"Okay, Sailor," he said. "You ride with us."
We went out in single file: Garcia, me, and J.D. Garcia got in behind the wheel of a Lincoln. J.D. and I got in the back. We rolled west on Franklin with the windows up and the air conditioning on. No one spoke. At Laurel Canyon we went down to Sunset and continued on Sunset as the houses got bigger and the lawns more empty through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills to Bel Air. We went in past the Bel Air gate and the private police booth and wound along into Bel Air until Garcia stopped the Lincoln in front of a pair of ten-foot spiked iron gates with gilded points. He rolled down the window as a guy in a blue blazer and grey slacks stepped out of the sentry box next to the gate. The guy looked in, saw Garcia and went back in the sentry box. I could see him pick up a phone, and in a moment the gates opened slowly and Garcia drove us through. There was no house in sight yet. Just a winding driveway paved in some sort of white material that might have been crushed oyster shells. The headlights played over a forest of flowering shrubs and short trees that I couldn't identify in the dark. We went down a small hill, wound up a somewhat higher one and turned a corner. The house that rose up in front of us wasn't anywhere near big enough to hold all of California. Probably not more than the entire population of Los Angeles comfortably. It was lit from the outside with spotlights: white masonry with gables and towers and narrow Tudor windows with diamond panes. There was a vast porte-cochere in front, and when we pulled in under it and stopped, two more guys in blazers appeared to open the doors.
"You work for Walt Disney?" I said.
"It's a little showy," Garcia said. He got out of the car. So did I. J.D. got out after me.
"Wait here, J.D.," Garcia said.
"How long you gonna be, Eddie?" J.D. said. "I got stuff I'm supposed to do tonight."
Garcia paused and turned his head slowly and looked at J.D. He didn't say anything. J.D. shifted from one foot to the other. Then he tried a smile.
"No rush, Eddie," he said. "Anything else I got going tonight can wait."
Garcia nodded and walked toward the front door. He seemed to expend no effort walking; he seemed to glide. I went after him. One of The Blazers opened the right-hand half of the double front door. It was ten feet high and studded with wrought-iron nail heads.
Inside was a stone floor the length of the house with French doors in the distance that led to something leafy. There was a vast curving staircase rising on the left side of the central corridor and doors opened to the right and left. The ceiling rose thirty or forty feet, and from it hung an enormous iron chandelier in which candles flickered. Real candles, on a giant iron wheel. There was probably a hundred of them. They provided the only light in the hall. On the stone floor there was an Oriental runner that reached the length of the floor and on the wall were tapestries of medieval knights on plump horses with delicate legs.
The front door closed behind us. A butler appeared. He opened one of the doors on the right-hand wall and held it open.
"Follow me, please," he said.
We went through a library with bookshelves filled to the 15-foot ceilings and giant candles burning in 8-foot candlesticks. There was a fireplace that I could have ridden a horse into. To the right of the fireplace another door opened and we followed the butler through into some sort of space that, had it been three times smaller, might have been somebody's office. The far wall was all glass and opened out onto a pool and beyond, the spotlit gardens. The pool had been built to look like some sort of jungle pool with vines and plants dripping practically into it and a rock-strewn waterfall at the far end splashing down into the lapis lazuli water. There was a bar along another wall, a television set, an illuminated globe almost as big as the original, green leather furniture of the thick-sofa, club-chair variety scattered over a green marble floor, with here and there Oriental throw rugs to stand on if your feet got tired. On the right wall, behind a desk big enough to land helicopters on, wearing an actual red velvet smoking jacket with black silk lapels, was a hatchet-faced man with ice-white hair cut very short, and that phony-looking tan that everybody in Southern California thinks you have to have to prove that you don't live where there's smog. I had seen his picture on a wall once.
Hatchet Face was smoking a white clay pipe with a stem about a foot long, the kind you see in old Dutch paintings. He looked at me the way a wolf looks at the lamb chop and put the stem in his mouth and puffed.
"If you meet people bowling ten pins in the mountains," I said, "don't drink anything they offer."
Hatchet Face didn't change expression. Maybe he couldn't.
Garcia said, "Guy's name is Marlowe, Mr. Blackstone. He thinks he's tough, and he thinks he's funny."
Blackstone's voice sounded like someone pouring sand out of a funnel.
"I don't think he's either," he said. There was nothing there for me; I let it pass.
"We found him in that house on Kenmore," Garcia said. "He was tossing it."
Blackstone nodded. He still had the long stem in his mouth, the bowl cradled in his right hand.
"Why?" he said.
"Says he's a PI. Got a California license, had a gun."
"What else?"
"Didn't want to say. Said he wanted to talk with you. I figured you might want to talk with him."
Blackstone nodded, once. It was an approval nod. Garcia didn't look like he cared whether Blackstone approved. On the other hand, Blackstone didn't look like he cared if Garcia cared. These weren't people who wore their hearts on their sleeves. Blackstone shifted his stare to me. His eyes were very pale blue, almost grey.
"What else?" he said in his sandy whisper.
"I was told a woman named Lola lived there," I said. "She popped up in a case I was working on."
"And?"
"And I thought I'd look over her house, see what it told me."
Blackstone waited. I waited. Eddie Garcia waited. You had the sense from Eddie that he could wait forever.
"And?"
"And what's your interest?" I said.
Blackstone looked from me to Garcia and back.
"Perhaps I should have Eddie teach you some manners," he said.
"Perhaps you should stop trying to scare me to death and share a little information. Maybe we're not adversaries."
"Adversaries." Blackstone made a sound which he probably thought was a laugh. "An intellectual peeper."
"My wife reads aloud to me sometimes," I said.
Blackstone made his sound again. "With a wife that can read," he said. "You know that Lola Faithful is dead?"
"Yeah, shot in the head with a small-caliber gun at close range, in a photographer's office on Western Ave."
"So what's that got to do with you?" Blackstone said.
"I found the body."
Blackstone leaned back a little in his chair. He pushed his lower lip out maybe half a millimeter.
"You," he said.
"Yeah, and that made me sort of wonder about who shot her."
"Have you a theory?"
"Nothing as strong as a theory," I said.
Blackstone stared at me for a moment, then he looked at Garcia, then back at me.
"I too would like to know who murdered her," he said.
"I had a sense you might be interested," I said. "About the time your boys threw down on me in Lola's house. And I figure you don't know much about it or why would you have a couple of guys staking the place out. And I figure it's important as hell to you or why would one of the guys be your top boy."
"What else do you figure?" Blackstone whispered.
"It's what I don't figure that matters. I don't figure whether you're interested in who killed Lola because of Lola, or because of who killed her."
Again Blackstone looked at me with his expressionless gaze. Again he glanced at Garcia, which was probably as close as he got to indecision.
"I don't know Lola Faithful," he said.
"So it's who killed her that you're worried about," I said.
"Cops like t
he photographer," he said.
"Cops like the obvious," I said. "Usually they're right."
"You like him?" Blackstone said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"He doesn't seem the type."
"That's all?" Blackstone said.
"Yep."
"You ever a cop?"
"Yeah," I said. "Now I'm not. Cops can't decide that someone doesn't seem the type. They've seen too many axe murderers that look like choirboys. They don't have time to think if someone's the type. They have to throw everything in the hopper and take what sifts through."
"You seem a romantic, Mr. Marlowe."
"And you don't, Mr. Blackstone."
"Not often," Blackstone said.
"Did you know, I know your daughter?" I said.
Blackstone didn't say anything. It was what he did instead of showing surprise.
"I didn't know that," he said.
"She's married to the photographer," I said.
There was no sound in the room, except the nearly inaudible sigh of breath that Blackstone let out through his nose. It was only one sigh. Then silence. It was a risk telling him. He might not know the connection between Les and Larry. He might actually be the tooth fairy, too. Sooner or later he'd find out that I knew Muriel, and that I knew both Les and Larry, and if it was dangerous to tell him now it would be more dangerous later when he knew I was holding out on him. I could feel Garcia behind me, with my gun in his pocket. Blackstone laid down the long silly pipe and put both his steepled hands under his chin and looked at me silently.
"Mr. Marlowe," he said, "maybe you and I should have a drink."
22
I was sitting in one of the green leather chairs.
"Les owed a guy money," I said. I had a big Scotch and soda with Scotch from a curved crystal decanter and soda from a siphon. Blackstone had the same. Garcia had nothing; he lounged against the wall near the bar as if time had stopped and would start only when he said so. He didn't listen or not listen. He simply existed over there by the bar in total relaxation.
"And the guy hired me to locate Les for him."
"Who's the guy?" Blackstone said.
I shook my head. "Client's got a right to be anonymous," I said.
"Where the hell do you think you are, Marlowe?" Blackstone said. "In court someplace?"
"Guy in my business hasn't got much to sell: a little muscle, a little guts, some privacy." I crossed one leg over the other and rested my drink on the top knee. "If I'm going to be in this business I can't go around spilling my guts to every loonigan I meet."
"I'm hardly a loonigan, Marlowe."
"Sure," I said, "you're a citizen and a half. Pillar of the community, or what there is of it out here. Bet you're on the board at a lot of important places."
Blackstone nodded.
"Which is why," I said, "you have Eddie Garcia walking behind you everywhere you go."
"A man makes enemies, Marlowe."
"And Eddie takes care of them," I said.
"Whenever necessary," he said.
"Sure," I said.
Across the room Garcia never moved. We could have been discussing the price of aldermen for all the difference it seemed to make to him.
"Anyway," I sipped a little Scotch; it seemed to seep into my mouth and spread gently. You could probably spend my weekly earnings for a bottle of this stuff. "It seemed simple enough."
"Only it wasn't," Blackstone said.
"No," I said. "I started with his wife, your daughter. She said he was on location doing stills for a movie production. While I was there I noticed a fashion photo of a model I recognized with Les's name on it."
"You checked the movie company," Blackstone said. "They never heard of him. You checked the model. She never heard of him."
"Eddie's been busy," I said.
Blackstone merely nibbled at his drink.
"So I went back and searched his house."
Blackstone said, "My daughter's house."
"Probably your house," I said. "I'll bet old Les didn't buy it."
"I gave it to her," Blackstone said.
I nodded. "In his drawer I found a parking ticket. I ran that back, found the address and found a photographer named Larry Victor in the building at the address. I braced him. He said he knew Les but that Les was out of town. I followed him to a bar, watched him have a fight with Lola Faithful. I lost Larry, went back to search his office."
Blackstone interrupted. "Why?"
"Why not?" I said. "I didn't have anything else. He said he knew Valentine."
Blackstone nodded.
"I walked in and there was Lola with her brains on the floor."
"And this guy Larry?" Blackstone said.
"Is Valentine," I said, "with a wig and contact lenses."
"Where is he?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Well," Blackstone said, "you have accomplished much, but not enough. Do you know why Valentine masquerades as Victor?"
"Or vice versa," I said. "No, I don't."
Blackstone nodded.
"Two things I'd like to know," I said.
I drank some more of the Scotch and paused to admire it.
"One, why were you looking for Valentine, and two, why did you have Garcia watching Lola's house?"
"You seem to have been candid with me, Marlowe, up to a point. I'm looking for Valentine because he's been away and my daughter was worried. As for Lola Faithful, a woman of that name attempted to blackmail my daughter."
"About what?"
Blackstone shook his head.
"My daughter did not say, and I did not ask. I told my daughter that I would have Eddie speak to her. Eddie was away on business for a day or so, and when he returned he went to call on Lola only to find that she had been murdered."
Blackstone sampled his Scotch. It didn't seem to amaze him. He was used to it.
"You can understand my interest," he said.
I nodded.
"And your daughter?"
"I merely told her that the woman had died. I did not ask her anything."
We were quiet then, inhaling the Scotch, speculating about each other's intentions.
Finally I said, "How do you feel about Les Valentine, Mr. Blackstone?"
Blackstone held the glass of Scotch between his palms and looked into it and turned it slowly as if he wanted to admire it from all its angles. He took some air in slowly through his nose and let it out more slowly.
"He's a liar, a womanizer, a petty thief, an opportunist, a fool, an unsuccessful, probably compulsive, gambler, with no more spine than a dandelion. And my daughter loves him. As long as she does he is one of nature's noblemen to me. I will support him. I will intercede with those who bear him ill will. As long as he is married to my daughter, he is family."
"Even though he's a wrong Gee," I said.
"I am not much of a father, Mr. Marlowe. I have only my daughter. Her mother is long since gone. I indulge my daughter entirely, doubtless for selfish reasons. If she wishes to be married to a wrong Gee then he will become, so to speak, my wrong Gee."
"The wrong Gee is home," I said. "I delivered him myself."
"So you weren't telling me everything," Blackstone said.
"I never said I was."
"You're an interesting man, Marlowe. You wouldn't tell me that until you decided what I'd do with the information."
I didn't say anything.
"I can admire that, Marlowe. But do not make the mistake of confusing admiration with patience. I can eliminate you by nodding my head. And if it suits my purposes I will."
"Anybody can eliminate anybody, Mr. Blackstone. Once you realize that, it all gets into perspective."
"Where did you find him?"
"He was in his office," I lied. "I told him the cops would be after him any minute and he came with me."
"Where had he been?"
I shrugged. "He didn't say."
Blackstone put the glass to his lips, discov
ered it was empty, gestured, without looking, to Garcia. Eddie was there with the decanter and siphon. He looked at me. I shook my head. Eddie was back at the bar.
"Be careful, Marlowe. I'm not a playful man. So be very careful."
"Sure," I said. "You don't mind if I nibble on a turnip once in a while."
"Take him home, Eddie," Blackstone said. "When you get there give him back his gun."
"Lola's place would be fine," I said. "I didn't finish searching it."
Blackstone almost smiled.
"Take him where he wants to go, Eddie."
This time J.D. drove and Eddie rode in back with me. When we got to Kenmore Eddie reached in his side pocket and got my gun. J.D. stopped in front of Lola's house. It was silent. The street was dark. There was a high pale moon shining straight down on us. Garcia handed me my gun.
"You're a piece of work, Marlowe," he said. "I'll give you that."
I stowed the gun under my arm and got out of the car.
J.D. slid it into gear. I gave it the gunman's salute as they drove away.
23
It was 3:37 on my wristwatch, by moonlight, when I came out of Lola Faithful's house. I hadn't found anything, but on the other hand no one else had come and pointed a gun at me. It was too late to go home. I drove slowly. Hollywood was empty, the houses blank and aimless, all the colors altered by the moon glow. Only the neon lights along Sunset were still awake. They were always awake. Bright, hearty and fake, full of Hollywood promises. The days come and go. The neon endures.
I tried to figure out why I was here, alone, in the night on Sunset musing about neon. I had a client, but he sure as hell hadn't hired me to protect Valentine and look for whoever killed Lola. I hadn't slept in a while. I hadn't eaten in a while, and the rye for lunch and the Scotch for supper had worn off, leaving me feeling like something that belonged on Sunset Boulevard at 3:30 in the morning with no place to go. I had a beautiful wife at home in a comfortable bed, sleeping with one arm across her forehead and her mouth open only a fraction. If I got into bed with her now she would roll toward me and put one arm around me. What the hell difference did it make if she owned the bed? What the hell difference did it make if Les Valentine had killed Lola Faithful? Why not let the cops sort it out? At Western Ave I turned up toward Hollywood Boulevard. I didn't have any purpose. I wasn't going anywhere. What the hell difference did it make where I drove? I drove past Larry's building. Ten yards past it I slowed, and U-turned, and cruised back. Something had moved in the doorway of Larry's building. Probably just a bum staying out of the moonlight. Why not take a second look? It didn't matter.
Poodle Springs (philip marlowe) Page 10
