This time his groin was within range of my foot. I kicked out with everything I had and he let loose an agonized whoop that was music to my ears and doubled over on his knees with his hands clutched to his testicles. That put my hands within reach of his face. I wasn’t gentle with him. When he stopped thrashing around I whipped off the belt of my trenchcoat and tied his hands behind him and pulled off his shoes and socks so that even if he came to and got loose he couldn’t run far. The mechanism around his middle I didn’t touch or even stare at too closely. My breathing was still a wheeze when I stumbled across the rear lot of the auto court and around to the front and kicked in the door of the cabin marked MANAGER and hit the light switch and found the phone and asked the operator to put me through to the state police.
“You bet your ass it was a real bomb. Disposal squad just finished deactivating it.” Major Fry, the officer in charge of the neighborhood cop barracks, was no taller than Alan Ladd and had a roll of fat around his belly that would have fed a European refugee camp for a week. He poured coffee from the pot in his private office into two chipped mugs and splashed in tots of whiskey from a bottle he pulled out of a file drawer. Through the dirty windows fronting on the barracks parking lot I watched the sun glow over the eastern hills. “Dynamite and percussion caps stolen from a highway crew the other day. He wasn’t kidding about how good he is with mechanical devices. That auto court would have turned into a twenty-foot crater if he’d pressed the button.”
“Christ,” I muttered, and downed half the cupful in a gulp. The over-boiled coffee made roadside java taste like nectar of the gods, and the raw hooch must have been left over from Prohibition. I had never enjoyed a drink so much. “I’m meant to live a while yet.”
“If you’re a good boy,” Fry said, and glanced at his wristwatch. “Miss Dunkel ought to be here any minute now, Marlowe. She wants to thank you personally for the way you handled the situation and, ah, her client.” Miss Amanda Dunkel, he’d told me earlier, was Hume’s lawyer, and I got the distinct impression she was a big noise in this state. “She’d rather you didn’t press charges against the kid. I feel the same way. Let nature take its course.”
“He’s a loony,” I said. “Someone has to put him away. Jail or the nut farm, doesn’t matter where. You’ll need me to testify about what happened.”
“Marlowe,” he sighed, “we need you like we need higher taxes. As soon as Miss Dunkel has thanked you properly we’re packing your valise and escorting you out of here. But just so you won’t get too curious and come back poking around, I’m going to tell you a few things. Have you figured out why Hume talks about himself as if he were two people?”
“I can make an educated guess.” I downed the rest of the spiked coffee and held back a shudder. “Back when he was thirteen years old, he killed his mother.”
“Smart peeper. I was new on the force when it happened but I got a good memory. I bet you could even tell me how he did it to her.”
“Not in detail,” I said. “But my guess is it was another cute mechanical device. He said the cops found fragments of a small cardboard box on the mountainside near where his mother had the crackup. Was that it?”
Fry’s jowls wobbled like gelatin mold as he nodded. “He’d caught some hornets and stuffed them into that box and rigged it so the top would fly off a couple minutes after he set the thing on the front seat of her Duesenberg. The lid flew up and the hornets flew out and all over her and she lost control of the wheel just like he’d counted on and the car went over the cliff. We think he got the idea from one of those pulp detective magazines he was always reading. It was clever enough for a thirteen-year-old but it only fooled us for a few hours. Of course he was too young to be charged with murder, so they sent him to an institution where he belonged. Then eight or nine years ago Miss Dunkel came into the picture and got him out. A lady with money and clout, Marlowe. One of her brothers is on the state supreme court and the other’s lieutenant governor. When the kid was free she started a suit to overturn his mother’s will.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He mentioned something about that too. Said there were no grounds.”
“He misspoke himself.” Fry swept his pudgy hand toward the steel-gray bookcase behind his desk. I noticed then that most of the volumes on the shelves were law school casebooks. “I take night law courses at the state U when I have the time. Hume was right that in this state and almost every other state a parent can cut a child out of a will for any reason or no reason. But Miss Dunkel’s got brains as well as money and clout. She didn’t file suit here, she did it in Louisiana, where the Humes had lived half of each year. Louisiana’s the only state in the union where the law isn’t based on English common law, it’s based on the Napoleonic Code. They’ve got a rule called legitime that says if you have a child and die with a will, you have to leave the kid at least one-third of your property. You can’t disinherit a child except for just cause. Mrs. Hume’s will was drafted by a lawyer up here, not in Louisiana, and the guy never figured it might be contested under Louisiana law, so the will didn’t give any reason at all why the boy was cut out and everything was left to set up that medical research facility. Well, after Miss Dunkel had the kid released from the loony bin, she claimed his mother had died—what’s the damn word?—domiciled in Louisiana and filed suit down there to give him his legitime. The case was settled. Twenty-five per cent of Louisiana Lady’s annual income goes into a trust fund for Hume’s benefit. Guess who’s the trustee.”
I heard the crunch of tires on gravel and saw a gleaming black 1939 Cadillac sedan turn into the front yard of the barracks building. A wizened chauffeur in livery opened the rear door and out came a biscuit-faced peroxide blonde at least fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight, wrapped in a tentlike ankle-length car coat which she wore like a royal robe of office. She gestured to the old geezer to watch the Cadillac and rolled majestically toward the guardpost at the front door.
“She got a settlement that good? Major, I’ve never been to law school but isn’t there a rule that a murderer isn’t allowed to benefit from his crime and can’t inherit from his victim?”
“Sure is.” I detected a note of impatience in his voice. “Damn good rule, too. Otherwise everybody’d be killing everybody else for inheritance money and we wouldn’t have a civilized society. So what? Remember, because of his age and his mental condition Hume was never convicted of murder. The rule doesn’t apply.” He jerked his thumb toward the window in which the Cadillac was framed. “That was her argument anyway. Now, Marlowe, before that fat bitch waddles in here and I can’t talk freely, let me ask you one more question. If anything should happen to young Hume, who do you suppose would come into the money he gets each year from the settlement?”
I was tired of guessing and tired of talking and sick of the smell of corruption. I kept my mouth glued and let him tell me.
“It goes to her,” Fry said. “You see, Marlowe, after she got him out of the asylum she had one of her judge friends certify he was sane again, and then she married him and they made wills in each other’s favor. They live in the fanciest house in the country, up in the hills fifty miles from here. Used to belong to Hume’s mother. I’ve heard rumors she keeps him locked in the basement. Looks like he flew the coop a couple nights ago. Anyway, I figure someday soon she’s going to make an accident happen to him or he’ll make one happen to her, and I’m just letting nature take its course like I said. I’ll be waiting for the survivor.”
So that’s what Hume had been babbling about just before I had kicked him. A heavy knock sounded on the door, and the overstuffed fiftyish phony blonde who would have reaped another fortune if her young husband had blown himself and me to powder in the woods behind the auto court billowed across the office and extended a cool plump hand and with a queenly smile fixed on her mouth but not in her eyes she murmured thanks.
I turned in the U-drive and caught a bus to Chicago, where I promoted myself a Pullman on the next Super Chief to L.A. With e
very added mile of distance between myself and the affairs of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Henry Hume II I felt cleaner, but I couldn’t get to sleep. At fourteen after two in the morning I was sitting alone in the rear lounge car, staring out the window at the farmhouse lights winking by in the black void, wondering which of that pair of intertwined spiders would empty its venom sac first into the other.
* * *
* * *
A lot of the mystery writers I know are Chandler junkies and almost all of them got hooked when they were in their early teens, the years when we find or are handed most of our passions. I’m the oddball. I read The Big Sleep when I was fourteen or fifteen and didn’t like it. It left me confused and disturbed as I had never been by the classical detective fiction I was used to. I was several years older when I read Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye and understood precisely what gifts Chandler had that most of his contemporaries didn’t. I still think his best work is endlessly rereadable, but I’ve never been tempted to try writing in his style. In “Consultation in the Dark” I’ve tried to be evocative of Chandler’s motifs and approaches without imitating them too slavishly. The true Chandler junkies among both the writers and readers of this book will surely let me know if I’ve pulled it off.
Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
IN THE JUNGLE OF CITIES
* * *
* * *
ROGER L. SIMON
1947
THEY SAID THE Kraut was a Commie and he sure seemed strange to me. I was introduced to him by another Kraut with the unpronounceable name of Feuchtwanger and they said he was a phenomenologist. I didn’t know whether that was better or worse than a Communist, but my friend Eddie seemed impressed. Eddie was a screenwriter.
It all began on a torrid Sunday in October when my neighbor with the pockmarked face was determinedly weeding every inch of his dichondra bed even though the temperature was cresting ninety-four. Eddie peeled up in a brand new Buick convertible that made it look as if Jack Warner had just given him the assignment of a lifetime. I wasn’t used to Eddie this way. He was usually unemployed about nine months a year and rarely wrote anything more important than voice-overs for Daffy Duck cartoons.
“Hey, Marlowe,” he said, leaning out of the Buick with that self-satisfied grin of the new-car owner. “How’s the wheel of fortune treating you?”
“Not half as well as you, Eddie, I see.”
“Yeah, well, a couple of writers named Reynolds and Lipman got the sackaroo and I ended up with a new term contract at Metro. Won’t give you the exact figures but let me tell you it’s enough to switch to the imported stuff. And I’ve got an office in the Thalberg Building too. . . .Hey, ever met a genuine literary celebrity?”
“Sure, Eddie. You. Weren’t you writing an historical novel once? What was it about? Ancient Greece?”
“The Punic Wars,” said Eddie. He looked insulted that I didn’t remember, although as far I knew, he had never finished the book. He had bills to pay, he frequently explained, and there were a lot of hungry writers nipping at his heels for those coveted Daffy Duck slots. “There’s a party tonight I want you to come to. You’ll meet some real intellectuals.”
“You mean the rest of the Daffy Duck staff?”
He didn’t think it was funny. “I’m talking about Mann,” he said. “Thomas Mann! And Feuchtwanger—the phenomenologist.” I didn’t bother to ask what that was at the time because I had a sneaking suspicion Eddie couldn’t explain it anyway. But I had to admit the name Mann did mean something to me. He was one of those German eggheads who had escaped to L.A. during the war in order to avoid ending up as one of Schickelgruber’s lampshades. I could hardly say I blamed them.
Then Eddie leaned over the side of his convertible and whispered to me. “I think Bertolt Brecht is going to be there. You know—the Commie who writes plays.”
“I thought knowing Commies was bad news for guys in your racket, Eddie. Fella could be out of a job faster than you can say Josef von Stenberg. And I hear they keep a list.”
“Paranoia.” He waved dismissively. “Look, I’ll give you a ride in my new short. Come around seven.” He winked conspiratorially. “I think there’s a job in it for you.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what that could be and even less of an idea when I walked into the party that night in Feuchtwanger’s Spanish house overlooking Santa Monica Canyon. It didn’t help matters that most of the people there were speaking foreign languages. They were congregated in a living room lined with more books than any store in L.A., if that meant anything, listening to a scruffy Russian with thick eyebrows play peculiar-sounding music on the piano with no discernible melody.
When the music stopped, I heard some Brit who looked nancy talking about short stories he was writing about Berlin and then some lady named Anita holding forth on what barbarians the movie moguls were. I had been around film people enough to know this kind of bitching was pretty standard fare and was relieved when a pinch-faced man took me and Eddie by the arm.
“I am Lion Feuchtwanger,” he said, leading us into another booklined study. I must say he pronounced it very well. “And this is Bertolt Brecht . . . Mr. Marlowe, Mr. Brecht.”
He nodded to a small nearly bald man in a severe black leather jacket puffing a cheap cigar and staring at us through a monocled eye that seemed to penetrate every secret you ever had or imagined.
“Marlowe’s what they call in America a shamus,” Feuchtwanger said to Brecht, indicating me with some amusement. The playwright didn’t react but continued to puff his cigar, staring at me in that same penetrating, unnerving manner.
“He’s one of the best,” said Eddie, talking me up in a way that somehow I felt didn’t mean much to the German refugee.
“So what do I want him for?” Brecht said at length in heavily accented, but entirely grammatical English.
Feuchtwanger glanced over at Eddie. “As Mr. Brackwell has explained, it will be necessary to have a bodyguard.” Feuchtwanger turned to me. “On Tuesday next, Herr Brecht will testify as a friendly witness before your House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of the motion picture industry.”
“A friendly witness?” I made no attempt to hide my astonishment. The newspapers had been filled of late with reports of the ongoing HUAC investigation of Hollywood lefties with much discussion of “unfriendly” and “friendly” witnesses—the “unfriendly” being those who stood on their rights, shut up, and looked as if they were headed for the slammer; the “friendly” being those who talked to the committee, ratted on their buddies, and continued to work. That didn’t sound like Brecht.
“Is this true?” I asked him.
Brecht simply nodded.
I looked from him to Eddie and Feuchtwanger, wondering what was up. “I don’t get it,” I said. “If you’re going to be a ‘friendly’ witness, why don’t you get the feds to guard you?”
“I will not have those people around me under any circumstances,” said the playwright with a sudden vehemence.
“Hey, we’re only doing this for your benefit, Bert,” said Eddie. “The committee’s going to want you to name names and—”
“I will tell the truth as I know it. That is all.”
“But you promised you’d allow someone to stay with you until you testified. If you don’t cooperate, you can’t expect them to cooperate with you. It’s the American way. Besides, they could deport you and that’d be the end of your contract with Republic. Weren’t you going to write the next Laughton picture?”
The playwright half smiled, inhaling on his cheap cigar. “All right,” he said. “As you say, a deal is a deal. I hope you like schnapps, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Never tried ’em.”
That night I did. I sat in the kitchen of Brecht’s place drinking schnapps while the playwright read some books. The schnapps weren’t bad but the books looked inscrutable. But this didn’t deter the Kraut, who pored over them, jotting down quotes and underlining phrases.
“What’re
you reading?” I asked finally.
“My own plays.”
“You don’t know them already?”
“More or less. But I want to see which ones sound as if they are written by a Communist. The committee will no doubt ask me about them, and since they have surely not read any of them, I will be able to substitute one for the other and leave them completely confused.”
“Not a bad plan,” I allowed. “So I take it, Mr. Brecht, that you are a Commie . . . ”
“Of course I am. And a capitalist. And an atheist. And a believer. And a lot of other things.”
“Sounds a little inconsistent, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I am a writer, Mr. Marlowe, and that is my job—to be a lightning rod for ideas. To try them on the way other people do winter coats. If I didn’t, I would be terrible at what I did. And a coward.”
“Are you going to tell the committee that?” “I do not think they would understand it. In fact, I do not think they would understand the truth about anything. Besides, those of us who have lived in Germany recently have a habit of distrusting politicians. And I have the distinct impression things will get worse here before they get better. . . . And now, if you will excuse me, I must get some rest.”
And with that he nodded to me, stubbed out his cigar, and left. I sat there a moment before pulling over his stack of books for a look-see. They were all in German and I was about to push them aside when I saw an envelope sticking out of the bottom one. It had an Air France logo on the front, and inside was a one-way ticket to Paris in Brecht’s name for October 31—the day after he was scheduled to talk to the House committee.
I was mulling that one over when there was a sharp tap on the window near where I was sitting. Eddie was standing outside motioning for me to come out and gesturing across the street.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 21