“We’ll see about that,” Ohls said. “This chauffeur I spoke of that’s drowned off Lido shot a guy last night in your territory. A guy named Geiger who ran a dirty book racket in a store on Hollywood Boulevard. Geiger was living with the punk I got outside in my car. I mean living with him, if you get the idea.”
Cronjager was staring at him levelly now. “That sounds like it might grow up to be a dirty story,” he said.
“It’s my experience most police stories are,” Ohls growled and turned to me, his eyebrows bristling. “You’re on the air, Marlowe. Give it to him.”
I gave it to him.
I left out two things, not knowing just why, at the moment, I left out one of them. I left out Carmen’s visit to Brody’s apartment and Eddie Mars’ visit to Geiger’s in the afternoon. I told the rest of it just as it happened.
Cronjager never took his eyes off my face and no expression of any kind crossed his as I talked. At the end of it he was perfectly silent for a long minute. Wilde was silent, sipping his coffee, puffing gently at his dappled cigar. Ohls stared at one of his thumbs.
Cronjager leaned slowly back in his chair and crossed one ankle over his knee and rubbed the ankle bone with his thin nervous hand. His lean face wore a harsh frown. He said with deadly politeness:
“So all you did was not report a murder that happened last night and then spend today foxing around so that this kid of Geiger’s could commit a second murder this evening.”
“That’s all,” I said. “I was in a pretty tough spot. I guess I did wrong, but I wanted to protect my client and I hadn’t any reason to think the boy would go running for Brody.”
“That kind of thinking is police business, Marlowe. If Geiger’s death had been reported last night, the books could never have been moved from the store to Brody’s apartment. The kid wouldn’t have been led to Brody and wouldn’t have killed him. Say Brody was living on borrowed time. His kind usually are. But a life is a life.”
“Right,” I said. “Tell that to your coppers next time they shoot down some scared petty larceny crook running away up an alley with a stolen spare.”6
Wilde put both his hands down on his desk with a solid smack. “That’s enough of that,” he snapped. “What makes you so sure, Marlowe, that this Taylor boy shot Geiger? Even if the gun that killed Geiger was found on Taylor’s body or in the car, it doesn’t absolutely follow that he was the killer. The gun might have been planted—say by Brody, the actual killer.”
“It’s physically possible,” I said, “but morally impossible. It assumes too much coincidence and too much that’s out of character for Brody and his girl, and out of character for what he was trying to do. I talked to Brody for a long time. He was a crook, but not a killer type. He had two guns, but he wasn’t wearing either of them. He was trying to find a way to cut in on Geiger’s racket, which naturally he knew all about from the girl. He says he was watching Geiger off and on to see if he had any tough backers. I believe him. To suppose he killed Geiger in order to get his books, then scrammed with the nude photo Geiger had just taken of Carmen Sternwood, then planted the gun on Owen Taylor and pushed Taylor into the ocean off Lido, is to suppose a hell of a lot too much. Taylor had the motive, jealous rage, and the opportunity to kill Geiger. He was out in one of the family cars without permission. He killed Geiger right in front of the girl, which Brody would never have done, even if he had been a killer. I can’t see anybody with a purely commercial interest in Geiger doing that. But Taylor would have done it. The nude photo business was just what would have made him do it.”
Wilde chuckled and looked along his eyes at Cronjager. Cronjager cleared his throat with a snort. Wilde asked: “What’s this business about hiding the body? I don’t see the point of that.”
I said: “The kid hasn’t told us, but he must have done it. Brody wouldn’t have gone into the house after Geiger was shot. The boy must have got home when I was away taking Carmen to her house. He was afraid of the police, of course, being what he is,7 and he probably thought it a good idea to have the body hidden until he had removed his effects from the house. He dragged it out of the front door, judging by the marks on the rug, and very likely put it in the garage. Then he packed up whatever belongings he had there and took them away. And later on, sometime in the night and before the body stiffened, he had a revulsion of feeling and thought he hadn’t treated his dead friend very nicely. So he went back and laid him out on the bed. That’s all guessing, of course.”8
Wilde nodded. “Then this morning he goes down to the store as if nothing had happened and keeps his eyes open. And when Brody moved the books out he found out where they were going and assumed that whoever got them had killed Geiger just for that purpose. He may even have known more about Brody and the girl than they suspected. What do you think, Ohls?”
Ohls said: “We’ll find out—but that doesn’t help Cronjager’s troubles. What’s eating him is all this happened last night and he’s only just been rung in on it.”
Cronjager said sourly: “I think I can find some way to deal with that angle too.” He looked at me sharply and immediately looked away again.
Wilde waved his cigar and said: “Let’s see the exhibits, Marlowe.” I emptied my pockets and put the catch on his desk: the three notes and Geiger’s card to General Sternwood, Carmen’s photos, and the blue notebook with the code list of names and addresses. I had already given Geiger’s keys to Ohls.
Wilde looked at what I gave him, puffing gently at his cigar. Ohls lit one of his own toy cigars and blew smoke peacefully at the ceiling. Cronjager leaned on the desk and looked at what I had given Wilde.
Wilde tapped the three notes signed by Carmen and said: “I guess these were just a come-on. If General Sternwood paid them, it would be through fear of something worse. Then Geiger would have tightened the screws. Do you know what he was afraid of?” He was looking at me.
I shook my head.
“Have you told your story complete in all relevant details?”
“I left out a couple of personal matters. I intend to keep on leaving them out, Mr. Wilde.”
Cronjager said: “Hah!” and snorted with deep feeling.
“Why?” Wilde asked quietly.
“Because my client is entitled to that protection, short of anything but a Grand Jury.9 I have a license to operate as a private detective.10 I suppose that word ‘private’ has some meaning. The Hollywood Division has two murders on its hands, both solved. They have both killers. They have the motive, the instrument in each case. The blackmail angle has got to be suppressed, as far as the names of the parties are concerned.”
“Why?” Wilde asked again.
“That’s okey,” Cronjager said dryly. “We’re glad to stooge11 for a shamus of his standing.”
I said: “I’ll show you.” I got up and went back out of the house to my car and got the book from Geiger’s store out of it.12 The uniformed police driver was standing beside Ohls’ car. The boy was inside it, leaning back sideways in the corner.
“Has he said anything?” I asked.
“He made a suggestion,” the copper said and spat. “I’m letting it ride.”
I went back into the house, put the book on Wilde’s desk and opened up the wrappings. Cronjager was using a telephone on the end of the desk. He hung up and sat down as I came in.
Wilde looked through the book, wooden-faced, closed it and pushed it towards Cronjager. Cronjager opened it, looked at a page or two, shut it quickly. A couple of red spots the size of half dollars showed on his cheekbones.
I said: “Look at the stamped dates on the front endpaper.”
Cronjager opened the book again and looked at them. “Well?”
“If necessary,” I said, “I’ll testify under oath that that book came from Geiger’s store. The blonde, Agnes, will admit what kind of business the store did. It’s obvious to anybody with eyes t
hat that store is just a front for something. But the Hollywood police allowed it to operate, for their own reasons. I dare say the Grand Jury would like to know what those reasons are.”
Wilde grinned. He said: “Grand Juries do ask those embarrassing questions sometimes—in a rather vain effort to find out just why cities are run as they are run.”
Cronjager stood up suddenly and put his hat on. “I’m one against three here,” he snapped. “I’m a homicide man. If this Geiger was running indecent literature, that’s no skin off my nose. But I’m ready to admit it won’t help my division any to have it washed over in the papers. What do you birds want?”
Wilde looked at Ohls. Ohls said calmly: “I want to turn a prisoner over to you. Let’s go.”
He stood up. Cronjager looked at him fiercely and stalked out of the room. Ohls went after him. The door closed again. Wilde tapped on his desk and stared at me with his clear blue eyes.
“You ought to understand how any copper would feel about a cover-up like this,” he said. “You’ll have to make statements of all of it—at least for the files. I think it may be possible to keep the two killings separate and to keep General Sternwood’s name out of both of them. Do you know why I’m not tearing your ear off?”
“No. I expected to get both ears torn off.”
“What are you getting for it all?”
“Twenty-five dollars a day and expenses.”
“That would make fifty dollars and a little gasoline so far.”
“About that.”
He put his head on one side and rubbed the back of his left little finger along the lower edge of his chin.
“And for that amount of money you’re willing to get yourself in Dutch with half the law enforcement of this county?”13
“I don’t like it,” I said. “But what the hell am I to do? I’m on a case. I’m selling what I have to sell to make a living. What little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around in order to protect a client. It’s against my principles to tell as much as I’ve told tonight, without consulting the General. As for the cover-up, I’ve been in police business myself, as you know. They come a dime a dozen in any big city. Cops get very large and emphatic when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same things themselves every other day, to oblige their friends or anybody with a little pull. And I’m not through. I’m still on the case. I’d do the same thing again, if I had to.”
“Providing Cronjager doesn’t get your license,” Wilde grinned. “You said you held back a couple of personal matters. Of what import?”
“I’m still on the case,” I said, and stared straight into his eyes.
Wilde smiled at me. He had the frank daring smile of an Irishman. “Let me tell you something, son. My father was a close friend of old Sternwood. I’ve done all my office permits—and maybe a good deal more—to save the old man from grief. But in the long run it can’t be done. Those girls of his are bound certain to hook up with something that can’t be hushed, especially that little blonde brat. They ought not to be running around loose. I blame the old man for that. I guess he doesn’t realize what the world is today. And there’s another thing I might mention while we’re talking man to man and I don’t have to growl at you. I’ll bet a dollar to a Canadian dime that the General’s afraid his son-in-law, the ex-bootlegger, is mixed up in this somewhere, and what he really hoped you would find out is that he isn’t. What do you think of that?”
“Regan didn’t sound like a blackmailer, what I heard of him. He had a soft spot where he was and he walked out on it.”
Wilde snorted. “The softness of that spot neither you nor I could judge. If he was a certain sort of man, it would not have been so very soft. Did the General tell you he was looking for Regan?”
“He told me he wished he knew where he was and that he was all right. He liked Regan and was hurt the way he bounced off without telling the old man good-bye.”
Wilde leaned back and frowned. “I see,” he said in a changed voice. His hand moved the stuff on his desk around, laid Geiger’s blue notebook to one side and pushed the other exhibits towards me. “You may as well take these,” he said. “I’ve no further use for them.”
1. Door-to-door salesman selling products from the Fuller Brush Company, founded in 1906.
2. Marlowe’s old boss lives near Lafayette Park, west of downtown in the direction of Beverly Hills, in a large house that features a porte-cochere. He lives well, perhaps on old family money, or perhaps on the spoils of his office. He is stylish but also tough, and always looking for a fight. In some respects he recalls a slightly more colorful real-life figure, Buron Fitts.
Fitts was LA’s DA from 1928 to 1940, and also gave the impression that he was a fighter. He ascended to the office after prosecuting his predecessor, Asa Keyes, for his part in the Julian Petroleum Company scandal. During his three-term career, Fitts raised the rate of successful prosecutions from 55 percent in 1932 to 82 percent twelve years later. He lived well, didn’t shy from publicity, and enjoyed the company of movie people. Though characterized in the papers as tough and honest, he wasn’t immune from LA’s endemic corruption.
In 1934, Fitts was indicted for bribery and perjury for allegedly accepting payment to drop a statutory rape charge against a real estate developer. He was acquitted but was subsequently accused of using his position to block an investigation of the rape of Patricia Douglas at the 1937 MGM Sales Convention to protect a business associate. He was also rumored to have taken a bribe to conceal facts around the suicide of Paul Bern, Jean Harlow’s husband.
3. Early in the century, the finest Los Angeles addresses were located near downtown in Bunker Hill, West Adams, and Westlake. As the city grew, prosperous Angelenos moved farther west to Windsor Square, Hancock Park, and, in the 1920s, Beverly Hills. Some brought their mansions with them. Wilde’s home, tastefully rather than garishly well-appointed, suggests old money and an established home. Marlowe’s comment points out that in rootless and restless Los Angeles, even solid homes rest on shifting foundations.
4. As noted in the introduction, the population of Los Angeles exploded in the early twentieth century. In 1910, there were just over three hundred thousand people living in the city; the 1939 City Directory gives more than a million more. The formerly barren greater LA County housed two and a half million people by the beginning of the 1930s. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assessment, from 1928: “This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire. Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful, and thin.” Chandler had a dimmer take: he noticed a cityscape “dark with something more than night.”
5. heap: Old car.
6. “Police business,” Captain Webber says in The Lady in the Lake, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of man, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get and we get things like this.”
The image of an unarmed “perp” being gunned down (or, for that matter, beaten, as Marlowe often will be, in later novels) based on dubious provocation seems especially relevant today. Readers may recall a June 2015 incident in which LAPD officers shot an unarmed Los Feliz man in the head, then rolled him over to cuff him. This example and many others, most notably the Rodney King beating, point to a force that adheres to a culture of violence.
This can’t be classified as rogue behavior, since it is, as Marlowe’s barb illustrates, part of a long-established and accepted set of practices that can be traced back through LA history. Ernest Hopkins, author of a 1913 book called Our Lawless Police, studied police practices throughout American cities, concluding that “nothing so clearly marks our police tradition as the use of extreme and unlawful force.” Even in this context the Los Angeles police stood out, for this author, for publicly espousing “a theory of law
enforcement more openly opposed to the Constitution than any I had yet encountered.” James E. Davis, the chief of police under Mayor Frank Shaw, was notorious for the brutal tactics he encouraged, including the 1937 bombing of city reformers’ headquarters and the attempted murder of private investigator Harry Raymond.
Riveting accounts of the endemic corruption and violence in the LAPD can be found in Richard Rayner’s A Bright and Guilty Place (2009) for Chandler’s period, and John Buntin’s L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City (2010) for the period just after (the forties to the sixties).
7. California’s sodomy laws, first instituted in 1872, were not repealed until 1976. Until then, homosexual relationships were prosecutable by law. In Gay L.A., authors Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons document the history of the persecution of gays and lesbians beginning in the late nineteenth century. In 1938, the time of TBS’s writing, a Carol Lundgren reporting Geiger’s murder to the police would make him a target for the LAPD’s new Sex Squad (see note 3 on this page).
8. This rather unconvincing scenario is never replaced by any more plausible one. It might even be considered a bigger plot hole than the unsolved Owen Taylor case (see the “Who Killed Owen Taylor?” text box on this page).
9. Grand Jury: A panel of jurists convened by a court to decide if it is necessary and proper to indict someone suspected of a crime.
10. The contentiousness of the scene is pure hard-boiled formula. Cops and PIs just don’t get along. As the intrepid Race Williams puts it in Carroll John Daly’s The Snarl of the Beast (1927), generally credited with being the first hard-boiled detective novel, “Under the laws I’m labeled on the books and licensed as a private detective. Not that I’m proud of that license but I need it, and I’ve had considerable trouble hanging onto it. My position is not exactly a healthy one. The police don’t like me. The crooks don’t like me. I’m just a halfway house between the law and crime; sort of working both ends against the middle.” Naturally, this attitude doesn’t sit too well with the police, who invariably cast aspersions on the PI’s methods and motives, even when they stop short of actually accusing him or her of the crime.
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 24