I met him under a jacaranda tree standing next to a wire-haired man with the ramrod posture of a retired Eagle Scout.
“This is Mr. Pierson,” said Eddie, nodding toward the wire-haired man, who flipped open his wallet. An F.B.I. badge glinted in the reflection of a streetlamp. “We were wondering if you’d seen anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know—anybody call, come by, anything suspicious?”
“I haven’t seen anything. And I thought you worked for Metro, Eddie. On a term contract.”
“Of course I do. But these are difficult times. These guys need help.”
“Some of the writers around here are a little naive,” said Pierson. “They think some kind of witch-hunt’s going on, but the security of the nation’s at stake. And we just want to be sure the Kraut’ll be straight with the committee on Tuesday. Otherwise he’s gonna land in stir with the rest of those pinkos.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Now don’t be gettin’ smart, Marlowe,” said Eddie. “I vouched for you, you know. And remember who’s paying your salary.”
“Yeah. Just who is paying?” I cracked, but continued before they could say anything. “But don’t worry. I haven’t seen or heard anything. And if I do, you’ll be the first to know. . . .Now buzz off before the Kraut starts getting suspicious.” And with that I headed back across the street, leaving them standing under the jacaranda.
Brecht was waiting in the kitchen when I got there.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“J. Edgar Hoover’s younger brother. When’s your flight to Washington?”
“Tomorrow evening.”
“Too late. They’re looking for any excuse to hang you, and they’re not beyond a plant if you don’t do it to yourself first.” I paced about a moment. “Let’s get you on the morning flight. I think there’s one at seven a.m. I’ll drive you to the airport. And do yourself a favor—between now and then, don’t answer the phone and don’t talk to anybody. And when you get to Washington, lay low, don’t let anybody know where you are, and keep your mouth shut. . . .Now get some rest. And by the way . . . ” I flipped open the book and handed him the Air France envelope. “Whatever you do, hide your Paris ticket.”
Brecht stood there a moment, silently digesting this until we heard the car drive off. Then he took his pen and started to autograph one of his books to me.
“Don’t bother,” I said.
“It is The Three-Penny Opera,” said Brecht with some pride in his voice.
“Yeah, I heard of it,” I shrugged. “But I could never read German.”
The playwright nodded and went to bed, but I could see he was hurt. These writers are very sensitive about their stuff.
Three days later I caught his testimony in the paper. I had to admit it was pretty funny. The Kraut pretended he could barely speak English and he ran so many rings around the committee by the time they were through with him they were begging him to leave. Some of it went like this:
Committee: Have you attended any Communist Party meetings?
Brecht: No, I don’t think so. . . .
Committee: Well, aren’t you certain?
Brecht: No—I am certain, yes.
Committee: You are certain you have never been to Communist Party meetings?
Brecht: Yes, I think so. . . .
Committee: You are certain?
Brecht: I think I am certain.
Committee: You think you are certain?
Brecht: Yes, I have not attended such meetings, in my opinion.
That appeared in the paper on November 1, the same day Brecht arrived at his final destination, Switzerland. At the same time, I decided to drive over to M.G.M. Studios to take care of some unfinished business. I slipped a sawbuck to the guard to let me through the gate, parked directly in front of the Thalberg Building, and hurried inside. I didn’t stop at the reception desk but waltzed right by the secretary like a producer who had just signed a two-picture deal with Rita Hayworth.
Eddie Brackwell’s office was on the third floor with a corner view of the entire lot and was more than big enough to write an encyclopedia, let alone a script. It had a couple of mock Louis XV couches and a Chippendale bar filled with enough champagne for an Oscar party.
Eddie was sharing a glass of the bubbly with a starlet when I came in and didn’t look too pleased to see me, so I walked straight over to him and disconnected the phone before he could call the security service.
“Didn’t you get your check, Marlowe?” he said, looking at me strangely.
“Sure did, Eddie. And I split it up the moment I got it for the old tenants of this office. I sent half of it to Mike Lipman and his family, who are living down in Mexico now that you cost him his writing job. And the other to Sherman Reynolds, who’s back in New York trying to stay out of jail because you bastards smeared him.”
“You didn’t save anything for yourself?” he asked, his voice squeaking.
“No. I wanted something else for payment.”
And with that I let him have a left to the solar plexus and a vicious right to the head. He flew backward into the Chippendale, breaking the glass and crumpling to the floor. Blood trickled from his forehead as I stared down at him.
“You know, Eddie, you guys don’t give a good goddamn whether these guys are Communists or what they are—Brecht or anybody else. You just want their jobs, you pathetic assholes!”
Then I kicked him one for good measure and left, leaving the starlet screaming like a lost ingenue at a casting call.
* * *
* * *
Let me be blunt. Raymond Chandler saved my life. This is how it happened:
In my early twenties, I published two novels to respectful reviews and virtually no sales and, like many writers before me, hied myself to Los Angeles to take a shot at the screen trade. But also like many before me I didn’t exactly get a kick out of sleaze balls with German cars and Spanish houses telling me what to write.
So I saved my money and tried my hand at another novel which was even more “literary” and unsalable than the previous two. I could see that in the eyes of my friend Alan Rinzler, who had just been appointed head honcho of Rolling Stone’s new publishing division, when he was reading the manuscript in the back yard of my house in L.A.’s Echo Park.
“This is pretty good,” he said, sounding like freshman English teacher grading a paper. “But couldn’t you do something more . . . Rolling Stone?”
I racked my brain. The Stone was hot (this was 1972) and I sure wanted to work for it, but nothing came to mind when I blurted, as if out of nowhere: “Y’know, I’ve been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler lately. Farewell, My Lovely. The Long Goodbye. . . .Somebody oughta update the old genre. Do a private dick of our generation—hip, political, you know . . . a longhair.”
“Great idea,” said Alan, dollar signs exploding under his Afro cut. “What do you want to call him?”
“Moses Wine,” I replied, as quickly as that. I didn’t give it any more thought.
Three months later, The Big Fix was finished.
Now, in May 1988, my sixth Wine novel is about to come out. They’ve been published in fourteen languages in umpteen editions and made into a film. Thanks, Ray.
Roger L. Simon
STAR BRIGHT
* * *
* * *
JOHN LUTZ
1948
FEED A NICKEL to the jukebox, Marlowe,” Artie Duke told me. I did. Frank Sinatra started crooning about perfect love. I thought, Frankie should know.
Artie winked at the teenage waitress as she sashayed over to our booth with his toast and eggs. Artie was about fifty, a weaselly little guy with a greasy black pompadour and ears that stuck out like open car doors. He was sporting a natty, double-breasted gray suit with white stripes not quite as wide as bowling alleys, and a withered red carnation from yesterday still snagged on a lapel.
I’d ordered only coffee. It was too early in the morning
for food. Too early for Artie. Too early for Frank Sinatra. Especially too early for that.
Artie was the publisher of Duke and Duchess, a low-level Hollywood magazine that revealed “inside information” on the stars but specialized in predicting success for struggling young actors and actresses. Mostly actresses, because they provided the magazine with plenty of cheesecake layouts. Duke and Duchess wasn’t quite a plain-brown-wrapper kind of magazine, but Hollywood dealt in sex, sublime or otherwise. Flesh was the name of Artie’s game.
On a case I’d worked on in forty-seven, last year, Artie had provided me with information I couldn’t have obtained elsewhere. I owed him a favor. He’d phoned last night and set up this meeting at the Meteor Diner on Figueroa to tell me how I could settle the debt. In my business, private investigation, it was the kind of debt I had to pay, and Artie knew it. And Artie never left leverage unused.
“I ain’t gonna ask you to do anything sleazy,” he said around a mouthful of toast, spraying the back of my hand with spittle and crumbs. “I mean, one thing about me’s I got a certain amount of class.”
I didn’t argue with him. After all, he ate his eggs with a fork. I sipped my coffee, gazed past dead flies out the grease-spotted window, waited. The traffic signal at the corner bonged, and a parade of cars accelerated in a cloud of exhaust fumes that rose wavering in the hot morning air. Some of the fumes found their way into the diner.
Artie spooned so much sugar into his coffee I thought I might get cavities from watching. When he stopped shoveling he said, “Has to do with murder.”
Swell. “Who’s the lucky victim?”
“Photog name of Corcoran.”
“One of your photographers?”
“Naw, free-lancer. But he did some work for us now and then on contract.”
“Cops know who bumped him?”
“Cops know from nothin’.” Artie used his toast to sop up egg yellow and concentrated for a while on eating. He swallowed, loud, and said, “Corcoran phoned me a few days ago all excited. Said he had a layout on a new blonde bombshell, a sexy sorta child-woman Warner Brothers is planning on making into a major star within a year. The studio’s keeping it all hush-hush, but I told him I wanted her photos for the magazine. Offered him plenty, too.”
“Pay him before he died?”
“Sure.”
I doubted it, knowing Artie. Just thinking about money caused his fingers to break out with glue. “So you want me to get the photographs.”
“And find out the girl’s name and address.”
I was surprised. “You don’t know her name?”
“First name only. Ella Lou. But that’s her real name. I got no idea what her stage name’s gonna be; maybe whoever’s handling her ain’t even picked one out yet. She’s that fresh on the market.” Artie wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. He’d finished breakfast the same time Sinatra finished singing. Body and soul were sated.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “You go to Corcoran’s office and search through the files till you find an Ella Lou. Get your pictures and her address.”
Artie shook his head so violently his ears flapped. “Uh-uh, Marlowe.
I ain’t goin’ anywheres near that place. This has gotta be on the Q.T. The cops have got Corcoran’s office sealed and maybe they’re even watching it in case whoever rubbed him out comes back. That’s why I need you to figure a way in, get me what I need.”
I added more cream to my java and stirred, tapped the spoon handle a few times lightly and musically on the mug’s rim. What Artie had told me didn’t feel right. I said, “This girl really that big a deal?”
His narrow little eyes flared so you could almost see the pupils. “Corcoran told me the camera loves her more’n anybody he ever pointed a lens at. He wasn’t a man that raved about much, Marlowe, but he raved about this Ella Lou whazzername.” He straightened up and sat back in the red padded booth with something like indignity, as if struck by delayed shock that I should ask such a question. “She that big a deal? Damn right she is! That’s why she’s being kept under wraps by the people wanna make millions outta her if she hits right, which is just how she’ll hit. This little gal’s a genuine can’t-miss proposition. You know how rare that is?”
“Rare enough I never saw one.” I tossed back my head and drained my coffee mug. The sun had edged across the sky and was beating in through the window, warming my right shoulder and arm. I wanted to get out of there, away from Artie Duke, and fulfill my obligation to him. Get it over with like a trip to the dentist and then move on to things more pleasant.
He was studying me, absently probing with a fingernail at a morsel lodged between his crooked front teeth.
“Okay,” I told him, “It doesn’t sound like much. I’ll give you a call when I get what you need.”
He handed me a folded piece of jagged-edged paper with the address of Corcoran’s studio scrawled on it in black ink, and I tossed a dime and a nickel on the table and stood up. One of the coins spun with a descending, noisy clatter.
“By the way,” I said, “how’d the photographer get it?”
Artie grinned kind of funny, like he might be sick to his stomach and tasting metal. “Shot behind the ear, finally.”
“Finally? Isn’t it always final when somebody shoots somebody else behind the ear?”
“I mean, after he was tortured.”
“Tortured how?”
“I dunno. Burned with cigarettes and all. And I heard stuff was done to him with a knife.”
I knew then why Artie chose to have me go after the photographs rather than going in himself. But if that question was answered, a lot more were raised.
He was still beaming that silly half grin at me, a spot of egg yellow on his chin. I gave him a good-bye nod and got out of there. The heat bouncing off the pavement on Figueroa slammed into me like a truck.
I felt a little nauseated myself as I crossed the street, and I wondered if I was wearing the same sickly look I’d seen on Artie. I didn’t like murder. It could be messy. For the victim. For the murderer.
For the detective.
Corcoran’s studio was on Alameda, a low, beige stucco building with flowering jacarandas out front and a sign that said Jack Corcoran Portraits in flowing red letters on a gray background. I drove past it slowly in second gear and saw a black ’48 Ford coupé with a chopped-off antenna parked half a block down. There was a musclehead type slouched behind the steering wheel, actually pretending to read a newspaper. Even cops were going to the movies these days.
I parked in the next block and cut through a grassy field dotted with orange trees. A million insects droned and chirped that I was trespassing, and a warm breeze brought me a sweet scent of blossoms that clung like cheap perfume.
Back on concrete, I made my way down a narrow gangway and located the back of Corcoran’s studio. I’d made sure the cops didn’t have the place staked out in back, only assigned the block-jawed newspaper buff to keep watch for whoever might come by the studio to see Corcoran, not knowing he’d been killed.
It was easy to force a rear window and climb inside. Illegal, but easy. Too many laws worked that way.
I found myself in a vast, well-lighted room with high windows, pale gray walls, and a plank floor. There were photographic backdrops propped all over the place: stand in the right spot and you could be at the beach, in front of a snow-peaked mountain, in a plush boudoir, or in New York. Here, in Los Angeles, there was a three-section, silk Chinese folding screen in one corner that set off the area Corcoran had used as an office.
Sidestepping a bulky Speed-Graphic camera on a tripod, and a tilted white umbrella used for deflecting light, I walked over to the desk and file cabinets behind the screen. I moved quietly, as if the plainclothes cop outside in the Ford had rabbit ears and might hear me.
Alongside the desk, I noticed I was standing in the middle of a large dark stain. At the stain’s edge was a yellow chalk outline of a man curled in the fetal position. I move
d off the ugly stain and got down to business, keeping in mind that murderers did now and then return to the scene of the crime, death having given birth to the death wish.
Since I didn’t know Ella Lou’s last name, I started with the top file drawer and worked my way down. The gray folders were stuffed with photographs and personal information; usually eight-by-ten glossy shots of Hollywood hopefuls, mostly women, and their vital statistics. I thumbed through this jumble of perfect teeth and clear eyes and flawless flesh until finally I spotted Ella Lou’s name after a comma and her last name, Harrison. The blue, typed info sheet in her folder said she was seventeen years old, five foot two, a natural blonde, and measured 36-24-36. They all measured 36-24-36.
Also, her folder contained no photographs.
Quickly I rummaged through other folders, other drawers. Hers appeared to be the only folder in which there were no photographs. That was odd. This was, after all, Corcoran’s photo file.
It didn’t take me long to figure out why Corcoran had been tortured before his death. He’d known what his assailants would want and had hidden the photographs. The torture was to get him to say where.
I looked again at the bloodstain that had seeped into the hardwood floor. I was sure Corcoran had talked, or he’d still be alive somewhere—wishing he were dead.
It would be a waste of time to search the studio for the photos of Ella Lou. Anyway, the cops had no doubt made a thorough, routine search, and even they probably would have stumbled across hidden photos of a can’t-miss blonde bombshell. It was a good bet that whoever had killed Corcoran now had the Ella Lou photographs.
The question was why. It was a question I knew I had to answer, not just for Artie but for myself.
And maybe for Ella Lou Harrison.
I unclipped my Eversharp from my shirt pocket and copied Ella Lou’s address on the slip of paper Artie had given me in the diner. Then I left the same way I’d entered.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 22
