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

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