A kid with the unlikely name of Elvis Presley was singing a pretty standard Tin Pan Alley song named “Heartbreak Hotel” and the world was treating it as if Christ had just sent the whole planet a letter.
I put my hand on the bellhop’s wrist and said, “I’m a Glenn Miller man, myself.” Then I put a crisp five dollar bill in the handkerchief pocket of his silly red coat.
“My hearing just got better.”
“It isn’t your hearing I’m worried about,” I said. “There’s a woman in six-oh-two.”
Obviously he’d seen. Obviously he’d liked her. “There sure is.” He grinned. “A babe.”
“You see or hear anything of her this afternoon?”
“Nope.”
“You see or hear anything in the room?”
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Why would I lie?”
I nodded to the radio. “I’m not sure I trust anybody who likes music like that.”
“Hey, pal,” he said. “It’s one way people like us can stay young.”
“If that’s young, give me my rocking chair.”
He bent over the ice machine again and scooped up cubes into a plastic bucket. After three scoops he started shaking his hands. “Fingers get cold. I should start wearing gloves.” Then he said, “Hey, gloves.”
“ ‘Gloves’ what?”
“Reminds me of what she said.”
“Who said?”
“The babe in six-oh-two.”
“I thought she didn’t say anything.”
“I guess I just kind of forgot. About her dropping her purse and all.”
“She dropped her purse?”
“Yeah, as the three of them were going into the room.”
“Who were the three?”
“Well, the dame, this guy about my age who looked like he’d probably been a cop at one time or another, and this pretty boy who plays Captain Starman or some candyass thing like that.”
“So she dropped her purse?”
“Yeah, and her gloves fell out and then this little bottle of pills. And that’s when Captain Starman goes apeshit.”
“Why would he do a thing like that?”
He shrugged. The tassels on his epaulets swayed back and forth like a skirt on a hula girl lamp. “Said she wasn’t supposed to be taking them with booze.”
“That’s all?”
“They closed the door. That’s all I heard.”
“You didn’t hear them arguing or anything?”
“Not really arguing. He just got kind’ve p.o.’d was all. Then, like I said, they closed the door.” He nodded to his container of ice. “We about done, pal?”
“Yeah, pal, we’re about done.”
Back in the room Hanratty said, “He’s starting to smell.”
“So I noticed.”
“We’re gonna have to call the cops, aren’t we, Philip?” He was shaking again.
I took him over and planted him in a chair. He looked very bad. “You got any left?”
He knew exactly what I was talking about. He measured out about an inch and said, “In there.” He nodded to the bedroom.
I went in and got it out. It was cheap stuff, about what you’d expect. I put it in his hands. He drank it quickly and without shame. The way his throat worked when he was gulping it down was almost obscene. I had to look away to Susan Ames. If she’d moved at all, you would have had to use a tape measure to prove it.
“I’ve got to call the cops,” I said.
He grabbed my hand. Lepers grab at the pope this way. “Can you keep my name out of it, Philip? Can you, Philip, huh?”
I sighed. “I’ll try. That’s all I can say.”
He shot up from the chair before I could push him back in it.
“Why the hell don’t you sit down and let me call the cops and get this thing rolling?”
“I gotta pee, Philip. I’m sorry. Ever since my rookie days, when I get nervous, I have to pee. I can’t help it.”
I sighed. “Okay, but hurry up, all right?”
“All right.”
Harcourt was far happier than he should have been about standing next to a corpse. He was a detective and he was young and he looked, from a certain angle, not unlike the actor John Derek, over whom any number of teenage girls were ready to ruin their lives.
Harcourt had good reason to be happy. He was the man in charge of investigating the death of Captain Starman. Of just such fortuitous opportunities are entire careers made.
All the people you expected to see were there, from the medical examiner’s team looking like a pair of dour pharmacists in their white jackets to eager newspaper photographers who kept peering inside the suite’s front door until one of the uniformed boys threatened to slam the door in an act of legal decapitation.
You could tell that Harcourt was a college man because he said “ain’t” only three times in his first four sentences, which is far below average for an L.A. cop.
“So you’re in this room,” he said.
“So I’m in this room,” I said.
“And you see her with blood all over her clothes and hands.”
“And I see her with blood all over her clothes and hands.”
“And Hanratty’s over there?”
I nodded.
“And then you call the police?”
I nodded once again.
He had a grin as big as a crooked politician’s. “So that, I guess, is that.” He pointed to the Ames woman, who looked, if anything, comatose by this point, and had two uniformed men lead her away.
There were flashbulbs exploding and endtables being dusted for prints and a fat uniformed cop yawning. Even murder can get tedious.
“And you’ll testify to all this?” Harcourt asked me.
“Yes.”
Harcourt, who wore a crewcut and the sort of black horn-rimmed glasses prep schools hand out on registration day, glanced at Hanratty and said, “Some goddamn bodyguard he is.”
Hanratty, insulted, started up out of his chair as if he were going to punch Harcourt. Obviously thinking better of it, he sat back down and glared at me with an I-told-you-so look deep in his eyes.
I made a show of patting my pockets. “Nuts.”
“What?” Harcourt said.
“No cigarettes.”
He reached in his suitcoat pocket and came back with a red and white package of Cavaliers. “Have one of mine.”
“Afraid I’m a sissy these days. Filters only. Think I’ll go downstairs and buy myself a pack.”
“I’m not through with you.”
“Five minutes is all I’m asking. I’ll even get a note from my Mom.”
Harcourt said, “Five minutes.”
Before the police had come, and after Hanratty had gone into the bathroom again, I’d checked through Susan Ames’s purse, finding her driver’s license and all sorts of interesting data. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know a little something about her.
More helpful than her license had been the bill from a Doctor Farnham. It was stamped OVERDUE in bold, ominous letters. The letterhead gave no indication of what sort of doctor this Farnham was. My naturally suspicious mind got very suspicious indeed.
Which is why, when I reached the lobby on my supposed mission to get a pack of filter-tips, the first thing I did was angle myself into a phone booth and call Doctor Farnham.
The secretary, who had apparently studied under Hermann Goering, was about as cooperative at first as a nun at an orgy. But then when I told her a little white lie about being with the L.A.P.D., she put some sunshine in her voice.
Doctor Farnham came on twenty-three seconds later.
We had a brief but most instructive chat about Susan Ames. In not much time at all, I was thanking the doctor and hanging up.
Then, because stars, even television stars, don’t have listed numbers, I phoned the Screen Actors Guild and asked for the name of Robert Hutchings’ agent. From that man, again floating my little white lie, I got Hutc
hings’ home number and called.
Knowing that what I was doing was as risky as asking Liberace about his sex life, I dialed the number and said in as Hanratty-like a rasp as I could summon, “It’s all done and the cops are here.” I spoke very quickly, hoping the speed would help.
From the woman on the other end of the phone, I heard, “Thank God.”
“I’ll be wanting the rest of the money.”
She got a little snappish. “You know our deal, Hanratty, you—”
I hung up and went back upstairs in an elevator as fancy as the inside of a rich man’s coffin.
Harcourt had now allowed the press in. He was smiling as much as those pretty boys in toothpaste commercials.
One of the reporters was talking about how crushed his six year old was going to be when he heard that Captain Starman was dead. He was right. I could still remember the day when my mother told me that Fatty Arbuckle might go to prison. Young minds shouldn’t have to deal with things like that.
“Yes,” Harcourt was pontificating, “it’s open and shut. She was jealous because he was going back to his wife and so she killed him.”
I went over to Hanratty where he sat in a chair staring out the window. I said, “I know what happened, Hanratty. Why the hell did you do it?” I was trying to whisper but the way people snapped toward us, I could tell I was doing a lousy job.
I stepped into the ring of reporters and said, “Hanratty killed him.”
For the second time in less than twenty minutes, Hanratty came up out of the chair as if he were going to thrash somebody.
I said, “He was working with Mrs. Hutchings. They knew that Susan Ames had a history of mental problems and was occasionally given to violence, and so she was the perfect patsy for a setup like this. She was under the care of a Doctor Farnham, a psychiatrist, if you want to check this out.
“Mrs. Hutchings no doubt stood to collect a lot of insurance money on her husband. So she got hold of Hanratty, whom her husband had hired as a bodyguard, and made a deal with him. If Hanratty killed her husband and made it look as if Susan Ames did it, then Hanratty got a big chunk of the insurance money. Isn’t that how it went, Hanratty?”
Before he could respond, I said, “And he brought me in as a witness. I would come up here and see that everything looked as if Susan Ames had in fact killed Robert Hutchings. Then Hanratty would have a kind of second-hand witness to back up his story. I would testify that everything looked to me as if she was the killer. I’d make a reasonably credible witness on the witness stand and Hanratty knew it. In a sense, I’d be his alibi.”
Harcourt, not a man to be upstaged, said, “And that’s exactly why I kept Hanratty right in this room.” Like any good political hack, he sensed that a bandwagon was starting to roll, and he wanted to jump on.
“But you said that Susan Ames was the killer,” a kid who had one of those squeaky Jimmy Olsen voices said to Harcourt.
“Only because I wanted to lull Hanratty here into a false sense of security.” He glanced at me anxiously. “Right, Marlowe?”
“Right,” I said. “Harcourt here knew about it all along.”
“Man,” the kid with the squeaky voice said. “This is some story.” He gave the impression he’d just graduated from journalism school last week.
I rode down the service elevator with Hanratty and his handcuffs and two beefy, silent cops.
Hanratty was pretty bad off. I tried not to look at the way he was shaking.
“I wish I knew what to say, Philip.”
“Yeah.”
“You mad?”
“We shouldn’t talk about it, Hanratty. We shouldn’t talk about it at all.”
“I never was crooked. Not on the force, I mean.”
“I know.”
He was starting to cry. “You know what my wife said to me when she was dyin’, Marlowe?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.” My voice didn’t sound much better than Hanratty’s and I knew in that moment why I’d always liked him. He was an older version of myself. In younger days, when he’d been dapper and successful, he’d been somebody I’d wanted to be. Now, he was somebody I feared I would be.
“She said, ‘You never been the man you could been.’ You know, Marlowe, she was right.”
He started crying so hard he was choking. He fell into me and I held him. The two cops looked at each other and shook their heads.
When he got hold of himself again, there in the tiny oil-smelling elevator, he said, “I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
“That’s the hell of it,” I said, just as the elevator bumped to a stop and the ornate doors began to open. “There isn’t anything to say, Hanratty. There really isn’t.”
We walked outside into the afternoon that was dying grandly—with purple and amber streaking the sky and the cricket-clack of palm fronds chattering in the breeze—and they put him in the car and he didn’t look back at me. He didn’t look back at me at all.
He did us both a hell of a favor.
* * *
* * *
More than any writer except Hemingway, Raymond Chandler taught me that language matters at least as much as story and perhaps as much as character. Proof of this is simple enough—think of the hundreds of private eye tales told and now utterly forgotten. Why do we, all these long years later, remember Chandler? For his stories? In most cases, he was not an especially gifted tale spinner. For his characters? Yes and no. A few were brilliantly rendered, but most were little more than stereotypes, and movie stereotypes at that. I always wondered—were there really so many gangsters in the world? No, we remember Chandler for the way his sentences made the familiar special and the trite brand-new. His socks with the clocks. His tarantula on the angel food cake. The overheated hothouse and the crippled tyrant with the blanket on his lap. In addition, he gave us at least one great novel, arguably the best private-eye novel ever written, The Long Goodbye. It is mystery fiction’s Gatsby, and one can’t say much more than that.
Ed Gorman
THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
* * *
* * *
JAMES DRADY
1957
SUPLEE WAS A weathered trio of adobe buildings on a sunbaked plain of sand and scrub brush 224 miles northeast of L.A. where a state road crossed US91. Two box houses sat on one side of the state road. Across that black snake was a truck stop cafe and gas station. My car was up on the rack in the garage and I was nursing a cup of coffee in the cafe, pretending to study the menu while I considered my next move, when she walked in.
We all turned to look: the beatnik couple at the next table, the trucker perched on a counter stool reading a newspaper, the waitress filling the trucker’s mug at the coffee urn, and the beefy man behind the cash register. She had wind-twisted long brown curls, wore an Air Corps leather jacket over a snap-buttoned cowboy shirt, khaki slacks, and battered black flats. Her purse was black and bulky and probably went to the prom. When she brushed the hair off her face she was maverick beautiful, with wide lips, a fine nose, and bright green eyes. The air around her was electric. She got her bearings, went to the counter, and drank the glass of water beside the trucker.
“Broke down,” she said, putting the empty glass on the counter, “about a mile back. You got a wrecker?”
“Thirsty?” cracked the waitress without a smile.
“Get Billy,” the man behind the cash register told the waitress. An open door connected the cafe to the garage bay. The wheels of my car were visible six feet off the cement. The waitress walked to that door and yelled at the kid in overalls.
“Mister,” Billy said to me as he walked in from the garage, “I pulled off two tires, but ain’t found . . . ”
Billy saw the girl, lost his voice. The calendar said they were about the same age, but the calendar lied.
“She needs a wrecker,” said the cash register man. “’Bout a mile back north. That right?”
“Yes,” said the girl. “My brothers are
with the car.”
The trucker’s toothpick changed corners in his mouth.
“You mean you got two men in the car, ’n’ they let you walk it out?” he said.
“Sure.” She smiled at Billy. He blushed.
“What the hell kind of men are they?” said the trucker. “Letting a woman walk. This out here ain’t safe like the city.”
“Hank,” said Billy to the man behind the register, nodding toward me, “I ain’t figured what’s making noise in this guy’s car. He’s still up on the hoist.”
“Go ahead and pull them in,” I said, grateful for the luck. “I’m in no hurry.”
“Be right with you!” he told the girl.
“Go without me,” she said, and Billy’s face fell. “It’s the only broke-down car between here and there. The guys will take care of you.”
Billy left in the wrecker. The girl sat one stool away from the trucker, her back to the counter, watching the rest of us. The trucker ordered a hot roast beef sandwich. The beat couple whined about no club sandwiches on the menu, ordered hamburgers.
“What about you?” asked the waitress when she got to me.
“Steak sandwich,” I told her.
“What’s wrong with your car?” Her name tag read Anna.
“Ask Billy,” I said. “Many people live in this town?”
“Not enough to be a town,” Anna said and we laughed. “Me and Billy drive over from Baker.”
The girl took her purse and went into the bathroom.
“Who does live here?”
“Looking to move?” I smiled, and she said: “Just Hank, the owner, Sal, the cook, and a sheepherder and Hell, he’s a drunk.”
“Lot of people ’round here use the bus?” I asked, nodding to the Greyhound sign on the wall.
“Ain’t a lot of people around here. You gotta drive to get here, so if you got a car, why take the bus? How come you want to know?”
“No special reason.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 35