The Black-Eyed Blonde

17

The hour was long past midnight, and I was lying on my bed in my shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling. The bedside lamp was on, and those painted roses were throwing shadows up the walls — they looked like bloodstains someone had started to wash away and then given up on.

I was thinking about this and that, this being Clare Cavendish, and that being Clare Cavendish too. The side of the bed I was on was the side where she’d lain, and I could smell the fragrance of her hair on the pillow, or thought I could, anyway. I was telling myself how right I’d been to let her go. She was not only good-looking but loaded, and that kind of woman just wasn’t for me. Linda Loring, over there in Paris, was another of the same type, which was why I wasn’t too keen on marrying her, though she kept on asking. Linda and I went to bed together once, and I guess she did love me, but why she thought love should inevitably lead to marriage, I didn’t know. Her sister had been married to Terry Lennox and ended up with a bullet in her brain and her face smashed in. Hardly an example of conjugal bliss. Besides, I wasn’t young anymore, and maybe I wasn’t going to marry anyone.

The phone rang, and I knew it was Clare. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. I have a thing with phones — I hate them, but I seem to be on their wavelength in some funny way.

“Is that you?” Clare said.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“It’s late, I know. Were you asleep? I’m sorry if I woke you.” She spoke very slowly, as if in a trance. “I couldn’t think who else to call.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I wonder — I wonder if you could come to the house?”

“To your house? Now?”

“Yes. I need — I need someone to—” Her voice began to shake and she had to stop for a few seconds and get it under control. She sounded close to hysteria. “It’s Rett,” she said.

“Your brother?”

“Yes — Everett.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

She paused again. “I really would appreciate if you could come here. Do you think you could? Am I asking too much?”

“I’ll come,” I said.

Of course I’d come. I would have gone to her if she’d been calling from the dark side of the moon. It’s strange, the sudden way things can change. A minute ago I’d been congratulating myself on getting rid of her, but now it was as if a door had been flung open inside me and I was running out through it with my hat in my hand and my coattails flying. Why had I driven her away, making dumb wisecracks and acting like a heel? What the hell was wrong with me, to send a gorgeous woman like that out into the night with her lips set like a vise and her forehead pale with anger? Did I think I was such a hotshot that I could afford to push her away like that, as if the world were crowded with Clare Cavendishes and all I had to do was snap my fingers and another one would come hurrying up the steps to my front door, with her head down, putting one foot neatly in front of the other in little figure eights?

* * *

Outside, the street was deserted, and a warm mist was wafting down from the hills. Across the way, the eucalyptus trees stood motionless in the light from the streetlamp. They were like a band of accusers staring at me silently as I got into the Olds. Hadn’t they told me so? Hadn’t they said I was a fool that other night when I’d stood on the redwood steps and watched Clare Cavendish hurrying down them and made no attempt to stop her?

I drove across the city, too fast, but luckily there were no patrol cars out. Ahead of me a quarter-moon was flying through the mist as I hit the coast and turned right. Ghostly waves were breaking in the moonlight, and farther out the night was an empty blackness, with no horizon. I need someone, she’d said. I need someone.

I turned in at the gates of Langrishe Lodge and cut the headlights, as Clare had asked me to. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know I was coming; by “anyone” I presumed she meant her mother, maybe her husband, too. I drove around the side of the house and parked opposite the conservatory. There were lights in some of the windows, but it didn’t look like there were people in any of the rooms.

I turned off the engine and sat with the window down, hearing the distant sound of the ocean and the odd seabird sleepily crying. I needed a cigarette but didn’t want to strike a light. The misted air was warmly damp against my face. I couldn’t be sure that Clare would know I had arrived. She’d told me where to stop and said she’d find me. I settled down to wait. It’s part of the story of my life, sitting in cars late at night with stale cigarette smoke in my nostrils and the night birds crying.

I didn’t have to wait long. No more than a couple of minutes had passed when I spotted a figure coming toward me through the mist. It was Clare. She had on a long, dark coat that was tightly fastened at her throat. I got out of the car.

“Thank you for coming,” she said in an agitated whisper. I wanted to take her in my arms but didn’t. She closed her fingers on my wrist for a second, then turned back toward the house.

I followed her. The French doors were standing open, and we went inside. She didn’t switch on the light. She knew her way through the darkened house, but I had to go cautiously among the dim shapes of the furniture. She led me up a long, curving staircase and down a carpeted corridor. There were wall lights burning here, the bulbs turned low. She had taken off the dark coat downstairs. Underneath she wore a cream-colored dress. Her white shoes were wet from the garden, and her ankles were slim and shapely, with deep scoops at the back, smooth and pale, like the inside of a seashell, between the bone and the tendon.

“In here,” she said and again fixed her fingers urgently on my wrist.

The room had the look of a stage set, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the way it was lit. There were two lamps, a small one on a dressing table and a big one beside the bed, with a tan shade that must have been two feet in diameter. The bed was the size of a raft, and Everett Edwards the Third looked very small lying on it, passed out cold under a tangle of sheets. He was on his back, with his hands clasped over his breast, like the corpse of a martyr in a painting by an old master. His face was the same color as the sheets; his hair hung lank, soaked with sweat. He was wearing an undershirt with dried vomit on the front of it, and there were flecks of dried foam at the corners of his mouth.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked, though I could pretty well guess.

“He’s sick,” Clare said. She was standing beside the bed, gazing down at her brother. She looked like the mother of the martyr. “He — he took something.”

I lifted his left arm and turned it over and saw the puncture marks, some old and some new, stretching in a ragged line from the wrist to the inner side of the elbow. “Where’s the needle?” I asked.

She made a jerking motion with her hand. “I threw it away.”

“How long has he been like this?”

“I don’t know. An hour, maybe. I found him on the stairs. He’d been wandering through the house, I suppose, and must have passed out. I got him in here, somehow — this is my room, not his. I didn’t know what else to do. That’s when I called you.”

“Has he been like this before?”

“Never like this, no, never this bad.” She turned to me with a stricken look. “Do you think he’s dying?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “His breathing’s not too bad. Have you called a doctor?”

“No. I didn’t dare.”

“He needs medical attention,” I said. “Have you got a phone in here?”

She led me to the dressing table. The phone was custom-made, black and shiny with silver trimmings. I picked up the receiver and dialed. How the hell I had the number in my head I don’t know — it was as if my fingers remembered, not me. It rang for a long time; then a crisp, cold voice said, “Yes?”

“Dr. Loring,” I said. “It’s Marlowe, Philip Marlowe.”

I thought I heard a quick intake of breath. There was a humming silence for some seconds; then Loring spoke again. “Marlowe,” he said, making it sound like a curse word. “Why are you calling me at this hour of the night? Why are you calling me at all?”

“I need your help.”

“You have the nerve to—?”

“Listen,” I said, “it has nothing to do with me — I’m acting for a friend. There’s a man passed out here, and he needs help.”

“And you call me?”

“I wouldn’t have, if I’d been able to think of someone else.”

“I’m going to hang up now.”

“Wait. What about that oath you guys take? This man may die if he doesn’t get help.”

There was a silence. Clare had been standing close beside me all this while, watching me as if she could read in my face Loring’s side of the exchange.

“What’s wrong with this person?” Loring asked.

“He took an overdose.”

“He tried to kill himself?”

“No. He was shooting up.”

“‘Shooting up’?” I could picture him grimacing in distaste.

“Yeah,” I said, “he’s an addict. That make a difference? Addicts are people too.”

“How dare you lecture me!”

“I’m not lecturing you, Doc,” I said. “It’s late, I’m tired, you were the only name I could come up with—”

“Doesn’t this person have a family? Don’t they have a doctor of their own?”

Clare was still watching me, hanging on every word. I turned away from her and cupped my hand around the mouthpiece. “The name here is Cavendish,” I said quietly. “Also Langrishe. That mean anything to you?”

There was another pause. One good thing about Loring was that he was a snob — a good thing in the present circumstances, I mean. “Is this Dorothea Langrishe you’re talking about?” he asked. I could hear the change of tone in his voice, the little reverent hush that had come into it.

“That’s right,” I said. “So you realize how much discretion is required.”

He hesitated for no more than a moment, then said, “Give me the address. I’ll come over right away.”

I told him how to get to Langrishe Lodge and about dousing the car lights and parking by the conservatory, as I had. Then I hung up and turned to Clare. “You know who that was?”

“Linda Loring’s ex?”

“That’s right. You know him?”

“No. I never met him.”

“He’s a martinet and in love with himself,” I said, “but he also happens to be a good doctor — and discreet.”

Clare nodded. “Thank you.”

I shut my eyes and massaged the lids with my fingertips. Then I looked at her and asked, “You think you could rustle up a drink?”

She seemed helpless for a second. “There’s Richard’s whiskey,” she said. “I’ll go and see what I can find.”

“Where is Richard, by the way?” I said.

She shrugged. “Oh, you know — out.”

“What happens if he comes back and finds your brother in this state?”

“What will happen? Dick will laugh, probably, and go to bed. He doesn’t take much notice of what goes on between Rett and me.”

“And your mother?”

A flicker of alarm crossed her face. “Mother mustn’t know. She mustn’t.”

“Shouldn’t she be told? He is her son, after all.”

“It would break her heart. She doesn’t know about the drugs. When Richard gets angry at me, he threatens to tell her. It’s another way he holds power over me. Another of the many ways.”

“I get the picture,” I said. I rubbed my eyes again; they felt like they’d been lightly toasted in front of an open fire. “About that drink?”

She went away, and I returned to the bed and sat down on the edge of it and looked at the unconscious young man with the vomit on his shirt and his hair in a mess. I didn’t think he was dying, but I’m no expert when it comes to dope and dope fiends. Everett the Third was obviously a veteran — some of those needle marks on his arm had been there a long time. Sooner or later his mother was going to find out what her darling son did when he wasn’t at home having his hair stroked by her. I just hoped she wouldn’t find out the hard way. Having lost her husband like she had, the last thing she needed, at this stage of her life, was another violent death in the family.

Clare came back with a bottle of Southern Comfort and a cut-glass tumbler. She poured a generous measure and handed it to me. I stood up and tipped the edge of the glass to her in a gesture of appreciation. I don’t like Southern Comfort — too sickly sweet, for my taste — but it would do. I started to get out my cigarette case but changed my mind. It wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow, smoking in Clare Cavendish’s bedroom.

I glanced down at her brother again. “Where does he get the dope?” I asked.

“I don’t know where he gets it now.” She looked aside, biting her lip. Even in distress, she was beautiful. “Nico used to get him some, now and then,” she said. “That’s how I met him — Everett introduced us.” She made a sad little smile. “Are you shocked?”

“Yes,” I said, “a bit. I didn’t realize you and Peterson had that kind of relationship.”

“What do you mean? What kind of relationship?”

“The kind where you’re sleeping with a drug peddler.”

She flinched at that but made a quick recovery. She was getting her spirit back, now that she knew help was on the way and she could stop being responsible for everything. “You don’t understand women at all, do you,” she said.

I suddenly wondered if I’d ever heard her say my name, if she’d ever called me Philip. I didn’t think she had, not even when we were in bed together, in the glow of those blood-red painted roses. “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose I do. Does any man?”

“Yes, I’ve known some men who do.”

I drank my drink. It really was sickly sweet; they must put caramel or something in it. “Are you being straight with me?” I asked. “Did you really see Peterson on Market Street that day?”

Her eyes grew round. “Of course. Why would I lie?”

“I don’t know. Like you say, I don’t understand you.”

She sat down on the bed and folded her hands together and set them on her knees. “You’re right,” she said quietly, “I should have had nothing to do with him. He’s”—she searched for the word—“he’s unworthy. Does that sound strange? I don’t mean unworthy of me—God knows, I’m not worth all that much either. He’s charming, and funny, and he has an elegant mind. He’s even brave, in a way, but at the center there’s only a hollow.”

I watched her eyes. Inside them, she was far, far away. It came to me that it wasn’t Peterson she was talking about, that she was only using him as a way of talking about someone else. It was true; I was sure it was. And that someone else was precious to her in a way that a man like Nico Peterson could never be — in a way that a man like me could never be, either. I suddenly wanted very much to kiss her. I couldn’t think why that was, I mean why I wanted to kiss her now, while she was so far from me, thinking of someone she loved. Women are not the only thing I don’t understand — I don’t understand myself, either, not one little bit.

Suddenly she lifted her head, holding up a hand. “I hear a car,” she said. “It must be Dr. Loring.”

We went down through the dark house, the way we had come up, and out into the garden. Loring’s car was there, stopped behind mine. As we arrived, Loring opened the door and got out.

Loring was thin, with a small goatee and arrogant eyes. We’d had some rough exchanges, the two of us. I didn’t know if he knew that his ex-wife wanted to marry me. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference; he couldn’t loathe me any more than he did already. And he’d washed his hands of Linda some time ago. “Marlowe,” he said coldly. “I’ve come, as you see.”

I introduced him to Clare. He shook her hand briefly and said, “Where’s the patient?”

We returned through the house to Clare’s bedroom. I shut the door behind us, turned, and leaned my back against it. I figured Clare could handle it from here. Everett was her brother, and it was best that I stay out of Loring’s way as much as possible.

He walked to the bed and set down his black bag on the bedspread. “What was it?” he said. “Heroin?”

“Yes,” Clare said in a hushed voice. “I think so.”

Loring felt Everett’s pulse, lifted his eyelids and examined the pupils, put a hand on his chest and pressed gently a couple of times. He nodded and took a hypodermic syringe out of his bag. “I’ll give him a shot of adrenaline,” he said. “He’ll come around in a while.”

“You mean it’s not — it’s not serious?” Clare asked.

He gave her a baleful glance. His eyes had a way of seeming to shrink in their sockets when he was angry or outraged, which was pretty often. “My dear woman,” he said, “your brother’s heart rate is less than fifty, and his respiratory rate is less than twelve. I should guess that for a period tonight he was on the point of death. Luckily, he’s young and relatively healthy. However”—he held an ampoule of clear liquid upside down and pierced the rubber cap with the tip of the hypodermic—“if he continues to indulge this habit, it will almost certainly kill him, sooner rather than later. There are people who can live with a heroin habit — they don’t live well, but they live — but your brother, I can clearly see, is not of that type.”

He plunged the needle into Everett’s arm and glanced up at Clare. “He’s weak. He has weakness written all over him. You should get him into a clinic. I can give you some names, people to call, places to go and see. Otherwise, without the slightest doubt, you’ll lose him.” He extracted the needle and put it away in his bag, along with the empty vial. He turned to Clare again. “Here is my card. Call me tomorrow.”

Clare sat down on the side of the bed again with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked as if someone had punched her. Her brother stirred and groaned.

Loring turned away brusquely. “I’ll walk out with you,” I said. He gave me a cold stare.

* * *

We went down through the shadowy house. Loring was one of those men whose silence was more eloquent than his conversation. I could feel contempt and hatred coming off him like waves of heat. It wasn’t my fault his wife had left him and now wanted to marry me.

We walked through the dark conservatory and out into the night. The mist clung to my face like a wet scarf. Out at sea a light was winking on the mast of someone’s anchored boat. Loring opened the door of his car, threw his bag inside, and turned to me. “I don’t know why you keep turning up in my life, Marlowe,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t enjoy it much myself,” I said. “But I’m grateful to you for coming out here tonight. You think he might have died?”

He shrugged. “As I said, he’s young, and young men tend to survive all manner of self-pollution.” He was about to get into the car but paused. “What’s your connection with this family? You’re hardly at their social level, I’d have thought.”

“I’m doing some work for Mrs. Cavendish.”

He made a sound that from someone else might have been a laugh. “She must be in very deep trouble, if she had to call on you.”

“She’s not in trouble at all. She hired me to trace someone — a friend of hers.”

“Why doesn’t she go to the police?”

“It’s a private matter.”

“Yes, you’re good at poking into people’s private lives, aren’t you.”

“Look, Doc,” I said, “I’ve never knowingly done you harm. I’m sorry your wife left you—”

I could feel him stiffen in the darkness. “How dare you speak of my marriage.”

“I don’t know how I dare,” I said wearily. “But I want you to know I mean you no ill.”

“You think that matters to me? You think anything about you is of the slightest interest to me?”

“No, I guess not.”

“What happened to your face, by the way?”

“A fellow hit me with the barrel of a gun.”

He did that cold laugh again. “Nice people you deal with.”

I stepped back. “Anyway, thanks for coming. It can’t be a bad thing, if you saved a life.”

He seemed about to say more, but instead he got into the car and slammed the door and started up the engine and did a quick reverse, then skidded forward over the gravel and was gone.

I stood in the damp darkness for a minute, my damaged face lifted to the sky, breathing in the night’s salty air. I thought of going back into the house, then decided not to. I didn’t have anything more to say to Clare, not tonight, anyway. But she was back in my life. Oh, yes, she was back.