Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

He took it, made a business of shoving it into his waistband, stood up, gave me as dirty a look as he had in stock, and strolled to the door, nonchalant as a hustler with a new mink stole.

  He turned at the door and gave me the beady eye. “Stay clean, tinhorn. Tin bends easy.”

  With this blinding piece of repartee he opened the door and drifted out.

  After a little while I locked my other door, cut the buzzer, made the office dark, and left. I saw no one who looked like a lifetaker. I drove to my house, packed a suitcase, drove to a service station where they were almost fond of me, stored my car, and picked up a rental Chevrolet.

  I drove this to Poynter Street, dumped my suitcase in the sleazy apartment I had rented early in the afternoon, and went to dinner at Victor’s. It was nine o’clock, too late to drive to Bay City and take Anne to dinner.

  I ordered a double Gibson with fresh limes and drank it, and I was as hungry as a schoolboy.

  On the way back to Poynter Street I did a good deal of weaving in and out and circling blocks and stopping, with a gun on the seat beside me. As far as I could tell, no one was trying to tail me.

  I stopped on Sunset at a service station and made two calls from the box. I caught Bernie Ohls just as he was leaving to go home.

  “This is Marlowe, Bernie. We haven’t had a fight in years. I’m getting lonely.”

  “Well, get married. I’m chief investigator for the sheriff’s office now. I rank acting captain until I pass the exam. I don’t hardly speak to private eyes.”

  “Speak to this one. I need help. I’m on a ticklish job where I could get killed.”

  “And you expect me to interfere with the course of nature?”

  “Come off it, Bernie. I haven’t been a bad guy. I’m trying to save an ex-mobster from a couple of executioners.”

  “The more they mow each other down, the better I like it.”

  “Yeah. If I call you, come running or send a couple of good boys. You’ll have time to teach them.”

  We exchanged a couple of mild insults and hung up. I dialed Ikky Rossen’s number. His rather unpleasant voice said, “Okay, talk.”

  “Marlowe. Be ready to move out about midnight. We’ve spotted your boyfriends and they are holed up at the Beverly-Western. They won’t move to your street tonight. Remember, they don’t know you’ve been tipped.”

  “Sounds chancy.”

  “Good God, it wasn’t meant to be a Sunday school picnic. You’ve been careless, Ikky. You were followed to my office. That cuts the time we have.”

  He was silent for a moment. I heard him breathing. “Who by?” he asked.

  “Some little tweezer who stuck a gun in my belly and gave me the trouble of taking it away from him. I can only figure they sent a punk on the theory they don’t want me to know too much, in case I don’t know it already.”

  “You’re in for trouble, friend.”

  “When not? I’ll come over to your place about midnight. Be ready. Where’s your car?”

  “Out front.”

  “Get it on a side street and make a business of locking it up. Where’s the back door of your flop?”

  “In back. Where would it be? On the alley.”

  “Leave your suitcase there. We walk out together and go to your car. We drive by the alley and pick up the suitcase or cases.”

  “Suppose some guy steals them?”

  “Yeah. Suppose you get dead. Which do you like better?”

  “Okay,” he grunted. “I’m waiting. But we’re taking big chances.”

  “So do race drivers. Does that stop them? There’s no way to get out but fast. Douse your lights about ten and rumple the bed well. It would be good if you could leave some baggage behind. Wouldn’t look so planned.”

  He grunted okay and I hung up. The telephone box was well lighted outside. They usually are in service stations. I took a good long gander around while I pawed over the collection of giveaway maps inside the station. I saw nothing to worry me. I took a map of San Diego just for the hell of it and got into my rented car.

  On Poynter I parked around the corner and went up to my second-floor sleazy apartment and sat in the dark watching from my window. I saw nothing to worry about. A couple of medium-class chippies came out of Ikky’s apartment house and were picked up in a late-model car. A man about Ikky’s height and build went into the apartment house. Various other people came and went. The street was fairly quiet. Since they put in the Hollywood Freeway nobody much uses the off-the-boulevard streets unless they live in the neighborhood.

  It was a nice fall night—or as nice as they get in Los Angeles’ climate—clearish but not even crisp. I don’t know what’s happened to the weather in our overcrowded city, but it’s not the weather I knew when I came to it.

  It seemed like a long time to midnight. I couldn’t spot anybody watching anything, and no couple of quiet-suited men paged any of the six apartment houses available. I was pretty sure they’d try mine first when they came, but I wasn’t sure if Anne had picked the right men, or if the tweezer’s message back to his bosses had done me any good or otherwise.

  In spite of the hundred ways Anne could be wrong, I had a hunch she was right. The killers had no reason to be cagey if they didn’t know Ikky had been warned. No reason but one. He had come to my office and been tailed there. But the Outfit, with all its arrogance of power, might laugh at the idea he had been tipped off or come to me for help. I was so small they would hardly be able to see me.

  At midnight I left the apartment, walked two blocks watching for a tail, crossed the street, and went into Ikky’s drive. There was no locked door, and no elevator. I climbed steps to the third floor and looked for his apartment. I knocked lightly. He opened the door with a gun in his hand. He probably looked scared.

  There were two suitcases by the door and another against the far wall. I went over and lifted it. It was heavy enough. I opened it—it was unlocked.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “It’s got everything a guy could need for three-four nights, and nothing except some clothes that I couldn’t glom off in any ready-to-wear place.”

  I picked up one of the other suitcases. “Let’s stash this by the back door.”

  “We can leave by the alley too.”

  “We leave by the front door. Just in case we’re covered—though I don’t think so—we’re just two guys going out together. Just one thing. Keep both hands in your coat pockets and the gun in your right. If anybody calls out your name behind you, turn fast and shoot. Nobody but a lifetaker will do it. I’ll do the same.”

  “I’m scared,” he said in his rusty voice.

  “Me too, if it helps any. But we have to do it. If you’re braced, they’ll have guns in their hands. Don’t bother asking them questions. They wouldn’t answer in words. If it’s just my small friend, we’ll cool him and dump him inside the door. Got it?”

  He nodded, licking his lips. We carried the suitcases down and put them outside the back door. I looked along the alley. Nobody, and only a short distance to the side street. We went back in and along the hall to the front. We walked out on Poynter Street with all the casualness of a wife buying her husband a birthday tie.

  Nobody made a move. The street was empty.

  We walked around the corner to Ikky’s rented car. He unlocked it. I went back with him for the suitcases. Not a stir. We put the suitcases in the car and started up and drove to the next street.

  A traffic light not working, a boulevard stop or two, the entrance to the freeway. There was plenty of traffic on it even at midnight. California is loaded with people going places and making speed to get there. If you don’t drive eighty miles an hour, everybody passes you. If you do, you have to watch the rearview mirror for highway patrol cars. It’s the rat race of rat races.

  Ikky did a quiet seventy. We reached the junction to Route 66 and he took it. So far nothing. I stayed with him to Pomona.

  “This is far enough for me,” I said. “I’ll grab a bus bac
k if there is one, or park myself in a motel. Drive to a service station and we’ll ask for the bus stop. It should be close to the freeway.”

  He did that and stopped midway on a block. He reached for his pocketbook and held out four thousand-dollar bills.

  “I don’t really feel I’ve earned all that. It was too easy.”

  He laughed with a kind of wry amusement on his pudgy face. “Don’t be a sap. I have it made. You didn’t know what you was walking into. What’s more, your troubles are just beginning. The Outfit has eyes and ears everywhere. Perhaps I’m safe if I’m damn careful. Perhaps I ain’t as safe as I think I am. Either way, you did what I asked. Take the dough. I got plenty.”

  I took it and put it away. He drove to an all-night service station and we were told where to find the bus stop. “There’s a cross-country Greyhound at two twenty-five a.m.,” the attendant said, looking at a schedule. “They’ll take you, if they got room.”

  Ikky drove to the bus stop. We shook hands and he went gunning down the road toward the freeway. I looked at my watch and found a liquor store still open and bought a pint of Scotch. Then I found a bar and ordered a double with water.

  My troubles were just beginning, Ikky had said. He was so right.

  I got off at the Hollywood bus station, grabbed a taxi, and drove to my office. I asked the driver to wait a few moments. At that time of night he was glad to. The night man let me into the building.

  “You work late, Mr. Marlowe. But you always did, didn’t you?”

  “It’s that sort of business,” I said. “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  Up in my office I pawed the floor for mail and found nothing but a longish narrowish box, Special Delivery, with a Glendale postmark.

  It contained nothing at all but a freshly sharpened pencil—the mobster’s mark of death.

  I didn’t take it too hard. When they mean it, they don’t send it to you. I took it as a sharp warning to lay off. There might be a beating arranged. From their point of view, that would be good discipline. “When we pencil a guy, any guy that tries to help him is in for smashing.” That could be the message.

  I thought of going to my house on Yucca Avenue. Too lonely. I thought of going to Anne’s place in Bay City. Worse. If they got wise to her, real hoods would think nothing of beating her up too.

  It was the Poynter Street flop for me—easily the safest place now. I went down to the waiting taxi and had him drive me to within three blocks of the so-called apartment house. I went upstairs, undressed, and slept raw. Nothing bothered me but a broken spring—that bothered my back.

  I lay until 3:30 pondering the situation with my massive brain. I went to sleep with a gun under the pillow, which is a bad place to keep a gun when you have one pillow as thick and soft as a typewriter pad. It bothered me, so I transferred it to my right hand. Practice had taught me to keep it there even in sleep.

  I woke up with the sun shining. I felt like a piece of spoiled meat. I struggled into the bathroom and doused myself with cold water and wiped off with a towel you couldn’t have seen if you held it sideways. This was a really gorgeous apartment. All it needed was a set of Chippendale furniture to be graduated into the slum class.

  There was nothing to eat and if I went out, Miss-Nothing Marlowe might miss something. I had a pint of whiskey. I looked at it and smelled it, but I couldn’t take it for breakfast on an empty stomach, even if I could reach my stomach, which was floating around near the ceiling.

  I looked into the closets in case a previous tenant might have left a crust of bread in a hasty departure. Nope. I wouldn’t have liked it anyhow, not even with whiskey on it. So I sat at the window. An hour of that and I was ready to bite a piece off a bellhop’s arm.

  I dressed and went around the corer to the rented car and drove to an eatery. The waitress was sore too. She swept a cloth over the counter in front of me and let me have the last customer’s crumbs in my lap.

  “Look, sweetness,” I said, “don’t be so generous. Save the crumbs for a rainy day. All I want is two eggs three minutes—no more—a slice of your famous concrete toast, a tall glass of tomato juice and a dash of Lea and Perrins, a big happy smile, and don’t give anybody else any coffee. I might need it all.”

  “I got a cold,” she said. “Don’t push me around. I might crack you one on the kisser.”

  “Let’s be pals. I had a rough night too.”

  She gave me a half smile and went through the swing door sideways. It showed more of her curves, which were ample, even excessive. But I got the eggs the way I liked them. The toast had been painted with melted butter past its bloom.

  “No Lea and Perrins,” she said, putting down the tomato juice. “How about a little Tabasco? We’re fresh out of arsenic too.”

  I used two drops of Tabasco, swallowed the eggs, drank two cups of coffee, and was about to leave the toast for a tip, but I went soft and left a quarter instead. That really brightened her. It was a joint where you left a dime or nothing. Mostly nothing.

  Back on Poynter Street nothing had changed. I got to my window again and sat. At about 8:30 the man I had seen go into the apartment house across the way—the one about the same height and build as Ikky—came out with a small briefcase and turned east. Two men got out of a dark-blue sedan. They were of the same height and very quietly dressed and had soft hats pulled low over their foreheads. Each jerked out a revolver.

  “Hey, Ikky!” one of them called out.

  The man turned. “So long, Ikky,” the other man said.

  Gunfire racketed between the houses. The man crumpled and lay motionless. The two men rushed for their car and were off, going west. Halfway down the block I saw a limousine pull out and start ahead of them.

  In no time at all they were completely gone.

  It was a nice swift clean job. The only thing wrong with it was that they hadn’t given it enough time for preparation.

  They had shot the wrong man.

  I got out of there fast, almost as fast as the two killers. There was a smallish crowd grouped around the dead man. I didn’t have to look at him to know he was dead—the boys were pros. Where he lay on the sidewalk on the other side of the street I couldn’t see him—people were in the way. But I knew just how he would look and I already heard sirens in the distance. It could have been just the routine shrieking from Sunset, but it wasn’t. So somebody had telephoned. It was too early for the cops to be going to lunch.

  I strolled around the corner with my suitcase and jammed into the rented car and beat it away from there. The neighborhood was not my piece of shortcake any more. I could imagine the questions.

  “Just what took you over there, Marlowe? You got a flop of your own, ain’t you?”

  “I was hired by an ex-mobster in trouble with the Outfit. They’d sent killers after him!”

  “Don’t tell us he was trying to go straight.”

  “I don’t know. But I liked his money.”

  “Didn’t do much to earn it, did you?”

  “I got him away last night. I don’t know where he is now, and I don’t want to know.”

  “You got him away?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Yeah—only he’s in the morgue with multiple bullet wounds. Try something better. Or somebody’s in the morgue.”

  And on and on. Policeman’s dialogue. It comes out of an old shoebox. What they say doesn’t mean anything, what they ask doesn’t mean anything. They just keep boring in until you are so exhausted you slip on some detail. Then they smile happily and rub their hands, and say, “Kind of careless there, weren’t you? Let’s start all over again.”

  The less I had of that, the better. I parked in my usual parking slot and went up to the office. It was full of nothing but stale air. Every time I went into the dump I felt more and more tired. Why the hell hadn’t I got myself a government job ten years ago? Make it fifteen years. I had brains enough to get a mail-order law degree. The country’s full of lawyers who couldn’t write a complaint w
ithout the book.

  So I sat in my office chair and disadmired myself. After a while I remembered the pencil. I made certain arrangements with a .45 gun, more gun that I ever carry—too much weight. I dialed the sheriff’s office and asked for Bernie Ohls. I got him. His voice was sour.

  “Marlowe. I’m in trouble—real trouble,” I said.

  “Why tell me?” he growled. “You must be used to it by now.”

  “This kind of trouble you don’t get used to. I’d like to come over and tell you.”

  “You in the same office?”

  “The same.”

  “Have to go over that way. I’ll drop in.”

  He hung up. I opened two windows. The gentle breeze wafted a smell of coffee and stale fat to me from Joe’s Eats next door. I hated it, I hated myself, I hated everything.

  Ohls didn’t bother with my elegant waiting room. He rapped on my own door and I let him in. He scowled his way to the customer’s chair.

  “Okay. Give.”

  “Ever hear of a character named Ikky Rossen?”

  “Why would I? Record?

  “An ex-mobster who got disliked by the mob. They put a pencil through his name and sent the usual two tough boys on a plane. He got tipped and hired me to help him get away.”

  “Nice clean work.”

  “Cut it out, Bernie.” I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face. In retaliation he began to chew a cigarette. He never lit one, but he certainly mangled them.

  “Look,” I went on. “Suppose the man wants to go straight and suppose he doesn’t. He’s entitled to his life as long as he hasn’t killed anyone. He told me he hadn’t.”

  “And you believed the hood, huh? When do you start teaching Sunday school?”

  “I neither believed him nor disbelieved him. I took him on. There was no reason not to. A girl I know and I watched the planes yesterday. She spotted the boys and tailed them to a hotel. She was sure of what they were. They looked it right down to their black shoes. This girl—”

  “Would she have a name?”

  “Only for you.”

  “I’ll buy, if she hasn’t cracked any laws.”

  “Her name is Anne Riordan. She lives in Bay City. Her father was once chief of police there. And don’t say that makes him a crook, because he wasn’t.”