Poodle Springs

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 what 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.