Read Online The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel by Benjamin Black - Free Book Online

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