The Black-Eyed Blonde

10

I hadn’t known where I was headed until I got there. The air was fresh, after the rain, and had a melancholy fragrance. I had the car window down, enjoying the cool breeze on my face. I was thinking of Mandy Rogers, and of all the other kids like her who had come out here to the coast, drawn by the promise of one day getting to play opposite Doris and Rock in some mindless concoction of schmaltzy songs and mink coats and white telephones. There was bound to be a boy in Hope Springs who still pined for her. I could see him, clear as the rinsed light over the Hollywood Hills, a gawky fellow with hands like shovels and ears that stuck out. Did she ever think of him, there among the cornfields, eating his heart out over the memory of her? I felt sorry for him, even if she didn’t. I was in that frame of mind; it was that kind of hour, after the rain.

I parked at the start of Napier Street and walked to Peterson’s house. I didn’t want another encounter with the old buzzard across the way, and I figured that if I drove up he would probably recognize the Olds — his type remembers cars more than it does people. His shack was shut up, and there was no sign of him anywhere. This time I didn’t go to Peterson’s front door, but made my way around to the back, the wet grass squeaking under my shoes.

The yard was overgrown, and there were gone-to-seed acacia bushes and some kind of creeper, with a sickly yellow flower, that had run riot and was strangling everything within reach. Here, just like at the front, a couple of wooden steps led up to the porch. The windows were dusty. A tabby cat that had been sleeping by the door opened one eye and looked at me, then got up slowly and padded away, its tail lazily twitching. What is it cats know about us that makes them disdain us so?

I tried the door, but it was locked. That was hardly a surprise. Luckily, I happened to have on my key ring a handy implement given to me in my days at the DA’s office, which I’d managed to hold on to when I’d left the job, and which has proved invaluable ever since. It was molded out of the same blue-black metal they made tuning forks from, and it opened any lock you could care to name, short of the big one at Fort Knox. Having quickly glanced first over my left shoulder and then over my right, I inserted the dingus into the little slit under the doorknob, fiddled around for a bit, with my teeth on edge and one eye shut, then heard the tumblers click, and all at once the knob turned under my hand. The DA nowadays was a fellow called Springer, a political type with big ambitions. I wished I could let him know how my time in his office had continued to help me in my role as a lone crime fighter.

I shut the door behind me and leaned my back against it and stood for a moment, listening. Nothing like the stillness inside a deserted house. There was a faint sweet smell of dry rot in the motionless air. I felt as if the furniture was watching me, like a pack of guard dogs too dispirited to get off their hind legs or even bark. I had no idea what I might be looking for. That smell of mold and the dust everywhere and the gray lace curtains at the windows hanging down dejectedly somehow suggested there would be a body somewhere, in a locked room, lying on a bed in a body-shaped hollow, its eyes, still with a trace of surprise in them, fixed on the dim ceiling.

But the body wasn’t here; I knew that. It had lain for a spell in a mangled state at the side of that road in Pacific Palisades, then it had been gathered up and whisked away to the morgue, and then burned, and now was no more than a scattering of random atoms on the air. Over these past days, since Clare Cavendish had first walked into my office, Peterson had become a ghostly presence for me, shimmering and elusive, like one of those slippery floating motes you get in your eye that move every time you try to look at them directly. But what did I care about Peterson, really? Nothing. It wasn’t him I cared about.

* * *

It was a small house, and I must say Peterson kept it in good order. In fact, it was so tidy it didn’t seem lived in. I looked around the living room, poked my head into the bedroom. The bed looked as if a hospital nurse had made it up, with the covers all squared off at the corners and the pillows as smooth as slabs of marble.

I’d gone through a few drawers and opened and shut a few closets when I heard a key being pushed into the front door lock. I had the usual reactions: bristling hairs on the back of my neck, thumping heart, palms suddenly moist. At times like that you know how an animal feels when it hears a twig breaking under a boot heel and looks up to see the huntsman’s silhouette against the forest glow. I was leaning over the bureau, with a framed photograph in my hand — an old lady, Peterson’s mother I assumed, steel-rimmed glasses on the end of her nose, glaring with disapproval at the camera — and when I looked to the door I saw through the dusty glass panel the outline of a woman’s head. Then the door swung open. With slow and careful movements, I replaced the photograph on the bureau.

“Jesus!” the woman said, rearing back and in her fright stamping a heel down hard on the wooden threshold. “Who are you?”

Straight off I knew two things about her: first, that this was the woman Mandy Rogers had seen with Peterson. I couldn’t say how I knew it. Sometimes these things just come to you, and you have to accept them. The second thing I realized was that I’d seen her before somewhere. She was a big-jawed, slouchy brunette, with wide hips and a heavy bust. She wore a tight white blouse and a red skirt that was even tighter, and white mules with a high square heel. She looked like the kind of girl who’d have a dinky little pistol in her purse.

“It’s all right,” I said, holding up what was meant to be a reassuring hand. “I’m a friend of Nico’s.”

“How did you get in?”

“Back door was unlocked.”

I could see her trying to decide whether to stay or get out of there quick. “What’s your name?” she demanded, acting tough. “Who are you?”

“Philip Marlowe,” I said. “I’m in security.”

“What sort of security?”

I gave her one of my lopsided, aw-shucks-it’s-only-little-me smiles. “Look, why don’t you step inside and shut the door. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The smile must have worked. She did step in, she did shut the door. All the same, she didn’t take her eyes off me for a second.

“You’re Nico’s sister, right?” I said.

It was a shot in the dark. I’d recalled Floyd Hanson mentioning that Peterson’s sister had identified his body at the morgue. This had to be her. Of course, it could have been one of the many girlfriends I’d heard so much talk about, but somehow I didn’t think so. Also at that moment I remembered where I’d seen her before: coming through the door from the swimming pool at the Cahuilla Club, in a terry-cloth robe with a towel wrapped around her head. Same wide face, same green eyes. That was why Hanson had been thrown for a second when she’d appeared. She was Peterson’s sister, and he hadn’t wanted me to meet her.

She took a couple of steps sideways now, still watching me, cautious as a cat, and stopped by an armchair and laid a hand on the back of it. She was beside a window, so I got a good look at her. Her hair was almost black, with bronze tints in its depths. There was something vague and undefined about her, as if whoever made her got interrupted before adding the finishing touches and never came back to complete the job. She was one of those women whose sister would be beautiful though she’d just missed it herself. “Marlowe,” she said, “is that what you say your name is?”

“That’s right.”

“And what are you doing here?”

I had to think about that one. “I was looking through Nico’s things,” I said weakly.

“Oh, yeah? For what? He owe you money?”

“No. He had something of mine.”

She curled a lip. “What was that? Your stamp collection?”

“No. Just a thing I need to get back.” I knew how lame it sounded, but I was improvising as I went along, and it wasn’t easy. I moved away from the bureau. “Mind if I smoke? You’re making me nervous.”

“Go ahead, I’m not stopping you.”

I wished I had my pipe; getting that filled would have given me time to think. I fumbled around with my cigarette case and a box of matches, got out a pill, and lit up, doing it all as slowly as I could. She was still standing there by the armchair, still with her hand on the back of it, still watching me.

“You are Nico’s sister, aren’t you?” I said.

“I’m Lynn Peterson. I don’t believe any of this stuff you’re telling me. How about you come clean and say who you really are?”

I had to hand it to her, she had guts. I was the intruder, after all, and she had stumbled on me nosing around in her brother’s house. I could have been a robber. I could have been a maniac escaped from the loony bin. I could have been anybody. And I could have been armed. But there she was, standing her ground and taking no guff from me. In any other circumstances, I’d probably have asked her to come out with me to some shady bar and see what might have happened after. “All right,” I said. “My name is Marlowe, that much is true. I’m a private investigator.”

“Sure you are. And I’m Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Here,” I said, taking one of my cards out of my wallet and passing it to her. She read it, frowning. “I’ve been hired to look into your brother’s death.”

She wasn’t really listening. Now she started to nod. “I’ve seen you,” she said. “You were with Floyd, at the club.”

“Yes,” I said, “I was.”

“Floyd have something of yours too, that you needed to get back?”

“I was talking to him about Nico.”

“Talking to him what about Nico?”

“About the night your brother died. You were there that night, weren’t you, at the club?” She said nothing. “Did you see your brother’s body?”

“Floyd wouldn’t let me.”

“But you identified it the next day, at the morgue, right? Your brother’s body, I mean. That must have been rough.”

“It wasn’t much fun.”

We let a silence follow that. We were like a pair of tennis players taking a breather between sets. Then she came forward and went to the bureau and picked up the framed photograph of the sour old lady in the wire-rimmed spectacles. “This can’t be what you were looking for,” she said. She turned to me with a cold smile. “It’s Aunt Margie. She reared us. Nico hated her — I don’t know why he’s got her picture on his bureau.” She put the photo down. “I need a drink,” she said, and walked past me, out to the kitchen.

I followed her. She’d got a bottle of Dewar’s down from a cabinet on the wall and was searching in the freezer for ice cubes. “What about you,” she said over her shoulder, “you want a belt?”

I took a couple of tall glasses from a shelf and set them on the counter beside the gas stove. She brought a tray of ice to the sink and ran water on the back of it, and a handful of cubes came loose. She piled them into the glasses. “See if there’s a mixer under there,” she said. I opened the cupboard she had pointed to and found a couple of miniatures of Canada Dry. I like the glug-glug-glug that the soda makes as it tumbles over ice; it’s a sound that always cheers me up. I could smell Lynn Peterson’s perfume, a sharp, feline scent. That was cheery, too. This chance encounter was turning out not so bad after all.

“Mud in your eye, buster,” Lynn said, and clinked the rim of her glass against mine. Then she leaned back with her behind against the sink and gave me the once-over. “You don’t look like a shamus,” she said, “private or otherwise.”

“What do I look like?”

“Hard to say. Gambler, maybe.”

“I’ve been known to sit in on the odd game.”

“Did you win?”

“Not often enough.”

The hooch was spreading its warmth inside me slowly, like sunlight flowing across a summer hillside. “You know Clare Cavendish?” I asked, though perhaps I shouldn’t have. “Nico’s girlfriend.”

She laughed so suddenly she almost choked on her drink. “The ice maiden?” she said hoarsely, staring at me with a disbelieving smile. “His girlfriend?”

“So I’m told.”

“Well, it must be true then, I suppose.” She laughed again, shaking her head.

“She was there that night, too, at the club — the night Nico died.”

“Was she? I don’t remember.” Now she frowned. “She hire you to stick your nose into what happened that night?”

I took another go of Mr. Dewar’s best. That inner sunshine was getting sunnier by the minute. “Tell me what happened at the morgue,” I said.

She was watching me again, just as she had when she’d first laid eyes on me. “What do you mean, what happened? They brought me into a white room, they lifted back the sheet, and there was Nico, dead as a Thanksgiving turkey. I shed a tear, the cop patted my shoulder, I was led out, and that was that.”

“What cop?” I asked.

She lifted her shoulders and let them fall again. “I don’t know what cop. He was there, he asked me if this was my brother, I said yes, he nodded, I left. Cops are cops. They all look alike to me.”

I half heard, very faintly, a car pulling up in the street out front. I took no notice of it, though I should have. “He didn’t give you his name?”

“If he did, I’ve forgotten. Look, Marlowe, what’s this all about?”

I looked away from her. I wondered if I should tell her what Clare Cavendish had told me, about seeing Nico hurrying through the crowds on Market Street up in San Francisco that day? Could I risk it? I was about to speak, not really knowing what I was going to say, when I noticed that she was looking past my shoulder with an odd expression. I turned, just as the back door opened and a guy with a gun in his hand stepped into the room. A Mexican guy. Behind him there was a second Mexican. He had no gun. He looked like he wouldn’t need one.