The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (22 page)

“You think I could have a cigarette?” I said. “I promise not to use it to burn through these ropes, or anything like that.”

“I don’t smoke,” Canning said. “Filthy habit.”

“You’re right, it is.”

“Have you got cigarettes? Where are they?”

I pointed with my chin toward the breast pocket of my suit jacket. “In there. Matches, too.”

He reached inside my jacket and brought out my silver case with the monogram, as well as a matchbook I’d forgotten I’d picked up in Barney’s Beanery. He took a cigarette from the case and fitted it between my lips, lit a match, applied the flame. I drew a long, deep lungful of hot smoke.

Canning dropped the case back in my pocket and resumed his pacing. “The Latin races,” he said, “I haven’t much respect for them. Singing, bullfighting, squabbling over women, that’s about their limit. You agree?”

“Mr. Canning,” I said, working the cigarette to one side of my mouth, “I’m not exactly in a position to disagree with anything you say.”

He laughed, making a thin, piping sound. “That’s true,” he said, “you’re not.” He paced again. It seemed he had to keep moving, like a shark. I wondered how he had made his money. Oil, I guessed, or maybe water, which was almost as precious in this dry gulch the early Angelenos chose to build a city in. “There are only two worthwhile races, in my opinion,” he said. “Not even races, in fact—specimens, rather. Know what they are?” I shook my head, and immediately the pain made me regret it. A flurry of cigarette ash tumbled silently down the front of my shirt and landed in my lap. “The American Indian,” he said, “and the English gentleman.” He glanced at me with a merry eye. “A strange pairing, you suppose?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I can see things they would have in common.”

“Such as?” Canning had stopped pacing and turned to me with one of those thick black eyebrows lifted.

“Devotion to the land?” I said. “Fondness for tradition? Enthusiasm for the hunt—?”

“That’s right, you’re right!”

“—plus a tendency to slaughter anyone who gets in their way.”

He shook his head and waved a reproving finger at me. “Now you’re being naughty, Mr. Marlowe. And I don’t like naughtiness, any more than I like inquisitiveness.” He paced again, turning and turning about. I was keeping an eye on that swagger stick; a slash across the face from that would be a thing I wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

“Killing is sometimes necessary,” he said. “Or, rather, call it elimination.” His expression darkened. “Some people don’t deserve to live—that’s a simple fact.” He approached nearer again and squatted down on his heels beside the chair I was tied to. I had the uneasy feeling that he was going to make a confession. “You knew Lynn Peterson, didn’t you,” he said.

“I didn’t know her, no. I met her—”

He nodded dismissively. “You were the last human being to see her alive. That’s not counting”—he nodded toward the door—“those two pieces of crud.”

“I suppose I was,” I said. “I liked her. I mean I liked what I saw of her.”

He looked into my face from the side. “Did you?” A muscle was twitching in his left temple.

“Yes. She seemed a decent sort.”

He nodded absently. A strange, tense expression had come into his eyes. “She was my daughter,” he said.

That took a while to absorb. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing. Canning was still watching me. There was a far, deep sorrow in his face; it came and went in a matter of moments. He rose to his feet and walked to the edge of the pool and stood there in silence for a while with his back to me, looking down into the water. Then he turned. “Don’t pretend you’re not surprised, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I’m not pretending,” I said. “I am surprised. Only I don’t know what to say to you.”

I had smoked my cigarette to the end, and now Canning came and with an expression of disgust extracted the butt from my mouth and carried it to a table in the corner, holding it in front of him nipped between a finger and thumb, as if it were the corpse of a cockroach, and dropped it in an ashtray there. Then he came back.

“How is it your daughter’s name was Peterson?” I asked.

“She took her mother’s name, who knows why. My wife was not an admirable woman, Mr. Marlowe. She was part Mexican, so maybe I should have known. She married me for my money, and when she’d spent enough of it—or, I should say, when I put a stop to her spending—she ran off with a fellow who turned out to be a con man. Not an attractive history, I know. I can’t say I’m proud of that particular passage of my life. All I can offer in my defense is that I was young and, I suppose, bewitched.” He grinned suddenly, showing his teeth. “Or is that what all cuckolds say?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Then you’re a lucky man.”

“There’s luck and there’s luck, Mr. Canning.” I glanced down at the ropes. “Mine doesn’t seem to be much in operation just now.”

My mind was foggy again, probably due to a drop in circulation because of the ropes. But my strength was coming back, I could feel it, unless it was just the effect of the nicotine. I wondered how long all this was likely to go on for. I wondered too—again—how it might be going to end. I thought of López’s bulging eye and the blood on his shirtfront. Wilber Canning was playing the part of the soft old boy, but I knew there was nothing soft about him, except maybe in his regard for his dead daughter.

“Listen,” I said, “can I take it that if Lynn was your daughter, then Nico is your son?”

“They were both my offspring, yes,” he said, not looking at me.

“Then I’m sorry,” I said. “Your son I never met, but like I said, Lynn seemed all right to me. How come you weren’t at her funeral?”

He shrugged. “She was a tramp.” He spoke without emphasis. “And Nico was a gigolo, when he wasn’t being worse. They both had a lot of their mother in them.” Now he did look in my direction. “You’re shocked by my attitude toward my son and daughter, Mr. Marlowe, even though I’ve lost them both?”

“I’m hard to shock.”

He wasn’t listening. He had started pacing again, and it made me feel dizzy, watching him. “I can’t complain,” he said. “I wasn’t exactly a perfect father. First they ran wild, then they ran off. I didn’t try to find them. Afterward, it was too late to make it up to them. Lynn hated me. Nico probably did, too, only there were things he needed from me.”

“What sort of things?” He didn’t bother to answer that. “Maybe you weren’t as bad as you thought,” I said. “Fathers often judge themselves too harshly.”

“You have children, Marlowe?” I shook my head, and again what felt like a set of big wooden dice rattled together inside my skull. “Then you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, sounding more sad than anything else.

Though the day must have been waning, the heat in the big, high-ceilinged room was rising. It felt a little like an August afternoon in Savannah. Plus the dampness in the air seemed to have a tightening effect on the ropes around my chest and my wrists. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the feeling back in my upper arms.

“Look, Mr. Canning,” I said, “either tell me what you want from me or let me go. I don’t care a damn about the Mexicans—they deserved all they got from your man Jeeves. Rough justice is enough justice, in their case. But you’ve got no reason to keep me trussed up here like a Sunday chicken. I’ve done nothing to you, or to your son or daughter. I’m just a gumshoe bent on making a living, and not doing too well at it.”

If nothing else, my words had the effect of getting Canning to stop pacing, which was a relief. He walked up and stood in front of me with his hands on his hips and his swagger stick clamped under his arm. “The thing is, Marlowe,” he said, “I know who you’re working for.”

“You do?”

“Come on—what do you take me for?”

“I don’t take you for anything, Mr. Canning. But I have to say, I very much doubt you know the identity of my client.”

He leaned forward and held out to me the amulet that was hanging on the string around his neck. “Know what this is? It’s the eye of a Cahuilla god. Very interesting tribe, the Cahuilla. They have powers of divination that are scientifically attested to. No point in lying to these folks—they see right through you. I was privileged to be inducted as an honorary brave. Part of the ceremony was the presentation of this precious image, this all-seeing eye. So don’t try telling me lies or try to sidetrack me by playing the innocent. Talk.”

“I don’t know what you want me to talk about.”

He shook his head sadly. “My man Jeeves, as you call him, is going to be back here shortly. You saw what he did to the Mexicans. I wouldn’t want to be forced to have him do the same to you. Despite the circumstances, I have a certain respect for you. I like a man who keeps a cool head.”

“The problem is, Mr. Canning,” I said, “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“No?”

“Really, I don’t. I was hired to find Nico Peterson. My client thought, like everybody else, that Nico was dead but then saw him on the street and came to me and asked me to track him down. It’s a private matter.”

“Where is he supposed to have seen Nico, your client, as you call him?”

Him.
So he didn’t know what he thought he knew. It was a relief. I wouldn’t have wanted to think of Clare Cavendish here, tied to a chair with this murderous little madman strutting up and down in front of her.

“In San Francisco,” I said.

“So he’s up here, is he?”

“Who?”

“You know who. What was he doing in San Francisco? Was he looking for Nico? What made him suspect Nico wasn’t dead?”

“Mr. Canning,” I said, as patiently and gently as I could, “none of what you’re saying makes sense to me. You’ve got it wrong. It was a chance sighting of Nico—if it
was
Nico.”

Canning was again standing in front of me with his fists planted on his hips. He gazed at me in silence for a long time. “What do you think?” he said finally. “Do you think it was Nico?”

“I don’t know—I can’t say.”

There was another silence. “Floyd tells me you mentioned Lou Hendricks. Why did you?”

“Hendricks picked me up on the street and took me for a drive in his fancy car.”

“And?”

“He’s looking for Nico too. Popular boy, your son.”

“Hendricks thinks Nico is alive?”

“He didn’t seem to know one way or the other. Like you, he’d heard I was sniffing around, trying to pick up Nico’s trail.” I didn’t mention the suitcase, which to my regret I had mentioned to Hendricks. “There was nothing I could tell him, either.”

Canning sighed. “All right, Marlowe, have it your way.”

The door at the other end of the pool opened then, right on cue, and Bartlett and Floyd Hanson came back in. Hanson was looking more troubled than ever. His face was gray with tinges of green. He had bloodstains on his nice linen jacket and on his previously spotless white pants, too. Disposing of a couple of badly roughed-up corpses—I thought it a pretty fair assumption that the second Mexican was dead by the time he got to wherever it was he was taken—would be hell on your clothes, especially if you were as natty a dresser as Floyd Hanson. Clearly he wasn’t used to the sight of gore, at least not in the quantities shed by the two Mexicans. But hadn’t he said he had fought in the Ardennes? I should have known to take that with a shovelful of salt.

Bartlett came forward. “That’s all fixed then, Mr. Canning,” he said in his Cockney voice.

Canning nodded. “Two down,” he said, “one to go. Mr. Marlowe here isn’t being cooperative. Maybe a good soaking would clear his head. Floyd, give Mr. Bartlett a hand, will you?”

Bartlett went behind me again and began untying the ropes. When he got them off, he had to help me stand since my legs were too numb to support me. He had released my hands, too, and I flexed my arms to get the blood flowing in them. Now he walked me to the edge of the pool and put a hand on my shoulder and made me kneel on the marble tiles. The water level was only an inch or two below the edge. Bartlett held one of my arms, and Hanson came forward and took the other. I thought they were going to tip me into the pool, but instead they yanked my arms behind my back and Bartlett grabbed my hair again and pushed my head forward and plunged it into the water. I hadn’t taken a deep enough breath, and right away I began to experience the panic of a drowning man. I tried to get my face turned sideways so I could snatch some air, but Bartlett’s fingers were as strong as a pit bull’s jaws, and I couldn’t move. Very soon I felt as if my lungs were about to burst. Then at last I was hauled upright again, with water streaming in under my collar. Canning came and stood beside me, leaning down with his hands braced on his knees and his face close to mine. “Now,” he said, “are you ready to tell us what you know?”

“You’re making a mistake, Canning,” I said between gasps. “I don’t know anything.”

He sighed again and nodded to Bartlett, and once more I was underwater. Funny the things you notice, even in the most desperate circumstances. I had my eyes open and could see, far down, on the pale blue bottom of the pool, a small ring, a plain gold band, that must have slipped off some woman bather’s finger without her noticing. At least this time I had been smart enough to fill my lungs, but it didn’t make much difference, and after a minute or so I was a drowning man all over again. I’d never gone in the water much and certainly had never learned to hold my breath the way champion swimmers do. I wondered if maybe that ring down there would be the last thing I’d ever see. I could think of worse sights to have your eye fixed on while you were breathing—or, in my case, not breathing—your last.

Bartlett could feel when I began to panic and was close to opening my mouth and letting my lungs fill up, and he wasn’t ready to let me die, not yet. He and Hanson pulled me up again. Canning leaned down, peering into my face. “You ready to talk, Marlowe? You know what they say about going down for the third time. You don’t want to join those two spics on the rubbish heap, now do you?”

I said nothing, only hung my dripping head. Hanson was on my right, holding my arm twisted behind me; I could see his nifty loafers and the cuffs of his white linen pants. Bartlett was on the other side, grasping my left arm and with his right hand still clutching the back of my head. I reckoned they would probably drown me this time. I had to do something. I thought I’d rather be beaten to death than die underwater. But what could I do?