John Lutz
RAYMOND CHANDLER’S
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PHILIP MARLOWE
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THE FIFTIES
STARDUST KILL
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SIMON BRETT
1950
THE HOUSE WAS in Malibu, backing on nothing but the beach and the ocean. Low, a white bungalow spreading like a melted ice cream in the white-hot sun. Terra-cotta tile roof, lots of purposeless curls of metal on the edges. Trying to look like it had history, and failing. A new building built with new money. A lot of new money.
The gates in the high white wall looked more purposeful than the rest of the curled metal. They were there to keep out unwanted guests. The Japanese houseboy who came when I pumped the bell-push had been trained to make all guests feel unwanted. I handed over a plain business card. “Miss West’s expecting me.”
He scowled as he opened the gates. He kept right on scowling as he led me up to a front door garnished with more gratuitous metal, into a dim hallway and through another door. The light in the sun porch was so bright I almost missed his farewell scowl, but I saw enough to know he’d been saving that one up specially.
My eyes adjusted quickly to the light when I saw the redhead on the chaise-longue. She was a nice piece of construction work and I wasn’t the first man to think it. Most men evidently told her their thoughts on the subject, which explained the smug look on her face. Smugness aside, the face also had straight dark eyebrows, a cute nose, a pointed chin, and cherubic lips the Pope would have given up Lent for. For the eyes, black as olives, he might well have called in the valuers to give him a price on the Vatican. She wore a silk lounging robe with maybe enough underneath it for plunging into the ocean that winked away to the horizon. Certainly not more.
The Jap had had just enough strength left from scowling to hand her my card and she fingered this like it was ash and might blow away. “Mr. Marlowe,” she said in a voice that hadn’t been designed to be audible more than six inches from a pillow. The accent was thick Spanish.
I sat on a low tasseled sofa and threw my hat down beside me. “Got it in one,” I said. “Did the card help?”
“Yes,” she said. God had put so much into the rest of the package there hadn’t been any room left for humor.
“I have a job for you,” she said, moving straight to business.
I said nothing.
“Obviously you know who I am, Mr. Marlowe.”
I did. You didn’t have to be the biggest movie fan in the world to know who Lila West was. One of those actresses who spends more time in newspapers than in pictures.
“Fame is all very fine and dandy,” she said, “but it attracts a lot of crazy people.”
She wanted some reaction to this. I gave her a nod.
“People sick in their heads. Screwballs see you smile from their seat in the movie theater and think you’re smiling at them. Half-baked saps write you letters, even call you up. You get used to it. Go into movies, that’s part of the deal. But when some psycho says he’s gonna cut you up, well, baby, you’re reading from a different script.”
Finally she’d made it to something worth hearing. “You’ve had threats?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. She reached under the chaise-longue and pulled out a sheaf of blue papers.
I took them. Plain paper, no headings. Plain language, too. Sure, the guy wanted to cut her up. But he wanted to do a few fancy things to her before that, while she was still pretty.
I put the letters down on the floor. It was a still day. The salt smell rose off the ocean like incense. Not a day for cutting up beautiful dames. I said: “Why don’t you take these to the cops?”
A little petulance tugged at her cherubic lips, making them look less cherubic. Making them look downright mean.
“Cops, what do they know? They won’t take this kind of stuff seriously. They’ll think it’s a publicity play.”
“And is it?”
Now it was hard to remember that the lips had ever been even slightly cherubic. “What’s your game, bozo?” she snapped. “I can get insulted without paying you to do it.”
“I had to ask,” I said mildly. “And I’m glad to hear about the paying.”
“What do you charge for your kind of work?” she asked.
I told her. About the daily rate. About the retainer. About the expenses.
“I figured it’d be more,” she said.
Suddenly she came to life. Or as near life as you can get without moving from a chaise-longue. She reached underneath and produced a photograph in a worn leather frame. “That’s the punk,” she said.
It was a studio shot, so the photographer must have made the guy look his best. I didn’t want to see his worst. The neck and the head didn’t stop and start, they were one continuous feature. The eyes had been banged in close like tacks, and the mouth was one thin, hard line.
Lila West stretched to a box beside her for a cigarette. Pink, silver tip, a woman’s cigarette. Or a pimp’s. She snapped open a table lighter and sucked in the flame, then blew out a ribbon of smoke. “His name’s Johnny Escalito. Hangs out as a doorman and part-time pug at the Stardust Club in Bay City.”
“And he wrote these letters?”
She nodded curtly.
“How’d you know?”
“Hell, I know. What’s with all these questions? I want questions, I’ll hire a cop. I hire you because I don’t want questions. All I want is you to do the job, take the money, take a powder. We never met, okay?”
“What is the job?” I asked quietly.
“I told you. Johnny Escalito.” I reckon if the Pope had seen the viciousness in her eyes then, he’d have pulled the plugs on the Vatican sale. “I want Johnny Escalito dead.”
I picked up my hat. “You got the wrong man, Miss West.”
“Hell, you’re a private investigator, aren’t you? I was told—”
“You were told wrong.”
I turned towards the door and found myself looking down the muzzle of a big Savage. The old coot who held it was too fat to be wearing Bermuda shorts, too bald to look good with sunglasses hiked up on his forehead, too flabby to look convincing with a gun in his hand. The face was kind of familiar, but I couldn’t think from where.
His voice didn’t sound tough, either. A nitpicker’s voice, a vote-counter’s voice, a jealous voice. “What’s this slime doing in the house, Lila?”
He didn’t worry her. Not enough to get her up off the chaise-longue. “Mr. Marlowe was recommended to me for some domestic work,” she said languidly.
He moved forward, sniffing the air for lies. But he moved like he owned the place. Come to think of it, he probably did own the place. Lila West hadn’t pulled in that kind of sugar from her lousy movies. Some sucker had to be picking up her tab. And this one had sucker written all over him.
“But it turns out,” she went on, “that Mr. Marlowe is nothing but a cheap cheat.”
“Glad you recognize your own kind, sweets,” I said, cramming on my hat. At the door I stopped. “And at least I conduct my business standing up.”
When I got into the car, I noticed a dusty black Packard parked way back in the shade of a pepper tree. The driver was slumped over the wheel. Asleep. Maybe dead. I was too hot to care that much.
I drove down the coast road, hungry for sea breezes. There weren’t any. The sky was uniform blue, the sun dealing out its punishment to everyone rich enough to live on the coast. The road ahead sparkled and fragmented jeweled layers in the haze.
Suddenly I remembered who the sugar daddy was. A face seen in the papers as often as hers. Bud Cone, head of Ingot Pictures. Rich enough for the Malibu house to be among his small change. Good fish for an ambitious actress to leech onto.
I had given up on sea breezes by then and was on Wilshire, driving into the city. The traffic was heavy, hot, and angry. In the mirror I saw the dusty black Packard three
cars back. The driver had woken up or been resurrected. Either way he was tailing me.
When I took a left onto Highland he was still three cars back. At the intersection with Santa Monica I tried to dust him off at the lights, but he stayed with me. So I cut a little square dance I’d done before around Yucca and Vine. That lost him.
The gods were smiling—there was a space to park outside the Cahuenga Building. I remembered the office bottle was empty. Five minutes later I had a pint under my arm and the virtuous, exercised glow of a man who’s walked to the liquor store and back.
I don’t know where he’d lost the Packard, but he was waiting for me in the lobby with a Colt automatic. It wasn’t there to persuade me to do anything. It was there to kill me.
His dim outline flashed on the glass of the door as I entered, and I hit the carpet at the moment the gun spoke.
It barked a couple more times. I heard the slugs bite the floor as I rolled towards him. I caught his shin hard with the bottle and hooked my legs round his. He came crashing down.
I was up first and kicked at the hand along which he was sighting the Colt. The automatic skittered across the lobby. He grunted in pain. I planted a second kick firmly in his gut.
Another grunt, but he was tough. And quick. On his feet again, huge as a windmill, he swung a fist at my head. I felt its wake on my hair as I dropped to one knee.
I lunged a right to where his belt was, then, as the square chin came down, caught its edge with a left hook so sweet it should have been in a box with red ribbons on top.
His head clicked back. His eyes rolled blank. He thudded against the wall and trickled down to a heap on the lobby floor.
His face was only a little blanker than when he was conscious. Solid cement from ear to ear. Not Johnny Escalito, but school of Johnny Escalito.
I checked his pockets. Nothing you wouldn’t expect to find in a bottom league pug’s pockets. A spring blade, a brass knuckle, a lead-filled leather blackjack, a book of matches from the Stardust Club, a small notebook.
I pocketed the arsenal and added the Colt to my collection. Saw with satisfaction that the pint bottle had survived intact. I lifted the hood’s lids. The eyes registered two big zeros. He’d be out a while longer. I took the notebook with me up to the sixth floor.
I swiveled in my swivel chair as I checked it through. The book was a kind of diary. Names, addresses, times. Some details recurred. Thursday afternoons three o’clock there was “Trudi.” An address for her in the back of the book: 2397 Railton Street, part of the city where the only class you see is the rats. There were other repeated entries. Particularly the initials “S.C.” These always came after a name, suggesting a place rather than a person.
“Stardust Club”? Maybe too obvious. If it was “Stardust Club”, he had a meeting there that evening with someone called “B.C.” Bud Cone? Or was that being obvious, too?
The net curtains at the open windows bellied outwards, drawn by invisible breezes that had no effect on the ambient temperature. I drew in the hot smoke of a cigarette and drummed my fingers on the glass top of my desk.
I could have called the police. But then I don’t have that many friends who are cops. So I called the Sanitation Department. Complained to them about the trash in the lobby.
My memory had been too kind to Railton Street. It had slid a long way since I was last there. Even the rats had probably moved out, looking for a nicer area to bring up their babies.
It was a street of cracked sidewalks, flaking paint, and broken windows. Frame houses tired with the effort of staying upright. Boarded-up drugstores, hollow-eyed restaurants under faded lettering, defunct beer parlors. Snatches of cheap music and cheap quarrels surged and died from unseen rooms.
In spite of the afternoon heat, the front windows of 2397 were closely curtained. Sad jazz yearned from behind the door.
The woman who opened it carried enough weight to find the heat real hard, but she wore an evening dress that was all glitter and dangles. Makeup as thick as piecrust. Her hair, immobilized by a permanent, wasn’t in God’s color chart. Jet beads throttled a wrestler’s neck. Her feet must have been fed into the French shoes with spoons.
“Yes?” she said, waiting to find out who I was before she committed herself to an intonation.
“My name’s Marlowe,” I said, trying the obvious. “Johnny Escalito sent me.”
The obvious worked. She led me through the hallway into a dimly lit room of dark velour and davenports. Bottles on a small bar winked in the corner. The jazz mourned louder from an old gramophone.
She gestured me to a velour sofa which shuddered as she lowered herself down beside me. “How is Johnny?” she wheezed.
“Good,” I said.
“And his new job?”
“Good.”
“Hey, I never offered you a drink.” She flopped around the sofa, like a whale trying to get up and tango. “Mind helping yourself?”
I moved to the bar. She wanted one of those liqueurs that leave your lips sticky for weeks. I loaded myself a glass with scotch and ice.
She went on talking. “Johnny never really fitted here. Too clumsy for a barkeep. And then he’s only got a coupla words of English. Do better at the Stardust, where they just need muscle. Only here two weeks and I’m glad he shifted before I had to take a crowbar to him. Took him on as a favor to Rocky Hernandez. You know Rocky?”
“No,” I said.
“Runs a joint in Mexico City. I started out there, so I owe him. Sure Johnny did fine in that kind of trash can. Lot of rough stuff there, punks beating up on girls, dopeheads, you know. In this city you gotta have more finesse.”
I nodded. I’d seen all I wanted of the finesse of Railton Street. “Johnny mentioned a girl called Trudi.”
The woman smiled. Her eyes disappeared. They could have got lost in the fat forever. “Trudi’s kind of busy right now. You could come back in an hour. Or wait. Or then again”—a puffy hand brushed my knee—“does it have to be Trudi?”
I drained my glass and stood up. “I’ll come back in an hour, beautiful,” I said, lying on two counts.
As I drove along Santa Monica toward Bay City, the sunset went through its usual party pieces of flames and pinks and yellows and apricots and golds and was trying to invent a new color. Damn near succeeding, too.
The heat had hardly lifted with the evening. My shirt clung to my back like an extra skin. Too much driving that day. Still, the second visit to the office hadn’t been wasted. Calls to Mexico City and to an old lush who owed me a favor. Used to work in movie publicity till the booze made him careless and he started telling the truth. Gave me some good answers to a few questions, though.
What’s more, the Sanitation Department had depugged the lobby.
I lifted the dash lighter to a new cigarette. Smoke mingled with the lethargic perfume of jacarandas and the salt sting of the ocean.
A couple of prowl cars passed. The cops inside eyed me, bored and curious. Not enough crime on the streets of the city that night. Or not enough crime that they hadn’t been told to ignore.
The Stardust Club was smart. Smart place for smart people, the kind who had shaken their dice out lucky in the movies. The kind whose only redeeming feature was money. Though most of them were way beyond redemption. The pug in my lobby hadn’t been carrying Stardust Club matches because he went there, only because he worked there. As did the lump of pot roast in purple uniform who came forward to open the door of my car. Johnny Escalito. I’d have recognized him anywhere.
His face said it expected more expensive cars than mine. When I stepped out and tossed him the keys, it said it expected more expensive people.
“Mr. Cone in?” I asked him.
He jerked his head toward the door, for a fleeting moment giving the illusion that he had a neck. He was a man of few words, and he was saving those up for someone else.
Inside, the Stardust Club was all cool pale columns and flounced pink curtains. I felt like Jonah in the belly o
f an anemic whale. In the bandshell a colored combo played the kind of tunes that don’t begin and don’t end but just pour on out like water from a faucet. With about as much taste. Couples who liked that kind of thing circled aimlessly on the dance floor.
Two slabs of granite in purple tuxes had registered my entrance and I felt their eyes making dents in my back as I drifted across to the pale, pale bar. A barkeep who had escaped from some corps de ballet somewhere pirouetted across to me. I took a lot of Scotch with a lot of ice, parked on a tall stool, and looked around.
It was early yet. Most of the expensive people were still at the studios being overpaid. But, as Johnny Escalito had promised, Bud Cone was there. A white tux did more for him than Bermuda shorts, but that wasn’t saying a lot.
Lila West had managed by this time in the day to get upright, or at least into a sitting position. The dress that adhered to significant bits of her body was flame-colored silk. She looked as inconspicuous as a watermelon in a basket of currants.
She didn’t see me. Too busy giving a hard time to the tuxedoed bank account beside her. Bud Cone had done something to get her goat, and she wasn’t rationing her feelings on the subject. My ears shriveled in sympathy.
Reading from the Latin flurry of gestures that garnished her conversation, it seemed her beef was with the Stardust Club itself. She wanted Bud to take her someplace else. Any place.
The old sucker was equally determined to stay put. And for some reason she didn’t just follow her sweet nature, irrigate his bald head with her drink, and walk out. She seemed afraid to leave him there on his own. I figured I knew why.
One of the purple-tuxed tombstones lumbered toward their table and handed the girl a note. Her eyes flashed fury at its contents and raked across to the doorway. Johnny Escalito loomed there, the line of his mouth ruckled in a dumb grin.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 24