The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Benjamin Black

  “So you knew I was after you.”

  “What do you mean, after me?”

  “I’ve been looking into the circumstances of your sad demise.”

  “That so? On behalf of who?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  His face took on a bitter twist. “Sure, I can guess.”

  The fellow at the counter in the fedora drank the last of his coffee and sauntered out, whistling. I could feel Peterson relaxing a notch or two.

  “I talked to Mandy Rogers,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said indifferently. “Nice kid.” It was obvious Mandy wasn’t a significant part of his landscape anymore. If she ever had been.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” I said.

  He as good as shrugged. “Yeah, she was always unlucky.”

  I felt like hitting him, but instead I said, “What do you want with me, Peterson?”

  He scratched his jaw with a fingernail, making a rasping sound. “I need you to run an errand for me,” he said. “Pays a hundred bucks.”

  “What kind of errand?”

  He was watching the door again. “An easy one,” he said. “I need the suitcase delivered to a certain party.”

  “Oh, yes? Why can’t you do it yourself?”

  “Too busy,” he said. He snickered again. It was the kind of noise that would make me very irritated if I had to hear it very often. “You want the job or not?”

  “Let’s hear some details,” I said.

  Our coffee came, in those big, off-white cups you see only in railway stations and the less greasy of greasy spoons. I tasted the coffee and was sorry I had.

  “Okay,” Peterson said, lowering his voice, “here’s the deal. I stand up and walk out of here, leaving the suitcase against the wall there. You wait, say, half an hour, then take it and bring it to a guy called—”

  “Lou Hendricks?” I said.

  He gave me that hare-eyed stare again. “How did you know—?”

  “Because,” I said, “Mr. Hendricks invited me for a ride in his big black car and issued threats, assuring me he’d break my legs if I didn’t tell him where you were.”

  He frowned. “He’s not the one that hired you to find me?”

  “Nope.”

  “He just picked you up off the street?”

  “That’s right.”

  He scowled and chewed on a knuckle for a bit. “So what did you say to him?” he asked at last.

  “I said I didn’t know your whereabouts and that even if I did, I wouldn’t tell him. I said so far as I knew, you were dead. He didn’t buy that. Someone had put him straight.”

  Peterson nodded, thinking hard. There was a light film of sweat on his forehead. He fingered his mustache, which had tiny beads of moisture sprinkled through it. I didn’t like looking at it. The worst thing about it was the little gap down the middle of it, a pale nick that seemed too intimate a part of him to be on public show.

  I pushed the coffee aside and lit a cigarette. “You want to tell me what happened, Nico?”

  He flew straight into a bluster. “I don’t need to tell you anything! I’m offering you a hundred dollars for a job, and that’s it. You ready to do it?”

  I pretended to consider. “If you mean the money, I can live without it. As for the job, let’s see.”

  He took a silver pillbox from his jacket pocket and extracted a small white pill and slipped it under his tongue.

  “Got a headache?” I asked.

  He didn’t seem to think that worth replying to. “Listen, Marlowe,” he said, “I’m in something of a hurry here. You going to take the suitcase and deliver it to the person we mentioned or not?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “And you may as well slow down. You’re scared, you’re on the run, and if I’m the only one you could think to turn to, then obviously you’re in serious trouble. I’ve been on your trail for some time, and there are a few things I want cleared up. Now, are you ready to talk?”

  He pouted, and I could see him as a sulky kid. “What do you want to know?” he mumbled.

  “Everything, pretty much. Let’s start with the suitcase. What’s in it that Lou Hendricks is so eager to get his hands on?”

  “Just some stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Look, Marlowe—”

  I grabbed his wrist where it had been resting on the table and squeezed until the bones inside it creaked. He tried to pull away, but I held on.

  “You’re hurting me!” he snarled.

  “Yeah, and I’ll hurt you a lot more if you don’t start talking. What’s in the suitcase?”

  He tried again to free himself, but I squeezed harder. “Let go,” he whined. “I’ll tell you, for Christ’s sake!”

  I loosened my fingers, and he slumped back on his chair as if all the air had suddenly gone out of him. “It has a false bottom,” he said in a sullen undertone. “Underneath there’s ten keys of horse, in twenty cellophane bags.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Keep your voice down!” He threw a quick look around the room. No one was taking any notice of us. “Heroin, yeah, that’s what I said.”

  “For delivery to Lou Hendricks. Who from?”

  He shrugged. “Just a guy.” He was massaging his wrist with the fingers of his other hand. His eyes were full of rage. I told myself to remember never to let him get the drop on me.

  “What guy?” I asked.

  “A guy down south.”

  “Give me the name.”

  He took a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and wiped his mouth with it. “You know Mendy Menendez?”

  I paused. That wasn’t the name I had expected. Menendez was a hoodlum, used to be very big in these parts—one of the biggest, in fact. But he’d moved to Mexico, and the last I’d heard of him, he was operating out of Acapulco. Nice work if you can get it, if you choose to call it work. “Yeah, I know him,” I said.

  “He and Hendricks have a business going between them. Menendez sends up a consignment every couple months or so and Hendricks handles the distribution.”

  “And you’re the courier.”

  “I did it a few times. Easy money.”

  “You bring that much junk every time?”

  “More or less.”

  “What’s ten kilos of heroin worth?”

  “On the street?” He pursed his lips, then grinned. “Depending on demand, about as much as a flatfoot like you will earn in a lifetime.”

  Those lips of his were pink and almost as shapely as a woman’s. This wasn’t the man Clare Cavendish was in love with, the one she had spoken of with such passion that night in her bedroom, sitting on the bed beside her unconscious brother; I had only to look at Peterson, to see those mean eyes and hear his whining tone, to know she wouldn’t have touched him with an ebony cigarette holder. No, there was someone else, and now I knew who it was. I’d known for some time, I suppose, but you can know something and at the same time not know it. It’s one of the things that help us put up with our lot in life and not go crazy.

  “You know how many lives that much dope would destroy?” I asked.

  He sneered. “You think the life of a junkie is worth saving?”

  I studied the tip of my cigarette. I hoped that at some point before we parted I might get the opportunity to smash my fist into Peterson’s pretty, suntanned face. “So what did you do,” I said, “decide to keep the stuff for yourself and make a deal of your own with someone else?”

  “There’s a guy I knew in Frisco, he said that for a cut he could take whatever I had and sell it to the mob, no questions asked.”

  “But it didn’t work out.”

  Peterson swallowed; I heard him do it. I thought maybe he was going to cry. It must have seemed so simple, the old switcheroo. He’d hang on to the suitcase and let his pal sell the dope to a client that even Lou Hendricks, if he got to hear about the deal, wouldn’t dare challenge. In the meantime, Peterson would be on his way to s
omewhere far off and safe, his pockets bulging with more dough than he’d ever dreamed could be his.

  “The guy I knew,” Peterson said, “he met with a fatal accident—his old lady caught him two-timing and shot him in the face, before blowing her own brains out.”

  “A tragic tale,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sure. Tragic. And there I was, stuck with twenty bags of horse and no one to sell it to.”

  “Couldn’t you have gone to the mob yourself?”

  “I didn’t have the contacts. Plus”—he gave a sad little laugh—“I was too scared. Then I heard about Lynn, and that made me even more scared. Things seemed to be—they seemed to be closing in around me. I knew what would happen if Hendricks got his hands on me.”

  “Why didn’t you just surrender, call up Hendricks and say you were sorry and hand over the suitcase?”

  “Oh, sure. Hendricks would say thanks, relieve me of the goods, and then have one of his boys pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And that would be just for starters. You don’t know these people.”

  He was wrong there, but it wasn’t worth contradicting him. The coffee in my cup had developed a shiny skin, like a miniature oil spill. The smoke of my cigarette tasted acrid in my mouth. You can feel tainted just by being in the vicinity of a two-bit swindler like Peterson.

  “Let’s back up a bit,” I said. “Tell me how you faked your death.”

  He gave an angry sigh. “How long you going to keep me here, Marlowe,” he demanded, “answering your damn fool questions?”

  “As long as it takes. I’m a man prone to curiosity. Humor me.”

  He had begun distractedly massaging his wrist again. It was beginning to show bruise marks already. I didn’t think I had such steely talons.

  “I knew Floyd Hanson,” he said in his sulky way. “He used to let me in the club when the old man was away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He twisted up his face again in that way that made it no longer pretty. “My father had disowned me, banned from coming anywhere near him or his precious Cahuilla Club. I liked going in there and getting drunk and throwing up on his Indian rugs.”

  “What did you have on Hanson?”

  “Did I have to have something on him?”

  “I’d say so. He was taking a big risk, letting you come in there. I’ve met your father. He didn’t seem to me a tolerant man. Were you paying Hanson?”

  He laughed; it was the first genuine laugh I’d heard from him. “Naw,” he said. “I didn’t need to pay him. There were things I knew about him. He made a pass at me once, when I was young. He said afterward he didn’t know what had come over him and begged me to swear not to tell the old man. I said sure, I wouldn’t tell. But I let Hanson know that from then on we had a deal.” He smiled to himself, proud of his own smartness.

  “The body you dressed up in your clothes that night and left at the side of the road,” I asked, “where did it come from—who was it?”

  “Some roustabout working at the club,” he said.

  “Did you kill him?”

  He reared back from me, staring. “What, are you kidding?”

  “Then Hanson must have done it.” I paused. “Funny, I didn’t take him for a killer. I didn’t think he had it in him.”

  Peterson was thinking it over. “I didn’t ask him about the body,” he said petulantly. “I guess I thought whoever it was had died from natural causes. I didn’t see any marks on him. Floyd and I put him into my suit out back of the clubhouse, then brought him in a wheelbarrow out onto the road. I’d been playing drunk all evening, making sure everyone saw me—”

  “Including Clare Cavendish.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Clare was there. Also, I’d fixed it with Lynn to identify the body and arrange for the cremation. Everything was set up, everything was in place. I had a car parked down the road, and as soon as Floyd and I had got the body dumped I hightailed it north, with the suitcase in the trunk. It should have worked.” He smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “It should have worked.”

  “Your father know about any of this?”

  “I don’t think so. How would he? Floyd wouldn’t have said anything.” He picked a matchstick from the ashtray and rolled it between two fingers and a thumb. “How come you met him?”

  “Who? Your father? I went out to the club to ask about you. I spoke to Hanson, who was less than helpful. Then, later, two Mexicans turned up, the ones who’d killed your sister, also looking for you, and your father and Bartlett the butler got ahold of them and squeezed them till their pips popped. I made the mistake of paying a return visit while this was going on, and next thing I knew I was being dunked in the swimming pool, to encourage me to tell all I knew about you and your supposed whereabouts. Impressive man, your father. Forceful. I can see why you and he wouldn’t get along so well.”

  I was watching the waitress at her station by the counter, sneaking a break. She was a washed-out blonde with sad eyes and an unhappy mouth. She kept pushing out her lower lip and blowing upward, so that the fringe of damp hair at her forehead lifted and fell back again. I felt a sudden stab of pity for her, for the mean life she’d been condemned to, running around here all day, amid the noise and the smells and the endless rush of hurrying, impatient, ill-tempered people. Then I thought, who am I to pity her? What do I know about her and her life? What do I know about anyone?

  “I hate the old bastard,” Peterson said, in a faraway tone. “He queered everything for me, from the start.”

  Oh, sure, I wanted to say, it’s all the old man’s fault—it always is, with people like you. But I didn’t. “You know he’s on the run,” I said, “your father.”

  That cheered him up a bit. “He is? Why?”

  “He killed those Mexicans, or had them killed.”

  “Yeah?” He seemed amused. “Where’d he go?”

  “That’s what a lot of people would like to know.”

  “He’ll be in Europe somewhere. He has dough stashed there. He’ll be operating under a false name.” He chuckled, almost admiringly. “They’ll never find him.”

  We were silent for a while, the two of us; then Peterson stirred himself. “I got to move, Marlowe,” he said. “What’s it to be? Will you take the stuff to Hendricks?”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll take the stuff.”

  “Good. But don’t get any ideas yourself—I’m going to let Hendricks know you have the suitcase.”

  “Do what you like,” I said.

  He slid a hand inside his jacket and brought out a billfold and held it in his lap, under the level of the table, and began to count out a stack of sawbucks. There were a lot of them in there. I hoped he hadn’t pulled any funny tricks with Mendy Menendez’s dope, like taking a slice of it for himself and replacing it with a couple of bags of plaster of paris. Hendricks wouldn’t be dumb enough to be fooled by that old trick.

  “I don’t want your money, Peterson,” I said.

  He gave me a sidelong look, suspicious and calculating. “How come?” he said. “You operating a charity?”

  “Those bills have been through hands I wouldn’t want to touch.”

  “Then why—?”

  “I liked your sister,” I said quietly. “She had spirit. Let’s say I’m doing this for her.” He would have laughed, if it hadn’t been for the look in my eye. “What about you, what are your plans?” I asked. Not that I cared, only I wanted to be sure I was never going to see him again.

  “I’ve got a pal,” he said.

  “Another one?”

  “Works for a South American cruise line. He can get me a job. Then when we get to Rio or Buenos Aires or someplace like that, I’ll jump ship and start a new life.”

  “What kind of a job is your friend offering?”

  He smirked. “Nothing very demanding. Being nice to the passengers, helping them with any little problems that might arise. That kind of thing.”

  “So your dad was right,” I said. “It�
�ll be official.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll be a bona fide, paid-up member of the honorable order of gigolos.”

  The smirk died. “That’s rich,” he said, “coming from a peeper. But think of this—you’ll still be here pounding the pavement and spying on people’s husbands to catch them shtupping their girlfriends, while I’m in a hammock basking in the southern sun.”

  He began to get to his feet, but I caught him by the wrist again and held him back. “I’ve got one last question,” I said.

  He licked those lovely pink lips of his, glanced longingly toward the door, then sat down again, slowly. “What’s that?”

  “Clare Cavendish,” I said. “She says you and her were romantically involved.”

  He opened his eyes so wide they almost bulged out of their sockets. “She said that?” He breathed a laugh. “Really?”

  “You’re telling me it’s not true?”

  He shook his head, not in denial but a kind of amazement. “I’m not saying I would’ve turned her down—I mean, who would?—but she never had an eye for me. A dame like that, she was way out of my league.”

  I let go of his wrist. “That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “Now you can leave.”

  But he stayed where he was, his eyes narrowing. “She’s the one that hired you to go after me, right?” he said, and nodded. “Yeah, that figures.”

  He was looking at me the way I’d looked at the waitress, with pity in his eyes. “He sent her to you, didn’t he? He used to talk about you—that’s where I first heard your name mentioned. He knew you’d fall for her, for those eyes of hers, that hair, the ice maiden act. You’d be the type that couldn’t resist her.” He leaned back, a big broad smile spreading slowly over his face, like molasses. “Jeez, Marlowe, you poor sap.” Then he stood up and was gone.

  There was a phone booth beside the cash register. I squeezed myself into it and pushed the folding door shut behind me. The air inside smelled of sweat and warm Bakelite. Through the glass panel in the door I could see across the room to the suitcase under the table, by the wall. Maybe I was hoping someone would snatch it and run off with it, but I knew that wouldn’t happen; things like that never happen, not when you want them to.