Poodle Springs

"Yeah," I said. "I barely escaped with my life last time."

Her face said she didn't remember too much about last time.

"I was at your house," I said, "asking you about a photographer named Les Valentine."

"I was on a toot," she said.

"Yeah. You suggested, as I recall, that I might want to toot along with you."

If she remembered she didn't show it. There was no sign of embarrassment.

"Tommy hates that," she said. She didn't sound like she cared if Tommy hated that or not. "So what do you want, Marlowe? Or are you one of those guys gets his rocks off talking to a woman while you look at her nude picture?"

"That's one of my favorites," I said. "But this time I'm trying to get a handle on Larry Victor."

She cocked her head and looked at me for a moment.

"Larry? How come?"

"Case I'm working on," I said.

"You're not trying to shake me down?"

"I wouldn't dare," I said. "What can you tell me about Larry?"

"A full-fledged creepster," Sondra said. "Took third-rate pictures and couldn't make a living except doing nudes for skin magazines and adult bookstores. He shot a lot of us when we were new, trying to make a living, trying to get noticed. He had a nice line, scored a lot of the models. God knows why-he wore a toupee and his hands sweated all the time. But…" She shrugged. "Takes all kinds."

"And he'd keep prints and if you got to be an important model," I said, "he'd try to blackmail you."

"Or if you got into pictures," she said. "Studios were always worried about that stuff. Kids that got into pictures probably did pay off."

"Not a bad racket, then. Sells the product once and in some cases sells it again for more, later."

"Like a growth stock," Sondra said. She smiled and took a drag on her cigarette and held the smoke for a long moment, then let it slide out through the smile. "Only times changed. Pretty soon no one much cared if you showed your tush in public and Larry's business took a nosedive."

"Outmoded by changing times," I said, "like livery stables. Did you know he'd gotten married?"

"I lost track of Larry a while back, as soon as I climbed out of the gutter he works in."

"And you don't know a photographer named Les Valentine?"

"No."

"Muriel Valentine? Muriel Blackstone? Angel Victor?"

As I did the names, Sondra kept shaking her head.

"Any close friends from the old days you'd remember?" I said.

She laughed shortly. "Friends? Not that you'd notice. If the little creep had any friends they were likely to be women." She shook her head again. "I never understood that," she said.

"You can't remember any names?" I said.

She dragged in some more smoke and blew it out in a big puff. She shook her head.

"No," she said, "I can't."

"And you wouldn't have a guess where he might be now?"

"Is that it? she said. "He's missing?"

I nodded.

"No," she said. "No. I'd have no idea."

I was still holding her picture. I gave it to her. She took it and looked at it.

"I was a piece of work in those days," she said.

"Still are," I said.

She smiled at me. "Thanks," she said. I turned toward the door.

"Marlowe," she said.

I stopped with one hand on the doorknob and turned to look at her.

"I remember every detail of what happened when you visited me last time," she said.

"Me too," I said.

She smiled at me. "The offer still holds," she said.

"Thanks," I said and gave her my killer grin and left.

31

I went back up Westwood to the Village and then onto Weyburn and up Hilgard past UCLA to Sunset and drove east.

I barely knew Larry Victor and I was getting very sick of him already. My marriage was in trouble, the cops were in a contest to see who had the best plan for locking me up the longest, Clayton Blackstone and Eddie Garcia were lurking in the corners and everything I learned about Larry Victor made me wonder why I was taking any trouble for him at all. Maybe he had killed Lola, maybe he was stupid enough to kill her in his office. Maybe he killed Lippy too, maybe he was tougher than I thought he was. If a guy was stupid enough to kill a woman in his own office after recently arguing with her in public, was he smart enough to get the two bodyguards out of the way in order to kill Lippy while they had a drink and Lippy looked out the window?

I passed the pink stucco silliness of the Beverly Hills Hotel, half hidden by palm trees. On both sides of Sunset were big homes, expensive and ugly in that special way that Southern California money finds to combine both. Movie stars, directors, producers, agents, people who had found a way to package emptiness and sell it as dreams.

Lola had to have been blackmailing Larry, with a picture. And she wouldn't have been so dumb as to go to the meeting with her only copy. She must have had a back-up. So where was it? I had tossed her house like a Caesar salad and found nothing. Not a crouton. So where would she hide it? Where would I hide something like that?

I was on the strip now, billboards of singers I'd never heard of, boutiques dickied up to look like French country cottages. At Horn Ave a guy with long curly black hair turned onto Sunset driving a two-seater sports car that was longer than my Olds. He squealed rubber as he floored it for fifty yards before he had to brake for a stoplight. The car was ugly, impractical, ostentatious, uneconomical and badly designed for city driving, but it was expensive.

I drove on through Hollywood and swung up Ken-more to Lola's house. I had a thought.

The lawn looked a little more unkempt, but everything else seemed the same. People die, hearts break, dynasties fall on their kisser, and the grass keeps growing a little at a time, and the fronts of houses weather very slowly. I parked out front and walked up the front steps and stood under the cooling overhang. The mailbox was stuffed with mail that Lola would never read; some catalogues and advertising flyers had collected on the floor under the mailbox. Clearly no one had notified the post office. I took the envelopes out of the mailbox. Most of them were bills; there was nothing personal among them. I opened the door again the same way I had last time and went in, again. It was as I had left it. I put the mail on the hall table and looked around the house. Last time I'd been looking for a picture. This time I was looking for something else, a key, a receipt, something to tell me where she hid the picture. It had to be there. And it was. After an hour I found it. In among the unpaid bills stuffed into a pigeonhole in the old desk in her den was a receipt from the parcel room at Union Station.

It took me half an hour to get to Union Station and park and find the checked-luggage office and present my receipt. A black man of many years shuffled back into the catacombs of storage and emerged after maybe three weeks with a flat manila envelope sealed with transparent tape along the flap. Lola Faithful was scrawled in a big flowery hand across the face of the envelope. The I in Faithful was dotted with a big circle. I took the envelope and went and sat in the waiting room on an empty bench and opened the envelope. There was an 8 X 10 glossy, and a small glassine envelope with a negative. The glossy was a picture of Muriel Blackstone Valentine wearing high-heeled leather boots and nothing else. Naked, the body was all it promised to be. She was smiling a seductive smile that was skewed a little and her eyes were glassy. I held the negative up and looked at it against the light. It matched. I put the negative and the print back in the manila envelope and headed out under the arches, past the cab stand toward where I'd parked my car.