I looked up to see Alton shuffling over to Louise, who was slumped forward, a rivulet of blood snaking down her once-white dress. I got to one knee and lunged for the gun but Alton didn’t notice. He was trying to stop the massive body of his wife from sliding onto the floor. He didn’t have a chance. I picked up the gun by the barrel.
“She’s dying,” he wailed.
“She’s dead,” I corrected, walking over to him as Louise Cash rolled onto the floor.
“I killed her?” he asked, looking up at me.
“You killed her, Alton,” I confirmed.
“She’d be alive if you hadn’t come.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. Where’s the phone?”
“No phone,” he said.
He sat cross-legged on the floor cradling his dead wife’s head in his lap. The dust in the house and the taste of death got to me. I went for the door and into the sun still holding the .38 by the barrel. The bright hot day hadn’t gone away. Nothing had changed in the few minutes I’d been in the tomb the Cashes had lived in. The two kids across the street were looking at me, probably wondering about the gunshots but not too surprised to hear them in this neighborhood.
“You got a phone?” I asked.
“Nope,” said the girl, “but there’s one in Robinson’s store up the road. Anybody dead?”
“Most of the people who ever lived,” I said.
The Bay City police came about twenty minutes after I called them. An address on Oleander gave them plenty of reason to move slowly. I turned the pistol over to the cops, who showed little interest in a routine domestic incident, and said I was just passing through the neighborhood when I heard the shot and went in. I told them I didn’t know the Cashes, that I was just a good citizen, a former employee of the Los Angeles district attorney. I gave them Alton Cash’s .38 and left a false name and address in L.A. in case they wanted to get in touch with me. Alton was too far out of it to contradict me or pay any attention. He had been waiting and planning to go mad for more than half a lifetime. His moment had come.
I drove back to Los Angeles slowly and made my way to the Cascadia Lounge where Coils Conroy was behind the bar. It was late afternoon and the place was alive with a crew of construction workers who were tearing down an office building nearby. I ordered a Scotch straight and nursed it. Warren Hlushka came through the door about an hour after I did.
“Figured I’d find you here,” said Warren behind me over the sound of two of the construction workers arguing about whether a major league baseball team belonged in Los Angeles.
“You figured right,” I said without turning around.
“Any luck, Mister Marlowe?” he asked, squirming onto the red leather bar stool next me.
“Not for Louise Cash,” I said. “She’s dead.”
Behind us a construction worker had dropped a couple of dimes in the jukebox. A band blared out and I wanted to leave.
“What?”
“You’re too late, Warren,” I said. “You can’t kill her. She’s dead.”
“Kill her?” he asked, those eyes wide with confusion. “I didn’t want to kill her. I wanted to tell her I forgave her. I was bad to Louise, Mr. Marlowe. I said bad things to her when someone died. I tried once to have someone find her, tell her I was sorry, but she ran away. I tried to find her myself but it was no go. I wanted to forgive her.”
“For what she did to Sharon Rose?” I asked over the noise of the jukebox and the arguing construction workers.
“Yeah,” he said. “I said bad things and I been real sorry for a long time. I wanted to tell Louise I was sorry.”
I looked at Warren and I could see from his battered face that he was telling the truth. Alton and Louise Cash had spent most of a lifetime running from nothing but their own guilt.
“I guess I got no sister now,” Warren said. “Had two sisters most of my life. Now I got none.”
“You’ve got change coming, Warren,” I said, pulling out my wallet.
He put his hand on top of mine to stop me.
“No favoring,” he reminded me.
I shrugged and put the wallet back.
“Let me buy you a drink,” I said.
“Just a beer will do,” said Warren, looking around the bar in amazement. “You got any brothers or sisters, Mister Marlowe?”
“No,” I said, trying to get Coils Conroy’s attention.
“Too bad,” said Warren softly. “Too bad.”
I hardly heard him. The air was full of music.
* * *
* * *
Raymond Chandler is not one of my favorite writers. He is my favorite writer and has been since the day I happened to pick up a paperback copy of The Lady in the Lake shortly after my fourteenth birthday. I had read detective stories before that day, had listened to Sam Spade on the radio, had seen Mike Shayne movies, but Marlowe on the printed page came alive instantly. I knew what he was feeling, suffered his pain, understood his pleasures, though I could never remember the plots. I still get them confused, but I find the characters unforgettable, especially Marlowe, who carries the burden of living with a cynicism which manages to avoid bitterness. I imagine Marlowe with a wry, knowing smile, joking to ease the boredom and to protect his emotions, willing to let his romanticism show enough to help an innocent in distress, knowing that each adventure is destined to result in a tragic loss, a love gone sour, a friend who betrays. When I was fourteen, I sensed the pained author behind the characters and wondered why tales so melancholy could fascinate me. Now that I am an adult I no longer wonder. Chandler captured our world, an immoral world in which everyone has an excuse, a reason, even the worst of villains, for the transgressions they engage in. I am haunted by Chandler’s characters in this dark world, his fantasy pleading for understanding from Marlowe, who can understand their pain but do nothing about it. My only regret about Chandler is that he wrote so little. He did, however, spawn others who have tried to carry on and recapture, as much for themselves as for any audience, the world which Chandler created. And for that I am grateful.
Stuart Kaminsky
THE MAN WHO KNEW DICK BONG
* * *
* * *
ROBERT CRAIS
1953
THE WOMAN CAME in first, taking hard fast steps that made her spike heels dig into the linoleum out in the little reception office. She had bright red lips and penciled eyebrows and orange hair that was pinned back on one side and waved forward on the other. She was in a cheap camel suit with big shoulders that looked like it had seen a lot of wear. So did she.
When she saw me she stopped with her hand still on the door knob and said, “Are you Philip Marlowe?”
I would’ve taken my feet down from where they were napping on the desk, but she had been too fast for me. I let them snooze. “If the price is right.”
She gave me a hard grin. “A smart guy. I like that.” Knock’m dead, Marlowe.
She said something into the hall and a little boy came in. He had a chubby face and a chubby body and pencil-thin arms and legs. She had him dressed in a plaid short-sleeved shirt and short pants that were too big for his skinny legs and black wingtips that looked like they had never been polished. He was slurping at a grape-flavored Tootsie-Roll Pop and he was hanging onto a little cast tin model of a P-38 Lightning twin-engined fighter plane. You could smell the grape all the way across the office.
She pointed him at the couch beneath the window and said, “Sit over there till I’m finished.” He sat. She took the hard chair across from my desk and made a big deal out of looking at my feet. “Are you interested in a little job or is your dance card full?”
I shook my head. “I don’t do divorce work.”
“What makes you think that’s what I want?”
“You’ve got the look.”
She gave a single sharp laugh that I didn’t like very much. The boy was sitting quietly on the couch, playing with the little airplane and sneaking peeks at me. She said, “The divorce I g
ot twenty months ago. What I need is someone to collect the alimony and child support that the sonofabitch I was married to owes me.”
I glanced at the boy. “Are we talking about the boy’s father?”
“You don’t think I’d make this mistake more than once, do you?”
When she said it, the boy turned around and stared down at Hollywood Boulevard. His right shoe was on the couch, but I didn’t say anything. Worse than that had been there.
Her name was Louise Barris and her boy’s name was Robby. She’d met and married an aeronautical engineer named Frank Barris who’d worked in Burbank near the end of the war, but the marriage hadn’t amounted to much. Frank boozed, Frank whined about everything, Frank couldn’t make the grade as a man, and finally they’d split. Robby was their only child. Louise said, “The sonofabitch hasn’t been able to hold a job since the start of Korea, but now he’s managed to scrape up some kind of measly little irrigation engineer thing out in Tarzana or Woodland Hills or one of those places. I figure I can’t wait. I figure I better get mine before the no-good lush finds another way to get shitcanned.”
I looked at the boy again. He was holding the airplane out the window, lost flying in the hot summer sky three stories above Hollywood. I said, “If your ex isn’t paying alimony and child support, you don’t need me. Go back to court.”
She made a face, like I should’ve been sharper than that. “Going to court costs money.”
“So do I. Thirty bucks a day.”
She shook her head. “Jesus, things have gone up since the war.”
I nodded. Thirty was a backbreaker, all right. “If he’s been out of work, maybe he doesn’t have it.”
“He has it, all right. Don’t you worry about that.” She dug around in her purse until she came out with a photograph and a yellow piece of paper and put them on my desk. I had to move my feet to get them. “That’s a picture of Frank. I wrote down how to get to where he lives and where he’s working. There’s a little map.”
I didn’t bother with the map. Frank had a blocky head and a high brow and a pencil mustache under a zucchini nose. The picture looked like a college yearbook picture. Cal State, maybe. Or City College. The boy looked just like him.
She said, “It’s not even lunchtime, now. I figure you could get over there just after lunch, lean on him a little, then get back to my place by early afternoon with the money.”
“I’m not a hired thug.”
“So we’re not even talking a full day here, are we? Shouldn’t cost more than, what, fifteen dollars?”
I looked at the boy again. “How much does your ex owe you?”
“Nine months at a hundred-fifty a month. Thirteen-fifty. But don’t start thinking you can screw me out of a percentage. I need that money.” She frowned at the boy. “I got expenses.”
I nodded. Fifteen bucks.
She said, “He knows I want it, and he knows he’s got to get it to me. We talked about it and he said he would, only now he’s double-crossing me. Don’t let the no-good piece of shit kid you on that.”
The boy turned away from the window, both hands holding the little airplane as if it were flying in a long gentle turn. His lips moved as if he were talking to himself. Pilot to pilot. If I had a son, I wondered, would he look like me the way this boy looked like Frank Barris? I stood up. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She opened her purse, took out two fives and five singles and put them on my desk. I didn’t touch them. “My address is on the little map, too. We’ll be expecting you.”
I watched her seal up her purse. I said, “Tell me something, you always shit all over your ex-husband in front of the boy?”
She nodded. “Every chance I get.”
Louise Barris stood, put out her hand for the boy, and they left.
Frank Barris worked at a county irrigation station in the San Fernando Valley, in Tarzana. I drove up through the Cahuenga pass, then went west along Ventura Boulevard for about a million miles. The further I went, the drier the air became, until my skin felt tight and raw and gritty. It was cooler than I had expected, though. Only about a hundred and fifteen.
After a while, the number of buildings along the boulevard grew spotty and the orange groves began. They stretched up into the valley across desiccated ground, row after row of short, dark-trunked trees, each heavy with bright orange balls. Tarzana. Edgar Rice Burroughs had lived in Tarzana, but Tarzan never had. Everything was flat and dry and empty except for the endless rows of orange trees. No rivers. No alligators. No elephants or lions or friendly chimpanzees. Orange trees would be hell to swing through.
I followed the directions that Louise Barris had drawn on the yellow sheet of paper until I came to the irrigation station. It was a single-story industrial building made out of cement blocks and corrugated tin, with three county trucks and a couple of sedans out front. I went through a big sliding door into a warehouse where the county stored pipes and fittings and valves and pumps and the other equipment they used to fight the desert. A couple of Mexicans were carrying a pump that was too heavy for them, and a bald man was sitting at a dark wood table, smoking and reading the news. The bald man didn’t look up. I walked past him and went through the door into a little hall that joined a couple of glass-walled offices. One of the offices was empty, but Frank Barris was in the other.
Barris was lighting a cigarette with a big Zippo lighter and laughing at something that a goof named Lou Mardo was saying when I went in. There were large flat tables in each office with official-looking county irrigation plans spread over them and the sort of T-squares and angles engineers use for drawing, only Barris’s looked like they hadn’t been used in a while.
Barris saw me first and then Lou Mardo saw me. Lou was holding a short glass with something brown in it. There was another short glass on the desk in front of Barris and a pint bottle of Old Crow. Mardo stared at me until he put a name to the face, then tipped his glass. “Philip Marlowe. My, my.”
Lou and I went back. His older brother had been a pretty good peeler, splitting twenty-dollar bills for a living until a couple of psychos tortured him to death with an electric iron. Lou had wanted to take up his older brother’s trade, only he didn’t have the steady hand. His criminal career had topped out with two-bit burglary and making out he was better with safes and locks than he really was and telling lies. Some guys are born small time. “Hiya doing, Louie. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Lou took more of the Crow. Just a couple of guys meeting in a bar. “Korea.”
Frank Barris looked nervous. “Who is this guy?”
Lou smiled. “He’s a shamus. Forget him.”
“I didn’t think engineers were your style, Lou.” I grinned at Frank Barris. “Usually it’s pimps and horse dopers and candy queens.”
Barris said, “What’s he doing here?” He didn’t look any less nervous.
I said, “Lou doesn’t have anything to do with this, Frank. This is between me and you.”
Frank stared at me and so did Louie Mardo and I wondered what all the staring was about. I also wondered what a guy like Lou Mardo was doing in a county engineer’s office. Frank said, “I don’t have business with you.”
“Your ex-wife.”
“Louise?”
I nodded. “She needs the alimony and the child support and she sent me around to see about it.” I showed him the private buzzer. “How about it?”
Lou Mardo laughed suddenly and put down the glass. “These dames.” He went to the door. “I’ll see you later, Frankie. You, too, Marlowe.” He went out. There was a slight limp that I hadn’t seen before. Korea, maybe.
Frank Barris waited until Mardo was gone, then opened the desk drawer and flipped a maroon checkbook onto his desk. There was a framed diploma on the wall behind him. University of Southern California, College of Engineering. Not bad. Better than I had thought. He said, “You’re just here for the check?”
“Sure. Why else would I be here?”
Barris c
rossed his arms and leaned back in the chair away from the checkbook. You could see the boy in him, all right. Same round face, same wide nose, same high forehead. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “How much she paying you to arm-twist?”
“Fifteen dollars.”
“Man, you must be big-time.” Barris put on a smirk. “She’ll haul you in the sack if you like’m that way.”
I didn’t answer. There was a small photograph of a P-38 Lightning fighter thumbtacked to the wall over one of Barris’s drafting tables, the same plane that the boy had played with in my office. The photograph was seven or eight years old, and looked as if it had been handled a lot. I stared at it. When Barris saw what I was looking at, the smirk went away. He uncrossed his arms, dug out a pen, and wrote the check. “I owe her nine months. That’s one thousand three hundred fifty. Tell her she would’ve gotten the damn money without spending any of it on you.”
“The kid will appreciate it.” It came out harder than I liked.
Barris tore the check out of the book, blew on it, then slid it across the desk. “I’ve been out of work.”
“Sure.” I picked it up.
He looked as if there were more to say and he was deciding whether or not to say it. There was something soft in his eyes then, and it made me wonder if he ever called his boy or took him to the park to play ball. It made me think he wanted to. Barris looked at the Old Crow bottle, then lifted his glass and sipped some of it. “Don’t ever marry a whore, Marlowe,” he said. “You end up doing the damnedest things.”
“Sure.” I folded the check once, put it in my coat pocket, and went back out into the heat.
Louise Barris lived in a beige stucco bungalow on Whipple Street in North Hollywood, just off Lankershim Boulevard. There was a ’38 Ford coupe in the drive and a red Columbia bike lying on the ground by the little front porch. The lawn was brown and ratty because no one watered it and no one mowed it, and the house and the car and the bike and the lawn looked dusty.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 28
