Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  “You’re gonna do this job for me,” he said, shoving the cigar in his kisser.

  “I am?”

  He nodded. “You’re gonna go in a house and give a guy an envelope. Then you’re gonna forget you saw me.”

  “Now how could I ever do that?”

  He grinned again, as if that was so damn cute he thought he might have to break the customer’s chair to keep from laughing. Reaching across the desk, he clamped a monstrous hand on my shoulder, like it was a game of tag and I’d just been chosen “it.”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  I didn’t see any point in arguing.

  Pulling me around the side of the desk, he pushed me toward the pebbled-glass door. With his free hand, he grabbed my hat from the hatrack and stuffed it on my head.

  “I’d like to call Mom,” I said to him, over my shoulder. “She’ll worry.”

  The guy opened the door and shoved me into the hall.

  “Cute,” he said, under his breath.

  There was a gray Packard parked at a meter in front of the Cahuenga Building, where I had my doghouse. It wasn’t brand new, like a top-rank hood’s would have been, or custom built and frosted in chrome, like a movieland flesh peddler’s, but it was in nice enough shape to make me wonder about the guy behind me, the guy with the iron fist in my back. The car didn’t go with the rolling pin cigar and the crushed hat and the tout’s jacket. This guy should have had a Plymouth with a hole in the floorboard and an odometer that had flipped over the day the banks closed.

  He laid me on the front seat like boxed china and got in on the driver’s side. The car sank beneath his weight like a cheap mattress. Without a word he took off down Hollywood Boulevard.

  There was just enough of an April breeze that morning to carry the scent of oranges over from the big groves in the Valley. It mixed peculiarly with the burning-rubber stench of the man’s corona, like a crate of fruit that had been crushed by a truck.

  The big fellow ran a light and gunned the Packard south on Western.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked, just out of curiosity.

  “I told you,” he said, chewing over his cigar. “You’re going to meet a guy and give him a package.”

  “What’s in the package?”

  He smiled his tight-lipped smile. “It’s okay, shamus. It’s just scratch.”

  “Who are we paying off?”

  “A rat named Loma.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Tony Loma, the fight promoter?”

  The big man looked unpleasantly surprised.

  “You know him?” he said icily.

  “I know about him. Enough so that I wouldn’t want to owe him money.”

  The dangerous look on the big man’s face went away. “Well, you don’t always get what you want. Didn’t your momma teach you that, peeper?”

  We turned left on Wilshire, passing the ornate facade of the Wiltern theater. It hadn’t opened yet for the matinee double feature, but the marquee was lit like a vanity mirror. A kid on a ladder was making anagrams with the billing.

  “Secrets of French Police,” I read off the marquee. “How does that sound to you?”

  The big man grunted. “I was in it.”

  “You’re an actor?”

  The big man actually laughed, although the laughter had to make its way around the cigar, so it came out sounding like the barking of a dog with a bone in its mouth. “Hell no, I ain’t no actor. I was between bouts, and it was a couple days’ stunt work for me and Elmo.”

  “You’re a fighter, then?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “I wrestle, down at the Olympic there.”

  “Could be I’ve heard of you?”

  The big man took the cigar out of his mouth and studied the ragged end. “Yeah, maybe.” He picked a strand of loose tobacco off his lower lip. “Few years back I had a shot at Londes and the heavyweight title.”

  I waited and when he didn’t say it, I asked, “What was the name?”

  “My ring moniker was Crusher.”

  “Just Crusher? Nothing else?”

  “The,” he said without cracking a smile.

  I smiled for him. “The Crusher, huh? How did the match with Londes work out?”

  “Got my shoulder broke a week before the fight, in a prelim against Buddy Brewster.” He screwed the cigar back in his mouth and puffed on it. “Gained a little weight. Got some gray in my hair. Now it’s strictly tag team with Elmo.”

  I had trouble imagining the guy that could break this one’s shoulder, gray hair or no. But I’d have bet even money that old Buddy Brewster wouldn’t have fit in the front seat between us, maybe not even in the back by himself. It put me in mind of what a small fry like me was doing there. I couldn’t see The Crusher hiring another man to pay a debt, even if it was owed to a thug like Tony Loma.

  So I asked him, “Why’d you pick me to run this errand?”

  Once again, the big man took his time about replying, as if each word was a coin coming out of his own pocket. “Guy I know tells me you’re pretty straight. Says you can keep your mouth shut.”

  The world must have looked pretty crooked to him, from the way he said it. But that didn’t answer the question.

  “I mean, why don’t you just pay Loma yourself?” I said.

  The Crusher got that battened-down look on his face again, like his eyelids were a couple of wide-brimmed hats. “He don’t like me, and I don’t like him. Next time we meet . . . there’s gonna be trouble.”

  “Guys like Loma don’t travel alone.”

  “There’s gonna be trouble,” The Crusher repeated.

  By then we were on Grand, heading south through Bunker Hill toward Exposition Park. It suddenly dawned on me where we were going, the Olympic Arena on South Grand. Pretty soon, I could see it, a huge block of concrete rising out of the pavement, like a mirage on the freeway.

  The Crusher parked the Packard just outside the entrance on the south side of the building. On a good night, with a good card, the doorway would have been crowded with fans and reporters and a few well-dressed women with blood in their eyes, looking for one more bout to cap the evening. But at that hour of the morning there was nobody around, except for a couple of Spanish kids shadowboxing their way down the sidewalk.

  “I gotta check something,” The Crusher said, as he put on the safety brake.

  He got out and I got out with him. I followed him through the entryway into the darkness of the arena.

  The stands were built up on rafters, all the way to the ceiling, with spaced runways leading to the ring. An ingot of lead gray light fell onto the roped square of canvas in the center, illuminating it faintly, like an examination table in a morgue. Somewhere in the gloom someone was working a bag. You could hear the echo of his fists, pummeling the leather.

  We circled the stands to a stairway, then went down a flight to the dressing rooms. The hallway was plastered with posters advertising main events from years gone by. I spotted The Crusher’s name on one of them, way down in the undercard. Midway along the hall, the big man stopped at a dressing room door and rapped on the jamb—one short, two long.

  “Yeah?” someone inside said.

  Whoever the voice belonged to, he wasn’t the guy The Crusher was expecting.

  “Elmo?” he barked.

  “He ain’t in.”

  The big man’s face turned red as rye whiskey. Taking one quick step back, he lowered his shoulder and plowed directly into the dressing room door with a force that had to be seen to be appreciated. Even for a guy his size, it was impressive. The door splintered and groaned, coming right off its hinges, like it had been hit by a Chevy.

  The momentum of the big man’s blow carried him halfway into the dressing room. He lost his footing on the concrete floor and ended up on his knees in front of a short, stocky, balding guy with a wrinkled, deeply tanned face. I’d seen that face before, in the sports page and, when I was with the D.A., pasted in the mug books. Tony Loma.

  The
re were two other guys in the room with him, big, hulking torpedos in cheap black suits that looked like they’d been bought that morning at a mortuary fire sale.

  Loma took a look at The Crusher, kneeling on the floor, and started to laugh. The two torpedos started laughing too, a second later. They could afford to laugh. All three of them were holding .38’s.

  From his knees, The Crusher looked up at Loma. I could see that he didn’t care about the guns, and so could the bald man. He stopped laughing, cocked the pistol, and pressed the barrel against The Crusher’s forehead.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said to the big man.

  The Crusher’s chest heaved. It took every bit of self-restraint he had to keep from attacking the guy. You could see him fighting it out with himself. The sane part eventually won, but it was a split decision. Taking a couple more deep breaths, he passed a hand through his iron-gray hair. He’d lost the hat on the way in. “Where’s Elmo?” he said in a voice that was barely under control.

  “That’s what we were wondering. You don’t have no ideas, do you, Crush?”

  The Crusher glared at him.

  Loma pulled the gun away from The Crusher’s forehead and took a step back. “You never should have tied up with that punk. He’s bad news.”

  The Crusher gave Loma his battened-down look. “If you done him, Tony, you’re going to pay.”

  The bald guy chuckled. “You got guts, cracking wise with three .38’s pointed at your head. I always said that about you, Crush. More guts than brains.”

  “You said a lot of things, Tony.”

  The bald guy flushed a little. “You got paid. Wha’d you got to complain about? It was business.”

  “Business,” The Crusher said.

  Loma glanced through the broken door at me. “Who’s your pal?”

  “Nobody,” The Crusher said, slowly getting back to his feet.

  “Tell nobody to take his hands out of his pockets and come in here.” Loma nodded at one of the torpedos, and the hood trained his pistol on me.

  I raised my hands and stepped through the door.

  Loma looked back at The Crusher. “Elmo’s got till two this afternoon, Crush, to come up with the scratch. His pals won’t wait longer than that.”

  “Your pals,” the big man said bitterly.

  “Elmo’s a big boy. He shouldn’t mixed in this thing.”

  “He shouldn’t mixed with you.”

  “You tell him to get the five gees, or he takes a dip in the Pacific.”

  The big man reached down and picked up his hat, dusting it off against his pants leg before putting it back on his head. “You’ll get the dough,” he said.

  Loma pocketed his pistol and walked toward the door. The two torpedos followed behind him at a distance, as if they were carrying his train.

  “Elmo knows the place,” Loma said, from the doorway. “You tell him to be there. Ain’t no good hiding out. We’ll find him. You know we will.”

  The three thugs left. The big man stared after them with a look that would have given a normal man a nosebleed. After a while, he dropped his head.

  “Do you know where Elmo is?” I asked him.

  “I got an idea.”

  “Does he have the five gees?”

  The big man laughed bitterly. “He ain’t got a pot to piss in. Me, I can get the scratch.” He shook his head. “It’s all I got. Six years’ work. And I gotta hand it over to that monkey Loma.”

  “How did your buddy Elmo get in dutch with these boys?”

  He dropped his chin even lower, as if the thing were too embarrassing to look at head on. “When we was out on the movie ranch, Elmo fell in with some of that Hollywood trash, Loma’s crowd. He’s just a kid, nineteen. He don’t know which side the bread is buttered on, but he thinks he knows it all. Some chippy winks at him, and he’s falling all over himself to do her favors. She talks him into running down to TJ to pick up a package for Loma’s pals. And the damn fool does it. On the way back up to Malibu, the package gets heisted.”

  “By who?”

  “Who knows. Maybe some of Loma’s torpedos. I wouldn’t put it past the double-crossing rat.”

  “So Elmo’s got to pay back for the goods.”

  “He ain’t saved a dime,” The Crusher said. “He hasn’t learned that the money ain’t gonna always be there, that you ain’t gonna be nineteen forever.”

  “This kid a relative of yours?”

  The big man raised his head and stared at me balefully. “A friend.”

  “A good enough friend to spend your bankroll on?”

  The Crusher grunted. “How good does a friend have to be?”

  We stopped at the big man’s hotel before meeting with Loma’s Hollywood pals. The Crusher didn’t say why we were stopping, but I figured it was because the money was there, or nearby.

  It was a cheap place called the Metropole, on Seventh and Spring. The lobby was a deadbeat’s delight, but the rented room was surprisingly clean, or maybe it was just The Crusher who was clean. His place had the spare, neat, squared-away look of a soldier’s billet. It was a look I recognized, the look of longtime bachelorhood. It smelled like a bachelor’s flat too, of shaving soap and whiskey and the fat cigars the big man smoked.

  While The Crusher rummaged through a linen closet in the bathroom, I took a look at a photograph sitting on the nightstand. It was a picture of The Crusher taken in a much better year, when his face hadn’t looked like a crushed fedora and his hair hadn’t turned to iron. There was a girl in the picture, pretty and pale and a little in awe of the big man beside her. Whoever she was, he still thought enough of her to keep her picture by his bed.

  The only other decoration in the room was a poster on the door, featuring a picture of The Crusher and a red-haired kid billed as Young Wolf. I figured Young Wolf was Elmo. He certainly didn’t look wolfish on the poster. He looked musclebound and callow and stupid, like a streetcorner bully. But I was probably seeing him with a jaded eye, knowing what a spot he’d left his partner in.

  As I stood there staring at Elmo, The Crusher came back in the room carrying a zippered canvas gym bag. He had an odd look on his face.

  “Somebody’s been in here,” he said. “And I think I know who.”

  “Loma?”

  The big man nodded. “He probably stopped here, looking for Elmo, before he went down to the Olympic.”

  “Where is Elmo?”

  “He and that chippy were shacked up in some cheap motel in Long Beach. The Enchanted Cottages. He probably lammed it back over there, to dodge Tony and the boys.”

  “I hope Elmo appreciates what you’re doing for him.”

  “I told you. He’s a friend.” The Crusher set the canvas bag down on the bed and glanced at the photograph on the nightstand. “He’s the kid of a dame I used to know.” He looked back at the bag. “I owe her something.”

  He unzipped the bag and took out a couple of undershirts, some trunks, several pairs of rolled-up white socks, and a pair of shoes. When the thing was empty, he drew a penknife from his pocket and pried out the plywood bottom of the gym bag. Putting the board on the bed, he reached inside and his face turned white.

  “Jesus,” he said softly.

  He lifted up the bag and looked directly into it. Then he turned it upside down. A little tag of paper floated out. The Crusher tossed the bag across the room, picked up the tag of paper, and stared at it.

  “He done me again,” he said incredulously and sat down hard on the bed. “The bastard done me again.”

  “Who?”

  “Loma,” he said and I could hear the rage rising in his throat. “He pays off that gorilla, Brewster, to bust up my shoulder, so’s he can get his own boy a title shot. And now he takes my bankroll. Every penny I got!”

  He crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it on the floor. “I’m gonna kill him.”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said. “It’s a pretty long shot that a guy like Loma, a stranger, could come in here a
nd find that dough, without tearing the place up a little. Use your head. This room hasn’t been searched. Somebody knew where to look.”

  “Read the damn note!” The Crusher said, jumping to his feet and pushing me out of his way. He went straight for the door, tearing it open as if he were tearing Loma’s heart out.

  I picked the crumpled note up and read it quickly. It was printed in a crude hand and said, “Thanks for the dough, T.L.” I stuck it in my pocket and started after The Crusher.

  I managed to catch up to him on the street.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “You know where,” he snarled.

  “At least let me tag along.”

  “This is the main event. No tags, this time.”

  “How are you going to find Loma?”

  “I know where he’s at. With the Hollywood bunch up in Malibu.”

  “Crusher, Loma’s boys will kill you.”

  “So what?” he said and meant it.

  When we reached the car, the big man pulled a fat cigar from his coat, bit off the end, and screwed it into his mouth. “Shamus,” he said, “quit worrying about it. I’ve been getting mad most of my life, and it’s always cost me something. It’s cost me dough, it’s cost me friends, it’s cost me a good woman, and this time maybe it’s gonna cost the decision. But at least this time I’m getting mad at the right guy. When it comes down to it, it’s the only way this round could end.” He struck a match on his heel and lit the corona. “So long, shamus.”

  He got in the car and drove off.

  The first thing I did was phone Bernie Ohls from a pay phone in the Olympic lobby.

  “There’s a big guy in a gray 1937 Packard, California license number 53437. Pick him up.”

  “Why, Phil?” Bernie said.

  “Because he’s about to kill Tony Loma and get himself killed in the process.

  “Too bad,” Bernie said. “Loma could use killing. I’ll put out an A.P.B. What’s the guy’s name?”

  “He calls himself The Crusher. He’s a pro wrestler. I don’t know what his real name is. But you can’t miss him. He’s as big as a house. You better hurry on this, Bernie. The guy’s dead serious.”