I parked behind the Ford and went up to the front door and knocked. Marlowe earning his fifteen dollars.
The boy opened the door. The plaid dress-up-to-visit-the-detective shirt was gone. He was wearing a dirt-stained white tee-shirt with a veeneck collar, cutoff dungarees, and scruffy black sneakers. He was eating a Mars bar. I said, “Is your Mom home?”
He nodded.
“You think I could see her?”
He said, “My daddy knew Major Richard Bong, America’s Ace of Aces.” He blurted it out, the way he’d heard it on the newsreels. Richard Bong was America’s top fighter ace in World War Two. The last couple of years of the war, a week didn’t go by when Dick Bong wasn’t in the headlines.
I said, “Yeah?”
“My daddy built fighter planes. He went all over making sure that the planes worked right, and Dick Bong gave him a ride from Brisbane, Australia, all the way to Port Moresby, New Guinea. My daddy had to scrunch down in the back because there’s only one seat in a P-38.” P-38. The little twin-engined airplane the kid had carried into my office.
“Man,” I said. “That must’ve been something.”
The kid finished his Mars bar. “She’s in the kitchen. I’ll get her.”
I went in as he ran back through the tiny living room into the house. The living room wasn’t much cleaner than the front yard. There was a tattered davenport opposite a round-screen RCA television with a pecan coffee table keeping them apart. Empty Coca-Cola bottles and plates and dirty napkins were on the coffee table and on the T.V. An ashtray with about fifteen thousand butts in it sat on the couch’s arm, and old cigarette burns on the arm looked like furry black caterpillars. There was a copy of Life magazine on the floor with Marlon Brando on the cover. I walked over to the coffee table and looked at what was left in the plates. Lunch had been jelly sandwiches.
Louise Barris came out wearing a slip. “Buddy, you work fast. Did Frankie come across?”
I gave her the check. “He said you’ll get what’s yours. Every nickel.”
She looked at the check as if she thought he’d written it in disappearing ink. “If he knows what’s good for him, I will. You wait right here. I wanna call the bank and check on this sonofabitch.”
She went back into the kitchen. I heard ice in a glass before I heard her dial. Maybe I would ask for overtime.
The boy came in and stood with one foot atop the other and watched me the way you watch something that’s on television. I gave him a smile and he smiled back. I said, “You’re a pretty big kid. You like to play football?”
He crossed his arms and looked embarrassed. I wondered how long it had been since he’d talked with a man who wasn’t over here just to jump his mother.
He said, “Did you see my daddy?”
“Uh-huh. He said to tell you hello.”
He looked pleased. “Were you in the war like my daddy?”
“Nothing as classy as building fighter planes. I was in the infantry. In the Philippines.”
“Did you know Dick Bong?”
“No.”
“How about Tommy McGuire or Pappy Boyington?” Other fighter aces.
I shook my head. “Guys like me watched guys like Bong and McGuire fly by overhead and wished we were up there.”
He rubbed at the side of his face with the back of his forearm, smearing what was left of the Mars bar. “You wanta see what I got in my room?”
“Sure.”
We went back past a small turquoise bathroom into the boy’s bedroom. There was a single bed with a painted iron frame and a chest of drawers and a very old wicker trunk and an oval throw rug on the floor. A small stack of Human Torch comics was on the floor near the head of the bed and a G-Man Big Little Book was on the windowsill and four immaculately painted balsa wood P-38 Lightning model airplanes were on top of the chest. There were pictures of more P-38’s pinned to walls and three or four clippings from the Los Angeles Times showing Dick Bong, America’s Ace of Aces. The papers were old and yellowed but the edges had been neatly trimmed and the clippings had been pinned in place with great care. The models were free from dust and the floor free from litter. There were no dirty clothes scattered about and no clutter. The bedroom was spotless. It was as if this room were not part of the house, as if stepping in here were stepping into someplace special and preserved and private.
The boy said, “My daddy built these models for me. That’s Dick Bong’s plane. That’s Dick Bong right there.” He pointed at one of the browned clippings on the wall. A smiling young guy with blond hair and a baby face was standing beside the wicked round nose of a P-38. A girl’s portrait had been painted there. Beneath the painting was her name. Margie.
I said, “Dick Bong was something, all right.”
“He got forty Japs and the Medal of Honor, see?” Robby ran to another spot on another wall and showed me another clipping. Douglas MacArthur was placing a ribbon around Bong’s neck. The headline said Bravest of the Brave. “I’m gonna be a fighter pilot just like Dick Bong,” he said. “I’m gonna be just like Dick Bong and Tommy McGuire and Pappy Boyington and those other guys my daddy knew. Lookit this.”
He ran to the chest and pulled out the bottom drawer and took a flat package from under some clothes. There were two pieces of cardboard, tied together with yellow cord. The cardboard was old and smudged, but strong and stiff. He untied the cord and lifted back the top piece of cardboard like he was lifting the lid on a treasure chest. “My daddy gave me this last year. Dick Bong signed it himself.”
It was a simple black-and-white photograph of three men sitting together in a tent, very likely somewhere in the South Pacific. The man in the middle was Frank Barris, ten years younger. The man on his right was Tommy McGuire. The man on his left was Richard Bong. The three of them were smiling, and Tommy McGuire was kidding around by pulling out Frank Barris’s ears so he looked like Dumbo. An inscription across the right corner of the picture said Keep’m flying, Frankie! Your pal, Dick Bong.
Robby Barris tapped the picture and looked up at me with wide, bright eyes. He said, “You see. I’m gonna be just like Dick Bong. Just like him. You wait and see.” He kept tapping. He wanted to be like Dick Bong, all right. Pals with his dad.
Out in the kitchen, Louise Barris yelled, “That son of a bitch!”
She came crashing through the house, first into the living room where she screamed where in hell had I gone, then slapping barefoot back along the hall toward the kid’s room. Robby sandwiched the cardboard around the picture and then put it back under the clothes and shut the drawer. When I turned away from him I was in the door and she couldn’t get into the room. She expected me to move so that she could come in, but I didn’t. Her face was red and her eyes bulged and there was a dribble of spit down her chin. She held up the check and shook it. “The goddamned check’s no good! The son of a bitch is trying to screw me.”
I spoke quietly. “Not in front of the boy.”
“What in hell do you mean, not in front of the boy? He’s my boy.” She tried to look past me at the boy, and shouted louder. “He’s cheating us, Robby! You see how that no-good bastard father of yours cheats us? You see?”
The muscles in my neck and jaws went tight and I moved so that I filled the doorway as much as possible. She took a step back, and you could tell she was thinking that I was a no-good bastard, too, just like every other man she had ever known. I said, “Not in front of the boy.”
She leaned close to me and hissed, “You tell Frank his ass is mine. Tell him I’m going to get him for this.”
I looked back at their son. Robby had climbed up onto his bed and was sitting cross-legged, face stuck in one of his comic books, eating a Tootsie-Roll that had appeared from God knows where. One cheek was puffed out with candy and his jaw worked furiously and he looked the way he’d look if the guy who drew the comic book had drawn him. Only tears were dripping down from his cheeks onto the pages.
I turned back to Louise and took the check. “I’ll go
straighten it out.”
I left without saying anything.
I drove around for a while and stopped at the Studio City park and watched some kids playing softball. There was a guy selling ice cream out of a little white cart, so I stood in line and bought a bar. I was twice as tall as anyone else in the line. You wonder why people have kids. You think maybe people oughta have to get special licenses or take classes. How to be a good parent. How to love. How to beat up each other without damaging your child. You think maybe there ought to be a special goon squad that goes around checking up on parents and beating the shit out of those who don’t measure up. Ah, Marlowe. You crab.
I watched the kids playing softball and ate my ice cream and after a while I drove to a little market on Moorpark at Coldwater and called the Tarzana irrigation station and asked for Frank Barris. The guy who answered the phone told me Barris had taken off for the day. I asked if Barris usually called it quits after lunch. The guy said a couple of Barris’s buddies had stopped by in a maroon Caddie and if Barris wanted to go with them that was Barris’s business, Barris being the station’s chief engineer, though maybe not for long, heh-heh. I asked if the guy knew who the buddies might be. The guy said no, but they looked like a couple of high rollers, maybe I should try Santa Anita.
I hung up and shook my head. Frank Barris, check bouncer and all-American father.
I went into the little market, bought a strawberry soda, then drove over to Frank Barris’s apartment. Philip Marlowe, Captain of the Goon Squad.
Barris lived in a ground-floor apartment on Valley Spring Lane in Toluca Lake, a couple of blocks up from Universal Studios. It was a small building, just six units, home for secretaries who worked at film studios and apprentice film editors and people who like things quiet. On a Sunday there would be radios playing and a couple of the secretaries sunning themselves and the smell of suntan oil. Midweek it was empty.
I parked by the hydrant out front, walked back to Barris’s apartment, and knocked. After enough knocking I went around to the side of the place and let myself in through his bathroom window.
Frank had two rooms and a bath and not much else. There was a bed and a round wooden dining room table and two wooden chairs and a fridge in the kitchen and a lot of empty beer and Gilbey’s bottles. His underwear and socks and things were in a suitcase on the floor by the bed. Two wrinkled suits hung in the closet, and there were dozens of rolls of county blueprints leaning against the walls. Someone had dumped an ashtray of cigarette butts into the toilet and forgotten to flush it, and the heat made the whole place stink sour with booze and cigarettes and sweat. Nice. Just the sort of place for a guy who had known Dick Bong.
On a high closet shelf in the bedroom, there was a kit with a half-completed balsa wood model of a P-38 Lightning. The main body fuselage had been finished, and the right wing along with the right engine nacelle and tail boom had been assembled and sanded and cemented into place. The left engine and tail boom were sanded, but hadn’t been put together. When it was finished and painted, it would look just like the models in Robby Barris’s room. Only there was dust on the kit. No one had touched it in a long while.
I put the little airplane back on the high shelf and went out into the living room. I went over to the dining table and sat and lit a cigarette and looked around and got ready to wait. There must have been a hundred rolls of blueprints around the little apartment. Most looked like stamped county plans for pumping stations or irrigation site maps or topographic studies. Not aeronautical engineering, but not particularly complicated, either. Maybe just right for a guy with a booze problem and trouble keeping a steady job. I was trying to spell my name with smoke rings when I saw that one of the plans was a little different. It had fallen over and uncurled so you could see the job description. It wasn’t a pumping station or an aqueduct. It was a private home, and it belonged to a guy named Leo Pinella. Well, well. Leo Pinella ran a party house in the hills above Glendale. You could gamble, you could have girls, you could watch the kinds of movies they don’t show at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. You could get or do just about anything that money would allow you to get or do.
I unrolled the plans and looked at them. They were county file plans showing the plot map, the floor plan of Leo’s house, his electrical and plumbing layouts, the front and side elevations, and the grading and footing specifications. I rolled them up and put them against the wall where I had found them and wondered why a guy like Frank Barris would have Leo Pinella’s house plans lying around. A guy like Barris was just the kind of guy who’d find his way up to Pinella’s as a customer and dump what little money he had into Pinella’s pockets, but he and Pinella wouldn’t be friends. Pinella wouldn’t lower himself.
I thought about it some more, then I got up and unfurled the plans again and stared at them. Plans show you how to get in and how to get out. Take a guy like Barris who was hurting for money and mix in a heist artist like Lou Mardo who talked a good game as long as you were buying, and one things leads to another and maybe they start thinking they can take down Leo Pinella. Sprinkle in Barris telling his ex-wife he was going to pay her off and a couple of guys in a maroon Caddie taking him for a ride in the middle of the day and it didn’t look good. Of course, maybe it didn’t look bad, either. Maybe everything was fine and Barris was out at the track with a couple of his old buddies from the Dick Bong days.
Sure.
I turned to the first page of the plans, tore off Leo Pinella’s address, then let myself out through Frank Barris’s bathroom window.
Just before the war, Leo Pinella had bought six hundred acres of orange groves north of Los Angeles at the far edge of Glendale where the Verdugo Mountains push up from the valley floor. With mountains and desert behind him and a plain of orange groves in front of him, it was as far as he could get from cops and preachers and parent-teacher associations and anyone else who might object if he built a big place and ran people up there and let them do whatever they had a taste for doing. Leo Pinella had made a fortune.
I drove through Toluca Lake into Burbank where the Santa Monica foothills petered out by Griffith Park, then went north on Olive Boulevard toward Glendale. Up against the Santa Monicas there were little tract houses and movie studios, but further north along Olive the houses and studios gave way to factories and industrial facilities and finally the groves.
I turned off Olive and followed state roads into the trees and drove for a very long time. There was an Eagle filling station and a Simms Feed & Hardware and still more orange trees. The trees swallowed everything and pretty soon there was nothing else, just orange trees and crows and a hot, dry wind rippling the leaves. Out here, you could scream as deep and as loud and as long as you wanted and the trees and the wind would swallow it and give nothing back.
Pinella’s house was easy to see from the valley floor. It was a sprawling white hacienda, bright against a mountainside that had not been irrigated. Everything was stone and dust and rock lizards just as the valley had been before the knuckleballers like Mulholland brought the water. I was at the edge of the groves and wondering how best to approach the house when the maroon Caddie nosed its way down the hill.
I reversed off the road and backed into the groves and hoped that the shade and the trunks and the heavy green boughs would hide me. There was a guy with a pushed-in face driving and Leo Pinella sitting in back, but no Frank Barris. Hmmm. Maybe Leo had run out of mixers and Frank was waiting up at the house while Leo and his most trusted bartender sped into town to repair their embarrassingly bare larder. That Leo. He had a fleshy face and long sideburns and what hair he had left was oiled and slicked straight back. He kept a cigar as long and black as a cop’s baton in his mouth but he never lit it. I guessed he just sucked on them until they fell apart.
When the Caddie passed I eased back out to the road and continued on to the house. The road climbed quickly and pretty soon I was above the grove and could see forever. You could see the county roads that cut through the orange
groves. You could see the Eagle station and Simms hardware. You could see across the valley to Burbank, crawling up the Santa Monica mountains. You could see through the Glendale pass into Pasadena and the Los Angeles basin beyond. You could even see that the maroon Cadillac wasn’t going into town. I stopped and got out on the side of the road and watched.
The Caddie had turned off the county road a couple of miles back and was kicking up a rooster tail of dust along an unpaved service road. It turned onto another service road and then another and pretty soon it stopped at a small adobe-brick shed that was the only building around for miles. Not a place to go for mixers or to repair embarrassing social situations. Not a place a guy like Leo Pinella would ever go except for something very important or very secret. When the dust settled, all was still.
I got back into my car and turned around and pushed down the mountain as hard as I could, counting service roads and turnoffs and praying I had the right one when I slewed into the groves. I tried to remember how far the maroon Caddie had gone from the county road and which irrigation road it had turned onto and how it had gotten to the little shed. I drove as hard as I could and I didn’t give a damn if anyone saw my dust trail. When the little hut and the maroon Caddie were a hundred yards in front of me, I jerked my car into the trees, yanked off my coat and tie, got the .38 out of the glove box, and ran toward the old building.
It was hot in the grove, and earth that had been watered that morning was already seared crusty and brittle. Tiny flying things swarmed in the trees, clouding around fruit that had fallen or gone bad, and the smell of the bad fruit was thick and bitter. I worked my way to the Cadillac and then across to the shed. It was a small single-story box of adobe brick with a door in the front and a couple of windows on the north side. It might have been built a hundred years ago by some Spanish don who owned all of Verdugo as his rancho. Once a roof for vaqueros, it was now a place to store replacement pipe and harvesting tools, and where itinerant day laborers recovered from the heat before being pushed back to the trees. When I got closer I could smell the chemical fertilizers and bug sprays and the oil they used in the smudge pots. Within the shed there was a radio, Julius La Rosa singing Eh, Cumpari.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 29