1938
THE PHONE CALL came in the middle of a dream of good, smoky Scotch and a laughing, green-eyed blonde just about to slip out of something a little more comfortable.
The operator asked me if I was Philip Marlowe and against my better judgment I said I was guilty. Then she asked me if I would accept a collect call from Santa Rosa. I was too groggy to catch the name. I wasn’t dreaming the empty quart bottle that was giving me the glad eye from the windowsill. Despite the cement mixer between my ears and the sand dune in my mouth, I managed to sit up. It was the Santa Rosa part that had gotten my attention. I said, “Sure. Why not? Maybe I’ve been left a million simoleons by a long-lost relative.”
The voice that came out of the phone’s earpiece sounded about ten years old. “Philip? Is that you? You probably don’t remember me. This is your cousin June.”
“Who died?” I said. “And when do I collect my million?”
She giggled—a high-pitched titter that made me think of the automatic fun-house crone that tells penny fortunes and cackles mindlessly in her glass cage. “You always were a joker, Philip,” she chirped. “Nobody died. Not yet, anyway. But that’s what I’ve got to see you about.”
“You don’t got to see me about anything, lady. I never had a cousin June, or Moon, or even Spoon. And much as I hate to hang up on a sweet young thing like you, I suggest you go find somebody else to play telephone games with.” I slammed the receiver down, stubbed out my butt in an ashtray overflowing with dead gaspers, and tried to catch up with the dream.
No such luck. Cousin or no, Santa Rosa June had started up a train of thought that I usually manage to keep shunted off on a siding. There is nothing stupider than a chicken, unless it’s an egg. I came by this profound piece of folk wisdom honestly. I was born in Santa Rosa and my first job, while I was still in high school, was packing eggs at one of the local chicken ranches. Those eggs went off to places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I stayed put in Santa Rosa among the feathers and the smell of chicken dung. But not for long.
The phone rang again. I grabbed it and shouted, “No!”
This time it wasn’t the operator. June said, “Well, you don’t have to get so huffy. Even if you don’t remember me, I remember you. Sometimes I read about you in the newspapers. Once they even had a picture of you. So, would you drive up to Santa Rosa so I could talk to you about this problem I have?”
“No.”
She sighed. “I didn’t think so. That’s why I’m here in Hollywood. Me and my sister, January. She was pretending to be the operator before. Now do you remember us? We were the Abbott twins. Now she’s married and I’m not, but we’re still twins. And I know we’re not really cousins, but after you kissed me behind the gymnasium you said we could be ‘kissing cousins.’ ”
“I said that?”
“It was the nicest thing anybody’d ever said to me.”
“When?”
“Oh, it must be fifteen years ago. Maybe sixteen.”
“And you remembered.”
“Yes. But you didn’t.”
“I guess I owe you something for that. Where did you say you were staying?”
She named a fleabag over on Melrose. “But I could come to your place. My sister and I. We’ve been driving all night, but we’re not a bit tired.”
“Well, I am. Suppose you come to my office in the morning.”
“It is morning, silly.”
“I mean later this morning. Make it . . . ” I squinted at the alarm clock that never yet had been able to wake me up. It was nine-thirty. I had to assume it was morning. Venetian blinds and dark brown monk’s cloth draperies kept whatever sunlight there was outside the single window of my bedroom. “Make it eleven-thirty.” I gave her my office address and hauled myself under a cold shower.
I recognized them the minute I saw them. They were sitting side by side on the two straight chairs I keep in my waiting room just in case I should have more than one customer at a time. Or even in a day. My waiting room is never locked. There’s nothing in it worth lifting and I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from waiting around for me to finish a case or a hangover.
June had been dead right about Santa Rosa and even about the kiss behind the gymnasium. She and her sister were identical twins. Every high school has an ugly girl. The girl no one likes or wants for a friend. Santa Rosa was lucky. We had two ugly girls. The Abbott twins, June and January. I had kissed June behind the gymnasium in a pouring rainstorm because the other girls had stolen all her clothes and then pushed her down a ravine into the world’s biggest mud puddle. It was December and cold and it had been raining for about three weeks the way it does in northern California.
I gave her my slicker, kissed her muddy forehead, and drove her home in my junkmobile. Then I went back to the school, found the girls who’d done it to her, took them out to the chicken ranch to sample some bootleg hooch I had tucked away out there, and locked all four of them up in one of the chicken coops for the night. They were dead drunk when I snapped the padlock on them so they didn’t mind very much. Not right then.
Fifteen years hadn’t done much for the twins. They were still ugly. Ugly isn’t so bad if you’ve got something else to take your mind off of what you see in the mirror every morning. Look at Eleanor Roosevelt.
But the twins were trying to convince the world and themselves that roly-poly platinum blondes with bright magenta cupid’s-bow lips and eyebrows plucked to extinction were the cat’s pajamas. On Harlow it had worked, but she died. On them, it was grotesque and pathetic.
One of them got up and flung herself at me. The other one lolled in the rickety wooden chair and crossed her beefy legs in my direction. They were dressed identically, in green and white polka dot chiffon with lots of ruffles and flourishes, and they reeked of Evening in Paris. Their fat little feet were crammed into white kid T-straps that raised four pairs of hurtful looking bulges across their insteps.
The one who was leaning on me smirked up at my chin and tried for a husky whisper. “Remember me now? I remember you, but you’re a lot taller. And handsomer.”
The other one piped up in a voice that bore a striking resemblance to the squawking hens of Santa Rosa. “Quit the lollygagging, June. This was your idea. I still think it stinks, but let’s get on with it now that we’re here.”
“Good thinking,” I told her as I unlocked my office door. “Please step into my parlor and tell me all about it.” My parlor hadn’t changed much since I’d left it the night before. Even the air in it was the same, thick and stale with too much cigarette smoke and not enough ozone. I opened the window to liven the mix with an injection of exhaust fumes from the traffic on Cahuenga Boulevard.
The twins sorted themselves out, January flopping into the visitor’s chair and June draping herself against the bank of five green metal file cabinets I’d picked up at a flea market. If business didn’t improve, I’d have to return them emptier than I got them.
It was easy to tell them apart, even though they were identical. January oozed an attitude of sullen discontent, the bitter aura of gin battling it out with her perfume. June, at least, had kept a spark of vitality alive in her little shoe-button eyes.
She twinkled at me and said, “I hardly know where to begin.”
“How about the beginning,” I suggested. I sat down in the lopsided swivel chair behind my desk and parked my hat on top of the telephone. It wouldn’t keep it from ringing if it had a mind to, but the way business had been going lately, there wasn’t much danger of that.
June sighed and opened up her white leather pocketbook, a twin of the one that lay sprawled on January’s lap. She pulled out a deckle-edged snapshot and pressed it to her far from inconsequential bosom. January sat up a little straighter and flashed her sister a malevolent glance.
“Well, we are looking for him, aren’t we?” June pleaded.
“I don’t care if I never see the son of a sea cook again!” January’s carefully painted lips twisted in a vicious snarl. It almost made her look good.
“But Jan, he’s got Baby Grace with him. We want to get her back, don’t we?”
“If he hurts that kid, I’ll kill him. I swear to God, I’ll twist his crown jewels off and stuff them down his throat.”
The party was getting a little rough for my delicate sensibilities. “Ladies, ladies,” I soothed. “Your sisterly affection is touching, but if we’re going to get anywhere with this we have to take the unemotional approach. Is there a missing person?”
“No!” January shouted.
“Two,” June outshouted her. “Jan’s husband, Walter, and their daughter, Baby Grace.”
“They’re not just missing,” January rasped between teeth that kept trying to grit themselves into tooth powder. “He’s kidnapped her. When I get my hands on him, he’s dead. And I don’t care who knows it.” She snapped open her pocketbook and hauled out the smallest gun I’d ever seen. It almost got lost in her pudgy pink paw, but there was no doubt in my mind it could do the job.
“You know how to use that?” I asked her in my softest, most reasonable voice.
“You damn betcha! Right between the eyes for old Walter Watson when I find him.” She pointed the gun at me to show me how well she could aim.
“Well, that’s just swell. But in the meantime, would you mind putting it away? If you shoot me, accidentally, of course, I won’t be able to help you find Walter, will I?”
She swung the gun around to point it at her sister. “You might as well tell him. I just hate to tell anybody. It’s all so disgusting.”
“There, there, honey,” said June. “You don’t have to say a word. I know how it upsets you.” She sidled over to her sister and held her hand out, palm up. “Why don’t you just give me that. It’s not polite to point a gun at somebody who’s trying to help you.”
While they pondered the intricacies of pistol-packing etiquette, I slid open my desk drawer and slyly let my hand fall to rest on the .38 I kept there for just such social occasions.
But January stuffed her deadly toy back into her pocketbook and dragged out a brown glass medicine bottle instead. “It’s for my nerves,” she muttered as she twisted off the cap. “I got terrible nerves.” She swigged at the bottle, smacked her lips and put the lid back on without offering a dainty sip to anybody else. Emily Post would not have approved.
June waddled over and laid the snapshot down on my desk. “That’s him,” she said, “with Baby Grace on his shoulders.”
I stared down at a tall, narrow gent in a bathing suit. He was squinting into the sun over an eagle beak and a broad grin full of snaggles. The kid on his shoulders looked to be about five or six years old. Her light hair was crimped into the obligatory moppet curls and her little hands were clamped onto the guy’s ears. Her legs and bare feet hung down against his chest, and her toes were curled. But it was her face that told me she didn’t like being where she was, up above the world so high. Her eyes were big and scared and her mouth was small and pinched. A vague stretch of water shone in the sunlight behind them.
“We took that at Clear Lake about three weeks ago,” said June. “Walter was trying to teach her how to swim.”
“Forget the swimming,” January mumbled. “You should see her tapdance. She could make a fortune in the movies before she gets too old. She’s just the cutest little number in the world. Walter had no right . . . ” She trailed off into a cascade of gin-soaked blubbers.
Mother love. Hollywood was full of it these days. They came from Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas. Hard-eyed hungry women and their primped and painted Kewpie doll daughters. All trying to be the next Shirley Temple. The way I read this one, the twins were hot on the trail of Walter, who either was trying to save his little girl from breaking her heart against the movies’ indifference or had beaten Mommie Jan and Auntie June to the draw in selling their piece of merchandise. Either way, it wasn’t my kind of case.
I pushed the snapshot back across my desk. “Don’t they have police in Santa Rosa anymore?” I asked.
“Bunch of fatheads,” January snapped. “I wouldn’t ask them to find Jimmy Durante’s nose. Besides, we think Walter’s somewhere in L.A. His sister Lucille’s a seamstress at one of the studios. I called her yesterday and she sounded nastier than usual. She said she hadn’t seen or heard from Walter in months. But I don’t believe her. She hates me and she’d just love it if Walter left me and took Baby Grace with him.”
June had been perched on the edge of my desk while all this was going on. Now she leaned over and picked up one of my hands, which had just been lying there minding its own business. “Philip, you’ve got to help us,” she breathed. “There’s something more. We think . . . I mean, we have good reason to believe that Walter does things to Baby Grace.” Her round face had turned the color of dried phlegm, making the rouge spots on her cheeks stand out like traffic lights in the Mojave.
“What kind of things?” I asked demurely. I know, I know, I’m not a nice guy, forcing her to name the unnameable.
“You know what I mean,” she hedged. “He’s always picking her up and kissing and hugging her. We’ve never caught him doing anything more than that. But he’s home alone with her a lot. He takes cares of her while Jan and I work at the beauty parlor.”
“Great balls of fire, girls! He’s her father. What’s he supposed to do? Treat her like a piece of furniture?”
June lifted her hand off of mine, leaving behind a sticky film of sweat. She heaved a hopeless sigh and drooped like a deflated rubber swimming pool raft. “I should have known,” she said. “No one likes to believe that sort of thing. It took us a long time to even let ourselves think it. Now you know why Jan’s so upset. And why we don’t feel right about going to the police. If this got out, it could just ruin poor Baby Grace for life.”
There was some truth in what she said. Small town gossip is deadly. The natural inborn American killer instinct isn’t confined to gunsels and lowlifes. Character assassination is one of the greatest pastimes of the village righteous and, as I recalled, Santa Rosa had more than its share of sanctimony.
After her outburst, Jan had been nodding drowsily in her chair, whether in agreement with June’s accusation or in a gin stupor, I couldn’t tell. Now, she rose majestically to her tiny feet. “Let’s get out of here,” she rasped. “This guy turns my stomach.” She rested her flippers on top of it as if to hold it in place. “He’s a washout. He doesn’t want to help us, so let’s go find Baby Grace on our own.” She marched to the office door and flung it open. Then she turned and mustered up all the scorn accumulated throughout her twenty-eight or thirty years of being one of the Abbott twins.
“I hope you rot,” she told me sweetly. “I hope you die slowly and it hurts a lot. You’re in a crummy business in a crummy town and it suits you. I wouldn’t even hire you to haul garbage. You’re too . . . too . . . loathsome for that.”
I was beginning to like her. There was a kind of raw honesty about her that made up for the phony veneer of bottle-blonde hair and too much makeup.
“Hold on, ladies,” I said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take the case. Happens I don’t have anything else on right now. I can give it a day or two.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” burbled June, reinflating herself to full size. “I just knew you’d do it.”
“But your sister has to stop calling me loathsome. I’m a very sensitive guy. I’ll admit to crummy, but that’s as far as I’ll go.”
After I got the particulars about color of hair, eyes, and so forth, what the missing persons were wearing when last seen, and what kind of car Walter was driving, I asked for his sister’s address.
“Miss High-and-Mighty Lucille Watson lives in Bay City,” said January, and she gave me a street number in the run-down area behind the amusement pier. “Do you have to talk to her? She’ll say nasty things about me.”
“I promise not to listen any more than I have to. Which studio does she work at?”
January named one of the big ones, a fantasy factory where an army of poor slobs thought they were lucky to hammer and saw and stitch and paint their lives away. I guess they were. They got paid every week.
There wasn’t much else they could tell me, so I rode down in the elevator with them, a risky ride given the combined tonnage of the twins and the decrepit state of the mechanism.
After tucking them into their dented Dodge roadster and pointing them in the direction of lunch, I went back up to the office and started working the phone.
None of the bigger studios had casting calls out for moppets and only one had seen any new meat under sixteen in the past week, a pet Limey boy wonder brought in by the studio boss for not so obscure reasons of his own. That left the sad remnants of the independents over on Gower Gulch, but not even superannuated cowboys could get any work there these days.
On the other hand, Walter Watson did have a connection of a sort. It was time to pay a call on Miss Lucille Watson.
I drove over to the studio where she worked. One of the guards was a retired cop who knew the inside story of why I’d been fired from the D.A.’s office a few years ago. He was glad to see me.
“Ah, Philly,” he groaned, “ain’t it terrible what this town does to you. Here I should be tending to my fishing at some lake in the mountains, but try to do that on a cop’s pension, and you should be making a hero’s name for yourself on the side of the law. Instead, look at the both of us. Patsies from the word go.”
“It’s the law that’s the patsy,” I told him. “Whores are always patsies. They sell themselves to anybody who flashes a wad and forget what it feels like to be clean. I need your help, Ralph. Nothing that’ll get you in trouble.”
“You name it, you got it,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder with a grip reminiscent of the way he used to haul felons into the wagon. I tried not to wince; he meant it to be friendly.
“I need to talk to Miss Lucille Watson. She works here as a seamstress.”
“Sure,” he said, “I know Lucille. A tall, skinny sourpuss with goggles like the bottom of a shotglass. But I didn’t see her today. Nor yesterday, come to think of it. Lemme just check the sheet.”
He ducked into the little two-by-four office beside the gate and came out moments later shaking his head. “On sick leave since last week,” he said. “I don’t know where she lives.”
“That’s jake,” I told him. “She’s in Bay City, but I was hoping to catch her here. They’re not too fond of me in Bay City.”
He laughed a big haw-haw and roared, “Give ’em hell, Philly! You make those bozos look like the clowns they are.”
I drove away from the studio with the sun in my eyes and the heat pressing in through the open windows like the blast from a steel mill.
As as soon as I reached Bay City, I stopped at a drugstore and bought a box of chocolates from a small, clean old gent in a white pharmacist’s coat. He smiled as he wrapped the box in green paper and tied it with yellow string. “A present for your sweetie pie,” he murmured. “That’s nice. She’s a lucky girl.”
“Thanks, pop,” I said, pocketing my change. “I’ll tell her you said so. She may not agree.”
I found Miss Lucille Watson’s dirty white stucco bungalow in a row of other bungalows exactly like it. Hers was different by virtue of the white picket fence around the front yard and the enormous hydrangea bush that it guarded.
I rang the doorbell and heard it clang somewhere inside the house. The red painted door regarded me with wooden indifference and stayed closed. I rang again and turned to look back at the front yard. There was a Charlie McCarthy doll lying under the hydrangea. His mouth was open but he didn’t say anything.
The door creaked open about an inch and a watery eye peered out at me. A voice croaked, “I’m not buying any. Go away.”
“I’m not selling any. I’m giving it away this week.” I took my hat off like a good boy. “Are you Lucille Watson? If you are, you’ve just won the Blue Network’s Radio Sweetheart of the Week prize.” I brandished the box of chocolates. “All you have to do is answer a few simple questions.”
The eye went away from the door and came back magnified by a thick lens. The lens gleamed down at the chocolate box and then up at my face. “What questions?” The door creaked open a little wider.
“Nothing much, but I need to verify that you listen to the radio. You do have a radio, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” she snapped. By this time the door was open wide enough for me to see both lenses, a stiff headful of lacquered finger waves, and a starchy lavender and white housedress buttoned and belted onto a miserly frame. The lenses rested on a sharp inquisitive nose, not quite the equal of Walter’s eagle beak but clearly related. She licked her thin pale lips and reached out a bony hand for the candy box.
“Ah, ah, ah,” I said, hiding the box behind my back. “Mustn’t touch until I see the radio and you tell me what your favorite programs are.”
“Oh, come on in,” she said. “I guess you’re harmless. If you’re not, a hatpin in the right place’ll teach you some manners.” Her nasal twang branded her an escapee from the tall corn country.
She led me through a small dark foyer into an even darker living room anchored down with chunky California mission furniture. The radio was a floor model Philco with a round green dial. It was churning out another chapter of afternoon agony in the life of Young Widder Brown. “There it is,” she said. “My favorite programs are One Man’s Family and Jack Benny. Do you get paid for doing this?”
“What about your children? What do they like?”
“I’m not married,” she snapped.
“Beg your pardon, Miss Watson. I saw the doll out in the yard. I thought it belonged to a child.”
“What doll?” She hiked over to the front window and pulled aside the heavy drapes.
“One of those Charlie McCarthy dolls. Every kid seems to have one these days.”
“My niece,” she said. “She was visiting here with her father. Poor little thing. She’ll miss that doll. She loves it so. I guess I’ll have to send it to her.”
“Visiting from back home?” I asked.
“What business is it of yours?”
“None whatsoever,” I admitted in my best clodhopper fashion. “It just seems to me that children have a better chance of growing up on the straight and narrow in a place where folks work hard and go to church on Sundays.” I hoped I wasn’t laying it on too thick. “I’d guess you’re from Iowa.”
“I work hard and go to church on Sundays. But you’re right, young man. My brother’s taking little Grace back home with him to Council Bluffs. Now how about that candy?”
I handed over the box. “Must be hard on a little girl not to have a mother,” I remarked.
“Who told you that?” she demanded, ripping off the green paper.
“Nobody. But you didn’t mention little Grace’s mother. Did she die?”
“Be a blessing if she would.” She opened the box, picked out a chocolate-covered cherry, and popped it into her mouth. “She’s been a trial to poor Walter since the beginning, with her drinking and alley-catting around. I warned him about her. But he wouldn’t listen. But when she started in on little Grace, well that was the living end. Tap-dancing lessons and permanent waves. Putting lipstick on her and making her stand up in a barroom and sing. I ask you.” Her words were sticky with chocolate and moral indignation.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “So they’re well on their way home by now.”
She ate another chocolate and peered at me through her lenses. “You’re pretty curious about my brother and his whereabouts, aren’t you? I never heard of any Blue Network Radio Sweetheart of the Week nonsense. But I have heard of curiosity killing the cat.”
Her lenses were aimed somewhere over my left shoulder. Before I could turn around to see what was there, the whole roomful of mission furniture fell on my head. There was a smell of carpet dust in my nose and the taste of iron in my mouth. The last thing I heard was a tiny voice crying, “Mommy!”
And the first thing I heard when I could hear things again was “Gosh all hemlock, Jack!” from the Philco. Afternoon agony had segued into high adventure and the all-American boy was hot on the trail of evildoers in the steamy Amazonian rain forest. While the all-American booby was taking an enforced nap on the Axminster. I lifted one eyelid and saw a tiny black shoe three inches from my nose.
Charlie McCarthy sat propped up against a chair leg, smirking a superior kind of smirk. I expected him to pop off one of his wisecracks and wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. I deserved it. But he just sat there and watched me scramble to my knees and finger the sore spot on the back of my head. No blood. Just a mushy lump that could have been made by a baseball bat or a crowbar. Walter Watson had good aim. The lump was neatly centered on my cranium.
When I finished exploring my tolerance for pain, I noticed that Charlie was clutching a piece of paper in one wooden hand. “Thanks, pal,” I said as I took it from him. “Nice crowd you hang out with.”
The note said: “June should have told you that she’s been babbling about you ever since your picture showed up in the paper. We’ve been expecting you to turn up. Ask her about a Mr. Hap Delaney. And tell Jan that Grace is okay.” There was no signature. I turned off the radio when it sang at me, “Have you tri-e-e-ed Wheaties?”
I stuffed the note into my pocket, tucked Charlie McCarthy under my arm, and made a quick tour of the bungalow. In a small back bedroom, a single bed and a folding cot had been slept in. Underneath the cot, I found a pink sunsuit with grass stains on the seat.
The other bedroom wasn’t much larger. I learned that Miss Lucille Watson was a bedtime Bible reader and wore dentures. The kitchen told me nothing at all unless neatness counts. Lucille was a fanatic with the Fels-Naptha. And that was it. No hint of where they’d flitted off to. Only the certainty that Walter and Baby Grace had been here and now they were gone.
I did the only thing I could do. The name Hap Delaney rang a distant bell. Something to do with running a string of kid pickpockets in movie theaters around town. A regular latter-day Fagin. But that was a long time ago and I hadn’t heard his name since. I went back into the musty overweight living room, picked up the phone, and asked the operator for the Hollywood Citizen-News. My sometime drinking buddy and all-purpose oracle, Benny Flinders, might have some current dope.
When Benny came on the line, he sounded more dyspeptic than usual. “Now just tell me this, Marlowe,” he groaned. “What’s a guy to do when his girl gives him the gate, the sawbones tells him to quit drinking, and his hair starts falling out in clumps the size of haystacks? Where’ve you been, kid? I haven’t seen you in a month or so.” Benny’d been sounding like an old man ever since I’d known him, but he was closer to my age than he was to Methuselah’s.
I asked him about Hap Delaney and he laughed. “Easy,” he said. “Out of the slammer about six months and busy as a birddog with a new seam. Knowing Delaney, it’s got to be illegal, but nobody’s got anything on him yet. He’s got an office over on Highland, but he’s hardly ever in it. He’s been touring up and down the coast, interviewing talent. Calls himself an agent, specializing in kid actors. Between you and me, I think he’s buying and selling. I don’t know who’s in the market, but there’ve been a few rumors surfacing about parties where young kids provide the entertainment. And I don’t mean ring-around-the-rosy. You got something going with him?”
“I don’t know yet, Benny. But as soon as I do, it’s yours. Thanks.”
On the way back to Hollywood, with Charlie McCarthy propped up on the seat beside me, I tried to get a little conversation going. “Now tell me this, my wooden-headed friend. If the Gold Dust Twins have been doing business with Hap Delaney, and if Walter knows about it, then why doesn’t he blow the whistle on the deal?”
The dummy answered, “Don’t be stupid, shamus. Walter wants to keep the money and the kid.”
“What money?” I asked.
“The money the three of them got paid for the merchandise. Or maybe just the two of them.”
“Which two?”
“You figure it out. You’re the detective.”
I wasn’t much of a ventriloquist. The dummy’s answers only raised more questions.
It was late afternoon when I finally parked on Highland Avenue across the street from the building where Information had told me The Delaney Agency was located. The elevator operator was a rosy-cheeked lad who looked ready to burst into song and dance. Delaney’s office on the ninth floor had a candy-striped door and a sweet-faced granny type sitting at a candy-striped desk behind it.
“Hello,” she cooed at me. There was a fishbowl full of gumdrops on the desk. A rocking horse stood in one corner and a dollhouse in another. “How may we help you?”
“We can tell me if Hap Delaney is in.” I helped myself to a green gumdrop and dropped one of my cards on the desk.
The coo turned into a caw as she read my name out loud. “We’re closed for the day. I was just leaving.” She reached for a flowered straw hat and plopped it cockeyed on top of her gray topknot.
“He wouldn’t be on his way to Santa Rosa, would he?” I asked.
“Santa where?” she muttered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She got up from her chair and looked wildly at a slightly open door on the other side of the reception room.
“Because if he is, he doesn’t have to go so far. The merchandise that was stolen from him hasn’t left town.” I spoke right up, loud enough so that whoever was on the other side of the door could hear what I was saying.
The door opened and the sweet old granny sat back down. The man in the doorway looked a bit like a youthful Santa Claus—round pink cheeks, round button nose, a crown of curly red hair, and a smile as broad as Topanga Canyon. He was everybody’s favorite uncle.
“It’s all right, Bessie,” he said. “You go on home now. I’ll take care of this.”
She scuttled out the door and Hap Delaney ushered me into his office. The candy-stripe decor ran riot. A soda fountain with three stools occupied one side of the room. There were dolls and teddy bears everywhere, including a couple of Charlie McCarthys. “So you’re Philip Marlowe,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. Sit down, sit down. I’d offer you a drink, but the bar runs strictly to sarsaparilla. What can I do for you?”
I sat down on a couch between a Shirley Temple.doll and a Dionne quint. “I’m looking for a girl. Baby Grace Watson. A little bird told me I should look here.”
He laughed jovially. “Do you know how many Baby Thises and Baby Thatses I see in a week? They all tap-dance. They all sing. They all look alike. What I’m looking for is the one who stands out in a crowd.”
“What happens to the ones who don’t?” I asked.
He shrugged. “How do I know? They go home, grow up, and marry the boy next door. If their mothers let them, that is.”
“You wouldn’t happen to steer them into some other line of work, would you?”
“Such as what?” He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Oh, I don’t know. What other kind of work is there for a five-year-old girl?”
“Listen, Marlowe,” he said. “This is a legitimate business. It may not be a nice business, but it’s all legal and aboveboard. I don’t know who told you to come to me, but there’s nothing in it. I haven’t seen your Baby Whatsit.”
“Mind looking at a picture of her?” I pulled the photo out of my pocket and handed it to him.
He barely glanced at it. “Like I said, they all look alike. And all the mothers think they’re gonna get rich off their kids. Some of the fathers, too. But if a plain little girl with freckles and pigtails should walk in that door, her I could do something with. She’d be different. You know what I mean?” He handed me back the snapshot. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Well, if she should show up, you could give me a call. She’d be with her father. I left my card with Bessie.”
Downstairs in the long shadows, I hunkered down in my car and watched the front of the building. It took him about twenty minutes to hustle through the revolving door. There was a cab waiting for him right at the curb. I watched it head down toward Melrose and then made a U-turn and moseyed after it. Something told me I knew where Delaney was going, so I took a chance and stopped to make a phone call. Ralph, the studio cop, told me all about where the hired help stayed when they had to work late. A few more nickels and Lucille had given me chapter and verse and Deuteronomy for good measure. I gave her a time and a place, and she said, “We’ll see about that.”
There was a coffee shop on the ground floor of the hotel where the twins were staying. Through the plate glass window, I saw a platinum blonde head and a bright red one bent toward each other across a small table. I parked in a no parking zone right outside and went into the hotel lobby. I rang the twins’ room on the house phone. A muzzy voice answered.
“Get down to the lobby right away,” I said.
“Wh-a-a-t?”
“Do you want Baby Grace back or not?”
“But I’m not even dressed,” she wailed.
“Get dressed and get sober and get down here. I’ll be waiting for you.” I hung up on her before she could think of another reason why she couldn’t. Then I went to stand by the lobby entrance to the coffee shop where I could keep an eye on June and Hap Delaney.
Delaney didn’t look like everybody’s favorite uncle anymore. He was yapping away at June and she was taking it with her head bent. Then she raised her head and started yapping away at him. This went on for about ten minutes. They took a break while the waitress refilled their coffee cups.
January hove to alongside of me, huffing and sleepy-eyed.
“Look at that man,” I told her. “Ever seen him before?”
“Why, sure,” she said. “He’s the one who said he could get Baby Grace into the movies. He came to Santa Rosa looking for talent and said she was the greatest thing he’d ever seen.”
“He just came right up to the door and said that?” I asked.
“Well, not exactly,” said January coyly. “There was an ad in the paper about auditions for talented children. So I took Baby Grace. That’s how it happened. He even came out to the house to meet Walter and June just to prove everything was on the up-and-up. Then we were all going to come down here to find a place to live while Baby Grace was getting started on her career. But Walter skipped out with her before we could do that. What’s he doing talking to June?” Her pudgy hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my goodness!” she gasped.
“What is it?”
“The contract! Walter and I signed a contract. Do you suppose Mr. Delaney could sue us?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her.
“But I want Baby Grace to be a movie star,” she wailed. “She could do it. She’s cute enough.”
“Sure she is. She’s cute enough for Walter and June to go behind your back and sell her to Hap Delaney, so he could turn around and sell her to some baby lover for nursery games.”
She blinked at me, making a strange kind of keening way back in her throat. “That’s dirty,” she whispered finally. “That’s the dirtiest thing I ever heard of. Even Walter wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“You sure of that?” I asked her.
“I don’t know what I’m sure of anymore,” she moaned.
I liked her better when she was tearing off a piece of my hide. “Well, let’s go in,” I said. “Nothing like finding things out firsthand.”
I opened the coffee shop door and led the way. January lumbered behind me like a mother elephant in search of her lost calf. June saw us first and half rose out of her chair. She pasted a smile on her face and fluttered her hands at the waitress. “Two more chairs,” she called out. “It looks like we’re turning into a party.”
January bore down on her like the Bonus Army marching on Washington. “I want my baby. Where’s my baby? How could you do this to me, June?”
“Shut up,” said June. “You’re drunk again. What kind of mother are you? Can’t you see that Mr. Delaney’s here? He wants to find her just as much as we do.”
“No!” said January. “Not him. Where’s the money, June? I didn’t see any money. How much did he pay you for my baby?”
The waitress brought over two chairs and tried to edge them around us. “Please sit down,” she whispered. “The manager’s looking at you.”
January kicked one chair over and raised the other one to chest level as if she were a lion tamer in a one-ring circus.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said June. “Why don’t you have a drink? Let’s go out to the bar.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” said January. “Who is it who’s always buying me bottles of gin? I think I’m just beginning to understand something.”
Hap Delaney rose wearily to his feet, but his smile was back in place for my benefit. “Family squabbles,” he said. “I hate to get in the middle of them. Don’t you?”
I put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back into his chair. I’d seen something on the other side of the plate glass window—an eagle-nosed man with a little girl on his shoulders. And a pair of shot-glass lenses lurking just behind him. I put my other hand on January’s arm and helped her lower the chair to the floor. She was trembling.
“Let’s all take a deep breath,” I said. I picked up the chair that January had kicked over and sat on it. January sat on the edge of her chair. The waitress relaxed and the manager went back to whatever managers of hotel coffee shops do when they’re not anticipating riots.
And then the street door opened.
January was off the edge of her chair and halfway across the room before anyone could say a word. She lifted Baby Grace off Walter’s shoulders and came back and sat down with the little girl on her lap.
“Okay,” said Hap Delaney. “Let’s call the whole thing off. Give me back the three grand and I’ll forget I ever saw you folks.”
“I don’t have it,” said June. “I gave it to Walter.”
Walter said, “Not three thousand, you didn’t. More like three hundred. I wouldn’t sell my Baby Grace for a measly three hundred.”
“Did they do anything to you, baby?” January whispered into Grace’s tousled curls. “You can tell Mommy.”
Grace burrowed her face into her mother’s green and white ruffles and burst into tears.
Walter shuffled over to the table and put his hands on January’s shoulders. “I’m sorry about all this, Jan,” he said. “But I tried to tell you it was no good. You never would listen to me. It was always June you listened to, and believe me, she’s the one behind it all. She handed Grace over to him three days ago. When I found out, I came down here and got Lucille to help me find her. It wasn’t hard. She knows where all the dirt is in this town.”
“That Bessie Prince,” Lucille muttered. “Running a regular baby ranch out in the Valley. Everybody knows about it, but I never thought I’d see my own niece there.”
“Is that so?” June barked. “Blame it all on me, why don’t you? But you two wanted it just as much as I did. Only you’re just too feeble to admit it.”
“All I wanted was for my baby to be a movie star,” January whispered.
“That’s what they all say,” Delaney confided to me. “But I’m clean. Nobody can pin a thing on me.”
“That may be, Mr. Delaney. But I don’t think you should be doing what you do to anybody else’s little girls.” She sat there with Baby Grace on her lap and the little gun in her hand. “Don’t you move, Mr. Marlowe,” she said. “I know I really shouldn’t be doing this, but I just can’t help it. Walter, you’ll use the money to get me a really good lawyer, and then we’ll go home.”
And I didn’t move. It was a pleasure to watch Delaney try to crawl under the table. She shot him right through the breast pocket of his bright plaid jacket. Then she turned the gun on June. “Give Walter the rest of the money,” she commanded.
“No!” said June. “It’s mine. It’s my ticket out of Santa Rosa.”
“What’s wrong with Santa Rosa?” said January. “It’ll be just fine without you.” And she shot June twice, just to make sure.
Lucille picked up June’s white pocketbook, just slightly spattered with blood, and faded away to the lobby entrance.
When the police arrived, January was still sitting in the chair with Baby Grace asleep on her lap. She’d handed the gun over to me, and I handed it over to them.
They were pretty decent with her. They let her keep the kid with her, at least for a while. They didn’t even give me a hard time, for a change. I guess they were glad that somebody’d put Hap Delaney out of business for good.
Walter cried a little and apologized for bashing me over the head. “I thought you were working for June,” he said. “She kept telling us that you were her high-school sweetheart. I never had a high-school sweetheart. I never had anybody until I met Jan. She’s a fine woman, you know. Just a little hot tempered sometimes. When this is over, I’m taking her and Grace back home with me. I’ll make it all up to both of them.”
After they’d all cleared out and I was wondering what to do with the rest of the evening, the waitress presented me with a bill for two coffees and an apple pie à la mode. I had to give her an I.O.U.—an evening at the Trocadero so she could be seen by the right people and get started in the movies. I didn’t ask her if she could tap-dance.
When you grow up a movie-loving, library-haunting brat, it would be pretty hard to miss out on Raymond Chandler. And a whole lot of other writing people.
Of my two loves, I much preferred the library. Honestly. I could have spent my whole life there. But we were all shipped off in a slovenly clump on Saturday afternoons to the movies. I didn’t mind, and I never minded what was playing. I got to see a lot of good stuff. Some of it was Chandler, but I didn’t know that then. My dazzled childish eye saw only the Bogarts and the Bacalls. It was only later that I started looking for the writer, of the screenplay and of the book behind the movie.
I made a wonderful discovery in those days. The movies I liked best were often based on books, and that simple fact sent me back to the library where I would rather have been in the first place. Sad news. The libraries I went to weren’t large on Chandler. Dickens, yes. Steinbeck, yes. L. Frank Baum and Jack London and Oscar Wilde. So I read all those people and many, many others whose books were or weren’t made into movies before I got around to Chandler.
Did Chandler influence my work? Damned if I know. I’d like it if he had because he was a fine, honest, painstaking craftsman. I read and reread everything I could find of his, and everything I could find about him, while I was working on “Saving Grace.” You can be sure he influenced that story. And it was fun. Both the writing and the reading. I like to think of all of us who contributed to this book immersing ourselves in Chandler the man and Chandler the writer. May the experience make us all better writers than we ever thought we could be.
Joyce Harrington