There’s always something to do if you don’t have to work or consider the cost. It’s no real fun but the rich don’t know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else’s wife and that’s a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber’s wife wants new curtains for the living room.”
“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that’s wonderful.” I agreed with him.
“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
Ten minutes later I was sorry. But ten minutes later I was somewhere else.
Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character.
Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him.
“He’s not going to tell you, Sergeant,” Dayton said acidly. “He read that law book. Like a lot of people that read a law book he thinks the law is in it.”
He hooked me with a neat left and crossed it. Bells rang, but not for dinner.
You hear the voice of the night captain. You receive him loud and clear. He puts you through your paces as if you were a performing dog. He is tired and cynical and competent. He is the stage manager of a play that has had the longest run in history, but it no longer interests him.
If you had had a grain of sense you’d have told the police you hadn’t seen Lennox for a week. It didn’t have to be true. Under oath you could always have told the real story. There’s no law against lying to the cops. They expect
“In my book you’re a nickel’s worth of nothing.” He leaned across the desk and flicked me across the face back-handed, casually and contemptuously, not meaning to hurt me, and the small smile stayed on his face. Then when I didn’t even move for that he sat down slowly and leaned an elbow on the desk and cupped his brown chin in his brown hand. The bird-bright eyes stared at me without anything in them but brightness. “Know who I am, cheapie?” “Your name’s Menendez. The boys call you Mendy. You
“In my book you’re a nickel’s worth of nothing.”
Flatbush. “From my point of view, Mr.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.
was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.
There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
He had offered me a job once, but I never got desperate enough to take it. There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Carne knew all of them.
If a well man prays, that’s faith. A sick man prays and he is just scared.
He drove me back to Hollywood. I offered him a buck but he wouldn’t take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T. S. Eliot. He said he already had them.
I won’t say I never forget a face, but not that one.”
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to.
I didn’t like it, but nobody cared what I liked.
Ohls nodded. He took the chewed cigarette out of his mouth, dropped it into a tray, and put a fresh one in place of it. “I quit smoking,” he said. “Got me coughing too much. But the goddam things still ride me. Can’t feel right without one in my mouth.
Demerol’s about the worst of the lot. That’s the stuff Goering
He waved me on and went back to the parked car. Just like a cop. They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don’t find out they don’t know themselves.
Bernie Ohls called up and told me to come in and not stop on the way to pick any flowers.
Once in a while, come election time, some misguided politician would try to get Sheriff Petersen’s job, and would be apt to call him things like The Guy With The Built-In Profile or The Ham That Smokes Itself, but it didn’t get him anywhere. Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a closed mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable
The inquest was a flop. The coroner sailed into it before the medical evidence was complete, for fear the publicity would die on him. He needn’t have worried. The death of a writer—even a loud writer—is not news for long, and that summer there was too much to compete. A king abdicated and another was assassinated. In one week three large passenger planes crashed. The head man of a big wire service was shot to pieces in Chicago in his own automobile. Twenty-four convicts were burned to death in a prison fire. The Coroner of Los Angeles County was out of luck. He was missing the good things in life.
“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn’t, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system. Maybe it’s the best we can get, but it still ain’t any Ivory Soap deal.”
“You know something, kid? You think you’re cute but you’re just stupid. You’re a shadow on the wall. I’ve got twenty years on the cops without a mark against me. I know when I’m being kidded and I know when a guy is holding out on me. The wise guy never fools anybody but himself.
I put the chess board on the coffee table and set out a problem called The Sphynx. It is printed on the end papers of a book on chess by Blackburn, the English chess wizard, probably the most dynamic chess player who ever lived, although he wouldn’t get to first base in the cold war type of chess they play nowadays. The Sphynx is an eleven-mover and it justifies its name. Chess problems seldom run to more than four or five moves. Beyond that the difficulty of solving them rises in almost geometrical progression. An eleven-mover is sheer unadulterated torture. Once in a long while when I feel mean enough I set it out and look for a new way to solve it. It’s a nice quiet way to go crazy. You don’t even scream, but you come awfully close.
“And you want to talk to her,” he said slowly, “in the presence of a witness.” “That’s right.” “That means only one of two things to me, Marlowe. Either you are badly scared or you think she ought to be.” I nodded. “Which one?” he asked grimly. “I’m not scared.”
She sat down slowly. I sat down on the other davenport. Spencer was frowning. He took his glasses off and polished them. That gave him a chance to frown more naturally.
I didn’t expect anyone to jump six feet into the air and scream and nobody did.
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
I went to the bathroom and ran cold water and held a soaked towel against my throbbing cheek. I looked at myself in the glass. The cheek was puffed out of shape and bluish and there were jagged wounds on it from the force of the gun barrel hitting against the cheekbone. There was a discoloration under my left eye too. I wasn’t going to be beautiful for a few days.
Cop business is wonderful uplifting idealistic work, Bernie. The only thing wrong with cop business is the cops that are in it.”
“Now I’m here and I suppose without preamble, after we have had a reasonable quantity of champagne you plan to grab me and throw me on the bed. Is that it?” “Frankly,” I said, “some such idea did stir at the back of my mind.”
I kissed her some more. It was light, pleasant work.