11. stooge: Originally a theatrical term for a straight man who served as the butt of a comedian’s jokes; gradually, any insignificant underling.
12. Marlowe’s offer is that he will keep quiet about the porn ring operating under the noses of the cops in Hollywood if they keep Carmen Sternwood out of it.
13. Marlowe is in fact usually “in Dutch” (out of favor) with law enforcement. He bickers with Lieutenant Nulty like they’re an old married couple throughout Farewell, My Lovely; is beaten and falsely arrested in The Lady in the Lake; is lashed with a leather glove in The Little Sister; and is slugged and roughly arrested in The Long Goodbye. “Cops are just people,” Anne Riordan, daughter of a police chief, tells Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely. “They start out that way, I’ve heard,” he responds.
NINETEEN
It was close to eleven when I put my car away and walked around to the front of the Hobart Arms.1 The plate-glass door was put on the lock at ten, so I had to get my keys out. Inside, in the square barren lobby, a man put a green evening paper down beside a potted palm and flicked a cigarette butt into the tub the palm grew in. He stood up and waved his hat at me and said: “The boss wants to talk to you. You sure keep your friends waiting, pal.”
I stood still and looked at his flattened nose and club steak ear.
“What about?”
“What do you care? Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.”2 His hand hovered near the upper buttonhole of his open coat.
“I smell of policemen,” I said. “I’m too tired to talk, too tired to eat, too tired to think. But if you think I’m not too tired to take orders from Eddie Mars—try getting your gat out before I shoot your good ear off.”
“Nuts. You ain’t got no gun.” He stared at me levelly. His dark wiry brows closed in together and his mouth made a downward curve.
“That was then,” I told him. “I’m not always naked.”
He waved his left hand. “Okey. You win. I wasn’t told to blast anybody. You’ll hear from him.”
“Too late will be too soon,” I said, and turned slowly as he passed me on his way to the door. He opened it and went out without looking back. I grinned at my own foolishness, went along to the elevator and upstairs to the apartment. I took Carmen’s little gun out of my pocket and laughed at it. Then I cleaned it thoroughly, oiled it, wrapped it in a piece of canton flannel and locked it up. I made myself a drink and was drinking it when the phone rang. I sat down beside the table on which it stood.
“So you’re tough tonight,” Eddie Mars’ voice said.
“Big, fast, tough and full of prickles. What can I do for you?”
“Cops over there—you know where. You keep me out of it?”
“Why should I?”
“I’m nice to be nice to, soldier. I’m not nice not to be nice to.”
“Listen hard and you’ll hear my teeth chattering.”
He laughed dryly. “Did you—or did you?”
“I did. I’m damned if I know why. I guess it was just complicated enough without you.”
“Thanks, soldier. Who gunned him?”
“Read it in the paper tomorrow—maybe.”
“I want to know now.”
“Do you get everything you want?”
“No. Is that an answer, soldier?”
“Somebody you never heard of gunned him. Let it go at that.”
“If that’s on the level, someday I may be able to do you a favor.”
“Hang up and let me go to bed.”
He laughed again. “You’re looking for Rusty Regan, aren’t you?”
“A lot of people seem to think I am, but I’m not.”3
“If you were, I could give you an idea. Drop in and see me down at the beach. Any time. Glad to see you.”
“Maybe.”
“Be seeing you then.” The phone clicked and I sat holding it with a savage patience. Then I dialed the Sternwoods’ number and heard it ring four or five times and then the butler’s suave voice saying: “General Sternwood’s residence.”
“This is Marlowe. Remember me? I met you about a hundred years ago—or was it yesterday?”
“Yes, Mr. Marlowe. I remember, of course.”
“Is Mrs. Regan home?”
“Yes, I believe so. Would you—”
I cut in on him with a sudden change of mind. “No. You give her the message. Tell her I have the pictures, all of them, and that everything is all right.”
“Yes…yes….” The voice seemed to shake a little. “You have the pictures—all of them—and everything is all right….Yes, sir. I may say—thank you very much, sir.”
The phone rang back in five minutes. I had finished my drink and it made me feel as if I could eat the dinner I had forgotten all about; I went out leaving the telephone ringing. It was ringing when I came back. It rang at intervals until half-past twelve. At that time I put my lights out and opened the windows up and muffled the phone bell with a piece of paper and went to bed. I had a bellyful of the Sternwood family.
I read all three of the morning papers4 over my eggs and bacon the next morning.5 Their accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come—as close as Mars is to Saturn. None of the three connected Owen Taylor, driver of the Lido Pier Suicide Car, with the Laurel Canyon Exotic Bungalow Slaying. None of them mentioned the Sternwoods, Bernie Ohls or me. Owen Taylor was “chauffeur to a wealthy family.” Captain Cronjager of the Hollywood Division got all the credit for solving the two slayings in his district, which were supposed to arise out of a dispute over the proceeds from a wire service maintained by one Geiger in the back of the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. Brody had shot Geiger and Carol Lundgren had shot Brody in revenge. Police were holding Carol Lundgren in custody. He had confessed. He had a bad record—probably in high school. Police were also holding one Agnes Lozelle, Geiger’s secretary, as a material witness.
It was a nice write-up. It gave the impression that Geiger had been killed the night before, that Brody had been killed about an hour later, and that Captain Cronjager had solved both murders while lighting a cigarette. The suicide of Taylor made Page One of Section II. There was a photo of the sedan on the deck of the power lighter, with the license plate blacked out, and something covered with a cloth lying on the deck beside the running board. Owen Taylor had been despondent and in poor health. His family lived in Dubuque, and his body would be shipped there. There would be no inquest.
1. On Franklin Avenue near Kenmore (Chapter Twenty-Three), the northern rim of Hollywood. In “Finger Man” it is “just another apartment house, in a block lined with them.” Marlowe moves constantly throughout the novels, but he always lives in humble, nondescript apartment buildings, except in The Long Goodbye, where he rents a house cheap because he can be asked to vacate it at a moment’s notice. The only other exception is in the late Poodle Springs (unfinished at Chandler’s death in 1959, and completed by Robert B. Parker thirty years later). There, Marlowe has a fancy house in the wealthy wasteland of “Poodle” (Palm) Springs, courtesy of his new wife, Linda Loring. He can’t accept being a kept man, however. Chandler planned to have them divorce and for Marlowe to return to his humble origins, as Parker faithfully wrote it out.
2. jake: All right. According to Mencken, one of many terms imported into general speech from “the rum-running mobs of Prohibition days.”
3. In case we’d forgotten. But this is about to change.
4. See note 4 on this page (where there seem to only be two of them).
One of the three would have been the Los Angeles Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst. The term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the Hearst style of reporting at the turn of the century, and that sensationalist tradition (and lack of concern for factual reporting) continued at the Examiner. Ten years later, the Black Dahlia ca
se would provide further lurid, true-crime material for LA papers. Other such stories of the day included evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s disappearance and possible kidnapping and the murder of twelve-year-old Marion Parker. Private investigators were also in the news. Private detective Harry Raymond made headlines in 1938 when he survived a bomb explosion in his car while investigating Mayor Frank Shaw for election fraud.
5. Day three on the case.
TWENTY
Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau laid my card down on his wide flat desk and arranged it so that its edges exactly paralleled the edges of the desk. He studied it with his head on one side, grunted, swung around in his swivel chair and looked out of his window at the barred top floor of the Hall of Justice half a block away. He was a burly man with tired eyes and the slow deliberate movements of a night watchman. His voice was toneless, flat and uninterested.
“Private dick, eh?” he said, not looking at me at all, but looking out of his window. Smoke wisped from the blackened bowl of a briar1 that hung on his eye tooth. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m working for General Guy Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood.”
Captain Gregory blew a little smoke from the corner of his mouth without removing the pipe. “On what?”
“Not exactly on what you’re working on, but I’m interested. I thought you could help me.”
“Help you on what?”
“General Sternwood’s a rich man,” I said. “He’s an old friend of the D.A.’s father. If he wants to hire a full-time boy to run errands for him, that’s no reflection on the police. It’s just a luxury he is able to afford himself.”
“What makes you think I’m doing anything for him?”
I didn’t answer that. He swung around slowly and heavily in his swivel chair and put his large feet flat on the bare linoleum that covered his floor. His office had the musty smell of years of routine. He stared at me bleakly.
“I don’t want to waste your time, Captain,” I said and pushed my chair back—about four inches.
He didn’t move. He kept on staring at me out of his washed-out tired eyes. “You know the D.A.?”
“I’ve met him. I worked for him once. I know Bernie Ohls, his chief investigator, pretty well.”
Captain Gregory reached for a phone and mumbled into it: “Get me Ohls at the D.A.’s office.”
He sat holding the phone down on its cradle. Moments passed. Smoke drifted from his pipe. His eyes were heavy and motionless like his hand. The bell tinkled and he reached for my card with his left hand. “Ohls?…Al Gregory at headquarters. A guy named Philip Marlowe is in my office. His card says he’s a private investigator. He wants information from me….Yeah? What does he look like?…Okey, thanks.”
He dropped the phone and took his pipe out of his mouth and tamped the tobacco with the brass cap of a heavy pencil. He did it carefully and solemnly, as if that was as important as anything he would have to do that day. He leaned back and stared at me some more.
“What you want?”
“An idea of what progress you’re making, if any.”
He thought that over. “Regan?” he asked finally.
“Sure.”2
“Know him?”
“I never saw him. I hear he’s a good-looking Irishman in his late thirties, that he was once in the liquor racket, that he married General Sternwood’s older daughter and that they didn’t click. I’m told he disappeared about a month back.”
“Sternwood oughta think himself lucky instead of hiring private talent to beat around in the tall grass.”
“The General took a big fancy to him. Such things happen. The old man is crippled and lonely. Regan used to sit around with him and keep him company.”
“What you think you can do that we can’t do?”
“Nothing at all, in so far as finding Regan goes. But there’s a rather mysterious blackmail angle. I want to make sure Regan isn’t involved. Knowing where he is or isn’t might help.”
“Brother, I’d like to help you, but I don’t know where he is. He pulled down the curtain3 and that’s that.”
“Pretty hard to do against your organization, isn’t it, Captain?”
“Yeah—but it can be done—for a while.” He touched a bell button on the side of his desk. A middle-aged woman put her head in at a side door. “Get me the file on Terence Regan, Abba.”4
The door closed. Captain Gregory and I looked at each other in some more heavy silence. The door opened again and the woman put a tabbed green file on his desk. Captain Gregory nodded her out, put a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his veined nose and turned the papers in the file over slowly. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers.
“He blew on the sixteenth of September,” he said. “The only thing important about that is it was the chauffeur’s day off and nobody saw Regan take his car out. It was late afternoon, though. We found the car four days later in a garage belonging to a ritzy bungalow court place near the Sunset Towers.5 A garage man reported it to the stolen car detail, said it didn’t belong there. The place is called the Casa de Oro. There’s an angle to that I’ll tell you about in a minute. We couldn’t find out anything about who put the car in there. We print the car but don’t find any prints that are on file anywhere. The car in that garage don’t jibe with foul play, although there’s a reason to suspect foul play. It jibes with something else I’ll tell you about in a minute.”
I said: “That jibes with Eddie Mars’ wife being on the missing list.”
He looked annoyed. “Yeah. We investigate the tenants and find she’s living there. Left about the time Regan did, within two days anyway. A guy who sounds a bit like Regan had been seen with her, but we don’t get a positive identification. It’s goddamned funny in this police racket6 how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can’t be sure.”
“That’s one of the qualifications for good hotel help,” I said.
“Yeah. Eddie Mars and his wife didn’t live together, but they were friendly, Eddie says. Here’s some of the possibilities. First off Regan carried fifteen grand, packed it in his clothes all the time. Real money, they tell me. Not just a top card and a bunch of hay.7 That’s a lot of jack but this Regan might be the boy to have it around so he could take it out and look at it when somebody was looking at him. Then again maybe he wouldn’t give a damn. His wife says he never made a nickel off of old man Sternwood except room and board and a Packard one-twenty8 his wife gave him. Tie that for an ex-legger in the rich gravy.”9
“It beats me,” I said.
“Well, here we are with a guy who ducks out and has fifteen grand in his pants and folks know it. Well, that’s money. I might duck out myself, if I had fifteen grand, and me with two kids in high school. So the first thought is somebody rolls him for it10 and rolls him too hard,11 so they have to take him out in the desert and plant him among the cactuses. But I don’t like that too well. Regan carried a gat and had plenty of experience using it, and not just in a greasy-faced liquor mob.12 I understand he commanded a whole brigade in the Irish troubles back in 1922 or whenever it was.13 A guy like that wouldn’t be white meat to a heister.14 Then, his car being in that garage makes whoever rolled him know he was sweet on Eddie Mars’ wife, which he was, I guess, but it ain’t something every poolroom bum would know.”
“Got a photo?” I asked.
“Him, not her. That’s funny too. There’s a lot of funny angles to this case. Here.” He pushed a shiny print across the desk and I looked at an Irish face that was more sad than merry and more reserved than brash. Not the face of a tough guy and not the face of a man who could be pushed around much by anybody. Straight dark brows with strong bone under them. A forehead wide rather than high, a mat of dark clustering hair, a thin sho
rt nose, a wide mouth. A chin that had strong lines but was small for the mouth. A face that looked a little taut, the face of a man who would move fast and play for keeps. I passed the print back. I would know that face, if I saw it.
Captain Gregory knocked his pipe out and refilled it and tamped the tobacco down with his thumb. He lit it, blew smoke and began to talk again.
“Well, there could be people who would know he was sweet on Eddie Mars’ frau. Besides Eddie himself. For a wonder he knew it. But he don’t seem to give a damn. We check him pretty thoroughly around that time. Of course Eddie wouldn’t have knocked him off out of jealousy. The set-up would point to him too obvious.”
“It depends how smart he is,” I said. “He might try the double bluff.”
Captain Gregory shook his head. “If he’s smart enough to get by in his racket, he’s too smart for that. I get your idea. He pulls the dumb play because he thinks we wouldn’t expect him to pull the dumb play. From a police angle that’s wrong. Because he’d have us in his hair so much it would interfere with his business. You might think a dumb play would be smart. I might think so. The rank and file wouldn’t. They’d make his life miserable. I’ve ruled it out. If I’m wrong, you can prove it on me and I’ll eat my chair cushion. Till then I’m leaving Eddie in the clear. Jealousy is a bad motive for his type. Top-flight racketeers15 have business brains.16 They learn to do things that are good policy and let their personal feelings take care of themselves. I’m leaving that out.”
“What are you leaving in?”
“The dame and Regan himself. Nobody else. She was a blonde then, but she won’t be now. We don’t find her car, so they probably left in it. They had a long start on us—fourteen days. Except for that car of Regan’s I don’t figure we’d have got the case at all. Of course I’m used to them that way, especially in good-class families. And of course everything I’ve done has had to be under the hat.”17
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 25
