Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  The payout to her had been two million dollars. And therefore arose the question as to what she intended to do with it. But that couldn’t be asked directly.

  “You must be sad here,” I said. “The place you built with Donald. Is that why you’re closing it down?”

  “Of course it is. Would you stay on if you were me?”

  “Surely not.”

  “It’s like living in a ghost house. I could make it work if I had the spirit. But I don’t. I’m exhausted.”

  “So did you sell it?”

  “I did, Mr. Marlowe. I sold it to a company called Dragon Tower. They’ll probably pull everything down and start again. But as for that, I really don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Donald would have been devastated. But I have to be practical.”

  “Don’t we all? I don’t blame you for that. There always comes a time to move on, as they say.”

  “I guess I’ve come to that time. Would you like to have a look at the property? I know you’re going to ask anyway.”

  She seemed about to be ingratiating, stepping toward the door. I laughed, admitted that it was so, and we went outside, our shoulders almost touching for a moment. The heat blinded me for an instant and I felt my balance sliding. Out of the momentary darkness came the sly agreeability of a smile. She was an Able Grable on the make, flirtatious to an old wreck and therefore faking it. But still. We walked around the resort in a blistering late-afternoon wind, and I leaned heavily on my cane. My lips were suddenly dried out and puckered, and my eyes as well. The water remaining in the pool quivered and rippled, and between the deck chairs the sand had begun to accumulate. The ruin was well advanced, but it had not yet triumphed. The pool bar still had bottles of Stolichnaya under plastic, and the unit windows still had their curtains. Yet at the edge of the property, the sand was making more serious inroads. The incoming company was paying to keep the sprinklers on so the lawns wouldn’t die. And to think, she said, that Donald had laid those lawns down himself. With a shovel and trowel, I thought, with no help from Mexicans?

  “Did you go to Mexico to deal with the body?” I asked, thinking to take her out of her stride. But she took it in with that glassy coolness she always seemed to marshal.

  “I did. It was a terrible thing. He was a good swimmer, so I don’t see how it could have happened. Did you ever see a drowned person?”

  “Plenty. They look kind of peaceful.”

  “He didn’t look peaceful at all.”

  “You know, it can happen—tides and all that. It doesn’t matter if they’re strong swimmers.”

  “The police there said he had been drinking heavily and that maybe there were some drugs on the beach. You know he had marijuana in his blood?”

  “They told me.”

  “I should have gone with him on that trip. But a fishing trip is a man’s trip. He and his friends always went to Mazatlán for marlin.”

  It was jauntily said and I liked the way there was no reproach in it: she hadn’t minded that he did his own things in his own time.

  “Is that where you met him?”

  “I was a waitress at one of the clubs.”

  “Always the way,” I murmured.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. Men marry waitresses all the time. They ought to.”

  The look was not altogether contemptuous. We came to the large gardens that they had spent a fortune to create on desert soil and which Dragon Towers was now paying to lubricate. Tall datura shaded a path made out of seashells.

  “Where are Donald’s ashes now?” I asked.

  “I have them here. Would you like to see them?”

  “Not especially.”

  She winced and her sarcasm failed a little.

  I said, “I’m sorry he died that way, by the way.”

  It couldn’t have happened to a more ambiguous guy, I thought.

  “I suppose you’re thinking we were having problems,” she went on, however. We walked under the datura shade and its sweet smell changed the atmosphere between us. I felt the old rhythm of charm, the beginning of a dance in which I was no longer an adept partner. “Well, we were, but that doesn’t mean anything. Everyone in business goes through periods when there are problems. I’m sure you’ve been through times like that yourself.”

  “I’m going through one now, as a matter of fact.”

  “Then you understand. It was just temporary.”

  Pacific Mutual had gone through the numbers, and the failure of the resort had to be reckoned in the millions. The affable Donald had borrowed ten times more than he could ever pay back, and he had done so purely on the back of the same allure that had seduced a young waitress into a life very different from the one which she already knew. In the pictures I had seen he was the most dapper man in any room, at least in the middle strata of the beautiful and chic. But other than that he was a local boy with fingernails filled with El Centro dirt. I was glad I’d never met him. I would have hated him as well as envying him his wife. But many of his earlier developments had failed, and each time he had managed to escape utter ruin. He was one of those beguilers whom I have known all my life. An old-school snake charmer whose blood was immune to venom. He had ventures all over Mexico because there the law was weaker and he could get away with more: it’s an old story and Dolores knew it just as well as I did. Then one night, at three in the morning, tanked up on tequila and dope, he went for a late-night swim off the wild beach of Caleta de Campos and a riptide or a jellyfish ended his improbable streak of luck. Adios, pendejo. By a slip of fate he had left his young widow provided for, and there was nothing wrong with that in my book. There was a lot right with it.

  Our little tour ended with a gate that opened out into the open desert and its layers of arroyos glittering with yellow cholla flowers. The oppressive mountains at the horizon gave it its foreboding and its sense of endless time, yielding nothing.

  “After you’ve wrapped up here, Dolores, where next?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll go home.”

  “It’s never a bad idea. What do you think Donald would have wanted?”

  “To go home, no question.”

  But then where was home, exactly? She didn’t seem like a person who had one or even wanted one. She had that in her eyes: the shiftiness of the vagrant, the ever-moving pupil that reminds you of an apple bobbing in dirty water. But now she seemed impatient to have done with me, and I felt myself being ushered very subtly back toward the gates. To slow the momentum, I asked:

  “I was just curious about one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  Her eyes were suddenly no longer hostile or apprehensive.

  “I wanted to know what you loved most about Donald. I mean, what drew you to him when you first met him?”

  She paused and thought on the question. She finally said that one night at the Crocodilo Club, a man in a burgundy velvet smoking jacket came in with two girls and asked for the cigar collection. It was a cliché, she said, but it was such a confident cliché that it had made her laugh. What was wrong with clichés, anyway? They served their purpose. That was Donald. A cliché in a smoking jacket, but with a big, sentimental heart and terrible blue eyes.

  “Oh, were his eyes blue?”

  “Blue as they come. Blue as a little boy’s.”

  We walked back to the main office, and the wind came through the sad arches with a brutal heat and we covered our faces. She didn’t invite me in and I was in no position to insist. My brief allotment of her time was up. My cane held me up in the gusts and sand flew into my eyes as she saw me to the gate.

  “I don’t know why they asked you to come,” she said as she stayed in the shade and I ventured back out into the glare. “The reports were all filed correctly with the police down in Caleta de Campos. The embassy l
ooked over the papers and they said—”

  “They’re just doing their job, Dolores. It’s nothing personal.”

  “I’d prefer it if it was.”

  I shook her hand and there was a dutiful farewell, a question about whether I could see her again, and suddenly she was calling out to the guard to help me to the car. “No me necesita,” I called back to him, and he hung back. She watched me crawl back to my rental, and her hand was lifted to her eyes to protect them and to see better the plates. I felt that she was memorizing them. In a week, maybe two, she would be gone, and Pacific Mutual would have no idea where she would be gone to. A figure of quiet elegance and melancholy as she stood in the shade of her ruined gate, her hand raised and her lips pursed. Glad to be rid of me, no doubt, and protective of the urn standing somewhere in her empty rooms. “Hasta la vuelta,” I thought, but didn’t say.

  * * *

  —

  It was dusk by the time I got to the Kon Tiki Motel on Adams Avenue in El Centro. The motel boasted a neon green and yellow palm that leaned out into the street and sputtered as night came down. There was a gravel courtyard filled with the beaten-down cars of the Okies who came to work in the lettuce fields in Imperial Valley. The owners were Chinese. Their daughter played a violin in the back room, something romantic and Russian, and their life went on behind a drawn curtain. I went up to the second floor, opened the door, flung my bag onto the bed, then locked the door behind me. The room doubled as a temporary sauna. I turned on the AC and the walls shuddered, and after a half hour it began to cool.

  I had a bottle of rye with me and poured a shot into a paper cup and drank it on my back on the bed. It was fine enough in its way and I dare say it calmed me down. It always does. I laid my cane next to me and dozed for an hour. At some point the violin stopped and I seemed to rouse, but it was a false start: I was still sleeping. A dark-red moon hung above the ragged manzanita trees and one could see nothing by its light. When I did wake, though, it was morning and I was still in my dust-heavy clothes of the day before. I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours and had begun to wither inside. Seventy-two years old, I thought and still disheveled at 6 a.m.

  I went to the diner on Adams and ordered chimichangas with heavy cream and agua de Jamaica. The wide avenue beyond the window had no passeggiatas; it was empty but for whirls of grit blown in the desert wind. And yet its ghost-world luminosity came through the same window and fell upon my hands as they lay next to the sugar shaker. A fossil alone in his little rock bed, curled up as if ready for the eons. As sidelined as the old Pacific Electric Red Cars that used to plow their way across West Hollywood. I wondered who was in the huge finned machines rumbling through the heat of Adams, passing under the palms, the windows darkened, the mariachi turned up: assassins unable to find their early-morning prey. In twenty years, or even thirty, it had changed only outwardly. I had sat at a window like this in 1971 and watched the sugar trucks go by and wondered why my hands looked so old before their time. At that time, it was the machinery of homicides that consumed my mind. But the years of retirement had drawn me away to simpler pursuits: whiskey collecting, amateur telescopes, and porpoise watching, and I had lost the habit a little. Now the panoramas outside whatever window I was sitting by filled me with gentle interest, and little more.

  All the same, now that I had met the real Mrs. Zinn eye-to-eye, I was more interested than I had been the day before. A beautiful fraud is like the merging of two elements that combine to make something far more formidable than the merely beautiful and the merely fraudulent. One of those can always bring you back to life.

  It was afterward, as I drove down to the police precinct, where I knew one of the detectives—we’d worked together on a case a decade earlier—that I wondered if I should have just driven home and forgotten about the whole thing. But there was the money, which I needed, despite what I’d said to the goons from Pacific Mutual. And the feeling that comes with not being entirely useless to the world. So I drove on. The precinct was a low sixties building a few blocks from Imperial Avenue with no air-con in the lobby and numerous photographs on the walls of law enforcement heroes going back to the twenties, policemen posed on the sideboards of their cars with tommy guns and tilted brims. Spiders crawled over the ceiling as if unconcerned by interruptions, and in the cells a few vagrants slept on their sides through the heat.

  Bonhoeffer was the man I knew. His face looked down from those same photos, but now it was made more complex and tormented by the passing of years. We had worked together on a case by the Salton Sea in which three people had been cut up and sunk inside suitcases, three dead people who had turned out to be drug runners. I had been hired by the wife of one of the corpses to find him, and find him I did. But not in the way she had hoped. Bonhoeffer had been the calmer of us two in those days. He never got into fights and he never raised his voice. The aura of fear that surrounded him—and of which he was not entirely aware—made such vulgarities improbable, as did his way of looking at you as if one eye were closed when it was not. He suggested we go for a drive somewhere with takeout coffees.

  “You look a little rough,” he said in the car. “Should you be out and about like this?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s my choice after all.”

  “That’s the worst part,” he said.

  It was a blue day again, and the desert shone a powdered-chalk white under the promise of a cloudless sky. We came to the Yuha Cutoff and Signal Road. Mount Signal was where all the cocaine from Mexico came in. Bonhoeffer was in a buoyant mood and he seemed fatter than when I had last seen him. He was a charlatan, I thought, trapped in the body of an honest cop. It must have been a difficult lifelong act. But in the end the act had become a reality, and I supposed that that meant he was not a charlatan after all.

  When we had gotten out and were in the stillness of the desert, sipping our coffees, I asked him if he had ever come across Donald Zinn.

  He flinched a little, and then looked away in the way that people do when they are in fact not thinking about far-off things at all.

  “Well, the Zinns are an old family here. Donald was the flamboyant one. Sure I came across him. He was drunk driving so many times I forget.”

  “He never had any convictions, though?”

  “Let’s say it’s why we’re out here having this chat in the middle of nowhere. Donald was one of our characters. I wouldn’t say he was a bastard through and through. I rather like his wife. I feel sorry for her, and maybe you feel the same. I just have a hard time believing he’s dead. I feel like if he came to the moment of death he’d talk his way out of it. He really would. Death would roll over and give him a contract disfavorable to hell.”

  “That’s quite a talent.”

  “Yes, sir, it is. But as for you, Philip, you really shouldn’t be out here chasing after smoke and mirrors. Not at your age. What are they offering you?”

  “A fair pile.”

  “You’re not going to Mexico, are you?”

  “I live there already.”

  “But now you’ve come out of retirement?”

  He leaned against the car and placed his hand on the hood. As far as the eye could see, the shining cholla spines formed a kind of flowering minefield that undulated over the arroyos. A faint whiff of ammonia came on the wind.

  “I wouldn’t go down there,” he said quietly, “unless it’s just to go home. I heard you got a house near La Misión. Is that true?”

  “Been there awhile now.”

  “It’s not the same world up here, for sure. You did well to get out. Do you remember that body we fished out of the Salton Sea in ’79? Turned out it was an Italian in the real estate line. I hear he got into a shouting match with Donald in a bar in El Centro. It’s just a rumor.”

  Perhaps he had a point, I thought.

  “You h
ave a good life, Philip. You’re too old to knock people out. Stay down there and go fishing. They can’t be offering you that much. Or maybe you’re just bored.”

  “There’s that. I never thought retirement would be so sad.”

  “What’s sad about doing what you want?”

  “Maybe I’m just not old enough yet. There are some mornings—I just want to get in my car and disappear on the road. It’s like that. It’s a stupid thing to explain.”

  “Then don’t,” his eyes said, and they were merry enough.

  “Don’t you have a girl down there? You always used to have one.”

  “Used to.”

  “Well, that’s a sorry thing for a start.”

  “You know, I was married once, but the condition doesn’t agree with me. It makes me unstable.”

  “That’s the thing,” he growled.

  Is it? I thought. Was it something everyone knew then, a doom that lay around every connubial corner?

  I spent the next few days in San Diego thinking over what he had told me and making a few calls to people in the real estate business whose names Bonhoeffer had given me. None of them played ball, however. It was as if word had gotten out that Donald had gone on the lam, a has-been gumshoe was after him, and it wasn’t worth their time to cooperate. But I had known all along that, sooner or later, I would have to take a plane to Mazatlán. And I didn’t mind the idea at all. It was a place for vacations and a Carnival that was said to be one of the biggest in the world. I’d always wanted to see it. That, and a stronger sun and some dolphin watching. It must have been the late ’50s or early ’60s since I had last been there. Years can turn a place upside down; or worse, turn it right side up.