1956
THE FIRST TIME I ever saw Robert Hutchings, he was lying on a fancy leather couch in a fancy hotel just off Hollywood Boulevard. Across from him on the seventeen-inch screen of a blond Admiral television console, Douglas Edwards was telling us all about a Negro named Autherine Lucy who was trying to enter the University of Alabama. She was not having any notable success. It was a feeling I was familiar with. My business—Philip Marlowe, Investigations—was not exactly going through a golden age, either.
Closer by Hutchings, on a love seat that seemed made especially for the properly rounded bottom of a princess, perched a tall, recklessly beautiful, dark-haired woman in a gray gabardine suit meant to make her beauty seem not quite so reckless. But her slight overbite and the moontide gravity of her dark eyes made that impossible. She was thirty-five perhaps, and she would have exuded sexuality inside a steel coffin that had been dropped straight down into the Pacific. Or would under normal circumstances, anyway. At present her condition appeared to be one of clinical shock and so her sexual appeal was operating at one remove, like a museum statue that could only suggest the real thing.
There was one other person in the room, a shabby man in need of a shave, a clean suit, and a brand new life. His name was Donald Hanratty and there had been a time, back in his days on the force, when he’d been shiny as a new dime. But that had been before a wife had died of cancer and a son had wrapped a ’46 Ford convertible around the unremitting finality of a light pole. Hanratty, good cop, good man, good husband, good father, had died a death of sorts right along with them—the death of bottled spirits, that peculiar half-life that is lived out in tears and rage and the bleeding stomach of the alcoholic. He’d stayed on the force until “nerves” had forced him to retire, and since then he’d sold shoes, parked cars, and worked—laughably and sadly—as a bouncer at a juke joint where a male starlet had broken his jaw one night. For the past few years, Hanratty had been calling himself a private investigator.
Hanratty, lighting his third Chesterfield in less than ten minutes, said, “She killed him.”
Somebody had killed him, anyway. An especially nasty looking butcher knife had been plunged hilt deep into Robert Hutchings’ chest. The blood was completely ruining the fancy brown leather couch. There were some hotels in L.A. where they would just hose down the room and go back about their business. This wasn’t one of them. Here, when the management found out, there would be a lot of shrieking, a lot of cursing, enough cops to go around for a policeman’s ball, and plenty of press. Plenty. Robert Hutchings had been, after all, Captain Starman on the television.
I moved over closer to the woman. Her eyes told me she was still someplace else, someplace where small-time T.V. stars didn’t get butcher knives shoved into their chests. She reminded me just then, with that vacant but somehow melancholy look filling her eyes, of Jean Simmons in Olivier’s Hamlet. I don’t spend all my time reading Confidential magazine.
“She has blood on her hands and her suit,” I said.
“I know,” Hanratty said.
“And you haven’t called the cops in yet? Why not?”
“I needed time to think. Because of this—” He nodded to the blood-soaked chest of Captain Starman. “This doesn’t make me look real good, Philip.”
It wasn’t quite the proper thing to say with a dead television star no more than six feet from us and a woman in clinical shock sitting even closer by.
Still, his remark made me more than casually curious. “What kind of jobs have you been doing, Hanratty?”
I spoke softly. Ten years ago, my investigator’s license under serious and perhaps terminal review by some very unfriendly types up in Sacramento, Hanratty had written me a letter of endorsement that would have melted the heart of a hanging judge. I owed him and I’d never repaid him.
He sighed. He sounded as if Pat O’Brien all got up in a Roman collar was about to walk him down an echoing corridor to the electric chair. “I kind of watch over stars.”
“’Watch over’?”
“Take care of any problems they have.”
“Which stars?”
He had some more Chesterfield. When he took it from his mouth you could see the wet spot on the white paper where he’d lipped it. A fleck of paper remained behind on his lip. “Not big stars, Philip. Nobody in the movies, I mean. But T.V. people, you know. Like that.” He looked dog sad and dog whipped.
“And you were ‘watching over’ Hutchings?”
“Yeah. Or I was supposed to. He was supposed to be meeting her in this suite and he was afraid to be alone with her.”
Hutchings had been a strapping blond, just the sort of machine-tooled Muscle Beach product who’d wind up playing Captain Starman. No doubt he’d had as many faults as a defrocked minister, but physical cowardice wasn’t likely to have been one of them.
“He was afraid of her?” I asked.
“She tried to shoot him two days ago.”
“Why?”
“He was playing around on her and she didn’t like it.”
“Who was he playing around with?” He shrugged. “His wife.”
Wandering over to the window, I looked down on the April afternoon. They didn’t let you into this section of the city if you drove anything less than a Packard and then it had better have been waxed and buffed and polished within the past twenty-four hours. I glanced over the suite once more. In the vast marble lobby below, an area that suggested a set from Quo Vadis gone slightly to seed, there were photographs of the stars who’d stayed over the years—the young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Clark Gable, and Garbo herself. I tried to imagine them sitting in this staid, icy room laughing their silver Hollywood laughs, but somehow the stiff worked against my sense of nostalgia.
I turned back to him, putting my pipe in my mouth. “Hanratty, what the hell’s going on?”
“You know what I said I wouldn’t do?”
“Yeah.”
“I did it.”
I said a word that sounded particularly vulgar on the refined air of this room. Five times in three years I’d taken Hanratty to and from those discreet little motel-like hospitals where they strap drunks to beds and let them scream long past midnight. Five times he was supposed to have been “cured.” Five times. I suppose it was my way of trying to pay him back for helping me with my license.
He had tears in his eyes now. I nearly did, too. “It’s easy enough, Philip. She—Susan Ames here—was to be the next Mrs. Hutchings. But then the first Mrs. Hutchings—Darla—started looking good to him again. A couple days ago he tried to break it off with Susan and that’s when she tried to shoot him.”
“No police again?”
“No police. He’s a hero to the kids. He can’t afford this kind of publicity.” He shook his head. He didn’t have to say it. It was sadly plain. “Well, I sat in the other room there while Hutchings and Susan were talking and—” He pawed at his face again.
“You had a bottle?”
“Yeah.”
“How much of a bottle?”
“Pint.”
I said the dirty word again. “So you started drinking and—”
“It was only supposed to be a couple belts, Philip. Honest.”
“You passed out.”
He paused. “Yeah.”
“And while you were passed out—”
He finished it for me. “She killed him.”
Now I could see why he didn’t want any publicity about this job. You didn’t get a lot of bodyguard work when you were known for drinking yourself to sleep. Or when the person you’re supposed to be watching gets killed.
He had a croak in his throat and as soon as he started to talk, he started crying. He looked old, the kind of old that can scare you to see, the kind of old you hope you don’t live long enough to ever become. “How do I get out of this mess?”
“Walk me through it.”
“Huh?” He was starting to shake.
“Walk me through it. Show me where you were and where they were and just how you found them.”
“Oh,” he said, “right.” He pushed his shoulders back and wiped at his runny red nose with the back of his hand and then put another Chesterfield between his lips. “It was pretty simple.”
It took us ten minutes to go through the whole thing. When he’d awakened in the next room, he’d heard sobbing, and when he’d come out, he’d found Susan Ames sitting next to Hutchings. Hutchings was long dead. Susan was deep into some kind of traumatic withdrawal.
When he finished walking me through it all, I ended up where he’d ended up, right next to the Ames woman.
I sat down and took her cold hand in mine. I touched one of her cheeks gently with my fingertips, then moved her face toward mine. “I need to talk to you, Susan. I need to talk to you.”
But there was nothing in the eyes. Hers was the beauty of the department store mannequin, the ironic vacancy in the perfect erotic shell.
“Susan,” I said again. “Susan.”
But I knew better. Much better.
As I stood up, Hanratty said, “Can you keep my name out of the papers?”
Now I found myself shaking my head. “God, Hanratty, I’ll try, but you aren’t exactly talking to the mayor, you know.”
“But people know you, Philip. Important people.”
“Yeah,” I said, “like my landlord on rent day.”
He said it one more time. “I just need a little help, Philip. Just a little.”
In the hallway, I heard the squeaking of shiny shoes on thinning carpet. The sound gave me an idea. “Wait here.”
“Huh?”
“Wait here,” I said.
There was light at the far end of the hallway where dust motes tumbled in rich yellow afternoon sunlight. A Negro maid pushed a cart with the weariness of plantation days, and a dapper young couple, just finished with one of those disposable adulteries almost mandatory here, went whistling toward the elevators.
Bent over an ice machine, his gray trousers shiny, his red jacket shabby, was a bellhop whose tiny monkey cap looked silly perched on his greasy hair. I believe the kids call the hairstyle a duck’s ass. The guy was at least thirty.
“You been working on this floor most of the afternoon?” I said.
“Who wants to know?”
“I want to know.”
“So you want to know. So big deal, pal.” He raised a hand to turn up the volume on a small white plastic radio. “Elvis,” he said. “I dig him.”
A kid with the unlikely name of Elvis Presley was singing a pretty standard Tin Pan Alley song named “Heartbreak Hotel” and the world was treating it as if Christ had just sent the whole planet a letter.
I put my hand on the bellhop’s wrist and said, “I’m a Glenn Miller man, myself.” Then I put a crisp five dollar bill in the handkerchief pocket of his silly red coat.
“My hearing just got better.”
“It isn’t your hearing I’m worried about,” I said. “There’s a woman in six-oh-two.”
Obviously he’d seen. Obviously he’d liked her. “There sure is.” He grinned. “A babe.”
“You see or hear anything of her this afternoon?”
“Nope.”
“You see or hear anything in the room?”
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Why would I lie?”
I nodded to the radio. “I’m not sure I trust anybody who likes music like that.”
“Hey, pal,” he said. “It’s one way people like us can stay young.”
“If that’s young, give me my rocking chair.”
He bent over the ice machine again and scooped up cubes into a plastic bucket. After three scoops he started shaking his hands. “Fingers get cold. I should start wearing gloves.” Then he said, “Hey, gloves.”
“ ‘Gloves’ what?”
“Reminds me of what she said.”
“Who said?”
“The babe in six-oh-two.”
“I thought she didn’t say anything.”
“I guess I just kind of forgot. About her dropping her purse and all.”
“She dropped her purse?”
“Yeah, as the three of them were going into the room.”
“Who were the three?”
“Well, the dame, this guy about my age who looked like he’d probably been a cop at one time or another, and this pretty boy who plays Captain Starman or some candyass thing like that.”
“So she dropped her purse?”
“Yeah, and her gloves fell out and then this little bottle of pills. And that’s when Captain Starman goes apeshit.”
“Why would he do a thing like that?”
He shrugged. The tassels on his epaulets swayed back and forth like a skirt on a hula girl lamp. “Said she wasn’t supposed to be taking them with booze.”
“That’s all?”
“They closed the door. That’s all I heard.”
“You didn’t hear them arguing or anything?”
“Not really arguing. He just got kind’ve p.o.’d was all. Then, like I said, they closed the door.” He nodded to his container of ice. “We about done, pal?”
“Yeah, pal, we’re about done.”
Back in the room Hanratty said, “He’s starting to smell.”
“So I noticed.”
“We’re gonna have to call the cops, aren’t we, Philip?” He was shaking again.
I took him over and planted him in a chair. He looked very bad. “You got any left?”
He knew exactly what I was talking about. He measured out about an inch and said, “In there.” He nodded to the bedroom.
I went in and got it out. It was cheap stuff, about what you’d expect. I put it in his hands. He drank it quickly and without shame. The way his throat worked when he was gulping it down was almost obscene. I had to look away to Susan Ames. If she’d moved at all, you would have had to use a tape measure to prove it.
“I’ve got to call the cops,” I said.
He grabbed my hand. Lepers grab at the pope this way. “Can you keep my name out of it, Philip? Can you, Philip, huh?”
I sighed. “I’ll try. That’s all I can say.”
He shot up from the chair before I could push him back in it.
“Why the hell don’t you sit down and let me call the cops and get this thing rolling?”
“I gotta pee, Philip. I’m sorry. Ever since my rookie days, when I get nervous, I have to pee. I can’t help it.”
I sighed. “Okay, but hurry up, all right?”
“All right.”
Harcourt was far happier than he should have been about standing next to a corpse. He was a detective and he was young and he looked, from a certain angle, not unlike the actor John Derek, over whom any number of teenage girls were ready to ruin their lives.
Harcourt had good reason to be happy. He was the man in charge of investigating the death of Captain Starman. Of just such fortuitous opportunities are entire careers made.
All the people you expected to see were there, from the medical examiner’s team looking like a pair of dour pharmacists in their white jackets to eager newspaper photographers who kept peering inside the suite’s front door until one of the uniformed boys threatened to slam the door in an act of legal decapitation.
You could tell that Harcourt was a college man because he said “ain’t” only three times in his first four sentences, which is far below average for an L.A. cop.
“So you’re in this room,” he said.
“So I’m in this room,” I said.
“And you see her with blood all over her clothes and hands.”
“And I see her with blood all over her clothes and hands.”
“And Hanratty’s over there?”
I nodded.
“And then you call the police?”
I nodded once again.
He had a grin as big as a crooked politician’s. “So that, I guess, is that.” He pointed to the Ames woman, who looked, if anything, comatose by this point, and had two uniformed men lead her away.
There were flashbulbs exploding and endtables being dusted for prints and a fat uniformed cop yawning. Even murder can get tedious.
“And you’ll testify to all this?” Harcourt asked me.
“Yes.”
Harcourt, who wore a crewcut and the sort of black horn-rimmed glasses prep schools hand out on registration day, glanced at Hanratty and said, “Some goddamn bodyguard he is.”
Hanratty, insulted, started up out of his chair as if he were going to punch Harcourt. Obviously thinking better of it, he sat back down and glared at me with an I-told-you-so look deep in his eyes.
I made a show of patting my pockets. “Nuts.”
“What?” Harcourt said.
“No cigarettes.”
He reached in his suitcoat pocket and came back with a red and white package of Cavaliers. “Have one of mine.”
“Afraid I’m a sissy these days. Filters only. Think I’ll go downstairs and buy myself a pack.”
“I’m not through with you.”
“Five minutes is all I’m asking. I’ll even get a note from my Mom.”
Harcourt said, “Five minutes.”
Before the police had come, and after Hanratty had gone into the bathroom again, I’d checked through Susan Ames’s purse, finding her driver’s license and all sorts of interesting data. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know a little something about her.
More helpful than her license had been the bill from a Doctor Farnham. It was stamped OVERDUE in bold, ominous letters. The letterhead gave no indication of what sort of doctor this Farnham was. My naturally suspicious mind got very suspicious indeed.
Which is why, when I reached the lobby on my supposed mission to get a pack of filter-tips, the first thing I did was angle myself into a phone booth and call Doctor Farnham.
The secretary, who had apparently studied under Hermann Goering, was about as cooperative at first as a nun at an orgy. But then when I told her a little white lie about being with the L.A.P.D., she put some sunshine in her voice.
Doctor Farnham came on twenty-three seconds later.
We had a brief but most instructive chat about Susan Ames. In not much time at all, I was thanking the doctor and hanging up.
Then, because stars, even television stars, don’t have listed numbers, I phoned the Screen Actors Guild and asked for the name of Robert Hutchings’ agent. From that man, again floating my little white lie, I got Hutchings’ home number and called.
Knowing that what I was doing was as risky as asking Liberace about his sex life, I dialed the number and said in as Hanratty-like a rasp as I could summon, “It’s all done and the cops are here.” I spoke very quickly, hoping the speed would help.
From the woman on the other end of the phone, I heard, “Thank God.”
“I’ll be wanting the rest of the money.”
She got a little snappish. “You know our deal, Hanratty, you—”
I hung up and went back upstairs in an elevator as fancy as the inside of a rich man’s coffin.
Harcourt had now allowed the press in. He was smiling as much as those pretty boys in toothpaste commercials.
One of the reporters was talking about how crushed his six year old was going to be when he heard that Captain Starman was dead. He was right. I could still remember the day when my mother told me that Fatty Arbuckle might go to prison. Young minds shouldn’t have to deal with things like that.
“Yes,” Harcourt was pontificating, “it’s open and shut. She was jealous because he was going back to his wife and so she killed him.”
I went over to Hanratty where he sat in a chair staring out the window. I said, “I know what happened, Hanratty. Why the hell did you do it?” I was trying to whisper but the way people snapped toward us, I could tell I was doing a lousy job.
I stepped into the ring of reporters and said, “Hanratty killed him.”
For the second time in less than twenty minutes, Hanratty came up out of the chair as if he were going to thrash somebody.
I said, “He was working with Mrs. Hutchings. They knew that Susan Ames had a history of mental problems and was occasionally given to violence, and so she was the perfect patsy for a setup like this. She was under the care of a Doctor Farnham, a psychiatrist, if you want to check this out.
“Mrs. Hutchings no doubt stood to collect a lot of insurance money on her husband. So she got hold of Hanratty, whom her husband had hired as a bodyguard, and made a deal with him. If Hanratty killed her husband and made it look as if Susan Ames did it, then Hanratty got a big chunk of the insurance money. Isn’t that how it went, Hanratty?”
Before he could respond, I said, “And he brought me in as a witness. I would come up here and see that everything looked as if Susan Ames had in fact killed Robert Hutchings. Then Hanratty would have a kind of second-hand witness to back up his story. I would testify that everything looked to me as if she was the killer. I’d make a reasonably credible witness on the witness stand and Hanratty knew it. In a sense, I’d be his alibi.”
Harcourt, not a man to be upstaged, said, “And that’s exactly why I kept Hanratty right in this room.” Like any good political hack, he sensed that a bandwagon was starting to roll, and he wanted to jump on.
“But you said that Susan Ames was the killer,” a kid who had one of those squeaky Jimmy Olsen voices said to Harcourt.
“Only because I wanted to lull Hanratty here into a false sense of security.” He glanced at me anxiously. “Right, Marlowe?”
“Right,” I said. “Harcourt here knew about it all along.”
“Man,” the kid with the squeaky voice said. “This is some story.” He gave the impression he’d just graduated from journalism school last week.
I rode down the service elevator with Hanratty and his handcuffs and two beefy, silent cops.
Hanratty was pretty bad off. I tried not to look at the way he was shaking.
“I wish I knew what to say, Philip.”
“Yeah.”
“You mad?”
“We shouldn’t talk about it, Hanratty. We shouldn’t talk about it at all.”
“I never was crooked. Not on the force, I mean.”
“I know.”
He was starting to cry. “You know what my wife said to me when she was dyin’, Marlowe?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.” My voice didn’t sound much better than Hanratty’s and I knew in that moment why I’d always liked him. He was an older version of myself. In younger days, when he’d been dapper and successful, he’d been somebody I’d wanted to be. Now, he was somebody I feared I would be.
“She said, ‘You never been the man you could been.’ You know, Marlowe, she was right.”
He started crying so hard he was choking. He fell into me and I held him. The two cops looked at each other and shook their heads.
When he got hold of himself again, there in the tiny oil-smelling elevator, he said, “I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
“That’s the hell of it,” I said, just as the elevator bumped to a stop and the ornate doors began to open. “There isn’t anything to say, Hanratty. There really isn’t.”
We walked outside into the afternoon that was dying grandly—with purple and amber streaking the sky and the cricket-clack of palm fronds chattering in the breeze—and they put him in the car and he didn’t look back at me. He didn’t look back at me at all.
He did us both a hell of a favor.
More than any writer except Hemingway, Raymond Chandler taught me that language matters at least as much as story and perhaps as much as character. Proof of this is simple enough—think of the hundreds of private eye tales told and now utterly forgotten. Why do we, all these long years later, remember Chandler? For his stories? In most cases, he was not an especially gifted tale spinner. For his characters? Yes and no. A few were brilliantly rendered, but most were little more than stereotypes, and movie stereotypes at that. I always wondered—were there really so many gangsters in the world? No, we remember Chandler for the way his sentences made the familiar special and the trite brand-new. His socks with the clocks. His tarantula on the angel food cake. The overheated hothouse and the crippled tyrant with the blanket on his lap. In addition, he gave us at least one great novel, arguably the best private-eye novel ever written, The Long Goodbye. It is mystery fiction’s Gatsby, and one can’t say much more than that.
Ed Gorman