the Week prize.” I brandished the box of chocolates. “All you have to do is answer a few simple questions.”
The eye went away from the door and came back magnified by a thick lens. The lens gleamed down at the chocolate box and then up at my face. “What questions?” The door creaked open a little wider.
“Nothing much, but I need to verify that you listen to the radio. You do have a radio, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” she snapped. By this time the door was open wide enough for me to see both lenses, a stiff headful of lacquered finger waves, and a starchy lavender and white housedress buttoned and belted onto a miserly frame. The lenses rested on a sharp inquisitive nose, not quite the equal of Walter’s eagle beak but clearly related. She licked her thin pale lips and reached out a bony hand for the candy box.
“Ah, ah, ah,” I said, hiding the box behind my back. “Mustn’t touch until I see the radio and you tell me what your favorite programs are.”
“Oh, come on in,” she said. “I guess you’re harmless. If you’re not, a hatpin in the right place’ll teach you some manners.” Her nasal twang branded her an escapee from the tall corn country.
She led me through a small dark foyer into an even darker living room anchored down with chunky California mission furniture. The radio was a floor model Philco with a round green dial. It was churning out another chapter of afternoon agony in the life of Young Widder Brown. “There it is,” she said. “My favorite programs are One Man’s Family and Jack Benny. Do you get paid for doing this?”
“What about your children? What do they like?”
“I’m not married,” she snapped.
“Beg your pardon, Miss Watson. I saw the doll out in the yard. I thought it belonged to a child.”
“What doll?” She hiked over to the front window and pulled aside the heavy drapes.
“One of those Charlie McCarthy dolls. Every kid seems to have one these days.”
“My niece,” she said. “She was visiting here with her father. Poor little thing. She’ll miss that doll. She loves it so. I guess I’ll have to send it to her.”
“Visiting from back home?” I asked.
“What business is it of yours?”
“None whatsoever,” I admitted in my best clodhopper fashion. “It just seems to me that children have a better chance of growing up on the straight and narrow in a place where folks work hard and go to church on Sundays.” I hoped I wasn’t laying it on too thick. “I’d guess you’re from Iowa.”
“I work hard and go to church on Sundays. But you’re right, young man. My brother’s taking little Grace back home with him to Council Bluffs. Now how about that candy?”
I handed over the box. “Must be hard on a little girl not to have a mother,” I remarked.
“Who told you that?” she demanded, ripping off the green paper.
“Nobody. But you didn’t mention little Grace’s mother. Did she die?”
“Be a blessing if she would.” She opened the box, picked out a chocolate-covered cherry, and popped it into her mouth. “She’s been a trial to poor Walter since the beginning, with her drinking and alley-catting around. I warned him about her. But he wouldn’t listen. But when she started in on little Grace, well that was the living end. Tap-dancing lessons and permanent waves. Putting lipstick on her and making her stand up in a barroom and sing. I ask you.” Her words were sticky with chocolate and moral indignation.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “So they’re well on their way home by now.”
She ate another chocolate and peered at me through her lenses. “You’re pretty curious about my brother and his whereabouts, aren’t you? I never heard of any Blue Network Radio Sweetheart of the Week nonsense. But I have heard of curiosity killing the cat.”
Her lenses were aimed somewhere over my left shoulder. Before I could turn around to see what was there, the whole roomful of mission furniture fell on my head. There was a smell of carpet dust in my nose and the taste of iron in my mouth. The last thing I heard was a tiny voice crying, “Mommy!”
And the first thing I heard when I could hear things again was “Gosh all hemlock, Jack!” from the Philco. Afternoon agony had segued into high adventure and the all-American boy was hot on the trail of evildoers in the steamy Amazonian rain forest. While the all-American booby was taking an enforced nap on the Axminster. I lifted one eyelid and saw a tiny black shoe three inches from my nose.
Charlie McCarthy sat propped up against a chair leg, smirking a superior kind of smirk. I expected him to pop off one of his wisecracks and wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. I deserved it. But he just sat there and watched me scr
amble to my knees and finger the sore spot on the back of my head. No blood. Just a mushy lump that could have been made by a baseball bat or a crowbar. Walter Watson had good aim. The lump was neatly centered on my cranium.
When I finished exploring my tolerance for pain, I noticed that Charlie was clutching a piece of paper in one wooden hand. “Thanks, pal,” I said as I took it from him. “Nice crowd you hang out with.”
The note said: “June should have told you that she’s been babbling about you ever since your picture showed up in the paper. We’ve been expecting you to turn up. Ask her about a Mr. Hap Delaney. And tell Jan that Grace is okay.” There was no signature. I turned off the radio when it sang at me, “Have you tri-e-e-ed Wheaties?”
I stuffed the note into my pocket, tucked Charlie McCarthy under my arm, and made a quick tour of the bungalow. In a small back bedroom, a single bed and a folding cot had been slept in. Underneath the cot, I found a pink sunsuit with grass stains on the seat.
The other bedroom wasn’t much larger. I learned that Miss Lucille Watson was a bedtime Bible reader and wore dentures. The kitchen told me nothing at all unless neatness counts. Lucille was a fanatic with the Fels-Naptha. And that was it. No hint of where they’d flitted off to. Only the certainty that Walter and Baby Grace had been here and now they were gone.
I did the only thing I could do. The name Hap Delaney rang a distant bell. Something to do with running a string of kid pickpockets in movie theaters around town. A regular latter-day Fagin. But that was a long time ago and I hadn’t heard his name since. I went back into the musty overweight living room, picked up the phone, and asked the operator for the Hollywood Citizen-News. My sometime drinking buddy and all-purpose oracle, Benny Flinders, might have some current dope.
When Benny came on the line, he sounded more dyspeptic than usual. “Now just tell me this, Marlowe,” he groaned. “What’s a guy to do when his girl gives him the gate, the sawbones tells him to quit drinking, and his hair starts falling out in clumps the size of haystacks? Where’ve you been, kid? I haven’t seen you in a month or so.” Benny’d been sounding like an old man ever since I’d known him, but he was closer to my age than he was to Methuselah’s.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 8