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 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 had fooled me and angled around the corner of the Permanent Insurance Company building and was shining full on the windshield and, of course, the steering wheel. I opened all four windows and drove off fast to get a breeze going, but it didn’t help. What would have happened, I wondered, if somehow the English Pilgrims and not the Spaniards had landed first on this coast? I guess they’d have prayed for rain and low temperatures and the Lord would have heeded them.
It was cooler at the Palisades, where the ocean was close. I had to ask directions a couple of times before I found the Cahuilla Club. The entrance was up a leafy road at the end of a long high wall with bougainvillea blossoms spilling over it. The gates weren’t electrified, as I’d expected they would be. They were tall, ornate, and gilded. They were open, too, but just inside them a striped wooden pole blocked the way. The gatekeeper stepped out of his little hut and gave me a cheesy look. He was a young fellow in a spiffy beige uniform and a cap with braid on the peak. He had a pin head on top of a long neck and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a Ping-Pong ball when he swallowed.
I said I was there to see the manager.
“You got an appointment?” I told him no, and he screwed up his mouth in a funny way and asked my name. I showed him my card. He frowned at it for a long time, as if the information it contained was written in hieroglyphics. He did that thing with his mouth again — it was a kind of soundless gagging — and went into the lodge and spoke briefly on the phone, reading from my card, then came back and pressed a button and the barrier came up. “Keep to the left, where it says ‘Reception,’” he said. “Mr. Hanson will be waiting for you.”
The drive wound its way beside a long, high wall with hanging masses of bougainvillea. The blossoms here came in a variety of shades, pink, crimson, a delicate mauve. Someone sure was fond of the stuff. There were other things growing, gardenias, and honeysuckle, the odd jacaranda, and orange trees filled the air with their sweet-sharp fragrance.
The reception area was a log cabin affair with lots of squinty little windows and a red carpet in front of the door. I stepped inside. The air had a piney tang, and flute music was playing softly through hidden speakers in the ceiling. There was no one at the desk, a large and venerable item with stacks of drawers with brass handles and a rectangle of green leather set into the top, the kind of thing an Indian chief might have signed away his tribal lands on. Various items of Americana stood about: a full-length Indian headdress on a special stand, an antique silver spittoon, an ornate saddle on another stand. On the walls were mounted bows and arrows of various designs and sizes, a pair of ivory-handled pistols, and framed photographs by Edward Curtis of noble-looking braves and their dreamy-eyed squaws. I was having a close-up gander at one of these studies — tepees, a campfire, a circle of women with papooses — when I heard a soft step behind me.