I went around and sat in the swivel chair. It didn't have to be this building, of course. The car could have been parked here and Valentine could have gone up to Hollywood Boulevard looking for movie stars. Or down to Sunset looking for excitement. Or he could have caught a cab to Bakersfield where he had about as much chance for either.
Still, the car was tagged outside this building and here was a photographer with the same initials. I inventoried the desk. On top was a picture of a pretty black-haired woman, maybe 25, with big dark eyes. The cubbyholes were stuffed mostly with bills, a lot of them unpaid, including three more traffic tickets. The middle drawer had a Greater L.A. street map, the lower left drawer held L.A. phone directories, the lower right drawer had a bottle of cheap Scotch with maybe five ounces gone. I got up and went across to the file cabinet. The top drawer contained a car insurance policy, an unopened bottle of the same Scotch, a package of paper cups and a big manila envelope with a small metal clasp at the top. I opened the envelope. In it was a collection of 8 X 10 glossy prints of naked women doing a variety of tricks, some of them quite old. The other two file drawers were empty.
I took the big envelope over to the desk and sat back down and began to look a little more carefully at what there was. What there was was porn, a lot of it, pretty good quality, some of it maybe shot in front of the very white paper backdrop that stood to my right. It had been quite some time since pictures of people copulating had stimulated my libido, and this stuff was no different. Even if it had been stimulating it was so much that overkill would have suffocated randiness in the simple mass of overindulgence that it represented.
In addition to being pretty well lit, and in good focus, the pictures were of generally attractive models. Actresses no doubt, come to Hollywood, soon to be stars, or maybe starlets, waiting for the right part. The men in the pictures were props for the women, obscure, generally faceless, no more noticeable than the lamp in the background, or the bare metal leg of the daybed on which the action took place.
I flipped through the pictures and stopped. There, looking younger, as naked as she had been only a few days earlier, was Sondra Lee, posing alone, suggestively, with the same empty-eyed smile. I slipped it out of the pack, rolled it the short way, put a rubber band around it and slipped it into my inside coat pocket. I riffled through the rest of the pictures without encountering anyone else I knew and got up and put the folder back into the file drawer. I went back and sat down in the swivel and put my feet up and thought about it a little. The coincidences were piling up, photographer, same initials, picture of Sondra Lee.
While I was thinking about these things, I heard a key scratch on the lock, then go into the keyhole. There was no place to hide. So I kept sitting, with my feet up. The key turned, the door opened and in came a guy who looked like a finalist in the Mr. Southern California pageant. He had longish blond hair, combed straight back. His face was tanned, he was slim, medium height, medium build. He wore a cream sport coat and white pants, and a black shirt with a big collar that spilled out over his lapels.
When he saw me, he stopped, pulled his head back an inch, raised his eyebrows and stared at me.
"Don't be confused," I said. "I am not you."
"I can see that, Chappy," he said, "but who the hell are you?"
"You first," I said.
"Me first? This is my office."
"Ah ha," I said. "You must be Larry Victor."
"Yes, I must," he said. "But I still don't know you. Or why you're sitting in my chair, or how you got in."
"Kind of like a nursery rhyme, isn't it?" I said.
Victor stood with the door still open, in case he needed to run.
"Are you going to tell me?" he said.
"Marlowe," I said. "I'm looking for a guy named Les Valentine."
"You a cop?"
"Nope," I said. "I met Valentine at a card game, I stayed pat with two pair. He had a flush. He took my marker for half a g and gave me this address."
"And the door?" Victor said. "I suppose it was open?"
"Yeah," I said, "as a matter of fact it was."
Victor nodded. "Mind if I sit at my desk, Marlowe?"
I stood, stepped aside, and he sat.
"I think I'll have a short one," Victor said. "Join me?"
"Sure," I said. He rummaged the cheap Scotch out of the drawer and poured some into a couple of paper cups. I had a swallow. It tasted like something you'd take for mange. Victor guzzled it down and poured another couple of inches into the paper cup. Then he leaned back in his swivel and tried to look easy. While he was looking easy he edged a glance at the file cabinet. Then he looked back at me.
"Funny thing," Victor said. "I know Les Valentine."
"Amazing," I said.
"Not so amazing, really. We're both in the same line. Both do a lot of movie still work, publicity stuff, that sort of thing. Do a lot of high-fashion stuff too."
I glanced around the office.
"Hey," he said, "don't waste money on fancy front stuff, you understand? You got the goods, you don't need all that floss and gloss stuff, you know, all that Hollywood flash."
"I can see that you're not wasting time on that," I said. I swished a little more of his Scotch around in my mouth. If I was going to drink it I might as well try to prevent cavities while I was at it. Victor didn't seem to be having any problem with it. He was already pouring out a third slug. Maybe he was tougher than he looked.
"So I know Les, like I was saying. Good photographer."
"Where is he now?" I said.
"I heard he was out of the country," Victor said.
I believed that like I believed I was drinking Chivas Regal.
"Some kind of work for the government. China, I think."
He leaned back and savored his drink, just a breezy guy, passing the time, having a drink with a guy who'd broken into his office. He was as authentic as a starlet's smile.
"Know a model named Sondra Lee?" I said.
"Sonny? Of course, any photographer would know Sonny. She's the top model on the coast."
"Ever photograph her?"
"Naw, never had the pleasure myself. I mean, I've been approached, but you know how it is, Marlowe. You got commitments, she's got commitments. We've never been able to get together."
"Even when she was younger?" I said. I had no idea where I was going. I just wanted to keep it going. Something might surface.
He shook his head. "When she was young, pal, I wasn't in the business. Sonny's no coed, you know."
I nodded, and eased another small sip of the Scotch into my mouth, sort of sneaking around on it from the side. It was still putrid.
"How about Manny Lipshultz?" I said.
If it hit him oddly he didn't show anything. He pursed his lips slightly and looked up at the corner of the room. Then he shook his head.
"Nope, no Manny Lipshultz," he said. "Swell name though, ain't it."
I agreed that it was swell. We were all swell. He and I were especially swell, just a couple of swell guys sitting around lying to each other on a pleasant afternoon.
13
I went out onto Western Avenue and sat in my car and waited. While I waited I tried to figure out what I thought I was doing. I knew I was getting ready to tail a guy who wasn't the man I was looking for, but he had a picture of Sondra Lee and an office in a building where the guy I was looking for had gotten a ticket. There was no reason to do it except the guy was all wrong. You walk into your office and find a guy there you don't sit down and drink with him. You call the buttons.
About twenty minutes after I started sitting and waiting, Victor came out of his office building and headed down Western on foot. I waited until he got to the corner, and when he turned right on Sunset I got out of the Olds and hot-footed it after him, slowing to a casual walk when I reached Sunset. I crossed to the south side of Sunset and headed west. Victor was across the street from me, maybe fifty yards ahead. He had a furtive quality to his walk, but it was probably in
stinctive. He didn't look around. Halfway down the next block he turned into a bar called Reno's. I let him settle in, then I sidled in myself and slid into a booth near the front. The waitress scowled at me, one guy in a booth for four.
"I'm part of the Southern Cal backfield," I said. "My teammates will be joining me soon."
"Everybody's funny as hell, out here," she said. "You want a drink?"
I ordered a gimlet, on the rocks, and sipped it slowly, letting it work against the taste of Victor's deadly Scotch. Victor was at the bar, on a stool, shoulders hunched over a shot of something which, judging from his Scotch, probably tasted like an old pipe cleaner.
Beside him was a blonde in a very short skirt, her legs crossed, sitting sideways on the bar stool, leaning toward Victor. She had on green eye shadow and very bright red lipstick, and her green and red tank top gaped a little at the back of her skirt as she leaned forward. The only other person at the bar was an aging redhead with a big chest confined by a white sequined sweater that was raveled at the sleeve. She was drinking Manhattans, and while I watched, the bartender brought her one and gestured toward Larry Victor. She took it, nodded her thanks at Victor and dipped into it.
Larry made a little salute back at her with two fingers touching his forehead and turned his attention to La Blondie.
La Blondie was demanding it. I couldn't hear her, but from the intensity of her movements and the speed with which her mouth moved it was clear that she was mad as hell. Victor kept shaking his head and muttering back at her.
The inside of Reno's was fake knotty pine, with a few longhorns mounted on the wall, and some old Frederic Remington prints framed here and there around the room. It was not very bright inside, and the brightness of the Southern California sun outside made it seem even dimmer. It was cool, and would probably have been quiet if the redhead at the end hadn't kept feeding the jukebox. A cool bar on a hot afternoon is a very comfortable place sometimes.
The blonde took something that looked like a photo from her purse and shoved it toward him. Victor took a pair of rimless glasses from the breast pocket of his shapeless sport coat and put them on to look at the picture. When he saw the picture he quickly put his hand over it, palm flat, and looked around the room, uncomfortably. Then he shoved the picture back at the blonde, took his glasses off and put them away. The blonde picked up the photograph and put it back in her purse. The whole exchange probably hadn't lasted more than twenty seconds, but it had been enough, when he had looked around the bar with his rimless glasses on, for me to realize what bothered me about him. Except for the hair, he looked like the picture I'd seen of Les Valentine. And hair can be arranged.
Victor stood up suddenly, slammed a ten on the bar and walked out of the bar like a man leaving his wife for good. The blonde sat staring after him. I got up and went after Victor, being careful not to step into the blonde's gaze. It would have punched holes in my rib cage.
He was halfway to the corner of Western when I came out of the bar. By the time he got his car from the curb near his office I was in my Olds with the motor idling. He went west on Sunset until he hit the freeway and south to Venice Boulevard. It was the middle of a bright afternoon and traffic was easy. I kept two or three cars between me and Victor, and shifted lanes from time to time. He wasn't expecting to be tailed, and he had other things on his mind. I could have followed him in a ferris wheel.
I followed him down to the beach. And when he pulled into the narrow parking slot behind a beachfront bungalow, I went on past and parked under an olive tree between two trash barrels under a sign that said Private Parking, This Means You. I walked back to the beach bungalow, past the backs of dank little clapboard houses, each with a car rammed up against its back wall, squeezed in off the street. Once, someone had planted olive trees along this road, and here and there where the salt wind hadn't killed them they grew stunted and misshapen, littering the ground with incomplete black olives that looked like human droppings. The harsh smell of their leaves mingled with the sea smell and the scent of cooking, and under it the rich evasive smell of decaying garbage from the overfilled trash cans that shared the tiny back space with the cars.
Behind Victor's house, at the little cement pad path that led around the house to the front door, was a mailbox. The lettering on it said Larry and Angel Victor. I went on, two houses down, and cut through another narrow cement pad path with weeds forcing up through the sand beneath the pads. In front of the houses was the beach walk and then the beach and then the fat Pacific Ocean waddling in onto the coastline.
Two houses down, Larry Victor was sitting on a beach chair on his front porch with his feet up on the railing. Next to him was the black-haired young woman with big dark eyes from the picture on his desk. She had on some kind of loose-fitting Hawaiian dress and little white sling strap high-heeled shoes, and she had let the dress slide halfway up her thighs as she sat with her feet up beside Victor's. They were drinking Mexican beer from the bottle and holding hands. It was the kind of domestic scene that the insurance companies use when they try to tell you that enough life insurance will make you secure. I stood halfway behind a patch of giant geraniums, at the corner of the beach house two doors down, and watched.
Marlowe, the all-seeing, sees all, peeps at everything. The girl leaned over and kissed Victor and the kiss lingered and developed. When the kiss and ensuing struggle ended Victor reached up in an automatic gesture and straightened his hair. I smiled. Bingo. Les Valentine with a hairpiece.
14
I drove back to the Springs in time for a late supper which Tino made up for me in the kitchen. Linda was at the Racquet Club and didn't get home until I was finishing the last of the salad that Tino insisted on serving after the meal.
"It is how it is done, Mr. Marlowe," Tino said. "Everyone does it this way in the Springs."
"Everybody but me, Tino," I said. "I eat my salad before the meal."
Tino shook his head. "Mrs. Marlowe said we will never civilize you, Mr. Marlowe."
"I'm as civilized as I'm likely to get," I said.
/"You are very fine the way you are, Mr. Marlowe."
At which point Linda entered.
"Well, darling," she said, "look at you home from a hard day's gumshoeing. How nice."
She came over and gave me a light kiss. I could smell the booze on her breath.
"Would you like some supper too, Mrs. Marlowe?"
"No, Tino, please, just a large Scotch, light soda, on the rocks."
Linda sat across from me in the kitchen. Tino brought her the drink.
"Did you detect anything very good today, darling?"
"I found Les Valentine," I said.
"How exciting for you. I'm sure it compensates for missing our dinner at the club with Mousy and Morton."
"Perfect," I said. "Myrria Loy couldn't have read it better."
"Don't be rude, darling. You did stand me up, you know."
"I know," I said. "And I'm sorry I had to. But the whistle doesn't blow at cocktail time, for me."
"And I knew that when I married you," Linda said.
There was nothing in that for me. I let it pass.
"It would be encouraging, darling, if sometimes I felt that you'd shirk the job to be with me."
"It is the only way I can be with you," I said. "Your old man has about a hundred million bucks. If I start shirking my job to be with you, pretty soon I'll be laying around having my eyebrows plucked."
"You're such a goddamned fool," Linda said.
"Probably," I said.
Linda nuzzled her drink again.
"Don't you even want to be with me?" she said.
"Damn it, that's the point. Of course I want to be with you. I'd like to spend all my time in bed with you, having cocktails by the pool with you, helping you sort your lingerie. And if I give in to that, what am I? You could get me a little jeweled collar and we could go for walks."
Linda stood and turned away from me, the drink half finished in her hand. She t
ook two steps toward the door, stopped, threw the glass at the sink. It missed and banged against the cabinet and broke and splattered on the rug. She turned and collapsed into my lap with her mouth against mine.
"You bastard," she said, her mouth open against mine. "You unbreakable bastard."
I picked her up and headed for the bedroom. Money had its uses. Tino would clean up the drink.
In the morning Linda had a headache and we stayed in bed drinking orange juice and coffee and waiting for the headache to dwindle.
"Too much Scotch," I said.
"Of course not," Linda said. "I go to a quiet party and have a couple of teenie drinks, and come home sleepy, and… well, I certainly didn't get much sleep."
"I noticed that," I said.
Tino rapped softly on the bedroom door and then came in with a breakfast tray.
She turned her head away quite quickly.
"Ah, but Mrs. Marlowe," Tino said with a smile. "Mr. Marlowe will eat his and most of yours, I believe."
Tino put the tray down on my side of the bed and went out. I set to work to prove him right.
"How can you, you beast," Linda said.
"Exercise," I said. "Healthy indoor exercise all night. Makes me hungry."
Without looking, Linda groped over, found half a piece of toast and took a small bite of the point. She chewed it carefully. Then she leaned back against the pillow carefully to rest and let it settle.
"You said last night that you found Muffy Black-stone's husband," Linda said softly, her eyes still closed.
"Yes," I said. "He's living in Venice under the name Larry Victor. Has a photography studio in Hollywood."
"I'm sure Mr. Lipshultz will be very proud of you, darling."
Poodle Springs (philip marlowe) Page 6
