The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Benjamin Black

  I too leaned forward now, until our faces across the table were no more than a foot apart. “So, Mrs. Cavendish, I’m asking you, is it as simple as it seemed? That’s what I mean when I say I want you to level with me. You once asked me to do like Pascal and make a wager. I did. I think I lost. And by the way, you haven’t touched your drink.”

  I sat back in my chair. Clare Cavendish glanced to her right and left and then frowned. “I’ve just realized,” she said, “this is my mother’s favorite table.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a coincidence.”

  “Of course, you met here, didn’t you.”

  “In this very spot.”

  She nodded distractedly. She seemed to be thinking of many things, sifting, calculating, deciding. She took off her hat and put it on the table, beside her purse. “Is my hair awful?” she said.

  “It’s lovely,” I said. “Your hair.”

  I meant it. I was still in love with her, in some sort of painful, hopeless way. What a chump I was.

  “What were we saying?” she said.

  I think she really had lost the thread. It crossed my mind that maybe she didn’t know any more than I did, that maybe her hiring me to look for Nico Peterson really had no connection with the rest of the stuff that followed. It was possible, after all. Life is far more messy and disconnected than we let ourselves admit. Wanting things to make sense and be nice and orderly, we keep making up plots and forcing them on the way things really are. It’s one of our weaknesses, but we cling to it for dear life, since without it there’d be no life at all, dear or otherwise.

  “We were saying,” I said, “or, that is, I was saying, I was asking, if you can explain to me how your hiring me to go after Nico Peterson ties up with Peterson’s sister being kidnapped and murdered, and then her killers themselves getting killed, and Floyd Hanson killing himself, and Wilber Canning fleeing the country, and me ending up feeling like all these people rushing around have been rushing around over me, like a herd of buffalo.”

  She lifted her head quickly and stared at me. “What did you say about Floyd Hanson? The newspaper said—”

  “I know what the newspaper said. But Hanson didn’t die by accident—he tore up a sheet and made a rope of it and put it around his neck like a noose and tied the other end to a bar in the window and let himself drop. Only the window wasn’t high enough off the ground, so he had to make his legs go limp and dangle there until he had no more breath left. Think how much effort and determination that took.”

  Her face had gone ashen, which made those black eyes of hers seem to start from her face, huge and moist and glossy. “Dear God,” she whispered. “The poor man.”

  I watched her carefully. I can always tell when a man is acting, but with women I’m never sure. “This is a dirty affair,” I said, keeping my voice low and as gentle as I could make it. “Lynn Peterson died in a cruel, painful fashion. So did Floyd Hanson, though maybe he deserved to. A pair of Mexicans were beaten to death, and even if no one should feel sorry for them, it was brutal and ugly. Maybe you don’t understand the full extent of what you’re involved in. I hope you don’t, or I hope you didn’t, at least. Now you can’t pretend anymore. So are you ready to tell me what you know? Are you ready to let me in on the things I’m convinced you’ve been keeping from me all along?”

  She was staring before her, seeing horrors, and maybe she was really seeing them for the first time. “I can’t—” she said, then faltered. “I don’t—” She made a fist and pressed the whitened knuckles against her lips. A woman at a nearby table was watching her and spoke now to the man opposite, who turned his head and looked too.

  “Drink some of your drink,” I said. “It’s strong, it will do you good.”

  She shook her head quickly, still with her fist pressed hard against her mouth.

  “Mrs. Cavendish—Clare,” I said, leaning forward over the table again and speaking in an urgent whisper, “I’ve kept your name out of this all along. A very tough policeman—in fact, two policemen—have leaned on me pretty hard to tell them who hired me to look for Nico Peterson. I gave them nothing. I told them my search for Peterson had nothing to do with all the other things that happened, that it was just a coincidence that I was involved. Cops don’t like coincidences—it offends their sense of how things are in the world as they know it. As it happens, in this case it suits them to take my word for it, however much they grouse. If it turns out I’m mistaken, they won’t believe it’s a mistake, and they’ll come down on me like the vengeance of Jehovah. I don’t mind—I’ve been through things like this before, and worse. But if they turn me over, it means they’ll get to you. And you won’t like how that feels, take it from me. Even if for some reason you’re not concerned for yourself, think of what a scandal like that would do to your mother. Long ago she saw enough violence and suffered enough grief to last a lifetime. Don’t put her through that wringer again.”

  I stopped. By now I was sick to death of the sound of my own voice, and the lone drummer in my head had been joined by an entire percussion section, a bunch of amateurs who made up for in energy what they lacked in proficiency. I hadn’t eaten anything yet today, and the vodka was burning like acid through my defenseless innards. Clare Cavendish, sitting hunched in front of me and still staring before her, suddenly looked ugly to me, and I wanted to be away somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t here.

  “Give me time,” she said. “I need time to think, to—”

  I waited. I could see she wasn’t going to go on. “To do what?” I said. “Is there someone you have to consult?”

  She looked up at me quickly. “No. Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You just look to me like you’re calculating what someone else will say when you report back on what we’ve talked about here today.”

  It was true: she did seem to be thinking of someone else, the same someone she had been thinking of that night in her bedroom, though I didn’t know how I had guessed it. The mind has doors that it insists on leaning against and keeping firmly shut, until a day comes when what’s outside can be resisted no longer, and the hinges give way and the thing bursts open and all kinds of stuff comes tumbling in.

  “Give me time,” she said again. She had made fists of both hands now and was pressing them down hard, side by side, on the table. “Try to understand.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” I said, “trying to understand.”

  “I know. And I appreciate it”—she glanced up at me again, in a sort of beseeching way—“really, I do.”

  Suddenly she became very busy, gathering up her cigarettes and the ebony holder and putting them away in her purse. She picked up her hat, too, and put it on. The brim leaned down lazily over her forehead, as if a breeze had caught it in its caress. How could I have thought her ugly, even for a second? How could I have thought her anything but the most lovely creature I had ever seen, or would ever see again? My diaphragm gave a heave, like a roadway rippling in an earthquake. I was losing her, I was losing this precious woman, even if I had never really had her in the first place, and the thought filled me with a sorrow the like of which I didn’t think a person could experience and still survive.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  She looked at me and blinked rapidly, as if she had forgotten I was there or no longer knew who I was. She stood up. She was trembling a little. “It’s late,” she said. “I have—I have an appointment.”

  She was lying, of course. It didn’t matter. She had been trained from a young age to tell such lies, the mild, social ones, the lies that everyone takes for granted, or everyone in her world, anyway. I got to my feet, my ribs creaking under their casing of bruised flesh. “Will you call me?” I said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  I didn’t think she’d heard me; that didn’t matter, either.

  She turned to go. I wanted to put out a hand to stop her, to hold her there, to keep her with me. I saw myself reaching out and taking h
er by the elbow, but it was only in my imagination, and with a murmured word that I didn’t catch she turned from me fully and walked away, weaving among the tables, ignoring the many male eyes that were lifted to watch her go.

  I sat down again, though it felt more like a collapse. On the table stood her untouched drink, with a solitary olive submerged in it. Her crushed cigarette in the ashtray had a smear of lipstick. I looked at my own glass, half empty, at a crumpled paper napkin, at a flake or two of ash on the table that a breath would have blown away. These are the things that get left behind; these are the things we remember.

  I took a cab over to Barney’s Beanery to collect my car. There were three parking tickets clipped to the windshield. I tore them up and dropped them down a storm drain. It wasn’t raining; it only seemed to be, to my eyes.

  22

  That was the second time I came close to giving up. I was sore in body and spirit and could see no way forward along the path I’d been following for what seemed a very long time, although it had been no more than a week or so. The heat showed no sign of lifting, and in the mornings a pall of brownish-blue smog hung above the streets, the sun trying its best to strike through it, with not much success. The city felt like one vast, congested lung.

  I sat for hours in my office with my feet on the desk, my jacket off, and my shirt collar open, gazing listlessly into space or watching a small squadron of flies circling endlessly around the light fixture dangling from the ceiling. More than once I was tempted to get the bottle out of the drawer in my desk, but I knew what would happen if I did.

  A few would-be clients dropped in, but none of them stayed. One was a woman who was convinced that her next-door neighbor was trying to poison her cat. There was something familiar about her, and then I realized she had come to me before, a few years back, with the same complaint, and I’d given her the same brush-off. I guess she’d worked her way through all the private investigators in the phone directory and was now going down the list a second time. I should have bawled her out, I suppose, but I felt sorry for her. Awash in sadness myself, I was feeling sorry for everything, even the bonsai tree, a Japanese maple, that I had bought one day on a whim, to brighten up the office and keep me company in the long hours when nothing was happening and no one called, and that was dying despite all my efforts to save it, or because of them, maybe.

  One particularly slow morning when even the flies seemed jaded, I called Bernie Ohls, to ask him how things were going in what the newspapers, during the day or two that Harlan Potter had allowed them to stay interested, had dubbed the Cahuilla Club Case. There was nothing new, Bernie said. He sounded as listless as I felt. There was a rasp in his voice, and I guessed he had kept on smoking after he’d fallen off the wagon that night at Victor’s. I had helped him fall and felt guilty now.

  “No trace of Canning,” he said. “Bartlett is still not talking, because he can’t—you certainly fixed him, Marlowe, with that quick draw of yours. Seems the cap you put in his knee blasted a hole in an artery. They’re not holding out much hope for him. And the Mexes remain unidentified.”

  “You talk to your friends in the Tijuana border patrol again?” I asked.

  “What for? They know nothing, those guys, and care less. I figure that pair were after something of theirs your pal Peterson had run off with, and then they made the mistake of tangling with Canning and that so-called butler of his.”

  He stopped to cough. He sounded like an old Nash sedan with real bad carburetor trouble. “What about you?” he said. “You still in touch with the mystery man who hired you to find Peterson?”

  “We have off-and-on contact,” I said. “I haven’t been paid yet.”

  “That so? And to think of all the trouble you went to on his behalf.”

  “Go easy there, Bernie,” I said. “I don’t want you getting all choked up with sympathy.”

  He chuckled, but that made him cough again. “Hold out for your dough,” he croaked when the fit had passed. “Booze and smokes ain’t getting any cheaper.”

  “Thanks for that advice. I’ll try to keep it in mind.”

  He laughed again. “So long, sucker,” he said, and I could hear him wheezing as he hung up.

  I’d hardly put the receiver back in its cradle when the thing rang, making me jump, as usual. I thought it was Bernie calling me back with some further amusing crack. But it wasn’t.

  “Marlowe?” a man’s voice said, low and guarded.

  “This is Marlowe.”

  “Philip Marlowe?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The private investigator?”

  “How long is this questionnaire going to be, bud?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “This is Peterson. Nico Peterson.”

  * * *

  It was commuter hour at Union Station. The main terminus always looks to me like a giant adobe church. I parked on Alameda Street and joined the hurrying crowd. It was like diving into a swollen, surging river, except for the heat and the mingled smells of sweat and hot dogs and trains. The public address system was squawking stuff that no one could understand. A redcap, crossing in front of me, ran over my foot with the back wheel of his trolley and didn’t even say he was sorry.

  I was a little early, and to use up time I stopped at a paper stand and bought a pack of chewing gum. I don’t chew gum, but I couldn’t think what else to ask for—I’d seen enough newspapers to last me for a long time. The guy who ran the stand was fat, and his face was greased with sweat. We sympathized with each other about the heat, and he gave me a free copy of the Chronicle, which I was too polite to refuse. As soon as I was out of his sight, I dumped it in a trash bin.

  I felt as keyed up as a bobby-soxer on her way to her first Sinatra concert.

  I was still a long way off when I glimpsed Peterson through a parting in the crowd. I knew straight off it was him. There was no mistaking that pencil mustache, the oiled, wavy hair, the too-bright blue jacket and the pale slacks. He was sitting on a bench under the big departures board, which was where he’d said he’d be waiting. He looked scared all over. There was a suitcase standing beside him, and he was holding on to the handle of it as if he thought the thing might suddenly sprout legs and scuttle away.

  I hung back, struggling with a surge of surprise and confusion that hit me like a sucker punch. The shock was that I recognized the suitcase. It was made of pigskin bleached from age and had battered fittings of gold metal. I hadn’t seen it in quite a while, but there was no mistaking it.

  I moved sideways through the crowd and stopped in front of him. “Hello, Mr. Peterson,” I said. He looked up at me with suspicion and hostility in his eyes. He was everything I’d expected, and more. He was deeply tanned, and a single, glistening black curl hung down on his forehead, real cute, as if it had been arranged there, which it probably had. The collar of his shirt was open, the two flaps of it folded back nicely over the lapels of his jacket. He wore a fine gold chain around his neck, with a crucifix almost hidden in a nest of wiry black chest hair. “I’m Marlowe,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He looked past me, to see if I’d brought backup, I suppose. “I came alone,” I told him, “like you said I should.”

  “How about flashing some ID?” He hadn’t got to his feet; he just sat there looking up at me narrowly. He was trying to seem unconcerned and insolent, but he was gripping the handle of the suitcase so tightly his knuckles were white under the suntan. He had his sister’s green eyes. It was uncanny, looking into them and seeing hers.

  When I put my hand inside my jacket, he couldn’t stop himself from flinching. I brought out my license slowly and showed it to him. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.” He stood up and flexed his shoulders to make his suit jacket sit right. I could see he was a man blissfully in love with himself.

  We were about to move away when the numbers on the departure board above us changed with a loud rattle, and he flinched again. When you’re in the state
he was in, the crackle from a bowl of breakfast cereal will sound like a firing squad cocking its rifles. He was one worried fellow.

  He picked up the suitcase. “That looks heavy,” I said. “Why don’t you let a redcap take it for you?”

  “Don’t make jokes, Marlowe,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m not in the mood for humor. You packing a gun?”

  “No.”

  “No? What kind of private eye are you?”

  “The kind who doesn’t carry a gun with him everywhere he goes. Besides, a couple of Mexicans helped themselves to my weapon.”

  But he didn’t react to that the way I thought he would. He didn’t react at all.

  * * *

  We found a coffee shop away from the main concourse and sat down at a table in the corner, facing the door. The place wasn’t too busy. Customers kept looking at their watches and jumping up and rushing out, but then others came in, more slowly, to replace them. Peterson shoved the suitcase against the wall behind his chair.

  “Nice bag,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The suitcase. A handsome piece, with the gold fittings and all.”

  “It’s not mine.” He was watching the door. His green eyes were sharp and bulged a little, like a hare’s.

  “So,” I said, “you’re not dead.”

  “You’re real perceptive,” he said, with a nasty snicker.

  The waitress came and we ordered coffee. Peterson had his eye on a tough-looking type standing at the counter, wearing a gray fedora and a tie with a dragon painted on it.

  “How come you called me?” I asked.

  “Say what?”

  “Why me?”

  “I’d heard your name, then I saw you mentioned in the paper when they were running stories on Lynn.”