1939
HE WAS ABOUT six feet two, no wider than a beer truck, maybe forty, forty-five years old, with a gray felt hat crushed down around his ears, a checked sportcoat holding him in like a whalebone corset, and a cigar the size of a rolling pin wedged between the first two fingers of his right hand. His face, what I could see of it under the hat brim, was set in a scowl, somewhere between the casual contempt a really big man has for ordinary mortals and the kind of slit-eyed mean that’s truly dangerous, the kind that doesn’t give a damn about cops or damages or little toylike things such as the electric chair. I might have been wrong, but I thought he looked like trouble.
The huge man stared at the dingy office, then squinted with his whole face, like the view hurt his eyes.
“What’s a guy like you charge?” he growled in a solidly contemptuous voice.
“Why’s a guy like you want to know?”
“I got a job for you. Deliver a package. Take a few hours.”
“I don’t work by the hour. And I don’t run a delivery service.”
“Cute,” he said softly. “That’s very cute.”
He put the cigar down on the corner of the desk and picked up my penset, pretending to study it for a moment like it was a ship in a bottle. With a tight-lipped grin, he held the thing out in front of his face and casually broke it in two. Still smiling, he dropped the pieces back on the desk.
“I’m cute, too,” he said.
“I can tell that about you.”
The man picked up the cigar and flicked ashes on the carpet, which was all it was good for anyway. And I’d been meaning to break the penset since January. Still there was something about him I didn’t like.
“You’re gonna do this job for me,” he said, shoving the cigar in his kisser.
“I am?”
He nodded. “You’re gonna go in a house and give a guy an envelope. Then you’re gonna forget you saw me.”
“Now how could I ever do that?”
He grinned again, as if that was so damn cute he thought he might have to break the customer’s chair to keep from laughing. Reaching across the desk, he clamped a monstrous hand on my shoulder, like it was a game of tag and I’d just been chosen “it.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
I didn’t see any point in arguing.
Pulling me around the side of the desk, he pushed me toward the pebbled-glass door. With his free hand, he grabbed my hat from the hatrack and stuffed it on my head.
“I’d like to call Mom,” I said to him, over my shoulder. “She’ll worry.”
The guy opened the door and shoved me into the hall.
“Cute,” he said, under his breath.
There was a gray Packard parked at a meter in front of the Cahuenga Building, where I had my doghouse. It wasn’t brand new, like a top-rank hood’s would have been, or custom built and frosted in chrome, like a movieland flesh peddler’s, but it was in nice enough shape to make me wonder about the guy behind me, the guy with the iron fist in my back. The car didn’t go with the rolling pin cigar and the crushed hat and the tout’s jacket. This guy should have had a Plymouth with a hole in the floorboard and an odometer that had flipped over the day the banks closed.
He laid me on the front seat like boxed china and got in on the driver’s side. The car sank beneath his weight like a cheap mattress. Without a word he took off down Hollywood Boulevard.
There was just enough of an April breeze that morning to carry the scent of oranges over from the big groves in the Valley. It mixed peculiarly with the burning-rubber stench of the man’s corona, like a crate of fruit that had been crushed by a truck.
The big fellow ran a light and gunned the Packard south on Western.
“Where are we headed?” I asked, just out of curiosity.
“I told you,” he said, chewing over his cigar. “You’re going to meet a guy and give him a package.”
“What’s in the package?”
He smiled his tight-lipped smile. “It’s okay, shamus. It’s just scratch.”
“Who are we paying off?”
“A rat named Loma.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Tony Loma, the fight promoter?”
The big man looked unpleasantly surprised.
“You know him?” he said icily.
“I know about him. Enough so that I wouldn’t want to owe him money.”
The dangerous look on the big man’s face went away. “Well, you don’t always get what you want. Didn’t your momma teach you that, peeper?”
We turned left on Wilshire, passing the ornate facade of the Wiltern theater. It hadn’t opened yet for the matinee double feature, but the marquee was lit like a vanity mirror. A kid on a ladder was making anagrams with the billing.
“Secrets of French Police,” I read off the marquee. “How does that sound to you?”
The big man grunted. “I was in it.”
“You’re an actor?”
The big man actually laughed, although the laughter had to make its way around the cigar, so it came out sounding like the barking of a dog with a bone in its mouth. “Hell no, I ain’t no actor. I was between bouts, and it was a couple days’ stunt work for me and Elmo.”
“You’re a fighter, then?”
He didn’t answer right away. “I wrestle, down at the Olympic there.”
“Could be I’ve heard of you?”
The big man took the cigar out of his mouth and studied the ragged end. “Yeah, maybe.” He picked a strand of loose tobacco off his lower lip. “Few years back I had a shot at Londes and the heavyweight title.”
I waited and when he didn’t say it, I asked, “What was the name?”
“My ring moniker was Crusher.”
“Just Crusher? Nothing else?”
“The,” he said without cracking a smile.
I smiled for him. “The Crusher, huh? How did the match with Londes work out?”
“Got my shoulder broke a week before the fight, in a prelim against Buddy Brewster.” He screwed the cigar back in his mouth and puffed on it. “Gained a little weight. Got some gray in my hair. Now it’s strictly tag team with Elmo.”
I had trouble imagining the guy that could break this one’s shoulder, gray hair or no. But I’d have bet even money that old Buddy Brewster wouldn’t have fit in the front seat between us, maybe not even in the back by himself. It put me in mind of what a small fry like me was doing there. I couldn’t see The Crusher hiring another man to pay a debt, even if it was owed to a thug like Tony Loma.
So I asked him, “Why’d you pick me to run this errand?”
Once again, the big man took his time about replying, as if each word was a coin coming out of his own pocket. “Guy I know tells me you’re pretty straight. Says you can keep your mouth shut.”
The world must have looked pretty crooked to him, from the way he said it. But that didn’t answer the question.
“I mean, why don’t you just pay Loma yourself?” I said.
The Crusher got that battened-down look on his face again, like his eyelids were a couple of wide-brimmed hats. “He don’t like me, and I don’t like him. Next time we meet . . . there’s gonna be trouble.”
“Guys like Loma don’t travel alone.”
“There’s gonna be trouble,” The Crusher repeated.
By then we were on Grand, heading south through Bunker Hill toward Exposition Park. It suddenly dawned on me where we were going, the Olympic Arena on South Grand. Pretty soon, I could see it, a huge block of concrete rising out of the pavement, like a mirage on the freeway.
The Crusher parked the Packard just outside the entrance on the south side of the building. On a good night, with a good card, the doorway would have been crowded with fans and reporters and a few well-dressed women with blood in their eyes, looking for one more bout to cap the evening. But at that hour of the morning there was nobody around, except for a couple of Spanish kids shadowboxing their way down the sidewalk.
“I gotta check something,” The Crusher said, as he put on the safety brake.
He got out and I got out with him. I followed him through the entryway into the darkness of the arena.
The stands were built up on rafters, all the way to the ceiling, with spaced runways leading to the ring. An ingot of lead gray light fell onto the roped square of canvas in the center, illuminating it faintly, like an examination table in a morgue. Somewhere in the gloom someone was working a bag. You could hear the echo of his fists, pummeling the leather.
We circled the stands to a stairway, then went down a flight to the dressing rooms. The hallway was plastered with posters advertising main events from years gone by. I spotted The Crusher’s name on one of them, way down in the undercard. Midway along the hall, the big man stopped at a dressing room door and rapped on the jamb—one short, two long.
“Yeah?” someone inside said.
Whoever the voice belonged to, he wasn’t the guy The Crusher was expecting.
“Elmo?” he barked.
“He ain’t in.”
The big man’s face turned red as rye whiskey. Taking one quick step back, he lowered his shoulder and plowed directly into the dressing room door with a force that had to be seen to be appreciated. Even for a guy his size, it was impressive. The door splintered and groaned, coming right off its hinges, like it had been hit by a Chevy.
The momentum of the big man’s blow carried him halfway into the dressing room. He lost his footing on the concrete floor and ended up on his knees in front of a short, stocky, balding guy with a wrinkled, deeply tanned face. I’d seen that face before, in the sports page and, when I was with the D.A., pasted in the mug books. Tony Loma.
There were two other guys in the room with him, big, hulking torpedos in cheap black suits that looked like they’d been bought that morning at a mortuary fire sale.
Loma took a look at The Crusher, kneeling on the floor, and started to laugh. The two torpedos started laughing too, a second later. They could afford to laugh. All three of them were holding .38’s.
From his knees, The Crusher looked up at Loma. I could see that he didn’t care about the guns, and so could the bald man. He stopped laughing, cocked the pistol, and pressed the barrel against The Crusher’s forehead.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said to the big man.
The Crusher’s chest heaved. It took every bit of self-restraint he had to keep from attacking the guy. You could see him fighting it out with himself. The sane part eventually won, but it was a split decision. Taking a couple more deep breaths, he passed a hand through his iron-gray hair. He’d lost the hat on the way in. “Where’s Elmo?” he said in a voice that was barely under control.
“That’s what we were wondering. You don’t have no ideas, do you, Crush?”
The Crusher glared at him.
Loma pulled the gun away from The Crusher’s forehead and took a step back. “You never should have tied up with that punk. He’s bad news.”
The Crusher gave Loma his battened-down look. “If you done him, Tony, you’re going to pay.”
The bald guy chuckled. “You got guts, cracking wise with three .38’s pointed at your head. I always said that about you, Crush. More guts than brains.”
“You said a lot of things, Tony.”
The bald guy flushed a little. “You got paid. Wha’d you got to complain about? It was business.”
“Business,” The Crusher said.
Loma glanced through the broken door at me. “Who’s your pal?”
“Nobody,” The Crusher said, slowly getting back to his feet.
“Tell nobody to take his hands out of his pockets and come in here.” Loma nodded at one of the torpedos, and the hood trained his pistol on me.
I raised my hands and stepped through the door.
Loma looked back at The Crusher. “Elmo’s got till two this afternoon, Crush, to come up with the scratch. His pals won’t wait longer than that.”
“Your pals,” the big man said bitterly.
“Elmo’s a big boy. He shouldn’t mixed in this thing.”
“He shouldn’t mixed with you.”
“You tell him to get the five gees, or he takes a dip in the Pacific.”
The big man reached down and picked up his hat, dusting it off against his pants leg before putting it back on his head. “You’ll get the dough,” he said.
Loma pocketed his pistol and walked toward the door. The two torpedos followed behind him at a distance, as if they were carrying his train.
“Elmo knows the place,” Loma said, from the doorway. “You tell him to be there. Ain’t no good hiding out. We’ll find him. You know we will.”
The three thugs left. The big man stared after them with a look that would have given a normal man a nosebleed. After a while, he dropped his head.
“Do you know where Elmo is?” I asked him.
“I got an idea.”
“Does he have the five gees?”
The big man laughed bitterly. “He ain’t got a pot to piss in. Me, I can get the scratch.” He shook his head. “It’s all I got. Six years’ work. And I gotta hand it over to that monkey Loma.”
“How did your buddy Elmo get in dutch with these boys?”
He dropped his chin even lower, as if the thing were too embarrassing to look at head on. “When we was out on the movie ranch, Elmo fell in with some of that Hollywood trash, Loma’s crowd. He’s just a kid, nineteen. He don’t know which side the bread is buttered on, but he thinks he knows it all. Some chippy winks at him, and he’s falling all over himself to do her favors. She talks him into running down to TJ to pick up a package for Loma’s pals. And the damn fool does it. On the way back up to Malibu, the package gets heisted.”
“By who?”
“Who knows. Maybe some of Loma’s torpedos. I wouldn’t put it past the double-crossing rat.”
“So Elmo’s got to pay back for the goods.”
“He ain’t saved a dime,” The Crusher said. “He hasn’t learned that the money ain’t gonna always be there, that you ain’t gonna be nineteen forever.”
“This kid a relative of yours?”
The big man raised his head and stared at me balefully. “A friend.”
“A good enough friend to spend your bankroll on?”
The Crusher grunted. “How good does a friend have to be?”
We stopped at the big man’s hotel before meeting with Loma’s Hollywood pals. The Crusher didn’t say why we were stopping, but I figured it was because the money was there, or nearby.
It was a cheap place called the Metropole, on Seventh and Spring. The lobby was a deadbeat’s delight, but the rented room was surprisingly clean, or maybe it was just The Crusher who was clean. His place had the spare, neat, squared-away look of a soldier’s billet. It was a look I recognized, the look of longtime bachelorhood. It smelled like a bachelor’s flat too, of shaving soap and whiskey and the fat cigars the big man smoked.
While The Crusher rummaged through a linen closet in the bathroom, I took a look at a photograph sitting on the nightstand. It was a picture of The Crusher taken in a much better year, when his face hadn’t looked like a crushed fedora and his hair hadn’t turned to iron. There was a girl in the picture, pretty and pale and a little in awe of the big man beside her. Whoever she was, he still thought enough of her to keep her picture by his bed.
The only other decoration in the room was a poster on the door, featuring a picture of The Crusher and a red-haired kid billed as Young Wolf. I figured Young Wolf was Elmo. He certainly didn’t look wolfish on the poster. He looked musclebound and callow and stupid, like a streetcorner bully. But I was probably seeing him with a jaded eye, knowing what a spot he’d left his partner in.
As I stood there staring at Elmo, The Crusher came back in the room carrying a zippered canvas gym bag. He had an odd look on his face.
“Somebody’s been in here,” he said. “And I think I know who.”
“Loma?”
The big man nodded. “He probably stopped here, looking for Elmo, before he went down to the Olympic.”
“Where is Elmo?”
“He and that chippy were shacked up in some cheap motel in Long Beach. The Enchanted Cottages. He probably lammed it back over there, to dodge Tony and the boys.”
“I hope Elmo appreciates what you’re doing for him.”
“I told you. He’s a friend.” The Crusher set the canvas bag down on the bed and glanced at the photograph on the nightstand. “He’s the kid of a dame I used to know.” He looked back at the bag. “I owe her something.”
He unzipped the bag and took out a couple of undershirts, some trunks, several pairs of rolled-up white socks, and a pair of shoes. When the thing was empty, he drew a penknife from his pocket and pried out the plywood bottom of the gym bag. Putting the board on the bed, he reached inside and his face turned white.
“Jesus,” he said softly.
He lifted up the bag and looked directly into it. Then he turned it upside down. A little tag of paper floated out. The Crusher tossed the bag across the room, picked up the tag of paper, and stared at it.
“He done me again,” he said incredulously and sat down hard on the bed. “The bastard done me again.”
“Who?”
“Loma,” he said and I could hear the rage rising in his throat. “He pays off that gorilla, Brewster, to bust up my shoulder, so’s he can get his own boy a title shot. And now he takes my bankroll. Every penny I got!”
He crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it on the floor. “I’m gonna kill him.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “It’s a pretty long shot that a guy like Loma, a stranger, could come in here and find that dough, without tearing the place up a little. Use your head. This room hasn’t been searched. Somebody knew where to look.”
“Read the damn note!” The Crusher said, jumping to his feet and pushing me out of his way. He went straight for the door, tearing it open as if he were tearing Loma’s heart out.
I picked the crumpled note up and read it quickly. It was printed in a crude hand and said, “Thanks for the dough, T.L.” I stuck it in my pocket and started after The Crusher.
I managed to catch up to him on the street.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“You know where,” he snarled.
“At least let me tag along.”
“This is the main event. No tags, this time.”
“How are you going to find Loma?”
“I know where he’s at. With the Hollywood bunch up in Malibu.”
“Crusher, Loma’s boys will kill you.”
“So what?” he said and meant it.
When we reached the car, the big man pulled a fat cigar from his coat, bit off the end, and screwed it into his mouth. “Shamus,” he said, “quit worrying about it. I’ve been getting mad most of my life, and it’s always cost me something. It’s cost me dough, it’s cost me friends, it’s cost me a good woman, and this time maybe it’s gonna cost the decision. But at least this time I’m getting mad at the right guy. When it comes down to it, it’s the only way this round could end.” He struck a match on his heel and lit the corona. “So long, shamus.”
He got in the car and drove off.
The first thing I did was phone Bernie Ohls from a pay phone in the Olympic lobby.
“There’s a big guy in a gray 1937 Packard, California license number 53437. Pick him up.”
“Why, Phil?” Bernie said.
“Because he’s about to kill Tony Loma and get himself killed in the process.
“Too bad,” Bernie said. “Loma could use killing. I’ll put out an A.P.B. What’s the guy’s name?”
“He calls himself The Crusher. He’s a pro wrestler. I don’t know what his real name is. But you can’t miss him. He’s as big as a house. You better hurry on this, Bernie. The guy’s dead serious.”
“We’ll try, Phil.”
“Notify the C.H.P., too. And see if you can dig up a Malibu address for Loma. That’s where the big guy is headed.”
“Will you be in the office?”
“No, I’ll check back with you. I’ve got to take a trip to Long Beach.”
I caught a fast cab back to the office and picked up my car. It took me about a half an hour to make it down to Long Beach and another ten minutes to find The Enchanted Cottages motel. They didn’t look enchanted to me. Haunted, maybe. I slipped the clerk in the office a fin to point me toward the right shack, then drove down the driveway and parked in front of it. Even though the clerk had claimed that the couple in 22 hadn’t checked out, there was no other car around, and that worried me a little.
The cabin was made out of redwood logs with gingerbread appliqués over the door and window. The curtain in the window had been drawn. I pulled the .38 out of the gun holder beneath the dashboard and got out into the sun. You couldn’t smell the oranges in Long Beach. Just diesel oil and mildew and the backwater smack of the pier.
I didn’t have time for niceties, so I walked over to the door and kicked it open. I wasn’t The Crusher, so it took me a couple of boots. When the lock finally sprang, I stepped in holding the gun in front of me.
A disheveled looking redheaded kid, the same kid I’d seen in the poster on The Crusher’s door, was standing by the bed, a sheet wrapped around his torso. He looked sleepy and disoriented, as if my foot had been his alarm clock. He also looked mad. I could see a blush spreading up his neck into his freckled face.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
“Marlowe,” I said. “I’m a detective working for a friend of yours. A big guy named The Crusher.”
“Jack wouldn’t send a guy like you,” the kid said, getting angrier.
“I guess that’s what you were counting on, wasn’t it, Elmo?”
“What do you mean?” Elmo said nastily.
“That Jack wouldn’t tumble to your game. You always treat your friends like that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sit,” I said, pointing to the bed with the gun.
He sat.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked.
“Irene? She went out to eat, while I was asleep. She left a note saying she’d bring me back some chow.”
“Want to bet?”
“Bet?” the kid said stupidly.
“Let’s see the note.”
He picked up a slip of paper from the nightstand and held it out toward me. I walked over to the bed. As soon as I got within arm’s reach, Elmo went for my legs.
He was quick, but he was wearing a sheet. Besides, I was expecting it. I sidestepped him and smacked the gun barrel across his temple. Elmo groaned and grabbed his head.
“Jack was right about you, buster,” I said, reaching down to pick up the note. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”
Elmo blubbered like a baby.
I took a look at the note. It was written in a crude hand and said, “Gone to get eats. Back soon. I.” I wasn’t a handwriting expert, but I didn’t have to be one to recognize the scrawl. It was the same hand that had scribbled the note in The Crusher’s room.
I tapped the kid with the gun again, just hard enough to get his attention. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes.
“Whose idea was it to steal Jack’s bankroll?”
The kid looked genuinely surprised. “Jack’s bankroll?”
“The five gees he kept in his gym bag.”
“Nobody knows about that,” the kid said. “Nobody but me and Jack.”
“You didn’t mention it to Irene, maybe? Just in passing, in the night?”
The kid swallowed hard. “Oh, God,” he said.
“You’re a real sap, Elmo, you know that?” I stared at the boy disgustedly. “Because of your double-cross a friend of yours is in real trouble.”
The kid shook his head helplessly. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I was gonna get the money back to Jack, after he paid Tony off.”
“And where were you going to get five gees, Elmo?”
His head sank to his chest. “The stuff. Irene was gonna sell the stuff.”
“The stuff you brought back from TJ. The stuff you told Jack was heisted.”
The kid put both hands to his head. “She said it was worth ten, maybe twenty thousand. She has friends who . . . they’d buy it from us.”
“Well, now she has the drugs and Jack’s five thousand. What do you think she’s going to bring you back from the restaurant, Elmo?”
“Bitch,” he said between his teeth.
“Get dressed, Elmo,” I said. “Get dressed quick, while there’s still a chance to save Jack’s life.”
“His life?” Elmo said with horror.
“Your girlfriend made it look like Tony Loma took his money. Jack’s gone after him.”
Elmo leaped up and started dressing.
We made the trip up the coast highway as fast as the car could run.
Elmo had sobered up completely when he realized the spot his friend was in. It made me think that there might be something there worth saving—maybe the same thing that Jack had been willing to bet his life on.
The kid stared desperately through the windshield as we tore through Pedro and Bay City, rocking back and forth on the seat, as if he were trying to urge the car on with body English like a jockey. As fast as we went, it wasn’t fast enough. I knew it before we got to the Colony, as surely as if it were already written. I knew it, but the kid didn’t.
He started babbling and pointing, as soon as we hit the Malibu coast. I followed his sign language, down a little road off the highway that ran behind a row of beach houses. As soon as I saw the police cars and the ambulances, I slowed to a crawl. The kid flung the passenger side door open and hit the ground on the run. I pulled to a stop a few hundred feet away and stared at the little beach house, crawling with cops. I don’t run toward tragedies unless I can do something to prevent them. And this time, it was too late to do anything at all.
After a while, I got out. The only smell was the smell of the sea, thick and salty like a taste on the tongue. I sat down on a big white rock beside the roadside berm. The beach ran right up the road, and the ocean stretched out beyond it, languid and sunstreaked and coolly oblivious to all the petty commotion on that tiny spot of shoreline.
Bernie Ohls walked over, throwing a long shadow across the sand. I looked up at him.
“The big guy’s dead.”
I nodded. “That’s the way it figured.”
“He got Loma, though. And one of his torpedos. The other one got him.” Bernie looked back at the beach house. “The kid you brought along, Elmo Pritchard . . . he’s pretty upset. He blames himself for what happened. He mentioned a girl, Irene Chivalo.”
“Elmo was carrying drugs up from TJ for Loma. He told Loma the drugs had been heisted. But Elmo and the girl took them themselves, and left the big guy to clean up the mess.”
“That’s what the kid told us. We’ll get an A.P.B. out on the Chivalo dame immediately. She and Elmo are going to do time. I think the kid knows it, too. He asked if he could talk to you.”
“Why not?”
Brushing the sand off my cuffs, I got to my feet and walked up the road to the beach house. Elmo was sitting in the front seat of a cop car, staring at two attendants wheeling a loaded gurney over to an ambulance.
“Is that Jack?” I said to him, through the cop car window.
He nodded. “It’s my fault.”
“Yes.”
Elmo put his hands to his face and started to cry.
“Everything’s got a price tag, kid. The big guy knew that. You’re learning it now.”
He sobbed. “Call my mom in Oxnard, will ya? Tell her.”
I walked back down the road to my car. Bernie was waiting there for me.
“Is there anyone to claim the body?” he asked.
“I’ll look into it,” I told him.
When I got back to my office, late in the afternoon, I picked up the county phone book and started thumbing through the various towns and municipalities, searching for a woman named Pritchard in Oxnard. It was going to take some time to drive up there. But time was all I had that afternoon, and I figured the woman would want to know.
The year I chose, 1939, was a good year for Chandler. It was the year of Farewell, My Lovely, which happens to be the first Chandler novel I read. I’ve written my story in what I hope is an approximation of the style of that novel (although it’s somewhat stripped down, because of limitations of length). Knowing that Chandler often “cannibalized” his short fiction, I’ve made an attempt to write a story that might have served as a springboard for Farewell, My Lovely, touching upon some of the same kinds of characters and themes.
Along with many of your other contributors, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have become a detective story writer had it not been for Chandler. Reading him in grad school was a revelation. Here, for once, was a genre writer with style and wit. His sense of place and character were first rate. But it was his language, more than anything else, that impressed me. Chandler had a truly memorable voice; and through his narrator Marlowe, he showed me that a detective could be a lot more than a wisecracking stereotype (although Marlowe could crack wise with the best of them). Philip Marlowe remains, I think, the funniest, the most worldly wise, the most charmingly cynical, and the most original creation in American detective fiction. Marlowe was, and will always be, a model for us all.
Jonathan Valin