How prudent. I must have looked full of myself when I hit the street because there was a Santa with a yellow smile lurking on the corner of Franklin and Kenmore, and he pointedly rang his bell at me.
“Merry Christmas,” he said and jiggled the bell clapper again, in case I hadn’t tumbled.
“ ’Tis but the sixth of December,” I said, flipping a quarter into his kettle. “Begone, oh shade of holidays past, and trouble us no more.”
Santa gave me a sour look and scratched at his cotton-batting beard.
There was a new radio in my car, so I turned it on and listened. Britain was threatening to declare war on Finland, Rumania, and Hungary because said nations had refused to quit fighting Russia. Jap diplomats were meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the Navy flyboys had gotten careless and crashed the world’s largest flying boat.
Not a word about card cheats at Sydney Sanders’ Saturday night poker fest, marooned for the last month in Bay City. Heading west on Wilshire, I kept a light foot on the pedal, not wanting to find out if it was true, as rumor had it, that there were two or three cops in Bay City who weren’t dirty.
449 San Vicente Boulevard was a drab little building a few blocks from the sea. Pale yellow light came from the lower windows, where the silhouette of a thin woman drifted languidly through the artificial illumination. I parked on the opposite side of the street, a block away, and rolled down the window. There was a tang of cut grass in the air, and sea salt, and white wash. Especially the white wash. In Bay City it’s the only brand of perfume the law allows.
I was purposely early. Ten minutes expired before a black Ford sedan, not new, pulled to the curb. The specimen who climbed out did so gingerly, as if afraid the potholed street might give way underneath him. The old-man carefulness was not a consequence of age: He was a thin boy with a mop of wavy black hair cut short over the ears. He wore an off-the-rack gabardine suit, the kind that lasts forever but never hangs quite right, and carried his hat in his hand.
He went up the steps. The door opened before he got there. The door went dark again.
Three minutes later a battleship veered around from the ocean end of the boulevard. It was a two-tone battleship, fawn on the fenders and puce on top, and it was not quite as long as Roosevelt’s term in office. It managed to drift to the curb without the assistance of a tug, and an admiral climbed out. A Hollywood admiral with a braided cap and jodhpurs and knee-high boots that matched the paint job on the limousine.
He opened one of the rear doors. He didn’t curtsey, but almost. Out came a debonair extrovert in velvet spats, size small. The little man wore a bowler, pushed back on his head at that certain special angle, and of course he carried a cane. I assumed he was going to flog the chauffeur with it, but he surprised me. He simply skipped up the steps and into the house.
The chauffeur took off the braided cap, dusted the billows of his jodhpurs with it, and appeared to be satisfied with life and where it had taken him. I wanted to tell him he’d stepped in something only it was the Christmas season and I was the kind who gave quarters to phony Santas.
Sanders arrived in a new Chrysler roadster. I got out to meet him at the bottom of the steps. He was nervous and that made me nervous and I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers, unlit.
He said: “I see Willy is here. That boat’s a studio limo. He’s got it on loan. Think you can fool him?”
“Try to look like you’re not booked into the heist of the century, okay?” I said. “We’re just playing cards, is all, and I’m going to pay attention. Where’s the crime in that?”
“I suppose you’re right. It’s just—I still find it hard to believe Willy would cheat us. He sure doesn’t need the money.”
Sanders had taken out a cigar and was mimicking my trick of rolling it around his fingers. Not on purpose, near as I could tell, and before long he dropped it. Then he picked it up and dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket, as if it had never touched the ground.
“I’m probably making a terrifically big mistake,” he said.
We went up to the door, Sanders leading the way, and it opened before he could ring the bell. A thinnish woman with a halo of fine, dyed-yellow hair held out a pallid hand and said, “Sandy, that’s a new flower, isn’t it? And this must be the new gentleman. Come in, come in. Ray’s out in the kitchen getting ice for Willy. You know how he wants his ice.”
Sanders pressed his lips to her wrist and said, “Cissy, this is Marlowe. He’s going to try his luck with us this evening.”
Until you took her in and examined the effect, Cissy appeared to be in her late forties, and carried herself even younger. Her face never stopped moving and neither did her hands, which she used better than semaphores, and the reason for all the movement was to keep herself out of focus. She was seventy if she was a day, and there were fine cracks in the expert glaze of makeup, and her hair was as unreal as the flutter of angel wings. The act didn’t make sense until a few minutes later, when I met her husband, and then it made plenty of sense.
She gave me her hand. I followed Sanders’ example and brushed my lips against a frail wrist scented with sandalwood and said, “Nice of you people to let me sit in. Have you lived in Bay City long?”
“We never live anyplace for long,” she responded vaguely, and showed me where to hang my hat.
It was a four-room apartment, sparsely furnished. There seemed to be too many books and not enough chairs. The skinny boy with the old-man walk was sitting on a faded red davenport, holding a glass tumbler in both hands.
“Marlowe,” I said, tipping a salute. “I’m the new kid on the block.”
“I’m Nixon,” he said. “They call me Nick here. It’s very informal.”
Sanders went into the kitchen, where someone was joking in a German accent. The accent may or may not have been the joke, it was too early to tell. The Scotch and swish had been set up on a little glass-topped tabouret. I poured myself a drink—I wasn’t fussy about ice—and got Nick the oldish boy to light my cigarette, just to see if his hand was steady. It was.
“When do we start?” I said, nodding at a round table and the empty chairs surrounding it.
“When Mr. Farnum gets here. He’s an amazing man, Mr. Farnum is, considering.”
I didn’t ask considering what. Sanders came back, accompanied by Willy Boy, and a diffident-looking gent who carried an ice bucket and tongs. Ice Bucket wore round horn-rims that failed to obscure mild, inquisitive eyes. Sanders introduced him as Ray, a poet.
“No kidding,” I said. “The kind that rhymes?”
“Now and then,” he said. “When it strikes my fancy.”
This was a new experience for me. I didn’t know that poets came with names like Ray. He was at least twenty years younger than Cissy, his wife, and that explained her curious, girlish affectations. Sanders, who had something to do with publishing, was “handling” a book of Ray’s verses. He made it sound as if the book was a speckled trout he’d caught on a dry fly he’d tied himself. The way Sanders looked at it, the fly was the important part, not the fish.
Willy Boy sniffed at his drink and said, “Why must we always wait for this Farnum man?” with a lot of v’s in place of the w’s, which established to my satisfaction that the German accent was real enough. When he spoke, and he often did, he gestured with his thin, leather-handled malacca cane. I got the impression Ray didn’t care for Willy or his cane, although Willy didn’t appear to notice.
Sanders had recovered his nerve and remembered his lines. He smiled slightly and said, “Poor Mr. Farnum lost a pile last week, Willy. Remember? You won it off him, I believe.”
“No excuse,” Willy Boy said. His black, Brill-Creamed hair was so precisely parted the white mark on his skull looked like a scar.
Sanders wasn’t ready to let it go yet. He said, “It’s been nice of Ray and Cissy to let us play here, Willy, but I can’t help thinking it was more convenient at your place in Beverly Hills. Any chance we’ll get back in
there?”
Willy Boy glared. “Shaddup, Sandy. You know my situation.”
We sat down at the round table and waited for Mr. Farnum. Ray lit up a bulldog pipe and smoked. He didn’t talk much. Thinking up verse, maybe. Cissy fussed around us with a tray of crackers and Yakima apples and sliced cheese. I nibbled a bit of cheese. It was sharp enough for surgery.
“This is nonsense,” Willy Boy said, glowering impatiently. “We’re here, let’s begin. Deal the cards!”
Nixon said, “Mr. Farnum got a little out of sorts last week when we started without him. He likes to be here when the deck is cracked. Last time he wasn’t and he lost a thousand or so.”
Willy Boy glared. “What’s that supposed to mean? There was nothing wrong with his cards except they weren’t good enough to win.”
Sanders coughed into his fist. “I’m sure Nicky didn’t mean anything. Did you, Nicky?”
Nixon was working his lower lip in and out as he nodded, trying to pass it off as a smile. No matter what he did with his face, this is what came through: the perpetually aggrieved expression of a man who changed his socks either five times a day or never.
The doorbell rang.
Nixon said, “That’ll be Mr. Farnum,” and he was right.
The great man wore a heliotrope cape that hung in luxurious folds from a set of wide shoulders. His face was florid and puffy, his mouth small and moist, to match his eyes. I didn’t like him much. He unclipped the cape with his left hand and caught it by the nape before it hit the floor, which took some doing. His right sleeve was empty.
He said: “I’ll have a whiskey, please,” and when he sat the chair under him creaked like an old wooden ship nudging an incoming tide.
Ray put down his pipe and peeled the cellophane from a deck of cards. He held the deck up. Farnum slurped at his drink and nodded. Willy Boy, upstaged by the cape and sleeve, could only glare.
The poet shuffled the cards and dealt.
I had five hundred of Sydney Sanders’ dollars in my pocket before the game started, and more an hour later. It was basic poker, stud and draw. The only trick was knowing how to bet, and that was some trick.
“Turn that down,” Willy Boy said quite suddenly, as Nicky was in the act of dealing. “I hate it.”
He was referring to the radio. Cissy, smiling a dreamy kind of smile, had tuned in the Boswell Sisters, who were fronting for the Dorsey Orchestra. She drifted near the wall, feeling the music with her thin arms, like a butterfly that had loosed itself from the fading wallpaper.
Ray said, “Okay,” and got up to turn off the radio. Cissy kept right on feeling the music. When Ray sat back down his eyes were very quiet and still.
“You got two aces showing, Sydney,” Willy Boy said. “Are you raising?”
Sanders examined his manicure. Willy had four spades showing. “A hundred,” Sanders said.
He and Willy and Nixon were still in the hand. There was over a thousand in the pot. I’d gotten out early with a pair of deuces that never meant to tango, so I could watch the act. Farnum watched, too, as his left hand planted the soggy end of a cheroot in his glistening mouth.
“See the hundred and double it,” Willy Boy said.
Nixon spoke up in turn, his voice cracking: “See the double and double that.”
We all looked at the boy. He had the makings of a low straight, if his down card was inside. Tiny beads of sweat came down from his hairline, like drops of fine oil on a pane of pebbled glass.
Willy Boy gave him a long look, then reached into his wallet, extracted five c-notes, and tossed them into the pot.
“Call,” he said.
Sanders looked at the pile of greenbacks and the cards he was facing and sighed and folded.
“I’m calling you,” Willy Boy said, nudging Nixon.
Nixon turned his bottom card. It made the straight. He reached out both hands to rake in the money. Willy Boy picked up his bottom card and flicked it into the center of the table. It was a spade.
“I believe that wins,” he said.
Poor Nicky was having trouble getting his breath. He looked like a goldfish in need of a shave. Willy Boy tapped his malacca cane on the floor and said, “Deal.”
I folded out of the next round and wandered into the kitchen, glass in hand. I’d seen enough, everything else was extra. Cissy was in the kitchen. She had a black Persian in her arms and she was purring along with the cat.
“Are we having fun?” she asked
“Tons,” I said. “I’ve got cramps I’ve been laughing so hard.”
The old woman stared at me. It was a long, lingering kind of look that started at the top of my head and slid down until she’d untied the knots in my shoelaces and tied them back up again, all in her head, just to see what kind of knot tier I was.
She said, “You remind me of someone I knew when I was younger—and he was younger, too.”
“Ah, youth,” I said. The words dropped like chips of ice into a broken cup, but it was too late to take them back.
“Mock it if you like,” she snapped, hugging the cat to her breast. “Maybe someday you’ll look into the mirror and see a tired old gentleman with his belt cinched too high.”
I tried to make amends by patting the black cat. The Persian, sensing the distress of her mistress, bared small, perfect teeth. An ugly laugh brayed in the other room and someone swore in German. I went back in to take my medicine.
Nicky nodded as I sat down. “Mr. Wilder just won a bundle with trip tens. You’re pretty clever with cards, aren’t you, Mr. Wilder?”
Willy Boy lifted his cane, placed the gold-tipped end on a spot over Nixon’s heart, and pushed gently. “You’re all bluff,” he said. “I think I’ll sell you to Sam Goldwyn. Now keep dealing.”
Ray won the next hand for a smallish pot, and then Sanders came back for a while, unwilting his green silk flower. It didn’t matter. I knew the play by then. The work was in waiting for the third act.
The curtain came an hour before dawn. Nixon had the deal. A dark beard was showing through his boy face, like stub ends of frost-killed grass coming up in a blanket of gray snow. He licked his lips and shuffled the cards.
Willy Boy looked at him the way a toad looks at a wingless fly. “Don’t be nervous,” he said sweetly. “It’s only money.”
“You mean it’s only his money,” Farnum said suddenly. He’d been silent for more than an hour, losing in dribs and drabs. The empty sleeve hung at his side like a pennant on a windless battlefield.
“It’s okay, Mr. Farnum,” Nixon said. “I know what he means.”
Farnum shrugged. The cheroot in his mouth was as cold and wet as the glint in his eye.
Nixon dealt.
Willy Boy showed a king.
Farnum had a jack up.
“Luck is with me,” Willy Boy said after checking his down card.
Farnum said, “You call it luck? How amusing.”
They began to bet into each other, raising like fiends. It was more than cards. There was a small war being waged as dawn came. The rising sun poured knife cuts of red light through the drawn blinds. When the last round had been dealt, only Willy Boy and Farnum remained in the game, facing a pride-swollen pot. Ten grand or more—I’d stopped counting.
The German, who’d been strangling the leather handle of his cane, got his third king.
“God is good,” he said.
The man with one arm was showing three jacks.
“So,” Farnum sighed softly. “Do you speak of the German god? Or the Hollywood god?”
Willy Boy said, “The god of money. A thousand times,” and pushed a stack of bills forward.
“See it. And raise five grand more—if you have the guts,” Farnum said.
Farnum reached into his pocket, removed his wallet, extracted five crisp bills, and fanned them into the pot. Done with one hand it was a beautiful thing to see.
Willy Boy looked at Farnum’s three jacks the way he might look over three plain-faced Nebraska g
irls posing on stools at Schwab’s Drugstore. His eyes narrowed.
“Call my chauffeur in,” he demanded.
This was done, and after a bit of contrived rigmarole the chauffeur produced another fat wallet and handed it reverently to the German.
“See the five and raise you . . . ten thousand more.”
That brought Sanders to life. He said, “Now wait a minute, Willy. The limit is five, we all agreed to it months ago.”
“Ten is fine,” Farnum said. He was gently rubbing his down card with a plump finger. “Provided you take my note.”
Willy Boy nodded. “But of course. Your note as a gentleman.”
Farnum borrowed paper and pen from Ray and wrote out the I.O.U. He placed it on top of Willy Boy’s ten grand.
“Make your move,” he said.
The German turned over his bottom card. “Full house, kings over.”
Farnum said, “Never trust God in a game of chance,” and turned over the fourth jack.
The black cat was sleeping in my hat. I shooed it away and soft-pedaled to the door. I wanted to be first out, before Sanders could ask me a lot of questions I wasn’t yet prepared to answer.
Ray was on the steps, polishing his glasses. He held them up against the sunrise. He seemed to be aware that he was blocking me. He spoke without turning around: “You can just see the ocean from here. I wonder why they call it the Pacific?”
“You’ll have to look it up,” I said. “See you around.”
“Do I look that dumb? Maybe I do.”
I said, “I don’t know what you mean by that.”
He shrugged and smiled a secret kind of smile. “You know what’s wrong with this crummy town?” he said. “There’s too much water out there, too many drowned men.”
I liked that, even if it didn’t rhyme.
When the others spilled from the apartment I was hunched down in my car, hat tipped over my eyes. The hat smelled of the cat, and just a hint of sandalwood. It didn’t bother me. There are worse things to smell.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 14