The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (8 page)

I said I was there to see the manager.

“You got an appointment?” I told him no, and he screwed up his mouth in a funny way and asked my name. I showed him my card. He frowned at it for a long time, as if the information it contained was written in hieroglyphics. He did that thing with his mouth again—it was a kind of soundless gagging—and went into the lodge and spoke briefly on the phone, reading from my card, then came back and pressed a button and the barrier came up. “Keep to the left, where it says ‘Reception,’” he said. “Mr. Hanson will be waiting for you.”

The drive wound its way beside a long, high wall with hanging masses of bougainvillea. The blossoms here came in a variety of shades, pink, crimson, a delicate mauve. Someone sure was fond of the stuff. There were other things growing, gardenias, and honeysuckle, the odd jacaranda, and orange trees filled the air with their sweet-sharp fragrance.

The reception area was a log cabin affair with lots of squinty little windows and a red carpet in front of the door. I stepped inside. The air had a piney tang, and flute music was playing softly through hidden speakers in the ceiling. There was no one at the desk, a large and venerable item with stacks of drawers with brass handles and a rectangle of green leather set into the top, the kind of thing an Indian chief might have signed away his tribal lands on. Various items of Americana stood about: a full-length Indian headdress on a special stand, an antique silver spittoon, an ornate saddle on another stand. On the walls were mounted bows and arrows of various designs and sizes, a pair of ivory-handled pistols, and framed photographs by Edward Curtis of noble-looking braves and their dreamy-eyed squaws. I was having a close-up gander at one of these studies—tepees, a campfire, a circle of women with papooses—when I heard a soft step behind me.

“Mr. Marlowe?”

Floyd Hanson was tall and slim, with a long, narrow head and oiled black hair brushed smoothly back and with a fetching touch of gray at each temple. He wore high-waisted white slacks with a crease you could cut your finger on, tasseled loafers, a white shirt with a laid-back collar, and a sleeveless sweater in a pattern of big gray diamonds. He stood with his left hand in the side pocket of his slacks and regarded me with a quizzical eye, as if there was something faintly comical about me that he was too polite to laugh at. I suspected it wasn’t personal, that this was how he looked at most things that came under his careful scrutiny.

“That’s me,” I said. “Philip Marlowe.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe? Marvin, our gateman, tells me you’re a private investigator—is that so?”

“Yes,” I said. “I used to work for the DA’s office, a long time ago. I’m freelance now.”

“Are you. I see.”

He waited another moment, calmly regarding me, then put out his right hand for me to shake. It was like being given a sleek, cool-skinned animal to hold for a moment or two. The most striking thing about him was a quality of stillness. When he wasn’t moving or speaking, something inside him seemed to switch off automatically, as if to conserve energy. I had the feeling that nothing the world could come up with would surprise or impress him. As he stood there looking at me, I found it hard not to fidget. “It’s about an accident that occurred around here a couple months ago,” I said. “A fatal accident.”

“Oh?” He waited.

“Fellow called Peterson got run down by a hit-and-run driver.”

He nodded. “That’s right. Nico Peterson.”

“Was he a member of the club?”

This brought on a cold smile. “No. Mr. Peterson wasn’t a member.”

“But you knew him—I mean, enough to identify him.”

“He came here often, with friends. Mr. Peterson was a gregarious type.”

“Must have been a shock for you, seeing him on the road like that, all bashed up.”

“Yes, it was.” His gaze seemed to roam over my face; I could almost feel it, like the touch of a blind man’s fingers exploring my features, fixing me in his mind. I started to say something, but he interrupted me. “Let’s take a stroll, Mr. Marlowe,” he said. “It’s a pleasant morning.”

He moved to the door and stood to one side of it, ushering me through with an upturned palm. As I stepped past him, I thought I caught him giving me another faint smile, amused and mocking.

He was right about the morning. The sky was a vault of clear blue shading to purple at the zenith. The air was laden with mingled fragrances of tree and shrub and blossom. A mockingbird somewhere was going through its repertoire, and among the shrubbery there was the soft hushed hiss of water sprinklers at work. Los Angeles has its moments, if you’re rich and privileged enough to be in the places where they happen.

From the clubhouse we walked down a smooth, curved path that led past yet more hanging clusters of bougainvillea. Here the profusion of colors was dazzling, and though they didn’t seem to have much of a scent the air was heavy with the damp presence of the blossoms. “These flowers,” I said, “they seem to be the signature of the place.”

Hanson gave this a moment or two of judicious consideration. “Yes, I suppose you could say that. It’s a very popular plant, as I’m sure you know. In fact, it’s the official flower of San Clemente, and of Laguna Niguel, too.”

“You don’t say.”

I could see him deciding to ignore the sarcasm. “Bougainvillea has an interesting history,” he said. “I wonder if you know it?”

“If I did, I’ve forgotten.”

“It’s native to South America. It was first described by one Philibert Commerçon, a botanist accompanying the French admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville on an around-the-world voyage of exploration. However, it’s thought that the first European to see it was Commerçon’s mistress, Jeanne Baret. He had smuggled her aboard dressed as a man.”

“I thought that kind of thing only happened in swashbuckling novels.”

“No, it was quite common in those days, when sailors and passengers could be away from home for years on end.”

“So this Jeanne—what did you say her last name was?”

“Baret. With a
t
.”

“Right.” I couldn’t hope to match his French pronunciation, and so I didn’t try. “This girl discovers the plant, her boyfriend writes it up, yet it gets called after the admiral. Seems less than fair.”

“I suppose you’re right. The world in general does tend to be a little on the unfair side, don’t you find?”

I said nothing to that. His affected, phony British accent was beginning to get on my nerves.

We came into a clearing shaded by eucalyptus trees. I happened to know a bit about the eucalyptus—unranked angiosperm, species of myrtle, native to Australia—but I didn’t think it worth parading my knowledge before this cool customer. He would probably just do another of his twitchy, dismissive little smiles. He pointed beyond the trees. “The polo grounds are over there. You can’t see them from here.” I tried to look impressed.

“About Peterson,” I said. “Can you tell me something of what happened that night?”

He continued to walk along beside me, without saying anything or even registering that he had heard the question, and looking at the ground ahead of him, the way Clare Cavendish did when we were strolling together across the lawn at Langrishe Lodge. His silence left me with the dilemma of whether to ask the question again and probably make a fool of myself. There are people who can do that, who can put you on edge just by staying quiet.

At last he spoke. “I’m not sure what you want me to tell you, Mr. Marlowe.” He stopped and turned to me. “In fact, I’m wondering what exactly is your interest in this unfortunate business.”

I stopped too, and scuffed the dirt of the pathway with the toe of my shoe. Hanson and I were facing each other now, but not in any confrontational way. Generally he seemed not to be the confrontational type; neither, for that matter, am I, unless I’m pushed.

“Let’s say there are concerned parties who’ve asked me to look into it,” I said.

“The police have already done that pretty thoroughly.”

“Yes, I know. The problem is, Mr. Hanson, people tend to have a wrong idea of the police. They go to the movies and see these cops with slouch hats and guns in their hands relentlessly pursuing bad guys. But the fact is, the police want a quiet life just like the rest of us. Mostly their aim is to get things cleared up and squared away, to write a neat report and file it along with stacks and stacks of other neat reports and forget all about it. The bad guys know this and make their arrangements accordingly.”

Hanson looked at me, nodding a little, as if in time with his thoughts. “And who, in this instance, would the bad guys be?” he asked.

“Well, the driver of the car, for a start.”

“Only for a start?”

“I don’t know. There are aspects of Nico Peterson’s death that raise certain questions.”

“Which questions?”

I turned away from him and walked on. After a few steps, however, I realized he wasn’t following me, and I drew to a halt and looked back. He was standing on the path with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, gazing toward the line of eucalyptus trees with his eyes narrowed. I was beginning to see that he was a man who did a lot of thinking. I walked back to him. “You identified the body,” I said.

“Not really. Not officially, anyway. I think his sister did that, the next day, downtown at the morgue.”

“But you were at the scene. You called the cops.”

“Yes, that’s true. I saw the body. It wasn’t a happy sight.”

We moved on together then. By now the sun had burned off all traces of morning mist and the light was sharp and the air so clear that far-off sounds traveled through it as smoothly as javelins. From somewhere nearby I could hear the slither and crunch of a gardener’s spade delving into what sounded like dryish clay. It struck me how lucky Hanson was to have a job that put him every day in these surroundings, among trees and flowering plants and watered grass, under a sky as blue and clean and bright as a baby’s eye. Yes, there were people who had all the luck, and then there was the rest of us. Not that I could have worked here: too much raw nature everywhere.

“Somebody else came on the body first,” I said, “is that right?”

“Yes, a young lady called Mary Stover. She was a hat-check girl here at the club. Her boyfriend had come to collect her at the end of her shift and drive her home. They’d barely turned onto Latimer Road when they saw Mr. Peterson’s body. They came back and told me of their grim find.”

Funny how easily even people as sophisticated as Hanson will fall into the jargon of dime novels. Their grim find, indeed.

“Is it possible for me to talk to Miss Stover?” I asked.

He frowned. “I’m not sure. She married her young man shortly afterward, and they moved together to the East Coast. Not New York. Boston, maybe? I’m afraid I can’t remember.”

“What’s her married name?”

“Ah. There you have me. Only met the young man that one time. Introductions were perfunctory, in the circumstances.”

Now it was my turn to do some heavy thinking. He watched me with a gleam of amusement. He seemed to be getting a lot of mild fun out of our encounter. “Well,” I said, “I guess she won’t be too hard to track down.” I could see he knew this was just talk, and knew I knew it, too.

We walked on again. Around a bend in the path, we came on an elderly Negro turning the clay in a bed of roses—his was the spade I had heard at work a minute ago. He wore faded denim overalls, and his hair was a close cap of tight gray kinks. He gave us a quick, furtive glance, the whites of his eye showing, and I thought suddenly of Richard Cavendish’s high-strung horse looking down at me through the window of my car.

“Good morning, Jacob,” Hanson called out. The old man did not reply, only gave him another nervous-eyed look and went on with his work. When we had passed, Hanson said quietly, “Jacob doesn’t talk much. He just appeared at the gate one day, frightened and starving. We’ve never succeeded in getting him to tell us where he came from or what had happened to him. Mr. Canning ordered that he be taken in, of course, and given shelter and something to do.”

“Mr. Canning?” I said. “Who’s he?”

“Oh, you don’t know? I thought you’d have found out everything like that, being an investigator. Wilber Canning is the founder of our club here. That’s Wilber with an
e
. In fact, his name is Wilberforce—his parents called him after William Wilberforce, the great English parliamentarian and leader of the abolitionist movement.”

“Yeah,” I said, in as dry a tone as I could muster, “I think I’ve heard of him, all right.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“William Wilberforce, I mean.”

“Mr. Canning is a dedicated humanitarian, as were his parents before him. His father set up the club, you know. Our aim is to help, insofar as we can, the less fortunate members of society. The elder Mr. Canning’s employment policy, which still holds today, directed that a certain number of positions be reserved for—well, for those in need of help and protection. You’ve met Jacob and Marvin, our gateman. If you’re around for long enough, you’ll come across some other deserving individuals who’ve found sanctuary here. The Cahuilla Club has an excellent reputation among the migrant fraternity.”

“That’s very impressive, Mr. Hanson,” I said. “You make this place sound like a cross between a rest home and a rehabilitation center. That wasn’t the impression I had of it, somehow. But no doubt folks like Nico Peterson really appreciate the philanthropic spirit of the place.”

Hanson smiled tolerantly. “Not everyone subscribes to Mr. Canning’s benevolent principles, of course. Besides, as I said, Mr. Peterson was not a member.”

Without my realizing it, we had come full circle, and now suddenly we were back at the clubhouse. We weren’t at the front door, though, the one I’d entered by earlier, but somewhere along the side of the building. Hanson opened a door with a full-length glass panel in it and we stepped into a wide, low room with chintz armchairs standing about, and little tables on which stacks of magazines were laid out neatly like roof shingles, and a stone fireplace about as roomy as the living room in my house on Yucca Avenue. A fireplace like that would surely get a lot of use in Pacific Palisades. There was a faint after-smell of cigars and fine old brandy. I could see Wilberforce Canning and his fellow patricians gathered here in the evening after dinner, discussing the lamentable decline in public morality and planning good works. In my imagination, they wore frock coats, knee breeches, and powdered wigs. I get fanciful sometimes; I can’t help it.