“We’ll try, Phil.”
“Notify the C.H.P., too. And see if you can dig up a Malibu address for Loma. That’s where the big guy is headed.”
“Will you be in the office?”
“No, I’ll check back with you. I’ve got to take a trip to Long Beach.”
I caught a fast cab back to the office and picked up my car. It took me about a half an hour to make it down to Long Beach and another ten minutes to find The Enchanted Cottages motel. They didn’t look enchanted to me. Haunted, maybe. I slipped the clerk in the office a fin to point me toward the right shack, then drove down the driveway and parked in front of it. Even though the clerk had claimed that the couple in 22 hadn’t checked out, there was no other car around, and that worried me a little.
The cabin was made out of redwood logs with gingerbread appliqués over the door and window. The curtain in the window had been drawn. I pulled the .38 out of the gun holder beneath the dashboard and got out into the sun. You couldn’t smell the oranges in Long Beach. Just diesel oil and mildew and the backwater smack of the pier.
I didn’t have time for niceties, so I walked over to the door and kicked it open. I wasn’t The Crusher, so it took me a couple of boots. When the lock finally sprang, I stepped in holding the gun in front of me.
A disheveled looking redheaded kid, the same kid I’d seen in the poster on The Crusher’s door, was standing by the bed, a sheet wrapped around his torso. He looked sleepy and disoriented, as if my foot had been his alarm clock. He also looked mad. I could see a blush spreading up his neck into his freckled face.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
“Marlowe,” I said. “I’m a detective working for a friend of yours. A big guy named The Crusher.”
“Jack wouldn’t send a guy like you,” the kid said, getting angrier.
“I guess that’s what you were counting on, wasn’t it, Elmo?”
“What do you mean?” Elmo said nastily.
“That Jack wouldn’t tumble to your game. You always treat your friends like that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sit,” I said, pointing to the bed with the gun.
He sat.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked.
“Irene? She went out to eat, while I was asleep. She left a note saying she’d bring me back some chow.”
“Want to bet?”
“Bet?” the kid said stupidly.
“Let’s see the note.”
He picked up a slip of paper from the nightstand and held it out toward me. I walked over to the bed. As soon as I got within arm’s reach, Elmo went for my legs.
He was quick, but he was wearing a sheet. Besides, I was expecting it. I sidestepped him and smacked the gun barrel across his temple. Elmo groaned and grabbed his head.
“Jack was right about you, buster,” I said, reaching down to pick up the note. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”
Elmo blubbered like a baby.
I took a look at the note. It was written in a crude hand and said, “Gone to get eats. Back soon. I.” I wasn’t a handwriting expert, but I didn’t have to be one to recognize the scrawl. It was the same hand that had scribbled the note in The Crusher’s room.
I tapped the kid with the gun again, just hard enough to get his attention. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes.
“Whose idea was it to steal Jack’s bankroll?”
The kid looked genuinely surprised. “Jack’s bankroll?”
“The five gees he kept in his gym bag.”
“Nobody knows about that,” the kid said. “Nobody but me and Jack.”
“You didn’t mention it to Irene, maybe? Just in passing, in the night?”
The kid swallowed hard. “Oh, God,” he said.
“You’re a real sap, Elmo, you know that?” I stared at the boy disgustedly. “Because of your double-cross a friend of yours is in real trouble.”
The kid shook his head helplessly. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I was gonna get the money back to Jack, after he paid Tony off.”
“And where were you going to get five gees, Elmo?”
His head sank to his chest. “The stuff. Irene was gonna sell the stuff.”
“The stuff you brought back from TJ. The stuff you told Jack was heisted.”
The kid put both hands to his head. “She said it was worth ten, maybe twenty thousand. She has friends who . . . they’d buy it from us.”
“Well, now she has the drugs and Jack’s five thousand. What do you think she’s going to bring you back from the restaurant, Elmo?”
“Bitch,” he said between his teeth.
“Get dressed, Elmo,” I said. “Get dressed quick, while there’s still a chance to save Jack’s life.”
“His life?” Elmo said with horror.
“Your girlfriend made it look like Tony Loma took his money. Jack’s gone after him.”
Elmo leaped up and started dressing.
We made the trip up the coast highway as fast as the car could run.
Elmo had sobered up completely when he realized the spot his friend was in. It made me think that there might be something there worth saving—maybe the same thing that Jack had been willing to bet his life on.
The kid stared desperately through the windshield as we tore through Pedro and Bay City, rocking back and forth on the seat, as if he were trying to urge the car on with body English like a jockey. As fast as we went, it wasn’t fast enough. I knew it before we got to the Colony, as surely as if it were already written. I knew it, but the kid didn’t.
He started babbling and pointing, as soon as we hit the Malibu coast. I followed his sign language, down a little road off the highway that ran behind a row of beach houses. As soon as I saw the police cars and the ambulances, I slowed to a crawl. The kid flung the passenger side door open and hit the ground on the run. I pulled to a stop a few hundred feet away and stared at the little beach house, crawling with cops. I don’t run toward tragedies unless I can do something to prevent them. And this time, it was too late to do anything at all.
After a while, I got out. The only smell was the smell of the sea, thick and salty like a taste on the tongue. I sat down on a big white rock beside the roadside berm. The beach ran right up the road, and the ocean stretched out beyond it, languid and sunstreaked and coolly oblivious to all the petty commotion on that tiny spot of shoreline.
Bernie Ohls walked over, throwing a long shadow across the sand. I looked up at him.
“The big guy’s dead.”
I nodded. “That’s the way it figured.”
“He got Loma, though. And one of his torpedos. The other one got him.” Bernie looked back at the beach house. “The kid you brought along, Elmo Pritchard . . . he’s pretty upset. He blames himself for what happened. He mentioned a girl, Irene Chivalo.”
“Elmo was carrying drugs up from TJ for Loma. He told Loma the drugs had been heisted. But Elmo and the girl took them themselves, and left the big guy to clean up the mess.”
“That’s what the kid told us. We’ll get an A.P.B. out on the Chivalo dame immediately. She and Elmo are going to do time. I think the kid knows it, too. He asked if he could talk to you.”
“Why not?”
Brushing the sand off my cuffs, I got to my feet and walked up the road to the beach house. Elmo was sitting in the front seat of a cop car, staring at two attendants wheeling a loaded gurney over to an ambulance.
“Is that Jack?” I said to him, through the cop car window.
He nodded. “It’s my fault.”
“Yes.”
Elmo put his hands to his face and started to cry.
“Everything’s got a price tag, kid. The big guy knew that. You’re learning it now.”
He sobbed. “Call my mom in Oxnard, will ya? Tell her.”
I walked back down the road to my car. Bernie was waiting there for me.
“Is there anyone to claim the body?” he asked.
When I got back to my office, late in the afternoon, I picked up the county phone book and started thumbing through the various towns and municipalities, searching for a woman named Pritchard in Oxnard. It was going to take some time to drive up there. But time was all I had that afternoon, and I figured the woman would want to know.
The year I chose, 1939, was a good year for Chandler. It was the year of Farewell, My Lovely, which happens to be the first Chandler novel I read. I’ve written my story in what I hope is an approximation of the style of that novel (although it’s somewhat stripped down, because of limitations of length). Knowing that Chandler often “cannibalized” his short fiction, I’ve made an attempt to write a story that might have served as a springboard for Farewell, My Lovely, touching upon some of the same kinds of characters and themes.
Along with many of your other contributors, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have become a detective story writer had it not been for Chandler. Reading him in grad school was a revelation. Here, for once, was a genre writer with style and wit. His sense of place and character were first rate. But it was his language, more than anything else, that impressed me. Chandler had a truly memorable voice; and through his narrator Marlowe, he showed me that a detective could be a lot more than a wisecracking stereotype (although Marlowe could crack wise with the best of them). Philip Marlowe remains, I think, the funniest, the most worldly wise, the most charmingly cynical, and the most original creation in American detective fiction. Marlowe was, and will always be, a model for us all.
Jonathan Valin
RAYMOND CHANDLER’S
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PHILIP MARLOWE
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THE FORTIES
SAD-EYED BLONDE
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DICK LOCHTE
1940
THE THING ABOUT having an office on Hollywood Boulevard is that you never know what’s going to come calling. Even if you’re six flights up. That humid Monday morning, the list began with a butterfly. It cleared the sill, maneuvered past the lifeless curtain and paused to check out the room before committing itself further. It took in walls the color of a jaundice victim, a desk that had more scars than Primo Carnera’s nose, a rump-sprung client’s chair, five pond-green filing cabinets, three of them as empty as my stomach, and me, leaning back in a swivel chair that squeaked like a mouse that had expected Swiss cheese and got farina. In spite of everything, the butterfly decided to stick around. It soared to the ceiling, skimmed the cobwebs, then did a rollover and dived for the floor where it nestled on the edge of the worn red carpet. It had just settled in when a pair of black and white spectators waltzed through the door and sent it off to bug Valhalla.
The two-tone Sunday dogs were only a part of my visitor’s sartorial splendor. Accompanying them were a wide-brim Panama with a pink band, a nutmeg brown silk suit, a dark red shirt, and a white dickey-sized tie with pink bubbles on it that matched the hatband. The guy’s vaguely cherubic face was pink, too, and freshly barbered. His sunburned nose, which should have been on a larger, fatter man, was as red as a beefsteak tomato.
His nervous eyes shifted from me to the squashed butterfly. He said, “Aw, Christ,” and dropped to one knee. He used a polished fingernail to scrape what was left of the bug from the carpet, whipped out a pink display hanky and rested the remains on it. “Aw, Christ,” he repeated.
I watched him with a certain sense of wonder as he brought the handkerchief litter to my desk and placed it carefully on the glass top before sinking with a sigh onto the client chair.
“He was a beauty, too,” he said. “It’s not like we got so much beauty in the world, we can afford to waste a little. I’m a goddamn Jonah is what I am.”
I removed my dead pipe from the ashtray, picked up his handkerchief and dropped the ex-butterfly among the ashes and butts. I dumped the whole mess into the wastebasket and handed him back his pink linen. “Stir seems to have bared your poetic soul, Johnny. Or is this a new grift?”
He gave me a smile as thin as boardinghouse milk and said, “So sue me if I like insects. Try five years doubled up in a ten-foot cage with an ex-pin jabber who can’t do nothing but play nose checkers, and see if you don’t start giving pet names to cockroaches.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, waiting for him to get around to the reason he’d dropped by.
As he patted his handkerchief back into his coat pocket, he scanned the room. “You ain’t exactly conquering the world, are you, Marlowe?”
“I’ll leave that to Mr. Hitler and see how far he gets with it. Are we just waltzing here, or is something special going to happen when the band stops playing?”
His smile grew wider under his bright red nose. “Kathy’ll be up in a sec. She stopped off at the Madison to grab some smokes, say hello to the old gang. She tole me how you helped out while I was inside.”
Kathy was Johnny Horne’s wife, a tall blonde with sad, China-blue eyes, who used to be a good cop. Her problem was, she had lousy taste in men. Johnny wasn’t the worst of them. But he was determined to bounce checks for a living even though he had no aptitude for it. So Kathy had been forced to turn in her tin and get a job selling smokes at the Madison House while Johnny spent most of their wedded years in San Quentin sewing mailbags. That’s where he’d been when Kathy had brought me into a situation involving stolen pearls.
It hadn’t been quite the cakewalk she’d described; but four or five stiffs later, we wound up splitting twenty-five grand that the insurance company had posted for the recovery of the teardrops.
Johnny Horne ran his little pinkie along a crater a cigarette had scorched in the desk. “You musta put your share of the loot in the bank, huh, Marlowe? Saving it for a rainy day.”
“I keep it in my bathtub in dimes and quarters so I can run my fingers through it on slow nights.”
I was about to ask him how Kathy was when I found out for myself. “Hi, Phil,” she drawled from the doorway. The last I’d seen of her, she’d been slightly seedy and as glum as St. Agnes on a cloudy day, even with a handbag full of twelve thousand five-hundred dollars. In the harsh sunlight that sneaked past the drapes, she looked like a new woman. Her blue eyes were so bright they glittered, and her simple aqua dress fit her lanky frame like pants on a lambchop. I wondered if the reward money had been responsible for the changeover, or if it was Johnny getting his wings.
He hopped from the chair and held it out for her as carefully as if it were a Chippendale.
Kathy asked, “How much have I missed?”
“We haven’t left the starting gate,” I told her.
Johnny cleared his throat and said: “Waitin’ on you, angel cake.”
Angel cake leaned back in the chair. “You still hide your gargle in that desk drawer, Phil?”
“Right next to the knitting,” I said, pulling out the Old Forester and a couple of glasses. Ever the proper host, I poured them each a shot and took mine from the bottle. Johnny sipped his carefully. Kathy downed hers with a little chuckle, coughed once, and said, “I figure we owe you this one.”
“You don’t owe me a thing.”
“You split that insurance loot right down the middle; and hell knows, you did all of the work and took all of the knocks.”
“History doesn’t pay the rent,” I said. “So the hell with history.”
“Phil, this one’ll make us all fat as geese,” she said earnestly. Johnny’s eyes ping-ponged from her to me.
“Maybe I’m trying to lose weight.”
Johnny chuckled nervously. He shook his head, and his Panama wiggled like it had caught a breeze. “Marlowe, the tag on this could be as much as one hundred gees.”
I smiled at them both. “As much as that, huh?”
Kathy started to straighten the papers on my desk. Either she was a compulsive cleaner, or she was being evasive. “Are you in?” she asked.
“Not yet. But I love a good story.” I had nothing pressing. The chicken pot pie wouldn’t be ready at Musso’s for another two hours.
She pulled a pack of gaspers from her purse, peeled away the cellophane, tore off a neat square of silver paper, and deposited it into my empty ashtray, all in one graceful motion. “A little touch I picked up pushing tobacco down at the Madison,” she said, offering me a nail.
I used the desk lighter on her cigarette, then mine, and relit it for Johnny’s. No sense tempting fate. After we’d blown enough smoke in each other’s faces, Kathy said, “Ever hear of the Jeweled Skull of Lhasa?”
I replied, “You stepped in what?”
“The Jeweled Skull of Lhasa. About the size of an ostrich egg. Belonged to a holy man a couple of lifetimes ago. This tribe in Tibet inlaid it with sparklers, rubies, the works. A British expedition stumbled on it, twenty or twenty-five years back. One of the Brits pinched it when nobody was looking.”
“Gee,” I said. “Is there a curse on it? People dropping like flies just from the sight of it?”
Kathy said, “Crack wise all you want, Phil. But a Warbucks in Frisco wound up with it on his mantelpiece. And, though some may consider it to be in bad taste, he was goddamned fond of it. So when it got lifted he posted one hundred grand for its return.”
“And you know where it is?”
“No,” she said. “But I know somebody who knows.”
“How’d you manage that?”
Her blue eyes sparkled. “The years I spent on the force count for something,” she said. “I still got friends downtown.”
Johnny Horne bent down and kissed his wife’s cheek.
“An L.A. cop knows the whereabouts of a priceless doodad and he talks to you about it?” I wondered.
“That’s the beauty part,” Johnny said. “He can’t move on it.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 11