17
About twenty miles north of the pass a wide boulevard with flowering moss in the parkways turned towards the foothills. It ran for five blocks and died—without a house in its entire length. From its end a curving asphalt road dove into the hills. This was Idle Valley.
Around the shoulder of the first hill there was a low white building with a tiled roof beside the road. It had a roofed porch and a floodlighted sign on it read: Idle Valley Patrol. Open gates were folded back on the shoulders of the road, in the middle of which a square white sign standing on its point said STOP in letters sprinkled with reflector buttons. Another floodlight blistered the space of road in front of the sign.
I stopped. A uniformed man with a star and a strapped-on gun in a woven leather holster looked at my car, then at a board on a post.
He came over to the car. “Good evening. I don’t have your car. This is a private road. Visiting?”
“Going to the club.”
“Which one?”
“Idle Valley Club.”
“Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. That’s what we call it here. You mean Mr. Morny’s place?”
“Right.”
“You’re not a member, I guess.”
“No.”
“I have to check you in. To somebody who is a member or to somebody who lives in the valley. All private property here, you know.”
“No gate crashers, huh?”
He smiled. “No gate crashers.”
“The name is Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Calling on Eddie Prue.”
“Prue?”
“He’s Mr. Morny’s secretary. Or something.”
“Just a minute, please.”
He went to the door of the building, and spoke. Another uniformed man inside, plugged in on a PBX. A car came up behind me and honked. The clack of a typewriter came from the open door of the patrol office. The man who had spoken to me looked at the honking car and waved it in. It slid around me and scooted off into the dark, a green long open convertible sedan with three dizzy-looking dames in the front seat, all cigarettes and arched eyebrows and go-to-hell expressions. The car flashed around a curve and was gone.
The uniformed man came back to me and put a hand on the car door. “Okay, Mr. Marlowe. Check with the officer at the club, please. A mile ahead on your right. There’s a lighted parking lot and the number on the wall. Just the number. Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. Check with the officer there, please.”
I said: “Why would I do that?”
He was very calm, very polite, and very firm. “We have to know exactly where you go. There’s a great deal to protect in Idle Valley.”
“Suppose I don’t check with him?”
“You kidding me?” His voice hardened.
“No. I just wanted to know.”
“A couple of cruisers would start looking for you.”
“How many are you in the patrol?”
“Sorry,” he said. “About a mile ahead on the right, Mr. Marlowe.”
I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the special badge pinned to his shirt. “And they call this a democracy,” I said.
He looked behind him and then spat on the ground and put a hand on the sill of the car door. “Maybe you got company,” he said. “I knew a fellow belonged to the John Reed Club. Over in Boyle Heights, it was.”
“Tovarich,” I said.
“The trouble with revolutions,” he said, “is that they get in the hands of the wrong people.”
“Check,” I said.
“On the other hand,” he said, “could they be any wronger than the bunch of rich phonies that live around here?”
“Maybe you’ll be living in here yourself someday,” I said. He spat again. “I wouldn’t live in here if they paid me fifty thousand a year and let me sleep in chiffon pajamas with a string of matched pink pearls around my neck.”
“I’d hate to make you the offer,” I said.
“You make me the offer any time,” he said. “Day or night. Just make me the offer and see what it gets you.”
“Well, I’ll run along now and check with the officer of the club,” I said.
“Tell him to go spit up his left pants leg,” he said. “Tell him I said so.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
A car came up behind and honked. I drove on. Half a block of dark limousine blew me off the road with its horn and went past me making a noise like dead leaves falling.
The wind was quiet out here and the valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as if they had been cut with an engraving tool.
Around the curve the whole valley spread out before me. A thousand white houses built up and down the hills, ten thousand lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close, on account of the patrol.
The wall of the club building that faced the road was white and blank, with no entrance door, no windows on the lower floor. The number was small but bright in violet-colored neon. 8777. Nothing else. To the side, under rows of hooded, downward-shining lights, were even rows of cars set out in the white lined slots on the smooth black asphzalt. Attendants in crisp clean uniforms moved in the lights.
The road went around to the back. A deep concrete porch there, with an overhanging canopy of glass and chromium, but very dim lights. I got out of the car and received a check with the license number on it, carried it over to a small desk where a uniformed man sat and dumped it in front of him.
“Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Visitor.”
“Thank you, Mr. Marlowe.” He wrote the name and number down, handed me back my check and picked up a telephone.
A Negro in a white linen doublebreasted guards uniform, gold epaulettes, a cap with a broad gold band, opened the door for me.
The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail. Under the beautiful soft indirect lighting the walls seemed to go up forever and to be lost in soft lascivious stars that really twinkled. You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders. At the back was a free-arched stairway with a chromium and white enamel gangway going up in wide shallow carpeted steps. At the entrance to the dining room a chubby captain of waiters stood negligently with a two-inch satin stripe on his pants and a bunch of gold-plated menus under his arm. He had the sort of face that can turn from a polite simper to coldblooded fury almost without moving a muscle.
The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved mothlike against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blond in a dress that looked like seawater sifted over with gold dust came out of the Ladies’ Room touching up her lips and turned toward the arch, humming.
The sound of rhumba music came through the archway and she nodded her gold head in time to it, smiling. A short fat man with a red face and glittering eyes waited for her with a white wrap over his arm. He dug his thick fingers into her bare arm and leered up at her.
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.
I went into the bar and sank into a leather bar seat packed with down. Glasses tinkled gently, lights glowed softly, there were quiet voices whispering of love, or ten per cent, or whatever they whisper about in a place like that.
A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse one of the barmen. He cursed him in a loud clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rhumba music like a shovel through snow.
The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman.
The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing in his face but pallor. Then he turned to me and said:
“Yes, sir?”
“I want to talk to a fellow named Eddie Prue.”
“So?”
“He works here,” I said.
“Works here doing what?” His voice was perfectly level and as dry as dry sand.
“I understand he’s the guy that walks behind the boss. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Eddie Prue.” He moved one lip slowly over the other and made small tight circles on the bar with his bar cloth.
“Your name?”
“Marlowe.”
“Marlowe. Drink while waiting?”
“A dry martini will do.”
“A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.”
“Okay.”
“Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?”
“Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.”
“On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?”
“Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “A dry martini.”
He took three steps away from me and then came back and leaned across the bar and said: “I made a mistake in a drink. The gentleman was telling me about it.”
“I heard him.”
“He was telling me about it as gentlemen tell you about things like that. As big shot directors like to point out to you your little errors. And you heard him.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how long this was going to go on.
“He made himself heard—the gentleman did. So I come over here and practically insult you.”
“I got the idea,” I said.
He held up one of his fingers and looked at it thoughtfully.
“Just like that,” he said. “A perfect stranger.”
“It’s my big brown eyes,” I said. “They have that gentle look.”
“Thanks, chum,” he said, and quietly went away.
I saw him talking into a phone at the end of the bar. Then I saw him working with a shaker. When he came back with the drink he was all right again.