Poodle Springs

21

Number 222 was on the left side as you drive up Ken-more toward Franklin. It sat up on a small lawn, its front door barely visible under the overhang of the porch roof. It was one of those comfortable cool bungalows with big front porches that they used to build at about the time that L.A. was a sprawling comfortable place with a lot of sunshine and no smog. People used to sit on those porches in the evening and sip iced tea and watch the neighbors water their lawns with long loping sweeps of a hose. They used to sleep with the front door open and the screen door held with a simple hook. They used to listen to the radio, and sometimes on Sundays they'd take one of the interurban trains out to the beach for a picnic. I parked around the corner on Franklin and walked back.

The lawn had gone to hell in front of the place. The grass was so high it had gone to seed. The house needed paint and the screen had pulled loose in the front screen door in several places and the screening had curled up like the collar points on an old shirt. The front door was locked, but the frame had shrunk up so that it didn't take much to get in. I put my shoulder against the frame and the flat of my hand against the door and pushed in both directions at once and I was in.

The place smelled like places do that have been closed up empty for a while. To the right through an archway was the sitting room. There was a couch there, half sprung, with a crocheted throw on it, turned back as if someone had been under it and just gotten up. Opposite was a big old television set on legs. On top was a square apothecary jar full of small colorful hard candies, individually wrapped in cellophane. The thin blue Navaho rug on the floor was worn threadbare, and a coffee table made of bent bamboo was shoved over near the head of the couch. There were some movie magazines and a true romance magazine and an ashtray full of filter-tipped cigarette butts. The late afternoon light as it sifted through the dusty muslin curtains picked up dust motes in the air.

The cops would have seen all this. They'd have looked at everything like they do, and anything that mattered would be down in a box in property storage with a case tag on it. Still, they didn't know all the things I knew, and I was hoping I might see something that wouldn't have meant anything to them. It wasn't in the sitting room. I moved to the kitchen. It had gotten dark. I snapped on a light. If the cops had a watch on the place they'd have seen me come in and would be here by now. The neighbors would just think I was another cop.

There was a half loaf of bread and an unwrapped stick of butter sitting on a saucer, in the refrigerator. In the freezer was a bottle of vodka. There were three or four limes turning yellow in a Pyrex dish on the kitchen counter, and some instant coffee in a jar in the cupboard. There was a shrunken bar of hand soap on the rim of the sink. That was it. No flour, no salt, no meat, no potatoes. Just bread and butter and vodka and instant coffee. The limes were probably for scurvy. I looked behind the refrigerator and under the sink and inside the empty cabinets. I took the strainer out of the sink and looked down into the drain as best I could. I checked the oven, examined the linoleum around the edges to see if anything had been slipped down underneath. I unrolled the window shades and pulled over a chair and climbed up and looked inside the glass globe on the kitchen light.

While I was doing that a voice behind me said, "Hold that pose, Sailor."

I had a gun in a shoulder rig but it might as well have been in the trunk of my car for all the good it did me standing on a chair with my hands over my head. I stood still.

"Now put your hands on top of your head and step down off of there," the voice said. It was a soft voice with no accent but a faint foreign lilt in it.

I managed to keep my hands on my head and get off the chair without dislocating a kneecap.

"Turn around," the voice said. There was nothing gentle in the softness; it was the softness of a snake's hiss. I turned around.

There were two of them. One was a California Beach Boy, lots of tan, lots of muscle, just enough brains to know the handle end of a blackjack. He had on white pants and a flowered shirt and he was holding a Colt .45 automatic like the army used to issue. He held it Southern California casual, half turned over on his palm, not aimed at anything special, but generally toward me. The other guy was shorter and slimmer. He wore a black suit, black shirt and narrow black tie and his movements were very graceful. Merely standing still he looked like a dancer. He had a thick black moustache and longish black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes had no feeling in them at all. The voice belonged to him.

"So, Sailor, why don't you sort of tell me about who you are and how come you're standing on a chair in the kitchen here. Stuff like that."

"Who's asking?" I said.

He smiled without any feeling at all and pointed at the beach boy's automatic.

"Oh," I said, "him. I've met him before. He doesn't impress me."

"Tough," he said. He looked at the beach boy. "Everybody's tough," he said. He'd have been more impressed if I wiggled my ears.

"You want me to shoot some corner of him, Eddie? So he'll know we mean it?"

Eddie shook his head.

"My name's Garcia," he said, "Eddie Garcia." He nodded at the beach boy. "This is J.D. Pretty, isn't he?"

"Beautiful," I said. "If he pulls the trigger on that thing can he hit what it's pointed at?"

"From this close?" Eddie smiled. The effect was of light passing over a flat stone surface for a moment. The surface never changed.

"We represent a very important person who has an interest in this house and its occupant and we wish to report to him what you were doing in here, and why. We would rather do that than deliver your body to him in the trunk of our car."

I nodded. "Who's your man?" I said.

Garcia shook his head. J.D. thumbed the hammer back on the Colt. I looked at Garcia. J.D. didn't matter. Garcia's empty obsidian eyes gazed blankly back at me. I knew he'd do it.

"My name's Marlowe," I said. "I'm a private eye working on a case. How about you take me to your VIP and I tell him the rest. Maybe our interests would mesh."

"You know who owns this house?" Garcia said.

"Woman named Lola," I said. "She's dead."

Garcia nodded. He looked at me. There was no expression. I assumed he was thinking.

"Okay," he said. "You got a piece under your left arm. I'll have to take it. And I want to see some ID."

"Wallet's in my left hip pocket," I said.

Garcia drifted in, took the gun out of my shoulder holster, lifted the wallet off the hip and drifted out, all it seemed in one seamless motion. He dropped the gun in his side pocket and flipped open my wallet. He looked at the photostat of my license for a moment and then shut my wallet and handed it back to me. I took my hands off my head and took the wallet and slipped it in my hip pocket.

"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 the 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."