The Annotated Big Sleep
Page 28
I left my bacardi and padded across the carpet. The little orchestra started to play a tango, rather loud. No one was dancing or intending to dance. I moved through a scattering of people in dinner clothes and full evening dress and sports clothes and business suits to the end table at the left. It had gone dead. Two croupiers stood behind it with their heads together and their eyes sideways. One moved a rake14 back and forth aimlessly over the empty layout. They were both staring at Vivian Regan.
Her long lashes twitched and her face looked unnaturally white. She was at the middle table, exactly opposite the wheel. There was a disordered pile of money and chips in front of her. It looked like a lot of money. She spoke to the croupier with a cool, insolent, ill-tempered drawl.
“What kind of a cheap outfit is this, I’d like to know. Get busy and spin that wheel, highpockets.15 I want one more play and I’m playing table stakes.16 You take it away fast enough I’ve noticed, but when it comes to dishing it out you start to whine.”
The croupier smiled a cold polite smile that had looked at thousands of boors and millions of fools. His tall dark disinterested manner was flawless. He said gravely: “The table cannot cover your bet, madam. You have over sixteen thousand dollars there.”17
“It’s your money,” the girl jeered. “Don’t you want it back?”
A man beside her tried to tell her something. She turned swiftly and spat something at him and he faded back into the crowd red-faced. A door opened in the paneling at the far end of the enclosed place made by the bronze railing. Eddie Mars came through the door with a set indifferent smile on his face, his hands thrust into the pockets of his dinner jacket, both thumbnails glistening outside. He seemed to like that pose.18 He strolled behind the croupiers and stopped at the corner of the middle table. He spoke with lazy calm, less politely than the croupier.
“Something the matter, Mrs. Regan?”
She turned her face to him with a sort of lunge. I saw the curve of her cheek stiffen, as if with an almost unbearable inner tautness. She didn’t answer him.
Eddie Mars said gravely: “If you’re not playing any more, you must let me send someone home with you.”
The girl flushed. Her cheekbones stood out white in her face. Then she laughed off-key. She said bitterly:
“One more play, Eddie. Everything I have on the red. I like red. It’s the color of blood.”19
Eddie Mars smiled faintly, then nodded and reached into his inner breast pocket. He drew out a large pinseal wallet20 with gold corners and tossed it carelessly along the table to the croupier. “Cover her bet in even thousands,” he said, “if no one objects to this turn of the wheel being just for the lady.”
No one objected, Vivian Regan leaned down and pushed all her winnings savagely with both hands on to the large red diamond on the layout.
The croupier leaned over the table without haste. He counted and stacked her money and chips, placed all but a few chips and bills in a neat pile and pushed the rest back off the layout with his rake. He opened Eddie Mars’ wallet and drew out two flat packets of thousand-dollar bills. He broke one, counted six bills out, added them to the unbroken packet, put the four loose bills in the wallet and laid it aside as carelessly as if it had been a packet of matches. Eddie Mars didn’t touch the wallet. Nobody moved except the croupier. He spun the wheel left-handed and sent the ivory ball skittering along the upper edge with a casual flirt of his wrist. Then he drew his hands back and folded his arms.
Vivian’s lips parted slowly until her teeth caught the light and glittered like knives.21 The ball drifted lazily down the slope of the wheel and bounced on the chromium ridges above the numbers. After a long time and then very suddenly motion left it with a dry click. The wheel slowed, carrying the ball around with it. The croupier didn’t unfold his arms until the wheel had entirely ceased to revolve.
“The red wins,” he said formally, without interest. The little ivory ball lay in Red 25, the third number from the Double Zero. Vivian Regan put her head back and laughed triumphantly.
The croupier lifted his rake and slowly pushed the stack of thousand-dollar bills across the layout, added them to the stake, pushed everything slowly out of the field of play.
Eddie Mars smiled, put his wallet back in his pocket, turned on his heel and left the room through the door in the paneling.
A dozen people let their breath out at the same time and broke for the bar. I broke with them and got to the far end of the room before Vivian had gathered up her winnings and turned away from the table. I went out into the large quiet lobby, got my hat and coat from the check girl, dropped a quarter in her tray22 and went out on the porch. The doorman loomed up beside me and said: “Can I get your car for you, sir?”
I said: “I’m just going for a walk.”
The scrollwork along the edge of the porch was wet with the fog. The fog dripped from the Monterey cypresses that shadowed off into nothing towards the cliff above the ocean. You could see a scant dozen feet in any direction. I went down the porch steps and drifted off through the trees, following an indistinct path until I could hear the wash of the surf licking at the fog, low down at the bottom of the cliff. There wasn’t a gleam of light anywhere. I could see a dozen trees clearly at one time, another dozen dimly, then nothing at all but the fog. I circled to the left and drifted back towards the gravel path that went around to the stables where they parked the cars. When I could make out the outlines of the house I stopped. A little in front of me I had heard a man cough.
My steps hadn’t made any sound on the soft moist turf. The man coughed again, then stifled the cough with a handkerchief or a sleeve. While he was still doing that I moved forward closer to him. I made him out, a vague shadow close to the path. Something made me step behind a tree and crouch down. The man turned his head. His face should have been a white blur when he did that. It wasn’t. It remained dark. There was a mask over it.
I waited, behind the tree.
1. After five chapters of new material, Chandler picks up this scene and parts of Chapter Twenty-Three from his 1934 story “Finger Man.” In the story, the Las Olindas gambling joint belongs to gangster Canales.
2. The 1939 WPA Guide calls Los Angeles the “fifth largest Mexican city in the world.” The band is one of the many ethnic presences in the margins of the main action throughout Chandler’s work.
3. rhumba: More commonly “rumba,” originally an Afro-Caribbean style of music.
4. We have seen how Chandler’s toughs and “dames” fashion displays of their respective masculinities and sexualities (see note 17 on this page). Even the band is in on the act: the Mexican orchestra simulates “Mexican orchestra,” hewing to stereotypes of ethnicity and vocation.
5. Another meticulously observed interior.
6. parquetry: Woodwork with inlay of a variety of geometric shapes.
7. croupiers: The people in charge of the gaming tables.
8. bacardi: A brand of rum. Spade drinks Bacardi in The Maltese Falcon, where it’s capitalized.
9. frail: Generic sexist term for a woman. As an adjective, Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic Devil’s Dictionary (1911) gives “liable to betrayal, as a woman who has made up her mind to sin.”
10. gentle up: Max Décharné’s fun reference work Straight from the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang gives “Add some more alcohol to the mixture, make it more potent” for “Gentle up a drink.” However, the bartender here seems to be offering to water down the straight rum. Compare this exchange in “Finger Man”: “Do you like that stuff straight, or could I smooth it out for you?” “Smooth it out with what?…You got a wood rasp handy?” (A wood rasp is a coarse metal file used in woodworking.)
11. Marlowe’s normal drink is bourbon or rye, American products; his response to the bartender indicates his low opinion of this Cuban import. He’s even more damning of the Mexican tequila he drinks in
“Finger Man”: “Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?”
12. croup medicine: Cough syrup.
13. That is, her winning run makes him want to gamble too.
14. rake: The long L- or T-shaped stick that the croupier uses to sweep chips across the table.
15. highpockets: American slang for a tall fellow, perhaps derived from baseball lingo.
16. That is, Vivian isn’t increasing the amount of money that’s already on the table, so she should be allowed to continue.
“PUT IT ON THE RED”: FROM “FINGER MAN”
The tense depiction of Vivian’s risky gamble has a precedent in Chandler’s short story “Finger Man,” which appeared in Black Mask in 1934.
The girl said: “Put it on the red.”
The croupier leaned across the table and very carefully stacked her money and chips. He placed her bet for her on the red diamond. He placed his hand along the curve of the wheel.
“If no one objects,” Canales said, without looking at anyone, “this is just the two of us.”
Heads moved. Nobody spoke. The croupier spun the wheel and sent the ball skimming in the group with a light flirt of his left wrist. Then he drew his hands back and placed them in full view on the edge of the table, on top of it.
The red-haired girl’s eyes shone and her lips slowly parted.
The ball drifted along the groove, dipped past one of the bright metal diamonds, slid down the flank of the wheel and chattered along the tines beside the numbers. Movement went out of it suddenly, with a dry click. It fell next the double-zero, in red twenty-seven. The wheel was motionless.
The croupier took up his rake and slowly pushed the two packets of bills across, added them to the stake, pushed the whole thing off the field of play.
Canales put his wallet back in his breast pocket, turned and walked slowly back to the door, went through it.
I took my cramped fingers off the top of the railing, and a lot of people broke for the bar.
17. More than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money.
18. A reminder that Mars, like the other characters in the novel, courts appearances for calculated effect.
19. As we know, Vivian has a flair for extravagant, melodramatic rhetoric. The symbolism works on the surface—see note 21 below—and also runs deeper than might be expected. See (or wait for) note 13 on this page.
20. pinseal wallet: See note 15 on this page.
21. Reminiscent of her sister’s glistening, predatory teeth. There is something of the jungle cat in Chandler’s depiction of the Sternwood sisters—and of the vampire. The folkloric bloodsucker was not invented by Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel Dracula, but that Victorian figuration set the archetype in its modern form. The German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu widened the horrific purchase. But another German might be more apt in this context. Karl Marx famously wrote in the first volume of Das Kapital (1867): “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” The idea that the wealthy Sternwoods suck the life of the living (where are you, Rusty Regan?) runs plausibly through TBS. For an extended analysis of this theme, see Sean McCann’s compelling Gumshoe America. The daughters have the vicious teeth, but it’s the General who craves the presence of a man “with blood in his veins.”
Ann Sothern commandeers the roulette table in the 1936 film Don’t Gamble with Love (Photofest)
22. Marlowe’s (and the check girl’s) quarter contrasts sharply with the preceding abundance of cash.
Monterey cypress
TWENTY-THREE
Light steps, the steps of a woman, came along the invisible pathway and the man in front of me moved forward and seemed to lean against the fog. I couldn’t see the woman, then I could see her indistinctly. The arrogant carriage of her head seemed familiar. The man stepped out very quickly. The two figures blended in the fog, seemed to be part of the fog. There was dead silence for a moment. Then the man said:
“This is a gun, lady. Gentle now. Sound carries in the fog. Just hand me the bag.”
The girl didn’t make a sound. I moved forward a step. Quite suddenly I could see the foggy fuzz on the man’s hat brim. The girl stood motionless. Then her breathing began to make a rasping sound, like a small file on soft wood.
“Yell,” the man said, “and I’ll cut you in half.”
She didn’t yell. She didn’t move. There was a movement from him, and a dry chuckle. “It better be in here,” he said. A catch clicked and a fumbling sound came to me. The man turned and came towards my tree. When he had taken three or four steps he chuckled again. The chuckle was something out of my own memories. I reached a pipe out of my pocket and held it like a gun.1
I called out softly: “Hi, Lanny.”
The man stopped dead and started to bring his hand up. I said: “No. I told you never to do that, Lanny. You’re covered.”
Nothing moved. The girl back on the path didn’t move. I didn’t move. Lanny didn’t move.
“Put the bag down between your feet, kid,” I told him. “Slow and easy.”
He bent down. I jumped out and reached him still bent over. He straightened up against me breathing hard. His hands were empty.
“Tell me I can’t get away with it,” I said. I leaned against him and took the gun out of his overcoat pocket. “Somebody’s always giving me guns,” I told him. “I’m weighted down with them till I walk all crooked.2 Beat it.”
Our breaths met and mingled,3 our eyes were like the eyes of two tomcats on a wall. I stepped back.
“On your way, Lanny. No hard feelings. You keep it quiet and I keep it quiet. Okey?”
“Okey,” he said thickly.
The fog swallowed him. The faint sound of his steps and then nothing. I picked the bag up and felt in it and went towards the path. She still stood there motionless, a gray fur coat held tight around her throat with an ungloved hand on which a ring made a faint glitter. She wore no hat. Her dark parted hair was part of the darkness of the night. Her eyes too.
“Nice work, Marlowe. Are you my bodyguard now?” Her voice had a harsh note.
“Looks that way. Here’s the bag.”
She took it. I said: “Have you a car with you?”
She laughed. “I came with a man. What are you doing here?”
“Eddie Mars wanted to see me.”4
“I didn’t know you knew him. Why?”
“I don’t mind telling you. He thought I was looking for somebody he thought had run away with his wife.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“Then what did you come for?”
“To find out why he thought I was looking for somebody he thought had run away with his wife.”
“Did you find out?”
“No.”
“You leak information like a radio announcer,”5 she said. “I suppose it’s none of my business—even if the man was my husband. I thought you weren’t interested in that.”
“People keep throwing it at me.”
She clicked her teeth in annoyance. The incident of the masked man with the gun seemed to have made no impression on her at all. “Well, take me to the garage,” she said. “I have to look in at my escort.”
We walked along the path and around a corner of the building and there was light ahead, then around another corner and came to a bright enclosed stable yard lit with two floodlights. It was still paved with brick and still sloped down to a grating in the middle. Cars glistened and a man in a brown smock got up off a stool and came forward.
“Is my boy friend still blotto?”6 Vivian asked him carelessly.
“I’m afraid he is, miss. I put a rug over him and run the windows up. He’s okey, I guess. Just k
ind of resting.”
We went over to a big Cadillac and the man in the smock pulled the rear door open. On the wide back seat, loosely arranged, covered to the chin with a plaid robe, a man lay snoring with his mouth open. He seemed to be a big blond man who would hold a lot of liquor.
“Meet Mr. Larry Cobb,” Vivian said. “Mister Cobb—Mister Marlowe.”
I grunted.
“Mr. Cobb was my escort,” she said. “Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten—when Larry Cobb was sober.”7
“Yeah,” I said.8
“I’ve even thought of marrying him,” she went on in a high strained voice, as if the shock of the stick-up was just beginning to get to her. “At odd times when nothing pleasant would come into my mind. We all have those spells. Lots of money, you know. A yacht, a place on Long Island, a place at Newport, a place at Bermuda, places dotted here and there all over the world probably—just a good Scotch bottle apart. And to Mr. Cobb a bottle of Scotch is not very far.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Does he have a driver to take him home?”
“Don’t say ‘yeah.’ It’s common.”9 She looked at me with arched eyebrows. The man in the smock was chewing his lower lip hard. “Oh, undoubtedly a whole platoon of drivers. They probably do squads right in front of the garage every morning, buttons shining, harness gleaming, white gloves immaculate—a sort of West Point10 elegance about them.”
“Well, where the hell is this driver?” I asked.
“He drove hisself tonight,” the man in the smock said, almost apologetically. “I could call his home and have somebody come down for him.”
Vivian turned around and smiled at him as if he had just presented her with a diamond tiara. “That would be lovely,” she said. “Would you do that? I really wouldn’t want Mr. Cobb to die like that—with his mouth open. Someone might think he had died of thirst.”