The Black-Eyed Blonde

6

I was almost at the gate when I met Richard Cavendish walking a big chestnut stallion up the drive. I drew the car to a stop and rolled down the window.

“Hello there, sport,” Cavendish said. “Leaving us already?” He didn’t look like a man who had been riding hard for the past hour. His oaken hair was untousled, and his jodhpurs were as pristine as when he’d first walked into the conservatory. He wasn’t even sweating, not so you’d notice. The horse was the one that looked frazzled; it kept rolling its eyes and tossing its head and tugging at the reins, which rested in its master’s hand as lightly as a child’s jump rope. Excitable creatures, horses.

Cavendish leaned down toward the window and rested a forearm on the door frame and smiled broadly at me, showing two rows of small white even teeth. It was one of the emptiest smiles I’d ever had flashed at me. “Pearls, eh?” he said.

“That’s what the lady said.”

“That’s what she said, yes, I heard her.” The horse was nuzzling at his shoulder now, but he took no notice. “They’re not as valuable as she thinks they are. Still, I imagine she’s attached to them. You know what women are like.”

“Not sure that I do, where pearls are concerned.”

He was still smiling. He hadn’t believed the story of the lost necklace for a second. I didn’t much care. I knew Cavendish — he was a type I was familiar with: the handsome, polo-playing smoothie who marries a rich girl and then proceeds to make her life hell whining about what a tough time he has spending her money and how wounding it is to his pride.

“Nice horse,” I said, and as if it had heard me, the animal rolled an eye my way.

Cavendish nodded. “Spitfire,” he said. “Seventeen hands, strong as a tank.”

I made a funnel of my lips as if to whistle, but didn’t. “Impressive,” I said. “You play polo on him?”

He gave a little laugh. “Polo is played on ponies,” he said. “Can you imagine trying to get at a ball on the ground from this guy’s back?” He rubbed his chin with a forefinger. “You don’t play, I take it.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Where I come from, the polo stick is never out of our hands.”

He studied me, letting his smile dismantle itself in lazy stages. “You’re quite a joker, aren’t you, Marlowe.”

“Am I? What did I say?”

He went on looking at me for a while. When he narrowed his eyes, a fan of fine wrinkles opened at the outer corner on each side. Then he straightened, smacked a palm on the door frame, and stepped back. “Good luck with the pearls,” he said. “Hope you find them.”

The horse tossed its head and flapped its lips in that funny way they do. The sound it made was very like a sarcastic laugh. I put the car in gear and let out the clutch. “Tally ho,” I said and drove off.

* * *

Half an hour later I was in Boyle Heights, parking outside the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. I wondered how many times I’d plodded up those steps. The building was a wild piece of art nouveau architecture and looked more like a gin palace than a government building. It was cool inside, though, and restfully quiet. About the only sound to be heard was the clicking of an unseen lady clerk’s high heels as she walked down a corridor on one of the floors somewhere above me.

The public desk was manned, if that was the word, by a bouncy little brunette in an unignorably tight sweater. I passed my detective’s license in front of her like a magician showing the playing card he’s about to palm. Most of the time they don’t bother to look and assume I’m from police headquarters, which is fine by me. She said it would take an hour to call up the file on Nico Peterson. I said in an hour I’d be watering my cactuses. She gave me an uncertain smile and said she’d see if the process could be speeded up.

I paced the corridor for a while, smoked a cigarette, then stood at a window with my hands in my pockets and watched the traffic on Mission Road. It’s an exciting life, being a private detective.

The sweater girl was as good as her word and came back in under fifteen minutes with the file. I took it to a bench by the window and flipped through the papers. I hadn’t expected them to tell me much, and I wasn’t wrong, but you have to start somewhere. The deceased had been struck by a vehicle, driver unknown, on Latimer Road, Pacific Palisades, in the County of Los Angeles, at some time between eleven P.M. and midnight on the night of April 19. He had suffered numerous injuries with long names, including a “gross comminuted fracture of the right side of the skull” and multiple lacerations of the face. The cause of death was our old friend blunt force trauma — pathologists love blunt force trauma; the very sound of it makes them rub their hands. There was a photograph taken at the scene of the accident. How black and glossy blood looks in the light of a flashbulb. Driver Unknown had done some job on Nico Peterson. He resembled an ill-used side of beef trussed up in a sharkskin suit. I heard myself heave a little sigh. Death be not proud, said the poet, but I don’t see why the Reaper shouldn’t feel a certain sense of accomplishment, given the thoroughness of his work and his unchallenged record of successes.

I handed the file back to the little lady and thanked her nicely, though all I got in return was a distracted smile; she had other things to think about. It crossed my mind to ask her if she had plans for lunch, but no sooner had the notion formed than I dropped it. Thoughts of Clare Cavendish weren’t going to be neutralized that easily.

On the street, I stepped into a phone booth and called Joe Green at Central Homicide. He answered on the first ring. “Joe,” I asked, “don’t they ever give you time off?”

He let out his rattly sigh. Joe reminds me of one of the larger seagoing mammals — a porpoise, maybe, or a big old elephant seal. After twenty years on the force, dealing every day with murderers, drug pushers, kiddie rapists, what have you, he’s become a shapeless wad of weariness and melancholy and the occasional sudden rage. I asked if I could buy him a beer. I could hear him turning suspicious. “Why?” he growled.

“I don’t know, Joe,” I said. An angry-looking young woman wearing ski pants and a scarlet halter, with a kid in a stroller, was waiting outside the booth, glaring at me to finish my call and let her have the phone. “Because it’s summer,” I said, “and it’s lunchtime, and it’s hotter’n hell, and besides, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“More about the Peterson stiff?”

“That’s right.”

He waited a moment, then said, “Yeah, why not. Meet me at Lanigan’s.”

When I opened the door of the booth, the air from inside met the outside heat with a soundless thump. As I stepped out, the young mother swore at me and pushed past and grabbed the receiver. “Don’t mention it,” I said. She was too busy dialing to swear at me again.

* * *

Lanigan’s was one of those pretend-Irish places with shamrocks painted on the mirror behind the bar and photographs of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in glowing Technicolor framed on the walls. Among a shelf of bottles there was a quart of Bushmills wearing a tam-o’-shanter. Scotland, Ireland — what’s the difference? The bartender seemed the genuine article, though, short and gnarled, with a head like an oversized potato and hair that had once been red. “What’ll yiz have, boys?” he said.

Joe Green was wearing a wrung-out suit of gray linen that at some time in the past had probably been white. When he took off his straw hat, the rim of it left a livid groove across his forehead. He yanked a big red handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and mopped his brow. This brow had by now extended so far up his skull that he would very soon be officially bald.

We sat slumped in front of our beers with our elbows on the bar. “Jesus,” Joe said, “how I hate summer in this town.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s bad.”

“You know what gets me?” He lowered his voice. “You know the way your boxer shorts bunch up in your crotch, hot and damp, like some damn poultice?”

“Maybe you’re wearing the wrong kind,” I said. “Consult Mrs. Green. Wives know about these things.”

He threw me a sidelong look. “Oh, yeah?” He had the eyes of a bloodhound, loose-lidded and mournful and deceptively stupid-looking.

“So I’m told, Joe,” I said. “So I’m told.”

We drank our beers in silence for a while, avoiding our own eyes in the mirror in front of us. Pat the bartender was whistling the tune of “Mother Machree”—he was, I could hardly believe it. Maybe he was paid to do it, bringing the true lilt of the Old Sod to the City of the Angels.

“What you dig up on the Peterson bird?” Joe asked.

“Not much. I had a peek at the coroner’s report. Mr. P. took some pounding that night. You ever get a lead on who it was that ran him down?”

Joe laughed. His laugh sounded like a plunger being pulled out of a toilet. “What do you think?” he said.

“Latimer Road wouldn’t have been busy at that hour.”

“It was a Saturday night,” Joe said. “They come and go at that club there like rats at the back of a diner.”

“The Cahuilla?”

“Yeah, I think that’s what it’s called. Could have been one of a hundred cars that flattened him. And of course nobody saw nothing. You been to that place?”

“The Cahuilla Club is not my kind of spot, Joe.”

“Guess not.” He chuckled; this time it was a smaller plunger coming out of a smaller toilet. “This mystery broad you’re working for — she go there?”

“Probably.” I put my teeth together and gave them a grind; it’s a bad habit I have when I’m working up the nerve to do something I think I shouldn’t do. But there comes a moment when you have to level with a cop, if he’s going to be of any use to you. Sort of level, anyway. “She thinks he’s still alive,” I said.

“Who, Peterson?”

“Yes. She thinks he didn’t die, that it wasn’t him who got mashed on Latimer Road that night.”

That made him sit up. He swivelled his big pink head and stared at me. “Jeez,” he said. “What gives her that idea?”

“She saw him, the other day, she says.”

“She saw him? Where?”

“In San Francisco. She was in a taxi on Market Street and there he was, large as life.”

“Did she talk to him?”

“They were going in opposite directions. By the time she got over the surprise, she was way past.”

“Jeez,” Joe said again, in a tone of happy wonderment. Cops love it when things get turned on their head; it adds a pinch of spice to their dull working day.

“You know what that means,” I said.

“What does it mean?”

“You may have a homicide on your hands.”

“You figure?”

Mrs. Machree’s boy was standing by the cash register dreamily poking a matchstick in one of his ears. I signaled him for another couple of glasses.

“Think about it,” I said to Joe. “If Peterson didn’t die, who did? And was it really an accident?”

Joe turned this over for a minute, paying special attention to the dirty underside of it. “You think Peterson set it up so he could disappear?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said.

Our fresh beers arrived. Joe was still thinking hard. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know that, either,” I said.

“I can’t just do nothing. Can I?”

“You could maybe have the body exhumed.”

“Dug up?” He shook his head. “It was cremated.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but I should have, of course. “Who identified Peterson?” I asked.

“Dunno. I can check.” He picked up his glass, then put it down again. “Christ, Marlowe,” he said, more rueful than angry, “every time I talk to you, it’s nothing but trouble.”

“Trouble’s my middle name.”

“Ho ho.”

I moved my beer glass an inch to the side and then back again to where it had been, standing in its own ring of froth. I thought of Clare Cavendish doing the same thing a couple of hours before. When a woman gets into your head, there’s nothing that won’t remind you of her. “Look, Joe, I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe none of this is for real. Maybe my client only imagined it was Peterson she saw. Maybe it was a trick of the light or she’d had one martini too many.”

“You going to tell me who she is?”

“You know I’m not.”

“If it turns out she’s right, and this guy ain’t dead, you’ll have to name her.”

“Maybe so. But for now there’s no case, so I don’t need to tell you anything.”

Joe sat way back on his stool and gave me a long look. “Listen, Marlowe, you called me, remember? I was having a nice peaceful morning, nothing on my desk ’cept a schoolgirl that’s been missing for three days, a gun heist at a filling station, and a double murder over in Bay City. It was going to be a breeze of a day. Now I have to worry whether this guy Peterson arranged for some poor schmuck to be run over so he could vamoose.”

“You could forget I told you anything. Like I say, there may be nothing in it.”

“Yeah — like that high school kid may be visiting her grandma in Poughkeepsie, and it may be by accident those two guineas in Bay City got a slug each in the noggin. Sure. The world is full of things that only look serious on the surface.”

He slid down from the stool and took his straw hat from where it had been sitting on the bar. Joe’s face turns the color of liver when he’s annoyed. “I’ll run some more checks on Peterson’s death, or whoever it was that died, and let you know. In the meantime, you go and hold your lady client’s hand and tell her not to worry about her boyfriend Lazarus, that if he’s alive you’ll track him down or your name ain’t Doghouse Reilly.”

He turned and strode off, whacking his hat against his thigh. That went well, Marlowe, I told myself. Nice work. The bartender came and asked mildly if everything was all right. Oh, sure, I told him, everything’s fine.

* * *

I drove back to the office, bought a hot dog from a stand at the corner of Vine, and ate it at my desk with a bottle of soda. Then I sat for a long time with my feet up and my hat on the back of my head, smoking. Anyone looking in at me would have said I was engaged in some hard thinking, but I wasn’t. In fact, I was trying not to think. How much I might have loused things up by calling Joe Green I couldn’t say, mostly because I didn’t want to say. Had I betrayed Clare Cavendish’s trust in me by telling Joe about her spotting Peterson when he was supposed to be dead? It was hard to see it otherwise. But sometimes, when you’re getting nowhere, you have to give the wasps’ nest a wallop. But shouldn’t I have waited, shouldn’t I have followed Peterson’s trail further before I brought Joe in on the affair?

I put a hand to my forehead and gave little groan. Then I opened the drawer in my desk that’s supposed to hold document files and got out the office bottle and poured myself a stiffish one into a paper cup. When you know you’ve goofed, there’s nothing for it but to blitz a few million brain cells.

I was contemplating another belt from the bottle when the telephone rang. How is it that, after all these years, the damned machine can still make me jump? I expected it would be Joe, and I was right. “That stiff had Peterson’s wallet in his pocket,” he said. “Plus he was identified at the scene by the manager of — what did you say that club is called?”

“The Cahuilla.”

“Don’t know why I keep forgetting it. The manager is a Floyd Hanson.”

“What do you know about him?”

“If you mean have we got anything on him, we don’t. The Cahuilla is a hoity-toity outfit and wouldn’t hire anyone with a record to head it up. You know the Sheriff’s a member there, plus a couple of judges and half the business bigwigs in town. You poke a finger in there, you’re liable to get the end of it bitten off.”

“Anything in the file about a disturbance there the night Peterson, or whoever he was, got run over?”

“No. Why?” I could hear Joe getting suspicious again.

“I heard Peterson was tanked that night and kicked up a fuss in the bar,” I said. “It got so bad they threw him out. Next thing, someone found him on the side of the road as dead as a side of mutton.”

“The someone being one of the hat-check girls on her way home with her boyfriend. The boyfriend had picked her up at the end of her shift.”

“Anything there?” I asked.

“Naw. Couple of kids. They went back and got Hanson, the manager. He called us.”

I thought about this for a while.

“You there?” Joe said.

“I’m here. I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking you’re wasting your time on this, right?”

“I’ll call my client.”

“You do that.” He was chuckling when he hung up.

I drank another little drink from my trusty bottle, but it didn’t go down well. It was too hot for bourbon. I took my hat and left the office and went down in the elevator and out onto the street. The idea was to clear my head, but how do you do that when the air is as hot as the inside of a furnace and tastes like iron filings? I walked up the sidewalk a ways, keeping in the shade, then back again. The whiskey was making my head feel like it was full of putty. I went back up to the office and lit a cigarette and sat staring at the phone. Then I called Joe Green again and told him I had spoken to my client and convinced her she was wrong about having seen Peterson.

Joe laughed. “That’s frails for you,” he said. “They get a notion in their pretty little heads and make you run in circles for a while, then it’s Oh, I’m tow towwy, Mr. Marwo, I must have been wong.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” I said.

I could hear Joe not believing a word I was telling him. He didn’t care. All he wanted was to close the file on Nico Peterson and put it back on the dusty shelf he’d taken it down from.

“She pay you anyway?” he asked.

“Sure,” I lied.

“So everybody’s happy.”

“Don’t know if that’s the word, Joe.”

He laughed again. “Keep your nose clean, Marlowe,” he said and hung up. Joe is an all-right guy, despite his temper.