“Go —— yourself.”
“Say that again and I’ll put a pillow under your head.”
His mouth twitched. I left him lying on the floor with his wrists shackled behind him and his cheek pressed into the rug and an animal brightness in his visible eye. I put on another lamp and stepped into the hallway at the back of the living room. Geiger’s bedroom didn’t seem to have been touched. I opened the door, not locked now, of the bedroom across the hall from it. There was a dim flickering light in the room and a smell of sandalwood. Two cones of incense ash stood side by side on a small brass tray on the bureau. The light came from the two tall black candles in the foot-high candlesticks. They were standing on straight-backed chairs, one on either side of the bed.
Geiger lay on the bed. The two missing strips of Chinese tapestry made a St. Andrew’s Cross over the middle of his body, hiding the blood-smeared front of his Chinese coat. Below the cross his black-pajama’d legs lay stiff and straight. His feet were in the slippers with thick white felt soles. Above the cross his arms were crossed at the wrists and his hands lay flat against his shoulders, palms down, fingers close together and stretched out evenly. His mouth was closed and his Charlie Chan moustache was as unreal as a toupee. His broad nose was pinched and white. His eyes were almost closed, but not entirely. The faint glitter of his glass eye caught the light and winked at me.
I didn’t touch him. I didn’t go very near him. He would be as cold as ice and as stiff as a board.
The black candles guttered in the draft from the open door. Drops of black wax crawled down their sides. The air of the room was poisonous and unreal. I went out and shut the door again and went back to the living room. The boy hadn’t moved. I stood still, listening for sirens. It was all a question of how soon Agnes talked and what she said. If she talked about Geiger, the police would be there any minute. But she might not talk for hours. She might even have got away.
I looked down at the boy. “Want to sit up, son?”
He closed his eye and pretended to go to sleep. I went over to the desk and scooped up the mulberry-colored phone and dialed Bernie Ohls’ office. He had left to go home at six o’clock. I dialed the number of his home. He was there.
“This is Marlowe,” I said. “Did your boys find a revolver on Owen Taylor this morning?”
I could hear him clearing his throat and then I could hear him trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. “That would come under the heading of police business,” he said.
“If they did, it had three empty shells in it.”
“How the hell did you know that?” Ohls asked quietly.
“Come over to 7244 Laverne Terrace, off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I’ll show you where the slugs went.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“Just like that.”
Ohls said: “Look out the window and you’ll see me coming round the corner. I thought you acted a little cagey on that one.”
“Cagey is no word for it,” I said.
1. Now inseparable from the landscape of California flora, the eucalyptus (like that other California symbol, the palm) is not native to the state. It was introduced by Australians during the Gold Rush. (See also note 23 on this page on the pepper tree.)
2. We have seen Hammett’s profound influence on TBS already, but here Chandler blatantly steals an entire scene from The Maltese Falcon, substituting Carol for Wilmer in Falcon. Both characters are described as “masculine” and are attached to effeminate older men, a relation of dependence that has class as well as sexual connotations. Their dialogue is similar, the same obscenities met with the same threat: “People lose teeth talking like that.” They both fight the detective in physically intimate ways with noticeably sexual undertones. They inspire uncharacteristically violent responses from the detectives, both of whom fall into what contemporary readers would call homosexual panic when faced with their young adversaries. Spade rants of Wilmer, “Keep that gunsel away from me while you make up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him. He makes me nervous. I’ll kill him the first time he gets in my way.” Marlowe’s threats to Carol are likewise brutal and sadistic, at odds with his usual understatement and self-restraint.
Why does Chandler commit such an obvious act of literary theft? He was always quite unapologetic about his acts of literary imitation. Still, the extent of the rip-off is surprising and particularly brazen: Chandler’s readers were the same as Hammett’s, and they had the same publisher and editor. Everyone would have noticed. Was the literary ventriloquism perhaps an audacious challenge? Regardless, it’s a good opportunity for the reader to compare the two writers: see the “Spade and Wilmer Tussle” text box on this page.
SPADE AND WILMER TUSSLE: FROM THE MALTESE FALCON
Chandler appropriated this scene from The Maltese Falcon. Is it homage, or is it plagiarism?
“Where is he?” Spade was busy with his cigarette.
“Who?”
“The fairy.”
The hazel eyes’ gaze went up Spade’s chest to the knot of his maroon tie and rested there. “What do you think you’re doing, Jack?” the boy demanded. “Kidding me?”
“I’ll tell you when I am.” Spade licked his cigarette and smiled amiably at the boy. “New York, aren’t you?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie and did not speak. Spade nodded as if the boy had said yes and asked: “Baumes rush?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie for a moment longer, then raised his newspaper and returned his attention to it. “Shove off,” he said from the side of his mouth.
Spade lighted his cigarette, leaned back comfortably on the divan, and spoke with good-natured carelessness: “You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny—some of you will—and you can tell G. I said so.”
The boy put his paper down quickly and faced Spade, staring at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. The boy’s small hands were spread flat over his belly. “Keep asking for it and you’re going to get it,” he said, “plenty.” His voice was low and flat and menacing. “I told you to shove off. Shove off.”
Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and a thin-legged blonde girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and said: “That would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But you’re not in Romeville now. You’re in my burg.” He inhaled cigarette-smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. “Well, where is he?”
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”
“People lose teeth talking like that.” Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. “If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.”
The boy repeated his two words.
3. Chandler has various characters smile by “showing their teeth,” a turn of phrase he lifted from Hammett. Compare, for example: “Vernon pushed aside a stack of papers with a the-world-can-wait gesture and said, ‘Glad to see you; sit down,’ nodding vigorously, showing me all his teeth” (Hammett, The Dain Curse). Hammett in turn owed the spirit of the trope to Hemingway, who, for example, has Lady Brett Ashley “wrinkling the corners of her eyes” for smiling in The Sun Also Rises. Walter Mosley, the great modern-day inheritor of Hammett and Chandler, renews the phrasing to good effect, especially when his characters enjoy making the bottle bubble.
4. Marlowe is saying that Geiger is bisexual, though we have not seen evidence that he does anything more than take pictures of women. (The phrase is from Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars.) Bisexuality will be on Marlowe’s mind again when he wakes up in Chapter Twenty-Eight.
5. The first act of violence against Marlowe was from a woman (Agnes), which was easy enough for him to master. This one, from a “punk kid,” proves a little more challenging. He will not fare so well in the third.
6. pansy: An Americanism that could generally
mean an effeminate man or, more specifically, a male homosexual. The term comes from the flower named for thought (French pensée) and associated with love. As might be supposed from such a lovely namesake, the term was not originally derogatory (like “fairy”—see note 1 on this page). Michael Bronski notes in his Queer History of the United States that “the pansy was a stock figure in popular culture” in the early twentieth century. For more, see note 3 on this page and note 3 on this page.
7. chancery: A wrestling term for a headlock.
8. Do you suppose? If so, Carol isn’t playing by Queensberry Rules.
9. Quite a poetic coupling for someone so disgusted by such couplings. Marlowe immediately retreats into the grotesque and hard-boiled.
CHANDLER, MARLOWE, AND THE BOYS
There has been continued speculation about Chandler’s (and by extension Marlowe’s) sexuality. Most recently, Judith Freeman raised the question in her 2007 book The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. Freeman quotes artist Donald Bachardy, the partner of writer and close Chandler friend Christopher Isherwood, saying that “the funny thing about Chandler is that when Chris and I first met him we both had the feeling he might be gay himself.” Critic Gershon Legman, in his 1949 defense of open representations of sexuality entitled Love & Death, declares that Marlowe is “clearly homosexual.” Chandler responded, in a letter to friend James Sandoe: “He called me a homosexualist….The man is, like so many soreheads, not without talent, but everything he says leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.”
And yet Marlowe’s appreciation of handsome men is quite evident throughout the novels. His relationship with charismatic rogue Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye is perhaps the most romantic one he ever has.
Compare Marlowe’s descriptions of Red Norgaard in Farewell, My Lovely: “He smiled a slow tired smile. His voice was soft, dreamy, so delicate for a big man that it was startling. It made me think of another soft-voiced big man I had strangely liked.” And, later: “He had the eyes you never see, that you only read about. Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl. His skin was soft as silk. Lightly reddened, but it would never tan. It was too delicate….His hair was that shade of red that glints with gold.”
In “Pearls Are a Nuisance,” Chandler’s burlesque of the hard-boiled genre from 1939, two male characters flirt:
He looked at me from under his shaggy blond eyebrows. Then he looked at the bottle he was holding in his hand. “Would you call me a looker?” he asked.
“Well, Henry—”
“Don’t pansy up on me,” he snarled.
“No, Henry, I should not call you very handsome. But unquestionably you are virile.”
After a night of drinking, the two wake up in bed together:
At five o’clock that afternoon I awoke from slumber and found that I was lying on my bed in my apartment in the Chateau Moraine, on Franklin Avenue near Ivar Street, in Hollywood. I turned my head, which ached, and saw that Henry Eichelberger was lying beside me in his undershirt and trousers. I then perceived that I also was as lightly attired.
But that is burlesque. The Little Sister (1949) sees a return to masculinist form: Marlowe decries the “pansy decorators” and “lesbian dress designers” that have recently infected developing Los Angeles. In any event, in Chandler’s hundreds of personal letters there is no suggestion of gay affairs.
EIGHTEEN
Ohls stood looking down at the boy. The boy sat on the couch leaning sideways against the wall. Ohls looked at him silently, his pale eyebrows bristling and stiff and round like the little vegetable brushes the Fuller Brush man1 gives away.
He asked the boy: “Do you admit shooting Brody?”
The boy said his favorite three words in a muffled voice.
Ohls sighed and looked at me. I said: “He doesn’t have to admit that. I have his gun.”
Ohls said: “I wish to Christ I had a dollar for every time I’ve had that said to me. What’s funny about it?”
“It’s not meant to be funny,” I said.
“Well, that’s something,” Ohls said. He turned away. “I’ve called Wilde. We’ll go over and see him and take this punk. He can ride with me and you can follow on behind in case he tries to kick me in the face.”
“How do you like what’s in the bedroom?”
“I like it fine,” Ohls said. “I’m kind of glad that Taylor kid went off the pier. I’d hate to have to help send him to the deathhouse for rubbing that skunk.”
I went back into the small bedroom and blew out the black candles and let them smoke. When I got back to the living room Ohls had the boy up on his feet. The boy stood glaring at him with sharp black eyes in a face as hard and white as cold mutton fat.
“Let’s go,” Ohls said and took him by the arm as if he didn’t like touching him. I put the lamps out and followed them out of the house. We got into our cars and I followed Ohls’ twin tail-lights down the long curving hill. I hoped this would be my last trip to Laverne Terrace.
Taggart Wilde, the District Attorney,2 lived at the corner of Fourth and Lafayette Park, in a white frame house the size of a carbarn, with a red sandstone porte-cochere built on to one side and a couple of acres of soft rolling lawn in front. It was one of those solid old-fashioned houses which it used to be the thing to move bodily to new locations as the city grew westward.3 Wilde came of an old Los Angeles family and had probably been born in the house when it was on West Adams or Figueroa or St. James Park.
There were two cars in the driveway already, a big private sedan and a police car with a uniformed chauffeur who leaned smoking against his rear fender and admired the moon. Ohls went over and spoke to him and the chauffeur looked in at the boy in Ohls’ car.
We went up to the house and rang the bell. A slick-haired blond man opened the door and led us down the hall and through a huge sunken living room crowded with heavy dark furniture and along another hall on the far side of it. He knocked at a door and stepped inside, then held the door wide and we went into a paneled study with an open French door at the end and a view of dark garden and mysterious trees. A smell of wet earth and flowers came in at the window. There were large dim oils on the walls, easy chairs, books, a smell of good cigar smoke which blended with the smell of wet earth and flowers.
Taggart Wilde sat behind a desk, a middle-aged plump man with clear blue eyes that managed to have a friendly expression without really having any expression at all. He had a cup of black coffee in front of him and he held a dappled thin cigar between the neat careful fingers of his left hand. Another man sat at the corner of the desk in a blue leather chair, a cold-eyed hatchet-faced man, as lean as a rake and as hard as the manager of a loan office. His neat well-kept face looked as if it had been shaved within the hour. He wore a well-pressed brown suit and there was a black pearl in his tie. He had the long nervous fingers of a man with a quick brain. He looked ready for a fight.
Ohls pulled a chair up and sat down and said: “Evening, Cronjager. Meet Phil Marlowe, a private eye who’s in a jam.” Ohls grinned.
Cronjager looked at me without nodding. He looked me over as if he was looking at a photograph. Then he nodded his chin about an inch. Wilde said: “Sit down, Marlowe. I’ll try to handle Captain Cronjager, but you know how it is. This is a big city now.”4
I sat down and lit a cigarette. Ohls looked at Cronjager and asked: “What did you get on the Randall Place killing?”
The hatchet-faced man pulled one of his fingers until the knuckle cracked. He spoke without looking up. “A stiff, two slugs in him. Two guns that hadn’t been fired. Down on the street we got a blonde trying to start a car that didn’t belong to her. Hers was right next to it, the same model. She acted rattled so the boys brought her in and she spilled. She was in there when this guy Brody got it. Claims she didn’t see the killer.”
“That all?” Ohls asked.
Cronjager raised his eyebrows a little. “Only happened about an hour ago. What did you expect—moving pictures of the killing?”
“Maybe a description of the killer,” Ohls said.
“A tall guy in a leather jerkin—if you call that a description.”
“He’s outside in my heap,”5 Ohls said. “Handcuffed. Marlowe put the arm on him for you. Here’s his gun.” Ohls took the boy’s automatic out of his pocket and laid it on a corner of Wilde’s desk. Cronjager looked at the gun but didn’t reach for it.
Wilde chuckled. He was leaning back and puffing his dappled cigar without letting go of it. He bent forward to sip from his coffee cup. He took a silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of the dinner jacket he was wearing and touched his lips with it and tucked it away again.
“There’s a couple more deaths involved,” Ohls said, pinching the soft flesh at the end of his chin.
Cronjager stiffened visibly. His surly eyes became points of steely light.
Ohls said: “You heard about a car being lifted out of the Pacific Ocean off Lido pier this a.m. with a dead guy in it?”
Cronjager said: “No,” and kept on looking nasty.
“The dead guy in the car was chauffeur to a rich family,” Ohls said. “The family was being blackmailed on account of one of the daughters. Mr. Wilde recommended Marlowe to the family, through me. Marlowe played it kind of close to the vest.”
“I love private dicks that play murders close to the vest,” Cronjager snarled. “You don’t have to be so goddamned coy about it.”
“Yeah,” Ohls said. “I don’t have to be so goddamned coy about it. It’s not so goddamned often I get a chance to be coy with a city copper. I spend most of my time telling them where to put their feet so they won’t break an ankle.”
Cronjager whitened around the corners of his sharp nose. His breath made a soft hissing sound in the quiet room. He said very quietly: “You haven’t had to tell any of my men where to put their feet, smart guy.”
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 23
