“I know she’s dead. You just showed her to me, and Albert Schweitzer over there spelled it out in gory detail. But listen to me, Bernie: it’s got nothing to do with me. You really have to believe that. I’m what they call an innocent bystander.” Bernie snorted. “I am, honest,” I said. “It happens, you know that. You’re at the teller’s window in the bank and two robbers run in behind you and snatch every last dime in the vault and shoot the manager dead before making off with the loot. The fact that you were doing a bit of business there, putting money in your account or taking some out, that doesn’t mean you’re connected to the robbery. Does it?”
Bernie thought it over, biting the side of his thumb. He knew I was right, but in a case like this, all cops hate letting go of the one possible lead they think they have. At last he gave a disgusted snarl and flapped a hand at me as if he were swatting a fly. “Go on,” he said, “get out of here. I’m sick of you, you sanctimonious clown.”
It wasn’t nice, being called names. Sanctimonious I could take, but to be cast in the role of Coco of the red nose and the size twenty shoes, that was another thing. “I’m going home now, Bernie,” I said, keeping my voice nice and quiet, even respectful. “I’ve had a long and difficult day, and I need to lay my sore head down and rest. If I find out anything about Nico Peterson, or his sister, or any of his family or friends, and if I think it would be pertinent to this case, I promise I won’t keep it from you. All right?”
“Go boil your head,” he said. Then he turned away from me and walked back to where Torrance the medic was directing the stowing of Lynn Peterson’s broken body into the back of the ambulance.
16
I thought that was the end of the business. Bernie drew a blank on the Mexicans, as I knew he would. He said he’d contacted a friend of his in the border police in Tijuana about the possible whereabouts of Gómez and López, but the friend hadn’t been any help. A couple of things surprised me about this. First, that Bernie had a friend, and in Tijuana, of all places. Second, that there were border police down there. So that’s what those guys are at the crossing, the ones in khaki shirts with sweat-stained armpits who look at you with bored eyes and wave you through, hardly bothering to take the toothpicks out of their mouths. I must remember to show them more respect, next time I drift down Mexico way.
Anyway, I don’t know how much of an effort Bernie made trying to track down Lynn Peterson’s killers. She hadn’t been anyone much, not like Clare Cavendish, for instance. It turned out Lynn had been a dancer and had worked around the clubs in Bay City. I knew a bit about that kind of life, the grift and the grind of it. I could imagine how it had been for her. The guys with curly hair on the backs of their hands trying to paw you all the time. The night managers who applied their own, unofficial conditions of employment. The drink and the drugs, the bleary late-night weariness, and ash-colored dawns in cheap hotel rooms. I had liked her, the little I’d seen of her. She’d deserved better out of life, and out of death.
I had to make myself stop thinking about the two Mexicans. The kind of smoldering rage I felt against them burns into the soul. You have to cut your losses and move on. The gash on my cheek was healing nicely, and the lump at the back of my skull had shrunk to no more than the size of a pigeon’s egg.
A couple of days later, I went to Lynn’s funeral. It was held at a mortician’s in Glendale, I don’t know why—maybe that’s where she had been living. She’d been cremated, like her brother. The ceremony took about three minutes. There were only two mourners present, me and a distracted old girl with wire-wool hair and a pinched-up lipstick mouth painted crookedly over her real one. Afterward I tried to talk to her, but she shied away from me as if she thought I might be a brush salesman. She said she had to get home, that her cat would be hungry by now. When she wasn’t speaking, she kept moving that painted-on mouth in a sort of silent mumble. I wondered who she was—not Lynn’s mother, I was fairly sure of that. An aunt, maybe, or maybe just her landlady. I wanted to ask her about Lynn, but she wouldn’t stay, and I didn’t try to keep her. A hungry cat has to be fed.
* * *
I drove back to the office and parked the Olds. Outside the door of the Cahuenga Building a skinny young guy in a red-and-green checked jacket and a porkpie hat peeled himself away from the wall and stepped in front of me. “You Marlowe?” He had a thin, sallow face with prominent cheekbones and eyes of no particular color.
“I’m Marlowe,” I said. “Who are you?”
“The boss wants to talk to you.” He glanced past my shoulder to where a big black car was parked at the curb.
I sighed. When a guy like that stops you dead on the way to your place of work and informs you that his employer desires an interview with you, you know it’s trouble. “And who’s your boss?” I asked.
“Just get in the car, willya?” He opened the right-hand flap of his jacket an inch or two and let me see something black and shiny in there, tucked snugly into a shoulder holster.
I strolled over to the car. It was a Bentley, right-hand drive. Someone must have imported it from England. The kid with the persuader under his arm opened the rear door and stood back to let me climb inside. As I leaned down I thought for a second he was going to put his hand on the top of my head, the way the cops do in the movies, but something in my eye told him not to go too far. He shut the door behind me. It made a rich, heavy clunk, like the door of a bank vault closing. Then he went back to his perch by the wall.
I had a look around the car. There was a lot of chrome and highly polished walnut. The pale cream upholstery had that new-leather smell that’s always particularly strong in these expensive English models. In front, sitting at the wheel, was a black man wearing a chauffeur’s cap. He hadn’t made a move when I got in but had kept looking straight ahead, through the windshield, though I did catch his eye in the rearview mirror for a second. It wasn’t a friendly eye.
I turned to the fellow beside me. “So,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?”
He smiled. It was a warm, expansive smile, the smile of a happy and successful man. “You know who I am?” he asked pleasantly.
“Yes,” I said, “I know who you are. You’re Lou Hendricks.”
“Good!” The smile grew broader still. “I hate the bother of introductions, don’t you?” He had a plummy, put-on British accent. “Such a waste of precious time.”
“Sure,” I said, “jolly tedious, for busy chaps like us.”
He didn’t seem to mind being mocked. “Yes,” he said easily, “you’re Marlowe, all right, I’ve heard of your smart mouth.”
He was a large man, large enough to seem to be filling one whole side of the rear section of this overlarge car. He had a head the shape of a shoe box, sitting on three or four folds of fat in the place where there used to be a chin, and a flap of thick hair dyed the color of oiled teak was plastered sideways across his flat skull. His eyes were small and gleamed merrily. He wore a double-breasted suit cut from many yards of lavender-colored silk and a fluffed-up crimson tie with a pearl pin stuck in it. For a hoodlum, he sure was a fancy dresser. I wouldn’t have been surprised to glance down and see that he was wearing spats. Lovely Lou, they called him, behind his back. He owned a casino out in the desert. He was one of the big boys in Vegas, along with Randy Starr and a couple of other tough nuts in the gambling racket. They said he ran plenty of things besides the Paramount Palace: prostitutes, drugs, things like that. He was quite a boy, our Lou.
“I’m reliably informed,” he said, “that you’re looking for someone I’d be interested to hear something of myself.”
“Oh? Who would that be?”
“A man called Peterson. Nico Peterson. Ring a sonorous bell, does it, that name?”
“I think I hear a tinkle, all right,” I said. “Who’s your reliable informant?”
His smile turned roguish. “Ah, now, Mr. Marlowe—you wouldn’t reveal a source, why should you expect it of me?”
“You have a point there.�
�� I got out my case, took out a cigarette, but didn’t light it. “I’m sure you know,” I said, “that Nico Peterson is dead.”
He nodded, making those supplementary chins wobble. “So we all thought,” he said. “But now it seems we may all have been wrong.”
I played with the unlit cigarette, turning it in my fingers and so on. I was trying to figure out how he knew Peterson had been spotted when he was supposed to be dead. Hendricks didn’t seem the type who would be acquainted with Clare Cavendish. Who else had I talked to about Peterson? Joe Green and Bernie Ohls, and Travis the bartender, and the old guy who lived opposite the house on Napier Street. Who else? But maybe that was enough. The world is porous; things trickle through all by themselves, or so it always seems.
“You think he’s alive?” I asked, still playing for time. He did his gloating, merry smile, wrinkling up the corners of his bright little eyes.
“Oh, come on, Mr. Marlowe,” he said. “I’m a busy man, and I’m sure you are, too. We started out so briskly, but now you’re positively dragging your feet.” He heaved himself about, beached-whale fashion, and got a large white handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with a honk. “The smog in this city,” he said, putting the handkerchief away and shaking his head. “It plays havoc with my air passages.” He peered at me. “Does it trouble you?”
“Some,” I said. “But I’ve got trouble in that department already.”
“Oh, yes?”
Suddenly he didn’t seem to mind wasting time.
“Smashed septum,” I said, tapping a finger to the bridge of my nose.
“Tut tut, that must have been painful. How did it happen?”
“College days, football tackle, then a joke doctor who broke the nose again, worse, trying to fix it.”
“Dear me.” Hendricks shuddered. “I can hardly bear to think of it.” All the same, I could see him wanting to hear more. I recalled his reputation as a hypochondriac. How is it that the life of crime breeds so many genuine oddballs?
“You know Peterson’s sister got killed,” I said.
“Yes, indeed. Came in contact with a couple of truculent persons from the south, so I hear.”
“You’re very well informed, Mr. Hendricks. The papers didn’t say where the killers were from.”
He simpered, as if I’d paid him a big compliment. “Oh, I keep an ear to the ground,” he said modestly. “You know how it is.” He picked an invisible speck of something from the sleeve of his suit. “You think those southern gentlemen were also after her brother? You did run across them, didn’t you?” He tut-tutted again. “Or, rather, I think, they ran across you—that bruise on your cheek speaks volumes.”
He looked at me with sympathy. He was a man who would know about pain—the kind that gets inflicted on others, that is. Then he turned businesslike. “Anyway, back to the matter in hand—I really would appreciate a word with our friend Nico, if indeed he is still with us. You see, he used to run regular errands for me down in the land of the sombrero and the mule—nothing serious, just some little items hard to come by up here, where the laws are so unnecessarily strict. At the time of his supposed death, he had something of mine that’s since gone missing.”
“A suitcase?” I said.
Hendricks gave me a long, careful look, his eyes glittering. Then he relaxed, letting his square, lavender-draped frame sink back against the soft leather of the seat. “Shall we have a drive?” he said, then spoke to the black man in the front. “Cedric, take us for a spin around the park, will you?”
Cedric met my eye again in the rearview mirror. It seemed a little less unfriendly this time. I guess by now he knew there was nothing about me he needed to be resentful of. He steered the car away from the curb. The engine must have been idling all the time, but I hadn’t heard a sound. The British sure know how to build cars. Turning back, I caught a glimpse of the kid in the porkpie hat snapping away from the wall and lifting an urgent arm, but neither Cedric nor his employer took any notice. Muscle like that are a dime a dozen.
We whispered out into the traffic on Cahuenga, heading south at a steady twenty-five. It was strange to be moving in such a big car so quietly. Car rides in dreams are like that. Hendricks opened a walnut cabinet built into the door beside him and took out a tube of something, unscrewed the top, squeezed out an inch of thick white unguent, and began working it into his hands. The perfume that the stuff gave off seemed familiar. I glanced at the label: “Lily of the Valley Hand Lotion,” by Langrishe. It might have been an interesting coincidence, except that most of the folks in this town who lived above the breadline used Langrishe products. That was how it seemed to me, anyway—ever since I’d met Clare Cavendish, that damned perfume was everywhere.
“Tell me,” Hendricks said, “how did you know it was a suitcase I was interested in?”
I looked away from him, out at the houses and the storefronts we were passing by along Cahuenga. What could I say to him? I didn’t know where the word had come from; it had just popped out, surprising even me. In fact, it wasn’t suitcase that had come to my mind but the Spanish word maleta, and I had automatically translated it.
Maleta. Who had I heard saying that? It could only have been the Mexicans. I must have been still hearing in some sort of way even after Gómez had whacked me on the bean with his burly silver gun in Nico’s house and sent me in a heap to the floor. They must have begun grilling Lynn Peterson as I lay at their feet with stars and twittering birds circling my head, like Sylvester the Cat after he’s been socked by Tweety Pie.
Hendricks had begun drumming his sausage-shaped fingers on the leather armrest beside him. “I’m waiting for you to answer me, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, still sounding pleasant and nice. “How did you know it was a suitcase? Did you speak with Nico, maybe? Did you catch sight of the article in question?”
“I took a guess,” I said lamely and looked away again.
“Then you must be clairvoyant. That’s a useful gift to have.”
Cedric had steered us off Cahuenga, and we were traveling westward now along Chandler Boulevard. Nice street, Chandler, nothing mean about it: it’s broad and clean and well lighted at night. It wasn’t the park, though; that had just been one of Hendricks’s little fancies. He was a playful fellow, I could see that.
“Look, Hendricks,” I said, “will you please tell me what this is about? Say Peterson had your suitcase, say he died and you lost it, or he didn’t die and he took it. What’s that got to do with me?”
He gave me a mournful look, seeming sadly offended. “I told you,” he said. “Peterson gets himself dead, then suddenly he’s not dead, and next I hear you’re on his trail. That interests me. When I have an inquisitive itch, I have to scratch it—if you’ll forgive the indelicacy.”
“What was in the suitcase?”
“I told you that, too.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“You want a detailed inventory, is that it?”
“Doesn’t have to be detailed.”
His face had turned ugly, and suddenly he reminded me of a fat boy I knew at college, name of Markson, if I recall. Markson was a rich man’s son, spoiled and of a testy temperament. He colored easily, just like Hendricks, especially when he was annoyed or was told he couldn’t have something he wanted. He moved on after a couple of semesters—kicked out, some said, for smuggling a girl into his room and beating her up. I don’t like the Marksons of this world; in fact, they’re one of the reasons I’m in the business I’m in.
“Are you going to tell me what I want to know?” Hendricks said.
“Tell me what it is and maybe I will. Or maybe I won’t.”
He was looking at me and shaking his head. “You’re a stubborn man, Mr. Marlowe.”
“So I’m told.”
“I could get seriously irritated by you—by your manner, if nothing else. I’m thinking perhaps I should tell Cedric here to turn back and go pick up Jimmy—Jimmy is the young man in the unfortunate hat who invited you in
to the car. Jimmy carries out for me the more—what shall we say?—the more messy chores.”
“That gunsel lays a finger on me I’ll break his back,” I said.
Hendricks widened his piggy little eyes. “Oh-ho!” he said. “How very tough we are all of a sudden.”
“I don’t know about us,” I said, “but I am, when I need to be.”
Now Hendricks chuckled. It made him wobble all over, like Jell-O dressed up in a suit. “You’re a two-bit snooper,” he said, without raising his voice. “Have you any idea of the things I could have my people do to you? Young Jimmy may not impress you much, but I assure you, Marlowe, there are more Jimmys where he came from, and each one is bigger and nastier than the last.”
I tapped the Negro on the shoulder. “You can drop me here, Cedric. Like to stretch my legs.”
He ignored me, of course, and drove blithely on.
Hendricks sat back in the seat and kneaded his hands—without lotion, this time. “Let’s not fall out, Mr. Marlowe,” he said. “When we picked you up outside your office, you didn’t have the look of a man bent on urgent business, so why the hurry now? Stay a while, enjoy the ride. We can speak of other things, if you like. What topics interest you?”
It occurred to me he’d fit in well at the Cahuilla Club, with his phony British voice and his prissy manners. I wondered if maybe he was already a member there. Then it came to me: Floyd Hanson must have told him about me. How could I have forgotten my visit to the Cahuilla Club and my talk there with the manager? I still had that cigarette in my fingers, and now I lit it. Hendricks frowned, pressed a button on the armrest, and cracked open the window beside him. I blew some smoke in his direction, as if by accident.
“Maybe we can do a swap,” I said. “You tell me what you know about Peterson’s death, and I’ll tell you what I know about him coming back to life.” It was a long shot, especially since what I knew about Peterson, dead or alive, amounted to a very small hill of beans—in fact, it wasn’t even that; there was no hill, and the few beans I had were dry and tasteless. Still, you’ve got to try.
The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 14
