Poodle Springs

"No, thanks," I said.

"Hey, Chico," the bartender said. "How many times I got to tell you, out." He started around the bar.

"Pictures?" the kid said to me.

I shook my head.

"Reefers, maybe? Coke?"

The bartender came around the bar and swiped at the kid with his towel.

"Go on, kid, take a hike."

I took a dollar from my pocket and handed it to the kid.

"Here," I said. "Thanks for asking."

The kid took the bill and dashed for the door.

"You keep coming in here, kid, you're going to end up down to juvie hall, goddammit."

The bartender went back behind the bar shaking his head.

"Beaners," he muttered.

I sipped my rye. The bartender cut up some limes and lemons and stored them in a big-mouthed jar.

The old couple in the booth had another round. She had her head on his shoulder now, her eyes half shut, her mouth dropped open. A fly circled slowly in on the wet spot where my glass had sat. It lazed down close to it, its translucent wings blurred, then it landed and sampled some and rubbed its forefeet together in appreciation. I had another sip of rye.

A red-haired woman came into the bar and glanced around and saw me and came to the bar and sat two stools away. It was the same woman who had played the jukebox during Lola's argument with Victor.

"White wine, Willie," she said.

The bartender got a big jug of wine out of the under-bar refrigerator and poured some in a glass and set it in front of her on a napkin. He put the jug in a sink full of ice, where it was handy, rang up the bill on the register and put it near her on the bar. She picked up the wine and looked at it for a moment and then carefully drank maybe half the glass. She put the glass down on the bar without letting go of the stem and looked at the bartender.

"Ah, Willie," she said. "You can always trust it, can't you?"

"Sure, Val."

She smiled and got out a long thin cigarette with a brown wrapper and looked in her purse, then turned toward me with the cigarette in her mouth, held in place by two fingers.

"Got a light?" she said.

I got a kitchen match out of my coat and managed to snap it into flame with my thumbnail on the first try. I held it steady for her while she leaned forward and put the tip of her cigarette into the flame. She took a deep inhale and let the smoke out slowly as she straightened.

Her hair was red, brighter than any God had ever made, but probably a version of its original shade. She had a soft face in which the lines at the corners of her mouth had deepened over the years into deep parentheses. She wore all the make-up there was and maybe a little no one else knew about. She had on false eyelashes and green eye shadow, and her mouth was made wider than her lips with thick strokes of lipstick. There was a line low on her throat where the make-up stopped short of the collar of her blouse, and the soft flesh under her chin made her neck line blend in with her chin line. Her blouse was white with a frilly collar and her skirt was black and above her knees. Her fingernails were very long and sharp and painted the same harsh red as her lipstick. She wore two large gold hoops dangling from her earlobes. Even in the dim bar I could see fine vertical lines on her upper lip, and the cross-hatching of fine lines around her eyes.

"Wine, cigarettes and a good man," she said. "All anyone can ask of life."

She drank the rest of her wine and gestured with her head for the bartender to pour some more.

"The first two sound all right," I said.

"You don't want a good man?" She laughed, a hoarse, raspy, ma

"Not a man's man, 1 guess," she wheezed as she pushed the laughter back in place. She coughed a little and drank some wine. I smiled encouragingly.

"Wish I could say the same," she said. "Easy to get wine and cigarettes. Hard as hell to find a good man."

She coughed again and drank some wine and picked up the little paper napkin that came with the wine, and patted her lips with it.

"And God knows I've tried a lot of them."

Her wine was gone. She glanced at the bartender, but he was looking at the old couple in the booth.

"Willie," I said, "lady needs a refill. Put it on my tab."

Willie decanted the jug wine without comment. Rang it up on my bill.

"Thanks," she said. "You seem too nice a guy to be hanging out here."

"I was going to say that about you," I said.

"Sure you were," she said. "Then you were going to put me in pictures, weren't you."

"If I'd been in the picture business a few years back," I said. I could see my face in the bar. It had the i

"You look like a guy could get things done if he wanted."

"I was here the other day, and saw you," I said. "There was an argument. Man and woman were hollering at each other and you were playing the jukebox."

Val drank some of her wine. Her cigarette had burned away to an unsmokable roach in the ashtray. She dug another from her purse and I had the kitchen match ready. Marlowe the courtier. I'd have made a great manservant.

"Yeah," she said, "Lola and Larry. Are they a trip? What I mean about men, you know."

"What were they fighting about?" I said. She got some wine in. She was drinking it as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been sighted in Encino.

Val's shrug was elaborate. Everything about her was exaggerated, like a female impersonator.

"What's your name, honey?"

"Marlowe," I said.

"You ever been in love, Marlowe?"

"As we speak," I said.

"Well, wait'll it goes sour," she said. I nodded at Willie and he filled her wine glass.

"When it goes sour, it's like rotting roses. It reeks."

"Lola and Larry?" I said.

"For a while, a while back." She shook her head in a slow, showy sweep. "But he dumped her."

"What was the fight the other day specifically about?" I said.

"She had something she knew," Val said. "She was going to get even, I guess."

She drank.

"A woman spurned," she said heavily. "We were made for love. We can get pretty poisonous when it turns."

She drank again. A little of the wine dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She dabbed at it again with the paper place napkin.

"She had something on him," I said.

"Sure," Val said. "And she was going to make him pay."

"What'd she have?" I said.

"Hell, Marlowe, I don't know. There's always something. Probably something on you if somebody looks hard." She laughed her wheezy laugh again, gestured at me with her wine glass.

"Prosit," she said and laughed some more. The rim of the wine glass was smeared with her lipstick.

"You know Larry too," I said.

She nodded and fished in her purse, taking things out. Compact, lipstick, a crumpled tissue, chewing gum, rosary beads, a nail file.

"You got any quarters, Marlowe?"

I slid a five at Willie.

"Quarters," I said.

He made change and put the quarters in five neat piles of four on the bar in front of me.

"You're a ge

"What was you asking me?" Val said.

"Did you know Larry very well?" I said, carefully. Drunks are fragile creatures. They need to be carried like a very full glass; tip either way and they spill all over. I knew about drunks. I'd spent half my life talking to drunks in bars like this one. Who'd you see, what'd you hear? Have another drink. Sure, on me, Marlowe, the big spender, the lush's pal, drink up, lush. You're lonely and I'm your pal.

"Sure, I know Larry. Everybody knows Larry. The man with the camera. The man with the pictures."