I told Johnny to sit tight and wait for me. Then I crossed a footbridge that put me on the other side of the canal, two darkened houses away from Sandor’s. I unholstered the .38 and hopped the nearest fence, moving quietly through the sandy soil to the next, slightly higher fence.
I walked along it to the front of the house and crossed a front lawn until I was facing Sandor’s square, flamingo-colored stucco house. A shade blocked the view through the front picture window.
I tried the far side of the house, following the stepping-stones to the rear of the place until I met up with the chicken wire fence. It was only as high as my waist. I waited for a beat, to see if a dog would sniff me out. When none appeared, I pushed down on the chicken wire and stepped over it easily and silently. I could hear Sandor, inside the house, railing on about the powers of the mind.
In the moonlight I could barely see Johnny standing beside my car across the canal. I waved to him, but he didn’t wave back.
I moved closer to the back door, which was open a few inches. There were three wooden steps leading to it. My plan was simple. A bit too simple, all things considered. I was going to push through the door, draw down on Sandor, and force him to show me the objet d’art. I got as far as the top step when I was attacked from the rear. A pair of large gray geese took a sudden interest in my ankles and legs. They did not pursue me silently. I was so intent on guarding my flank that I did not hear Sandor until he was at the door, shouting, “Mine enemies I shall smite down.” And damned if he wasn’t a man of his word.
Consciousness was a thing with feathers. Flapping near my face. I was lying on my back. Sandor, or someone, had dragged me inside the shack, which was now dark. The goose was not attacking me, merely trying to get out of the closed back door. The hell with the goose. Whatever I’d been smote with had raised a knob the size of a gumball on the back of my head. I pressed it, winced, and sat up. My gun was still in my hand. I smelled it, and didn’t like the odor.
There was more of it in the room.
The gray goose continued to try to flap through the closed door. I staggered to it, threw the door open, and the goose hopped out without a word of thanks. I leaned against a wall and tried to make the floor settle down.
There was a light switch near my hand and I used it. A red bulb disclosed a bedroom. That is to say a bed was in it. It was covered with a spread decorated with the signs of the zodiac, a nice touch. The walls had been carelessly painted black and silver.
Sandor the All-Seeing had been caught on his blind side. He lay beside his bed, face down. He’d been shot in the back, twice, and the blood had congealed in a dark pool under him. A .32 was near his body.
There was another corpse in the doorway. Johnny Horne was propped against the jamb. He’d lost his hat and one eye. His head was angled so that the blood had drained away from his face. His mouth was open in astonishment. His once ruddy nose might have been made of clay.
I moved past him into a larger room where a curtain was drawn over a picture window. No more bodies. No geese. No jewel-encrusted skulls. Only furniture draped in black. A long sideboard covered in black velvet contained a glass fortune teller’s ball, black and silver candles, and little boxes of powders and foul-smelling vials. A desk yielded six guns of various calibers, a can of oil, and several little white patches of cloth. Sandor evidently took good care of his weapons.
On a coffee table near a black sofa was an ashtray that had been used as a candle holder. The ashes and butts it contained had been emptied, but a drop of wax had trapped something. A neat square of tinfoil.
According to my wristwatch, I hadn’t been out longer than an hour. Two men had been murdered and the stage had been set to make it look like . . . what? Sandor had shot Johnny and I had shot the swami? And done what? Fallen over backward and knocked myself unconscious?
The Venice cops might have bought that. But I didn’t feel like giving them the chance. I’d been lucky enough to have been awakened prematurely by the goose. It was time to see how far that luck would take me.
A police car was pulling up in front of the shack as I let myself out the rear door. I was looking for the geese this time, but they’d wandered off to the side of the fence, drawn by the noise the cops were making.
I moved quickly in the opposite direction, wading into the dark, brackish water of the canal. By the time Sandor’s back door opened again, I was standing beside my car, dripping on the running board, shivering, and panting as quietly as I could.
I carefully unlatched the door and eased behind the wheel. Across the canal, a uniformed cop entered the backyard with a drawn gun and a flashlight. When the geese hit him, he discharged his gun. Several times. Lights went on all along the canal. People shouted. Two more cops rushed from the murder house.
I kicked my engine over and backed away from the edge of the canal. I didn’t put on my lights until I turned onto Venice Boulevard, a full two miles from the murder scene.
* * *
“Phil? Is that you?”
“None other,” I said to Kathy Horne, who stood in her doorway wrapped in a silk robe, squinting at me and yawning. My wet duds were dripping all over the bedroom floor of my apartment. “Better get some clothes on, Kathy. We have to go see Beaudry.”
“Did something go wrong?”
“A little snag. We’ll discuss it at Beaudry’s.”
“I . . . Johnny didn’t come home tonight. He left right after dinner and he didn’t come back. Oh, Phil. He didn’t do anything . . . ?”
“Let’s worry about Johnny later,” I said.
In another half hour, I parked in front of Beaudry’s bungalow behind Kathy’s green sedan. She eyed it nervously as she got out of my car. “Johnny’s here?” she asked.
“I’d be very surprised,” I told her.
I rattled the screen door, then put my knuckle to it. Someone moved inside the house. The porch light went on. The front door opened a crack and Beaudry’s head, bad haircut and all, poked out. “Kathy?” he asked when he spied her. He opened the door wide.
We both went in fast. Beaudry didn’t like my being there. He was in his bathrobe, with bare legs and the straps of a gray undershirt showing. He stared at us. Kathy took the sofa. I leaned against the bookcase, while Beaudry closed the front door.
I unbuttoned my coat and said, “Things went a little awry tonight.” And with them staring at me attentively, I told them as much as I had observed at Sandor’s, before and after I’d been sapped.
When I described in detail the condition of Johnny Home’s head, Kathy’s blue eyes got their sad look back. But it was an act. I said to them, “What I don’t understand is why you crazy kids just didn’t run off together. Why put on this goofy Toby show? You always had a weird way of thinking, Beaudry, but jeweled skulls! Jesus!”
“There is one,” Beaudry said angrily. “All that stuff is true.”
“It’s just that Sandor didn’t happen to have it.”
Beaudry shook his head. “Naw. It belonged to one of Hammett’s Pinkerton pals. Far as Hammett knew, the guy still had it.”
“How was it supposed to go down?” I asked.
“You figure it out, shamus. You’re the bright boy.”
Beaudry was moving away from Kathy. I didn’t like that, so I edged toward him, keeping them both in sight.
“You and Kathy have been playing house for a while. Long enough for her to tidy up this place and fill the tables with flowers from her garden. The only things in the beds outside are weeds.”
I turned to her. “I guess you couldn’t spruce up the grounds too much, what with nosy neighbors and all.”
“We can work on the garden later,” Beaudry said, as if he meant it.
“Not after they hang two murders on you,” I told him.
Kathy sighed and reached into her coat pocket. I tensed, but it was a cigarette she was after. She lighted up and said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“How’d you get Johnny out here
tonight?”
She said wearily, “He was getting wise that I was . . . involved with somebody, so I sort of hinted that it was you, Phil. I was hoping he’d follow you to the swami’s. He did even better: He talked you into letting him come along.”
I turned to Beaudry. “And Sandor was primed for our visit, right? Judging by his arsenal, the swami was also a hired shooter. You paid him to put the slug on me and take out Johnny. I’d wake up, see that Sandor had flown, and assume that he’d bumped off Johnny because of the jeweled doodad. Only something went wrong. What was it, Kathy? I know you were there. I saw the neat little square you tear from your cigarette packs. What was it that Sandor wanted? More money?”
“He wanted to kill you, too, Phil,” Kathy said flatly. “Said it would be cleaner. He had his pistol pressed against your temple when I picked up your gun and shot him.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to believe her or not. I said, “Was that before or after he shot Johnny?”
“Johnny was already dead,” she said and looked away.
“Johnny wouldn’t have just walked in there. But he would have come running if you’d called to him.”
She looked away but said nothing.
I continued, “He told me you’d done some things to help him out, things that might have put you in trouble with the cops. Maybe you played around with some evidence, misfiled a few papers. Was that what you were afraid of, that he’d spill if you ditched him for Beaudry and you’d wind up in the slammer?”
“Something like that,” she said and took more smoke into her lungs.
Beaudry said, “What the hell good will it do to put Kathy through the wringer on this, Marlowe? You know damn well Johnny was no great loss.”
“He liked butterflies,” I told him. “Besides, maybe Sandor didn’t kill Johnny.”
“You can’t think that Kathy . . . ”
“You mean an ex-cop wouldn’t dream of using a gun on a husband she wanted dead? Actually, Beaudry, I was thinking that this is your kind of play. Too complicated by half. Maybe you followed us there tonight and pulled the trigger yourself.”
He dug his hand deeper into his robe pocket. He said, “I never been near the place.”
I bent down and picked up something from the polished floor. A gray goose feather.
I saw his arm tense and pushed myself away from the wall of books, drawing my gun as I went. His robe pocket exploded and a bullet tore the hide off of a book on the shelf. He paused too long to stare at the ruined book and I shot him several times in the chest. The force of the slugs lifted him off his feet and knocked him back into the door he had just closed.
Kathy gave a sharp scream and ran to him.
She didn’t cry. By the time the cops arrived, she was cradling Beaudry’s ugly, lifeless head in her lap, but she still hadn’t cried. She had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen, but she didn’t seem to have a tear to put in them.
I never found out if she’d really saved my life in Sandor’s shack. But I did finally discover, quite by accident, what Beaudry had been trying to tell me in Taggart Wilde’s office the day I was fired. On a surveillance job that kept me holed up in the Bay City library for six days, I happened to open a book of poems by the guy who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, and read: “So, naturalists observe, a flea/ hath smaller fleas that on him prey;/ And these have smaller still to bite ’em;/ And so proceed ad infinitum.” Some reader, that Beaudry. But he should have stuck with Swift and stayed clear of Hammett.
* * *
* * *
Thanks to a paperback cover depicting what I thought to be Gregory Peck with a gun in his hand discovering a naked girl in a closet, when I was thirteen years old I went directly from the Oz books by L. Frank Baum to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Baum was no slouch at moving the action along, but Chandler’s pace took my breath away. And while some of the aspects of the plot were beyond the comprehension of a very naive teenager, I remember being in awe of the narrative style and the marvelously funny dialogue. One of Marlowe’s lines, “Don’t go simple on me, Joe,” served to toughen up my schoolyard act to a degree that now, several decades later, I still find myself using it to make a point.
Since Chandler’s novels introduced me not only to the mystery story, but to adult fiction, his influence has been profound. When, after a ten year span as columnist for the Los Angeles Times book review, I finally decided to write a novel, I knew it had to be a mystery—a mystery featuring an honest, hard-boiled, but sentimental private eye who walked the mean streets of Los Angeles. Oddly enough, by the time that book, Sleeping Dog, was completed, a second protagonist had sneaked in—a precocious little girl who had lost her dog. I guess I couldn’t ignore the Baum influence either.
Dick Lochte
THE EMPTY SLEEVE
* * *
* * *
W. R. PHILBRICK
1941
I WAS READING THE latest on Lepke when the man with the silk flower in his lapel entered the lobby of the Mansion House Hotel. Lepke had been born Louis Buchalter, and according to the newspaper he had matured into a thoroughly unpleasant item who had just been sentenced to die in New York, in the electric chair. I looked at his picture. Mr. Buchalter was a natty little dresser in a cashmere overcoat, a nice conservative tie, and a gray fedora, well blocked. The glint of handcuff at his wrist might have been an item of personal jewelry, the way he carried himself.
“Ahem,” said a hesitant voice. “Mr. Marlowe?”
I looked up from Lepke and focused on the silk flower. Two pale, nervous fingers were twisting the green wire stem.
“What if I wasn’t?” I said. “Then all the world would know.”
The gentleman with the nervous fingers was Sydney Sanders. I knew that because of the corny trick with the flower.
“We could walk across the street and take the elevator up to my office,” I suggested. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”
“Ahem,” he said again, letting his small gray eyes flick around the seedy lobby. “That is, I prefer not.”
He’d told me over the phone that he daren’t risk being seen entering a private investigator’s office. Apparently it was okay if he was seen disappearing into the haze of nickel cigar smoke in the lobby of a round-heeled hotel.
I lit up my pipe and looked him over. Sanders wasn’t quite as natty a dresser as Lepke, but he was trying. Soft leather brogans, black silk socks, dove-gray flannel trousers, the kind that hold a crease, and a belted raincoat of the type that is popular with weather-beaten war correspondents but is rarely seen in sunny Los Angeles. Oh, and the silk flower.
His face was just another middle-aged, putty-colored face, or would have been if it hadn’t kept twitching. The twitch was a lively thing, flitting from the corner of his mouth to his cheek, then up to his eyebrows. I had to look away.
I said: “Spill it. It’s only sixteen shopping days until Christmas.”
“I feel like such a traitor,” he said, passing a hand over his face. It didn’t work. It only made his hand tremble. “If they find out, they’ll throw me out of the game, and then where will I be?”
Out of the game. He made it sound as bad as being booted out of the country club, which for a man with dove-gray flannels can be a terrible thing indeed. I was about to get up and make my exit and let Mr. Sanders twitch in peace when he said:
“Do you play cards, Mr. Marlowe? This will never work if you don’t play cards.”
“Can’t I play chess?”
“Poker,” he said, fussing with the flower again. “High-stakes poker. And I’m very much afraid that one of us is cheating.”
So I settled back and relit my pipe.
He sighed. “It started out sort of social, at a fellow I know’s place out in Beverly Hills. Then the money part of it got more important and we were hooked, all of us. A month ago my friend started having trouble with his wife and we had to move it from Beverly Hills. And that’s when the game started getting funny, if
you know what I mean.”
I said, “You better tell me the funny part.”
Sanders yammered on for a while and then made his pitch. When he had finished and gone, I tapped my pipe in the brass ashtray, just because I like the way it rings, and went up to the cigar stand. The blonde behind the counter was reading a paperback with a lurid cover.
“The butler did it,” I said. “Only he’s not really the butler and that’s the whole trick.”
“Hello, Philip,” she said. “I already guessed about the butler. I’m only reading so’s I don’t have to stare at the dingy walls.”
“Got a pack of cards there?”
She put a sealed deck on the glass countertop and pushed it at me. “Your pal looked familiar,” she said. “I seen him in the papers, I think.”
I said: “Nah. A man as fine as that never comes in a place like this.”
“Anything you say, brown eyes. Stick around, why don’t you? We could play fish or something.”
“Sorry, Jo Ann,” I said. “Got a date.”
She asked, “Who’s the lucky number?” and squinted slightly.
“Nobody special,” I said, “Four guys with whiskey to drink and money to lose.”
I slipped the pack of cards into my side pocket and planted a small, friendly kiss on the corner of her mouth. Maybe it brightened up her day. It did mine.
Back in my office I closed and locked the inner door. It wouldn’t do if a potential client caught me playing solitaire. I might give in to the impulse to put a red queen down on a red jack, and then where would I be if word got around?
At my apartment I showered and shaved, not too close. I wasn’t supposed to be a tough guy, not the way Sanders had thought it through, but it wouldn’t do to looked buffed and polished for the occasion, either. I wasn’t hungry, particularly, but fried up a thick steak and made myself eat it, every bite. I kept chewing until I could see the shine on the plate, and in it a man who expects to imbibe a fair share of Scotch and wants meat in his belly to tame it.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 13
