Then I heard a cough in the night and I wasn’t alone anymore. A tall thin man, bareheaded, light-haired, several days of whitish stubble on his cheeks, darted out from the edge of the woods and planted himself between me and the row of cabins. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and what looked in the moonlight like an army fatigue jacket. “Mr. Marlowe, sir?” His voice was low, nervous. “Could I bother you for just a minute?”
I was startled by the sound of my own name half whispered in the night. The idea in setting up shop at the auto court for a few days had been to give people a chance to get in touch with me, help me out with leads to the vet I was hunting, but I hadn’t expected anyone to sneak up on me out of the woods at half past two in the morning. I formed my face into a mask of professional politeness and looked at the man. He didn’t look at me but through me, into the cold nothingness that surrounded us. I guessed his age as somewhere in the late twenties. He kept his pale gloveless hands dangling at his sides as if he wanted to make sure I didn’t think he had a weapon. If he was my lost vet, I was Eleanor Roosevelt’s hairdresser.
“I’m Marlowe,” I told him, trying to keep my tone mildly amiable. “What can I do for you? And can’t it wait till morning?”
“I saw the story in the county paper the other day,” he said, still so softly I could just make out the words, “about the young G.I. who was raised around here and has come into some money, and how you’re trying to locate him. The article said you were staying at unit six of this auto court for a few days. I’ve been out here since ten-thirty last night, but I decided it was too late to knock on your door. Then when I saw you come out for a walk I decided there was no reason to wait till morning. Thanks for saving me a cold night in the woods!” He laughed, a short harsh bark that made me think of wolves, and fumbled with the belt of his fatigue jacket. “I don’t know anything about the fellow you’re looking for, but I do have a problem of my own on which I’d value your help very highly indeed.”
I tried to avoid his eyes and groped for a diplomatic way out of this unwanted consultation. “Look, kid,” I said, “whatever your problem is, I can’t help you. I’m a stranger here. I’m not licensed in this state. Maybe the cops, or some local private . . . ”
“No one else will do!” he shrieked, and tore at his jacket’s zipper. For one mad moment I was sure he was going to expose himself. Then I saw the squat black box belted around his waist like the change-making machines that trolley conductors wear.
“Can you see the button?” he asked me, soft and gentle as the beautiful maiden in a fairy tale. “No, I don’t suppose you can. But if I press down on it,” he said, “we both turn to dust. You see, Mr. Marlowe, this consultation is literally worth your life.”
He didn’t move and I didn’t move. We stood there at the edge of the woods, perhaps ten feet apart. A thousand miles from us a lumbering freight truck’s highway beams bleached a patch of hillside as it topped a rise and vanished. The crickets kept chattering as if the world were on an even keel.
“My name is Hume.” The white-skinned young-old man gave me a wistful smile as he introduced himself. “Charles Henry Hume II. I’m sorry I can’t offer you my hand, Mr. Marlowe, but if I did you just might grab it and try to undo my belt. Mind if we keep it formal?”
Somehow I managed a dumb nod into the night.
“It’s not my own problem I need to discuss with you,” Hume said. “It’s that of—well, of my dearest friend. We’ll call him Chuck. Poor Chuck is inhibited about being seen in public. I speak for him.”
I gulped down the bile in my throat and breathed deep. Nothing like crisp clean night air to make a guy feel bursting with health.
“Chuck never knew his father.” Hume’s voice dropped another notch. I had a hunch that it wasn’t me he was talking to. “His parents married when they were both in high school. They—they had to marry. Six months later they had a little girl, born prematurely, weighing less than two pounds. There was irreversible brain damage. The baby never lived to walk or talk. She died when she was four months old. Chuck’s mother told him later that the child had the face of an angel. She became pregnant again, but a few months later Chuck’s father was drafted and sent to fight in the war to end war. Remember that one, Mr. Marlowe? The year was nineteen-seventeen. Chuck’s father never lived to see his son.”
I peered into the star-punctuated darkness, hunting for Hume’s face, trying to read in his expression whether he expected a reply or comment. The pale-stubbled features were blank as a granite slab. I took a chance, said something I hoped was innocuous.
“So his mother had to support herself and the boy?”
“Yes,” he said. Nothing hostile in his tone or look, but his splayed fingers kept playing with that change-maker’s belt.
“Even in the first war they had death benefits,” I said. “Widows’ pensions.”
“The money they paid her you couldn’t raise a dog on,” Hume said. “She had to find a job. She went back to Louisiana where she had grown up, and a small businessman in Opelousas hired her as his secretary. But she hadn’t trained for a real career—how many women do?—so she was never able to get ahead of the bills and save anything. She spent almost nothing on herself, just a Chaplin picture now and then. You know what she did for fun? She invented her own recipes for special dessert treats.” He began to chuckle as if he could taste them as he talked, a low throaty sensuous sound that put a coating of ice along my backbone. “Those treats changed her life.”
Another pause. I let it hang there, kept my mouth shut, waited for him to pick up the thread of the story.
“Ever hear of Louisiana Lady?” he asked.
It sounded like the name of a movie, maybe something with Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby. In another place and time I might have told him so. Not then, not there. A smart-mouth remark like that could kill us both.
“Louisiana Lady!” he repeated impatiently as if I were a backward child who hadn’t done his homework. “The mail-order gourmet food business. Jellies, pastries, cakes. People send them to other people on special occasions.”
Not in my line they don’t. Maybe that’s the trouble with being a private snoop, you don’t get to meet many people you want to send gifts to. For the second time in ten minutes I chose prudence and kept my flip remark to myself.
“In the twenties and even during the Depression it was the most profitable business of its kind in the country,” Hume said proudly, as if he had been its founder. “The fellow Chuck’s mother worked for set it up for her. She created all the recipes. Suddenly she was a wealthy woman, and the hard work of marketing her products was done for her. Within a few years Chuck had a grand new life. Private tutors, servants, a second home up here in the hills where they spent half of each year.” I thought I heard a low sob somewhere in his voice. “Except that along the road to riches he lost his mother.”
“She married again?” I guessed.
Bad move. The question touched a raw nerve and he shrieked, “No! No! No!” and made me think of someone I had once heard shrieking like that when his face had collided with a barbed-wire fence. God, why didn’t the auto court manager hear him and look out the window and see something was wrong and call the cops? Hume’s fingers tapped a code message on the belt of his black box. For an instant I thought the two of us were dead. Then the next moment the unshaven young lunatic was calm as a summer lake at dawn.
“Several times a year,” he said, “she’d go away for a week or ten days at a time. Even as a child Chuck dimly understood. A different man went with her each trip. She’d never bring any of them home. Oh, she was the soul of discretion.” He gave another of those throaty chuckles.
I stood stiffly in the darkness and measured the distance between us and tried to nerve myself to risk a flying leap that would pin the madman to the ground, and I couldn’t make myself do it. That kind of play was for movie heroes or their stuntmen, not for me. Maybe he was bluffing, maybe there were no explosives in that belt, and if
I lived through this encounter and found out he’d run a bluff on me I might curse myself as a gutless wonder, but at least I’d be alive. This was too cold a night to die in for no reason.
“I understand her better than Chuck did at the time,” Hume went on. “She had loved her husband and her first child so much, and then she’d lost them both less than a year apart, and afterward she just couldn’t bring herself to make that kind of emotional commitment again, not to another man and not to Chuck. Oh, she recognized her obligations to the boy and went through the motions, but a child can tell the difference. Chuck grew up alone. He had no money worries but lived a withdrawn and solitary life.” Hume began to giggle gently and moved a few steps closer to me until his back was against the trunk of a sycamore, or maybe it was an elm. “I was his only friend,” he said.
I didn’t want to ask him where the two boys had met, first because it might have prodded him to tap the button and second because I knew the answer already: somewhere behind his pale wormy eyebrows. With the cricket symphony as background music I was trying to figure my next move when all of a sudden the crickets had competition, and so did the stars. There was the hum of a well-tuned auto engine and the crunch of tires on gravel. Headlight beams painted a cone of acid whiteness in the woods and came pivoting along the tree trunks toward us like the searchlight in a prison-break movie as the invisible car rounded the corner of the building line and turned our way. “Down behind those rocks,” Hume hissed. “Now!” He dived for cover and lay on his side, his right hand caressing the black box, forefinger poised above what I had to take for the trigger button. I didn’t want whoever was in that car to be blown apart for no reason and I didn’t want myself to be either. I hit the dirt Marine-style and crawled into the screen of bushes within Hume’s line of sight but as far from his own position as I dared. We flattened ourselves against the earth as the headlights bathed the bushes for a few seconds. The car circled the rear of the auto court and braked at the far end of the building line, maybe a hundred feet from us, parking at an angle so that I could make out the state cop insignia on the driver’s door. A heavyset guy in uniform shirt and trousers and Sam Browne belt slid out of the car and stretched and yawned in the dimness of his parking lights and sauntered to the edge of the woods and stood facing the tree line and fumbled with his pants for a moment and relieved himself. He sauntered back to the car and slid behind the wheel and put on his headlights and completed his circuit of the auto court. His taillights winked out around the far corner of the line of cabins. Hume stepped out from his cover and made a hand motion that ordered me to do the same. His other hand never strayed from his belt box. As soon as the crunch of the cop car’s tires on gravel had receded into the noises of the night, Hume went on with his life story as if the interruption had been a dream.
“Chuck was a solitary adolescent,” he said, “but he learned to amuse himself. In fine weather he’d stay outdoors for hours, catching insects that he later mounted, or sitting in the grass watching the squirrels and birds. Sometimes he’d sit out in the woods all night. On rainy days he’d play indoors, making clever little mechanical devices out of scraps of wood and metal. And he read constantly. Pulp detective magazines were his favorites. If he and his mother exchanged a dozen words a day it was a lot.”
“Great life,” I said.
“In the summer of nineteen-thirty, when Chuck was thirteen, that life ended. Their second home in the mountains was about sixty miles west of here, at the end of a dirt track that curved off from a two-lane paved road that wound around the mountainside like a macadam snake. Chuck used to call the road Old Twistibus.” Hume raised his face to the crescent moon and in a sweet choirboy voice, to the tune of the old Christmas carol O Tannenbaum, he began to sing:
O Twistibus!
O Twistibus!
A corkscrew’s straight
Beside thee.
My breath went ragged. The way he stood there at the edge of the tree line singing softly up at the stars told me we were both going to be dead or mutilated before morning if I didn’t make exactly the right move soon. I started to edge closer to him. First we were a dozen feet apart, then ten, then eight or nine. A few more steps, another half minute of his fit of abstraction, and I’d be close enough to aim a quick kick into his groin and then pin his hands behind him before he could touch the trigger button.
Then right in the middle of one of his cockeyed verses he shoved out at me with both hands. I hit the ground hard on my left hip. The impact went through me like an explosion. Hume towered over me, right forefinger on the button, smiling inanely. “I can read your mind, Mr. Marlowe,” he said politely. “And I’d really appreciate it if you would allow me to finish my story.”
As if I could stop him while I lay there like a dummy.
“One muggy summer afternoon in nineteen-thirty, Chuck’s mother went off in her Duesenberg to do some errands in the village at the foot of the mountain. She never made it. At one of the nastiest bends of Old Twistibus she lost control of the wheel and went over the cliff. The gas tank blew and she was burned to a cinder. The Duesenberg was left a twisted hunk of steel. Believe it or not, the police had the absurd idea that it wasn’t an accident, that poor innocent thirteen-year-old Chuck had sabotaged the brakes or something and turned the car into a death trap. Well, I did say he was clever with mechanical devices. . . .Anyway, the experts examined the wreck and found no signs of tampering. But they couldn’t figure why she’d lost control of the wheel. She was a careful driver and it hadn’t rained in weeks, so there were no wet spots where she might have skidded. The only piece of possible physical evidence was the burned fragments of some sort of small cardboard box that they found down the mountain from the wreck, and they couldn’t even prove she’d had that with her. And anyway Chuck was far too young to be prosecuted for murder even if they had found evidence.”
I lay prone on the cold earth and tried to weigh my chances of seeing the sunrise.
“So there Chuck was,” Hume said, “suddenly a millionaire at age thirteen. His mother’s gourmet jellies and cakes selling like wildfire. Naturally a guardian had to be appointed for him till he turned twenty-one. All sorts of earnest lawyers popped out of the woodwork to volunteer their services. I wonder how many of them had slept with Chuck’s mother. But after the will was read they all crawled back into their holes. Can you guess why, Mr. Marlowe?”
“She, she . . . ” Tough guy private peeper couldn’t make anything come out of his smart mouth but a stutter. “Didn’t leave him anything?”
“She cut me out like a cancer!” He screamed the words into the night like the death cry of an animal being disemboweled by a predator. “No apology. No explanation. ‘It is my intent that no part of my estate shall pass to my son Charles Henry Hume II.’ Can you see what a blow to Chuck that was?” The split between the two halves of him was wide open again. “She was flogging him from her grave, the bitch! Everything—the house and land, the stock in Louisiana Lady, personal effects—everything went to endow a foundation to do research into brain damage in newborn babies.” He pointed into the far distance, beyond the highway and the hills. “That foundation is on the campus of the state U a mile from here.”
My only interest that night was in living through it, but keeping him talking looked like the best way to do that, so I asked him a question. “You contested her will?” Good boy, Marlowe. Logical query under the circumstances, the voice halfway under control. There may be hope for you yet.
“The local lawyers said I had no grounds,” he told me. “Oh, I was handed a few scraps. Exempt property, a maintenance award, stuff an unmarried minor child is entitled to in this state no matter what the will says. Didn’t amount to a hill of beans next to the value of Louisiana Lady.” He looked at me the way a snake looks at the bird it wants for breakfast and nervously licked his lips. “I suppose you’re wondering how I’ve lived since then.”
I didn’t like his oh-so-casual tone and I liked even less the way he a
rched his upper body over me waiting for my answer. Survival instinct told me he was setting a trap. “I don’t wonder anything,” I mumbled.
“Oh yes you do, you do, you do!” That disemboweled-animal howl again, cutting the darkness like a butcher knife. “I’ve been locked up and let out and locked up again! My mother—my lawyer—my life—” Maybe he said “wife,” I couldn’t be sure. “I’m a victim too! Don’t you care about justice, Mr. Marlowe? I want my life back. Everything that’s mine has been taken from me.”
“Sounds like you need a new lawyer,” I said.
He let loose a horselike snort of disgust. “Lawyers are jackals. A lawyer stole my inheritance. I need a detective. I need you.” He slithered closer to me as I lay still on the hard-packed ground. When he bent over me like a combat medic ministering to a wounded soldier I saw a tear forming in one eye. “Help me. Defend poor Chuck’s rights. If A is planning to kill C but C has a detective dig up all the dirt in A’s filthy past and C tells A that all that dirt will become public knowledge if anything happens to C—well, that guarantees C a long and happy life.” I had no idea what he was babbling about. He wiped his jacket sleeve across his eyes, and the tears were replaced by the sly serpentine look I had seen there before. His finger strayed toward the belt button. “Help me. Be my detective. Save your own life.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 20