Poodle Springs

"Same answer, I guess. You can't do my work and keep your self-respect if you let the cops decide what you should do."

"I frankly fail to see how you can do your work and keep your self-respect," Linda said.

"Because it involves spending time occasionally in jail? Because it brings you into contact with the lower classes?"

"Damn it, Philip, that's not fair," Linda said. "It's not my fault my father's rich."

"No," I said, "it isn't. And it isn't mine either. But one thing you can count on, you don't get as rich as Harlan Potter in this country without cutting some corners, and breaking some rules, and spending time with people you wouldn't care to break a crumpet with."

Linda shook her head fast several times.

"I don't know about that. I don't even care about that. What I know is that this is no kind of marriage I understand. You're out all night half the time. I don't know where you are or what you're doing. You might be getting killed. I wake up in the morning and get a call saying you're in jail. My husband. Here? In the Springs? In jail?"

"What will they say at lunch?" I said.

"Damn it, don't be so poor-snob high and mighty, Marlowe. These are my friends. I care about them. I want them to care about you. I don't want to know that they're laughing behind my back at my husband."

"They'll do that anyway," I said. "Not because I'm a gumshoe. Not because I spent the night in jail. They'll laugh at me because I'm a failure. I don't have any money. In this great Republic that's how the judgment is made, darling."

"But I have money, I have enough money for both of us."

"Which is why, as I keep trying to explain, I can't take it. The way I keep from being a failure is to be free. To be my absolute own man. Me, Marlowe, the Galahad of the gutter. I decide what I'll do. I won't be bought, or pushed, not even by love. You're a success if you have money, but you give up too much."

It was a long speech for me. I washed it down with some gimlet. It didn't help. Gimlets were for early afternoons in quiet bars where the tables gleamed with polish and the light filtered through the bottles and the bartender had a crisp white shirt with the cuffs turned back. Gimlets were for holding hands across the table and saying nothing and knowing everything. I put the drink on the table. Linda hadn't touched hers; she used it to stare into.

"When you're home," Linda said in a flat voice, "and we go to bed, there's a gun on the bureau, beside your wallet and car keys."

"I used to sleep with it in my teeth," I said. "But figured it was safer out here in the desert."

Linda looked up from her gimlet and stared at me for a moment.

"This isn't working," she said finally. Then she stood still holding the gimlet in both hands. "I'm not saying it's your fault… but it isn't working."

She turned and walked back into the house.

I picked up the nearly full double gimlet and stared at it for a little while without drinking, then I flicked my wrist and sluiced the contents in a thin arc onto the ground and carefully put the empty glass upside down on the table and leaned back on the chaise and listened to the ice melt in the bag on my knee.

29

I spent the night in the guest room. In the morning I was out of the house early. I got coffee in a place on Riverside that also sold stuffed burros, and little key chains with genuine gold nuggets attached. The desert looked harsher than I'd ever seen it as I drove over to Muriel Valentine's house. The earth had a harsh eroded look like an angry dowager, and the cactus plants seemed more loutish than I remembered them yesterday. The hard disinterested sky was cloudless and the heat was dry and unyielding as I got out and walked up Muriel's walk again. The houseboy answered my ring and let me stand in the hall while he went to fetch Mrs. Valentine. When she appeared she seemed as bleak as the desert. Her eyes looked as if she'd cried and her mouth was thin. "He's not here," she said.

"Your husband," I said.

"Yes. I don't know where he is."

The tip of her tongue appeared and touched her lower lip and disappeared.

"When did he leave?"

"He's been gone since the day after you left him here," she said.

"You know Lipshultz is dead," I said.

"Yes."

"Did you know he worked for your father?" I said.

She stepped back as if I had poked a live snake at her.

"Your father owns the Agony Club," I said.

She didn't say anything. She kept looking at me, her face tight, the tip of her tongue darting occasionally out over her lower lip. I looked back at her. Nothing else happened. Finally I turned and walked out and closed the door behind me. She felt worse than I did. I got in the Olds and sat for a moment staring at nothing, then I put the Olds in gear and headed for L.A.

I found Angel sitting on her front porch looking at the beach. There was toast grown cold on a saucer and a cup of tea turned dark with the tea bag sitting in it. Angel sat in the rocker with her knees up, her arms around them, her chin resting on them. The rocker shifted slightly but she wasn't really rocking.

"He's not here," she said.

"You waiting for him?" I said.

"Yes. I didn't go to work. I can't. I have to be here in case he comes."

"I've lost him," I said. "He's not where I left him."

The rocker moved a little. Angel didn't say anything.

The sound of the surf, muffled as it rolled over the sand, was a white sound behind us. There were people on the beach moving past us in both directions. Up the beach a bulldozer was moving sand around near a new playground.

"He's not worth this, Angel," I said. "He's got no spine."

"I love him," she said and shrugged. The rocker moved a little again and then stopped.

I thought about Muriel, her face scraped bare of anything but hurt. I looked at Angel. Would Angel forgive that too, another woman. Hell, another wife. This creep had two wives crazy about him. I was on my way to having none. "You wouldn't have a guess where he might be?" I said.

She shook her head.

"He'll come back here, though," she said. "Sooner or later."

"I'm not so sure, Angel," I said, "that he didn't kill Lippy."

"He wouldn't," she said.

"And if he killed Lippy he might have killed Lola."

Angel simply shook her head, grimly, and stared at the beach.

There wasn't anything else to say. If he'd killed Lola and I'd helped him get away then I was on the hook for Lippy as much as he was. I tried a wry smile at her and turned and went away from there. When I glanced back she was still staring at the beach, motionless.

I drove from Venice downtown to see Bernie Ohls. He was in his cubicle. Empty desk with a phone on it, swivel chair, hat on a hook on the back of the door.

"Harlan Potter spring you?" he said when I came in. "Or you tu

"Potter," I said.

"Bet he and his daughter were happy about that," Ohls said.

"Like spawning salmon," I said. I sat in the plain chair opposite the desk. There were no pictures on the walls, no citation, not even a window. Ohls had killed at least nine men that I knew of, several when they thought he was covered.

The office was as blank as a waiter's stare.

"You're not looking too good, Marlowe," Ohls said. "You look like a man who didn't sleep well, who had a lousy breakfast."

"Les Valentine and Larry Victor are the same guy," I said.

Ohls was sitting with one foot cocked on the open lower drawer of his desk. He took his foot off the drawer and swiveled the chair around and slowly placed both feet on the ground.

"Is that a fact?" he said. I could see him turning this over in his mind.

"Aren't they both married?" Ohls said.