The Black-Eyed Blonde

20

What followed was kind of downbeat, or so it seemed to me, given all the colorful and exciting events that had taken place earlier. Bernie and his cohorts raided the Cahuilla Club and found Bartlett still there by the pool, passed out from loss of blood. They’d had some trouble making their way through the crowd of drunken Shriners wandering about the grounds. Floyd Hanson they nabbed at his apartment down by the ocean in Bay City. He had been in the middle of packing his bags. Bernie said that if Hanson hadn’t tried to take so many of his things with him, there might have been just enough time for him to have made the skip.

“Jeez, you should have seen his place,” Bernie said. “These big framed photos of musclemen on the walls and purple silk dressing gowns in the closets.” He flapped a limp-wristed hand and whistled softly. “Whoo-whoo!”

I wanted to know about Canning, of course. Why wasn’t I surprised to hear that he, unlike Hanson, had gotten away? That evening Bernie had led a squad over to Canning’s house in Hancock Park, but the bird had already flown. The help couldn’t say where he’d gone; all they knew was that he’d arrived home in a great hurry, his clothes looking as if he’d been caught in a flash flood, and ordered for a bag to be packed and the car to be brought around immediately to take him to the airport. The Sheriff’s office set to work on combing through the passenger lists for departing flights, while Bernie’s men went out to the airport and showed Canning’s picture around among the airline staff. One check-in girl thought she recognized him, but the name he had given hadn’t been Canning. As to what he had called himself, she couldn’t remember. The flight he had taken was a direct shot to Toronto, with an onward leg to London, England, but she didn’t know which destination had been on his ticket. Bernie called the office and told his men to concentrate on the passenger manifest for the Air Canada night flight to Toronto and see what they came up with.

Bernie and I took ourselves out for a drink. I suggested Victor’s, and Bernie drove us over there. I ordered us both a gimlet. Victor’s is the only bar I know where they make a proper gimlet — that is, half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice tossed in some crushed ice. Other places put in sugar and bitters and stuff like that, but that’s all wrong. It was Terry Lennox who introduced me to Victor’s, and every so often I go over there and lift a glass to the memory of an old friendship. Bernie had known about Terry, but not in the way I did.

I asked where Floyd Hanson was now, and Bernie told me they’d taken him downtown, where the boys in the back room had got to work on him right away. They didn’t have to work hard. When they asked where the blood by the swimming pool had come from, he told them all about the Mexicans and how Bartlett, on Canning’s orders, had tortured them for information and then finished them off. Hanson even offered to take them to the Cahuilla Club and show them the lime pit, off in a far corner of the club grounds, where he and Bartlett had dumped the two bodies. “Seems the soil is real acid out there,” Bernie said.

“Hence the lime? Handy, having a pit full of it, when you need to get rid of a couple of stiffs.”

Bernie made no comment on that. “This is a good drink,” he said, taking a sip of his gimlet and smacking his lips. “Refreshing.” He wasn’t looking at me; even with his eyes wide open, Bernie has a way of seeming not to look at anything at all. “I can guess what Canning wanted information about, from you and the Mexicans,” he said. “Our old pal Peterson, right? Talk about a bad penny.”

I got out my cigarette case and offered it to him. He shook his head. “You still off them?” I asked.

“It ain’t easy.”

I put the case and my matchbook down on the bar. Bernie is not the type who should give up smoking; it just made him more irritable. I lit up and blew three smoke rings, all three of them perfectly formed — I hadn’t thought I was that good.

Bernie was scowling. He really wanted a cigarette. His face darkened and he gave me his spill-the-beans-or-else look. “All right, Marlowe,” he said, “let’s hear it.”

“Bernie,” I said, “would it kill you to call me by my first name once in a while?”

“Why?”

“Because all day, people have been calling me Marlowe, followed by menaces and threats and then a lot of violence. I’m sick of it.”

“So you want me to call you Phil—”

“‘Philip’ would do.”

“—and then we’d be pals and all, that right?”

I turned away from him. “Forget it,” I said.

The barkeep was passing by and raised an inquiring eyebrow, but I waved him on. With gimlets you have to pace yourself, unless you want to wake up the next morning with a head like a cageful of cockatoos. I could hear Bernie beside me breathing heavily. You always know it’s getting dangerous when Bernie starts snorting down his trunk like that.

“Let me lay it out for you, Marlowe,” he said and started ticking off items on his big, meaty fingers. “First, this guy Peterson gets dead, then maybe he’s not dead. Someone hires you to look into it. In the course of your investigations, you run into Peterson’s sister. Next thing, Peterson’s sister is dead, and in this case there’s no doubt at all, since we saw her with her throat slit from ear to ear. I invite you to the scene of the crime and ask you, nicely, to let me know what you know. You tell me where to go and what I can do with myself—”

“Come on!” I protested. “I was perfectly polite!”

“—and then I get another call from you, and this time there’s two corpses, and some kind of flunky lying beside a swimming pool with a slug in his leg, and a rich guy on the lam, and another guy attempting to be. I say to myself, Bernie, this is one hell of a business. The kind of business, Marlowe, that the Sheriff, when he hears about it any minute now, is going to expect me to clear up double quick. This Canning guy, you know who he is?”

“No, not really. But you’re going to tell me.”

“He’s one of the biggest real estate investors in these parts. He owns department stores, factories, housing tracts — you name it.”

“He’s also the Petersons’ father,” I said. “Lynn and Nico, that is.”

That shut him up for a second or two. He thrust his head forward and drew his eyebrows together so that he looked like a bull about to charge a particularly annoying matador. “You’re kidding,” he said.

“Would I kid you, Bernie?”

He sat there thinking. It was an awesome thing, the sight of Bernie deep in thought. Suddenly he reached out and grabbed my cigarette case, extracted a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and lit a match. He held the flame suspended for a second or two, with the look in his eye, sorrowing but defiant, of a sinner about to give in to his sin, Then he applied the light to the business end of the pill and took a long, slow drag. “Ah,” he sighed, expelling smoke. “Jesus, that tastes good.”

I caught the barkeep’s eye and held up two fingers. He nodded. His name was Jake. It was here, at Victor’s, that I first met Linda Loring, and Jake still remembers her. It’s not surprising. Linda is the kind of woman you remember. Maybe I should marry her, if she’s still interested, which maybe she’s not. Did I mention that she’s Terry Lennox’s sister-in-law? Sylvia Lennox, Terry’s missus, was the one who was murdered, which Terry took the rap for. In fact, Sylvia was killed by a woman crazy with jealousy — her husband and Sylvia had been lovers — and also just plain crazy. Terry wanted to disappear anyway, which is why he faked his suicide down in a flyblown nowhere town in Mexico called Otatoclán — though not many people know it was a fake, including Bernie. Why should I tell him? Terry was a heel, but I liked him anyway. He was a heel with style, and style is something I appreciate.

Jake brought the two fresh gimlets. Bernie was now thinking and smoking at the same time, and breathing hard between drags. I needed this drink, and maybe even another one after it.

“Listen, Bernie,” I said, “before you get going again and start counting things off on your fingers and so on, let me repeat what I already told you: my involvement in the Peterson business is accidental. It has nothing to do with Canning and the Mexicans and Lynn Peterson’s murder and—”

“Whoa there, smart guy!” Bernie said, holding up a hand that would have stopped the traffic on Bay City Boulevard. “Just back up a bit. You’re telling me Canning is this guy Peterson’s old man?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But how—?”

“Because Canning told me. He’d heard I was on the trail of his son — that’s why he hauled me round and had his man dunk me in the swimming pool.”

“And what about the two Mexes that he had ‘his man’ stomp to death? Where the hell do they come in?”

“They come in because they killed his daughter — they killed Lynn Peterson.”

“I know that — but why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did they kill her? Why did they snatch her at Nico Peterson’s house? Why were they at Peterson’s house in the first place?” He stopped, and sighed, and leaned his forehead on his hand. “Tell me I’m stupid, Marlowe, tell me my brain is fried after all these years of being a cop, but I just don’t get it.”

“Drink your drink, Bernie,” I said. “Have another cigarette. Relax.”

He snapped his head up and glowered at me. “I’ll relax,” he said, “when you quit stonewalling and tell me what the hell is going on.”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. I got caught up in the works of this thing by accident. Let me say it again: I was hired to look for a guy who was supposed to be dead. Next thing I know I’m up to my knees in corpses, and I damn near became a corpse myself. But listen to me, Bernie, please, listen when I say it once more. I don’t know, just as you don’t, what’s going on here. I feel like I stepped out one fine morning to take a little stroll and at the first street corner found myself involved in a ten-car pileup. Blood and bodies everywhere, burning vehicles, ambulance sirens wailing, the whole schlamozzle. And I’m standing in the middle of it, scratching my head like Stan Laurel. It’s a fine mess, all right, Bernie—but it ain’t my mess. Will you please believe me?”

Bernie swore and, in his agitation, picked up his nearly new drink and knocked it back in one short gulp. I winced. You don’t do that to a gimlet, one of the world’s most sophisticated drinks — simple, but sophisticated. Also, one of the world’s most sophisticated drinks has to be sipped nice and slow or it will hit you like a depth charge.

Bernie blinked a few times as the gin sank and found its target; then he got at my cigarette case again and lit up another cancer stick. I watched him and thought how I wouldn’t want to be Bernie’s wife, later on, or Bernie’s cat, since there was likely to be a lot of shouting and kicking going on in the Ohls residence tonight. “You got to tell me,” he said, in a voice made raspy by cigarette smoke and the liquor he had just flushed over his vocal cords, “you got to tell me who it was that hired you to find Peterson.” I had taken out my pipe, but he clamped a hand on my wrist. “And don’t start playing with that goddamned thing!”

“All right, Bernie,” I said soothingly, “all right.” I put the pipe back in my pocket and took a cigarette instead, figuring I might as well get one before Bernie smoked them all. I was searching around for another diversionary tactic. “Tell me what Hanson had to say,” I said.

“What do you mean, what he had to say?”

“I mean, what did he tell your boys when they went at him with the thumbscrews? What goods did he cough up?”

Bernie turned aside as if to spit, then turned back again. “Nothing worthwhile,” he said disgustedly. “He didn’t have anything. My guess is Canning didn’t trust him, not with the sensitive stuff, anyway. He said Canning wanted to find out what you knew about Nico Peterson, whether he might be alive and, if so, where he could be found. That was hardly news. As for the Mexicans, Canning knew they’d killed the girl, and took his revenge.”

“How did Canning get hold of the Mexicans? Did Hanson say?”

“He has associates south of the border. They nabbed the Mexes and shipped them up here. Pays to have influential friends, eh?” He picked up his empty glass and looked into it mournfully. “What a mess,” he said. “What an all-time, rip-roaring, Empire State Building of a mess.” He lifted his sad gaze and fixed it on me. “You know why I’m here, Marlowe? You know why I’m here, drinking with you and smoking? Because when I go home, my boss will have been on the telephone half a dozen times already, wanting to know if I’ve apprehended the miscreants yet, and if I’ve got you safely locked up in the sneezer, and how he’s going to explain to Canning’s fancy pals in city hall and elsewhere, who are his associates, too, most of them, how come we conducted a raid on this club of his — what’s it called?”

“The Cahuilla.”

“—how come we conducted a full-scale raid on the Cahuilla Club, where they’re all members, before I consulted him and got his permission.”

“What?” I said. “You went out there without telling the big man?”

Sheriff Donnelly had been elected just recently, beating his predecessor by a couple thousand votes in an election upset that had surprised everyone, including Donnelly himself, I imagine. The guy he’d ousted had been in the job since before World War I, or so it felt like, and Donnelly had a lot to prove. The Sheriff’s chair was still warm when he put his backside on it, and from day one he’d been throwing his considerable weight around and leaning heavily on Bernie and the other officers in his command. Maybe they deserved it — they’d probably gotten soft under the old regime.

“It seemed urgent,” Bernie said, “from the way you described the shenanigans out there at the club. If I’d involved Donnelly, there’d have been so many hoops to jump through before we moved that everyone in the joint, including the bar staff and the gardeners, would have vamoosed long before we got there.” He stopped and looked at me. “What’s the matter now?”

I must have given what they call an involuntary start. A thought had struck me, a big, dirty, nasty, obvious thought.

“Is there a list of the people who work out there, at the club?” I asked.

“A list? Whaddya mean?”

“There must be some kind of record of who’s on the staff,” I said, talking more to myself than to Bernie, “a personnel or a payroll list, something like that.”

“What are you talking about?”

I took a little of my drink, noticing yet again how the lime juice perfectly complemented the juniper-berry tang of the gin. Good old Terry — if he’d done nothing else, he’d certainly introduced me to a great cocktail. “When I was out there, at the club,” I said, “this guy, his name is Lamarr, came up and started talking to me. He’s a bit, you know”—I touched a finger to my temple—“but not crazy crazy, and harmless, I’d guess. He said he’d seen me talking to Captain Hook and that he was one of the Lost Boys.”

“Captain Hook,” Bernie repeated in a flat voice, nodding. “The Lost Boys. What’s this, for Christ’s sake?”

“Floyd Hanson told me that the club has a policy of hiring the likes of Lamarr, loners, drifters, people with no past and not much future. Kind of a philanthropic thing, though I can’t see Wilber Canning as a philanthropist — that would have been his father.”

I stopped. Bernie waited, then said impatiently, “So? What’s the deal?”

“If Nico Peterson is alive and his death was faked, there had to be a body — Lynn Peterson was shown a stiff in the morgue and identified him as her brother. Maybe she was lying, to cover up the fact that Nico was alive and the whole thing was a setup.”

Bernie thought it over. “You’re saying the body in the morgue could have been one of the hobos working at the club? That Nico killed someone there, changed clothes with him, ran over the body enough times to make it unrecognizable, then dumped it at the roadside and hightailed it?”

I nodded slowly. I was still thinking it out myself. “‘The Lost Boys,’ Lamarr said. ‘We’re the Lost Boys.’”

“Who the hell are the Lost Boys? And who’s Captain Hook?”

“He’s a character in Peter Pan. You know — by J. M. Barrie?”

“Crazy but well-read, then, this Lamarr.”

“He was talking about Floyd Hanson. Hanson was Captain Hook. And the night Nico Peterson is supposed to have died, Hanson was one of the first on the scene and gave a preliminary identification. You bring Hanson back in and sweat him properly this time, I’ll bet you’ll get the whole story out of him.”

Bernie was silent for a while, playing with my matchbook, turning it in his fingers edge over edge on the bar. “You still saying you know nothing about all this except what the rest of us know?”

“I am saying that, Bernie, yes. You might notice I’ve said it a few times. It give you the idea that maybe I’m telling the truth?”

“It all started with you, Marlowe,” Bernie said with his eyes downcast, watching the matchbook, his tone almost gentle. “You’re the key to it all, somehow, I know that.”

“How could I—?”

“Shut up. Peterson I don’t care about, or even his sister. The Mexes, too — what’s a couple of dead wetbacks? That fairy Hanson I can live without, also Canning’s pin-striped blackjack artist. But Canning — Canning’s a different matter. He’s the name that’s going to be splashed all over the papers tomorrow, unless someone steps in and applies a gag.”

“Oh?” I said. “Who might that someone be?” I was asking, but I had a sudden idea what the answer was, and my heart began to sink in anticipation.

“I guess one of the many things you didn’t know,” Bernie said, in that half-angry, half-smug way of his, “is that Wilber Canning is a close business associate of Harlan Potter’s.”

He’d been saving that one up. I looked into my glass. I wondered who invented the gimlet. And how had he thought up the name? The world is full of little questions like that, and only Ripley knows the answers to them all.

“Ah,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘Ah.’”

Harlan Potter owned a large chunk of this strip of the California coast, along with about a dozen major newspapers, last count. He also happened to be the father of Linda Loring and of the late Mrs. Sylvia Lennox, which of course made him Terry Lennox’s father-in-law. At every turn in my life, it seemed, there was Terry, smiling his rueful smile and twirling a gimlet glass in his bone-white fingers. Funny — most people thought he was dead, like they thought Nico Peterson was dead, but he wasn’t, though he kept haunting me as if he were.

If I marry Linda Loring, I thought, Harlan Potter will be my father-in-law. That was a three-gimlet prospect. I gave the sign to Jake the barkeep, and he replied with his nod that was so understated it was hardly a nod at all.

“So,” I said, releasing a slow breath. “Harlan Potter. Well, well. Citizen Kane himself.”

“Have some respect!” Bernie said, trying not to snigger. “You’re almost one of the family — I hear Potter’s daughter is still carrying a torch for you. You going to let her light up your gray little life?”

“Don’t push it, Bernie,” I said evenly.

He lifted his hands in the sign of peace. “Hey, calm down. You’re losing your sense of humor, Marlowe.”

I swiveled on the bar stool so I was facing him. His eyes moved away from mine. He knew he’d overstepped the mark, but I kept going anyway. “Listen, Bernie, you can pummel me all you like about stuff that’s of legitimate interest to you, but stay out of my private life.”

“All right, all right,” he mumbled, looking sheepish and still frowning at the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

I turned back to the bar, not wanting him to see the shadow of a smirk I couldn’t keep off my face. I didn’t often get the chance to make Bernie blush, and when I did, I milked it for all it was worth.

Jake brought our drinks. I could see that Bernie didn’t really want another one, but given the fact that his size eleven foot was still in his mouth, he couldn’t very well refuse.

“Anyway, you’re probably right,” I said, cutting him some slack.

“About what?”

“About Potter making sure that his pal Canning doesn’t get completely roasted in tomorrow’s editions.”

“Uh-huh.” He took a sip of his drink and replaced the glass on the bar with a worried grimace. He was probably going to have to see Donnelly before long, and it wouldn’t go down too well if he stank of gin, which he would now anyway, since he’d put away two gimlets already. “This town,” he said, clicking his tongue. “I’ve about had it up to here with it.” He put a hand horizontally under his chin. “You know I been on the force nearly a quarter century? Think of that. It’s a meat grinder, and I’m not even prime chuck steak.”

“Come on, Bernie,” I said, “you’ll have me weeping in a minute.”

He looked at me morosely. “And what about you?” he said. “You going to pretend your world is any cleaner than the one I’m stuck in?”

“It’s the same all around,” I said. “But look at it this way. With guys like you and me on one side of the scale, it’s not going to go down the whole way on the other side, where the Cannings and the Potters sit with their bags of gold in their laps.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bernie said. “You’re a regular Pollyanna this evening, ain’t you.”

I shut up then, not because of Bernie’s taunt but because I had a misgiving over putting Harlan Potter in the same league as Wilber Canning. Potter was tough, and you didn’t make his kind of money — they say he’s worth a hundred million — without cutting a few corners, and maybe a few throats, too. But a man who’d fathered a girl like Linda Loring couldn’t be all bad. I’d had a talk with him once. He started off by threatening me, went on to give me a lecture about what a dismal lot the rest of us were, then threatened me again, and ended up with the casual suggestion that he might think of putting some business my way, if I kept my nose clean. I said thanks but no thanks. At least, I thought I did.

Bernie looked at his watch. It was the size of a potato, but it still looked small on that arm of his. “I gotta blow,” he said and began shifting off the stool.

“You haven’t finished your drink,” I said. “Cocktails don’t come cheap, you know.”

“Listen, I’m officially on duty. Here”—he brought out his billfold and threw a five-spot on the bar—“have it on me.”

I gave him a look, then picked up the bill, folded it, and stuffed it in the top pocket of his blue serge suit. “Don’t insult me, Bernie,” I said. “I ask you to come for a drink, I pay. That’s part of what they call the social contract.”

“Yeah. I’m not so good on society rules.” He smiled, and I smiled back. “I’ll be seeing you, Phil,” he said.

“Do you have to?”

“It’s my job.” He put on his hat, adjusted it, and flicked the brim with a fingertip in a sort of salute. “So long, for now.”

I finished my drink and thought of finishing the one Bernie had left undrunk, but there are some limits us Marlowes just won’t cross. Instead I paid the bill and took up my own hat. I could see Jake getting ready to ask me how my lady friend was doing these days, meaning Linda Loring. To cut him off, I pretended to remember an urgent appointment elsewhere and made my escape.

* * *

It was a clear, cool night, and one big star was hanging low in the sky and throwing a long stiletto of light down into the heart of the Hollywood Hills. Bats were out too, squeaking and flickering like scraps of charred paper from a fire. I looked for a moon but couldn’t see one. Just as well — the moon always makes me feel melancholy. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I remembered that I didn’t have the car with me and flagged a taxi and told the driver to take me home. He was an Italian, as big as Bernie Ohls and about as good-humored. Every time a light turned red, he swore under his breath. The swear words were Italian, but I didn’t need a translation to know what they meant.

In the house the air was stuffy, as if a gang of people had been squatting in here all day with the windows sealed. I set up a chess game out of a book, Lasker vs. Capablanca, in which Capablanca demolished the German master with one of his sweetest and most deadly endgames. Chess doesn’t come any better. All the same, I wasn’t in the mood. I still had a buzz on from all the gin I’d put away, and I didn’t want it to fade. There are times when you wish your mind would stop working, and tonight mine was being much too busy for comfort. Some thoughts you try to keep out, but they get in anyway.

I hopped in the Olds and drove over to Barney’s Beanery, where I drank six straight bourbons and would have kept going only good old Travis, my guardian angel behind the bar, refused to serve me any more. Instead he made me give him my car keys and helped me out to the street and poured me into a cab. After that I don’t remember much. Somehow I got myself up the redwood steps and through the front door and even made it into the bedroom, where I woke around midnight, sprawled diagonally across the bed, on my face, with all my clothes on. I smelled like a raccoon and was as thirsty as a camel.

I stumbled into the kitchen and leaned over the sink and drank a quart or so of water straight from the faucet, then straightaway I stumbled into the bathroom and leaned over the toilet and threw up a couple of quarts. The first quart was water, followed by another quart of pale green liquid composed, I figured, half of gimlet and half of bile. It had been a long day.

And it wasn’t over yet. In the middle of the night, the phone woke me. At first I thought it was a fire alarm, and I would have run out into the night except that, for some reason, I couldn’t get the front door to open. I picked up the receiver as if it were the head of a rattlesnake. It was Bernie, calling to tell me that Floyd Hanson had just been found in his cell, hanging from one of the bars in the window. He had torn the bedsheet into strips and wound them together into a makeshift rope. The window hadn’t been high enough, and he’d had to let himself hang there with his feet on the floor and his knees flexed. It would have taken him a long time to die.

“So that’s one canary that won’t be singing,” Bernie said. I told him he was all heart. He laughed, without enjoying it. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You sound like you’re wearing a gag.”

“I’m drunk,” I told him.

“You’re what? I can’t make out what you’re saying.”

“I said I’m drunk. Iced. Soused. Spifflicated.”

He laughed again, with conviction this time. I supposed it must have been funny, hearing someone as far gone as I was trying to pronounce those words, especially the last one.

I took a deep breath, which made me feel dizzy, but then my head cleared enough for me to ask about Bartlett.

“Who’s Bartlett?” Bernie said.

“Jesus, Bernie, don’t shout,” I said, holding the receiver away from my ear. “Bartlett is the butler — the old guy with the blackjack, the one I shot in the knee.”

“Oh, him. He’s not so good. In a coma, last I heard. Lost a barrel of blood. They’re giving him transfusions. Maybe he’ll pull through, maybe not. You proud of yourself, Wild Bill?”

“He damn near drowned me,” I growled.

“That old guy? You’re losing it, Marlowe.”

“There you go, calling me Marlowe again.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot worse things I could call you. And just because you buy me a couple of drinks don’t mean I got to be your best friend and playmate. And the booze wore off as soon as I got into the office — Donnelly had been at some fancy fund-raiser, and he came in in a tuxedo and black tie, stinking of cologne and high-toned women. You ever notice how the smell of women is everywhere on that kind of evening?”

“Have I ever been to that kind of evening?”

“Makes your head swim. Has effects lower down, too. Anyway, Donnelly was pretty sore at being dragged away from the ball, but that was nothing compared to what he was like when he heard what had happened out at the Cahuilla Club, what with you shooting butlers and Canning doing the Indian rope trick and vanishing into thin air.”

“Bernie,” I said, in the voice of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, as the poet writes, “Bernie, I’m drunk and I’m sick and there’s a guy with a jackhammer hard at work on the back of my skull. I was almost drowned today. I also shot a guy who’s maybe not going to make it and probably doesn’t deserve to, but still, even popping bad guys takes it out of you. So can I please go back to bed?”

“Yeah, you go and sleep it off, Marlowe, while the rest of us stay up all night trying to sort out a mess that, as far as I can see, you started.”

“I’m sorry you’re in the wrong job, Bernie. What did you want to be, a kindergarten teacher?”

He exploded then into the kind of language the likes of which you wouldn’t find in one of those books you buy in a plain brown wrapper from a shop where the shades are always pulled and there’s no sign over the door. I let him rant, and eventually he ran out of steam and shut up, though I could hear him breathing angrily into the mouthpiece. Then he asked what I’d done with the gun.

“What gun?”

“What gun? The gun you shot Bartleby with.”

“Bartlett. I threw it away.”

“Where?”

“Into the bougainvillea.”

“Into the what?”

“The bushes. At the Cahuilla Club.”

“You dumb bastard. What were you thinking of?”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” I said. “I was operating on instinct. You remember what instinct is, Bernie? It’s what mostly guides the behavior of ordinary human beings, people who haven’t been on the police force for a quarter of a century.”

Then I hung up on him.