“He had a police record.”
She shrugged. She said negligently: “He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”15
She peeled her right glove off and bit her index finger at the first joint, looking at me with steady eyes. “I didn’t come to see you about Owen. Do you feel yet that you can tell me what my father wanted to see you about?”
“Not without his permission.”
“Was it about Carmen?”
“I can’t even say that.” I finished filling a pipe and put a match to it. She watched the smoke for a moment. Then her hand went into her open bag and came out with a thick white envelope. She tossed it across the desk.
“You’d better look at it anyway,” she said.
I picked it up. The address was typewritten to Mrs. Vivian Regan, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood. Delivery had been by messenger service and the office stamp showed 8:35 a.m. as the time out. I opened the envelope and drew out the shiny 4¼ by 3¼ photo that was all there was inside.
It was Carmen sitting in Geiger’s high-backed teakwood16 chair on the dais, in her earrings and her birthday suit. Her eyes looked even a little crazier than I remembered them. The back of the photo was blank. I put it back in the envelope.
“How much do they want?” I asked.
“Five thousand—for the negative and the rest of the prints. The deal has to be closed tonight, or they give the stuff to some scandal sheet.”17
“The demand came how?”
“A woman telephoned me, about half an hour after this thing was delivered.”
“There’s nothing in the scandal sheet angle. Juries convict without leaving the box on that stuff nowadays. What else is there?”
“Does there have to be something else?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me, a little puzzled. “There is. The woman said there was a police jam connected with it and I’d better lay it on the line fast, or I’d be talking to my little sister through a wire screen.”
“Better,” I said. “What kind of jam?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is Carmen now?”
“She’s at home. She was sick last night. She’s still in bed, I think.”
“Did she go out last night?”
“No. I was out, but the servants say she wasn’t. I was down at Las Olindas, playing roulette at Eddie Mars’ Cypress Club.18 I lost my shirt.”
“So you like roulette. You would.”19
She crossed her legs and lit another cigarette. “Yes. I like roulette. All the Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life.20 The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check.”
“What was Owen doing last night with your car?”
“Nobody knows. He took it without permission. We always let him take a car on his night off, but last night wasn’t his night off.” She made a wry mouth. “Do you think—?”
“He knew about this nude photo? How would I be able to say? I don’t rule him out. Can you get five thousand in cash right away?”
“Not unless I tell Dad—or borrow it. I could probably borrow it from Eddie Mars. He ought to be generous with me, heaven knows.”
“Better try that. You may need it in a hurry.”
She leaned back and hung an arm over the back of the chair. “How about telling the police?”
“It’s a good idea. But you won’t do it.”
“Won’t I?”
“No. You have to protect your father and your sister. You don’t know what the police might turn up. It might be something they couldn’t sit on. Though they usually try in blackmail cases.”
“Can you do anything?”
“I think I can. But I can’t tell you why or how.”
“I like you,” she said suddenly. “You believe in miracles. Would you have a drink in the office?”
I unlocked my deep drawer and got out my office bottle and two pony glasses. I filled them and we drank. She snapped her bag shut and pushed her chair back.
“I’ll get the five grand,” she said. “I’ve been a good customer of Eddie Mars. There’s another reason why he should be nice to me, which you may not know.” She gave me one of those smiles the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes. “Eddie’s blonde wife is the lady Rusty ran away with.”
I didn’t say anything. She stared tightly at me and added: “That doesn’t interest you?”
“It ought to make it easier to find him—if I was looking for him. You don’t think he’s in this mess, do you?”
She pushed her empty glass at me. “Give me another drink. You’re the hardest guy to get anything out of. You don’t even move your ears.”
I filled the little glass. “You’ve got all you wanted out of me—a pretty good idea I’m not looking for your husband.”21
She put the drink down very quickly. It made her gasp—or gave her an opportunity to gasp. She let a breath out slowly.
“Rusty was no crook. If he had been, it wouldn’t have been for nickels. He carried fifteen thousand dollars, in bills. He called it his mad money. He had it when I married him and he had it when he left me. No—Rusty’s not in on any cheap blackmail racket.”
She reached for the envelope and stood up. “I’ll keep in touch with you,” I said. “If you want to leave me a message, the phone girl at my apartment house will take care of it.”
We walked over to the door. Tapping the white envelope against her knuckles, she said: “You still feel you can’t tell me what Dad—”
“I’d have to see him first.”
She took the photo out and stood looking at it, just inside the door. “She has a beautiful little body, hasn’t she?”
“Uh-huh.”
She leaned a little towards me. “You ought to see mine,” she said gravely.
“Can it be arranged?”
She laughed suddenly and sharply and went halfway through the door, then turned her head to say coolly: “You’re as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?”22
“Sure.”
“You can call me Vivian.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Regan.”
“Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.” She went on out and didn’t look back.
I let the door shut and stood with my hand on it, staring at the hand. My face felt a little hot. I went back to the desk and put the whiskey away and rinsed out the two pony glasses and put them away.
I took my hat off the phone and called the D.A.’s office and asked for Bernie Ohls.
He was back in his cubbyhole. “Well, I let the old man alone,” he said. “The butler said he or one of the girls would tell him. This Owen Taylor lived over the garage and I went through his stuff. Parents at Dubuque, Iowa.23 I wired the Chief of Police there to find out what they want done. The Sternwood family will pay for it.”
“Suicide?” I asked.
“No can tell. He didn’t leave any notes. He had no leave to take the car. Everybody was home last night but Mrs. Regan. She was down at Las Olindas with a playboy named Larry Cobb. I checked on that. I know a lad on one of the tables.”
“You ought to stop some of that flash gambling,”24 I said.
“With the syndicate we got in this county?25 Be your age, Marlowe.26 That sap mark on the boy’s head bothers me. Sure you can’t help me on this?”
I liked his putting it that way. It let me say no without actually lying.27 We said good-bye and I left the office, bought all three afternoon papers28 and rode a taxi down to the Hall of Justice to get my car out of the lot. There was nothing in any of the papers about Geiger. I took anothe
r look at his blue notebook, but the code was just as stubborn as it had been the night before.
1. The “mannish” style for women was in vogue, popularized by noted bisexual star Marlene Dietrich. Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States notes the subversive appearance in the early twentieth century of a new popular-cultural gender role: “the mannish lesbian, recognizable by her masculine clothing and short-cropped hair.” The outfit is part of Vivian’s complex encoding: she clearly uses heterosexual norms for her own ends but tempers her femininity with a hard masculine edge. Marlowe will later think that she is “just like a man” in the way she handles a cigarette. Critic Anna Livia, for one, in the wonderfully titled essay “ ‘I Ought to Throw a Buick at You’: Fictional Representations of Butch/Femme Speech,” sees the elder Sternwood sister as a kind of butch character and reads the ensuing reference to Marcel Proust as a knowing nod to the homosexual literary tradition.
Marlene Dietrich in the mannish style
Robin Hood hat (drawing by Matt Seneca)
2. Bogey was too short and Lauren Bacall was blonde, but they were the hottest couple in Hollywood at the time. Chandler had mixed feelings about the casting. He wrote to Hamish Hamilton, his British publisher, that “the girl who played the nymph sister [Martha Vickers] was so good she shattered Miss Bacall completely.”
Bogart and Bacall
3. That is, expensive and ugly.
4. A jibe at the hours Marlowe keeps, and perhaps at his sexuality as well. Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a French writer best known for his great seven-part novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, published between 1913 and 1927 and translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931.
5. A reference to the work’s atmosphere of “luxurious, intoxicating sentimentality” (as Edmund Wilson wrote in 1930), and to its homosexual and bisexual characters. Moralists of the day condemned the novel’s explorations of “degeneracy” and “inversion” as pornographic. Proust himself was gay.
6. Vivian takes Marlowe’s avowed ignorance at face value, pursuing her cultural-class advantage in their competition for verbal and sexual mastery. In fact, Marlowe gives every indication of being cultured enough to get the reference. Indeed, the working-class detective quotes Shakespeare in Farewell, My Lovely, refers to Browning (“The poet, not the automatic”) in The Little Sister, and has read Flaubert in The Long Goodbye. Here he responds with mock archness and a suitably ironic French euphemism.
This exchange became a memorable scene when played by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the film, in which Bogey leaves no doubt of the playfulness of Marlowe’s response.
7. boudoir: The definition given by Webster’s Second makes Marlowe’s joke apparent: “A small elegantly furnished room to which one, esp. a lady, may retire to be alone or to receive intimates.” Elsewhere he facetiously calls it his “private thinking parlor.”
8. That is, empty.
9. The Dionne quintuplets, identical French-Canadian girls born in 1934, captured the public’s attention as they became the first quintuplets on record to survive past infancy. This is an incongruously Pollyannaish image for Marlowe’s office, but because it’s an advertising calendar, it was free.
10. “The usual,” perhaps because Sam Spade’s office is also appointed with said swivel chair and blotter. Marlowe’s office is particularly shabby compared with Spade’s, who has a genuine oaken armchair and a brass ashtray and can afford a secretary. Ten years later in The Little Sister, Marlowe has gotten his name lettered on “a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization.”
11. The description of the office, as well as Vivian’s outfit and opening gambit (minus the Proust reference) and Marlowe’s response, is reworked from “Mandarin’s Jade.” In the short story the meeting is with a very different character, the friendly and likeable Carol Pride—who in turn reappears in Farewell, My Lovely as Anne Riordan. When Chandler’s short stories were republished, fans learned, most for the first time, how extensively he had borrowed from his own work in writing his novels. In a 1952 letter, Chandler objects to a reader’s charge that he has committed “self plagiarism”: “These old stories of mine were written for the most ephemeral possible kind of publication, one which had a life of thirty days and then was as dead as Caesar. At the time it would never have occurred to me that any of these stories would ever be resurrected, remembered, republished again in any form.” Or as he puts it elsewhere: “Pulp paper never dreamed of posterity.”
12. The American detective agency founded in 1850 by former Chicago police officer Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton agents were responsible for protecting Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War but are probably best known for their role as strikebreakers protecting business interests against organized labor. Their notoriety in this area would make “putting up a front” unnecessary or impossible. Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton operative from 1915 to 1922.
13. For Chandler, Marlowe’s relative poverty was key to his character, since it results from refusing the illicit spoils that he’s privy to as a private detective (including ones offered later in this novel). Marlowe unwaveringly chooses personal integrity—and the autonomy that comes with it—over material gain. If there is such a thing as a social outlook in the Marlowe stories, this is it. Chandler’s statement, delivered in an eloquent letter to John Houseman, deserves quoting at length:
Why does he work for such a pittance? For the answer to that is the whole story….It is the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours, or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer….There is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.
Chandler himself skirted the boundaries of success, subversion, and self-sabotage in the oil industry, the film industry, and publishing. He was not poor but neither was he as rich as a Hollywood producer. He took it out in wisecracks, in letters, and in two decades of social critique via Marlowe’s incisive voice.
14. Vivian and Marlowe’s barbed exchanges are different on paper—there’s no love story blossoming under their surface—but they’re every bit the equal of Bogey and Bacall’s on celluloid.
15. Marlowe isn’t as cynical as Vivian, at least not yet. Or he’s unwilling to join in the casual cynicism of one of the beneficiaries of this unfair system.
16. See note 6 on this page.
17. A newspaper specializing in gossip and scandal. In LA, the Hearst-owned Herald-Express excelled at covering the seamy side. Crime reporter Agness Underwood had a flair for the sensational—she once dropped a white carnation on the body of a murdered woman so that she could name the case “The White Carnation Murder.” Magazines like Photoplay and Hollywood also “reported” on sex scandals, and gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were in their heyday.
18. Marlowe will take a trip to Las Olindas in Chapter Twenty-One.
19. Probably because it’s a flashy, high-stakes game based on luck rather than skill.
20. A steeplechase is a horse race that involves jumping fences. This is the first we hear of how the General wound up in his wheelchair. He’s been crippled not by battle, but by the aristocratic sport of the leisure class.
21. A pretty good idea, but not a definitive answer.
22. This is the first time the reader learns Marlowe’s given name, although throughout the Marlowe novels almost nobody calls him “Phil.” Vivian is playing a hand here, calling him by—and showing him that she knows—his
first name, in what will be a quickly failed attempt at ingratiation.
23. Chandler’s reference to Iowa touches upon a deep demographic reality. Los Angeles in the 1930s was a city of migrants. Journalist Garet Garrett, on visiting in 1930, observed that “you have to begin with the singular fact that in a population of a million and a quarter, every other person you see has been there less than five years. More than nine out of every ten you see have been there less than fifteen years.” In 1930, ten years into what Carey McWilliams called “the largest internal migration in the history of the American people,” only 20 percent of LA residents were born in California. Newcomers continued to arrive in droves during the Depression years, although many found the city less than welcoming. The same Los Angeles that had been hawking itself to tourists and settlers nationwide since early in the century—drawing so many from Iowa, in particular, that Iowans referred to California as “the seacoast of Iowa”—now qualified its invitation. Tourist ads run in national magazines and newspapers by the All-Year Club included the warning: “Come to Southern California for a glorious vacation. Advise others not to come seeking employment lest they be disappointed, but for the tourist, attractions are unlimited.” In 1935 a bill was proposed in the State Senate to “prohibit all paupers, vagabonds, indigent persons and persons likely to become public charges…from entering California until July 1, 1939”; after it failed, the LAPD took charge of the problem of “indigent alien transients,” setting up a “Bum Blockade” to keep undesirable migrants—those targeted were primarily Dust Bowl refugees—from crossing the border. Woody Guthrie memorialized such events in his classic folk song “Do Re Mi,” as did John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.
24. “Flash” in this context implies illicitness and an association with the underworld.
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 16