The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Benjamin Black

  “That’s going to be some bruise.”

  I’ve always been fascinated by the size of Bernie’s head. Joe Green may have had a large-sized nut, but it had nothing on this guy’s. And there was so much of it on top, from the eyes up. You know that type of English bread they call a cottage loaf, like two loaves, one stuck on top of the other? That was the shape of Bernie’s noodle. Plus, it looked as if it was made not of dough but of lightly broiled beef that had been pounded into some sort of shape with a mallet.

  He wore the regulation suit of dark blue flannel, no hat, and those black shoes they must make specially for cops, as broad as boats and with a rim of sole about a half inch wide all around. He makes a lot of noise, Bernie, and he has no great love for me, but all the same he’s a straight-up fellow, the kind you’d be lucky to have beside you when a scrap breaks out. He’s a good cop, too. Would have made captain long ago if the Sheriff hadn’t rammed a heel on his neck and kept him from rising. I like Bernie, though I’d never take the risk of telling him so.

  “I was drinking an old-fashioned earlier,” I said. “You want one?”

  “No. Gimme a soda.”

  While I fixed his drink he prowled the room, grinding the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left, like an old-time pharmacist working a mortar and pestle. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  I told him, spinning the same version I’d given Joe Green. When I’d finished I said, “Bernie, will you sit down, please? You’re making my headache worse, watching you walk up and down like that.”

  He took his glass of soda and ice and we sat down opposite each other at the table in the breakfast nook. I had made another brandy-and-sugar mess for myself. It couldn’t do me anything but good.

  “I put out an all-car alert for Lynn Peterson,” he said. “Joe says you said the Mexicans were driving some sort of model made down there, big square jalopy with a canvas roof.”

  “So I’m told. I didn’t see it myself.”

  Bernie was watching me with one eye half shut. “Who were you told by?”

  “Old guy across the street. He’s the neighborhood watchman, misses nothing.”

  “You talked to him today?”

  “No—the other day, first time I went over there.”

  “Snooping on behalf of this nameless guy who’s paying you, right?”

  “If that’s how you want to put it.”

  It tickled me that he thought my client was a man. Joe Green mustn’t have bothered to fill him in on the details. That was good. The less Bernie knew, the better.

  “You going to tell me who he is, and why he has you chasing Peterson?” I shook my head slowly; shaking it fast was out of the question, with that knot throbbing away at the back of my skull. “You know you’re going to have to tell me sooner or later,” he growled.

  “If so, it’ll be much later, probably after you’ve found out for yourself. I’m no snitch, Bernie. It’s against my code of ethics.”

  He laughed. “Listen to him!” he hooted. “His code of ethics! What do you think you are, some kind of priest hearing people’s confessions and guarding their secrets?”

  “You know the score,” I said. “I’m a professional, just like you.” By now my cheek had swollen up so much I could see the bruised skin when I looked down. Bernie was right: my beauty was going to be marred for some time to come. “Anyway,” I went on, “Lynn Peterson and the Mexicans, that’s something different from the job I’m on. The two are not connected.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do, Bernie,” I said wearily. “I just do.”

  That got his anger going again. He’s unpredictable that way: anything can set him off. His meaty face turned a light shade of purple. “Goddamn you, Marlowe,” he said, “I ought to run you downtown right now and book you.”

  It’s Bernie’s policy, tried and tested over a long career: when in doubt, book ’em.

  “Come off it, Bernie,” I said, keeping it light. “You’ve got nothing on me, and you know it.”

  “What if I choose not to believe in these Mexican bandits and all the rest of the guff you’ve been feeding Joe Green and me?”

  “Why would I make it up? Why would I report a woman missing if she wasn’t?”

  He banged his soda glass down on the table so hard that one of the ice cubes in it hopped out and skidded across the floor. “Why do you do anything you do? You’re the most devious son of a bitch I know—and that’s saying something.”

  I sighed. There it was again: me as the offspring of a female dog. Maybe they all knew something I didn’t. My cheekbone and the back of my skull were pounding in unison now; it felt like a pair of jungle drummers were putting in a hard piece of practice inside my head, and I decided it was time to start easing Bernie off the premises. I stood up. “You’ll call if you hear anything, won’t you, Bernie?”

  He stayed seated and looked up at me thoughtfully. “You and this Peterson broad,” he said. “You sure you met for the first time today?”

  “That’s right.” It was more or less true: my brief encounter with her at the Cahuilla Club couldn’t be called a meeting, and anyway, that was no business of his.

  “It’s not like you, Marlowe, to pass up an opportunity—good-looking woman, empty house with a bedroom in it, that kind of thing.” Bernie’s leer is a lot worse than his scowl. “You telling me you didn’t take what was on offer?”

  “Nothing was on offer.” And besides, what did he mean, it wasn’t like me? What did Bernie know about me in that line? Nothing. I clenched a fist at my side, where he couldn’t see it. He wasn’t the only one who could get mad. “I’m tired, Bernie,” I said. “I’ve had a hard day. I need to sleep.”

  He got to his feet, yanking at the waistband of his suit pants. He was putting on fat and had a belly I hadn’t noticed before. Well, I wasn’t getting any younger myself.

  “Call if your patrol cars turn up anything, right?” I said.

  “Why should I? You said whatever you’re up to has nothing to do with this business of the Mexicans and the missing woman.”

  “I’d like to know, all the same.”

  He put his head to one side and gave a sort of shrug. “Maybe I’ll call, maybe I won’t,” he said.

  “Depending on what?”

  “On how I feel.” He stuck a finger into my chest. “You’re trouble, Marlowe, you know that? I should have nailed you in that Terry Lennox business, when I had the chance.”

  Terry Lennox was a friend of mine who’d fled a murder rap—the woman who got murdered was his wife—and then shot himself in a hotel room in Mexico, or so people like Bernie Ohls were led to believe. There’d been nothing to nail me on then, either, and Bernie knew it. He was just trying to get under my skin. I wasn’t going to let him. “Good night, Bernie,” I said.

  I put out a hand. He looked at it, looked at me, then shook it. “You’re lucky I’m a tolerant man,” he said.

  “I know that, Bernie.” I spoke meekly. No point in making him mad all over again.

  * * *

  Bernie had got in his car and driven up to the turning circle at the end of the road when another set of headlights came raking along from the opposite direction. As Bernie passed the second car, he slowed down and tried to see the driver, then went on. I was starting to shut the front door when the car drew up and stopped at the bottom of my steps. I reached to the holster on my belt but then remembered that I had no gun. Anyway, it wasn’t the Mexicans coming to call on me. The car was a red sports job, foreign, an Alfa Romeo, in fact, and there was only one person in it. I knew who it was before she opened the door and got out.

  Ever notice how a woman walks up a set of steps? Clare Cavendish did it like they all do, keeping her head down and her eyes on her feet, which she placed neatly one in front of the other on each step going up. It was like watching an ice skater make a line of tiny figure eights.

  “Well, hello,” I said. She was on a level with me now and raised her head. She
smiled. She wore a light coat and a head scarf and had on dark glasses, even though it was dark out. “I see you’ve come disguised.”

  Her smile faltered a little. “I wasn’t sure,” she said in confusion. “I mean, I didn’t know if you’d be—I didn’t know if you’d be home.”

  “Well, I am, as you see.”

  She took off her glasses and looked closely at my face. “What happened to you?” she asked in a breathy rush.

  “Oh, this?” I said, touching a finger to my cheek. “Walked into a closet door. Come in.”

  I stood back and she went past me, still looking with concern at that purple-and-yellow bruise under my eye. I shut the door behind us. She took off the head scarf, and I helped her out of her coat. I smelled her perfume. I asked her what it was called, and she told me it was Langrishe Lace. I had myself convinced by now that I’d know it anywhere. “Care for a drink?” I asked.

  She turned to me. She was blushing. “I hope you don’t mind my coming,” she said. “I expected to hear from you, and when I didn’t…”

  When you didn’t, I thought, you decided to get in your little red sports car and come find out what Marlowe is doing to earn the money you’re paying him—or not paying him, as it happened. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t have anything for you that was worth sharing. I was intending to call you in the morning, just to check in.”

  “Would you like me to go?” she asked in a suddenly hopeless voice.

  “No,” I said. “What gives you that idea?”

  She relaxed a little, and smiled and bit her lip. “I don’t often find myself at a loss, you know. You seem to have that effect on me.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to get accustomed to it, so I can judge.”

  I kissed her then, or she kissed me, or maybe we both had the same idea at the same time. She pressed her hands against my chest, but not to push me away, and I reached around and put my hands on her back and felt her shoulder blades, like a pair of neatly folded, warm wings.

  “Have a drink,” I said. My voice, I noticed, wasn’t too steady.

  “Maybe a little whiskey,” she said. “With water, no ice.”

  “The English way,” I said.

  “The Irish, you mean.” She smiled. “But just a drop, really.”

  She laid her cheek against my shoulder. I wondered if she knew about my talk with her mother. Maybe that was why she’d come, to find out what the old girl had said.

  I moved away from her then and went to fix her drink. I poured a whiskey for myself, too, a stiff one. I needed it, though I wasn’t sure how well it would mix with the brandy I’d been drinking earlier. When I turned back to her, she was looking around, taking it all in—the worn carpet, the drab furniture, the anonymous pictures in their cheap frames, the chessboard set up for a solitary game. You don’t realize how narrow the space you’re living in is until someone else steps inside it.

  “So,” she said, “this is your house.”

  “I rent it,” I said, and heard how defensive it sounded. “From a Mrs. Paloosa. She moved to Idaho. Most of the stuff is hers—or the late Mr. Paloosa’s.” Shut up, Marlowe, you’re babbling.

  “And you have a piano,” she said.

  It stood in a corner, an old upright Steinway. I’d got so used to it being there that I’d stopped noticing it. She walked across and lifted the lid.

  “Do you play?” I asked.

  “A little.” She blushed again, faintly.

  “Play something for me.”

  She turned and gave me a startled look. “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it would be—it would be vulgar. Besides, I’m not good enough to play for anyone but myself.” She shut the lid. “And I’m sure it’s out of tune.”

  I drank some of my whiskey. “Why don’t we sit down,” I said. “The couch is not as unfriendly as it looks.”

  We sat. She crossed her legs and rested the tumbler on her knee. She’d hardly touched the whiskey. Away in the distance, a police siren set up its wailing. I lit a cigarette. There are certain moments when you feel like you’ve been led to the edge of a cliff and abandoned there. I cleared my throat, then had to do it again because I really needed to. I was wondering how she’d got my address. I couldn’t remember giving it to her—why would I have, anyway? I felt a little niggle of unease. Maybe it was all that space yawning below me, just beyond the cliff’s edge.

  “I know my mother spoke to you,” Clare said. She was blushing again. “I hope it was all right. She can be a little overpowering.”

  “I liked her,” I said. “I wasn’t sure how she knew about me.”

  “Oh, Richard told her, of course. He tells her everything. Sometimes I feel as if he’s married to her instead of to me. What did she say? Do you mind my asking?”

  “I don’t mind at all. She wanted to know why you’d hired me.”

  “You didn’t tell her?” She sounded alarmed. I looked at her stonily and said nothing. She dropped her eyes. “Sorry,” she said, “that was stupid of me.”

  I stood up and went to the drinks cabinet and poured myself another slug of whiskey. I didn’t sit down again. “You know, Mrs. Cavendish,” I said, “I’m all confused here. Maybe I shouldn’t confess it, but I am.”

  “Aren’t you ever going to call me Clare?” she asked, looking up at me out of those great eyes, those very kissable lips of hers parted a little.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  I turned away and did a bit of pacing, just like Bernie a while ago. Clare watched me. “Why are you confused?” she asked finally.

  “Because I can’t figure it out. I don’t know what to think. Why do you want to track down Nico Peterson? Did you care for him that much? From even the little I’ve learned about him, he doesn’t seem your type at all. And even if you were crazy about him, wouldn’t you be perhaps a tad disillusioned that he tricked you by pretending to be dead? And why would he do that, anyway? Why would he need to disappear?”

  I was standing in front of her again, looking down. I noticed that the knuckles of her hand that was holding the glass were white. “You’ve got to give me some help, Mrs. Cavendish, if I’m to keep on searching for him, and if I’m going to call you Clare.”

  “What kind of help?” she asked.

  “Any kind you can come up with.”

  She nodded distractedly, looking around the room again. “Have you got family?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Parents?”

  “I said no. Lost them early.”

  “No brother, sisters? Cousins, even?”

  “Cousins, maybe. I don’t keep in touch.”

  She shook her head. “That’s sad.”

  “What’s sad about it?” I said, sudden anger making my voice go husky. “To you a solitary life is unimaginable. You’re like one of those big fancy cruise ships, clambered all over by sailors, stewards, engineers, fellows in crisp uniforms with braid on their caps. You have to have all this maintenance, not to mention beautiful people dressed in white playing games on the deck. But see that little skiff heading off toward the horizon, the one with the black sail? That’s me. And I’m happy out there.”

  She set the glass on the arm of the couch, taking a lot of care to make sure it was balanced right, then got to her feet. There was hardly more than a couple of inches separating us. She put up a hand and touched the bruise on my cheek with her fingers. “So hot,” she murmured, “your poor skin, so hot.” I could see little silvery flecks deep in the irises of her black eyes. “Is there a bed somewhere in this house?” she asked softly. “Do you think Mrs. Paloosa would mind if we lay down in it for a while, you and me?”

  That throat of mine needed an awful lot of clearing tonight. “I’m sure she wouldn’t,” I said thickly. “Who’s going to tell her, anyway.”

  14

  There was a lamp in the bedroom, on the bedside table, with roses painted on t
he shade. The painting was pretty crude, done by an amateur. I’d been meaning to get rid of the thing, but somehow I never had. It wasn’t that I was attached to it. It was a piece of kitsch, like so many of the other things Mrs. Paloosa stuffed her house with. She was a collector of knickknacks, Mrs. P. Or maybe accumulator is a better word—she’d accumulated all this crap, and now I was stuck with it. Not that I noticed it much. Most of it had faded into the background, and I hardly registered it anymore. That lamp, though, was the last thing I saw at night, when I switched it off, and in the darkness an image of it would stay printed on the back of my eyes for quite a while. What was it Oscar Wilde said about the wallpaper in the room where he was dying? One of us will have to go.

  Now I lay on my back, with my face turned sideways on the pillow, staring at those roses. They looked as if they were painted with thick globs of strawberry jam that subsequently dried out and lost its sheen. I’d just made love to one of the most beautiful women I’d ever been allowed to get my arms around, but nevertheless I wasn’t at ease. The fact was, Clare Cavendish was out of my league, and I knew it. She had class, she had money to burn, she was married to a polo player, and she drove an Italian sports car. What the hell was she doing in bed with me?

  I didn’t know she was awake, but she was. She must have been reading my thoughts again, because she asked, in her sultry way, “Do you sleep with all your clients?”

  I turned my head toward hers on the pillow. “Only the female ones,” I said.

  She smiled. The best and loveliest smiles have a hint of melancholy in them. Hers was like that. “I’m glad I came over tonight,” she said. “I was so nervous, and then you looked so coldly at me when I arrived, I thought I should turn around and leave.”

  “I was nervous, too,” I said. “I’m glad you stayed.”

  “Well, I’ve got to go now.”

  She kissed me on the tip of my nose and sat up. Her breasts were so small they were hardly there when she was lying down. The sight of them made my mouth go dry. They were sort of flat along the top and plump underneath, and the tips of them were turned up in a delightful way that made me smile. “When will I see you again?” I asked. On these occasions, there’s nothing original to say.