Cuellar started to say, “Marlowe, this better—”
“Vic,” she said softly, cautioningly. “Kenny?”
Cuellar took in a long breath, letting it out slowly and with some effort. But when he spoke again, it was a whisper. “Why did you follow me?”
“I didn’t. I was waiting here for you.”
He said, “Karen is my partner’s wife. She needs somebody at night sometimes, with Kenny.”
“Let me tell you a bedtime story then. Only wait till I finish before you draw down on me or punch me out, okay?”
Cuellar and Mrs. Behagen just looked at me.
“You fall in love with your partner’s wife. Nobody means for it to happen, it just does. He finds out about it, or suspects it, and can’t abide it. He can’t trust you or he can’t stand you, but he can’t make you quit the force either, so he does. He goes into security work because it’s close to being a cop, as close as he can get on short notice maybe. But if you’re no longer partners, there’s no excuse for you seeing Karen anymore, and that eats at you. Then you think of the Hauer brothers, and you get a bright idea.”
Karen Behagen said, “Please stop.”
Cuellar said evenly, “No. Keep talking.”
“You get the idea of setting up your ex-partner, to get him out of the way and have a little nest egg from the insurance all at the same time. The Hauers like to rob things, and you know they killed a cop once and got away with it, so they’re not shy of the idea. You set it up with them to look like a robbery, but they’re really in it just to kill Behagen, for some cut of the policy from you and maybe to grab whatever they can off the truck. But you’ve got to be sure it doesn’t look like Behagen is in on it, because that would void the insurance. So you have them hit the truck when it’s not carrying that much, when an insider like Behagen wouldn’t have planned it, and when he’s not feeling too well so he’ll be in the truck alone while his buddies are grabbing some breakfast. How am I doing so far?”
Karen Behagen covered her face with her hands. “Please, please just stop this.”
Cuellar said, “Finish it, Marlowe.”
“Abel Hauer even arranges it so his younger brother can make his first kill. He was always looking after him that way. But Behagen is too good, and gets both brothers, saving you the trouble of knocking them off or facing blackmail for the rest of your life. I’m betting there’s a file clerk somewhere who’ll have a receipt or a memory of you asking for the Hauers’ jackets well before the robbery, around when they got out of prison. What do you think?”
Mrs. Behagen dropped her hands and said, “Vic, we’ve got to tell him.”
Cuellar said, “No.”
She laid one of her hands on his and squeezed. He turned to look at her. Something passed between them. Affection certainly, maybe love, and even guilt. But not passion. And suddenly I knew I was dead wrong.
Cuellar turned back to me, worked his jaw a few times, and said, “You’re right about the jackets on the Hauers, Marlowe. You’d be able to trace that I looked them over. I don’t think that’d be enough, but if Karen can’t stand this anymore, neither can I.”
He rubbed her knuckles with his thumb. “Dan was dying. He told everybody it was some allergy or other, but it was down in his lungs and he was coughing, on and off. The doctor told him some disease, got more syllables in it than Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too. Doc thought it was from the shipyard work Dan did, because the Doc sees a lot of guys from the old days in the shipyard with it.”
“From what, fifteen, twenty years ago?”
“That’s what Dan said.”
Mrs. Behagen said, “That was all he could think about.”
I said, “So your husband leaves the force, and Cuellar here scans the files for a likely robbery team. Then what?”
Cuellar said, “I knew the Hauers iced that deputy seven years ago, and they walked on it. Dan had killed a lot . . . in the war. He had a lot of nerve that way. So when the Hauers got out, Dan contacted them with a cock-and-bull story about leaving the force and being bitter, and they set up the heist, Dan doing all the planning.”
Part of which Garth Peevey saw from the drugstore on the Sunday morning. “And that’s why the back door of the armored car was open.”
“Right. The Hauers thought Randy was supposed to go in first, slug Dan to make it look good, then take off with what Dan told them would be a hundred, a hundred twenty grand. Instead Dan . . . ” Cuellar stopped, looked sideways at Mrs. Behagen. “Instead Dan shot Randy, knowing it would make the older brother Abel go nuts and come after him instead of taking off.”
“Which Behagen couldn’t tolerate because then there’s somebody who could tell the cops what happened.”
“Right. And . . . ” Cuellar glanced toward Mrs. Behagen again.
She said, “And Dan needed Abel to come after him, too, Mr. Marlowe.”
I finally saw it. “So Abel could shoot your husband. So he could qualify for the insurance.”
Her head drooped toward her chest. “The insurance would cover the mortgage and help me enough with Kenny to let us get by.”
I thought about Dan Behagen, shooting Randy and then waiting for Abel, not just to drive up but to draw and fire, waiting for Abel’s bullets to hit him somewhere he knew would be fatal, then having enough left to drill Abel, kill him for sure.
Cuellar said, “That’s it, Marlowe. Now what?”
I shut my eyes, but all I could see was a doubly dying man in a gray uniform, clutching his stomach and counting himself out in silence. “You got anything stronger than wine?”
Thursday morning Mims said, “Sit down, Marlowe. You look like hell.”
“Hangover.”
“On our time?”
“Not exactly.”
“You find out anything?”
“I did.”
He folded his paper and put it away. “Well?”
“Behagen’s clean as a whistle. No connection. It’ll all be in my report.”
“Then how come you came here in person?”
“I knew it was important to you. Wanted to ease your mind.”
Mims tried to tell if I was kidding him. “Why, I appreciate that. Especially after last night.”
I couldn’t read him. “Last night?”
“The Oscars, man. Where were you, Mars? Judy Garland lost out to that Kelly girl.”
I stood up, told Mr. Mims how much I’d enjoyed working for him, and left.
* * *
* * *
I know I saw movies based on Raymond Chandler’s works before reading any of his books. Struck by the version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and intrigued by the version of The Long Goodbye starring Elliott Gould, I began reading the novels themselves. Chandler’s straightforward, declarative tone in both narrative and dialogue appealed to the trial lawyer I was then. Many attorneys are criticized, correctly, for a prolix style in drafting contracts, wills, and other documents. Chandler came across as closer to the litigator than the obfuscator, as an author who had to make his points clearly for the wide audience of nonspecialists he attracted.
Chandler, John D. MacDonald, and Robert B. Parker were the authors I was reading when I started writing my first private investigator novel. A person who lived in the South when he or she began to speak tends to have a southern accent. I think Chandler and the other masters necessarily influenced me in a similar fashion. I just hope my efforts prove half so successful.
Jeremiah Healy
THE ALIBI
* * *
* * *
ED GORMAN
1956
THE FIRST TIME I ever saw Robert Hutchings, he was lying on a fancy leather couch in a fancy hotel just off Hollywood Boulevard. Across from him on the seventeen-inch screen of a blond Admiral television console, Douglas Edwards was telling us all about a Negro named Autherine Lucy who was trying to enter the University of Alabama. She was not having any notable success. It was a feeling I was familiar with. My business—
Philip Marlowe, Investigations—was not exactly going through a golden age, either.
Closer by Hutchings, on a love seat that seemed made especially for the properly rounded bottom of a princess, perched a tall, recklessly beautiful, dark-haired woman in a gray gabardine suit meant to make her beauty seem not quite so reckless. But her slight overbite and the moontide gravity of her dark eyes made that impossible. She was thirty-five perhaps, and she would have exuded sexuality inside a steel coffin that had been dropped straight down into the Pacific. Or would under normal circumstances, anyway. At present her condition appeared to be one of clinical shock and so her sexual appeal was operating at one remove, like a museum statue that could only suggest the real thing.
There was one other person in the room, a shabby man in need of a shave, a clean suit, and a brand new life. His name was Donald Hanratty and there had been a time, back in his days on the force, when he’d been shiny as a new dime. But that had been before a wife had died of cancer and a son had wrapped a ’46 Ford convertible around the unremitting finality of a light pole. Hanratty, good cop, good man, good husband, good father, had died a death of sorts right along with them—the death of bottled spirits, that peculiar half-life that is lived out in tears and rage and the bleeding stomach of the alcoholic. He’d stayed on the force until “nerves” had forced him to retire, and since then he’d sold shoes, parked cars, and worked—laughably and sadly—as a bouncer at a juke joint where a male starlet had broken his jaw one night. For the past few years, Hanratty had been calling himself a private investigator.
Hanratty, lighting his third Chesterfield in less than ten minutes, said, “She killed him.”
Somebody had killed him, anyway. An especially nasty looking butcher knife had been plunged hilt deep into Robert Hutchings’ chest. The blood was completely ruining the fancy brown leather couch. There were some hotels in L.A. where they would just hose down the room and go back about their business. This wasn’t one of them. Here, when the management found out, there would be a lot of shrieking, a lot of cursing, enough cops to go around for a policeman’s ball, and plenty of press. Plenty. Robert Hutchings had been, after all, Captain Starman on the television.
I moved over closer to the woman. Her eyes told me she was still someplace else, someplace where small-time T.V. stars didn’t get butcher knives shoved into their chests. She reminded me just then, with that vacant but somehow melancholy look filling her eyes, of Jean Simmons in Olivier’s Hamlet. I don’t spend all my time reading Confidential magazine.
“She has blood on her hands and her suit,” I said.
“I know,” Hanratty said.
“And you haven’t called the cops in yet? Why not?”
“I needed time to think. Because of this—” He nodded to the blood-soaked chest of Captain Starman. “This doesn’t make me look real good, Philip.”
It wasn’t quite the proper thing to say with a dead television star no more than six feet from us and a woman in clinical shock sitting even closer by.
Still, his remark made me more than casually curious. “What kind of jobs have you been doing, Hanratty?”
I spoke softly. Ten years ago, my investigator’s license under serious and perhaps terminal review by some very unfriendly types up in Sacramento, Hanratty had written me a letter of endorsement that would have melted the heart of a hanging judge. I owed him and I’d never repaid him.
He sighed. He sounded as if Pat O’Brien all got up in a Roman collar was about to walk him down an echoing corridor to the electric chair. “I kind of watch over stars.”
“’Watch over’?”
“Take care of any problems they have.”
“Which stars?”
He had some more Chesterfield. When he took it from his mouth you could see the wet spot on the white paper where he’d lipped it. A fleck of paper remained behind on his lip. “Not big stars, Philip. Nobody in the movies, I mean. But T.V. people, you know. Like that.” He looked dog sad and dog whipped.
“And you were ‘watching over’ Hutchings?”
“Yeah. Or I was supposed to. He was supposed to be meeting her in this suite and he was afraid to be alone with her.”
Hutchings had been a strapping blond, just the sort of machine-tooled Muscle Beach product who’d wind up playing Captain Starman. No doubt he’d had as many faults as a defrocked minister, but physical cowardice wasn’t likely to have been one of them.
“He was afraid of her?” I asked.
“She tried to shoot him two days ago.”
“Why?”
“He was playing around on her and she didn’t like it.”
“Who was he playing around with?” He shrugged. “His wife.”
Wandering over to the window, I looked down on the April afternoon. They didn’t let you into this section of the city if you drove anything less than a Packard and then it had better have been waxed and buffed and polished within the past twenty-four hours. I glanced over the suite once more. In the vast marble lobby below, an area that suggested a set from Quo Vadis gone slightly to seed, there were photographs of the stars who’d stayed over the years—the young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Clark Gable, and Garbo herself. I tried to imagine them sitting in this staid, icy room laughing their silver Hollywood laughs, but somehow the stiff worked against my sense of nostalgia.
I turned back to him, putting my pipe in my mouth. “Hanratty, what the hell’s going on?”
“You know what I said I wouldn’t do?”
“Yeah.”
“I did it.”
I said a word that sounded particularly vulgar on the refined air of this room. Five times in three years I’d taken Hanratty to and from those discreet little motel-like hospitals where they strap drunks to beds and let them scream long past midnight. Five times he was supposed to have been “cured.” Five times. I suppose it was my way of trying to pay him back for helping me with my license.
He had tears in his eyes now. I nearly did, too. “It’s easy enough, Philip. She—Susan Ames here—was to be the next Mrs. Hutchings. But then the first Mrs. Hutchings—Darla—started looking good to him again. A couple days ago he tried to break it off with Susan and that’s when she tried to shoot him.”
“No police again?”
“No police. He’s a hero to the kids. He can’t afford this kind of publicity.” He shook his head. He didn’t have to say it. It was sadly plain. “Well, I sat in the other room there while Hutchings and Susan were talking and—” He pawed at his face again.
“You had a bottle?”
“Yeah.”
“How much of a bottle?”
“Pint.”
I said the dirty word again. “So you started drinking and—”
“It was only supposed to be a couple belts, Philip. Honest.”
“You passed out.”
He paused. “Yeah.”
“And while you were passed out—”
He finished it for me. “She killed him.”
Now I could see why he didn’t want any publicity about this job. You didn’t get a lot of bodyguard work when you were known for drinking yourself to sleep. Or when the person you’re supposed to be watching gets killed.
He had a croak in his throat and as soon as he started to talk, he started crying. He looked old, the kind of old that can scare you to see, the kind of old you hope you don’t live long enough to ever become. “How do I get out of this mess?”
“Walk me through it.”
“Huh?” He was starting to shake.
“Walk me through it. Show me where you were and where they were and just how you found them.”
“Oh,” he said, “right.” He pushed his shoulders back and wiped at his runny red nose with the back of his hand and then put another Chesterfield between his lips. “It was pretty simple.”
It took us ten minutes to go through the whole thing. When he’d awakened in the next room, he’d heard sobbing, and when he’d come out, he’d found Susan Ames sitting next to H
utchings. Hutchings was long dead. Susan was deep into some kind of traumatic withdrawal.
When he finished walking me through it all, I ended up where he’d ended up, right next to the Ames woman.
I sat down and took her cold hand in mine. I touched one of her cheeks gently with my fingertips, then moved her face toward mine. “I need to talk to you, Susan. I need to talk to you.”
But there was nothing in the eyes. Hers was the beauty of the department store mannequin, the ironic vacancy in the perfect erotic shell.
“Susan,” I said again. “Susan.”
But I knew better. Much better.
As I stood up, Hanratty said, “Can you keep my name out of the papers?”
Now I found myself shaking my head. “God, Hanratty, I’ll try, but you aren’t exactly talking to the mayor, you know.”
“But people know you, Philip. Important people.”
“Yeah,” I said, “like my landlord on rent day.”
He said it one more time. “I just need a little help, Philip. Just a little.”
In the hallway, I heard the squeaking of shiny shoes on thinning carpet. The sound gave me an idea. “Wait here.”
“Huh?”
“Wait here,” I said.
There was light at the far end of the hallway where dust motes tumbled in rich yellow afternoon sunlight. A Negro maid pushed a cart with the weariness of plantation days, and a dapper young couple, just finished with one of those disposable adulteries almost mandatory here, went whistling toward the elevators.
Bent over an ice machine, his gray trousers shiny, his red jacket shabby, was a bellhop whose tiny monkey cap looked silly perched on his greasy hair. I believe the kids call the hairstyle a duck’s ass. The guy was at least thirty.
“You been working on this floor most of the afternoon?” I said.
“Who wants to know?”
“I want to know.”
“So you want to know. So big deal, pal.” He raised a hand to turn up the volume on a small white plastic radio. “Elvis,” he said. “I dig him.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 34
