When she was gone, I said, “You owe me some answers.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Bizzotto’s dead.”
“Dead!” Her color was coming back. She crossed to a sideboard and poured us both a drink.
“Murdered,” I said. “That’s why you need to tell me what’s going on.”
She swallowed her drink whole. “I see. If I don’t you’ll tell the police about the ring.”
“Any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“You be the judge, Mr. Marlowe. I’ll tell you my story and let you decide. You see, Tony Bizzotto bought the ring for me—twenty-five years ago.”
“So the bill of sale you showed me was false.”
“On the contrary. It was quite genuine. Tony and I were—well—quite different people then. He had names for me, because of my hair. Pinkie was one and Red Rock was another; sometimes Pink Lady or Reddy Kilowatt or even Ruby. Usually Red Rock. I tell you this for a reason.
“One night a business acquaintance of his was shot to death. The next day he and I had lunch in a certain very nice neighborhood and we took a walk afterwards. We saw the ring in a shop window and I turned to him and said, ‘I was with you last night.’ Just like that. Out of the clear blue. I’ve often wondered since how I had the nerve to do it.
“He said, ‘Come on,’ and took me by the wrist, almost dragging me into the shop. He said to the proprietor, ‘I’d like the red rock in the window, please,’ and he had it engraved with the letters I told you about and he had the bill of sale made out to me. It was the most perfect communication I have ever had with a living soul.”
“Don’t tell me. You dumped him the day after that.”
She lit a cigarette and gave me a smile that could have melted the snow pack at Mammoth. “Of course not. I kept my part of the bargain. I waited until he was clear of the murder investigation. And then I changed my name and moved—moved to a better neighborhood and in with a better crowd. I hocked the red rock to buy clothes. I wore the clothes to new places that I knew about and homes of new friends I made, and I met men. Invariably, the men gave me tiny tokens of their affection. I would cash in enough of the gifts to get the ring back, and when I had to I’d hock it again.”
She blew smoke out her nostrils. “Eventually, I met a very nice man and married him. And when that ended I met another and married him. My second husband died a year ago.” She paused. “Do you blame him?” she said finally, giving me as level a gaze as an accountant might.
“I think I get the point of the nickname.”
“I’ll ignore that and say only that I had no money, no education, and to my mind, no choice. And I had to make a home for my daughter.”
“Your daughter! Nancy was born . . . ”
“Out of wedlock. She was six when we moved to Los Angeles. Her father was killed in a mining accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. If he hadn’t been, our lives would have been different. But he was, and I got mixed up with Tony Bizzotto. For a long time afterward I was afraid he’d find me. I even dyed my hair to hide from him. But after so many years it hardly seemed to matter. I thought he’d have found me if he’d wanted to. So I stopped being cautious. And then that picture ran in the paper. And the ring disappeared. When I saw the other picture, I thought I knew what had happened, but I had to be sure.” She gave me the level gaze again, a look like the sky at night. “I didn’t kill him. Do you believe me?”
I shrugged. “I’ll think it over and let you know.”
It was nearly dark when I got back to Hollywood, but I could see her through the venetian blind slats—Evelyn Merrill sitting on her davenport, knees drawn up under her chin, staring at a spot on her green wall. It was a dull landlord green, but with her hair and eyes it looked good. She was wearing a satin hostess gown, blue-gray like the dusk outside.
She wasn’t wearing makeup, but her eyes weren’t red either. If she’d been crying, it didn’t show. “I found him,” I said.
“Wayne told me. The houseman. Would you like a drink?”
Without waiting for an answer, she poured me a stiff one, moving mechanically, like a person in deep shock.
“I’m sorry about Bizzotto,” I said.
A sound came out of her, the kind of sound you might expect from an animal whose front paw has just stepped into a trap. The tears came too, and I held her while she cried it all out. Then I got her a drink and made her swallow some of it.
“My client says he gave her the rock twenty-five years ago,” I said. I told her the story, leaving out nothing that would have protected Bizzotto’s privacy, wanting her to know, for the record, the kind of man he was. When I got to the part about the nickname, she winced. “He called me that,” she whispered. “Red Rock.” She swallowed. “He told me there was another one. That he had been in love with another woman once—that I reminded him of her. Mary Daniels.”
“Myra.”
“Myra! That was her in the picture! Myra Heatley. Oh, God, what have I done?” The tears started again. I held her some more, and after a while she could talk again.
“I looked her up. I pile my papers up on the back porch and then throw the whole pile away at once. That picture you showed me was only a couple of weeks old. So I just looked through till I found it. I knew there was something funny going on as soon as you showed it to me. Because of the picture of me. It wasn’t any accident—a passing photographer stopping for a cheesecake shot. Tony called up a newspaper friend and arranged it. He knew everybody, and everybody owed him. It wasn’t any effort for him.” She gave me a faint rueful smile.
“He said it would help my career. But when you showed me the other picture, I knew that wasn’t it. Only I didn’t know what was going on—and I had to know. He’d asked me to marry him, you see.” She let me have the smile again, a smile that said that was an idea she could hardly believe she’d ever entertained.
“So I called Myra Heatley. I told her you’d been here and I asked her if she knew Tony Bizzotto. And she said no, she’d never heard of him. But if she’s Mary Daniels, she and Tony had a daughter together.”
I was finding it hard to keep up. “They were married?”
She shrugged. “He never said. He just talked about his long-lost daughter and how much he missed her.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I fell for it, too. I felt really sorry for him and I wanted to give him something warm and soft to replace her. To replace both of them. Tell me—what’s she like?”
“Myra? She was probably a lot like you once. She had some bad breaks and she did the best she could. You’ll do better.”
I was starting to feel like a yo-yo that plopped down in Pasadena and fetched up in Hollywood, but I couldn’t conduct my next interview on the telephone. And I couldn’t conduct it without a search of my client’s garage.
I did the search before I rang the bell. There was a black Packard parked where I expected it. Nancy answered the door. “I’ll get my mother.”
“Don’t bother. I need to talk to you.” She looked as if I’d struck her. But she led me into the living room and sat me down. She didn’t offer me a drink.
“Bizzotto contacted you after he saw your mother’s picture, didn’t he?”
She nodded.
“And you saw him.”
Again she nodded, barely perceptibly, as if she were frozen and couldn’t thaw enough to move.
“May I ask why?”
She shook her head for no, and her whole body shook as well—the thaw had been sudden and violent.
“Easy,” I said, and put out a hand to steady her. She jerked away as violently as she had shook. The way she moved told a story all its own.
“He wasn’t your father, was he?”
“No!”
“You’ve never told anyone about him, have you?” She shook again. “But you can tell me. I won’t tell your mother.”
“He said he’d tell my mother,” she cried. “That’s why I saw him.”
<
br /> Myra Heatley strode into the room, looking as nearly panicked as I supposed she ever got. She was very white. “Tell me what?”
“You know what,” I said. “That’s why you dumped Bizzotto and changed your name. You knew what he was doing to her—maybe you even caught him; or maybe she told you; or maybe you just knew. You’ve spent your whole life trying to make her forget, and she’d rather see the scum again than take a chance you’d find out.”
Nancy was crying and shaking and keening. I wondered if she would have to be hospitalized. But her mother took her head in her arms and held it against her breast, as if Nancy were a small child, and rocked her, and then gave her some kind of pill and got her to bed.
When she came back, she was calm. “He did it all out of revenge, didn’t he? He set up the picture of Evelyn Merrill, but that wasn’t enough.” She poured herself a drink and knocked it back. “He knew the one thing that would really get to me. Hurting my baby.” Despite the drink, her face contorted and she covered it with her hand for a moment. “Just like he did before.”
She looked at me again, resolve all over her face, her square jaw set as if there were no turning back and no tomorrow. “And so when Evelyn Merrill called and told me he’d given her the ring, I knew he’d stolen it from me, and he knew where I was. But there hadn’t been a burglary. That meant Nancy must have given it to him. I knew that he’d seen her.” She shrugged, as if reporting that she’d had to let her maid go. “So I drove over and killed him.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
For a moment she looked utterly bewildered, but she pulled herself together without missing more than a beat. “I bought a cheap dime store wig so I wouldn’t be recognized. I’ll show it to you.” She disappeared and came back with a blonde hairpiece.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And what did you stab him with?”
She looked at me hard, like a poker player trying to read the opposition, and then she said, “I shot him.”
“Can I see the gun?”
“Of course not. I threw it over a cliff—into the ocean.”
“You didn’t kill Bizzotto. You didn’t know where he lived, and if you could have found out, you wouldn’t have had enough time to get there before I did—or maybe you would have, just barely. But you couldn’t have known I stopped for a sandwich. You had every reason to think I’d go straight from Evelyn Merrill’s to Bizzotto’s. If you’d wanted to kill Bizzotto, you’d have picked a more convenient time.”
“I didn’t even think about that. I was in a fury.”
“You’re good. You could probably convince the D.A. And he probably wouldn’t look any further once he had your confession. But what good would it do? What would happen to Nancy with her mother in prison?”
She looked at me as if I’d hit her. She hadn’t even thought about it, meaning that the whole performance had been improvised within the last ten minutes. She really was good.
“Look,” I said. “Do what you said you did. Find the gun and get rid of it. Burn the wig and the clothes she wore. And do it fast. Evelyn Merrill might mention you to the cops.”
“You’re not going to them?”
“Why should I? By the time I got there, you’d have destroyed the evidence.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief.
“By the way, there’s something you should know. Evelyn Merrill’s a nice kid. She’d probably remind you of yourself at her age.”
She smiled. “I’d like her to have the ring.”
There was something about the red rock. It had a funny quality. It could inspire perfect communication between two people.
* * *
* * *
I can’t imagine that any American writer hasn’t been influenced by Chandler, at least indirectly, as he or she will certainly have been influenced by writers whom Chandler influenced. Surely every American writer of mysteries must have been, no matter how funny, fluffy, or cozy, no matter how hard-boiled, street-wise, or tough their own books may be. Quite simply, Chandler set the standard and everything else is a deviation therefrom.
In my work, I’ve wanted to deviate a lot. I’ve wanted, for instance, to write about women as I know them—widely varied, sometimes murderous, often heroic, almost always hardworking—as opposed to the tarts, gold diggers, spoiled rich girls, and ruthless criminals who comprised Marlowe’s female acquaintanceship. I’ve wanted my men to be more lifesized in their own eyes than larger-than-life superhero Marlowe, with never a thought for himself.
Surely that is as it should be. A hero like Marlowe would be a derivative hero (and has been, often). An attempt to recreate Chandler’s vision would be pathetic and tatty. We must all write the way we write.
Chandler’s influence, for me, has been in his use of language—or rather, in the inspiration afforded by it. I don’t see how it is possible to read his books without being dazzled by the author’s economy, his originality, his brilliance—all of that—but most of all by his precision. Who among us doesn’t hear his cadences, his turns of phrase, when we sit down to work? We may never write that well—or even write similarly—but nonetheless we have internalized his work in a way that we couldn’t escape even if we wanted to. We have used it as a jumping-off place for our own work and those among us who are masochists may also use it as the standard of excellence by which they judge themselves. Those with a better-developed sense of self-preservation wouldn’t dare.
Julie Smith
THE DEEPEST SOUTH
* * *
* * *
PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II
1945
THE SUN, A perfect, orange-colored ball on the horizon, almost made up for the difficulty the breeze was causing me. I lit the third match and tried to cover the flame with my left hand. Alex had taken off his shoes and was squatting down, in deep conversation with a group of fishermen. He was speaking Spanish at full speed, eating his vowels, charming the three men. Seen from a distance he looked like the best vacuum-cleaner salesman in the world. He wasn’t. Halfway through the conversation, the monologue, he looked up and nailed me with those two blue eyes. I was about twenty yards from him, next to his abandoned shoes. I released the smoke from the cigarette in his direction; the wind blew it away.
I was already becoming accustomed to this relationship—distant, yet in a way affectionate—that turned us into phantoms, shadows of each other. Four days before, one of the lawyers who handles his father’s business had placed an envelope full of cash in front of me. “Alex will probably travel to Mexico sometime this week. Take care of him,” he said.
I didn’t like the lawyer’s tie, red dots on a metallic blue background, and I didn’t like his cross-eyed look. I liked even less his presumption that I knew who Alex was and why I had to take care of him. At any rate, as the sun entered through the cracks in the Venetian blinds in my Los Angeles office, the smoke from my cigarette made me remember a cup of steaming Mexican coffee I had drunk years ago.
Four days later Alex and I were looking at each other while the sun was setting on that beach some miles from Ensenada, in Baja California. If Alex was getting bored, soon we would be able to eat supper (at separate tables, of course) in some restaurant in Ensenada and I would be able to drink the coffee I remembered.
Alex seemed to get my message and, patting the fishermen on the back, walked toward his shoes. I didn’t move. Alex approached, reeling like a sailor in a Hollywood musical comedy, and picked up his shoes without looking at me.
“Dinnertime, shadow,” he said while speaking to the sea.
We walked toward the automobiles: his, a cherry-red Fleetwood convertible; mine, parked so close that it almost scraped his bumper, a green Oldsmobile that showed its scars and could have used a paint job.
I gave him a few seconds’ advantage, tossed my cigarette on the ground, took one last look at the sun which was beginning to set in the sea, and got into the car.
Alex was no vacuum-cleaner salesman on vacation south of the border. He was
the only heir to the Fletcher supermarket chain. Not that it mattered to me, but this seemed essential to the lawyer who slipped the envelope with dollars across my desk. He offered me very little else: a photograph of a boy of twenty-three with wild, blond hair that seemed to want to rise into a horn over his forehead, and a little bit of chatter about how “reckless” and “unstable” Alex was, “how sick he had returned from the Pacific,” and “how bad it had been for him during the war in one of those Japanese concentration camps in Burma or the Philippines or Malaya.” When I tried to determine the exact nature of my obligations as nanny, I couldn’t find out anything more concrete. “ . . . gets into too much trouble, you know? You can stop him from getting himself stabbed in some bad-luck brothel in Tijuana, that sort of thing.” When I asked whether Alex should know that I was following him, he answered, shrugging his shoulders, “Do as you wish. One way or the other, Alex will find out and I’m sure he’ll blame me. It’s difficult to hide things from Alex, as you’ll soon realize.”
Monday. Alex fulfilled the lawyer’s predictions and went south, first toward San Diego and later following the border to Calexico. He entered Mexico through Mexicali and stopped the Fleetwood right at Revolution Park, a few yards from the borderline. He rubbed his eyes as if he had just woken up and approached my automobile. Through the open window he said, “They told me that a China-Mex jumped that green fence seven times in one day. They captured him all seven times and sent him back to Mexico. He holds the local record. No one saw him, no one seems to know his name, but everyone knows the story. Maybe he never existed. I always wondered why he had to be Chinese. Why choose a Chinese guy for a myth?”
He didn’t wait for my answer and walked left toward the Hotel Palacio, carrying a suitcase. By the way he was carrying it, it must have been heavy. We ran into each other a half hour later in the hotel bar. I was weighing the possibilities of a margarita as opposed to a gimlet, when Alex made his appearance on the scene. The ceiling fans seemed to be bothered by arthritic pains. A pair of Central European refugees were sweating copiously while drinking an acid wine, their silent faces fixed on a horizon that must have been thousands of miles away. Just watching them made me hot, the worst kind of hot, sad and exhausting. A girl of about fifteen, probably German, was playing the piano in the corner and humming. Alex came over to me.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 18
