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

said. “It got so bad they threw him out. Next thing, someone found him on the side of the road as dead as a side of mutton.”
    “The someone being one of the hat-check girls on her way home with her boyfriend. The boyfriend had picked her up at the end of her shift.”
    “Anything there?” I asked.
    “Naw. Couple of kids. They went back and got Hanson, the manager. He called us.”
    I thought about this for a while.
    “You there?” Joe said.
    “I’m here. I’m thinking.”
    “You’re thinking you’re wasting your time on this, right?”
    “I’ll call my client.”
    “You do that.” He was chuckling when he hung up.
    I drank another little drink from my trusty bottle, but it didn’t go down well. It was too hot for bourbon. I took my hat and left the office and went down in the elevator and out onto the street. The idea was to clear my head, but how do you do that when the air is as hot as the inside of a furnace and tastes like iron filings? I walked up the sidewalk a ways, keeping in the shade, then back again. The whiskey was making my head feel like it was full of putty. I went back up to the office and lit a cigarette and sat staring at the phone. Then I called Joe Green again and told him I had spoken to my client and convinced her she was wrong about having seen Peterson.
    Joe laughed. “That’s frails for you,” he said. “They get a notion in their pretty little heads and make you run in circles for a while, then it’s Oh, I’m tow towwy, Mr. Marwo, I must have been wong .”
    “Yeah, I guess that’s it,” I said.
    I could hear Joe not believing a word I was telling him. He didn’t care. All he wanted was to close the file on Nico Peterson and put it back on the dusty shelf he’d taken it down from.
    “She pay you anyway?” he asked.
    “Sure,” I lied.
    “So everybody’s happy.”
    “Don’t know if that’s the word, Joe.”
    He laughed again. “Keep your nose clean, Marlowe,” he said and hung up. Joe is an all-right guy, despite his temper.

 
    7
    I could have left it there. I could have done what I’d said to Joe I’d done, could have phoned Clare Cavendish and told her she must have been mistaken, that it couldn’t have been Nico Peterson she had seen up in San Francisco that day. But why would that convince her? I had nothing new to give her. She was already aware that the dead man on Latimer Road had been wearing Peterson’s clothes and had Peterson’s wallet in his breast pocket. She knew, too, as she had told me before I’d parted from her in the leafy shade of Langrishe Lodge, that this fellow Floyd Hanson had identified the body. She had been at the Cahuilla that night, she had seen Peterson, drunk and loud, being escorted off the premises by a couple of Hanson’s goons, and she’d still been there an hour later when the hat-check girl and her boyfriend came in to tell everybody about finding Peterson dead at the side of the road. She had even gone out and seen the body being loaded into the meat wagon. Despite all that, she was certain it was Peterson she had spotted on Market Street a couple of months after he was supposed to have died. What could I say that would make her change her mind?
    I still had the feeling there was something wrong with all this, that there was something I wasn’t being told. Being suspicious becomes a habit, like everything else.
    *   *   *
    I was pretty idle for the rest of that day, but I couldn’t get the Peterson business out of my head. Next morning I went to the office and made a few telephone calls, checking on the Langrishes and the Cavendishes. I didn’t turn up much. About the most interesting thing I found out about them was that despite their money, there were no skeletons in their closets, at least none that anyone had ever heard rattling. But it couldn’t be that straightforward, could it?
    I went down in the elevator and crossed the road to where I’d parked the Olds. I had left it in the shade, but the sun