The Black-Eyed Blonde

5

I liked the idea of the outdoors. I mean I liked the thought of it being there: the trees, the grass, birds in the bushes, all that. I even liked looking at it, sometimes, from the highway, say, through a car windshield. What I didn’t much care for was being out in it, unprotected. There was something about the feeling of the sun on the back of my neck that made me uneasy — I didn’t just get hot, I got worried, in a twitchy sort of way. There was also the sense of being watched by too many eyes, trained on me from among leaves, from between fences, out of the mouths of burrows. When I was a kid I hadn’t been much interested in nature. Streets were where I did my boyhood wanderings and experienced my youthful epiphanies; I don’t think I’d have recognized a daffodil if I saw one. So when Clare Cavendish suggested a walk in the garden, I had to make an effort not to show how little the prospect excited me. But of course I said yes. If she had asked me to go on a hike in the Himalayas, I’d have put on a pair of mountain boots and followed her.

After she had pulled the pin and tossed me that grenade about having seen the supposedly dead Peterson, she had gone off to change, leaving me to stand at one of those curved glass walls looking out at the little puffs of white cloud sailing in from the ocean. As she was excusing herself, she had laid three fingers briefly on my wrist, where I could still feel them. If I’d thought before there was something fishy about this whole business, I had a hundred-pound marlin to grapple with now.

* * *

After fifteen minutes or so and a couple more cigarettes, she came back dressed in a white linen suit with box shoulders and a calf-length skirt. She may have been Irish, but she had all the poise and cool grace of an English rose. She was wearing flat shoes, which made me taller than she was by an extra couple of inches, but I still had that feeling of looking up at her. She wore no jewelry, not even a wedding ring.

She came up behind me quietly and said, “You probably don’t feel like walking, do you? But I have to get outside — my mind works better in the open air.”

I might have asked why she needed to have her thinking apparatus in tip-top working order, but I didn’t.

There was this to be said for the grounds of Langrishe Lodge: they were about as far from a wilderness as they could get and still be covered in greenery, or what would have been greenery if the summer hadn’t turned most of it brown. We set off along a gravel path that led away from the house at a right angle and headed straight as a stretch of railroad toward that stand of trees I’d seen from the road and, farther off, a few flashes of indigo that I knew must be the ocean. “All right, Mrs. Cavendish,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

I had put more of a grating note into it than I’d meant to, and she gave me a quick sideways glance, her cheeks coloring a little in that way I was getting used to. I frowned and cleared my throat. I felt like a kid on his first date, everything I did a false move.

We had gone a dozen paces before she spoke. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, “the way you can recognize people instantly, no matter where you are or what the circumstances? You’re walking through Union Station in a rush-hour crowd and you glimpse a face a hundred yards ahead, or maybe not even a face, just the set of someone’s shoulders, the tilt of a head, and immediately you know who it is, even if it’s a person you haven’t seen for years. How is that?”

“Evolution, I guess,” I said.

“Evolution?”

“The need to distinguish friend from foe, even in the depths of the forest. We’re all instinct, Mrs. Cavendish. We think we’re sophisticated, but we’re not — we’re primitives.”

She gave a faint laugh. “Well, maybe evolution will make something of us someday.”

“Maybe. But you and I won’t be around to see it.”

For a moment the sunlight seemed shadowed, and we walked on in a somber silence. “Nice, the oaks,” I said, nodding toward the line of trees ahead of us.

“Beeches.”

“Oh. Beeches, then.”

“Shipped from Ireland, believe it or not, twenty years ago. Where nostalgia is concerned, my mother will spare no expense. They were saplings then, and look at them now.”

“Yes, look at them now.” I needed a cigarette again, but again the surroundings frowned on the thought. “Where did you see Nico Peterson?” I said.

She did not reply immediately. As she walked, she looked at the tips of her sensible shoes. “In San Francisco,” she said. “I was there on business — for the firm, you know. It was on Market Street, I was in a taxi, and there he was, walking along the sidewalk in that way he did, in a hurry, off”—she let out that faint laugh again—“off to see someone, no doubt.”

“When was this?”

“Let me think.” She thought. “Friday, last week.”

“Before you came to see me, then.”

“Of course.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure.”

“You didn’t try to talk to him?”

“He was gone before I could think what to do. I suppose I could have told the driver to turn the taxi around, but the street was crowded — you know what San Francisco is like — and I didn’t think there’d be much hope of catching him. Besides, I was sort of numb and felt paralyzed.”

“From the shock?”

“No, the surprise. Nothing Nico did could ever shock me, really.”

“Even coming back from the dead?”

“Even coming back from the dead.”

At a distance, across the greensward, a horseman appeared, going at a fast clip. He raced along for a little way, then slowed up and disappeared under the trees. “That was Dick,” she said, “riding Spitfire, his favorite.”

“How many horses has he got?”

“I don’t really know. Quite a few. They keep him occupied.” I glanced at her and saw her mouth tighten at the corner. “He does his best, you know,” she said, in a tone of weary candor. “It’s not easy, being married to money, though of course everyone thinks otherwise.”

“Did he know about you and Peterson?” I asked.

“I told you, I can’t say. Dick keeps things to himself. I hardly ever know what he’s thinking, what he’s aware of.”

We had reached the trees. The path veered off to the left, but instead of following it, Clare took me by the elbow and led me forward, into the copse, I guess you’d call it; it took a spot like Langrishe Lodge to get me trawling through my vocabulary for the right words for things. The ground underfoot was dry and dusty. Above us the trees made a parched, muttering sound — thinking of their native land, I supposed, where the air, it’s said, is ever damp and the rain falls with the lightness of something being remembered.

“Tell me about you and Peterson,” I said.

She was watching the uneven ground, stepping over it with care.

“There’s so little to tell,” she said. “The fact is, I’d almost forgotten him. I mean, I’d almost stopped remembering him, or missing him. There wasn’t very much between us when he was alive — when we were together, that is.”

“Where did you meet?”

“I told you — the Cahuilla Club. Then I saw him again, a few weeks later, in Acapulco. That was when”—again that faint rush of blood to her cheeks—“well, you know.”

I didn’t know, but I could guess. “Why Acapulco?”

“Why not? It’s one of those places one goes to. Nico’s kind of place.”

“Not yours?”

She shrugged. “Few places are my kind of place, Mr. Marlowe. I bore easily.”

“Still, one goes there.” I tried to keep the sourness out of my voice but didn’t succeed.

“You mustn’t despise me, you know,” she said, trying to make it sound playful.

For a moment I felt slightly woozy, like you do when you’re young and a girl says something that makes you think she’s interested in you. I pictured her down there in Mexico, on the beach, in a one-piece bathing suit, reclining in a deck chair under an umbrella with a book, and Peterson walking by and stopping, pretending to be surprised to see her, and offering to fetch her something tall and cool from the fellow in the sombrero selling drinks from a shack under the palms up behind the beach. And at that moment, as we stepped out on the far side of the trees, as if my thoughts had conjured it, there was the ocean, with long, lazy waves rolling in, and the sandpipers scurrying, and a smokestack off on the horizon trailing behind it a motionless plume of white vapor. Clare Cavendish sighed and, seeming hardly aware that she was doing it, linked her arm in mine. “Oh, Lord,” she said, with a sudden fervent throb in her voice, “how I love it here.”

We had come out of the trees, onto the beach. The sand was close-packed, and walking on it was not difficult. I knew how out of place I must look, in my dark suit and hat. Clare made me stop and held on to my forearm with one hand as she leaned down to take off her shoes. I thought about what would happen if she was to lose her balance and fall against me, so that I had to catch her in the crook of my arm. It was the kind of fool thought that would come into a man’s head on such occasions. We walked on. She linked her arm through mine again. She was carrying her shoes in her other hand, dangling from the tips of two fingers. There should have been music, a big whoosh of soupy violins, and some guy with a vowel at the end of his name crooning about the sea and the sand and the summer wind and you …

“Who was it that told you about me?” I asked. I wasn’t really all that interested, but I wanted to talk about something besides Nico Peterson for a while.

“A friend.”

“Yes, you said — but what friend?”

She bit her lip again. “Someone you know quite well, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Linda Loring.”

That came like a smack in the chops. “You know Linda Loring?” I asked, trying not to sound too surprised — trying not to sound anything. “How?”

“Oh, from here and there. Ours is a very small world, Mr. Marlowe.”

“You mean the world of the rich?”

Was she blushing again? She was. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose that is what I mean.” She paused. “I can’t help it that I have some money, you know.”

“It’s not my business to blame anyone for anything,” I said, too quickly.

She smiled and looked sideways into my eyes. “I thought that’s precisely what your business was,” she said.

My mind was still on Linda Loring. A butterfly the size of a chicken was flapping its wings somewhere in the region of my diaphragm. “I thought Linda was in Paris,” I said.

“She is. I spoke to her on the telephone. We call each other now and then.”

“To check up on the latest gossip among the international set, I suppose.”

She smiled and squeezed my arm against her side reprovingly. “Something like that.”

We came to a sort of lean-to, like a bus shelter, standing at the edge of the soft sand where the beach met the low dunes. Inside it there was a bench made from a few roughly cut planks, well weathered by the salt wind. “Let’s sit for a moment,” Clare said.

It was pleasant there, in the shade, with a nice breeze coming up from the water. “This must be a private beach,” I said.

“Yes, it is. How did you know?”

I knew because if it had been public, a shelter like this would have been so fouled and littered we wouldn’t have dreamed of sitting in it. Clare Cavendish, I told myself, was one of those people the world shields from its own awfulness.

“So you told Linda about Nico disappearing and then suddenly resurrecting himself, right?” I said.

“I didn’t tell her as much as I’ve told you.”

“You haven’t told me very much.”

“I’ve admitted to you that Nico and I were lovers.”

“You think a girl like Linda wouldn’t have guessed that? Come on, Mrs. Cavendish.”

“I wish you’d call me Clare.”

“Sorry, but I don’t think I can do that.”

“Why not?”

I disengaged my arm from hers and stood up. “Because you’re my client, Mrs. Cavendish. All this”—I waved a hand to take in the shelter, the beach, those busy little birds down at the water’s edge where the pebbles hissed in the wash as if they were on the boil—“all this is very nice, and pretty, and friendly. But the fact is, you came to me with some story about your boyfriend disappearing and you being anxious to trace him, poor thing though he was. Then it turns out Mr. Peterson had done the biggest disappearing trick of all, which you, for whatever reasons of your own, failed to tell me about. Then you introduce me to your husband and indicate how unhappy he makes you—”

“I—”

“Let me finish, Mrs. Cavendish, then you can have your say. I come to your lovely home—”

“I didn’t invite you here. You could have phoned and asked me to call in to your office again.”

“That’s true, that’s very true. But here I came, the bearer of bad news, news that would be a shock to you, as I thought, only to discover that you already knew what I had to say. Then you take me for a pleasant stroll in your delightful garden, you link your arm in mine and lead me onto your private beach and tell me you know my friend Mrs. Loring, who recommended my services to you after you didn’t tell her why you needed them—”

“I did tell her!”

“You half told her.” She tried to speak again, but I held a hand in front of her face. She was gripping the seat at both sides and looking up at me with an expression of desperation I didn’t know whether to believe in or not. “Anyway,” I said, feeling tired suddenly, “none of that matters. What matters is, what exactly do you want from me? What is it you think I can do for you — and why do you feel you have to pretend to be on the verge of falling in love with me to get me to do it? I’m for hire, Mrs. Cavendish. You come to my office, you tell me your troubles, you pay me some money, I go out and try to solve your problem — that’s how it works. It’s not complicated. It’s not Gone with the Wind—you’re not Scarlett O’Hara and I’m not what’s-his-name Butler.”

“Rhett,” she said.

“What?”

She had lost her stricken look and had turned her eyes away from mine and was gazing down the beach, toward the waves. She had a way of batting things aside, things she didn’t like or didn’t want to deal with, that always left me hanging. It’s the kind of knack that only a lifetime soaked in money can teach you. “Rhett Butler is the character you mean,” she said. “It’s also, by coincidence, my brother’s pet name.”

“You mean Everett the Third?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “we call him Rett — without the h.” She smiled to herself. “I can’t imagine anyone less like Clark Gable.” Now she looked at me again, with a puzzled frown. “How do you know him?” she asked. “How do you know Everett?”

“I don’t. He was mooching about the lawn when I arrived. We exchanged a few friendly insults and he pointed me in your direction.”

“Ah. I see.” She nodded, still frowning. Again she looked off in the direction of the ocean. “I used to bring him here to play when he was little,” she said. “We’d spend whole afternoons, paddling in the surf, building sand castles.”

“He told me his name is Edwards, not Langrishe.”

“Yes. We have different fathers — my mother married again, when she came here from Ireland.” She pulled down the corners of her mouth in a wry smile. “It wasn’t a success, the marriage. Mr. Edwards turned out to be what the novelists used to call a fortune hunter.”

“Not just the novelists,” I said.

She inclined her head in an ironic little nod of acknowledgment, smiling. “Anyway, in the end Mr. Edwards checked out — worn down, I suppose, by the effort of pretending to be what he wasn’t.”

“Which was? Apart from a fortune hunter, that is.”

“What he wasn’t was fair and honest. What he was, well, I don’t think anyone knew what he really was, including himself.”

“So he left.”

“He left. And that’s when my mother brought me into the firm, young though I was. I turned out to have a talent for selling perfume, to the surprise of all, especially me.”

I sighed and sat down beside her. “You mind if I smoke?” I asked.

“Please, go ahead.”

I produced my silver case with the monogram on it. I’ve never found out whose monogram it is — I bought the case in a pawnshop. I opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head. I lit up. It’s pleasant, smoking by the sea; the salt air gives a fresh tang to the tobacco. Today, for some reason, it reminded me of being young, which was strange, since I hadn’t grown up by the ocean.

Once again, eerily, she seemed to read my thoughts. “Where are you from, Mr. Marlowe?” she asked. “Where were you born?”

“Santa Rosa. A nowhere town north of San Francisco. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Somehow it always seems important to know where someone comes from, don’t you think?”

I leaned back against the rough wood wall of the shelter and rested the elbow of my smoking arm in the palm of my left hand. “Mrs. Cavendish,” I said, “you puzzle me.”

“Do I?” She seemed amused. “Why is that?”

“I said already — I’m the hired help, but you’re talking to me like someone you’ve known all your life, or someone you’d like to know for the rest of it. What gives?”

She pondered this for a while, her eyes lowered; then she looked at me from under her lashes. “I suppose it’s that you’re not at all what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone hard and smart-mouthed, like Nico. But you’re not like that at all.”

“How do you know? Maybe I’m just putting on a show for you, pretending to be a pussycat when really I’m a skunk.”

She shook her head, closing her eyes briefly. “I’m not that poor a judge of men, despite evidence to the contrary.”

She had not moved at all, not that I’d noticed, yet somehow her face was closer to mine than it had been. There seemed nothing for it but to kiss her. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t respond, either. She just sat there and took it, and when I drew back she smiled a little and looked wistful. I was suddenly very conscious of the sound of the waves, of the pebbles hissing and the gulls crying. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?” She spoke very softly, almost in a whisper.

I got to my feet and dropped the cigarette on the sand and put my heel on it. “I think we should go back,” I said.

As we returned through the trees, she took my arm again. She seemed quite at ease, and I had to wonder if that kiss had really happened. We came out onto the lawn, and there was the house before us in all its ghastly grandeur. “Hideous, isn’t it,” Clare said, reading my thoughts again. “It’s my mother’s house, you know, not mine and Richard’s. That’s another reason for Richard’s moroseness.”

“Because he has to live with his mother-in-law?”

“Can’t be pleasant for a man, or for a man like Richard, anyway.”

I stopped and made her stop with me. I had sand in my shoes and salt grit in my eyes. “Mrs. Cavendish, why are you telling me these things? Why are you treating me like we’re on the most intimate of terms?”

“Why did I let you kiss me, you mean?” Her eyes sparkled; she was laughing at me, though not unkindly.

“All right, then,” I said. “Why did you let me kiss you?”

“I suppose I wanted to see what it would be like.”

“And what was it like?”

She thought for a moment. “Nice. I liked it. I’d like you to do it again, sometime.”

“I’m sure that could be arranged.”

We walked on, her arm in mine. She was humming to herself. She seemed happy. This, I thought, is not the woman who walked into my office yesterday and examined me coldly from behind her veil, sizing me up; this is someone else.

“One of the movie people built it,” she said. She was talking about the house again. “Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer — one of those moguls, I forget which one. They shipped the stone in from Italy, somewhere in the Apennines. Good thing the Italians can’t see what was done with it.”

“Why do you live here?” I asked. “You told me you’re rich — you could move somewhere else.”

I glanced at her. A little shadow had settled on her smooth brow. “I don’t know,” she said. She was silent for a few paces, then spoke again: “Maybe I can’t face the prospect of being alone with my husband. He’s not particularly good company.”

It wasn’t for me to comment on that, so I didn’t.

We were approaching the conservatory. She asked if I would come in. “Maybe you’d like a drink now?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m a working man, with a job to do. Is there anything else you want to tell me about Nico Peterson before I apply my bloodhound nose to his trail?”

“I can’t think of anything.” She picked a fragment of leaf from the sleeve of her linen jacket. “I’d just like you to trace him for me,” she said. “I don’t want him back. I’m not sure I wanted him in the first place.”

“Why did you get him, then?”

She made a clown’s lugubrious face. I liked the way she did it, making fun of herself. “He represented danger, I suppose,” she said. “As I told you, I get bored easily. He made me feel alive for a while, in a slightly soiled sort of way.” She gave me a level look. “Can you understand that?”

“I can understand it.”

She laughed. “But you don’t approve.”

“It’s not for me to approve or otherwise, Mrs. Cavendish.”

“Clare,” she said, again in that breathy whisper. I just stood there, feeling stolid and craggy-faced, like a cigar-store Indian. She gave a sad little shrug, then shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and drew in her shoulders. “I’d like you to find out where Nico is,” she said, “what he’s doing, why he pretended to be dead.” She looked off across the smooth green lawn, toward the trees. Behind her there was another, ghostly version of the two of us reflected in the glass of the conservatory. She said, “It’s strange to think of him, you know, being somewhere right now, doing something. I’d got used to believing he was dead, and I find it hard to adjust.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too difficult to trace. He doesn’t sound like a professional, and I doubt he’ll have covered his tracks too well, especially since he won’t be expecting anyone to be looking for him, him being dead, supposedly.”

“What will you do? How will you go about it?”

“I’ll have a look at the coroner’s report. Then I’ll talk to some people.”

“What kind of people? The police?”

“The cops tend not to be very helpful to someone who’s not one of their own. But I know one or two guys down at headquarters.”

“I wouldn’t like to think of it being generally known that it’s me who’s looking for him.”

“You mean you don’t want your mother to find out.”

Her face went hard, which was not an easy thing for that face to do. “I’m thinking more of the business,” she said. “Any kind of scandal would be very bad for us — for Langrishe Fragrances. I hope you understand.”

“Oh, I understand, all right, Mrs. Cavendish.”

From somewhere nearby there came a scream, eerily thin and piercing. I stared at Clare. “A peacock,” she said. Of course: there had to be a peacock. “We call him Liberace.”

“Does he do that often? Scream like that?”

“Only when he’s bored.”

I turned to go, then stopped. How beautiful she was, standing in the sun in her cool white linen, with all that shining glass and candy-pink stone behind her. I could still feel the softness of her mouth on mine. “Tell me,” I said, “how did you hear about Peterson’s death?”

“Oh,” she said, perfectly casual, “I was there when it happened.”