At about 7:30 in the evening, Fox came out of Lippy's office.
"We'd like to talk with you a little longer, Marlowe," he said. "We'll go over to the Springs. It's closer."
"I've got my car," I said.
"Monson will ride in with you," Fox said.
26
We were in an interrogation room at the Poodle Springs cop house. I was the special guest. Others included a female stenographer with hair the color of pink grapefruit, Sgt. Whitestone from the Springs, Fox, Lt. Wilton Crump, who was the Riverside County Chief Investigator, and as a surprise treat, Bernie Ohls. Crump was round shouldered and long armed. His neck was short. He had piggy eyes separated by a wide flat nose. The backs of his hands were hairy. He had on a black suit and vest and a Borsalino hat. He wore the hat tilted back on his head.
"Let's understand each other, Marlowe," Crump said. He was chewing tobacco and holding a paper cup to spit into. "I know you're Harlan Potter's son-in-law and it don't impress me a goddamned bit."
"Oh darn," I said. "I was hoping you'd want to dance with me."
Crump had the tobacco juice cup in his left hand. He reached around under his coat flap with his right hand and came out with a woven leather sap. He showed it to me and smiled, a big mean tobacco-stained smile, and slapped the blackjack softly against his right thigh.
"I don't have much time, Marlowe. I don't have much time for funny, I don't have much time for cute. You found two stiffs in the same week, both shot with a small-caliber gun, in the head. You got something you want to say about that?"
"Just lucky, I guess."
Crump slapped the blackjack again against his thigh and bent toward me. His breath smelled like he might have drunk some Scotch and then eaten Sen-Sen. I could see the red streaking in the whites of his eyes.
"Careful, Marlowe," he said. His voice sounded clotted. "Be goddamned careful."
I gave him a polite smile.
"Now we're just dumb coppers," Crump said, still close to my face, "and so a smart rich private eye like you probably knows stuff that we don't see."
"I'm not rich," I said. "My wife's rich."
Crump talked on as if I hadn't spoken.
"But we were wondering if there might not be some sort of connection, maybe, between the two stiffs you found. And maybe even that you might be telling the L.A. coppers one thing, and us another thing. Lieutenant Ohls here was wondering that enough to drive all the way out here after we called him and said we'd been talking to you."
Ohls was leaning against the wall across the room, with his hat tilted forward over his eyes and his arms folded across his chest.
"We might be wondering, too, before Crump frightens us both to death, if you might care to talk a little about how come you were chasing around Western and Sunset at three-thirty in the a.m. with Angel Victor, who is, for the record, the wife of the chief suspect in the murder of Lola Faithful."
"If he don't give me an answer I like," Crump said, "I'll do a hell of a lot more than frighten him." He glanced over at Ohls and then glared in my face.
I said to Bernie, "If you can get Buzzard Breath, here, out of my face, maybe we can talk."
Still leaning in close to me, Crump hit me on the side of the left knee with the blackjack. The pain ran the length of my leg both ways and into my groin. The leg started to throb immediately. There was a hint of tobacco juice at the corner of Crump's mouth.
He snarled at me, "Buzzard Breath, Smart Boy?"
Still leaning on the wall with his arms folded, Ohls said, "Put the sap away, Crump."
Crump straightened and stared across at Ohls.
"The hell with you," he said. "He's my prisoner."
Ohls took out one of his little cigars and put it in his mouth and got it lit. Then he straightened from the wall and walked easily across the room and stood directly in front of Crump with his face maybe a half inch away from Crump's. He let a little smoke drift out as he spoke.
"You either put the sap away," Ohls said in a soft and pleasant voice, "or I will strain it through your teeth."
Crump jerked a little, as if someone had jabbed him. No one said anything for a moment. The two men stood close together.
Then Crump said, "Aw, the hell with this," and stuffed the sap in his back pocket and turned and left the room. Ohls smiled as if at some private joke and turned and went back and leaned on the wall.
"Whyn't you talk about all this, Marlowe, take your time," he said. "We got all night. Fox here can represent Riverside."
I got out a cigarette and lit it and took in some smoke. Maybe it was time to dump this thing, to tell them the thing they didn't know and let them run with it and go home and drink gimlets with my wife. When they knew that Les owed Lippy dough, and that Les was also Larry, the one Lola had argued with before she ended up dead in his office, then the whole thing would go away. Larry would be gone and Muriel would be alone and Angel, with her big eyes and her smile…
"Lippy always had a couple of Roscoes with him," I said. "Whoever murdered him had to get around them first."
Ohls didn't move, or speak.
"I'd guess a woman," I said. "Small gun, whoever did it got close to him. He had his back turned. Scotch was out as if there was going to be a drink. But only one glass. Maybe he had a romantic rendezvous that went bang in the night."
Ohls took his hat off and held it down by his side, holding it by the brim. He had the little cigar in his mouth and he spoke around it.
"We've done this before, Marlowe. We can guess that sort of stuff without you."
I shrugged. "It's all I've got, Bernie."
Ohls tapped the hat against his thigh softly, took the cigar out of his mouth with his other hand, dislodged a bit of tobacco from under his upper lip with his tongue and spit the tobacco delicately toward the corner.
"You discover two homicides in a week," Ohls said. "That could be a coincidence. But in thirty-two years of police work I've never seen a coincidence like that."
There didn't seem much worth saying to that. I let it pass.
"Coincidences don't do anything for us, Marlowe. They don't take us anywhere. Believing in coincidences is believing in dead ends. Cops hate dead ends, Marlowe."
"I know," I said. "I worry about that. Some nights I can't sleep."
"Not only do you find two stiffs in a week, but you do so in the course of looking for a deadbeat named Les Valentine, who, it turns out, is Clayton Blackstone's son-in-law."
"And Clayton Blackstone worries you?"
"Yeah, I stay up nights too," Ohls said. He walked over to one of the scarred maple desks and put his cigar out in a half-empty paper cup of coffee. He turned back toward me.
"You got no client, Marlowe. You got nobody to protect. Unless you're protecting yourself."
"There's nothing more I can tell you, Bernie," I said.
"Maybe you shoulda let Crump have him, Lieutenant," Fox said.
"Crump is a thug with a badge," Ohls said. "I don't like him."
We were all quiet then. The pink-haired stenographer was poised and ready to record more. Except there wasn't any more.
Ohls sighed. "Okay, Marlowe," he said. He turned to Sgt. Whitestone. "Use your jail?"
"Sure," Whitestone said.
"Book him," Ohls said. "Stick him in a cell. Maybe a connection will occur to him."
"What charge, Lieutenant?"
"Your choice," Ohls said. "You'll think of something."
Then he put on his hat and walked out of the room.
27
It was quiet in the Poodle Springs hoosegow. There were a couple of other prisoners, but it was late and they were asleep. The only noise was the sound of sleeping men, an occasional snore, a mutter, once a brief sob.
I lay on the bunk in the dark. Outside the late night life of the Springs went on. People had midnight snacks and made love and watched movies on TV and slept quietly with the dog at the foot of the bed and the refrigerator humming quietly in the kitchen. The jail was at
tached to the police station and I could hear the patrol cars come and go: the sound of their radios, indistinct in the night, the crunch of tires on gravel, once the siren as a car pulled out in a hurry. But mostly there was nothing to hear, and nothing to do.
I wondered if Lippy would have been killed if I'd told the cops all I knew. If I'd told them even as much as I'd told Blackstone. Guys like Lippy were always walking on the railing, but dying's a long fall. Blackstone had no reason to kill Lippy, even if he found out that he was chasing Les for money. A word from the boss would have been enough. But Les had a reason, and he had a reason to kill Lola Faithful too, a blackmail reason having to do with a picture. Whoever killed Lola had also cleaned out Larry's files-I smiled to myself in the dark. When he was in Poodle Springs I called him Les, when he was in L.A. I called him Larry. No wonder I was confused-were they looking for the picture? Why would the killer take all the files? Because he was looking for something, or she was, and he didn't have time to look through them all. If Larry killed her he'd know what was in the files. He wouldn't have to take them. But he might because he'd know the cops would find them and maybe he didn't want them known, though there were pictures on sale at any newsstand as graphic as Larry's. Still, he might be embarrassed.
The turnkey strolled down the corridor outside the row of cells, his crepe-soled shoes squeaking. He paused in front of each cell and stared in for a moment before he moved on.
There hadn't been anyone in all those nude photos that I recognized except Sondra Lee. And I had her picture tucked under the floor mat in the trunk of my car. Suppose Larry had agreed to pay Lola blackmail and she came and brought the picture and he killed her and took it. He'd destroy the picture-but would Lola show up with the only print? Would she be that stupid? I didn't believe it. Blackmailers don't give up their leverage that easy. Even stupid blackmailers.
I thought about a cigarette. I didn't have any, or my pipe, or for that matter my shoelaces or my tie or my belt. I got up and walked in a tight circle around the cell a few times. It didn't make me sleepy. I lay back down on the bunk. There was no sheet, but there was a mattress and a blanket. I'd been in jails that had neither. Ah, Marlowe, you glamorous adventurer. Why the hell wasn't it Larry? Even if he did have a pretty, big-eyed little wife who adored him. Was she the legal one? Maybe I should check the bigamy laws when I got out. Hadn't had a lot of bigamy cases lately.
I did some deep breathing.
And where was the picture? Lola would have kept a copy. It wasn't in her house. If the cops had found it, it would have led them somewhere. They were as stuck as I was, stucker because they didn't know the things that I was stuck about. Could be in a safe-deposit box. Except where was the key? And whiskey-voiced old broads like Lola didn't usually keep safe-deposit boxes. Maybe she stashed the negative with a friend. Except whiskey-voiced old broads like Lola didn't usually trust friends with valuable property. The simplest answer was Larry again, and the simplest answer on Lippy was Les. And Les was Larry.
I did some more deep breathing.
Somewhere before morning I dozed off finally and dreamed that I was in love with a huge nude photograph of Linda, and every time I reached it Tweedledum and Tweedledee grabbed it away and ran off in perfect tandem.
28
At six A.M. they brought me some warm coffee and a stale roll. I sat on the bunk and ate. My head ached, my knee throbbed steadily. I touched the spot where Crump had hit me. It was puffy and sore. My stomach felt uneasy as I drank the coffee. I'd had maybe two hours' sleep.
At 10:30 A.M. a new turnkey came on down the corridor and stopped in front of my cell.
"Okay, Marlowe," he said. "You're sprung."
I got up stiffly and limped after him as we went along the corridor and up three stairs and into the lobby of the cop house. Linda was there, and a guy in a white suit and a loud shirt.
The guy in the loud shirt said, "Mr. Marlowe, Harry
Simpson. Sorry we took so long. I had to wait until court opened this morning to get a writ."
He had a dark tan and shiny black loafers with a little gold chain across the tongue of each. His shirt was open halfway to the navel and his bare chest looked like a leather washboard. The hair on his chest was grey. He had a little thick moustache and his wiry hair was tinged with more grey. He wore a pinky ring. A Poodle Springs lawyer. In a little while he'd be calling me baby.
Linda stood behind him; she didn't speak. Her eyes rested on me so heavily I could almost feel the weight of her look. I got my stuff back, signed a receipt, and we went out the front door. No alarms sounded. Linda's Cadillac was parked in the No Parking, Police Only spot beside a Mercedes convertible with the top down that I knew had to belong to my attorney.
"Where's your car?" Linda said.
"Out back," I said.
"I'll drive you home and send Tino back to get it," Linda said. "You look awful."
But better than I felt.
Simpson said, "You may have to appear, Mr. Marlowe. I'll try to squelch it, and, frankly, Mr. Potter's name carries some weight, but I can't guarantee anything."
"More than mine does," I said.
Linda opened the passenger side of the Cadillac.
"Get in, darling," she said.
"Anything I should tell your dad?" Simpson said.
'Tell him thanks," Linda said. "I'll call him later."
Then she went around and got in and we drove home in silence.
When we got home Linda said, "I think you should shower and get some sleep. We can talk later."
I was too tired to debate that, or much else. I did as she suggested, though I reversed the order.
At six o'clock that evening I was nearly human again. I had showered and shaved and was sitting by the pool in a silk robe with an ice pack on my swollen knee. Tino brought me a double vodka gimlet on the rocks, and a single for Madame. The gimlet was the color of straw and limpid as I looked at it in the thick square glass. The water in the pool moved slightly in the easy breeze that had come with the evening. I dipped into the gimlet and felt the drink ease into me and along the nerve trails. I looked at Linda. She was sitting on the chaise, her feet on the floor, her knees together, bent forward a little with her hands in her lap, both hands folded around her glass.
"Daddy's furious," she said.
"The hell with him," I said.
"He got you out," she said.
"The hell with him anyway," I said. "How are you?"
She shook her head slowly and stared down into her glass as if, in the bottom, was an answer she didn't quite have.
"I've been in the jug before, Linda. It's an occupational hazard, like boredom and sore feet."
"The police said you were obstructing justice."
"The police say what they need to say," I said. 'They wanted me to tell them something I didn't think they should know."
"And they put you in jail? Is that legal?"
"Probably not, but it happens all the time. After a while you get to understand it."
"Is it legal not to tell them what they want to know?"
"Same answer, I guess. You can't do my work and keep your self-respect if you let the cops decide what you should do."
"I frankly fail to see how you can do your work and keep your self-respect," Linda said.
"Because it involves spending time occasionally in jail? Because it brings you into contact with the lower classes?"
"Damn it, Philip, that's not fair," Linda said. "It's not my fault my father's rich."
"No," I said, "it isn't. And it isn't mine either. But one thing you can count on, you don't get as rich as Harlan Potter in this country without cutting some corners, and breaking some rules, and spending time with people you wouldn't care to break a crumpet with."
Linda shook her head fast several times.
"I don't know about that. I don't even care about that. What I know is that this is no kind of marriage I understand. You're out all night half the time. I don't know where you are or wh
at you're doing. You might be getting killed. I wake up in the morning and get a call saying you're in jail. My husband. Here? In the Springs? In jail?"
"What will they say at lunch?" I said.
"Damn it, don't be so poor-snob high and mighty, Marlowe. These are my friends. I care about them. I want them to care about you. I don't want to know that they're laughing behind my back at my husband."
"They'll do that anyway," I said. "Not because I'm a gumshoe. Not because I spent the night in jail. They'll laugh at me because I'm a failure. I don't have any money. In this great Republic that's how the judgment is made, darling."
"But I have money, I have enough money for both of us."
"Which is why, as I keep trying to explain, I can't take it. The way I keep from being a failure is to be free. To be my absolute own man. Me, Marlowe, the Galahad of the gutter. I decide what I'll do. I won't be bought, or pushed, not even by love. You're a success if you have money, but you give up too much."
It was a long speech for me. I washed it down with some gimlet. It didn't help. Gimlets were for early afternoons in quiet bars where the tables gleamed with polish and the light filtered through the bottles and the bartender had a crisp white shirt with the cuffs turned back. Gimlets were for holding hands across the table and saying nothing and knowing everything. I put the drink on the table. Linda hadn't touched hers; she used it to stare into.
"When you're home," Linda said in a flat voice, "and we go to bed, there's a gun on the bureau, beside your wallet and car keys."
"I used to sleep with it in my teeth," I said. "But figured it was safer out here in the desert."
Linda looked up from her gimlet and stared at me for a moment.
"This isn't working," she said finally. Then she stood still holding the gimlet in both hands. "I'm not saying it's your fault… but it isn't working."
She turned and walked back into the house.
I picked up the nearly full double gimlet and stared at it for a little while without drinking, then I flicked my wrist and sluiced the contents in a thin arc onto the ground and carefully put the empty glass upside down on the table and leaned back on the chaise and listened to the ice melt in the bag on my knee.
Poodle Springs (philip marlowe) Page 12
