Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  I had two options.

  I could bury the key in a flowerpot, or I could do what Leo obviously wanted me to do—go to New York, retrieve the loot, and give it back for him.

  Friends are a real pain in the ass, sometimes, but dead friends are the worst.

  You can say no to them, but they won’t hear you.

  So here I was, in Grand Central, doing a favor for a dead friend. Stay out of trouble, Violets McGee had said.

  Sure.

  I took the key out of my pocket and approached the bank of lockers. They weren’t that large, about fifteen inches square. What could fit in there, I wondered?

  Trouble, that’s what.

  Wait for the 8:05 train Marlowe and head for home, I told myself, but sometimes even I don’t listen to me.

  I walked to the locker, hearing my own footsteps on the floor, stuck the key in the lock, and opened it. There was a bag inside, the kind fighters use to carry their gear to the gym. I was about to take it out when I heard the other footsteps behind me.

  When trouble comes it doesn’t creep up on you on tippy toe.

  I turned and saw the two of them. They both held guns. I looked around, but there was no one else in sight. Saturday morning in New York. On a Monday or Tuesday or any weekday this place would have been teeming with people. On this Saturday there were only three of us, and two of us were pointing a gun at me.

  “Have you fellas got the right guy?” I asked.

  The one on my right had a droopy eye and an anvil jaw. The one on the left was slight, with a pronounced Adam’s apple.

  “You got the key to that locker, we got the right guy,” Droopy said.

  “This locker?”

  “If it’s got a gym bag in it, yeah, that locker,” Adam’s Apple said. It bobbed up and down when he talked.

  “There are gym bags,” I said, “and then there are gym bags. What’s in this one?”

  “If you don’t know,” Droopy said, “then you don’t need to know.”

  “What makes you think this is your gym bag?” I asked.

  “We been staking out these lockers for a week,” Adam’s Apple said, “waiting for somebody to show up with the right key.”

  “You been sticking up everybody who opened a locker? In New York that must have been a big job.”

  “Not so big,” Droopy said. “You’re the only mug who opened a locker what’s got a gym bag in it.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Where’d you get the key?” Adam’s Apple asked.

  “It came in the mail.”

  “Yeah, right,” Droopy said, “with your subscription to Life magazine.”

  “And the bills,” I said.

  “Comedian,” said Adam’s Apple. I wondered if he was related to the ticket clerk.

  “All right,” Droopy said to Adam’s Apple, “take it out.”

  Adam’s Apple moved towards me and waggled his gun, a .32. Droopy was a bigger man, so he was holding a .45. That one would put a hole in me and the lockers behind me.

  I moved aside.

  “See if he’s heeled,” Droopy said.

  Adam’s Apple patted me down and took my Luger from under my arm.

  “Nice piece,” he said.

  “Keep it,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  “Stop socializin’ and get the stuff,” Droopy said.

  Adam’s Apple reached into the locker and took out the gym bag. He tossed it to Droopy, who caught it with his left hand. The gun in his right never wavered.

  “See if there’s anything else in there,” Droopy said.

  Adam’s Apple peered inside the locker, then ran his hands over the bottom and the two sides.

  “Nothing.”

  He stepped away from the locker and I stepped in front of it again. It was waist high and I stood directly in front of it, remembering what Leo had said about his bread box: “They’d never look there . . . ”

  Adam’s Apple went and stood next to Droopy, who finally moved his gun away from me so he could unzip the bag. He opened it and whatever was in there must have been something, because they forgot about me for about ten seconds.

  That was plenty of time.

  I reached behind me and touched the top of the locker. It was there, taped tight. I grabbed it and pulled, and the tape gave.

  Droopy picked that moment to look at me and I brought the gun out of the locker. The tape was still stuck to it, flapping around as I raised it and pointed it at him.

  “Look out!” Droopy yelled, but he didn’t have time to heed his own warning.

  He dropped the bag and tried to bring the .45 up, but I shot him in the forehead. As he went over backward Adam’s Apple gaped at him, then looked at me.

  “Don’t,” I told him, but he didn’t listen to me any more than I listen to myself.

  I shot him in the chest as he tried to bring the .32 up.

  The shots echoed and I looked down the concourse to see if anyone was going to come running. The ticket clerks in New York are smart. They stayed where they were and didn’t even stick their heads out.

  I stared down at the two dead men and then at the .38 in my hand. I turned around and stuck the gun back to the top of locker 246. I didn’t have to wipe it because there was enough tape on it to keep my prints off it. I was lucky it had even fired with all that tape in the way. I went over to Adam’s Apple then and retrieved my Luger. From there I was stuck for what to do.

  The gym bag was lying on the floor, partially open. If I’d wanted to I could have looked inside. I like to think I wouldn’t have been tempted by what was inside, but I’m only human. I leaned over, picked up the bag, and zipped it shut. I put it back in locker 246, closed it, removed the key—I had to put a coin in it first before it would release it, and me not even on an expense account—and then stuck the key in Droopy’s jacket pocket.

  I had a couple of ways to consider what had happened. One was that Leo really wanted me to find the stuff—whatever it was—and return it.

  The other was that Leo purposely sent me a ticket that would get me to Grand Central Station at 7:15 a.m. on a Saturday morning, when the only three mugs who would be there were me and his two ex-partners. I wonder if he knew when he mailed it that he was going to be dead moments later? Maybe he thought that giving me to them would keep them off his trail. No, that wasn’t right. I had never been Leo’s patsy before, and there was no reason to think that he was looking to make one out of me now.

  I had been set up, all right, but to kill, and not to be killed.

  Leo probably thought he was really doing the right thing, this time.

  I knew I was going to do the right thing.

  I had five minutes to catch the 8:05, and I was going to catch it.

  * * *

  * * *

  The first private eye books I read were the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald. Little did I realize at that time—I was fifteen years of age—that Macdonald was refining a form that had been created by the big three of the pulps, Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.

  I went back and read the big three, and found that I enjoyed Chandler the most. Daly was coarse and undisciplined, Hammett perhaps the most literary in style. However, I found Chandler fairly straightforward, and I found Marlowe the perfect tarnished knight, and the P.I. from which all P.I.’s have sprung. Further, Marlowe—although never “Marlowe” in the pulps—is the series P. I. who sprang from the pulps and went on to great success.

  Chandler’s influence on my work is, to my way of thinking, almost nil. Instead, what he did was hook me on a form—he and Ross Mac—that I read voraciously from that time forward, but when I began writing my own stories, my “eyes” were far from what Marlowe was, and my writing certainly borrowed nothing from the master. Yet, it was Chandler and Marlowe who made me realize that I wanted to write P. I. fiction. For that I owe them a lot.

  Chandler is the master, and
fifty years after Marlowe made his first appearance he is still the quintessential hard-boiled P. I.

  Robert J. Randisi

  BITTER LEMONS

  * * *

  * * *

  STUART M. KAMINSKY

  1952

  WARREN HLUSHKA HAD the kind of face that made people say, “He’ll never win a beauty contest.” In fact, that’s just what the bartender at the Cascadia Lounge on Broadway said to me when Warren burst nervously into the perpetual darkness of the bar bringing an unwelcome blast of sun behind him and reminding me that there were hours to go before I called it a day.

  “Close the door,” the bartender called, and Warren shifted the weight of the oversized book under his arm, pulled himself together, and closed the door. Then he squinted, blinked, and tried to adjust his eyes to the amber darkness.

  Warren’s nose was pushed to one side as if his face were permanently pressed against a store window. His large popping eyes made him look amazed at even the most inconsequential contact with other human beings. Warren was short, bald, and so thin you wondered how well he could stand up against an evening breeze off the Pacific.

  Coils Conroy, the barkeep, was wrong. Warren had heard his beauty contest comment. Warren had won a beauty contest in Baker, Kansas, when he was a kid. He proved it to us by dropping what proved to be his family album on the bar and opening it to a brittle, crumbling, yellow newspaper clipping. The clipping showed that a boy named Warren Hlushka, son of Peggy and Marcus Hlushka, had won the 1912 Baker County Fair Best Looking Child ribbon. A photograph of a smiling blonde boy with yellow curls looked up at me. I turned the album around so Coils Conroy could see the clipping. He looked at it sourly, grunted, and turned away.

  “That’s me all right,” Warren insisted. “That’s me right there, Mister Marlowe.”

  I turned the album back around to look at the pretty young woman in the photograph holding the hand of the little boy. She wore a little hat and held her free hand up to her face to shield her eyes from the sun.

  I looked at the kid in the picture and then at Warren. The long eyelashes were still there and the features, they were there too, but exaggerated, grotesque.

  “And that, holding my hand, is my mother,” he said. “And there, the next picture, that’s my father, he’s holding my baby sister, Louise. I want you to find her for me. That’s why I came here looking for you. I thought it through, came looking for you. You’re not in your office so . . . ”

  “Your sister?”

  “Sister, right,” said Warren, looking in amazement at the photograph as if he had never seen it before.

  “The one you want me to find?”

  “The one,” he agreed. “I want to see her. I got something important to tell her.”

  “What?” I asked unwilling to reach for my beer and not offer Warren one.

  “Can’t tell you, Mister Marlowe,” he said, lowering his voice and glancing at Conroy to be sure he wasn’t listening. “Family stuff.”

  “How long has it been since you saw your sister?” I asked.

  “Louise?” he asked and then considered the question as he bit his lower lip. “Twenty, twenty-five years maybe. I got a letter.”

  He turned album pages quickly, passing photographs, postcards, matchboxes, and even candy wrappers.

  “Here,” he said, triumphantly slapping the page with his palm.

  I had come down to the bar to nurse a beer after a long morning of listening to the radio and reading the newspaper from cover to cover, including the car ads. The phone hadn’t rung. The mailman hadn’t brought a desperate cry for help, and no one had knocked at my door pleading for my services. I was tired from doing nothing. I wanted to look at Conroy’s homely face and feel the cold moisture of an amber beer bottle. I didn’t want to think about going back to my office or my apartment.

  I had nothing better to do, so I listened to Warren Hlushka.

  Warren fidgeted around, behind, and nearly on top of me, pleading, giving information as I tried to read the letter.

  “Letter’s from Louise,” he said pointing at the neatly scripted name in the corner of the envelope neatly pasted next to the letter.

  “I know,” I said.

  “She’s not in Baker, Kansas, anymore,” he said. “I called, asked. Long time ago. I looked for her a couple times. I asked.”

  “This letter’s almost twenty-five years old,” I said.

  “I know. I know. I told you,” he said shifting from one foot to the other and looking around the bar. There was no one there but me, him, and Conroy. “I just want you to find her for me. Tell me where she is, is all.”

  “She’s gone, Warren,” I said gently.

  Conroy walked over, examined my almost empty, and looked at me.

  “Another?” he asked

  “On me, Mr. Marlowe, on me,” said Warren eagerly.

  “No, thanks,” I told both of them.

  “You want privacy?” Conroy asked me, looking at Warren and making it clear that he would lead the man and his album to the door if I gave the word. Coils had lost his patience and most of his left leg on Guadalcanal. Warren was shaking his head no. I couldn’t tell if the no was for Conroy, in response to my saying his sister was gone, or in answer to the prodding of some private demon.

  “No, thanks,” I told Conroy. “Warren and I are old friends.”

  I had known Warren for a couple of years, but we weren’t friends. He did odd jobs in the neighborhood, washed windows, ran errands, swept up in exchange for free food from the restaurants, an odd pair of shoes or pants from a shoe store or clothing store, and a place to bed down in the basement of the building where I had my office.

  I was now engaged in the longest conversation I had ever had with the man.

  “I got drunk, Mister Marlowe,” Warren said as Conroy shrugged and turned his back on us to clean some glasses. “I got drunk to get up the nerve, you know. Then I was ashamed of being drunk so I sobered. So my head is hurtin’ fierce.”

  I gulped down the last of my beer, patted Warren on his shoulder, and got off the bar stool.

  “She’s gone, Warren,” I repeated. “Get drunk again and get some sleep.”

  “I’ve got money,” he said stepping back to dig into both pockets of his faded blue pants. Crumpled singles, fives, and tens appeared in his gnarled fists. He piled them on the bar next to his album and went back for more.

  “See,” he said. “I can pay.”

  More dollars. Lincoln and Washington looked up at me from the top of the heap of bills. They were on Warren Hlushka’s side and I found them convincing.

  “What’s the discrepancy here?” Conroy said turning back to us, towel in one hand, glass in the other.

  Warren was hyperventilating now, his large eyes fixed on my face waiting for the answer to all his prayers.

  “Life’s savings,” he said earnestly, his face pressing against the window of his expected failure. “All I’ve got. I’m not asking for favors here. Oh no. I’m hiring just like any Joe. You too busy? O.K., but I’m a . . . a . . . ”

  Warren wasn’t sure what he was and I didn’t want to tell him.

  “Give me a bag, Coils,” I said, and Conroy shook his head and reached under the counter in search of a bag, his eyes never leaving the pile of bills, mine watching him. He came up with a brown paper bag and handed it to me. I shoved Warren’s money into it and handed him the bag. He offered it to me again.

  The last time I had met a client in a bar I wound up finding a woman for him. The situation wasn’t quite the same. Warren wasn’t about to break heads the way Moose Malloy had done. And I didn’t figure to nearly get myself killed the way I had done looking for Moose’s woman. Besides, I needed the money now, but more important I needed to have something to do.

  “Twenty a day and expenses,” I said. “If I don’t find her in five days,

  I give it up and you promise to give it up. Deal?”

  Warren went stone still.

  �
�Give me fifty in advance,” I went on. “I’ll bill you for the rest if there is a rest. I’ll need your album.”

  Warren shook himself out of his funk, smiled, and reached past me for the album. He handed it to me.

  “That’s business,” he said, brushing his bald head in memory of long-departed hair and digging in to pull out my advance. “Alls you got to do is find her, tell me where she is. I’ll do the rest.”

  “I’m closing for lunch,” Coils Conroy said behind the bar as he removed his apron. “Place’s a morgue.”

  I drove home with Warren’s album on the seat next to me and his fifty bucks in my pocket. My car needed work. It was pitted with acne, but fifty dollars wouldn’t cover the body work. When I got through my door, I took off my jacket and tie, turned on the table fan next to my chessboard, and sat down to look at the Hlushka family album. I wondered once or twice if I were doing a good deed or conning a sap who would never make it off the bottom rung of life. I wondered, but I didn’t think about returning his fifty.

  Warren’s album contained six more photographs of Louise. She was about fifteen in the most recent one, a pretty girl in a white Sunday dress with a big white bow in her short auburn hair.

  Judging by Warren I guessed his little sister would be in her midforties now. The one letter Warren had shown me didn’t help much. It was postmarked Baker, Kansas, and said that Louise was thinking about getting married and that she and her fiance were considering a move to California. She asked if he could come home for the wedding. The address on the envelope indicated that Warren had lived in Dayton, Ohio.

  I played through a Capablanca game from the 1921 international, had a cheese sandwich, took a shower, and went to bed early, turning the fan toward me. I had no trouble sleeping.

  In the morning I shaved, stopped for a carry-out coffee and donut from a hole-in-the-wall called Casey’s on La Cienega. Casey’s coffee was awful, but his wife made great donuts. I took donut and coffee to my office; gathered in the three letters waiting for me in the morning mail, went to my desk, pulled over the phone, and got to work.