The Black-Eyed Blonde

9

I drove over to the Bull and Bear for a bite to eat — watching Ma Langrishe feed her face with chocolate cake had made me hungry, and anyway, it was lunchtime. As I dawdled along the Strip, steering with one finger on the wheel, I again considered calling up Clare Cavendish and telling her I wanted out. She hadn’t sent back the signed contract, and no filthy lucre had changed hands yet, so I was free to wave goodbye. But it’s not easy to let go of a woman like that, until you’re forced to, and it’s not easy then, either. I recalled her sitting in my office in her hat with the veil on it, smoking her Black Russian through that ebony holder, and knew I couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t break the link with her, not yet.

* * *

I can’t decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockneyfied joints like the Bull. I could describe it, but I haven’t the heart; think dartboards and wooden beer pulls and a framed pink-tinted photo of the young Queen Elizabeth — the present one, that is — on a horse. I sat at a table in a corner and ordered a roast beef sandwich and a tankard of ale. They served it warm, just like they do down Lambeth way; as to the sandwich, you sure take a sober view of matters while chewing on a slab of overcooked beef as tough as an Englishman’s tongue. Where was I to go from here in the quest for Nico Peterson? If he really was alive, there had to be someone who knew where he was and what he was up to. But who? Then I remembered Clare Cavendish mentioning a movie actress Peterson had worked with, or for. What was her name? Mandy something — Mandy Rogers, yes, the poor man’s Jean Harlow. She might be worth talking to. I took a sip of my beer. It was the color of shoe polish and tasted like soap suds. I thought, how come Britannia rules the waves, if this is what she gives her sailors to drink?

I got up from the table and crossed to the phone booth and dialed an old pal of mine, Hal Wiseman. Hal was in the same line of work as I was, only he was on the payroll at Excelsior Studios. He had a fancy title there — chief security officer, something like that — and took it easy, and why shouldn’t he. He spent his time babysitting starlets and keeping the younger actors on the straight and narrow, or on the not too crooked and not too wide, at least. Now and then he had to use his contacts at the Sheriff’s office to get one of Excelsior’s stars off a dope rap or to ease a studio exec out from under a charge of drunk driving or wife beating. It wasn’t a bad life, he said. While I waited for him to answer, I busied myself trying to work a piece of gristle from between my upper molars with my tongue. The roast beef of Old England sure is tenacious.

At last he picked up.

“Hello, Hal.”

He recognized my voice straight off. “Hiya, Phil, how’s it swinging?”

“Just fine.”

“You at a cocktail party or something? I hear the sound of revelry in the background.”

“I’m at the Bull and Bear, eating lunch. No revelers here, just the usual crowd. Listen, Hal, you know Mandy Rogers?”

“Mandy? Yeah, I know Mandy.” He’d gone cautious all of a sudden. Hal was no oil painting — kind of a cross between Wallace Beery and Edward G. Robinson — which made his success with women hard to explain, if you weren’t a woman. Maybe he was a great conversationalist. “Why do you ask?”

“There’s a guy who did some work with her,” I said. “Agenting work. Name of Nico Peterson.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. What’s this about, Phil?”

“You think you could get me a meeting with Miss Rogers?”

“What for?”

“I want to talk to her about Peterson. He got killed one night a couple months ago, over in Pacific Palisades.”

“Oh, yeah?” I could hear Hal continuing to close up, slowly, like a giant clam. “What kind of killed did he get?”

“Hit-and-run.”

“So?”

“So I’ve got a client who’s paying me to look into Peterson’s death.”

“Something in it that don’t meet the eye?”

“Could be.”

There was a silence. I could hear him breathing; it might have been the sound of his mind working, in long, slow beats. “What’s Mandy Rogers got to do with it?”

“Nothing at all. Only I need some background on Peterson. He’s kind of an enigma.”

“Kind of a what?”

“Let’s say there are things about him that don’t meet the eye.”

Some more breathing, some more thinking. Then he said, “I guess Mandy will talk to you.” He gave a snuffly laugh. “It ain’t as if she’s too busy these days. Leave it to me. You still at the same office, that flytrap on Cahuenga? I’ll call you.”

I went back to my table, but when I looked at the half-eaten sandwich and the half-drunk pint of tepid beer I lost heart, and instead of sitting down I dropped a bill beside my plate and left. A big purple cloud had come up from somewhere and covered the sun, and the light in the street had turned surly and had a livid cast. Maybe it was going to rain. That would be a nice novelty, in summer, in these parts.

* * *

Hal, who was a man of his word, telephoned in the afternoon. Mandy Rogers would meet me at the studio; I should come over there now. I took my hat, locked the office, and went down to the street. That cloud was still hanging over the city, or maybe it was another one just like it, and raindrops the size of silver dollars were splashing on the pavement. I sprinted across the road and made it into the car just as the shower got going in earnest. It may not rain here often, but when it rains, it rains. The wipers on the Olds needed replacing, and I had to crouch over the wheel with my nose nearly touching the windshield so I could see the road.

Hal was waiting for me at the gates of the studio, sheltering in the gateman’s cabin. He came out with his jacket pulled over his head and jumped in beside me. “Goddamn,” he said, “three steps and I’m soaked — look at me!” Did I mention that Hal is a sharp dresser? He was wearing a pale linen double-breasted suit, a green shirt and green silk tie, brown-and-white two-toned wingtips. Also a gold link bracelet, two or three rings, and a Rolex watch. He was doing well for himself; maybe I should look into the movie business.

“Thanks for doing this, Hal,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well.” He scowled, brushing at the raindrops on the padded shoulders of his jacket.

Movie lots are strange places. You feel like you’re in a waking dream, meeting cowboys and showgirls, ape-men and Roman centurions, all of them just walking along like any other bunch of workers on their way to the office or the factory. They looked even stranger than usual today, since most of them had umbrellas up. The umbrellas had the studio logo on them, a bright yellow sun rising out of a crimson lake and the words “Excelsior Pictures” emblazoned in gilt scrollwork. “Was that James Cagney we just passed?” I asked.

“Yeah. He’s on lease from Warner Brothers, doing a fight picture for us. The movie is crap, but Cagney will carry it. That’s what stars are for. Take a left here.”

“You know the word blasé, Hal? French word.”

“No. What’s it mean?”

“It means you’ve seen it all and don’t care for any of it anymore.”

“I get it,” he said sourly. He was still tut-tutting over a few spots of damp on the lapels of his suit. “You see how you’d feel, wiping the puke off the back seat of your car at four in the morning after you’ve sprung yet another star of the silver screen out of the drunk tank and dumped him at his mansion in Bel-Air. And then there’s the dames — they’re worse. Ever met Tallulah Bankhead?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Count yourself lucky. Stop here.”

We were at the commissary. A blond kid in a zipped-up windbreaker hopped out from the doorway with an Excelsior umbrella and escorted Hal inside — I was left to duck the rain as best I could. “Give Joey here the key,” Hal said. “He’ll look after your car for you.” Joey flashed me a big smile; he’d had a dental job done that I bet his old ma in Peoria or wherever had sacrificed her life’s savings for. Everyone in Hollywood is a hopeful.

It was midafternoon and there was hardly anyone in the place. Opposite the long counter where the food was served there was a big picture window looking out on a grass slope with palm trees and a small ornamental lake. The rain was making the water in the lake look like a bed of nails. Mandy Rogers sat at a table by the window, posing with a hand to her chin and gazing out soulfully at the sad gray day and thinking great thoughts. “Hey there, Mandy,” Hal said, laying a hand on one of her shoulder blades. “This is the guy I told you about — meet Philip Marlowe.”

She made a show of tearing herself away from her reverie and turned her saucer eyes up to me and smiled. I’ve got to say, film people have a special something, no matter how small-time they are. They spend so much of their days looking into things — cameras, mirrors, the eyes of their fans — that they get a smooth, all-over glaze, as if they’d been smeared with a special kind of honey. In the female of the species, the effect can take your breath away when you get treated to it up close.

“Mr. Marlowe,” Mandy Rogers said, offering me one of her little white hands to shake. “Charmed, I’m sure.” Her voice dispelled some of the magic. It was so high-pitched and piercing she could have etched her name on the window with it.

“Thanks for seeing me, Miss Rogers,” I said.

“Oh, call me Mandy, please.”

I was still holding on to her hand, which she was making no attempt to retrieve.

“Take a seat, Phil,” Hal said drily. “You look like you’re going to faint.”

Was I that much affected? Mandy Rogers was no Rita Hayworth. She was on the short side, not exactly slim, a bottle blonde with a butterfly mouth and a chubby little chin. Her eyes were nice, though, big and round and baby blue. She was wearing a scarlet dress that was tight and low in the bodice and full in the skirt. Only in a film studio could a girl get away with a dress like that in the middle of the afternoon.

At last she took back her hand, and I sat down on a metal chair. Out of the corner of my eye I saw through the window a bluebird flit down from one of the palm trees and land on the wet grass.

“Okay,” Hal said, “I’m going to leave you two together. Mandy, you keep an eye on this guy — he’s not as harmless as he looks.” And he gave me a soft punch on the shoulder and went away.

“He’s such a nice person,” Mandy sighed. “And you can’t say that of everybody in this business, you know.”

“I’m sure that’s true, Miss Rogers.”

“Mandy,” she said, shaking her head at me and smiling.

“All right — Mandy.”

There was a bottle of Coke on the table in front of her, with a straw sticking out of it. “Is it true, what Hal says?” she asked. “Are you so dangerous?”

“Naw,” I said. “I’m a pushover, you’ll see.”

“He tells me you’re a private detective. That must be exciting.”

“So much so I can hardly bear it.”

She gave me her hazy smile, then picked up the bottle and sucked up some Coke through the straw. For that moment she could have been just any kid sitting at a soda fountain, drinking a bottle of pop and dreaming of being a big star one day. I liked how, when she leaned over the straw and looked down, the upper set of her eyelashes almost rested on the soft curve of her cheek. I wondered how much she owed to how many men in this town already.

“Nico Peterson was your agent,” I said, “yes?”

She put down the bottle. “Well, he wanted to be. He did get me some work. I was in Riders of the Red Dawn—did you see it?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Oh, it’s gone now. Joel McCrea was supposed to be in it, but something happened and he couldn’t do it. I played the rancher’s daughter.”

“I’ll catch it when it comes around again.”

She put her head on one side, smiling. “You’re sweet,” she said. “Are all private investigators like you?”

“Not all of them, no.” I offered her a cigarette from my silver case, but she shook her head, pursing her lips demurely. I could see her as the rancher’s daughter, dainty one minute and feisty the next, in a gingham skirt and button boots, with a big bow in her hair. “What can you tell me about Mr. Peterson?” I asked.

“What would you like to know?” She bit her lip and gave her bubbly blond hair a toss. Since I’d first set eyes on her, five minutes or so previously, she had tried out half a dozen parts, from bobby-soxer to big-eyed siren. But she was still just a kid.

“When did you last see him?”

She pressed an index finger to her mouth at one side, making a dimple there, and turned her eyes up to the ceiling. I could see the direction in the script: She pauses, thinking. “I guess about a week before he died,” she said. “He was working on getting me into the new Doris Day movie — you know Miss Day’s real name is Kappelhoff? They say Rock Hudson is going to be in it too.” Her fresh little face clouded over for a moment. “I guess I won’t get the part now. Oh, well.”

A young guy came by the table. He wore a short white apron and was carrying a tray. He might have been the kid brother of the one who had held the umbrella over Hal when we got out of the car in the rain. I could have worked up a thought about the movies being a machine for devouring the young and the eager, but instead I asked for a cup of coffee. “You got it, sir!” the young guy said, and flashed a smile at Mandy and went off.

“Nico, was he a good agent?” I asked. “I mean, was he successful?”

Mandy gave that some thought, too. “He wasn’t one of the big ones,” she said. “He was just starting out, like me — only of course he was older. I’m not sure what he did before he was an agent.”

“Did you see him socially?”

She wrinkled her nose, which was as near to a frown as that sweet, clear face could come. “You mean, did he try to—? Oh, no. Ours wasn’t that kind of relationship.”

“I meant, did he take you out to places, places where you’d meet people?”

“What sort of people?”

“Well, producers, directors, studio heads.”

“No, he was always too busy. He always had someone to see.”

“Yes, so I hear.”

“Do you?” She was suddenly sharp. “Who from?”

“No one in particular,” I said. “Everyone talks, in this town.”

“You can say that again.”

She was looking out the window, and her eyes had narrowed. I really didn’t want to know more than I already did about Mandy Rogers, the ups and the — more likely — downs of her career so far. Yet I heard myself asking, “Where are you from, Mandy?”

“Me?” She seemed genuinely surprised by the question. For a moment she was confused, and when she was confused, I could see, she stopped acting. Suddenly she looked tentative, uncertain, maybe even a bit alarmed. “I was born in Hope Springs, Iowa. I guess you’ve never been there. Nobody has, really. Hope Springs is the kind of place people leave.”

The young waiter came with my coffee. Again he ogled Mandy, who gave him an absentminded smile in return. She was thinking still of Hope Springs and all the things, or all the nothings, she’d left behind her there.

“How did you hear of Nico’s death?” I asked.

She thought about it, then shook her head. “You know, I can’t remember. Isn’t that strange? There must have been talk about it here at the studio. Someone must have told me.”

I looked toward the window. The bluebird flew up to its perch in the palm tree again. When it got there I couldn’t see it any longer, in the shadows under the fronds. That’s happiness for you: there one minute, gone the next. At least the rain was easing off.

Mandy took another sip of Coke. The bottle, now almost empty, made a loud gurgle, and Mandy glanced at me quickly, as if she was afraid I’d laugh.

“Did you ever meet Nico’s friends?” I asked. “A girlfriend, maybe?”

She gave a little tinkly laugh. “Oh, he had plenty of those.”

“You didn’t meet any of them?”

“I saw him a couple of times with a woman, but I don’t think she was his girlfriend.”

“What did she look like?”

“I didn’t see her very well. Once it was at a party and he was leaving with her. Another time I saw them in a bar, but that night I was leaving. A tall woman. Dark hair. Nice face, too — big, you know, squarish, but nice.”

“Why do you think she wasn’t his girlfriend?”

“They didn’t have that air. She wasn’t really with him — you know what I mean? Maybe she looked a bit like Nico, too — maybe they were related, I don’t know.” She fiddled with the straw in the empty Coke bottle. “Is it one of his girlfriends you’re working for?”

I wondered what Hal had told her about me and my search for Nico Peterson, dead or alive. For my part, I hadn’t told Hal much — there wasn’t much to tell — so I supposed he must have made something up. Hal is like that. Despite his rough demeanor, he has a colorful imagination and loves to embroider the dull old truth. Mandy Rogers probably thought I was acting for some woman Nico had jilted before he died. And come to think of it, I thought, maybe I am.

“What was Nico like?” I asked.

“What was he like?” Mandy frowned. Peterson, I could see, hadn’t been anyone Mandy had given much thought to before today, even if he had got her a part in Riders of the Red Dawn. “Gee, I don’t think I knew him all that well. He was just a guy on the make. I liked him, I suppose — not in that way, of course. I mean, he wasn’t even a friend, just a business associate.” She paused, then said, “He asked me one time to come to Mexico with him.” She looked away and even blushed a little.

“Did he?” I said, trying not to sound too interested. “Where in Mexico?”

She was doing that lip-biting thing again. Who was she trying to be? Doris Kappelhoff, maybe, in one of her girl-in-buckskin roles.

“Acapulco. He often went down there, or so he told me. He knew people — I could tell he meant people who were rich.”

“But you didn’t go.”

She widened her eyes and made an O of her mouth. “Of course I didn’t! I suppose you think I’m the usual Hollywood tramp, ready to go anywhere, with anyone.”

“No, no,” I said soothingly. “I don’t think anything of the kind. I just thought, since he was older than you and so on, he might have been offering to take you on a nice trip with him, as a friend.”

She smiled, a grim, tight little smile. “Nico had girlfriends,” she said, “but he didn’t have girls who were friends. You know what I mean?”

A guy came in who looked so much like Gary Cooper that it couldn’t have been him. He wore riding breeches and leather leggings and a red bandanna knotted around his suntanned neck, and had a holster with a six-shooter in it strapped to his hip. He took up a tray and walked along the counter, eyeing the serving pans of food.

“You’ve been a real help, Miss Rogers,” I said, giving her my liar’s smile.

“Have I?” She looked startled. “How did I do that?”

“In my business,” I said, lowering my voice as if I were confiding a trade secret, “there’s nothing that’s not important, nothing that doesn’t help to build up a picture.”

She was looking at me with her lips parted and a knot of puzzlement between her eyebrows. “A picture of what?” she asked, speaking, like me, in a murmur.

I pushed my dead coffee cup away and picked up my hat. The rain outside had stopped, and it looked like the sun was toying with the possibility of coming out. “Let’s just say, Mandy,” I said, with a slow wink, “I know more now than I did when I came in.”

She nodded, still gazing at me, still wide-eyed. She was a sweet girl, in her way. I couldn’t help fearing for her future, in the career she’d chosen for herself. “Can I come talk to you again,” I said, “if I think of some more questions you might know the answers to?”

“Sure,” she said. Then she remembered who she was supposed to be, and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and leaned her head back lazily, showing off her snowy throat; I guessed Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, which was one I had seen. “Come around anytime,” she said. “Hal will tell you where to find me.”

On the way out, I passed the table where the rangy guy with the red bandanna was hunched over a plate of chili con carne, spooning the food into himself as if he thought someone might creep up and reach over his shoulder and steal it from him. He really was a dead ringer for the Coop.