The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Benjamin Black

  Hendricks was watching me, watching and thinking. I guess he was counting his beans, too. “All I know about it,” he said, “or what I was told, at least, is that the poor chap was run over one dark night in Pacific Palisades by a very irresponsible driver who didn’t stop.”

  “Did you go up there and have a look at where it happened?”

  He frowned again. “Why?” he said. “Should I have?” His frown this time was prompted by worry and not disapproval of my cigarette. I decided he must really think there were a whole lot of things I knew that I wasn’t telling him. How much further could I string him along?

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound smug and in the know, “if he wasn’t killed, what did happen that night? There was a body, it was brought to the morgue and identified as Peterson’s, and then it was cremated. That would’ve taken some organizing.”

  To be honest, I hadn’t given much thought myself to this particular aspect of things. There was a body, someone did die, and whoever it was, Lynn Peterson had said it was her brother. But if Peterson hadn’t died, then who had? Maybe it was time to go and talk to Floyd Hanson again.

  Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish—but hold up there. Clare? The rest would be easy to put out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde. I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll have cause to say it again: women are nothing but trouble, whatever you say, whatever you do. I thought of the painted roses on the lamp beside my bed. That shade, like Oscar’s wallpaper, would definitely have to go.

  Hendricks was thinking again. For all his silver-tongued smoothness, he wasn’t the quickest when it came to brainwork. “Nico must have organized it all himself,” he said at last. “The accident, the hit-and-run car, the cremation. That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “He would have needed help. Plus, he would have needed a body. I don’t imagine he found a volunteer—nobody has friends that accommodating.”

  Hendricks was silent again for a time; then he shook his head as if there were flies around it. “None of that matters,” he said. “I don’t care about any of that. All I want to know is whether he’s alive and, if so, where he is. He has that suitcase, and I want it.”

  “Okay, Hendricks,” I said, “I’ll level with you. And don’t get mad at me when I do—I didn’t get in this car of my own free will, remember.”

  “All right.” He scowled. “Start leveling.”

  I tapped my cigarette on the edge of the ashtray in the armrest on my side. It had a little lid with a spring in it. Someone—Cedric, I supposed—had forgotten to clean it out, and an acrid smell came up out of it. Probably it was the smell my lungs would give off if my chest cavity were to be opened up. Sometimes I think I should lay off cigarettes for good, but if I did that, I’d have no hobbies except chess, and I keep beating myself at chess.

  I took a good deep breath, one without smoke in it. “The truth is,” I said, “I don’t know any more than you do, about Peterson or anything else. I was hired to look into his death, because there was a question as to whether it had in fact occurred. I talked to a few people, including his sister—”

  “You talked to her?”

  “For about five minutes, mostly to say what I’d like her to put in the drink she was mixing for me. Then the two men from the south burst in, and that was that.”

  “Lynn Peterson told you nothing?” He was sitting very still now and watching me very closely.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I swear it. There wasn’t time.”

  “She say anything to you about the suitcase?”

  “No.”

  He thought that over. “Who else did you talk to?”

  “Nobody much. An old guy who lived opposite Peterson. Bartender in Barney’s Beanery, where Peterson used to drop in for a drink once in a while. The manager of the Cahuilla Club”—now it was me who was giving him the searching look—“name of Hanson, Floyd Hanson.” The name didn’t have the desired effect—in fact, it had no effect at all, and I wasn’t even sure he recognized it. “Know him?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “What?” He hadn’t been listening. “Yes, yes, I know him. I go there sometimes, to the club, for dinner or whatever.” He blinked. “What’s Hanson got to do with anything?”

  “Peterson was killed outside the Cahuilla Club.”

  “I know that—I knew that.”

  “Hanson was one of the first people on the scene of the accident that night.”

  “So he was.” He paused, biting at the side of his mouth. “Did he have anything to say—anything to tell you?”

  “No.”

  Now Hendricks got out Ma Langrishe’s lily of the valley lotion again and gave his hands another tender treatment. Maybe it soothed his nerves or helped him think. In that department, he could use all the help available. “Look, Marlowe,” he said, “I like you. I like the way you conduct yourself. You’ve got a brain, that’s apparent. Plus, you know how to keep your mouth shut. I could use a man like you.”

  I laughed. “Don’t even bother asking,” I said. He held up a hand the size of a small side of pork. Why do fat men insist on wearing rings? A ring on fingers like those always makes me think of prize hogs.

  “I’m not offering you a job,” he said. “I know I’d be wasting my time. But I’d like to hire you to look for Nico Peterson.”

  I laughed again, and put a bit of mirth in it this time. “Don’t you listen? I’m already looking for Peterson, on behalf of someone else.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I mean really look for him. You obviously haven’t put your heart into it so far.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  He opened his eyes and bored them into me. “Because you haven’t found him! I know you, Marlowe, I know what you’re like. You put your mind to something, you’re going to get it done.” By now his British accent had slipped badly. “What are you being paid, couple of hundred? I’ll give you a thousand. Cedric!” He held out his hand. In the front seat the black man leaned sideways, not taking his eye off the road, clicked open the glove compartment, and brought out a tall black leather wallet and passed it back over his shoulder. Hendricks took it from him and flipped the clasp and extracted from a pocket inside it five C-notes in mint condition and fanned them in front of me like a hand of cards. “Half now, half on discovery. What do you say?”

  “I say phooey,” I said. I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and let the spring lid snap shut. “I’ve already been hired to find Peterson—if he’s alive, which he’s probably not. But if he is, and I find him, it won’t be for you I do it. You got that? I have standards. They’re not very high, they’re not very noble, but on the other hand, they’re not for sale. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to my job. Cedric, stop the car—and do it this time or I’ll twist your head off.”

  Cedric glanced into the mirror, in Hendricks’s direction, and Hendricks gave a curt nod, and we drifted to the right and stopped. Hendricks still had the money in his hand, but now he heaved a sigh and tucked the bills away into the wallet and snapped the clasp. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, pursing his lips so that he looked like a baby—a baby hippo, say. “If you find him, I’ll know. Then I’ll come get him. And when that happens, I hope you won’t try to stand in the way, Mr. Marlowe.”

  I opened the door—it felt like it had as much steel in it as a ship’s bulkhead—and put a foot to the pavement. Then I turned back. “You know, Hendricks,” I said, “you’re all the same, all you guys in the rackets. You think because you have limitless wads of dough and a team of heavies behind you, there’s no one who’ll say no to you. Well, someone just did say no, and he’s going to keep on saying it, no matter how many Jimmys you send after him.”

  Hendricks was beaming at me with what seemed genuine delight. “Ah, Mr. Marlowe, you’re a man of spirit, you are that, and I admire you for it.” He nodded happily, once more every inch the picture
of a proper British gent. “I hope our paths cross again. I have a fair notion they will.”

  “If they do, be careful you don’t get tripped up. So long.”

  I climbed out and pushed the door shut behind me. As the car purred out into the traffic, I heard Hendricks blowing his nose again. It was like the sound of a distant foghorn.

  17

  The hour was long past midnight, and I was lying on my bed in my shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling. The bedside lamp was on, and those painted roses were throwing shadows up the walls—they looked like bloodstains someone had started to wash away and then given up on.

  I was thinking about this and that, this being Clare Cavendish, and that being Clare Cavendish too. The side of the bed I was on was the side where she’d lain, and I could smell the fragrance of her hair on the pillow, or thought I could, anyway. I was telling myself how right I’d been to let her go. She was not only good-looking but loaded, and that kind of woman just wasn’t for me. Linda Loring, over there in Paris, was another of the same type, which was why I wasn’t too keen on marrying her, though she kept on asking. Linda and I went to bed together once, and I guess she did love me, but why she thought love should inevitably lead to marriage, I didn’t know. Her sister had been married to Terry Lennox and ended up with a bullet in her brain and her face smashed in. Hardly an example of conjugal bliss. Besides, I wasn’t young anymore, and maybe I wasn’t going to marry anyone.

  The phone rang, and I knew it was Clare. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. I have a thing with phones—I hate them, but I seem to be on their wavelength in some funny way.

  “Is that you?” Clare said.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “It’s late, I know. Were you asleep? I’m sorry if I woke you.” She spoke very slowly, as if in a trance. “I couldn’t think who else to call.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I wonder—I wonder if you could come to the house?”

  “To your house? Now?”

  “Yes. I need—I need someone to—” Her voice began to shake and she had to stop for a few seconds and get it under control. She sounded close to hysteria. “It’s Rett,” she said.

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes—Everett.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  She paused again. “I really would appreciate if you could come here. Do you think you could? Am I asking too much?”

  “I’ll come,” I said.

  Of course I’d come. I would have gone to her if she’d been calling from the dark side of the moon. It’s strange, the sudden way things can change. A minute ago I’d been congratulating myself on getting rid of her, but now it was as if a door had been flung open inside me and I was running out through it with my hat in my hand and my coattails flying. Why had I driven her away, making dumb wisecracks and acting like a heel? What the hell was wrong with me, to send a gorgeous woman like that out into the night with her lips set like a vise and her forehead pale with anger? Did I think I was such a hotshot that I could afford to push her away like that, as if the world were crowded with Clare Cavendishes and all I had to do was snap my fingers and another one would come hurrying up the steps to my front door, with her head down, putting one foot neatly in front of the other in little figure eights?

  * * *

  Outside, the street was deserted, and a warm mist was wafting down from the hills. Across the way, the eucalyptus trees stood motionless in the light from the streetlamp. They were like a band of accusers staring at me silently as I got into the Olds. Hadn’t they told me so? Hadn’t they said I was a fool that other night when I’d stood on the redwood steps and watched Clare Cavendish hurrying down them and made no attempt to stop her?

  I drove across the city, too fast, but luckily there were no patrol cars out. Ahead of me a quarter-moon was flying through the mist as I hit the coast and turned right. Ghostly waves were breaking in the moonlight, and farther out the night was an empty blackness, with no horizon. I need someone, she’d said. I need someone.

  I turned in at the gates of Langrishe Lodge and cut the headlights, as Clare had asked me to. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know I was coming; by “anyone” I presumed she meant her mother, maybe her husband, too. I drove around the side of the house and parked opposite the conservatory. There were lights in some of the windows, but it didn’t look like there were people in any of the rooms.

  I turned off the engine and sat with the window down, hearing the distant sound of the ocean and the odd seabird sleepily crying. I needed a cigarette but didn’t want to strike a light. The misted air was warmly damp against my face. I couldn’t be sure that Clare would know I had arrived. She’d told me where to stop and said she’d find me. I settled down to wait. It’s part of the story of my life, sitting in cars late at night with stale cigarette smoke in my nostrils and the night birds crying.

  I didn’t have to wait long. No more than a couple of minutes had passed when I spotted a figure coming toward me through the mist. It was Clare. She had on a long, dark coat that was tightly fastened at her throat. I got out of the car.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said in an agitated whisper. I wanted to take her in my arms but didn’t. She closed her fingers on my wrist for a second, then turned back toward the house.

  I followed her. The French doors were standing open, and we went inside. She didn’t switch on the light. She knew her way through the darkened house, but I had to go cautiously among the dim shapes of the furniture. She led me up a long, curving staircase and down a carpeted corridor. There were wall lights burning here, the bulbs turned low. She had taken off the dark coat downstairs. Underneath she wore a cream-colored dress. Her white shoes were wet from the garden, and her ankles were slim and shapely, with deep scoops at the back, smooth and pale, like the inside of a seashell, between the bone and the tendon.

  “In here,” she said and again fixed her fingers urgently on my wrist.

  The room had the look of a stage set, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the way it was lit. There were two lamps, a small one on a dressing table and a big one beside the bed, with a tan shade that must have been two feet in diameter. The bed was the size of a raft, and Everett Edwards the Third looked very small lying on it, passed out cold under a tangle of sheets. He was on his back, with his hands clasped over his breast, like the corpse of a martyr in a painting by an old master. His face was the same color as the sheets; his hair hung lank, soaked with sweat. He was wearing an undershirt with dried vomit on the front of it, and there were flecks of dried foam at the corners of his mouth.

  “What’s the matter with him?” I asked, though I could pretty well guess.

  “He’s sick,” Clare said. She was standing beside the bed, gazing down at her brother. She looked like the mother of the martyr. “He—he took something.”

  I lifted his left arm and turned it over and saw the puncture marks, some old and some new, stretching in a ragged line from the wrist to the inner side of the elbow. “Where’s the needle?” I asked.

  She made a jerking motion with her hand. “I threw it away.”

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “I don’t know. An hour, maybe. I found him on the stairs. He’d been wandering through the house, I suppose, and must have passed out. I got him in here, somehow—this is my room, not his. I didn’t know what else to do. That’s when I called you.”

  “Has he been like this before?”

  “Never like this, no, never this bad.” She turned to me with a stricken look. “Do you think he’s dying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “His breathing’s not too bad. Have you called a doctor?”

  “No. I didn’t dare.”

  “He needs medical attention,” I said. “Have you got a phone in here?”

  She led me to the dressing table. The phone was custom-made, black and shiny with silver trimmings. I picked up the receiver and dialed. How the hell I had the number in my head
I don’t know—it was as if my fingers remembered, not me. It rang for a long time; then a crisp, cold voice said, “Yes?”

  “Dr. Loring,” I said. “It’s Marlowe, Philip Marlowe.”

  I thought I heard a quick intake of breath. There was a humming silence for some seconds; then Loring spoke again. “Marlowe,” he said, making it sound like a curse word. “Why are you calling me at this hour of the night? Why are you calling me at all?”

  “I need your help.”

  “You have the nerve to—?”

  “Listen,” I said, “it has nothing to do with me—I’m acting for a friend. There’s a man passed out here, and he needs help.”

  “And you call me?”

  “I wouldn’t have, if I’d been able to think of someone else.”

  “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Wait. What about that oath you guys take? This man may die if he doesn’t get help.”

  There was a silence. Clare had been standing close beside me all this while, watching me as if she could read in my face Loring’s side of the exchange.

  “What’s wrong with this person?” Loring asked.

  “He took an overdose.”

  “He tried to kill himself?”

  “No. He was shooting up.”

  “‘Shooting up’?” I could picture him grimacing in distaste.

  “Yeah,” I said, “he’s an addict. That make a difference? Addicts are people too.”

  “How dare you lecture me!”

  “I’m not lecturing you, Doc,” I said. “It’s late, I’m tired, you were the only name I could come up with—”

  “Doesn’t this person have a family? Don’t they have a doctor of their own?”

  Clare was still watching me, hanging on every word. I turned away from her and cupped my hand around the mouthpiece. “The name here is Cavendish,” I said quietly. “Also Langrishe. That mean anything to you?”

  There was another pause. One good thing about Loring was that he was a snob—a good thing in the present circumstances, I mean. “Is this Dorothea Langrishe you’re talking about?” he asked. I could hear the change of tone in his voice, the little reverent hush that had come into it.