Lola had to have been blackmailing Larry, with a picture. And she wouldn't have been so dumb as to go to the meeting with her only copy. She must have had a back-up. So where was it? I had tossed her house like a Caesar salad and found nothing. Not a crouton. So where would she hide it? Where would I hide something like that?
I was on the strip now, billboards of singers I'd never heard of, boutiques dickied up to look like French country cottages. At Horn Ave a guy with long curly black hair turned onto Sunset driving a two-seater sports car that was longer than my Olds. He squealed rubber as he floored it for fifty yards before he had to brake for a stoplight. The car was ugly, impractical, ostentatious, uneconomical and badly designed for city driving, but it was expensive.
I drove on through Hollywood and swung up Ken-more to Lola's house. I had a thought.
The lawn looked a little more unkempt, but everything else seemed the same. People die, hearts break, dynasties fall on their kisser, and the grass keeps growing a little at a time, and the fronts of houses weather very slowly. I parked out front and walked up the front steps and stood under the cooling overhang. The mailbox was stuffed with mail that Lola would never read; some catalogues and advertising flyers had collected on the floor under the mailbox. Clearly no one had notified the post office. I took the envelopes out of the mailbox. Most of them were bills; there was nothing personal among them. I opened the door again the same way I had last time and went in, again. It was as I had left it. I put the mail on the hall table and looked around the house. Last time I'd been looking for a picture. This time I was looking for something else, a key, a receipt, something to tell me where she hid the picture. It had to be there. And it was. After an hour I found it. In among the unpaid bills stuffed into a pigeonhole in the old desk in her den was a receipt from the parcel room at Union Station.
It took me half an hour to get to Union Station and park and find the checked-luggage office and present my receipt. A black man of many years shuffled back into the catacombs of storage and emerged after maybe three weeks with a flat manila envelope sealed with transparent tape along the flap. Lola Faithful was scrawled in a big flowery hand across the face of the envelope. The I in Faithful was dotted with a big circle. I took the envelope and went and sat in the waiting room on an empty bench and opened the envelope. There was an 8 X 10 glossy, and a small glassine envelope with a negative. The glossy was a picture of Muriel Blackstone Valentine wearing high-heeled leather boots and nothing else. Naked, the body was all it promised to be. She was smiling a seductive smile that was skewed a little and her eyes were glassy. I held the negative up and looked at it against the light. It matched. I put the negative and the print back in the manila envelope and headed out under the arches, past the cab stand toward where I'd parked my car.
32
I was back in Venice, where Angel worked as a waitress at a combination cafe and bookstore on the beach. The lunch crowd was gone and there were only a few early lush types sipping drinks at the outdoor tables and trying to look as if one would do them, they were just passing time. I sat and ordered coffee. Angel brought it to me.
"Take a minute," I said. "I need to show you something."
I pushed a chair away from the table with my foot.
"They don't allow me to sit with the customers," Angel said, "but I'm due for my break. You can come in back."
I got up and followed her through the kitchen to a storage room where full gallon-size cans of tomatoes and jugs of olive oil were stacked against the bare cinder-block walls. There was a mop and bucket next to the door.
I took the picture of Muriel out and handed it to Angel.
"You know her?" I said.
Angel shook her head. Her cheeks colored. I'd been looking at so many nude pictures lately I'd forgotten that she might be embarrassed. I liked her for it.
"Sorry," I said. "But it's the only picture I've got."
"It's all right," Angel said. She looked at the picture again. "She does have a wonderful body," she said.
"Sure," I said. "Larry took this picture."
"Larry?"
"I can't prove it, but I know it's the picture that Lola showed to Larry when they had their fight. She was trying to blackmail him with it."
"Because he took a naked picture?"
"Because it's his wife," I said.
Angel smiled tentatively at me.
"I don't understand," she said.
"Larry also goes by the name Les Valentine," I said. "-Under that name he is married to this woman, Muriel Blackstone, now Muriel Valentine."
"Larry's married to me," Angel said.
"Yes," I said, "and Les is married to her and Les and Larry are the same guy."
"I don't believe that," Angel said.
"No reason you should," I said. "But it's the truth and I've kept it from you as long as I'm going to."
"I don't know why you come to me and lie to me like this," Angel said. "You must be very evil or very sick."
"Tired," I said. "Tired of wading around in this swamp. Maybe your husband did kill somebody, maybe he didn't; but he's bolted again and I don't know where he is and I don't care. No more secrets."
"You still don't know where Larry is?" Angel said. It was as if everything else I'd told her had washed off her without a mark.
"No," I said. "Do you?"
"No. Do you think something happened to him?"
"No, I think he did what he knows how to do. He ran away."
"He wouldn't leave me," Angel said.
I just shook my head. I didn't know what the hell Larry/Les would do or where he'd go, and I was beginning to doubt that I ever would.
"He wouldn't," Angel said again.
I fished a card out of my wallet and handed it to her.
"If you find out where he is," I said, "you can call me."
She took the card without looking at it. I doubted that she'd call. I doubted that anyone would call. Ever.
I went out of the restaurant and back along the beach. The Pacific lumbered in toward me. The swells looked tired as they crested and fell apart on the beach, and gathered themselves and withdrew slowly, and got upright and fell toward the beach again.
Time to go back to the Springs.
33
Linda was pacing in the living room past the Hammond organ built into the bar, past the glass wall with the butterflies and back, past the oversized fireplace. The nude picture of Muriel Blackstone was on the bar. Nobody was looking at it.
"I admit I am astonished," Linda said. "I had no idea that Muffy Blackstone…" She shook her head. – "Maybe most women lead lives of quiet desperation, too," I said.
"Maybe they do, but I must say I don't see why my husband has to be the one to dig that up. I mean, really, Philip," she nodded at the picture, "aren't you embarrassed?"
"It's been a long time," I said, "since I got embarrassed."
"Well, you should be. I am."
"I'm a detective, lady. You knew that when you married me."
"I guess I didn't think you'd always be a detective."
"Or you thought I'd grow a thin moustache and drink port and figure out who killed Mrs. Posselthwait's cousin Sue Sue in Count Boslewick's castle garden, without ever getting bark mulch on my shoes," I said. "And maybe we'd dine occasionally with an amusing inspector of police."
"Damn you, Marlowe, can't you see how it is for me? Can't you budge even a little bit?"
"Depends what you need me to budge on," I said. "I can budge on where we live, or who we entertain, or where we go for our honeymoon. But you want me to budge on who I am. On what I am. And I can't. This is what I am, a guy who ends up with dirty pictures in his possession."