Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  Johnny’s grin was as big as his head was empty. I turned to Kathy. “I guess I missed a salient point.”

  Kathy stared at me for a beat. “I . . . the cop’s named Beaudry.”

  In my head, a nickel started rolling toward a slot.

  She continued, “You must remember him when you were working for the D.A.”

  The nickel dropped. A scarecrow with sawed-off hair and a chin like a towel rack who was always in dutch with the D.A., Taggart Wilde. Usually had his nose in a book. The day Wilde handed me my walking papers Beaudry looked up from his novel to grumble, “ ‘And so proceed ad infinitum.’ ” I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean and was not inclined at the time to care very much.

  “If Beaudry’s got a line on the skull, he’s holding all the aces,” I said. “Why deal me in?”

  She said, “Because I told him we can trust you.”

  I grinned at her. “Yeah. But other than that.”

  She smiled back. “Beaudry knows where the thief is holed up. But, being a cop, he can’t front the recovery. His boss, Captain Maclin, would get too curious.”

  “Maclin would also want a piece of the reward, like maybe ninety-nine percent,” Johnny added.

  “That’s why Beaudry came to me. He’d heard about the Leander pearls. And how the payoff went down.”

  I exhaled a little smoke and looked from her to Johnny. She took her husband’s hand and said, “Sweetheart, would you take a little stroll? Then we’ll have us a nice lunch somewhere.”

  Johnny leaned forward and touched her cheek. He cleared his throat and croaked, “I think I’ll take a stroll.” At the door he added, “Sorry about your butterfly, shamus.”

  “He wasn’t mine, Johnny. He dropped by to visit my bluebottle flies.”

  “Whatever.” He left us with another of his halfhearted, crooked smiles.

  Kathy wasted a minute after the outer door clicked shut before she said, “The last stretch took its toll, Phil. Johnny came out of Grey Castle like Ferdinand. He’d rather smell the flowers. But even if he wanted in on this, Beaudry would keep him out. You know how cops are about cons. So I suggested that you front the deal, and that was swell with Beaudry. He likes you.”

  “That must be why he looked the other way when Wilde lowered the boom on me.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, wasn’t somebody just telling me how useful history is?”

  “Good point. How do we carve it up?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Beaudry wants half. You and I split the rest.”

  Twenty-five grand. Enough for a good day’s work. I nodded.

  Kathy relaxed, tried a smile.

  “You look good,” I told her.

  “It comes and it goes.”

  I poured her another finger of hooch and we toasted the future. Then she turned off the smile and said, “Beaudry’s playing this close to the vest. He’s kept me in the dark about the who and the where. You’ll get it all tonight at his house—a bungalow over in Culver City, by the bakery. He’ll be there by eight. I’ll phone him you’re coming.”

  I stared at her while she wrote out the address. The situation seemed a little more complicated than necessary, but that was typical of Beaudry. No matter how many times his backside got gnawed on by Taggart Wilde because of it, Beaudry never did things the simple way. He preferred to circle a problem and attack it from some odd angle. By that time, it was usually too late.

  I took another swig. Recovering the skull was going to be a snap. Sure it was. I put that thought in my back pocket near my wallet and told Kathy that Johnny was making noises like he might be staying on this side of the gate for a while.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. But you know what they say about old habits, Phil. You can’t beat ’em to death with a crowbar.”

  They were having some sort of do at M.G.M. studios, and Washington Boulevard, which was usually pretty empty at that time of night, was teeming with sleek limousines driven by sleek chauffeurs. Maybe President Roosevelt was in town. Maybe Greta Garbo had finally decided she wanted company.

  The snarl made me ten minutes late for Beaudry. His bungalow was a fading matchbox on a patchy street full of potholes and weird ideas. Somebody had painted several trees bright yellow. Another had stuck baby dolls all over the top of his Packard. Maybe it was the air. Three blocks away, the Bialy Brothers Best Bread building, a place the size of an airplane hanger, was filling the still, humid night with bakery smells. It was the heady kind of odor that reminded you what the world was like when you were young. Which can be a pleasant thing. Or it can be murder.

  There was a dim light inside Beaudry’s, and the sound of tinny laughter. I walked past a parched lawn and a weed garden to a screen porch and dusted the door with my knuckles. Inside the house a familiar voice said, “Rochester, have you pressed my tuxedo pants?”

  I called out, “Beaudry?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Benny. Fella who rented ’em hasn’t brought ’em back yet.”

  More laughter.

  I slipped the .38 Colt Super Match from its shoulder holster and tried the screen door. It opened.

  “Well, call him and tell him to bring ’em back now. I’m due at the Colmans in an hour.”

  I stepped onto a neat little porch with two white rockers and a metal glider.

  “Can’t call him, Mr. Benny.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “I’m all out of nickels.”

  I moved through the open front door into a large living room illuminated only by the orange dial of a Philco console. The radio laughter subsided just as the shiny waxed floor creaked under my feet and I heard the click of a hammer being cocked.

  “Beaudry?” I asked hopefully, not moving.

  “That you, Marlowe?” came the baritone reply. “I must’ve drifted off. Lemme get rid of the noise.”

  A light went on in the corner of the room and Beaudry’s scarecrow figure shuffled past me. His bare feet and ankles showed under pants that were too short for him. A white shirt hung down over his belt and flapped around his butt. His gun was still in his hand. I didn’t put mine away either.

  He clicked off the radio, stuck the gun in his belt, and yawned. I took a quick look around as I holstered my .38. The place could have stood in for a Christian Science Reading Room. One wall was filled with books. Newspapers and magazines were piled neatly on a shiny oak table next to the radio. On the coffee table next to the couch an open volume rested. George Santayana’s The Realm of the Spirit, whatever that was.

  I asked him if he read much.

  He paused to look at his library and shrugged. “Like the feller said, ‘Reading maketh a full man.’ ’Sides, as you well know, most police work’d bore the horns off a mountain goat. So I read. Been doing it since my wife passed away. Eleven years, now. C’mon. I’ll get us some milk and cookies.”

  I followed him through a neat little dining room with a polished hardwood table and six matching chairs. A bouquet of buttercups and baby’s breath sat in a glass vase on a matching sideboard. Past that was the kitchen. White walls. Black and white checkerboard tile floor. A set of dirty dishes rested on a porcelain sink.

  He found a bottle of Old Canterbury in the cupboard and dragged it and two tumblers over to a small wooden breakfast table where a book rested beside another vase, this one full of bright red wildflowers, the kind they call desert paintbrush.

  Beaudry poured two heavy shots and said, “To crime, huh, Marlowe?”

  I clicked my tumbler against his and wet the back of my throat with the harsh alcohol.

  He emptied his glass, made a face, then let out his breath. “It’s all in there,” he said, indicating the book.

  It wasn’t a new edition. The blue jacket was battered and worn. The drawing on it was of a black bird and a hand emerging from water holding coins and jewelry.

  “This is supposed to tell me how to find a holy man’s skull?” I asked.

  “Have you read it?”

&nbs
p; Actually, I had. I’d heard that its author, Dashiell Hammett, was an ex-Pinkerton, and that had made me curious enough to plunk down the two dollars. I’d liked it, a hell of a lot more than I’d liked the film they made of it with a Latin-lover type as the sleuth, Sam Spade. I heard the Hollywood boys gave it another try a year ago. That time they changed Spade’s name. One day they’ll learn that some books will never make a good movie.

  “I don’t see what this’s got to do with the price of heads,” I told Beaudry.

  He grinned and filled our glasses. “There’s a lot in there Hammett didn’t make up, exactly.”

  I cocked an eye. “You mean the dame? Brigid whatever?”

  “Well, he made her up from two dames he knew. And the fat man was somebody he followed for Pinkerton. It’s the black bird I’m talking about. The falcon. It was supposed to have been a gift from the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem to Emperor Charles V. A gold falcon encrusted with jewels as a sort of rent payment for their occupation of the island of Malta.”

  Just listening to him made my throat dry, so I took another pull at the hooch and said, “I think you been reading a little too much, pal.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I never heard of a guy going broke because he read too much. You don’t want to hear any more, adios, brother.”

  When I didn’t ankle, he continued. “There never were any gold falcons. Historians like Jonathan Theil have written that the birds the Hospitalers gave in those days were made of feathers and claws, not precious metals. What got Hammett thinking about jewels was an ancient skull filled with diamonds and rubies. He saw it in San Francisco in the twenties, in the possession of a heavy holder named Grunwald who’d bought it off of a limey named Forbes-Ralston whose father had looted it from Tibet. Grunwald, who owns about five square blocks along Market Street, got his mansion broken into seven years ago. The skull was among the loot. The Frisco cops caught one of the crib crackers when he tried to fence some of the glitter. A little gyp known as the Midget Bandit. He’d been in and out of Q. since twenty-three, when he got nabbed with his mitt in the till of a gas station in Stockton.”

  “Are we getting to the point, Beaudry? Because if not, we’re going to need another bottle.”

  “The point is, the Midget is still in Q., and he never spilled on his partner. But I know the bustard’s name and I know where he’s hanging his turban these days.”

  “Mind telling me how you came by all this information?”

  He grinned at me. “A night three years ago, my partner, Ray Doyle, and I were sent out to Freddie March’s house to check a disturbance. There was a hell of a party going on. Flynn was there, and a bunch of writers. This Fitzgerald guy. And Ernest Hemingway. And Hammett, drunk as the well-known skunk, and shouting that Hemingway didn’t know nothing about women or how to write about women. Hemingway was responding to this by breaking all of the Marches’ glassware against the wall, which is what made the neighbor call us in the first place.

  “Anyway, we wind up driving Hammett back to his hotel, because he couldn’t drive himself, and the woman who was with him, Lillian somebody, didn’t want to leave the party. And he starts telling us about his days as a Pink. And that leads to him jawing about the Falcon, and the Skull of Lhasa. He talks about this Midget Bandit, who’s in the Falcon under the name of Wilmer, and the Midget’s partner, a wildman that Hammett swears he’s going to use in a book some day. And he laughs about the coincidence of the real Wilmer finally getting his hands on the real falcon.”

  He screwed up his face so that his shovel of a chin almost touched the tip of his nose, then sighed and said, “I got another five years before I retire, Marlowe. Now, me, I don’t see myself staying in blue another five years, what with guys on the right on the heavy grab and on the left turning ’em in. Sooner or later, somebody is gonna shoot somebody, and I don’t want it to be me. So I got a list of potential tickets to the good life—gems that have never surfaced, missing persons, a couple real bang-bang daddies with prices on their heads. Ever’ so often information blows in that strikes me as interesting. So I stick around after hours downtown and check out leads. None of ’em has paid off before. But this one ought to bring the average way up.

  “How’d you run across the Midget’s partner?”

  “I just looked up one afternoon and there he was. Seems he’s given up boosting in favor of a new grift, some sorta swami mumbo jumbo. This old Highland Park dowager swore out a complaint and so he got dragged in and booked. He has this beetle juice on his face to make him look Hindu and he’s wearing a goddamn turban and he calls himself Sandor the All-Seeing. But according to his prints, he’s the Midget’s partner, Smiler Foy.”

  “And nobody asked him about the theft in San Francisco?”

  “Nobody knew about it. Except me, of course. And now you.”

  He started to wet my glass again but I stopped him. “I want to be conscious when I meet the swami.”

  We both stood. “Any idea how you’re going to approach him?”

  “Head on,” I said.

  That wasn’t in Beaudry’s lexicon. He screwed up his face and said, “It’s your play to call. But the man is slippery as a greased eel. I blinked my eyes and he was out of the lockup.”

  “Have you got a better suggestion?”

  “Nope. But you don’t want to spook him.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “He’s got a crummy little rat trap in Venice. On the canal.”

  “You didn’t brace him, by any chance?”

  “Hell, no. Brace him? And tip him that I knew about the skull? What’d be the sense in that? You know me better than that, Marlowe.”

  I did at that. Bracing him would have been too simple, and simplicity was not Beaudry’s style. It had cost him countless arrests. Now it was going to cost him twenty-five grand.

  There was a green sedan parked in front of my car and a small man perched on my front fender. There was more than enough moonlight for me to see that it was Johnny Horne. He was wearing a dark blue suit so shiny it might have been dipped in brilliantine. His shirt was dark, too, with a cream-colored tie that matched his display handkerchief. A wild rose was stuck in his lapel.

  As I opened my car door, I asked, “Catching the night air, Johnny? Or do I get to guess what’s on your mind?”

  “You going after the dingus now?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Lemme tag along.”

  “Why should I?”

  He frowned and took a step to the right and a step to the left, like an anxious chicken. He finally blurted, “ ’Cause I need to jaw with you about something.”

  I slipped behind the wheel and opened the other door for him. He got in eagerly. The engine kicked over and we were off to Venice. He coughed and cleared his throat for a few minutes, then asked, “Phil, when I was at Q., did you and, uh, Kathy . . . well, you know what I’m asking?”

  My eyes went to his coat, which was stretched too tightly across his thin chest to be hiding a gun. Not that anything had happened between me and Kathy to make him want to draw down on me. I told him so.

  He shook his head. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “But I had to ask. My head’s all screwed up. Those were five long years and my rhythm’s jumbled now that I’m out again. Everything’s a little off. It’s me. I been imagining things.”

  I glanced over at him. He was staring out at the road, shaking his head. “Kathy’s the greatest. She did some things for me, coulda got her in dutch, maybe even put away. Did ’em to keep me out. And when I screwed up so bad she couldn’t pull any more strings, she came up once a week, like clockwork. For all five goddamn years. She’s there when I get out and she drives me to a swell place she’s bought out in Gray Lake. Painted it fresh for me. Neat as a pin. Got flowers planted all around. Like living in a rainbow.” He pointed to the wild rose in his lapel. “This came from our own garden, unnerstand?”

  I nodded. But I didn’t understand. He soun
ded like he was ready to unspool on me and I didn’t need any distractions. Not if I was going to have to deal with Sandor the All-Seeing. Still, it was interesting to hear about the house and garden. He said suddenly, “I’m not going back on the grift. If you ever hear I’m bouncing checks again, I want you to run me down and shoot me. You hear that, Marlowe. You shoot me.”

  “Relax, Johnny. Nobody’s gonna shoot you,” I told him. Which shows you how much I knew about anything.

  We glided down Venice Boulevard, over the crest where the ocean breeze dropped the temperature at least ten degrees and puffs of fog passed in front of the headlights like spirit tumbleweeds.

  Pretty soon we could see the Venice canals. And smell them. They were built in the early 1900’s by a real estate mogul named Kinney who had patterned the town after its Italian namesake. But his dream went up in smoke, literally, in the twenties when his pier burned and the canals filled with slime and the bohemians and oddballs moved in.

  Sandor lived not far from where Kinney’s version of the doge’s palace had once stood. I parked across the canal from his shack on an empty, weedy lot inhabited mainly by mosquitoes. Johnny asked, “What’re we doing over here?”

  “Trying not to make a hell of a lot of noise,” I told him. “I want to get a sense of the place.”

  Sandor had put up a four-foot chicken wire fence around his property line. Its closest side was about ten feet out into the scum-covered canal. The little plaster square it guarded didn’t seem to be worth all the trouble.

  There were no lights in the yard area, but a bright glow flooded from the back window. A big man was wandering around inside. He was brown-skinned with long gray hair. He was wearing a black short-sleeve shirt and what appeared to be black trousers. He was gesturing with his hands and shouting angrily. It looked like he was arguing with himself.

  Something moved in the yard, but I couldn’t see what it was. Maybe a dog. On the canal, several gray shapes bobbed. First, it was an ex-con who liked butterflies. Now I had a con man who kept ducks. Maybe I would get a pet ferret to walk on lonely afternoons.