“Mr. Canning give you a free hand?”
His eyes narrowed a fraction. “More or less. We have, you might say, an understanding.”
“Which is?” I seemed to know a lot of people who had understandings with each other.
“He leaves me alone to manage the place, and I don’t trouble him when difficulties arise. Unless the difficulties are—how shall we say?—hard for me to deal with alone.”
“Then what happens?”
He smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Then Mr. Canning takes charge,” he said softly.
I found myself blinking, as if there were dust in my eyes. The bourbon seemed to be working its magic awful fast. “I can see,” I said, “you have a healthy respect for your employer.”
“He’s a person who commands respect. How’s your drink, by the way?”
“My drink is very fine. It tastes of hickory fires on fall afternoons in the far backwoods of Kentucky.”
“Why, I do believe you’re something of a poet, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I’ve read a line or two of Keats in my time. Shelley, too.” What the hell was I talking about? My tongue seemed suddenly to have a mind of its own. “But I didn’t come here to talk poetry,” I said. I felt myself sliding down on the sofa and struggled to sit up straight. I looked at the glass in my hand. The liquor in it trembled and the ice cubes knocked together with a gentle sound, as if they were discussing me among themselves. I peered around the room again, blinking some more. The sun was very bright in the window, cutting like sword blades through the slats of the wooden blind.
Hanson was watching me with close attention. “What did you come here for, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.
“Came to talk to you some more about Peterson, didn’t I,” I said. “Nico Peterson, that is.” I was having trouble with my tongue again; it seemed to have swollen to about twice its normal size and sat in my mouth like a hot, soft potato with a bristly skin. “Not to mention his sister.” I frowned. “Even though I have mentioned her. Haven’t I? Lynn, her name is. Was. Good-looking woman. Nice eyes. Nice green eyes. Of course, you know her.”
“Do I?”
“Sure you do.” I was having difficulty now with my s’s; they kept getting caught on my front teeth, like knotted-up lengths of dental floss. “She was here, that day I came to see you. When was that? Anyway, doesn’t matter. We met her coming out of the—out of the whaddyacallit, the swi—the swim—the swimming pool.” I leaned forward to put the tumbler down on a low glass table in front of the sofa but miscalculated and let go of it when it still had a couple of inches to go and it landed on the glass with a sharp crack. “You know what,” I said, “I think I’m—”
Then my voice finally gave out. I was sliding forward on the sofa again. Hanson seemed very far away and high above me and was wavering somehow, as if I were sunk underwater and looking up at him through the swaying surface.
“Are you all right, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked in a voice that boomed in my ears. He was still leaning back against the desk, still with his arms folded. I could see he was smiling.
With a big effort, I got my voice to work again. “What did you put in the drink?”
“What’s that? You seem to be slurring your words. I would have thought you’d be a man who could hold his liquor, Mr. Marlowe. It seems I was wrong.”
I reached out a hand in a crazy attempt to get hold of him, but he was way too far off, and besides I don’t think my fingers would have had the strength to fix on anything. Abruptly I lost control and felt myself tumbling to the floor heavily, like a sack of grain. Then the light slowly went out.
19
It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been slipped a Mickey Finn, and it probably won’t be the last. As in everything else, you learn to cope with it, or at least with the aftermath. Like now, for instance, when I came around and knew better than to open my eyes straight off. For one thing, when you’re in that state, even the most muted shaft of daylight can hit your eyes like a splash of acid. For another, it’s always better to let whoever it was that slipped you the dose think you’re still out cold—that way you get a while to mull things over and maybe figure out your next move, while your body readjusts itself to whatever surroundings and circumstances it finds itself in.
The first thing I realized was that I was tied up. I was sitting on a straight-backed chair and lashed to it with loops of rope. My hands were bound too, behind my back. I didn’t make a move, just stayed slumped there with my chin on my chest and my eyes shut. The air around me had a warm, woolly feel to it, and I seemed to hear water lapping gently with a hollow, echoing sound. Was I in a bathroom? No, the place was bigger than that. Then I noticed the chlorine smell. A swimming pool, then.
My head felt as if it had been jammed full of cotton wool, and the bruise at the back that López had given me had taken on a whole new lease on life.
Someone groaned nearby. The groan had a rattle in it that told me the groaner was in a lot of distress, maybe even dying. For a second I wondered if it was myself I had heard. Then a voice spoke a few yards away: “Give him some water, bring him around.”
I didn’t recognize the voice. It was the voice of a man, not young. There was a harsh edge to it. Whoever he was, he was used to giving orders and being obeyed.
There were gagging sounds then, and a hoarse cough, and the sound of water splashing on stone. “He’s almost done for, Mr. C.,” another voice said. This one I seemed to know, or to have heard before, at least. The accent was familiar but not the tone.
“Don’t let him go yet,” the first voice said. “He has to pay some more, before he gets his release.” There was a pause, and I heard footsteps approaching, with sharp, echoing clicks of shoe leather on what had to be a marble floor, and stop in front of me. “What about this one? He should be awake by now.”
A hand suddenly grasped my hair at the back and jerked my head upright, so that my eyes snapped open like a doll’s. The light didn’t hit me too hard, but for the first few seconds all I could see in front of me was a burning whitish mist with some blurred figures moving in it. “He’s awake, all right,” the first voice said. “That’s good.”
The mist began to clear. I was in the swimming pool room. The space was large and long and had a high, domed glass roof through which the sunlight streamed. The walls and floor were covered with big tiles of veined white marble. The pool must have been fifty feet long. I couldn’t see who was behind me, still holding on to a handful of my hair. In front of me and off a little to one side was Hanson, pale and sick-looking in his light blue jacket and his string tie with the bull’s-head fastener.
Next to Hanson was a short, thickset, elderly man, entirely bald, with a pointed skull and heavy black eyebrows that looked as if they’d been painted on. He wore knee-high brown boots as shiny as new-shucked chestnuts, twill pants, and a black shirt with an open collar. Around his neck he had a set of wolf’s teeth threaded on a string, along with an Indian amulet made of some kind of bone with a big, slanted blue eye painted in the middle of it. In his right hand he was holding a malacca cane, what the British call a swagger stick, I believe. He looked like a scaled-down version of Cecil B. DeMille crossed with a retired lion tamer.
Now he approached me, peering at me with his bald head held to one side and slapping himself lightly on the thigh with his bamboo stick. He stopped and leaned down and put his face close to mine, his flinty blue eyes seeming to look into my very soul. “I’m Wilberforce Canning,” he said.
I had to do some work unscrambling my lips and tongue before I could get my voice in operation again. “I guessed that,” I said.
“Did you, now. Good for you.” Hanson was hovering at his shoulder anxiously, as if he thought I might break free of my bonds and go for the little guy. Fat chance of that. Aside from the ropes holding me fast to the chair, I had about as much strength in me as a cat with the mange. “How did you get that scar on your cheek?” Canning asked.
“Mosquito bit
me.”
“Mosquitoes don’t bite, they sting.”
“Well, this one had teeth.”
I squinted past Canning to the swimming pool. The blue water looked painfully inviting. I pictured myself floating on its cool, silken surface, calmed and soothed.
“Floyd here tells me you’re a very inquisitive man, Mr. Marlowe,” Canning said, still leaning forward and gazing into my face. He touched the end of his stick almost caressingly against my cheek and the scar there. “That can be an awkward thing, inquisitiveness.” There was another groan; it came from somewhere off to my right. I tried to look in that direction, but Canning pressed the swagger stick hard against my cheek and would not let me turn my head. “You just pay attention to me, now,” he said. “Just concentrate on the matter in hand. Why are you asking all these questions about Nico Peterson?”
“All what questions?” I said. “There’s only one, so far as I can see.”
“And what’s that?”
“Whether he’s dead or just pretending to be.”
Canning nodded and took a step back, and the one behind me at last let go of my hair. Free to look now, I turned my head. Gómez and López were there, a dozen feet away down the right-hand side of the pool and facing the water, seated side by side on straight-backed chairs to which, like me, they’d been tied with lengths of slender, tightly braided rope. López, I could see, was already dead. His head was a mass of gashes and bruises, and there was a cascade of half-dried, glistening blood down the front of his Hawaiian shirt. His right eye was swollen shut, while the left one bulged out of its socket, bloodshot and wildly staring. Someone had hit him very hard on the side of the head, hard enough to pop out that eyeball. His harelip was split in a dozen places now.
Gómez too was a mess, his powder-blue suit ripped and spattered all over with blood. At least one of them had soiled himself, and the smell wasn’t pleasant. It was Gómez who was doing the groaning. He sounded half-conscious and terrified, like a man dreaming that he was falling from the roof of a high building. It looked to me as if it was only a matter of time before he joined his compañero in the happier hereafter. A man beaten to death and another one on the way there is a terrible sight, but I wasn’t about to go into mourning for this pair. I recalled Lynn Peterson laid out on the pine needles in the clearing by the side of the road that night with her throat cut and Bernie Ohls telling me what had been done to her before she died.
Now the one who had been holding on to my hair stepped out where I could see him. It was Bartlett the butler, the old guy who had served tea to Hanson and me that first time I came to the club. He was wearing his striped vest and black morning pants under a long white apron, the strings of which were tied in a neat bow at the back, and his shirt sleeves had been rolled up. He didn’t look any younger than he had before, and his skin was still gray and slack-looking, but otherwise he was a different man. How had I missed how tough he was, hard and muscular, with short thick arms and a chest like a barrel? A onetime boxer, I guessed. There were spills of blood down the front of his apron. In his right hand he was holding a blackjack, as neat a little number as you’ve ever seen, polished and gleaming from frequent use. Well, I guess butlers get called on to perform all kinds of duties in the course of their work. I wondered if he had taken the blackjack from López, the one López had used on me.
“You remember these gentlemen, I’m sure.” Canning gestured toward the Mexicans. “Mr. Bartlett here has been in serious consultation with them, as you see. It’s just as well you were in so deep a sleep, for it was a noisy exchange and at times painful to witness.” He turned to the butler. “Get them out of here, will you, Clarence? Floyd will help you.”
Hanson stared at him in horror but was ignored.
“Right-oh, Mr. Canning,” Bartlett said. He turned to Hanson briskly. “I’ll take this gentleman, you bring the other.”
He went behind Gómez’s chair and grasped the back of it and tilted it on two legs and began dragging it toward the door at the other side of the pool, the door Lynn Peterson had come through the day I’d glimpsed her here, with the towel wrapped around her head. Hanson, with a look of deep distaste, took López’s chair and tilted it back and followed after Bartlett. The chair legs made a noise on the marble tiles like fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. Lopez’s head fell sideways, that eyeball dangling.
Canning turned to me again, and again gave himself a light slap on the thigh with his swagger stick. “They weren’t very forthcoming,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the departing Mexicans.
“Forthcoming about what?” I asked. I had a sudden, sharp craving for a cigarette. I wondered if I would end up like the Mexicans, beaten to a pulp and dragged out of here still strapped to this damned chair. What a lousy, undignified way to go.
Canning was shaking his bald head from side to side. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to get much out of them in the first place,” he said.
“That must have been a relief to them.”
“I wasn’t in the business of offering them relief.”
“No, I can see that.”
“You feel sympathy for them, Mr. Marlowe? They were just a pair of animals. No, not animals—animals don’t kill for fun.”
He began to pace up and down in front of me, three tight steps this way, three tight steps that, his heels clicking on the tiles. He was one of those coiled, restless little guys, and right now he looked awfully agitated. I had that familiar metallic taste at the back of my tongue, as if I had been sucking on a penny. It was the taste of fear.
“You think I could have a cigarette?” I said. “I promise not to use it to burn through these ropes, or anything like that.”
“I don’t smoke,” Canning said. “Filthy habit.”
“You’re right, it is.”
“Have you got cigarettes? Where are they?”
I pointed with my chin toward the breast pocket of my suit jacket. “In there. Matches, too.”
He reached inside my jacket and brought out my silver case with the monogram, as well as a matchbook I’d forgotten I’d picked up in Barney’s Beanery. He took a cigarette from the case and fitted it between my lips, lit a match, applied the flame. I drew a long, deep lungful of hot smoke.
Canning dropped the case back in my pocket and resumed his pacing. “The Latin races,” he said, “I haven’t much respect for them. Singing, bullfighting, squabbling over women, that’s about their limit. You agree?”
“Mr. Canning,” I said, working the cigarette to one side of my mouth, “I’m not exactly in a position to disagree with anything you say.”
He laughed, making a thin, piping sound. “That’s true,” he said, “you’re not.” He paced again. It seemed he had to keep moving, like a shark. I wondered how he had made his money. Oil, I guessed, or maybe water, which was almost as precious in this dry gulch the early Angelenos chose to build a city in. “There are only two worthwhile races, in my opinion,” he said. “Not even races, in fact—specimens, rather. Know what they are?” I shook my head, and immediately the pain made me regret it. A flurry of cigarette ash tumbled silently down the front of my shirt and landed in my lap. “The American Indian,” he said, “and the English gentleman.” He glanced at me with a merry eye. “A strange pairing, you suppose?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I can see things they would have in common.”
“Such as?” Canning had stopped pacing and turned to me with one of those thick black eyebrows lifted.
“Devotion to the land?” I said. “Fondness for tradition? Enthusiasm for the hunt—?”
“That’s right, you’re right!”
“—plus a tendency to slaughter anyone who gets in their way.”
He shook his head and waved a reproving finger at me. “Now you’re being naughty, Mr. Marlowe. And I don’t like naughtiness, any more than I like inquisitiveness.” He paced again, turning and turning about. I was keeping an eye on that swagger stick; a slash
across the face from that would be a thing I wouldn’t forget in a hurry.
“Killing is sometimes necessary,” he said. “Or, rather, call it elimination.” His expression darkened. “Some people don’t deserve to live—that’s a simple fact.” He approached nearer again and squatted down on his heels beside the chair I was tied to. I had the uneasy feeling that he was going to make a confession. “You knew Lynn Peterson, didn’t you,” he said.
“I didn’t know her, no. I met her—”
He nodded dismissively. “You were the last human being to see her alive. That’s not counting”—he nodded toward the door—“those two pieces of crud.”
“I suppose I was,” I said. “I liked her. I mean I liked what I saw of her.”
He looked into my face from the side. “Did you?” A muscle was twitching in his left temple.
“Yes. She seemed a decent sort.”
He nodded absently. A strange, tense expression had come into his eyes. “She was my daughter,” he said.
That took a while to absorb. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing. Canning was still watching me. There was a far, deep sorrow in his face; it came and went in a matter of moments. He rose to his feet and walked to the edge of the pool and stood there in silence for a while with his back to me, looking down into the water. Then he turned. “Don’t pretend you’re not surprised, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I’m not pretending,” I said. “I am surprised. Only I don’t know what to say to you.”
I had smoked my cigarette to the end, and now Canning came and with an expression of disgust extracted the butt from my mouth and carried it to a table in the corner, holding it in front of him nipped between a finger and thumb, as if it were the corpse of a cockroach, and dropped it in an ashtray there. Then he came back.
“How is it your daughter’s name was Peterson?” I asked.
“She took her mother’s name, who knows why. My wife was not an admirable woman, Mr. Marlowe. She was part Mexican, so maybe I should have known. She married me for my money, and when she’d spent enough of it—or, I should say, when I put a stop to her spending—she ran off with a fellow who turned out to be a con man. Not an attractive history, I know. I can’t say I’m proud of that particular passage of my life. All I can offer in my defense is that I was young and, I suppose, bewitched.” He grinned suddenly, showing his teeth. “Or is that what all cuckolds say?”
The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 17
