Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Read online

  “Philip Marlowe?” she asked, and her smile dimpled her cheeks in a manner that made her whole heart-shaped face smile, and the world smile as well, including me. She didn’t move off the stool, just extended her hand in a manner that was at once casual and regal.

  I took the hand, not knowing whether to kiss it, shake it, or press it into a book like a corsage I wanted to keep. I looked at her feeling vaguely embarrassed; she was so pretty you didn’t know where to look next, and felt like there was maybe something wrong with looking anywhere. But I couldn’t help myself.

  She had pale, creamy skin and her hair was almost white blonde. They called her the ice-cream blonde, in the press. I could see why.

  Then I got around to her eyes. They were blue, of course, cornflower blue; and big and sporting long lashes, the real McCoy, not your dimestore variety. But they were also the saddest eyes I’d ever looked into. The smile froze on my face like I was looking at Medusa, not a twenty-nine-year-old former sixth-grade teacher from Massachusetts who’d won a talent search.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked. Then she patted the stool next to her.

  I sat and said, “Nothing’s wrong. I never had a movie star for a client before.”

  “I see. You come recommended highly.”

  “Oh?”

  Her voice had a low, throaty quality that wasn’t forced or affected; she was what Mae West would’ve been if Mae West weren’t a parody. “A friend of mine in the D.A’s office downtown. He said you got fired for being too honest.”

  “Actually, I like to think I quit. And I don’t like to think I’m too honest.”

  “Oh?”

  “Just honest enough.”

  She smiled at that, very broadly, showing off teeth whiter than cameras can record. “Might I get you a drink, Mr. Marlowe?”

  “It’s a little early.”

  “I know it is. Might I get you a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything special?”

  “Anything that doesn’t have a little paper umbrella in it is fine by me.”

  She fixed me up with a rye, and had the same herself. I like that in a woman.

  “Have you heard of Laird Brunette?” she asked, returning to her bar stool.

  “Heard of him,” I said. “Haven’t met him.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  I shrugged. “Big-time gambler. Runs casinos all over Southern California. More every day.”

  She flicked the air with a long red fingernail, like she was shooing away a bug. “Well, perhaps you’ve noticed the tower above my restaurant.”

  “Sure.”

  “I live on the second floor, but the tower above is fairly spacious.”

  “Big enough for a casino, you mean.”

  “That’s right,” she said, nodding. “I was approached by Brunette, more than once. I turned him away, more than once. After all, with my location, and my clientele, a casino could make a killing.”

  “You’re doing well enough legally. Why bother with ill?”

  “I agree. And if I were to get into any legal problems, that would mean a scandal, and Hollywood doesn’t need another scandal. Busby Berkeley’s trial is coming up soon, you know.”

  The noted director and choreographer, creator of so many frothy fantasies, was up on the drunk-driving homicide of three pedestrians, not far from this cafe.

  “But now,” she said, her bee-stung lips drawn nervously tight, “I’ve begun to receive threatening notes.”

  “From Brunette, specifically?”

  “No. They’re extortion notes, actually. Asking me to pay off Artie Lewis. You know, the bandleader?”

  “Why him?”

  “He’s in Brunette’s pocket. Gambling markers. And I used to go with Artie. He lives in San Francisco now.”

  “I see. Well, have you talked to the cops?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to get Artie in trouble.”

  “Have you talked to Artie?”

  “Yes—he claims he knows nothing about this. He doesn’t want my money. He doesn’t even want me back—he’s got a new girl.”

  I’d like to see the girl that could make you forget Dolores Dodd.

  “So,” I said, “you want me to investigate. Can I see the extortion notes?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her white blonde curls like the mop of the gods, “that’s not it. I burned those notes. For Artie’s sake.”

  “Well, for Pete’s sake,” I said, “where do I come in?”

  “I think I’m being followed. I’d like a bodyguard.”

  I resisted looking her over wolfishly and making a wisecrack. She was a nice woman, and the fact that hers was the sort of body a private eye would pay to guard didn’t seem worth mentioning. My fee did.

  “Twenty-five a day and expenses,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said. “And you can have any meals you like right here at the cafe. Drinks, too. Run a tab and I’ll pick it up.”

  “Swell,” I grinned. “I was wondering if I’d ever run into a fringe benefit in this racket.”

  “You can be my chauffeur.”

  “Well . . . ”

  “You have a problem with that, Mr. Marlowe?”

  “I have a private investigator’s license, and a license to carry a gun. But I don’t have a chauffeur’s license.”

  “I think a driver’s license will suffice.” Her lips were poised in a kiss of amusement. “What’s the real problem, Marlowe?”

  “I’m not wearing a uniform. I’m strictly plainclothes.”

  She smiled tightly, wryly amused, saying, “All right, hang onto your dignity . . . but you have to let me pay the freight on a couple of new suits for you. I’ll throw ’em in on the deal.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  So for the next two months, she was my only client. I worked six days a week for her—Monday through Saturday. Sundays God, Marlowe, and Dodd rested. I drove her in her candy-apple red Packard convertible, a car designed for blondes with wind-blown hair and pearls. She sat in back, of course. Most days I took her to the Hal Roach Studio, where she was making a musical with Laurel and Hardy. I’d wait in some dark pocket of the sound studio and watch her every move out in the brightness. In a black wig, lacy bodice, and clinging, gypsy skirt, Dolores was the kind of girl you took home to mother, and if mother didn’t like her, to hell with mother.

  Evenings she hit the club circuit, the Trocadero and the El Mocambo chiefly. I’d sit in the cocktail lounges and quietly drink and wait for her and her various dates to head home. Some of these guys were swishy types that she was doing the studio a favor appearing in public with; a couple of others spent the night.

  I don’t like to tell tales out of school, but this tale can’t be told at all unless I’m frank about that one thing: Dolores slept around. Later, when the gossip rags were spreading rumors about alcohol and drugs, that was all the bunk. But Dolores was a friendly girl. She had generous charms and she was generous with them.

  “Marlowe,” she said, one night in early December when I was dropping her off, walking her up to the front door of the cafe like always, “I think I have a crush on you.”

  She was alone tonight, having played girlfriend to one of those Hollywood funny boys for the benefit of Louella Parsons and company. Alone but for me.

  She slipped an arm around my waist. She had booze on her breath, but then so did I, and neither one of us was drunk. She was bathed gently in moonlight and Chanel Number Five.

  She kissed me with those bee-stung lips, stinging so softly, so deeply.

  I moved away. “No. I’m sorry.”

  She winced. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m the hired help. You’re just lonely tonight.”

  Her eyes, which I seldom looked into because of the depth of the sadness there, hardened. “Don’t you ever get lonely, you bastard?”

  I swallowed. “Never,” I said.

  She drew her ha
nd back to slap me, but then she just touched my face, instead. Gentle as the ocean breeze, and it was gentle tonight, the breeze, so gentle.

  “Goodnight, Marlowe,” she said.

  And she slipped inside.

  “Goodnight,” I said, to nobody. Then to myself: “Goodnight Marlowe, you goddamn sap.”

  I drove her Packard to the garage that was attached to the bungalow above the restaurant complex; to do that I had to take Montemar Vista Road to Seretto Way, turning right. The Mediterranean-style stucco bungalow, on Cabrillo, like so many houses in Montemar Vista, climbed the side of the hill like a clinging vine. It was owned by Dolores Dodd’s partner in the cafe, movie director and producer Warren Eastman. Eastman had an apartment next to Dolores’s above the restaurant, as well as the bungalow, and seemed to live back and forth between the two.

  I wondered what the deal was, with Eastman and my client, but I never asked, not directly. Eastman was a thin, dapper man in his late forties, with a pointed chin and a small mustache and a widow’s peak that his slick black hair was receding around, making his face look diamond shaped. He often sat in the cocktail lounge with a bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other. He was always talking deals with movie people.

  “Marlowe,” he said, one night, motioning me over to the bar. He was seated on the very stool that Dolores had been, that first morning. “This is Nick DeCiro, the talent agent. Nick, this is the gumshoe Dolores hired to protect her from the big bad gambling syndicate.”

  DeCiro was another darkly handsome man, a bit older than Eastman, though he lacked both the mustache and receding hairline of the director. DeCiro wore a white suit with a dark sport shirt, open at the neck to reveal a wealth of black chest hair.

  I shook DeCiro’s hand. His grip was firm, moist, like a fistful of topsoil.

  “Nicky here is your client’s ex-husband,” Eastman said, with a wag of his cigarette-in-holder, trying for an air of that effortless decadence that Hollywood works so hard at.

  “Dolores and me are still pals,” DeCiro said, lighting up a foreign cig with a shiny silver lighter that he then clicked shut with a meaningless flourish. “We broke up amicably.”

  “I heard it was over extreme cruelty,” I said.

  DeCiro frowned, and Eastman cut in glibly, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Marlowe. Besides, you have to get a divorce over something.”

  “But then you’d know that in your line of work,” DeCiro said, an edge in his thin voice.

  “I don’t do divorce work,” I said.

  “Sure,” DeCiro said.

  “I don’t. If you gents will excuse me . . . ”

  “Marlowe, Marlowe,” Eastman said, touching my arm, “don’t be so touchy.”

  I waited for him to remove his hand from my arm, then said, “Did you want something, Mr. Eastman? I’m not much for this Hollywood shit-chat.”

  “I don’t like your manner,” DeCiro said.

  “Nobody does,” I said. “But I don’t get paid well enough for it to matter.”

  “Marlowe,” Eastman said, “I was just trying to convince Nicky here that my new film is perfect for a certain client of his. I’m doing a mystery. About the perfect crime. The perfect murder.”

  “No such animal,” I said.

  “Oh, really?” DeCiro said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Murder and crime are inexact sciences. All the planning in the world can’t account for the human element.”

  “Then how do you explain,” Eastman said archly, “the hundreds of murders that go unsolved in this country?”

  “Police work is a more exact science than crime or murder,” I admitted, “but we have a lot of corrupt cops in this world—and a lot of dumb ones.”

  “Then there are perfect crimes.”

  “No. Just unsolved ones. And imperfect detectives. Good evening, gentlemen.”

  That was the most extensive conversation I had with either Eastman or DeCiro during the time I was employed by Miss Dodd, though I said hello and they did the same, now and then, at the cafe.

  But Eastman was married to an actress named Miranda Diamond, a fiery Latin whose parents were from Mexico City, even if she’d been raised in the Bronx. She fancied herself as the next Lupe Velez, and she was a similarly voluptuous dame, though her handsome features were as hard as a gravestone.

  She cornered me at the cafe one night, in the cocktail lounge, where I was drinking on the job.

  “You’re a dick,” she said.

  We’d never spoken before.

  “I hope you mean that in the nicest way,” I said.

  “You’re bodyguarding that bitch,” she said, sitting next to me on a leather and chrome couch. Her nostrils flared; if I’d been holding a red cape, I’d have dropped it and run for the stands.

  “Miss Dodd is my client, yes, Miss Diamond.”

  She smiled. “You recognize me.”

  “Oh yes. And I also know enough to call you Mrs. Eastman, in certain company.”

  “My husband and I are separated.”

  “Ah.”

  “But I could use a little help in the divorce court.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Photographs of him and that bitch in the sack.” She said “the” like “thee.”

  “That would help you.”

  “Yes. You see . . . my husband has similar pictures of me, with a gentleman, in a compromising position.”

  “Even missionaries get caught in that position, I understand.” I offered her a cigarette, she took it, and I lit hers and mine. “And if you had similar photos, you could negotiate yourself a better settlement.”

  “Exactly. Interested?”

  “I don’t do divorce work. I don’t sell clients out. It’s a conflict of interests.”

  She smiled; she put her hand on my leg. “I could make it worth your while. Financially and . . . otherwise.”

  It wasn’t even Christmas and already two screen goddesses wanted to hop in the sack with me. I must have really been something.

  “No thanks, señorita. I sleep alone . . . just me and my conscience.”

  Then she suggested I do to myself what she’d just offered to do for me. She was full of ideas.

  So was I. I was pretty sure Dolores and Eastman were indeed having an affair, but it was of the on-again, off-again variety. One night they’d be affectionate, in that sickening Hollywood sweetie-baby way; the next night he would be cool to her; the next she would be cool to him. It was love—I recognized it—but the kind that sooner or later blows up like an overheated engine.

  Ten days before Christmas, Dolores was honored by a famous British comedian, so famous I’d never the hell heard of him, with a dinner at the Troc. At a table for twelve upstairs, in the swanky cream-and-gold dining room, Dolores was being feted by her show-biz friends, while I sat downstairs in the oak-paneled Cellar Lounge with other people not famous enough to sit upstairs, nursing a rye at the polished copper bar. I didn’t feel like a polished copper, that was for sure. I was just a chauffeur with a gun, and a beautiful client who didn’t need me.

  That much was clear to me: in the two months I’d worked for Dolores, I hadn’t spotted anybody following her except a few fans, and I couldn’t blame them. I think I was just a little bit in love with the ice-cream blonde myself. But she was a client, and she slept around, and neither of those things appealed to me in a girl.

  About half an hour into the evening, I heard a scream upstairs. A woman’s scream, a scream that might have belonged to Dolores.

  I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.

  Dolores was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Peters, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Dolores’s partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with
a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.

  I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Peters.

  “Miss Dodd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her two arms from behind, “don’t do this.”

  She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Philip.”

  It was the only time she ever called me that.

  I let go of her.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Dolores Dodd and her ex-husband.

  “He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.

  And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”

  DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”

  “I’m uninviting you. Go.”

  His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her décolletage and took a powder.

  “Are you ready to go home?” I asked Dolores.

  “No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.

  Two hours and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.

  “Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little starlet, which you may have noticed rhymes with harlot, and sat at another table, leaving me sitting next to an empty seat at a party in my honor. He sat there necking with that little tramp and I got up and went over and gave him a piece of my mind. It . . . got a little out of hand. Thanks for stepping in, Marlowe.”

  “It’s what you pay me for.”

  She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the top up on the convertible, but she’d said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.