The plainclothes cop was still looming behind the steering wheel of the black Ford, sweating and pretending to read about how Dewey was sure to stomp Truman.
Hadn’t even turned the page.
Half an hour later, I rang the bell of a three-story rooming house on Franklin whose address I’d gleaned from Ella Lou Harrison’s file. Years ago a palm tree had been planted too close to the house, and its swaying fronds rattled gently against the clapboard siding. Sounded like a lazy typist who now and then got a burst of energy. Oleander bushes with fragrant red flowers ran wild beyond the porch rail.
On the other side of the door, floorboards creaked like the moans of the damned. Then the door opened, and a stocky, gray-haired woman about sixty stood squarely blocking my path. She was wearing a wrinkled flower-print dress, with sagging bobby socks and what looked to be nurses’ regulation white shoes. Foot trouble. Varicose veins slightly thinner than ropes were networked over her unshaved legs. She had droopy, watery eyes and a dewlapped jaw, and she glared at me in the manner of a mastiff whose bone I’d just snatched.
I said, “I’d like to see Ella Lou Harrison.”
“I’m Mrs. Galton, owner and manager here. Who should I say’s callin’?”
“Philip Marlowe. Tell her it’s about some photographs.”
The woman’s weary blue eyes got flinty and suspicious. “What kinda photographs?”
“I’ll discuss that with Miss Harrison.”
“Not today, you won’t. She ain’t home. Ain’t been home the past week.”
I felt the flesh on the back of my neck trying to bunch up. Once it got started, murder could be as contagious as the common cold.
“I’m a private detective,” I said, and flashed her my I.D. “I’ve been hired to find Ella Lou.”
“Private detectives ain’t real cops.”
“There aren’t many real cops, even on the department.”
“Just ’cause the family hired you, that don’t mean you got special rights.”
“Nope.” I didn’t bother correcting her assumption that I was working for Ella Lou’s family.
Mrs. Galton propped her fists on her wide hips. “The old man called me all the way from Missouri day before yesterday. Said him and the missus was worried about their daughter ’cause she hadn’t phoned when she was s’pose to. Way I see it, they was lookin’ for me to put their minds at ease. But I couldn’t do nothin’ but tell ’em the truth, which is I ain’t seen Ella Lou the past week and her bed’s not been slept in.”
“What did the old man say to that?”
“Said thank you and hung up, is what he did. Sounded all choked up and mad.”
“How about if I look over Ella Lou’s room?”
She said no to my request; it was against her rules. Said yes to the three dollars peeking out between the fingers of my right hand. Rules were rules, but commerce was king.
“First door at the top of the stairs,” she said, as I was climbing the creaking steps. “You won’t find nothin’, though, ’cause that big fella was here before you.”
I turned and looked down at her. “Big fella? A cop?”
She grinned with yellow teeth. “Real cops don’t slip me money like you and him did.”
“What did he look like?”
“ ’Bout twice the size of you, with red hair and a mean smile.”
“What did he say?”
“Same as you, that he was sent by the family to find Ella Lou. Only he said he was a friend, not a private dick.”
I went on up the stairs, and the old woman followed and let me into a small furnished room. After closing the door, I listened to her clomp back down the steps.
I was looking at faded, rose-pattern wallpaper, dark mahogany furniture, a drab gray carpet with paths worn in it. Here was the kind of impoverished environment beginning show-biz types traditionally lived in, and then escaped from when they were discovered pumping gas or waiting tables. That was the dream, anyway, before it faded like the wallpaper.
I looked in vain for a photograph of Ella Lou. Then I checked the closet and her dresser drawers. There were a few dresses draped on wire hangers in the closet. In a drawer, with lingerie and a girdle, was a black lace nightgown. No nylons. Only one pair of high-heeled shoes. No luggage.
As I was leaving, I gave Mrs. Galton my card and asked her to phone me if Ella Lou showed up. She poked the card between sagging breasts inside her loosely buttoned housedress.
“Find anything upstairs?” she asked, as I pushed through the street door into brilliant sunlight.
“Not as much as there should be.”
Which meant that Ella Lou, voluntarily or not, had packed some of her things and taken a trip.
The next morning Artie Duke, wearing the same suit but a fresh carnation, slithered into my office on Cahuenga and asked if I’d gotten the photographs.
“There are no photos,” I told him, settling down behind my desk. I gave him an account of yesterday’s activities, and the longer I talked the more nervous he looked.
When I was finished he said, “Listen, Marlowe, I found out the big boys are very interested in Ella Lou.”
“Big boys? Should I hide my lunch money? What big boys?”
“Talent agents, syndicate types—crack wise and call ’em whatever you want. They’re the people that control valuable show business properties like Ella Lou’s gonna be. They play plenty rough, Marlowe, with other people and with each other.”
“They played rough with Jack Corcoran this time. They must have killed him as part of a power struggle over who owns a percentage of Ella Lou Harrison.”
“There’s no way to prove it, though,” Artie said. “They never leave a way to prove things like that.”
“ ‘Never’ isn’t a word to use lightly.”
Both our heads jerked around as the office door flew open.
The man standing in the doorway was tall and gangly, with a kind of rawboned power about him. His ill-fitting dark suit was so wrinkled the material might have been prune. Gnarled, big-knuckled hands on thick wrists dangled at his sides. He had a long, weather-battered face. Fierce blue eyes glinted under caterpillar brows. “Which of you’s Marlowe?”
Artie piped up, “He is,” and pointed at me.
With a towering awkwardness, the man shuffled all the way into the office. “Mrs. Galton, over at Ella Lou’s rooming house, tol’ me about you.” He had a flat midwestern drawl, as if his words hurt as they slid over his tongue. “I’m Cletus Harrison, Ella Lou’s daddy.”
Artie jumped up, said, “Clete, glad to meetcha!” He extended a hand, which Cletus shook almost absently as he moved in on my desk.
“These last two days, I come all the way here by train from Farmington, Missouri. Been told you was a detective, so what can you make of this? I got it in the mail four days ago and knew I was needed.”
I noticed he’d brought some of Missouri with him under his fingernails, as he gave me a postcard with a photo of a row of cabins next to a pinebordered lake. BIG ROCK RESORT was lettered across the front of the card. The writing on the back was in a cramped, feminine hand:
lve got to seak peace at this place for a while so I can keep my sanety and survive. Its where I am if you cant get in touch with me. Don’t worry please!!!
Love—Ella Lou
“Kinda thing makes a father fret,” Cletus said. “You know where this Big Rock Resort is, Marlowe?”
“I heard of it,” Artie chipped in. “Place up north on Route 101. We can take my car.”
Artie protecting his interest. Scared as he was, he didn’t want to lose whatever part he might play in Ella Lou’s future. It was a future that everyone seemed to be fighting over, and that had already caused one death.
I got the .38 from my desk drawer and slipped it into a belt holster under my suitcoat, where it rested bulky and meaningful. Then we hustled outside, and I climbed into the shotgun seat of Artie’s new turtle-back Buick sedan while Cletus folded himself in back. Ar
tie drove with a lead shoe.
Big Rock Resort was so named because of the large boulder alongside its entrance. The Buick roared and bucked over a winding dirt road, and Artie parked in a gravel lot shaded by tall pines. There was one other car on the lot, an old Chevy coated with dust and with a canvas water bag slung by a strap from its chrome hood ornament.
As we got out of the car I recognized the redwood cabins in the postcard photo, and beyond them the placid blue lake. From a nearby branch, a squirrel chattered furiously at us for intruding. The pines gave the clear air a sharp, fresh scent. The resort seemed like the kind of place where nothing ever went wrong for anyone, except maybe squirrels, but I knew better.
“I’ll do the talking,” I said as we strode toward the nearest cabin, with the OFFICE sign nailed over the door.
Cletus said, “Hell you will.”
Nothing like a game plan.
The crunching of tires on gravel made us pause and turn.
A long black Packard had pulled into the lot. A tickle of alarm ran up my spine as I remembered the car’s smiling chrome grille from the right-side fender mirror of Artie’s Buick.
We’d been followed from L.A.
There were two men in the Packard. They got out, slamming the car’s doors in unison so they made one solid thunk, and ambled toward us. One was short but double wide, with shoulders like curbstones. The other was a gigantic, thick-necked redhead wearing a nasty smile. Probably the man who’d beaten me to Ella Lou’s boarding house and searched her room. I heard Artie mutter fearfully, “It’s Red Mallory.”
Another man, wearing boots, a green plaid shirt, and a broad smile, had emerged from the resort office and was approaching us from the opposite direction. His face was youthful and sunburned, and glowed with the open expression of the outdoorsman.
He said, “Hi, I’m Dan Dillon, manager and guide here. You folks are lucky; you’ll be the only guests.”
Red Mallory pulled a German Luger from the pocket of his tent-sized jacket and said, “Right there’s fine. Don’t nobody move.”
None of us knew quite what to do, but Mallory’s advice seemed sound.
After a few seconds Dillon, putting on a young man’s bravado, broke the silence: “Say, what’s the deal here? What is it you guys want?”
“All of us wanna see the guest you say ain’t here,” Mallory said, “a Miss Ella Lou Harrison.”
Something hard came over Dillon’s features; it was obvious he’d succumbed to Ella Lou’s magic, like everybody else who’d met her.
“What cabin’s she in?” the broad man asked. He was balding on top and had a couple of long strands of black hair strategically plastered sideways across his skull. Fooled nobody.
Dillon didn’t answer until Mallory prodded him under the chin with the barrel of the Luger. “End cabin, number seven.”
Mallory said, “Butch,” and kept the gun on us while the broad guy swaggered off to see Ella Lou.
The cabin door was locked. Butch wasn’t one for etiquette. He kicked it open and disappeared inside.
After a few minutes there was the sound of voices arguing, one of them female. Then a long silence.
Cletus had endured enough. It was the silence that set him off. As loud a silence as I’d ever heard.
He took a step forward and Mallory grinned, skillfully caught Cletus off balance, and shoved him back.
Cletus ignored the gun in the redhead’s hand and charged him. Still grinning, Mallory sidestepped and whacked him alongside the head with the gun butt. This was all sport for him. Invigorating.
He said, “Calm down, you old bastard. I killed plenty during the war, so one more won’t matter. Be fun, in fact.”
Cletus rubbed the side of his head, spat on the ground, and set off walking toward Ella Lou’s cabin.
Mallory laughed. “C’mon back here. Don’t try runnin’ a bluff on me or you’ll get a gut fulla lead.”
Beside me, Artie whispered, “Jeez! Don’t that Cletus wanna live?”
Mallory’s eyes darted from Cletus to me and Artie, then back to Cletus. The Missouri-stubborn farmer wasn’t going to stop. He had a long, furrow-skipping stride; the distance between us was widening fast. “Get back here now, old coot, you don’t wanna be buzzard meat!”
Cletus kept walking.
“Good enough,” Mallory said calmly. He swung the Luger around and widened his stance to fire at Cletus.
I had my gun out in half a second, but he caught my motion from the corner of his eye. He took a quick shot at Cletus before whirling to blast me. I got a glimpse of Artie diving to the ground. Dillon jumping back. Cletus still standing. The .38 jumped in my hand. Mallory’s gun barked and blazed.
The big redhead danced around slowly, almost dreamily, through the smoke and stench of gunpowder. Tripping with an invisible partner.
Then he dropped abruptly, as if every nerve in his body had lost life simultaneously. He’d landed facedown, and the bullet’s exit hole in his back was gaping and ugly.
Artie was sitting on the ground with his head between his knees, retching. Cletus had resumed clomping toward the cabin, as if nothing had happened. Dillon bolted after him. I followed Dillon.
Butch had heard the shot and was out of the cabin, standing like a marauding bear on the plank porch. In his right hand was something metallic and shiny—not a gun. He immediately sized up what was happening and tossed the object away, trying to wrestle a gun out from beneath his jacket.
I stopped walking, aimed, fired.
I had to have hit him, but the wide man showed no effect. He had his gun out and snapped off a shot at Dillon, who spun to the ground and started writhing around and kicking. Butch was aiming at me now, and I knew I was as exposed as DiMaggio in center field.
I held my own aim, squeezed off a shot.
Again no reaction from my target. Was the guy real?
I dropped and rolled, knowing a bullet would be coming my way. And in my dizzying vision saw Cletus grab Butch’s thick arm and hurl him from the porch. I lay on my stomach, sighted along the barrel, and blasted three shots as Butch was struggling to his feet, the gun still in his right hand.
This time he rolled his eyes almost tenderly in my direction, as if I’d hurt his feelings. He started to raise his gun to take another shot at me, but it was suddenly too heavy. His arm fell.
The front of his shirt was red and his life was pumping out onto the ground. Scarlet arterial blood splattering into the dust at his feet. He stared down at it, hypnotized, then got down on his hands and knees as if he might attempt to crawl.
Instead he curled up and died.
Dillon was lying still now. He’d lost a lot of blood and looked dead. Even if he was alive, he couldn’t be moved. He needed an ambulance and plasma in a hurry, and that wasn’t possible out here in the wilds. His luck and his life had run out.
Artie was still sitting by Mallory’s body.
Cletus was nowhere in sight.
As I trudged toward the cabin, I stepped on the shiny object Butch had tossed from the porch—a straight razor. Dread and fury dropped through me like a cold weight. I ran the rest of the way.
Cletus was inside hugging his daughter to him, swaying from side to side like an oak tree caught in a storm. Ella Lou was sobbing, wearing only panties and a bra. Her body was smeared with blood and her face was a red mask.
“He cut her, Marlowe,” Cletus moaned, stroking golden hair with his big hand. “Cut my baby so’s she’d be ugly.” He began to weep, out of his head. “Looka here what he done, Marlowe! Lord, look what he done! . . . ”
I didn’t want to look closer, but I did.
Two days later, Artie and I saw Cletus and Ella Lou, her face swathed in white bandages, off on the train for Missouri. She’d suffered half a dozen clean slashes; they’d been stitched up and she’d be okay. She’d even look all right after the doctors were done with her—but only all right. She’d never be the same. Never again be the stuff of mass fantasy.
&
nbsp; Cletus helped her up into the pullman car, then glanced back and waved tentatively at us before boarding.
“Damned shame about her,” Artie said. “Coulda been something’ special. But they hadda fight over her like dogs over raw meat. This way everybody loses.”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
He missed my drift. “Yeah, that’s true. I hear there’s this hot blonde taking singing lessons over at Columbia. Same child-woman type as Ella Lou. Camera loves her the same way. Gonna be big. Name’s Norma Jean something’ or other.”
The streamliner cleared its throat and inched forward. Steel clanked as the slack was taken up between cars.
I watched the train growl slowly out of the station, carrying Ella Lou Harrison back to the Midwest, to vast skies and rich farmland and probably marriage and kids and growing old and enjoying grandkids. A normal life. A good life. It could happen for her.
Good-bye, Ella Lou.
Good luck, Norma Jean.
* * *
* * *
I owe Chandler for showing me the true potential of detective fiction. For demonstrating that, far from confining the writer inside a formula, the detective story provides almost endless possibilities and directions. In many ways it sets the writer free. The detective, observing, commenting, influencing, illuminating the clockwork of his corner of the world, is something like a novelist within a novel. It was Chandler who used this freedom and dimension to best advantage, lacing his perfectly balanced prose with wicked social insight as well as beauty and poetry. Like a skilled photographer, he seemed to realize that the object in the lens is sometimes not as important as the light that falls on it. There are few genuine innovators in writing, and Chandler was one of them. Most of us who write this kind of fiction, whether we know it or not, or acknowledge it or not, emulate Raymond Chandler. I consider it an honor and a gesture of respect to emulate him consciously and publicly for this collection.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 23