Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  “You do call,” he said, “at the damnedest times.” And yet it was midafternoon. I said I wanted to know if he could trace a Paul A. Linder for me for a modest fee. He wrote down the details on a napkin and we came to an agreement about it: he would call me back the next day.

  “But off the top of your head?” I said.

  “Never heard of him. He never crossed my path anyway.”

  “If he’s from that county you’ll find him. I’d check all the vagrants, too. I don’t know that he’s respectable.”

  For a moment he stopped eating his vile burger.

  “You’re in Mexico? You sound happier already. Maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

  It was an idea, to say the least.

  I set up the radio again and listened in to Zinn’s room a few doors down, where Dolores was pacing up and down anxiously awaiting her mad prince. An hour went by until he came. The door was garrulously thrown open, the sound of the lock being put in place, the whispers. They went out onto the balcony and I assumed that it was there that she explained to him what had happened. They came back inside and she was still explaining. His high singsong voice was full of threat and peril, but also with wonder and naïve amazement. For a while he went silent and she continued pacing the length of the room.

  “Who is he?” he kept asking.

  “He came to the resort. I didn’t tell you because—”

  “So now he’s here.”

  “We’ll pay him off. It’s not a big deal.”

  Donald lay on the bed—the springs creaked—and she sat next to him. They whispered inaudibly for a while, the voices rising to little crescendos of panic once in a while, and then one of them ran a bath. At first I thought it was an old trick to drown out their talk, but it turned out it wasn’t one they knew. He got in the bath and the room became still again. She spoke to him from the bed.

  “We’ll invite him up to the house for dinner and give him the money. Let’s treat him calmly. He just wants a payoff.”

  “These bastards—”

  She said, almost laughing, “It’s just human nature. I can understand him. Let’s invite him up to Barra and give him some good wine and a suitcase of money, and he’ll leave happily. Then it’s over.”

  “All these bastards are on the take. It makes me laugh.”

  She went to the bathroom and her voice receded. But I heard her say, “Leave it to me.”

  There was silence for a few minutes. Then I heard him get out of the bath and they lay on the bed together.

  “He’s got some nerve,” I heard him say quietly. “He’s got some fucking nerve.”

  “Yes, honey. He’s got some nerve.”

  “But here we are. And he’s right up our ass.”

  “Don’t lose your cool, though. Let’s have dinner with him and you can see what you think.”

  “All right.”

  “He’s just some silly old man. He won’t—”

  “Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”

  They must have slept for the rest of the afternoon, because the transmission went quiet. Eventually I let it go and went to the balcony with the camera. The bay was now lit by a sun almost touching the horizon, and across its calm surface white sails were scattered like moths feeding on a pool of rainwater. The hotel beaches were, as always, gathering their energies for yet another evening of joy, and the lamps around the resort were beginning to come on, lighting up the turrets and palisades and little Andalusian archways.

  I had looked at the map again and figured out that Barra was only a twenty-minute drive on the coast on the same road down which I had come a few days earlier. I had passed it without noticing it, only vaguely aware of the villas of the rich standing in jungle between the road and the sea. They could already have bought a home there in Linder’s name, a perfect hideaway for their dark but affluent future. Who knew how much cash Dolores had brought with her from El Centro, the suitcases loaded into her car and undeclared at the border. Even I could not estimate it. It might have been millions, all placed on a single bet, because if she had been stopped by customs they might have lost it all in a few minutes. But then, I was sure she knew all the Mexican border agents and could have bought them off. She had the nerve to do it; and in the end she had more of that mystical quality than I did. She didn’t think too much before acting, and that gave her a lightning speed when she did act. I was beginning to feel a grudging admiration for her. The evening deserved a Gucci tie, and I matched it with one of my old vests. I had a genius for looking like a man who had stepped out from another era with my clothes, but nothing else, intact. Thus armored, I waited for her call. At seven twenty it came.

  “Meet us down at the beachside restaurant. There’s a table under the name Mrs. Linder. We’ll be outdoors and in a crowd. Someone will meet you in the lobby and pat you down.”

  “I hope he’s handsome.”

  “Fifteen minutes from now?”

  I went down early and, as she had said, a man was waiting for me in the chaos of the lobby, able to single me out effortlessly. A young Mexican in beach whites and espadrilles. He was friendly and took me into the gents’, where he patted me down, wished me a good evening, and sent me on my way. Certified as harmless, I went out to the beach and claimed the table that had been reserved. There were four places set. I planted myself there and ordered another lime juice gimlet and then waited for the Zinns, or now the Linders, to show up. After half an hour I was beginning to think that I had been stood up, but as I called for the check for my drink, Dolores appeared, made up for an evening at the nightclubs, but nevertheless alone.

  She made her way to the table and apologized for being late, and then added that Donald was not feeling well and would not be joining us.

  “You needn’t ask if I’m making it up,” she said as she sat. “It’s the truth. He’s old, you know. It gets like this. He might come down afterward.”

  “Maybe he’s just upset.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t upset. He’s very upset.”

  “Well, here I am anyway.”

  She suggested we eat some barracuda, and who could say no to that?

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m having the crab. And I’ll stick to gimlets. You should try it, it’s an old man’s drink. It’s as sweet as the stuff you give toddlers.”

  “I drink water these days.”

  “Barracuda and water. No wonder you’re slim.”

  Strangely enough, it was a pleasant meal. We talked about California, as if for the moment there was no other business between us.

  “You’ll never go back,” I said.

  “I don’t want to go back. I sold all the properties after Donald died.”

  “What about the people you owed money to?”

  “Mexico’s a wonderful country, don’t you think? It’s like a wood with so many trees no one can count or see between them. The investors—they’re rich anyway. I’m not losing any sleep over them.”

  “Nor am I, to be honest.”

  “You’re not a fool, I knew that. The only thing that matters in life is getting through it to the end without being broke.”

  “Then why is it such a tall order?”

  “Money?” She suddenly reached over and picked up my gimlet to taste it. She grimaced and handed it back: it was an old man’s drink, all right. The lime cordial was from another age.

  She went on: “You have to have the right religion on your side.”

  When she was a child she used to pray with her sister at the shrines in Mazatlán to a cult called the Santa Muerte. The Holy Death was always represented as a skeleton Virgin Mary, also known as Our Lady of the Shadows. Goddess of luck and money, among other things. It was like the pagan cults they had in Naples in Italy, cults of drug dealers and criminals. In Mexico it was an underground faith. The shrines appeared spont
aneously in the slum streets and people went to them as penitents, on their hands and knees before effigies of skeleton women in dark wigs and wrapped in white robes. The assassins thought that the Santa Muerte brought them prosperity.

  “I’m not sure it doesn’t,” she said.

  “Did you pray to her when you picked up Donald’s ashes?”

  She smiled without missing a beat and yet her eyes registered the moment all the same.

  “That’s all past now. And I don’t see that it really concerns you at this point. I talked it over with Donald tonight and we agreed on a hundred thousand cash. I know it’s way more than you’re making on this case and it’s practically free money from your point of view. We think it’s a fair offer. You’re not going to tell me now that it’s unfair.”

  I pretended to think about it for a while, and it was gratifying to make her uneasy. Finally she got up and said she was going for a walk by the surf while I thought it over.

  I watched her from the table, solitary and lost looking as she tramped through the waves among the party boys. She didn’t quite fit the part that Donald had created for her. For one thing, she had her own mind and she made it up independently. I’d underestimated her before. She wasn’t an Able Grable, and she wasn’t a cheap muffin looking for easy money either. It was Donald who was the drip. Surely he was watching us now from some vantage point, his room balcony even. Hidden in the dark with a pair of binoculars, his husbandly pulse quickening a little.

  But I had already changed my mind about her yet again. She no longer felt to me like the puppet master but the puppet. The violence came from elsewhere. It was not her circus. The bruise on her neck was not the sign of a master manipulator. When she came back to the table, half-soaked from the surf and happier, she seemed as fresh and real as anyone I could remember. I was slack happy for a bit and she seemed to notice the fact. She dropped her hair elastic onto the table and sat again, shimmering with little cold drops, and her skin was goose pimpled as she picked up a quencher and tipped it back. If she was sugar, I wanted to ask straight out if she was rationed. She would’ve confirmed it and shaken me off, but it was still almost worth trying. Instead, I said, “You seem to like being among barracudas as well as eating them.”

  She paused before she said, “I think you’re going to say yes.”

  “I am. But for a hundred twenty thousand. I know Donald will agree, so why don’t we make a toast to it?”

  She blinked, but that was all.

  “All right,” she drawled. “A hundred twenty thousand. I’m not going to bargain with you after all this.”

  “Shall we get a bottle of champagne?”

  “What an insane idea.” She threw up her hands and then shrugged. “All right.”

  I called the waiter over and made a bombastic demand for a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

  “Para servirle,” he said, and gave Dolores a cool glance.

  “He sees me here every night,” she said when he had gone.

  “You and the boys. Are the boys watching us now?”

  “They probably are.”

  “You couldn’t run away even if you wanted to.”

  When the champagne came I made a toast not to our deal but to her. I said I was sorry we’d met in such unpleasant circumstances and that she wouldn’t see me again after I had been paid. We drank half the bottle and she didn’t care if it went to her head. She said that I was to come up to their house in Barra de Navidad the following evening and collect the money there. They would make me dinner and it would be friendly because, despite all his faith in her, Donald wanted to take a look at me up close to be sure that I could be trusted. He wanted to see me himself.

  I, too, wanted to meet Donald after all this chasing him through country towns. Having met him in the flesh, I supposed I could let him sink back into his obscurity while I sank back into mine—we’d be quits.

  “I’d prefer it if you just gave me the cash now. But you won’t, I guess. I can see you won’t.”

  “No, he wants to ask you a few questions himself. I suppose you know that Las Hadas is crawling with Mexican police? We’re not bringing money in here. Come to the house tomorrow and I’ll make you sangria.”

  She paid the check and we finished the bottle, though in reality it was mostly me who finished it, then she got up and wished me a good night and told me that in the morning she would put directions to the house under my door. Eight o’clock for dinner? She had it all worked out.

  I reached up and shook her hand and, seemingly satisfied, she walked off back toward the hotel, leaving me alone on the beach with two or three thoughts of my own, none of them valuable. I had the last glass of the Dom and drank it as slowly as I could while wondering what the instructions to be posted under my door would entail. When I got back to the room I switched on the bug, but they appeared not to be there. I didn’t want to stay up listening to them anyway, and so I slept with a Valium and didn’t dream. It was the first time I hadn’t dreamt in years. What a fine life it would have been if the same had been true for all my nights.

  In the morning, in any case, I went downstairs for my café de olla and read the American papers in one of the restaurants until I felt the need for an ocean swim. Later in the afternoon, Bonhoeffer called me from El Centro. To my surprise, and his, his errand had proved fruitful. He had found a Paul A. Linder, or rather found the traces of a man of that name, who had since disappeared without anyone knowing why. The man had a trailer home in Salton City, that settlement sitting on the edge of the inland sea of the same name a few miles north of El Centro and the border, and as far as Bonhoeffer could see he had no family waiting for him except an old father who also lived out in the desert and was hard to reach, as well as being half out of his mind. No one had missed Linder junior; he had worked as a part-time gardener and sold drugs down in Slab City, where the hippies lived.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” I said.

  FIFTEEN

  Bonhoeffer had found Linder’s records in Salton City and he had driven up there himself that morning to check them out. I knew that road so well, the mountains like great piles of ash mirrored in dead water. There’s a place near there called Hellhole Palms. I always wondered what it would be like to retire there and have that on my card. The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians live there, just below the other little hellhole called Mecca—and you have to admit the names of these places certainly have a sense of humor. I wondered if Salton City had an Avenida Salsipuedes, a street name I often saw in Mexico: Avenue Leave If You Can.

  Bonhoeffer had found the address of a trailer park in a place called Glamis on the far side of the Salton Sea. It was a road called Horseshoe Lane, within walking distance of the Glamis North Hot Spring Resort, where Linder worked as a gardener.

  With barely any sewage or electricity, Glamis was a frontier hamlet, dried to the bone, and it had been easy to find Linder’s trailer.

  “I knocked on the door, but there was no one there, of course. I found a neighbor and she told me Paul had gone away on a job. The place had a padlock on it, so he isn’t there. I looked up his records—he was caught once selling heroin down in Niland. They let him off.”

  “Was he part of the commune in Slab City?”

  This was a tiny alternative community lost in the desert, known for its dropouts and drug-induced outdoor sculptures.

  “I went down there after. They all knew him, but he’d been gone a few months and they could no longer remember him. They’re all stoned all the time. I couldn’t find his old man. They say he drives around the desert by himself and has no fixed address. What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. He’ll show up somewhere.”

  “There’s another funny thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “I ran a search inside the Palm Dunes resort you mentioned. They were clearing it out before the new
owners took possession and the workers found a marble urn in the basement. Definitely human ashes. Mrs. Zinn seems to have forgotten about it. I took it down to the station and we have it here. I don’t suppose you’d like to enlighten me?”

  “This is the problem with people today. They leave their loved ones in their basements and then forget about them.”

  “It does seem a bit degenerate.”

  “Maybe she was in a hurry? I can’t enlighten you about who’s in the urn. Maybe it’s someone who owed her money.”

  He laughed and muttered, “More’n like.”

  “Keep the urn there and I’ll pick it up from you later.”

  “You?”

  “When I know who’s in it. You won’t mind knowing either.”

  “It’s just an urn. It’s not a crime scene.”

  “See if you could find the father at some point, would you? I’d like to know what he thinks.”

  * * *

  —

  I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting in my room, listening to the bug, which relayed nothing more than the commotion of a maid tidying their affairs. It occurred to me that they had already left, but at about five o’clock the expected note was slipped under my door. It read: “Go down to the lobby at eight and follow the white Pontiac Grand Am to Barra. The driver will give you instructions to get to the house.”

  All right, I thought, I’ll play along. It was a risk, but something egged me on and it wasn’t just my curiosity—it was a need to look that sick bastard in the face and make him twist.

  I was able to get into the suite with the duplicate key, and once there I went to find the bug and pulled it out from under the carpet. I then took a look around the room. The sheets had not yet been restored to order and there were toffee wrappers all over the floor around it. And yet hadn’t the maid been there to tidy it? The bathroom, however, unlike the bedroom, was immaculate. They had swept out the suite with an admirable intensity of purpose, leaving not even a stray hair behind. Downstairs in the lobby, I asked the bellhop what time the Linders had checked out and he looked at his watch as if he had already forgotten the time.