Poodle Springs

8

There were 55 Valentines in the L.A. phone book. One was a Lester and one was a Leslie. Lester lived in Encino and was a Division Manager for Pacific Bell; Leslie had a place on Hope Street and was a retail florist. I called information. They hadn't any other Les Valentines listed.

I had no office in L.A. anymore. I had to make the calls from a phone booth on the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard across from the old office. I called a local modeling agency and the Chamber of Commerce in San Benedict. They were both civil to me, which is a high average in L.A.

It was January and cool in L.A. Across the valley, the highest peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains were snowcapped. In Hollywood people pretended it was winter and wore furs along the boulevard, and producers wore argyle sweaters under tweed jackets on their way to lunch at Musso and Frank's. I was clean-shaven, smelling of bay rum and back in town for the first time in a month. Fast, tough, and on a case.

I got in the Olds, went south a block to Sunset and then headed west.

The Triton Modeling Agency was in a courtyard off of Westwood Boulevard, just north of Olympic. The center of the courtyard was covered with white pebbles divided into squares with redwood planking. In each square a small palm tree grew in single file down the center of the yard. There were maybe ten commercial establishments in the complex, a rare-book shop, a store selling Mexican jewelry, a leather store, a lawyer. I walked along the low-canopied porch that fronted the entries until I came to Triton. I rang the little brass bell and opened the door. It was a plush, carpeted silver office. Walls and ceiling done in silver paint, the reception desk silver plastic, and behind the desk a blonde with long thighs and flawless nylons. She wore a scarlet dress of some loose knit material, and as I entered she was reapplying scarlet color to her lips. She kept carefully at it while I stood in front of her desk.

"Yippie I oh chi yea," I said.

She finished her last touch and closed her compact mirror and looked at me.

"Yes, Cowboy?"

"I'm easily excited," I said.

"How nice for you," she said.

"Married, too," I said.

"How nice for you," she said.

"Thanks. My name is Marlowe. I called about one of your models, Sondra Lee?"

"Ah, the detective." She looked me over the way a fish examines a worm. "Well, you've certainly got the shoulders for it," she said.

"Can you tell me how to get in touch with Miss Lee?" I said.

"Sure," the blonde said. "I called her. She said you can come see her at her place."

The blonde handed me a piece of paper with an address on it.

"It's off Beverly Glen," the blonde said. "Near the top."

I thanked her and turned to leave.

"If the marriage doesn't work…" she said.

I turned, gave her the gunman's salute with my thumb and forefinger, and left.

I picked up Beverly Glen off of Wilshire. North of Sunset it started to climb. The foliage pressed in close on it and the hills rose on either side waiting for the first heavy rain to wash the houses that rode their flanks down into the roadway. Sondra Lee's place would be one of the first to go. Its back end rested on two 15-foot lally columns that stood on concrete footings in the hillside. The driveway curved around the house and stopped to form a circle in front. There was no yard but the area in front of the house was full of flowering shrubs, and hummingbirds danced and spiraled over them as I pulled the car to a stop near the front door.

A Mexican woman answered my ring. Miss Lee was in the solarium. I followed her through the overdone bungalow into a glass addition that leaned against the front side of the house. A door at one end opened out onto the pool. It was closed now against the bite of a Hollywood winter, and Miss Lee was reclining indoors, on a leather-covered fainting couch, wearing a very small two-piece black bathing suit and tanning in the rays of the afternoon sun as it came filtering through the glass roof. There was a bar across the end nearest the house, and a couple of canvas chairs sitting about.

The woman on the couch had been on so many magazine covers that I felt I knew her. Her hair was jet black, and her eyes were black, and her skin was pale even after tanning. She looked like you could disappear forever into one of her sighs.

"Miss Lee," I said, "I'm Philip Marlowe."

"Of course, Mr. Marlowe. I've been expecting you. Will you have a drink?"

I said I would.

She smiled slowly and nodded toward the bar.

"Please help yourself, I really need to get another fifteen minutes of sun," she said. She had a way of dragging out every word so that she spoke very slowly, and you were obliged to hang on her words. I made a tall Scotch at the bar, adding ice from the silver bucket and watching the moisture bead up on the glass in the warm room.

I took my drink and sat in one of the canvas chairs where she could see me. I tried not to stare at her.

"I saw your photograph yesterday, hanging in the hallway of a man's home," I said. "He is a photographer and you had posed for him."

"Oh? What is his name?" she said.

"Valentine," I said. "Les Valentine."

She reached to the table beside her and took a long pull on a glass half full of what looked like water but probably wasn't.

"Valentine," she said. "What was his first name?"

"Les, that's how he signed the photograph, in gold, down in the right-hand corner."

"Les," she said. She shook her head slowly and nibbled a little more from her glass.

"I don't know any Les," she said.

"You get photographed so much," I said. "It must be hard to remember."

She shook her head and buried her muzzle in the glass again. When she came up for air she said, "No. I only let a few people photograph me. I would know if anyone took my picture."

She shifted slightly as if in keeping with the slow slide of the sun in the western sky, her nearly still body absorbing all it could get like some kind of gorgeous lizard. She emptied her glass and held it out toward me.

"Be a darling," she said, "and freshen my glass."

I took it and went to the bar.

"The cut glass decanter, at the far right," she said.

I took it, took out the stopper and poured her glass nearly full. I took a discreet sniff as I poured. Vodka. No wonder she talked slowly. I put the stopper back and brought her the drink.

"So why would a guy named Les Valentine have a photograph of you to which he'd signed his name?" I said.

"Because he wishes people to think he has photographed me, but he has not."

"Because you are famous," I said.

She was making good progress on her refilled glass.

"Of course. It makes people think he is important. But he is not. If he were important I would know him."

"And he you," I said.

She smiled at me as if we knew the secret to eternal health.

"I'll bet you have big muscles," she said.

"No bigger than Bronco Nagurski," I said.

"Do you think I'm beautiful?" she said.

I nodded. She drank a little more of her drink and put the glass down and smiled at me.

"I think you're beautiful too," she said. "But you have not seen everything." She twisted suddenly and put her hands behind her back and unhitched her bra strap, then she rolled over and arched and with the same quick grace she slid out of the bikini bottoms. Then she lay back against the chaise again and smiled at me, her pale tan body naked as a salamander.

"Dandy," I said.

She continued to smile and stretched her arms out toward me.

"Have I told you about Mrs. Marlowe?" I said.

She smiled even more brightly.

"You are married." She shrugged. "I am married." She beckoned again with her arms.

I took a cigarette out and put it in my mouth and let it hang there unlit.

"Look, Mrs. Lee…" I started.

"Mrs. Ricardo," she said. "Lee is my maiden name. So you may call me Miss Lee, or Mrs. Ricardo, you see. But you can't call me Mrs. Lee."

"Fine," I said. "You are very attractive, and I am very male, and seeing you there rolling around in the nude has the usual effect. But I usually like to spend a little more time getting to know the women I sleep with, and being as I'm married and all, I only sleep with my wife."

I took the unlit cigarette out of my mouth and rolled it between my fingers. We both looked at it.

"Which I do often," I said.

There was a fat round silver and pigskin table lighter on the end table near her chaise. I reached over and picked it up. I put the cigarette back in my mouth and lit it. When I looked up from doing that, I saw a tall man with a very strong nose standing in the doorway. I exhaled smoke slowly.

"What the hell?" the tall guy said. He had high shoulders and black hair slicked back smoothly from a widow's peak and hard dark eyes that glimmered on either side of the hatchet nose.

"Tommy," Sondra Lee said, not even looking. She took a delicate taste of her vodka. "Mr. Marlowe was admiring how beautiful I am."

"I can see that," Tommy said.

"Mr. Marlowe, this is my husband, Tommy Ricardo."

I nodded politely.

"Okay, pal," Ricardo said. "On your way, and quick."

On the chaise Sondra Lee giggled and wiggled herself a little.

"For chrissake, Sonny, cover yourself," Ricardo said, then his glance came back to me. I was still sitting, considering my cigarette.

"On your way, I told you once, pally. I'm not going to tell you again."

"Sure," I said. "You're tougher than a sackful of carpet tacks. She do this often?"

"She's a lush," he said. "She does it a lot. On your feet."

He took two steps toward me and his right hand came out of the pocket of his plaid madras sport coat. He had brass knuckles on it.

"Does this mean we're engaged?" I said.

He took another step and I was on my feet just in time to pull my chin out of the way of the knucks as they glittered past it. I stepped in under the right arm that was extended past me, slipped my left arm under his left arm and got a full nelson on him and held it.

"My name's Marlowe," I said. "I'm a private detective, and I came here to ask your wife about an entirely unrelated matter."

Ricardo was breathing hard. But he wasn't struggling. He knew I had him and he was waiting.

"Unrelated to what," he said in a half-strangled voice.

"Unrelated to her getting soused and taking off her clothes."

"You son of a bitch," he gasped.

"Taking them off wasn't my idea. She looks good, but I've got a wife who looks better, and when you showed up I was telling her that."

From the chaise, Lee was still giggling. There was real excitement in the giggle now. I looked over. She was still buck naked.

"Mrs. Ricardo, do you know anything at all about a guy named Les Valentine?" I said.

She shook her head slowly. Her eyes were wide and the pupils were very dilated. Maybe there was more than vodka in the decanter.

"Okay," I said. I bent Ricardo farther forward with the nelson. Then I put my knee against his backside, let go the nelson and shoved with my knee. He went forward stumbling three or four steps, and by the time he was able to get his balance I was out of the solarium and heading through the living room. I wasn't carrying a gun. I hadn't figured to need one at the top of Beverly Glen. He didn't come after me and I was out the door and in my Olds and heading downhill, with the sound of her giggle still ringing in my ear.

It was five o'clock and the traffic back into the Valley from L.A. streamed past me. The lights in the houses began to flick on, making sort of a Christmas tree effect in the dark hills. Sondra Lee's home probably looked just as pretty as the others now, in the early evening, with the darkness gathering. They knew something out here. You could make anything look good with the right lighting.