1944
SHE HAD LONG auburn hair that looked chestnut in the sun. It fell over her right eye, and her left one was green, a deep, clear emerald that had seen more than Kansas cornfields, but not much more. She had on shorts and a white halter top, but her skin was still white, still waiting for California to put its mark on her.
She stood before one of two rosebushes in the tiny bed outside her tile-roofed bungalow, a basket on her left arm, gathering her rosebuds. She looked like every kid from the Midwest whose old man drinks too much and works out on her old lady and who needs to get out of the house and who comes to Hollywood after winning a high school talent contest.
On the third finger of her right hand—the one holding the scissors—was an emerald-cut ruby not quite as large as a business card. To the left of the rock were two small diamonds and to the right were two more.
“Evelyn Merrill?”
“Yes?”
“Philip Marlowe.” I gave her my business card. “I saw your picture in the paper.”
She tossed her hair aside, letting me see both eyes. They flashed green fire. “I am already employed, thank you. I do not pose for artists. I am not looking for work as an actress. I do not wish to be a star.” She turned and started up the two steps to her postage stamp of a porch.
“I thought you were a singer.”
She turned around, furious. “How do you know that?”
I indicated the card. “Knowing is my business.”
For the first time, she looked at it. “A private investigator? What business could you possibly have with me?”
“If you’ll invite me in, maybe we could talk about it.”
“How do I know you’re on the level?”
“Forget it. Let’s talk here.”
“Oh, never mind. You look okay.”
She went in and held the door for me to follow. There was a davenport on one wall, under a couple of windows, with a cocktail table and a couple of chairs opposite. On the wall were a few family photos. The rug was straw. I sat on the davenport, the girl in one of the chairs.
I pulled a couple of newspaper clippings out of my breast pocket. One was of Evelyn Merrill at the beach, one of those cheesecake pictures taken by passing photographers who get lucky. She was standing sideways, throwing a beach ball, the rock on her finger all but throwing sparks.
The other was a photo of a much older party, also a handsome woman, wearing a hat with a small veil, silk scarf and smart suit. The caption said she had just completed a successful charity drive—or it would have, if I hadn’t discreetly removed it. The picture showed her shaking hands with the mayor. On her right hand, either the same rock or its twin was all but throwing the same sparks.
I passed the pictures over to Evelyn. “We need to have a talk about the rock.”
“The rock?”
I pointed to her ring. “The red one. On your finger.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at the pictures.”
She did and then she looked at me, confused. “It’s the same ring, isn’t it?”
“It is if yours is engraved ‘RR.’ ”
“It is. What’s this all about?”
“That’s my client in the picture. The ring was stolen from her shortly after the picture ran. When she saw your photo, she asked me to make discreet inquiries.”
“She thinks I stole it?”
“She wanted to know if you’d mind saying where you got it.”
“Of course not.” The green eyes were stricken. “My fiancé gave it to me.” She tossed the hair once again, even though it was already well out of her line of vision. It was a proud, defiant gesture. “You think my fiancé’s a taxi driver? Maybe a sailor who can’t find a ship to sail on? A pathetic clerk who deals with a cheap fence every now and then? He’s not. He’s Tony Bizzotto. Do you know him?”
“I know him.” Meaning I knew of him. Tony Bizzotto was one of the biggest developers in the business—not some gaudy little crook with nothing more to recommend him than good taste in women. Nothing like that. Tony was a little less ruthless than a pack of Cossacks.
“How’d a nice girl like you get tangled up with a heel like that?”
“Please don’t be fresh, Mr. Marlowe. I think I’ve helped you all I can.” She smiled sweetly. “Except for one small matter—shall I phone Tony and let him know you’re on your way?” I smelled fresh-cut flowers as I brushed past her.
I stopped somewhere for a sandwich and a martini and then I phoned Kenny Haste, a crime reporter on the Chronicle. After we had each showed the other how amusing we could be, he told me what I already knew from the phone book—Tony Bizzotto didn’t go into any office. “He works out of his home,” Kenny Haste said. “Probably out of his swimming pool.”
He gave me an address in the kind of neighborhood where you need a car to go next door to borrow a stamp. Too bad I wasn’t wearing my powder blue suit.
The driveway was slightly shorter than the Oregon Trail and I was on it when a black Packard demanded the right of way so forcefully I lightly smacked a tree trunk trying to comply. But I continued bravely on.
If Bizzotto didn’t live in the Taj Mahal, he didn’t occupy a railroad shack either. Maybe we could just say Scheherazade could have made the place up. I got out of my car, straightened my tie, walked to the door, fought off the urge to say “open sesame,” and rang the bell instead.
A young Filipino answered the door. He had a flat face, beetle brows, and a sullen expression. He also looked smart, like maybe Bizzotto was pretty careful about whom he hired and his employees pretty careful about whom they let in the house.
“Marlowe,” I said, handing him a card. “Mr. Bizzotto’s expecting me.
“Mr. Bizzotto’s not home.”
“Damn! He warned me not to be late. Was that him leaving in the Packard?”
For a second, uncertainty flickered under the beetle brows. The kid was smart, but he might as well have said, “What Packard?”
“Mr. Bizzotto’s not home,” he repeated.
“Thanks for your trouble,” I said, and headed back toward my car. A pair of smart, sullen brown eyes drilled a hole in my back and didn’t stop watching until I’d turned around and started chugging back down the Oregon Trail. At the first curve, I pulled off the road, parked, and meandered back to the sultan’s palace.
I slipped around the side, maybe taking to heart Kenny Haste’s remark about the pool, maybe just looking for an open door or for a servant who could use a bit of the folding. I wasn’t sure yet. I was sure Evelyn Merrill was in over her head, though.
Bizzotto was sitting by the pool, wearing swimming trunks. He was in his midfifties, maybe older, with hair that was gray like a frigate’s gray, and plenty of it, on both his head and chest. He had a dark, even tan, but he was going a little bit to seed around the middle. While you wouldn’t mistake his nose for a banana, it helped that it wasn’t yellow. His mouth was very wide and very nasty. His neck was a little too thick. His eyes would have been surprised if they hadn’t been glassy and empty. Someone had shot him in the chest, by the looks of things someone sitting in the chair next to his.
“I thought I told you to buzz off.” The houseman had slipped out a back door I hadn’t heard him open.
“Did you hear a shot a while ago?” I asked.
The Filipino came closer, took in the hole in the boss’s torso, and puked in a bed of begonias. I figured that made him innocent, but Hollywood’s full of actors. Finally he said, “I didn’t hear anything. He was with a woman. I stayed in a different wing of the house.”
“Why did you come out here now?”
“He had a phone call.”
“Did you see the woman he was with?”
He pulled aside the chair that had been recently occupied by a murderer and sat down gingerly. “Only from a distance. She drove up, swished out of the car, and went around back like she owned the place. He told me he was expecting a lady. I guess he phoned her and said to meet him in back.”
“You wouldn’t make a bad dick yourself.”
“Really?” The eyes that had recently changed from sullen to scared brightened up.
“Yeah. You’re smart and you’re observant. But stay out of the racket, kid. There’s no money in it.”
“Oh.” He looked down at the concrete patio. I slipped a five-spot into the pocket of his white jacket.
“There’s a little in talking to me, though. What did she look like?”
When he looked up, his face was sullen again. He looked as if he were trying to be tough, practicing for a new career as a shamus. “She was blonde and she was wearing a black hat and a blue print dress with a short jacket that was kind of mustard colored. That’s all I could see. I only got a glimpse of the back of her.”
I showed him the newspaper clipping of Evelyn Merrill wearing the rock. “Do you know anything about this?”
“Sure, that’s Miss Merrill. Swell, isn’t she?”
“What do you know about the ring?”
He shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I never thought about it.” He looked at Bizzotto, mentally hooking two up with another two. “The boss gave it to her, huh?”
If my client could have seen Tony Bizzotto’s Turkish delight of a mansion, she’d probably have had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. She lived in a two-story Tudor house in Pasadena, furnished mostly in faded chintz. The garden ran to English lilac, the living room to family photos on top of the Steinway. Her name was Myra Heatley and she lived with her daughter, Nancy Daniels, who answered my knock.
Nancy showed me into the living room, left, and returned with her mother. Myra had eyes like sapphires, hair that had settled down to the gracious peachy color of cantaloupe flesh, and a little way about her that was as subtle as a California sunset. The peach hair, which had probably once been red as poppies, was parted on the left side and arranged in elegant waves. She wore a royal blue suit that did its best to look demure.
Nancy wore brown. She had brown hair, cut in a pageboy, straight and sober, while her mother’s curled merrily. She had her mother’s fine skin and blue eyes, but they were a darker blue and without the sapphire sparkle. She was thinner than her mother, not so lush, and she carried her shoulders hunched slightly forward. Something about her was wary and I wondered if it was Myra she was wary of.
Myra came close and shook hands. Her perfume was jasmine, I thought—something, at any rate, that could have wafted in the window on a spring day. “Mr. Marlowe,” she said. “A report so soon?”
“Yeah,” I said, and sat on the flowered davenport. She and Nancy sat as well, in overstuffed chairs facing me. “A report so soon. Evelyn Merrill received the ring as a gift from a man named Tony Bizzotto.”
Myra drew in her breath and lost her color all at once. Nancy went rigid. After a moment, Myra spoke to Nancy. “Darling, could you excuse us?”
Nancy nodded, got up, and walked out with the gait of an old woman, one foot in front of the other, as if she were in danger of falling. I thought she could have used a shot of brandy, but I wasn’t her mother.
When she was gone, I said, “You owe me some answers.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Bizzotto’s dead.”
“Dead!” Her color was coming back. She crossed to a sideboard and poured us both a drink.
“Murdered,” I said. “That’s why you need to tell me what’s going on.”
She swallowed her drink whole. “I see. If I don’t you’ll tell the police about the ring.”
“Any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“You be the judge, Mr. Marlowe. I’ll tell you my story and let you decide. You see, Tony Bizzotto bought the ring for me—twenty-five years ago.”
“So the bill of sale you showed me was false.”
“On the contrary. It was quite genuine. Tony and I were—well—quite different people then. He had names for me, because of my hair. Pinkie was one and Red Rock was another; sometimes Pink Lady or Reddy Kilowatt or even Ruby. Usually Red Rock. I tell you this for a reason.
“One night a business acquaintance of his was shot to death. The next day he and I had lunch in a certain very nice neighborhood and we took a walk afterwards. We saw the ring in a shop window and I turned to him and said, ‘I was with you last night.’ Just like that. Out of the clear blue. I’ve often wondered since how I had the nerve to do it.
“He said, ‘Come on,’ and took me by the wrist, almost dragging me into the shop. He said to the proprietor, ‘I’d like the red rock in the window, please,’ and he had it engraved with the letters I told you about and he had the bill of sale made out to me. It was the most perfect communication I have ever had with a living soul.”
“Don’t tell me. You dumped him the day after that.”
She lit a cigarette and gave me a smile that could have melted the snow pack at Mammoth. “Of course not. I kept my part of the bargain. I waited until he was clear of the murder investigation. And then I changed my name and moved—moved to a better neighborhood and in with a better crowd. I hocked the red rock to buy clothes. I wore the clothes to new places that I knew about and homes of new friends I made, and I met men. Invariably, the men gave me tiny tokens of their affection. I would cash in enough of the gifts to get the ring back, and when I had to I’d hock it again.”
She blew smoke out her nostrils. “Eventually, I met a very nice man and married him. And when that ended I met another and married him. My second husband died a year ago.” She paused. “Do you blame him?” she said finally, giving me as level a gaze as an accountant might.
“I think I get the point of the nickname.”
“I’ll ignore that and say only that I had no money, no education, and to my mind, no choice. And I had to make a home for my daughter.”
“Your daughter! Nancy was born . . . ”
“Out of wedlock. She was six when we moved to Los Angeles. Her father was killed in a mining accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. If he hadn’t been, our lives would have been different. But he was, and I got mixed up with Tony Bizzotto. For a long time afterward I was afraid he’d find me. I even dyed my hair to hide from him. But after so many years it hardly seemed to matter. I thought he’d have found me if he’d wanted to. So I stopped being cautious. And then that picture ran in the paper. And the ring disappeared. When I saw the other picture, I thought I knew what had happened, but I had to be sure.” She gave me the level gaze again, a look like the sky at night. “I didn’t kill him. Do you believe me?”
I shrugged. “I’ll think it over and let you know.”
It was nearly dark when I got back to Hollywood, but I could see her through the venetian blind slats—Evelyn Merrill sitting on her davenport, knees drawn up under her chin, staring at a spot on her green wall. It was a dull landlord green, but with her hair and eyes it looked good. She was wearing a satin hostess gown, blue-gray like the dusk outside.
She wasn’t wearing makeup, but her eyes weren’t red either. If she’d been crying, it didn’t show. “I found him,” I said.
“Wayne told me. The houseman. Would you like a drink?”
Without waiting for an answer, she poured me a stiff one, moving mechanically, like a person in deep shock.
“I’m sorry about Bizzotto,” I said.
A sound came out of her, the kind of sound you might expect from an animal whose front paw has just stepped into a trap. The tears came too, and I held her while she cried it all out. Then I got her a drink and made her swallow some of it.
“My client says he gave her the rock twenty-five years ago,” I said. I told her the story, leaving out nothing that would have protected Bizzotto’s privacy, wanting her to know, for the record, the kind of man he was. When I got to the part about the nickname, she winced. “He called me that,” she whispered. “Red Rock.” She swallowed. “He told me there was another one. That he had been in love with another woman once—that I reminded him of her. Mary Daniels.”
“Myra.”
“Myra! That was her in the picture! Myra Heatley. Oh, God, what have I done?” The tears started again. I held her some more, and after a while she could talk again.
“I looked her up. I pile my papers up on the back porch and then throw the whole pile away at once. That picture you showed me was only a couple of weeks old. So I just looked through till I found it. I knew there was something funny going on as soon as you showed it to me. Because of the picture of me. It wasn’t any accident—a passing photographer stopping for a cheesecake shot. Tony called up a newspaper friend and arranged it. He knew everybody, and everybody owed him. It wasn’t any effort for him.” She gave me a faint rueful smile.
“He said it would help my career. But when you showed me the other picture, I knew that wasn’t it. Only I didn’t know what was going on—and I had to know. He’d asked me to marry him, you see.” She let me have the smile again, a smile that said that was an idea she could hardly believe she’d ever entertained.
“So I called Myra Heatley. I told her you’d been here and I asked her if she knew Tony Bizzotto. And she said no, she’d never heard of him. But if she’s Mary Daniels, she and Tony had a daughter together.”
I was finding it hard to keep up. “They were married?”
She shrugged. “He never said. He just talked about his long-lost daughter and how much he missed her.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I fell for it, too. I felt really sorry for him and I wanted to give him something warm and soft to replace her. To replace both of them. Tell me—what’s she like?”
“Myra? She was probably a lot like you once. She had some bad breaks and she did the best she could. You’ll do better.”
I was starting to feel like a yo-yo that plopped down in Pasadena and fetched up in Hollywood, but I couldn’t conduct my next interview on the telephone. And I couldn’t conduct it without a search of my client’s garage.
I did the search before I rang the bell. There was a black Packard parked where I expected it. Nancy answered the door. “I’ll get my mother.”
“Don’t bother. I need to talk to you.” She looked as if I’d struck her. But she led me into the living room and sat me down. She didn’t offer me a drink.
“Bizzotto contacted you after he saw your mother’s picture, didn’t he?”
She nodded.
“And you saw him.”
Again she nodded, barely perceptibly, as if she were frozen and couldn’t thaw enough to move.
“May I ask why?”
She shook her head for no, and her whole body shook as well—the thaw had been sudden and violent.
“Easy,” I said, and put out a hand to steady her. She jerked away as violently as she had shook. The way she moved told a story all its own.
“He wasn’t your father, was he?”
“No!”
“You’ve never told anyone about him, have you?” She shook again. “But you can tell me. I won’t tell your mother.”
“He said he’d tell my mother,” she cried. “That’s why I saw him.”
Myra Heatley strode into the room, looking as nearly panicked as I supposed she ever got. She was very white. “Tell me what?”
“You know what,” I said. “That’s why you dumped Bizzotto and changed your name. You knew what he was doing to her—maybe you even caught him; or maybe she told you; or maybe you just knew. You’ve spent your whole life trying to make her forget, and she’d rather see the scum again than take a chance you’d find out.”
Nancy was crying and shaking and keening. I wondered if she would have to be hospitalized. But her mother took her head in her arms and held it against her breast, as if Nancy were a small child, and rocked her, and then gave her some kind of pill and got her to bed.
When she came back, she was calm. “He did it all out of revenge, didn’t he? He set up the picture of Evelyn Merrill, but that wasn’t enough.” She poured herself a drink and knocked it back. “He knew the one thing that would really get to me. Hurting my baby.” Despite the drink, her face contorted and she covered it with her hand for a moment. “Just like he did before.”
She looked at me again, resolve all over her face, her square jaw set as if there were no turning back and no tomorrow. “And so when Evelyn Merrill called and told me he’d given her the ring, I knew he’d stolen it from me, and he knew where I was. But there hadn’t been a burglary. That meant Nancy must have given it to him. I knew that he’d seen her.” She shrugged, as if reporting that she’d had to let her maid go. “So I drove over and killed him.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
For a moment she looked utterly bewildered, but she pulled herself together without missing more than a beat. “I bought a cheap dime store wig so I wouldn’t be recognized. I’ll show it to you.” She disappeared and came back with a blonde hairpiece.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And what did you stab him with?”
She looked at me hard, like a poker player trying to read the opposition, and then she said, “I shot him.”
“Can I see the gun?”
“Of course not. I threw it over a cliff—into the ocean.”
“You didn’t kill Bizzotto. You didn’t know where he lived, and if you could have found out, you wouldn’t have had enough time to get there before I did—or maybe you would have, just barely. But you couldn’t have known I stopped for a sandwich. You had every reason to think I’d go straight from Evelyn Merrill’s to Bizzotto’s. If you’d wanted to kill Bizzotto, you’d have picked a more convenient time.”
“I didn’t even think about that. I was in a fury.”
“You’re good. You could probably convince the D.A. And he probably wouldn’t look any further once he had your confession. But what good would it do? What would happen to Nancy with her mother in prison?”
She looked at me as if I’d hit her. She hadn’t even thought about it, meaning that the whole performance had been improvised within the last ten minutes. She really was good.
“Look,” I said. “Do what you said you did. Find the gun and get rid of it. Burn the wig and the clothes she wore. And do it fast. Evelyn Merrill might mention you to the cops.”
“You’re not going to them?”
“Why should I? By the time I got there, you’d have destroyed the evidence.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief.
“By the way, there’s something you should know. Evelyn Merrill’s a nice kid. She’d probably remind you of yourself at her age.”
She smiled. “I’d like her to have the ring.”
There was something about the red rock. It had a funny quality. It could inspire perfect communication between two people.
I can’t imagine that any American writer hasn’t been influenced by Chandler, at least indirectly, as he or she will certainly have been influenced by writers whom Chandler influenced. Surely every American writer of mysteries must have been, no matter how funny, fluffy, or cozy, no matter how hard-boiled, street-wise, or tough their own books may be. Quite simply, Chandler set the standard and everything else is a deviation therefrom.
In my work, I’ve wanted to deviate a lot. I’ve wanted, for instance, to write about women as I know them—widely varied, sometimes murderous, often heroic, almost always hardworking—as opposed to the tarts, gold diggers, spoiled rich girls, and ruthless criminals who comprised Marlowe’s female acquaintanceship. I’ve wanted my men to be more lifesized in their own eyes than larger-than-life superhero Marlowe, with never a thought for himself.
Surely that is as it should be. A hero like Marlowe would be a derivative hero (and has been, often). An attempt to recreate Chandler’s vision would be pathetic and tatty. We must all write the way we write.
Chandler’s influence, for me, has been in his use of language—or rather, in the inspiration afforded by it. I don’t see how it is possible to read his books without being dazzled by the author’s economy, his originality, his brilliance—all of that—but most of all by his precision. Who among us doesn’t hear his cadences, his turns of phrase, when we sit down to work? We may never write that well—or even write similarly—but nonetheless we have internalized his work in a way that we couldn’t escape even if we wanted to. We have used it as a jumping-off place for our own work and those among us who are masochists may also use it as the standard of excellence by which they judge themselves. Those with a better-developed sense of self-preservation wouldn’t dare.
Julie Smith