The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (7 page)

He waited a moment, then said, “Yeah, why not. Meet me at Lanigan’s.”

When I opened the door of the booth, the air from inside met the outside heat with a soundless thump. As I stepped out, the young mother swore at me and pushed past and grabbed the receiver. “Don’t mention it,” I said. She was too busy dialing to swear at me again.

*   *   *

Lanigan’s was one of those pretend-Irish places with shamrocks painted on the mirror behind the bar and photographs of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in glowing Technicolor framed on the walls. Among a shelf of bottles there was a quart of Bushmills wearing a tam-o’-shanter. Scotland, Ireland—what’s the difference? The bartender seemed the genuine article, though, short and gnarled, with a head like an oversized potato and hair that had once been red. “What’ll yiz have, boys?” he said.

Joe Green was wearing a wrung-out suit of gray linen that at some time in the past had probably been white. When he took off his straw hat, the rim of it left a livid groove across his forehead. He yanked a big red handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and mopped his brow. This brow had by now extended so far up his skull that he would very soon be officially bald.

We sat slumped in front of our beers with our elbows on the bar. “Jesus,” Joe said, “how I hate summer in this town.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s bad.”

“You know what gets me?” He lowered his voice. “You know the way your boxer shorts bunch up in your crotch, hot and damp, like some damn poultice?”

“Maybe you’re wearing the wrong kind,” I said. “Consult Mrs. Green. Wives know about these things.”

He threw me a sidelong look. “Oh, yeah?” He had the eyes of a bloodhound, loose-lidded and mournful and deceptively stupid-looking.

“So I’m told, Joe,” I said. “So I’m told.”

We drank our beers in silence for a while, avoiding our own eyes in the mirror in front of us. Pat the bartender was whistling the tune of “Mother Machree”—he was, I could hardly believe it. Maybe he was paid to do it, bringing the true lilt of the Old Sod to the City of the Angels.

“What you dig up on the Peterson bird?” Joe asked.

“Not much. I had a peek at the coroner’s report. Mr. P. took some pounding that night. You ever get a lead on who it was that ran him down?”

Joe laughed. His laugh sounded like a plunger being pulled out of a toilet. “What do you think?” he said.

“Latimer Road wouldn’t have been busy at that hour.”

“It was a Saturday night,” Joe said. “They come and go at that club there like rats at the back of a diner.”

“The Cahuilla?”

“Yeah, I think that’s what it’s called. Could have been one of a hundred cars that flattened him. And of course nobody saw nothing. You been to that place?”

“The Cahuilla Club is not my kind of spot, Joe.”

“Guess not.” He chuckled; this time it was a smaller plunger coming out of a smaller toilet. “This mystery broad you’re working for—she go there?”

“Probably.” I put my teeth together and gave them a grind; it’s a bad habit I have when I’m working up the nerve to do something I think I shouldn’t do. But there comes a moment when you have to level with a cop, if he’s going to be of any use to you. Sort of level, anyway. “She thinks he’s still alive,” I said.

“Who, Peterson?”

“Yes. She thinks he didn’t die, that it wasn’t him who got mashed on Latimer Road that night.”

That made him sit up. He swivelled his big pink head and stared at me. “Jeez,” he said. “What gives her that idea?”

“She saw him, the other day, she says.”

“She
saw
him? Where?”

“In San Francisco. She was in a taxi on Market Street and there he was, large as life.”

“Did she talk to him?”

“They were going in opposite directions. By the time she got over the surprise, she was way past.”

“Jeez,” Joe said again, in a tone of happy wonderment. Cops love it when things get turned on their head; it adds a pinch of spice to their dull working day.

“You know what that means,” I said.

“What does it mean?”

“You may have a homicide on your hands.”

“You figure?”

Mrs. Machree’s boy was standing by the cash register dreamily poking a matchstick in one of his ears. I signaled him for another couple of glasses.

“Think about it,” I said to Joe. “If Peterson didn’t die, who did? And was it really an accident?”

Joe turned this over for a minute, paying special attention to the dirty underside of it. “You think Peterson set it up so he could disappear?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said.

Our fresh beers arrived. Joe was still thinking hard. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know that, either,” I said.

“I can’t just do nothing. Can I?”

“You could maybe have the body exhumed.”

“Dug up?” He shook his head. “It was cremated.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but I should have, of course. “Who identified Peterson?” I asked.

“Dunno. I can check.” He picked up his glass, then put it down again. “Christ, Marlowe,” he said, more rueful than angry, “every time I talk to you, it’s nothing but trouble.”

“Trouble’s my middle name.”

“Ho ho.”

I moved my beer glass an inch to the side and then back again to where it had been, standing in its own ring of froth. I thought of Clare Cavendish doing the same thing a couple of hours before. When a woman gets into your head, there’s nothing that won’t remind you of her. “Look, Joe, I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe none of this is for real. Maybe my client only imagined it was Peterson she saw. Maybe it was a trick of the light or she’d had one martini too many.”

“You going to tell me who she is?”

“You know I’m not.”

“If it turns out she’s right, and this guy ain’t dead, you’ll have to name her.”

“Maybe so. But for now there’s no case, so I don’t need to tell you anything.”

Joe sat way back on his stool and gave me a long look. “Listen, Marlowe,
you
called
me,
remember? I was having a nice peaceful morning, nothing on my desk ’cept a schoolgirl that’s been missing for three days, a gun heist at a filling station, and a double murder over in Bay City. It was going to be a breeze of a day. Now I have to worry whether this guy Peterson arranged for some poor schmuck to be run over so he could vamoose.”

“You could forget I told you anything. Like I say, there may be nothing in it.”

“Yeah—like that high school kid may be visiting her grandma in Poughkeepsie, and it may be by accident those two guineas in Bay City got a slug each in the noggin. Sure. The world is full of things that only look serious on the surface.”

He slid down from the stool and took his straw hat from where it had been sitting on the bar. Joe’s face turns the color of liver when he’s annoyed. “I’ll run some more checks on Peterson’s death, or whoever it was that died, and let you know. In the meantime, you go and hold your lady client’s hand and tell her not to worry about her boyfriend Lazarus, that if he’s alive you’ll track him down or your name ain’t Doghouse Reilly.”

He turned and strode off, whacking his hat against his thigh. That went well, Marlowe, I told myself. Nice work. The bartender came and asked mildly if everything was all right. Oh, sure, I told him, everything’s fine.

*   *   *

I drove back to the office, bought a hot dog from a stand at the corner of Vine, and ate it at my desk with a bottle of soda. Then I sat for a long time with my feet up and my hat on the back of my head, smoking. Anyone looking in at me would have said I was engaged in some hard thinking, but I wasn’t. In fact, I was trying not to think. How much I might have loused things up by calling Joe Green I couldn’t say, mostly because I didn’t want to say. Had I betrayed Clare Cavendish’s trust in me by telling Joe about her spotting Peterson when he was supposed to be dead? It was hard to see it otherwise. But sometimes, when you’re getting nowhere, you have to give the wasps’ nest a wallop. But shouldn’t I have waited, shouldn’t I have followed Peterson’s trail further before I brought Joe in on the affair?

I put a hand to my forehead and gave little groan. Then I opened the drawer in my desk that’s supposed to hold document files and got out the office bottle and poured myself a stiffish one into a paper cup. When you know you’ve goofed, there’s nothing for it but to blitz a few million brain cells.

I was contemplating another belt from the bottle when the telephone rang. How is it that, after all these years, the damned machine can still make me jump? I expected it would be Joe, and I was right. “That stiff had Peterson’s wallet in his pocket,” he said. “Plus he was identified at the scene by the manager of—what did you say that club is called?”

“The Cahuilla.”

“Don’t know why I keep forgetting it. The manager is a Floyd Hanson.”

“What do you know about him?”

“If you mean have we got anything on him, we don’t. The Cahuilla is a hoity-toity outfit and wouldn’t hire anyone with a record to head it up. You know the Sheriff’s a member there, plus a couple of judges and half the business bigwigs in town. You poke a finger in there, you’re liable to get the end of it bitten off.”

“Anything in the file about a disturbance there the night Peterson, or whoever he was, got run over?”

“No. Why?” I could hear Joe getting suspicious again.

“I heard Peterson was tanked that night and kicked up a fuss in the bar,” I said. “It got so bad they threw him out. Next thing, someone found him on the side of the road as dead as a side of mutton.”

“The someone being one of the hat-check girls on her way home with her boyfriend. The boyfriend had picked her up at the end of her shift.”

“Anything there?” I asked.

“Naw. Couple of kids. They went back and got Hanson, the manager. He called us.”

I thought about this for a while.

“You there?” Joe said.

“I’m here. I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking you’re wasting your time on this, right?”

“I’ll call my client.”

“You do that.” He was chuckling when he hung up.

I drank another little drink from my trusty bottle, but it didn’t go down well. It was too hot for bourbon. I took my hat and left the office and went down in the elevator and out onto the street. The idea was to clear my head, but how do you do that when the air is as hot as the inside of a furnace and tastes like iron filings? I walked up the sidewalk a ways, keeping in the shade, then back again. The whiskey was making my head feel like it was full of putty. I went back up to the office and lit a cigarette and sat staring at the phone. Then I called Joe Green again and told him I had spoken to my client and convinced her she was wrong about having seen Peterson.

Joe laughed. “That’s frails for you,” he said. “They get a notion in their pretty little heads and make you run in circles for a while, then it’s
Oh, I’m tow towwy, Mr. Marwo, I must have been wong
.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” I said.

I could hear Joe not believing a word I was telling him. He didn’t care. All he wanted was to close the file on Nico Peterson and put it back on the dusty shelf he’d taken it down from.

“She pay you anyway?” he asked.

“Sure,” I lied.

“So everybody’s happy.”

“Don’t know if that’s the word, Joe.”

He laughed again. “Keep your nose clean, Marlowe,” he said and hung up. Joe is an all-right guy, despite his temper.

7

I could have left it there. I could have done what I’d said to Joe I’d done, could have phoned Clare Cavendish and told her she must have been mistaken, that it couldn’t have been Nico Peterson she had seen up in San Francisco that day. But why would that convince her? I had nothing new to give her. She was already aware that the dead man on Latimer Road had been wearing Peterson’s clothes and had Peterson’s wallet in his breast pocket. She knew, too, as she had told me before I’d parted from her in the leafy shade of Langrishe Lodge, that this fellow Floyd Hanson had identified the body. She had been at the Cahuilla that night, she had seen Peterson, drunk and loud, being escorted off the premises by a couple of Hanson’s goons, and she’d still been there an hour later when the hat-check girl and her boyfriend came in to tell everybody about finding Peterson dead at the side of the road. She had even gone out and seen the body being loaded into the meat wagon. Despite all that, she was certain it was Peterson she had spotted on Market Street a couple of months after he was supposed to have died. What could I say that would make her change her mind?

I still had the feeling there was something wrong with all this, that there was something I wasn’t being told. Being suspicious becomes a habit, like everything else.

*   *   *

I was pretty idle for the rest of that day, but I couldn’t get the Peterson business out of my head. Next morning I went to the office and made a few telephone calls, checking on the Langrishes and the Cavendishes. I didn’t turn up much. About the most interesting thing I found out about them was that despite their money, there were no skeletons in their closets, at least none that anyone had ever heard rattling. But it couldn’t be that straightforward, could it?

I went down in the elevator and crossed the road to where I’d parked the Olds. I had left it in the shade, but the sun had fooled me and angled around the corner of the Permanent Insurance Company building and was shining full on the windshield and, of course, the steering wheel. I opened all four windows and drove off fast to get a breeze going, but it didn’t help. What would have happened, I wondered, if somehow the English Pilgrims and not the Spaniards had landed first on this coast? I guess they’d have prayed for rain and low temperatures and the Lord would have heeded them.

It was cooler at the Palisades, where the ocean was close. I had to ask directions a couple of times before I found the Cahuilla Club. The entrance was up a leafy road at the end of a long high wall with bougainvillea blossoms spilling over it. The gates weren’t electrified, as I’d expected they would be. They were tall, ornate, and gilded. They were open, too, but just inside them a striped wooden pole blocked the way. The gatekeeper stepped out of his little hut and gave me a cheesy look. He was a young fellow in a spiffy beige uniform and a cap with braid on the peak. He had a pin head on top of a long neck and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a Ping-Pong ball when he swallowed.