"Ah, Willie," she said. "You can always trust it, can't you?"
"Sure, Val."
She smiled and got out a long thin cigarette with a brown wrapper and looked in her purse, then turned toward me with the cigarette in her mouth, held in place by two fingers.
"Got a light?" she said.
I got a kitchen match out of my coat and managed to snap it into flame with my thumbnail on the first try. I held it steady for her while she leaned forward and put the tip of her cigarette into the flame. She took a deep inhale and let the smoke out slowly as she straightened.
Her hair was red, brighter than any God had ever made, but probably a version of its original shade. She had a soft face in which the lines at the corners of her mouth had deepened over the years into deep parentheses. She wore all the make-up there was and maybe a little no one else knew about. She had on false eyelashes and green eye shadow, and her mouth was made wider than her lips with thick strokes of lipstick. There was a line low on her throat where the make-up stopped short of the collar of her blouse, and the soft flesh under her chin made her neck line blend in with her chin line. Her blouse was white with a frilly collar and her skirt was black and above her knees. Her fingernails were very long and sharp and painted the same harsh red as her lipstick. She wore two large gold hoops dangling from her earlobes. Even in the dim bar I could see fine vertical lines on her upper lip, and the cross-hatching of fine lines around her eyes.
"Wine, cigarettes and a good man," she said. "All anyone can ask of life."
She drank the rest of her wine and gestured with her head for the bartender to pour some more.
"The first two sound all right," I said.
"You don't want a good man?" She laughed, a hoarse, raspy, mannish laugh that ended in a wheeze.
"Not a man's man, 1 guess," she wheezed as she pushed the laughter back in place. She coughed a little and drank some wine. I smiled encouragingly.
"Wish I could say the same," she said. "Easy to get wine and cigarettes. Hard as hell to find a good man."
She coughed again and drank some wine and picked up the little paper napkin that came with the wine, and patted her lips with it.
"And God knows I've tried a lot of them."
Her wine was gone. She glanced at the bartender, but he was looking at the old couple in the booth.
"Willie," I said, "lady needs a refill. Put it on my tab."
Willie decanted the jug wine without comment. Rang it up on my bill.
"Thanks," she said. "You seem too nice a guy to be hanging out here."
"I was going to say that about you," I said.
"Sure you were," she said. "Then you were going to put me in pictures, weren't you."
"If I'd been in the picture business a few years back," I said. I could see my face in the bar. It had the innocent oily look of a coyote stealing a chicken.
"You look like a guy could get things done if he wanted."
"I was here the other day, and saw you," I said. "There was an argument. Man and woman were hollering at each other and you were playing the jukebox."
Val drank some of her wine. Her cigarette had burned away to an unsmokable roach in the ashtray. She dug another from her purse and I had the kitchen match ready. Marlowe the courtier. I'd have made a great manservant.
"Yeah," she said, "Lola and Larry. Are they a trip? What I mean about men, you know."
"What were they fighting about?" I said. She got some wine in. She was drinking it as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been sighted in Encino.
Val's shrug was elaborate. Everything about her was exaggerated, like a female impersonator.
"What's your name, honey?"
"Marlowe," I said.
"You ever been in love, Marlowe?"
"As we speak," I said.
"Well, wait'll it goes sour," she said. I nodded at Willie and he filled her wine glass.
"When it goes sour, it's like rotting roses. It reeks."
"Lola and Larry?" I said.
"For a while, a while back." She shook her head in a slow, showy sweep. "But he dumped her."
"What was the fight the other day specifically about?" I said.
"She had something she knew," Val said. "She was going to get even, I guess."
She drank.
"A woman spurned," she said heavily. "We were made for love. We can get pretty poisonous when it turns."
She drank again. A little of the wine dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She dabbed at it again with the paper place napkin.
"She had something on him," I said.
"Sure," Val said. "And she was going to make him pay."
"What'd she have?" I said.
"Hell, Marlowe, I don't know. There's always something. Probably something on you if somebody looks hard." She laughed her wheezy laugh again, gestured at me with her wine glass.
"Prosit," she said and laughed some more. The rim of the wine glass was smeared with her lipstick.
"You know Larry too," I said.
She nodded and fished in her purse, taking things out. Compact, lipstick, a crumpled tissue, chewing gum, rosary beads, a nail file.
"You got any quarters, Marlowe?"
I slid a five at Willie.
"Quarters," I said.
He made change and put the quarters in five neat piles of four on the bar in front of me.
"You're a gennleman," Val said and took a pile and walked to the jukebox. In a minute she came back and sat on her bar stool as the first wail of a country song came on about a woman who loved a man and he done her wrong. Mood music.
"What was you asking me?" Val said.
"Did you know Larry very well?" I said, carefully. Drunks are fragile creatures. They need to be carried like a very full glass; tip either way and they spill all over. I knew about drunks. I'd spent half my life talking to drunks in bars like this one. Who'd you see, what'd you hear? Have another drink. Sure, on me, Marlowe, the big spender, the lush's pal, drink up, lush. You're lonely and I'm your pal.
"Sure, I know Larry. Everybody knows Larry. The man with the camera. The man with the pictures."
She finished her wine. Willie poured some more. He was not a boy to miss the main chance, old Willie. She needed another cigarette. I took one out of her pack on the bar and lit it and handed it to her. Maybe I wouldn't have made a good manservant. Maybe I would have made a good gigolo. Maybe I didn't want to think about that. Maybe that hit too close to home.
"I used to pose for Larry, you know."
"I can believe that," I said.
Val nodded and stared at me. "Wasn't that long ago I still looked good with my clothes off."
"I can believe that too," I said.
"Well, I did."
"Larry usually take women's pictures with their clothes off?"
"Sure," Val said. "Larry looked at more nudes than my gynecologist."
She was pleased as hell to have said that and laughed and wheezed until she got coughing and I had to beat her on the back to get her to stop.
"Wise old Dr. Larry," she gasped. "Used to peddle the stuff around the boulevard when it was harder to get. Now he wholesales it, I guess. I don't know. Who cares about dirty pictures anymore. You know?"
"Get 'em on any newsstand," I said. "Did he do any legit photography? Fashion stuff?"
Val repressed a belch, touched her fingertips to her lips automatically.
'"Scuse me," she said brightly. The jukebox moaned out another sad country ballad. The old couple in the booth got up and stumbled out, arms around each other's waist, her left hand in his back pocket, her head on his shoulder. Val was still smiling at me.
"Did he ever do fashion stuff?" I said.
"Who?"
"Larry."
"Oh, yeah, fashion stuff." She paused a long time. I waited. Time is different for drunks.
"Nooo," Val said. "He never did none. He said he did, but I never saw any or knew about anybody he photographed."
She had trouble
with photographed.
"Where'd Lola live?" I said.
"Lola?".
"Yeah."
"What about her?"
"Where'd she live?"
"Kenmore," Val said. "222 Kenmore, just below Franklin."
"She in any trouble lately?"
"Naw, Lola, she was fine. Had some alimony checks coming in every month. Me, I got to go to court to get mine. I'm in court more than the judge, for chrissake."
"Nobody mad at her or anything?"
Val grinned. Her lipstick had gotten blurred from frequent trips to the rim of her glass.
"Jes' Larry," Lola said.
"Because of the fight they had."
"Un huh."
Val drank some more wine. Some of it dribbled down her chin. She paid it no mind. She was singing along now softly to the mournful music.
"You wanna dance?" she said. "Used to dance like a swan."
"They're good dancers," I said.
"You don't have to," she said, "if you don't want." She was swaying a little to the music.
"As long as it's slow," I said. I stood and put out my arms. She slid off the stool and wavered a bit, got centered and stepped in close to me. She was wearing enough perfume to stop a charging rhino, and it hadn't come in a little crystal flagon. She put her left hand in mine, and her right lightly behind my left shoulder, and we began to move in the empty barroom to the lonesome country sound.
"Ain't supposed to be dancing in here," Willie said from behind the bar. But he said it weakly and neither of us paid him any attention. It was dim in the bar and most of the light reflected off the bar mirror and the bright array of bottles in front of it. We danced among the tables and along the booths, down toward the front where a little sunlight filtered through the dirty windows. In addition to the old cooking smell there was the fresh, delusive smell of booze that made the air seem cooler. Val put her head against my shoulder as we danced in a slow circle around the room, and she sang the song that we danced to. She knew the lyrics. She probably knew all the lyrics to all the sad songs, just like she knew just how many four-ounce glasses of white wine you got out of a half-gallon jug. The music stopped. The quarters she'd put in were used up, but still we danced, with her head on my shoulder. She sang a little more of the song and then she was quiet and all the sound was the shuffle of our feet in the empty room. Val started to cry, softly, without moving her head from my shoulder. I didn't say anything. Outside on Sunset somebody was power-shifting a car with dual exhausts and the snarling pitch changes bored through our silence. I danced Val gently past a table and four chairs and as I did she suddenly went limp on me.
I spread my feet and bent my knees and slid both my arms around her under hers and edged her to a booth. She was as limp as an overcooked noodle, her legs splayed and dragging. I bowed my back and heaved her into the booth and arranged her with as much dignity as she had left. Behind the bar Willie watched without comment.
"No need to help," I said. "She can't weigh more than a two-door Buick. I'll be fine."
"Drunks are heavy," Willie said.
I got out another twenty; they were getting scarce in my wallet. I walked over to the bar and gave it to Willie.
"When she comes around," I said, "put her in a cab."
"When she comes around," Willie said, "she's going to want to drink another gallon of white wine, until she passes out again."
"Okay," I said. "Then let her do that when she comes to."
"You spending an awful lot of dough on an old wino floozie," Willie said.
"I got a rich wife," I said.
I paid the bar bill with my last twenty and went out of there into the hot, hard, unkind sun.
21
Number 222 was on the left side as you drive up Ken-more toward Franklin. It sat up on a small lawn, its front door barely visible under the overhang of the porch roof. It was one of those comfortable cool bungalows with big front porches that they used to build at about the time that L.A. was a sprawling comfortable place with a lot of sunshine and no smog. People used to sit on those porches in the evening and sip iced tea and watch the neighbors water their lawns with long loping sweeps of a hose. They used to sleep with the front door open and the screen door held with a simple hook. They used to listen to the radio, and sometimes on Sundays they'd take one of the interurban trains out to the beach for a picnic. I parked around the corner on Franklin and walked back.
The lawn had gone to hell in front of the place. The grass was so high it had gone to seed. The house needed paint and the screen had pulled loose in the front screen door in several places and the screening had curled up like the collar points on an old shirt. The front door was locked, but the frame had shrunk up so that it didn't take much to get in. I put my shoulder against the frame and the flat of my hand against the door and pushed in both directions at once and I was in.
The place smelled like places do that have been closed up empty for a while. To the right through an archway was the sitting room. There was a couch there, half sprung, with a crocheted throw on it, turned back as if someone had been under it and just gotten up. Opposite was a big old television set on legs. On top was a square apothecary jar full of small colorful hard candies, individually wrapped in cellophane. The thin blue Navaho rug on the floor was worn threadbare, and a coffee table made of bent bamboo was shoved over near the head of the couch. There were some movie magazines and a true romance magazine and an ashtray full of filter-tipped cigarette butts. The late afternoon light as it sifted through the dusty muslin curtains picked up dust motes in the air.
The cops would have seen all this. They'd have looked at everything like they do, and anything that mattered would be down in a box in property storage with a case tag on it. Still, they didn't know all the things I knew, and I was hoping I might see something that wouldn't have meant anything to them. It wasn't in the sitting room. I moved to the kitchen. It had gotten dark. I snapped on a light. If the cops had a watch on the place they'd have seen me come in and would be here by now. The neighbors would just think I was another cop.
There was a half loaf of bread and an unwrapped stick of butter sitting on a saucer, in the refrigerator. In the freezer was a bottle of vodka. There were three or four limes turning yellow in a Pyrex dish on the kitchen counter, and some instant coffee in a jar in the cupboard. There was a shrunken bar of hand soap on the rim of the sink. That was it. No flour, no salt, no meat, no potatoes. Just bread and butter and vodka and instant coffee. The limes were probably for scurvy. I looked behind the refrigerator and under the sink and inside the empty cabinets. I took the strainer out of the sink and looked down into the drain as best I could. I checked the oven, examined the linoleum around the edges to see if anything had been slipped down underneath. I unrolled the window shades and pulled over a chair and climbed up and looked inside the glass globe on the kitchen light.
While I was doing that a voice behind me said, "Hold that pose, Sailor."
I had a gun in a shoulder rig but it might as well have been in the trunk of my car for all the good it did me standing on a chair with my hands over my head. I stood still.
"Now put your hands on top of your head and step down off of there," the voice said. It was a soft voice with no accent but a faint foreign lilt in it.
I managed to keep my hands on my head and get off the chair without dislocating a kneecap.
"Turn around," the voice said. There was nothing gentle in the softness; it was the softness of a snake's hiss. I turned around.
There were two of them. One was a California Beach Boy, lots of tan, lots of muscle, just enough brains to know the handle end of a blackjack. He had on white pants and a flowered shirt and he was holding a Colt .45 automatic like the army used to issue. He held it Southern California casual, half turned over on his palm, not aimed at anything special, but generally toward me. The other guy was shorter and slimmer. He wore a black suit, black shirt and narrow black tie and his movements were very graceful. Merely sta
nding still he looked like a dancer. He had a thick black moustache and longish black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes had no feeling in them at all. The voice belonged to him.
"So, Sailor, why don't you sort of tell me about who you are and how come you're standing on a chair in the kitchen here. Stuff like that."
"Who's asking?" I said.
He smiled without any feeling at all and pointed at the beach boy's automatic.
"Oh," I said, "him. I've met him before. He doesn't impress me."
"Tough," he said. He looked at the beach boy. "Everybody's tough," he said. He'd have been more impressed if I wiggled my ears.
"You want me to shoot some corner of him, Eddie? So he'll know we mean it?"
Eddie shook his head.
"My name's Garcia," he said, "Eddie Garcia." He nodded at the beach boy. "This is J.D. Pretty, isn't he?"
"Beautiful," I said. "If he pulls the trigger on that thing can he hit what it's pointed at?"
"From this close?" Eddie smiled. The effect was of light passing over a flat stone surface for a moment. The surface never changed.
"We represent a very important person who has an interest in this house and its occupant and we wish to report to him what you were doing in here, and why. We would rather do that than deliver your body to him in the trunk of our car."
I nodded. "Who's your man?" I said.
Garcia shook his head. J.D. thumbed the hammer back on the Colt. I looked at Garcia. J.D. didn't matter. Garcia's empty obsidian eyes gazed blankly back at me. I knew he'd do it.
"My name's Marlowe," I said. "I'm a private eye working on a case. How about you take me to your VIP and I tell him the rest. Maybe our interests would mesh."
"You know who owns this house?" Garcia said.
"Woman named Lola," I said. "She's dead."
Garcia nodded. He looked at me. There was no expression. I assumed he was thinking.
"Okay," he said. "You got a piece under your left arm. I'll have to take it. And I want to see some ID."
"Wallet's in my left hip pocket," I said.
Garcia drifted in, took the gun out of my shoulder holster, lifted the wallet off the hip and drifted out, all it seemed in one seamless motion. He dropped the gun in his side pocket and flipped open my wallet. He looked at the photostat of my license for a moment and then shut my wallet and handed it back to me. I took my hands off my head and took the wallet and slipped it in my hip pocket.
Poodle Springs (philip marlowe) Page 9