Breeze thought about that for a moment. Then he nodded. “True. Maybe it was this way. There wasn’t any name in the diary either, in the front. Maybe the printing was just a little game he played with himself.”
“Like Pepys’ shorthand,” I said.
“What was that?”
“A diary a man wrote in a private shorthand, a long time ago.”
Breeze looked at Spangler, who was standing up in front of his chair, tipping the last few drops of his glass.
“We better beat it,” Breeze said. “This guy is warming up for another Cassidy case.”
Spangler put his glass down and they both went over to the door. Breeze shuffled a foot and looked at me sideways, with his hand on the doorknob.
“You know any tall blonds?”
“I’d have to think,” I said. “I hope so. How tall?”
“Just tall. I don’t know how tall that is. Except that it would be tall to a guy who is tall himself. A wop named Palermo owns that apartment house on Court Street. We went across to see him in his funeral parlors. He owns them too. He says he saw a tall blond come out of the apartment house about three-thirty. The manager, Passmore, don’t place anybody in the joint that he would call a tall blond. The wop says she was a looker. I give some weight to what he says because he give us a good description of you. He didn’t see this tall blond go in, just saw her come out. She was wearing slacks and a sports jacket and a wrap-around. But she had light blond hair and plenty of it under the wrap-around.”
“Nothing comes to me,” I said. “But I just remembered something else. I wrote the license number of Phillips’ car down on the back of an envelope. That will give you his former address, probably. I’ll get it.”
They stood there while I went to get it out of my coat in the bedroom. I handed the piece of envelope to Breeze and he read what was on it and tucked it into his billfold.
“So you just thought of this, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well.”
The two of them went along the hallway towards the elevator, shaking their heads.
I shut the door and went back to my almost untasted second drink. It was flat. I carried it to the kitchen and hardened it up from the bottle and stood there holding it and looking out of the window at the eucalyptus trees tossing their limber tops against the bluish dark sky. The wind seemed to have risen again. It thumped at the north window and there was a heavy slow pounding noise on the wall of the building, like a thick wire banging the stucco between insulators.
I tasted my drink and wished I hadn’t wasted the fresh whiskey on it. I poured it down the sink and got a fresh glass and drank some ice water.
Twelve hours to tie up a situation which I didn’t even begin to understand. Either that or turn up a client and let the cops go to work on her and her whole family. Hire Marlowe and get your house full of law. Why worry? Why be doubtful and confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cockeyed, careless, clubfooted, dissipated investigator. Philip Marlowe, Glenview 7537. See me and you meet the best cops in town. Why despair? Why be lonely? Call Marlowe and watch the wagon come.
This didn’t get me anywhere either. I went back to the living room and put a match to the pipe that had cooled off now on the edge of the chess table. I drew the smoke in slowly, but it still tasted like the smell of hot rubber. I put it away and stood in the middle of the floor pulling my lower lip out and letting it snap back against my teeth.
The telephone rang. I picked it up and growled into it.
“Marlowe?”
The voice was a harsh low whisper. It was a harsh low whisper I had heard before.
“All right,” I said. “Talk it up whoever you are. Whose pocket have I got my hand in now?”
“Maybe you’re a smart guy,” the harsh whisper said. “Maybe you would like to do yourself some good.”
“How much good?”
“Say about five C’s worth of good.”
“That’s grand,” I said. “Doing what?”
“Keeping your nose clean,” the voice said. “Want to talk about it?”
“Where, when, and who to?”
“Idle Valley Club. Morny. Any time you get here.”
“Who are you?”
A dim chuckle came over the wire. “Just ask at the gate for Eddie Prue.”
The phone clicked dead. I hung it up.
It was near eleven-thirty when I backed my car out of the garage and drove towards Cahuenga Pass.
17
About twenty miles north of the pass a wide boulevard with flowering moss in the parkways turned towards the foothills. It ran for five blocks and died—without a house in its entire length. From its end a curving asphalt road dove into the hills. This was Idle Valley.
Around the shoulder of the first hill there was a low white building with a tiled roof beside the road. It had a roofed porch and a floodlighted sign on it read: Idle Valley Patrol. Open gates were folded back on the shoulders of the road, in the middle of which a square white sign standing on its point said STOP in letters sprinkled with reflector buttons. Another floodlight blistered the space of road in front of the sign.
I stopped. A uniformed man with a star and a strapped-on gun in a woven leather holster looked at my car, then at a board on a post.
He came over to the car. “Good evening. I don’t have your car. This is a private road. Visiting?”
“Going to the club.”
“Which one?”
“Idle Valley Club.”
“Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. That’s what we call it here. You mean Mr. Morny’s place?”
“Right.”
“You’re not a member, I guess.”
“No.”
“I have to check you in. To somebody who is a member or to somebody who lives in the valley. All private property here, you know.”
“No gate crashers, huh?”
He smiled. “No gate crashers.”
“The name is Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Calling on Eddie Prue.”
“Prue?”
“He’s Mr. Morny’s secretary. Or something.”
“Just a minute, please.”
He went to the door of the building, and spoke. Another uniformed man inside, plugged in on a PBX. A car came up behind me and honked. The clack of a typewriter came from the open door of the patrol office. The man who had spoken to me looked at the honking car and waved it in. It slid around me and scooted off into the dark, a green long open convertible sedan with three dizzy-looking dames in the front seat, all cigarettes and arched eyebrows and go-to-hell expressions. The car flashed around a curve and was gone.
The uniformed man came back to me and put a hand on the car door. “Okay, Mr. Marlowe. Check with the officer at the club, please. A mile ahead on your right. There’s a lighted parking lot and the number on the wall. Just the number. Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. Check with the officer there, please.”
I said: “Why would I do that?”
He was very calm, very polite, and very firm. “We have to know exactly where you go. There’s a great deal to protect in Idle Valley.”
“Suppose I don’t check with him?”
“You kidding me?” His voice hardened.
“No. I just wanted to know.”
“A couple of cruisers would start looking for you.”
“How many are you in the patrol?”
“Sorry,” he said. “About a mile ahead on the right, Mr. Marlowe.”
I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the special badge pinned to his shirt. “And they call this a democracy,” I said.
He looked behind him and then spat on the ground and put a hand on the sill of the car door. “Maybe you got company,” he said. “I knew a fellow belonged to the John Reed Club. Over in Boyle Heights, it was.”
“Tovarich,” I said.
“The trouble with revolutions,” he said, “is that they get in the hands of the wrong people.”
“Check,” I said.
“On the other hand,” he said, “could they be any wronger than the bunch of rich phonies that live around here?”
“Maybe you’ll be living in here yourself someday,” I said. He spat again. “I wouldn’t live in here if they paid me fifty thousand a year and let me sleep in chiffon pajamas with a string of matched pink pearls around my neck.”
“I’d hate to make you the offer,” I said.
“You make me the offer any time,” he said. “Day or night. Just make me the offer and see what it gets you.”
“Well, I’ll run along now and check with the officer of the club,” I said.
“Tell him to go spit up his left pants leg,” he said. “Tell him I said so.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
A car came up behind and honked. I drove on. Half a block of dark limousine blew me off the road with its horn and went past me making a noise like dead leaves falling.
The wind was quiet out here and the valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as if they had been cut with an engraving tool.
Around the curve the whole valley spread out before me. A thousand white houses built up and down the hills, ten thousand lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close, on account of the patrol.
The wall of the club building that faced the road was white and blank, with no entrance door, no windows on the lower floor. The number was small but bright in violet-colored neon. 8777. Nothing else. To the side, under rows of hooded, downward-shining lights, were even rows of cars set out in the white lined slots on the smooth black asphalt. Attendants in crisp clean uniforms moved in the lights.
The road went around to the back. A deep concrete porch there, with an overhanging canopy of glass and chromium, but very dim lights. I got out of the car and received a check with the license number on it, carried it over to a small desk where a uniformed man sat and dumped it in front of him.
“Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Visitor.”
“Thank you, Mr. Marlowe.” He wrote the name and number down, handed me back my check and picked up a telephone.
A Negro in a white linen double-breasted guards uniform, gold epaulettes, a cap with a broad gold band, opened the door for me.
The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail. Under the beautiful soft indirect lighting the walls seemed to go up forever and to be lost in soft lascivious stars that really twinkled. You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders. At the back was a free-arched stairway with a chromium and white enamel gangway going up in wide shallow carpeted steps. At the entrance to the dining room a chubby captain of waiters stood negligently with a two-inch satin stripe on his pants and a bunch of gold-plated menus under his arm. He had the sort of face that can turn from a polite simper to cold-blooded fury almost without moving a muscle.
The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved moth like against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blond in a dress that looked like seawater sifted over with gold dust came out of the Ladies’ Room touching up her lips and turned toward the arch, humming.
The sound of rumba music came through the archway and she nodded her gold head in time to it, smiling. A short fat man with a red face and glittering eyes waited for her with a white wrap over his arm. He dug his thick fingers into her bare arm and leered up at her.
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.
I went into the bar and sank into a leather bar seat packed with down. Glasses tinkled gently, lights glowed softly, there were quiet voices whispering of love, or ten per cent, or whatever they whisper about in a place like that.
A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse one of the barmen. He cursed him in a loud clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rumba music like a shovel through snow.
The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman.
The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing in his face but pallor. Then he turned to me and said:
“Yes, sir?”
“I want to talk to a fellow named Eddie Prue.”
“So?”
“He works here,” I said.
“Works here doing what?” His voice was perfectly level and as dry as dry sand.
“I understand he’s the guy that walks behind the boss. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Eddie Prue.” He moved one lip slowly over the other and made small tight circles on the bar with his bar cloth.
“Your name?”
“Marlowe.”
“Marlowe. Drink while waiting?”
“A dry martini will do.”
“A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.”
“Okay.”
“Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?”
“Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.”
“On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?”
“Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “A dry martini.”
He took three steps away from me and then came back and leaned across the bar and said: “I made a mistake in a drink. The gentleman was telling me about it.”
“I heard him.”
“He was telling me about it as gentlemen tell you about things like that. As big shot directors like to point out to you your little errors. And you heard him.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how long this was going to go on.
“He made himself heard—the gentleman did. So I come over here and practically insult you.”
“I got the idea,” I said.
He held up one of his fingers and looked at it thoughtfully.
“Just like that,” he said. “A perfect stranger.”
“It’s my big brown eyes,” I said. “They have that gentle look.”
“Thanks, chum,” he said, and quietly went away.
I saw him talking into a phone at the end of the bar. Then I saw him working with a shaker. When he came back with the drink he was all right again.
18
I carried the drink over to a small table against the wall and sat down there and lit a cigarette. Five minutes went by. The music that was coming through the fret had changed in tempo without my noticing it. A girl was singing. She had a rich deep down around the ankles contralto that was pleasant to listen to. She was singing Dark Eyes and the band behind her seemed to be falling asleep.
There was a heavy round of applause and some whistling when she ended.
A man at the next table said to his girl: “They got Linda Conquest back with the band. I heard she got married to some rich guy in Pasadena, but it didn’t take.”
The girl said: “Nice voice. If you like female crooners.”
I started to get up but a shadow fell across my table and a man was standing there.
A great long gallows of a man with a ravaged face and a haggard frozen right ey
e that had a clotted iris and the steady look of blindness. He was so tall that he had to stoop to put his hand on the back of the chair across the table from me. He stood there sizing me up without saying anything and I sat there sipping the last of my drink and listening to the contralto voice singing another song. The customers seemed to like corny music in there. Perhaps they were all tired out trying to be ahead of the minute in the place where they worked.
“I’m Prue,” the man said in his harsh whisper.
“So I gathered. You want to talk to me, I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to the girl that just sang.”
“Let’s go.”
There was a locked door at the back end of the bar. Prue unlocked it and held it for me and we went through that and up a flight of carpeted steps to the left. A long straight hallway with several closed doors. At the end of it a bright star cross-wired by the mesh of a screen. Prue knocked on a door near the screen and opened it and stood aside for me to pass him.
It was a cozy sort of office, not too large. There was a built-in upholstered corner seat by the french windows and a man in a white dinner jacket was standing with his back to the room, looking out. He had gray hair. There was a large black and chromium safe, some filing cases, a large globe in a stand, a small built-in bar, and the usual broad heavy executive desk with the usual high-backed padded leather chair behind it.
I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase. It seemed like a lot of copper.
The man at the window turned around and showed me that he was going on fifty and had soft ash gray hair and plenty of it, and a heavy handsome face with nothing unusual about it except a short puckered scar in his left cheek that had almost the effect of a deep dimple. I remembered the dimple. I would have forgotten the man. I remembered that I had seen him in pictures a long time ago, at least ten years ago. I didn’t remember the pictures or what they were about or what he did in them, but I remembered the dark heavy handsome face and the puckered scar. His hair had been dark then.
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