The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (3 page)

I sidled onto a stool and ordered a Mexican beer. There was a bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the bar; I took one and ate it with a lot of salt. The salt and the dryness of the egg yolk left my tongue feeling like a piece of chalk, so I called for a refill of Tecate.

It was a slow early evening and there were few customers in the place. Travis, not being an overly familiar sort, had given me the barest nod when I came in. I wondered if he knew my name. Probably not. He knew what I did for a living, I was pretty sure of that, though I didn’t remember him ever mentioning it. When the place wasn’t busy, he had a way of standing with his hands spread on the bar and his big square head lowered, gazing out through the open doorway into the street with a far-off look in his eye, as if he were remembering a long-lost love or a fight one time that he won. He didn’t say much. He was either dumb or very wise, I could never decide which. Either way, I liked him.

I asked him if he knew Peterson. I didn’t think Barney’s would be Peterson’s kind of place, but I thought it was worth a try anyway. “Lives over on Napier,” I said. “Or did, until recently.”

Travis slowly came back from whatever section of memory lane he had been wandering down. “Nico Peterson?” he said. “Sure, I know him. Used to come in in the afternoon sometimes, drink a beer and eat an egg, just like you.”

This was the second time I had been linked with Peterson—Clare Cavendish had said he was tall like me—and however weak the link was, I didn’t welcome it. “What sort of guy is he?” I asked.

Travis flexed his muscleman’s shoulders in a shrug. He was wearing a tight black sweatshirt, out of which his thick short neck stuck up like a fireplug. “Playboy type,” he said. “Or that’s how he presents himself. Ladies’ man, with that mustache and the oiled hair combed in a nice wave. Funny, too—he can always make them laugh.”

“He brought his girls here?”

Travis heard the skepticism in my voice; Barney’s was hardly the place to romance stylish ladies in. “Now and then,” he said, with a wry half-smile.

“One of them tallish, blond hair, black eyes, a particularly memorable mouth?”

Travis gave me his cautious smile again. “That could be any of them.”

“Has an air, this one. Nicely spoken and very elegant—too elegant for Peterson, probably.”

“Sorry. If they’re as good-looking as you make her sound, I don’t look too close. It’s distracting.”

He was a real professional, Travis. But it occurred to me that maybe there was a reason he didn’t notice women, and that he too didn’t much like the sign behind the bar, for his own, private reasons.

“When was he last in?” I asked.

“Haven’t seen him in a while.”

“A while being…?”

“Couple of months. Why? Is he missing?”

“He seems to have gone off somewhere.”

Travis’s eye took on a faintly merry light. “That a crime nowadays?”

I studied my beer glass, rotating it on its base. “Somebody is looking for him,” I said.

“The lady with the memorable mouth?”

I nodded. As I said, I liked Travis. Despite his size, there was something clean and neat about him, something trim and shipshape; maybe he had been a sailor, after all. I’d never felt I could ask. “I was over at his house,” I said. “Nothing there.”

A customer was signaling from the far end of the bar, and Travis went off to serve him. I sat and thought about this and that. For instance, why was the first sip of beer always so much better than the second? This was the kind of philosophical speculation I was prone to, hence my reputation as the thinking man’s detective. I thought a bit about Clare Cavendish, too, but, like Travis said, I found her distracting and instead went back to the beer question. Maybe temperature was the answer. It wasn’t that the second sip was going to be all that much warmer than the first, but that the mouth, having had that first cool rinse, knew what to expect the second time around and adjusted accordingly, so the element of surprise was absent, with a consequent falling off in the pleasure principle. Hmm. It seemed a reasonable explanation, but was it sufficiently comprehensive to satisfy a stickler like me? Then Travis came back and I was able to take off my thinking cap.

“I just realized,” he said, “you’re not the first to ask after our friend Peterson.”

“Oh?”

“A week or two ago, a couple of Mexicans were in here wanting to know if I knew him.”

That same two again, no doubt, in their car with the holes in the roof. “What sort of Mexicans?” I asked.

Travis gave me a sort of wistful smile. “Just Mexicans,” he said. “Businessmen, they looked like.”

Businessmen. Right. Like my man from New York with the pinkie ring. “They say why they were looking for him?”

“Nope. Just asked if he was a customer here, when he’d last been in, and so on. I couldn’t tell them any more than I’ve told you. It didn’t improve their mood.”

“A gloomy pair, were they?”

“You know Mexicans.”

“Yes—not the most scrutable people in the world. They stay around long?”

He gestured at my glass. “One of them drank a beer, the other had a glass of water. I had the impression they were men on a mission.”

“Oh? What sort of mission?”

Travis considered the ceiling for a moment. “Can’t say. But they had that serious look that made their eyes shine—you know what I mean?”

I didn’t, but nodded anyway. “You think this mission they were on might have had serious consequences for our Mr. Peterson?”

“Yeah,” Travis said. “One of them kept on toying with a pearl-handled six-shooter while the other picked his teeth with his knife.”

I wouldn’t have taken Travis for the ironic type. “Funny, though,” I said. “Peterson doesn’t seem the kind of guy to be involved with Mexican businessmen, somehow.”

“Lot of opportunities, south of the border.”

“You’re right, there are.”

Travis picked up my empty glass. “You want another?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to go wild.”

I paid the man and climbed down from the stool and went out into the evening. It was a little cooler now, but the air tasted of car exhaust, and the day’s grit had laid down a grainy deposit between my teeth. I had passed Travis my card and asked him to give me a call if he happened to hear any news of Peterson. I wouldn’t be waiting by the phone, but at least now Travis knew my name.

*   *   *

I drove home. The lights in the houses up in the hills were coming on, making it seem later than it was. A sickle moon hung low on the horizon, embroiled in a bank of mud-blue murk.

I still had the house in Laurel Canyon. The woman who owned it had gone on an extended visit to her widowed daughter in Idaho and decided to stay there—for the potatoes, maybe. She had written to say I could have the house for as long as I liked. It left me feeling pretty settled on Yucca Avenue, in my hillside roost with the eucalyptus trees across the street. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Did I really want to spend the rest of my days in a rented house where about the only things I could call my own were my trusty coffeepot and a chess set of faded ivory? There was a woman who wanted to marry me and take me away from all this, a beautiful woman, like Clare Cavendish, and rich like her, too. But I was bent on staying footloose and fancy-free, even if it didn’t feel quite like that. Yucca Avenue is not exactly Paris, which is where the poor little rich girl was nursing her bruised heart, last time I’d heard from her.

The house was about the right size for me, but on certain evenings, such as this one, it felt like the White Rabbit’s place. I brewed a strong pot of coffee and drank a cup of it and prowled around the living room for a while, trying not to carom off the walls. Then I drank another cup and smoked another cigarette, ignoring the dark blue night gathering in the window. I thought of laying out one of Alekhine’s less terrifying openings and seeing where I could go with it, but I didn’t have the heart. I’m not a chess fiend, but I like the game, the concentrated coolness of it, the elegance of thought it calls for.

The Peterson business was weighing on my mind, or at least the part of the business that involved Clare Cavendish. I was still convinced there was something fishy in her approach to me. I couldn’t say why, but I had the distinct sense that I was being set up. A beautiful woman doesn’t walk in off the street and ask you to find her missing boyfriend; it doesn’t happen that way. But what way does it happen? For all I knew, there might be offices like mine all over the country that beautiful women walked into every other day and asked poor saps like me to do exactly that. I didn’t believe it, though. For a start, the country surely couldn’t boast many women the likes of Clare Cavendish. In fact, I doubted there was even one more like her. And if she was really on the level, how come she was involved with a lowlife like Peterson? And if she was involved with him, why wasn’t she the slightest bit embarrassed about throwing herself on the mercies—I was going to say “into the arms” but stopped myself in time—of a private detective and imploring him to find the flown bird? All right, she didn’t implore.

I decided that in the morning I would do some digging around in the history of Mrs. Clare Cavendish née Langrishe. For now I had to content myself with placing a call to Sergeant Joe Green at Central Homicide. Joe had once briefly entertained the notion of charging me as an accessory to first-degree murder; that’s the kind of thing that will create a bond between two people. I wouldn’t say Joe was a friend, though—more a wary acquaintance.

When Joe answered, I said I was impressed that he was working so late, but he only breathed hard into the receiver and asked what I wanted. I gave him Nico Peterson’s name and number and address. None of it was familiar to him. “Who is he?” he asked sourly. “Some playboy involved in one of your divorce cases?”

“You know I don’t do divorce work, Sarge,” I said, keeping my tone light and easy. Joe had an unpredictable temper. “He’s just a guy I’m trying to trace.”

“You got his address, don’t you? Why don’t you go knock on his door?”

“I did that. No one home. And no one has been home for some time.”

Joe did some more breathing. I considered telling him he shouldn’t smoke so much but thought better of it. “What’s he to you?” he asked.

“A lady friend of his would like to know where he’s taken himself off to.”

He made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a chuckle. “Sounds like divorce business to me.”

You’ve got a one-track mind, Joe Green,
I said, but only to myself. To him I repeated that I didn’t handle divorces and that this had nothing to do with one. “She just wants to know where he is,” I said. “Call her sentimental.”

“Who is she, this dame?”

“You know I’m not going to tell you that, Joe. There’s no crime involved. It’s a private matter.”

I could hear him striking a match and drawing in smoke and blowing it out again. “I’ll have a look in the records,” he said at last. He was getting bored. Even the tale of a woman and her missing beau couldn’t hold his jaded interest for long. He was a good cop, Joe, but he’d been in the business a long time and his attention span was not broad. He said he would call me, and I thanked him and hung up.

*   *   *

He telephoned at eight the next morning, while I was frying up some nice slices of Canadian bacon to have with my toast and eggs. I was about to tell him again that I was impressed by the hours he kept, but he interrupted me. While he spoke I stood by the stove with the wall phone’s receiver in my hand, watching a little brown bird flitting about in the branches of the tecoma bush outside the window above the sink. There are moments like that when everything seems to go still, as if someone had just taken a photograph.

“The guy you were asking about,” Joe said, “I hope his lady friend looks good in black.” He cleared his throat noisily. “He’s dead. Died on”—I heard him riffling through papers—“April nineteenth, over in the Palisades near that club they got there, what’s it called. Hit-and-run. He’s in Woodlawn. I’ve even got the plot number, if she’d like to go visit him.”

4

I don’t know why they call it Ocean Heights, since about the only thing high about it would be the maintenance costs. The house wasn’t all that big, if you consider Buckingham Palace a modest little abode. Langrishe Lodge, it was called, though I couldn’t imagine anything less like a lodge. It was made of pink and white stone, lots of it, and had turrets and towers, and a flag flying proudly on a flagpole on the roof, and about a thousand windows. It looked pretty ugly to me, but I’m no judge of architecture. Off to the side there were big green trees, some variety of oaks, I thought. The short drive led straight to an oval of gravel in front of the house that you could have run a chariot race on. It struck me that I was in the wrong trade, if a pile like this was what you got for making women smell nice.

During the drive over I had been thinking of what Clare Cavendish had said about liking music. I hadn’t picked up on it, hadn’t asked her what kind of music she preferred, and she hadn’t offered to tell me, and somehow that was significant. I mean, it was significant that we had let it go. It wasn’t the most intimate thing she could have told me, not like her shoe size or what she wore or didn’t wear to bed at night. All the same, it had weight, the weight of something precious, a pearl or a diamond, that she had passed from her hand into mine. And the fact that I had taken it from her without comment, and that she had been content for me to say nothing, meant it was something held in secret between us, a token, a promise for the future. But then I decided that this was probably all hooey, just a case of wishful thinking on my part.

When I had parked the Olds on the gravel, I noticed a sporty-looking young man coming toward me across the lawn. He was swinging a golf club and knocking the heads off daisies with it. He wore two-tone golf shoes and a white silk shirt with a floppy collar. His dark hair was floppy too, a wing of it falling over his brow so that he had to keep pushing it out of his eyes with a nervous flick of a pale and slender hand. He walked in a willowy sort of way, meandering a little, as if there were a weakness somewhere in the region of his knees. When he got close I saw with a shock that he had Clare Cavendish’s almond-shaped black eyes—they were much too pretty for him. I saw too that he wasn’t nearly as young as he’d seemed at a distance. I guessed he was in his late twenties, though with the light behind him he could have passed for nineteen. He stopped in front of me and looked me up and down with a faint sneer. “You the new chauffeur?” he asked.