Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  “Was Behagen a particular friend of yours?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You called Behagen ‘Dan,’ but you call Wylie by his last name.”

  “Dan told me to do that, call him by his first name. He was a real cop, Mr. Marlowe, but he was down to earth, you know? Not like some other guys around here, getting by more on age than experience.”

  I took that to mean Wylie. “So how come it was you and Wylie instead of you and Behagen in the coffee shop?”

  “Dan wasn’t feeling too well, didn’t want to eat anything.”

  “Sudden sickness?”

  “Huh?”

  “Behagen been sick for a while or did it just hit him that morning?”

  “Oh, no. He had some kind of allergy, some days worse than others with coughing and stuff.”

  “What was your procedure for getting back into the truck?”

  “After we ate, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the one of us would get in the cab to drive, and the other would ride shotgun.”

  “In the cab, too?”

  “Yeah. Like on a stagecoach, you know?”

  I paused for a moment. “Look, I know you liked Behagen, but I’ve got a job to do here. Was there any reason he’d have for opening the rear doors?”

  Green moved his tongue around inside his mouth, like he’d been thinking about that himself and hadn’t come up with a good answer. “Not without recognizing one of us knocking.”

  Wylie had breath you could walk on. I tilted back in my chair but couldn’t get far enough away, so I stood up and questioned him from my feet.

  “I understand from Green that you and he were eating when the Hauer brothers made their move.”

  “I was eatin’. I didn’t see nothin’. “

  “When you heard the shots you got up, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And went to the door?”

  “No. Just Green.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Went to the back, phoned the cops.”

  “Leaving your buddy out on the street?”

  “If Behagen’d stayed buttoned up, he wouldn’t had no problem, see? How was I supposed to know he was gonna open the doors?”

  “What about Green?”

  “What about him?”

  “Wouldn’t he have been exposed, coming out of the restaurant like that?”

  “Kid wants to play John Wayne, fine with me. I’m not gonna cover him. I wanna retire in two years, mister. Kid like that don’t know what it means to die.”

  “He does now.”

  Garth Peevey was sixteen years old and worked in a drugstore on Vine, diagonally across the street from the coffee shop. At six feet and maybe a hundred and thirty counting the pimples, the Peevey fit him better than the Garth.

  Elbows on his counter, he said, “Yeah, mister, right over there was where they say it happened.”

  “You weren’t here the day of the robbery?”

  “Nah. I had school. But I was here the Sunday before, and that’s when I saw the guy.”

  “You know Behagen from somewhere?”

  “Nah, but his picture was in the paper, remember? He looked a lot younger in the photo, but it was him. He came right up to this window.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Taking inventory. My uncle owns the place, so he trusts me to count things right. He had me do it on Sunday, paid me extra and all, so I figured, hey, get it over with, no sense killing the whole day, right?”

  “Right. What time was this?”

  “Early. Early early, maybe six-thirty, seven. I was just getting started, coming out from the storeroom, when I see this guy, his back to the window there. Scared me a little, tell you the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that time of morning down here on a Sunday, it’s like a ghost town. I mean nobody on the streets, not even cars going by. So I freeze, and I don’t think he sees me because he’s concentrating so much.”

  “Concentrating?”

  “Yeah. Like he’s looking hard at one spot. Then he shifts around a little, and looks hard at another. Then he walked across the street toward the coffee shop, but real funny.”

  “You said that in your letter.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I took so much time to look at him and could recognize him from the newspaper. I thought he was a crazy, you know?”

  “He was walking crazy?”

  “No, no. I mean, not like wild or a raving lunatic or anything.” Peevey came out from behind the counter. “I mean he went up and down the sidewalk, going like this, and then he’d look at his watch.”

  Peevey took exaggeratedly long strides and glanced melodramatically at his wrist, causing a man on an end stool to stare at him and two older women at the magazine rack to look up and then away quickly.

  To me, Peevey said, “See?”

  “He was stretching out his steps?”

  “Yeah. But more like he was counting them or timing it.”

  “Counting his steps and timing them?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Like in a treasure hunt. ‘Take twelve steps north from the stone gate,’ you know?”

  The next day, I left my house on Yucca Avenue at nine. By the time I got to the office on Cahuenga, the air was so heavy it seemed the heat was sitting on me. Bad sign for only late March.

  I spent the morning cleaning up paperwork. After lunch downstairs, I drove to the Hollywood Division on Wilcox, where Dan Behagen had worked as a detective before signing on with Stanley Security. A uniform I knew at the desk told me Behagen’s former partner was named Cuellar.

  It was a large squad room, but Cuellar wasn’t hard to spot. He was the only olive-skinned man there that wasn’t handcuffed. He shared a back-to-back desk arrangement with another cop who hung up the phone and was leaving as I approached.

  “Detective Cuellar?”

  “Yeah?” He had a square face and a pompadour that Brylcreem could use in a television commercial. He also looked ragged, like trying to be better than the rest of the squad in order just to tread water was getting him down.

  “My name’s Marlowe. I’m investigating a claim for Golden State, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  His expression remained neutral, but the eyes glowed a little brighter. “I never met you before, right?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “You got anybody here who’ll vouch for you?”

  I gave him some names, enough so he didn’t feel he needed to call them on me.

  “Sit down. What can I do for you?”

  “Your partner, Dan Behagen.”

  Cuellar’s lips flared, but all he said was “Go ahead.”

  “I’d like to know more about him.”

  “Like for instance?”

  “How long were you partnered with him?”

  It wasn’t the question he’d been expecting. “Four years.”

  “Did you know him before that?”

  “Yeah. We went through the academy together just after we got . . . just after the war.”

  “You were in the Marines with him, too?”

  “Right. That’s how we met.”

  “I’m really sorry. About his death, I mean.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why’d he quit?”

  Cuellar was expecting that one. Sooner or later. “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t talk with you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Not even in general?”

  “’No.”

  “My guess is he was giving up fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand a year to go from the force to Stanley Security. He never talked about why?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to know what I’m thinking.”

  “Marlowe, I know guys with no teeth don’t talk so good anymore.”

  Just then the officer from the other desk came back and said, “Jeez, Vic, good to hear you talking like a cop again. Finally beat the ha
ngover?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can’t blame you none. I lost a partner once. Nothing I could do either, guy drowned out fishing somewheres, but I got plastered for three days anyway. Lieutenant asks, I’m out on the Steinberg case.”

  “Okay.”

  After the other cop left, I said, “He’s right, you know. There wasn’t anything you could do.”

  “Look, Marlowe, I was friends with the guy, all right? Doesn’t mean we were like brothers. I knew him from the war and all. Things worked out we were partnered. But he had his own life, like I got mine. I’ll tell you this, though—he was a good cop. As good as they come.”

  “And he proved it by going down in the line of duty?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’d like to know if Behagen was involved in the robbery before the Hauer brothers hit the truck.”

  “Dan never took a dime in his life. That’s . . . ”

  I waited while Cuellar thought of a different sentence than the one he was going to say.

  “That’s the truth.”

  I said, “You don’t want to talk to me, fine. I can talk with other people.”

  “You going to see Karen?”

  “If that’s his wife’s name, you know I am.”

  “Be nice to her, Marlowe. I find out you haven’t been, you’re gonna think God’s shitting bricks on you.”

  Behagen’s home was a stunted ranch on a block of houses so identical even the numbers didn’t help much in telling them apart. Everything looked washed and swept, but up close the driveway was cracking and the paint was peeling, a process that had started well before last week.

  I knocked on the screen door. The inner one opened, and for a minute, through the mesh, I thought Mims’s talk about Grace Kelly had gotten to me. She was that beautiful in the blonde, classy way.

  “Yes?”

  I took twice as long as usual to introduce myself and show her my identification. She opened the screen door to examine it, shifting a book awkwardly in her hand, an index finger crooking to mark her place. Without the screen between us, she looked older, the kind of aging that worry and heartache bring on early.

  She told me to come in, and I saw why things had been wearing down. For a long time.

  There was an iron lung in the living room, leaving very little space for much of anything else. The head of a boy of six or seven stuck out from a diaphragm that closed around his neck like a collar. The back of his head lay on a yellow vinyl pad. His face stared at me upside down from an angled mirror at the top of the machine.

  She said, “Kenny, this is Mr. Marlowe.”

  Kenny said, “Hi, Mr. Marlowe.”

  I said, “Hi.”

  “Kenny, Mr. Marlowe and I are going to talk in the kitchen for a while. Yell if you need anything.”

  “Right, Mom.”

  As we moved past him, I could see the bellows contraption at the foot end that breathed for him. It moved back and forth, making a noise like the swish of doors in a supermarket.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Behagen set down her book and I sat in a chair. “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Her back toward me, she poured herself a cup and tried to sound casual. “Something wrong with the insurance, Mr. Marlowe?”

  “Just some routine questions. I’m sorry to have to ask them of you now.”

  She sat down with the coffee, stirring it past the point of blending in the milk and sugar. “Dan always said that was what he’d tell the people who were in the most trouble.”

  “Before he quit the force.”

  She stopped stirring. “That’s right.”

  “Why did he quit, Mrs. Behagen?”

  “Just tired of it, I guess.”

  “And became an armed guard because he got tired of being a cop?”

  “I guess.”

  “And a pay cut with all the expenses . . . ”

  I stopped. She said, “All the expenses of a son like Kenny to take care of?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry. Polio isn’t something you did. It’s just something that happened.”

  “Did your husband act differently in any way lately?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “He went from being a cop, dealing with the dregs of the city, to being a relatively normal, typical working guy.”

  “Who worked around a lot of money.”

  She laughed. “Yes, a lot of money. Too bad he never brought any home, huh?”

  I watched her drink her coffee. She was good, almost as good as Mims.

  Abel Hauer’s girlfriend was named Monica. “After the pier,” she said. Short, with choppy brown hair, she had that cheap but alluring look that sours with the thirtieth birthday. She’d been souring for about five years.

  Monica reluctantly clicked off Red Skelton on the RCA when I suggested we could do without the competition. “So what do you want to know?”

  “How long had you known Abel Hauer?”

  “Hah, me and Abel, we go back a long ways together.” Catching herself, she added, “Of course, I was real young for him then. Too young, if you catch my drift. How about a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “Scotch okay?”

  “Fine.”

  For three glasses we covered her miserable childhood and aborted acting career. Then I said, “So you knew Abel before he went to prison?”

  “Oh, yeah. Way long before.” She took a healthy slug. “He was a good guy then, always looking after Randy ’cause they didn’t have no ma and pa, you know. Fact, even after they went to prison, he looked after Randy. Some kinda funny guys in prison, if you catch my drift.”

  I got the feeling Monica’s drifts were never too hard to catch. “What were they in for?”

  Monica looked at her drink, her head bobbing a bit. “Bank. They tried to do a bank. Jerks.”

  “What happened?”

  “Held it up, of course. Got away, too. But they killed . . . The cops said they killed this hick sheriff out in the valley someplace, getting away. They got caught finally, but they didn’t have a gun on them that killed the sheriff, so they only went up for the bank robbery. Still, seven years ain’t exactly a walk on the beach, you know?”

  “Both Abel and Randy are dead now. You can tell me the truth, can’t you?”

  Monica lifted her chin and hooded her eyes, giving me a saucy smile. “Some guys, I tell everything to.”

  “Abel killed the sheriff, right?”

  “I wasn’t there myself, of course. But that’s how I heard it.”

  “Supposedly Abel and Randy weren’t out too long before they went after the armored car.”

  “Brother, you said it. That Abel, he had me on my . . . He stayed with me for about three days, tops. Then he started working on a new caper. Always a new caper with Abel.”

  “You have any idea how he decided on an armored car?”

  She lifted her chin again, but not coyly. “What did you say you were again?”

  “An investigator. A private investigator.”

  “So you’re not a cop, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And what we’re talking about here, this doesn’t get back to the cops, right?”

  “My word on it.”

  “Well, that’s good enough for me. You see, Abel—pour me a little more of that, will ya, honey?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks. That’s just right.” She finished half of it. “What was I—oh yeah, that Abel, he had the brass of a . . . a . . . I don’t know what. But in the brains, he wasn’t so good. He needed . . . I don’t know, a leader, I guess.”

  “And he found one.”

  “Yeah. Or one found him. He said it that way, that the guy found him. Don’t know how.”

  “Then what?”

  “Guy sets this up, this whole thing up for Abel and Randy, but it stinks, turns out it . . . ” She started crying, swiping her forearm over her eyes, sm
earing the mascara. “It stinks and they get killed. Why’d they have to get killed like that, tell me?”

  I was losing her. “Who did Abel say set it up?”

  “I didn’t tell the cops.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “Sure. What’d they ever do for you, right?”

  “No, no, you jerk. I didn’t tell them because Abel told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “Told me it was a cop. A cop set it up. What did you think?”

  The Public Library is one of the best buildings we’ve got in L.A. I know because a friend of mine from Massachusetts once walked by it and complimented me that he could drop it into the middle of Boston and it wouldn’t even look out of place. I was there the next morning as they opened the doors, bothering the poor guy in charge of periodicals.

  I used Monica’s hazy memory as a gauge and started with 1948, figuring it might be front page stuff. I found the second story about the dead sheriff in the September 18th issue, then backtracked to September 17th for a page 10 story on the bank robbery. I recognized no one mentioned except the Hauers themselves.

  The last paragraph of the September 18th story gave a trial date in November. Flipping forward, I found the accounts of the five-day hearing. Monica was right: they were found guilty on the robbery, innocent of the killing. The reporter noted the particularly incensed face of one officer who had responded to the robbery scene and who had testified “in unbroken English.” A young patrolman named Victor Cuellar.

  Staking out a police station is tricky. Staking out a house is a lot easier. I figured he’d show up sooner or later. It turned out to be later. I looked away from his headlights to preserve my night vision. As he walked up the path to the little ranch, I could see his pompadour gleaming in the moonlight.

  I gave them a while to settle in, then went up and knocked on the door.

  Maybe I hadn’t given them long enough. As Karen Behagen led me silently through the living room and past a sleeping Kenny, she was fully, correctly clothed. Entering the kitchen, I looked down at Cuellar. He was rotating a grape jelly glass of jug red wine in his hand, but except for his jacket over the back of the chair and a pulled-down tie, he was perfectly presentable. And not a little angry.