Playback
Authors: Raymond Chandler
RAYMOND
CHANDLER
PLAYBACK
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
TO JEAN AND HELGA
ONE
The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn’t hear too well what it said—partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down. I fumbled it around and grunted.
“Did you hear me? I said I was Clyde Umney, the lawyer.”
“Clyde Umney, the lawyer. I thought we had several of them.”
“You’re Marlowe, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” I looked at my wrist watch. It was 6:30
A.M.,
not my best hour.
“Don’t get fresh with me, young man.”
“Sorry, Mr. Umney. But I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee. What can I do for you, sir?”
“I want you to meet the Super Chief at eight o’clock, identify a girl among the passengers, follow her until she checks in somewhere, and then report to me. Is that clear?”
“No.”
“Why not?” he snapped.
“I don’t know enough to be sure I could accept the case.”
“I’m Clyde Um—”
“Don’t,” I interrupted. “I might get hysterical. Just tell me the basic facts. Perhaps another investigator would suit you better. I never was an FBI man.”
“Oh. My secretary, Miss Vermilyea, will be at your office in half an hour. She will have the necessary information for you. She is very efficient. I hope you are.”
“I’m more efficient when I’ve had breakfast. Have her come here, would you?”
“Where is here?”
I gave him the address of my place on Yucca Avenue, and told him how she would find it.
“Very well,” he said grudgingly, “but I want one thing very clear. The girl is not to know she is being followed. This is very important. I am acting for a very influential firm of Washington attorneys. Miss Vermilyea will advance you some expense money and pay you a retainer of two hundred and fifty dollars. I expect a high degree of efficiency. And let’s not waste time talking.”
“I’ll do the best I can, Mr. Umney.”
He hung up. I struggled out of bed, showered, shaved and was nuzzling my third cup of coffee when the door bell rang.
“I’m Miss Vermilyea, Mr. Umney’s secretary,” she said in a rather chintzy voice.
“Please come in.”
She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked at me as if I had said a dirty word. I helped her off with her raincoat. She smelled very nice. She had a pair of legs—so far as I could determine—that were not painful to look at. She wore night sheer stockings. I stared at them rather intently, especially when she crossed her legs and held out a cigarette to be lighted.
“Christian Dior,” she said, reading my rather open mind. “I never wear anything else. A light, please.”
“You’re wearing a lot more today,” I said snapping a lighter for her.
“I don’t greatly care for passes this early in the morning.”
“What time would suit you, Miss Vermilyea?”
She smiled rather acidly, inventoried her handbag and tossed me a manila envelope. “I think you’ll find everything you need in this.”
“Well—not quite everything.”
“Get on with it, you goof. I’ve heard all about you. Why do you think Mr. Umney chose you? He didn’t. I did. And stop looking at my legs.”
I opened the envelope. It contained another sealed envelope and two checks made out to me. One, for $250, was marked “Retainer, as an advance against fees for professional services.” The other was for $200 and was marked “Advance to Philip Marlowe for necessary expenses.”
“You will account for the expenses to me, in exact detail,” Miss Vermilyea said. “And buy your own drinks.”
The other envelope I didn’t open—not yet. “What makes Umney think I’ll take a case I know nothing about?”
“You’ll take it. You’re not asked to do anything wrong. You have my word for that.”
“What else do I have?”
“Oh, we might discuss that over a drink some rainy evening, when I’m not too busy.”
“You’ve sold me.”
I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one.
“Turn it over,” Miss Vermilyea said.
On the back there was clearly typed material.
“Name: Eleanor King: Height five feet four inches. Age about 29. Hair dark reddish brown, thick, with a natural wave. Erect carriage, low distinct voice, well dressed but not overdressed. Conservative make-up. No visible scars. Characteristic mannerisms: habit of moving her eyes without moving her head when entering a room. Scratches palm of right hand when tense. Left-handed but adept in concealing it. Plays fast tennis, swims and dives beautifully, holds her liquor. No convictions, but prints on file.”
“Been in the coop,” I said, looking up at Miss Vermilyea.
“I have no information beyond what is there. Just follow your instructions.”
“No name, Miss Vermilyea. At twenty-nine a dish like this would almost certainly have been married. There’s no mention of a wedding ring or any other jewels. That makes me wonder.”
She glanced at her watch. “Better do your wondering at the Union Station. You haven’t much time.” She stood up. I helped her on with her white raincoat and opened the door.
“You came in your own car?”
“Yes.” She went halfway out and turned. “There’s one thing I like about you. You don’t paw. And you have nice manners—in a way.”
“It’s a rotten technique—to paw.”
“And there’s one thing I don’t like about you. Guess what it is.”
“Sorry. No idea—except that some people hate me for being alive.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
I followed her down the steps and opened her car door for her. It was a cheap job, a Fleetwood Cadillac. She nodded briefly and slid down the hill.
I went back up and loaded a few things into an overnight bag, just in case.
TWO
There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket. She wasn’t carrying anything but a paperback which she dumped in the first trash can she came to. She sat down and looked at the floor. An unhappy girl, if ever I saw one. After a while she got up and went to the book rack. She left it without picking anything out, glanced at the big clock on the wall and shut herself in a telephone booth. She talked to someone after putting a handful of silver into the slot. Her expression didn’t change at all. She hung up and went to the magazine rack, picked up a
New Yorker,
looked at her watch again, and sat down to read.
She was wearing a midnight blue tailor-made suit with a white blouse showing at the neck and a big sapphire blue lapel pin which would probably have matched her earrings, if I could see her ears. Her hair was a dusky red. She looked like her photograph, but a little taller than I expected. Her dark blue ribbon hat had a short veil hanging from it. She was wearing gloves.
After a while she moved across the arches outside of which the taxis wait. She looked left at the coffee shop, turned and went into the main waiting room, glanced at the drugstore and newsstand, the information booth, and the people sitting on the clean wooden benches. Some of the ticket windows were open, some not. She wasn’t interested in them. She sat down again and looked up at the big clock. She pulled off her right glove and set her wrist watch, a small plain platinum toy without jewels. Mentally I put Miss Vermilyea beside her. She didn’t look soft or prissy or prudish, but she made the Vermilyea look like a pick-up.
She didn’t stay long sitting down this time, either. She got up and strolled. She went out into the patio and came back and went into the drugstore and stayed some time at the paper-book rack. Two things were obvious. If anyone was going to meet her, the date hadn’t been for train time. She looked like a girl waiting between trains. She went into the coffee shop. She sat down at one of the plastic top tables, read the menu, and then started to read her magazine. A waitress came with the inevitable glass of ice water, and the menu. The subject gave an order. The waitress went away, the subject went on reading her magazine. It was about nine-fifteen.
I went out through the arches to where a redcap was waiting by the taxi starter. “You work the Super Chief?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Part of it.” He glanced without too deep interest at the buck I was teasing with my fingers.
“I was expecting someone on the Washington-San Diego through car. Anybody get off?”
“You mean get off permanent, baggage and all?”
I nodded.
He thought about it, studying me with intelligent chestnut eyes. “One passenger get off,” he said at last.
“What your friend look like?”
I described a man. Someone who looked something like Edward Arnold. The redcap shook his head.
“Can’t help you, mister. What got off don’t look like that at all. Your friend probably still on the train. They don’t have to get off the through car. She gets hitched on to Seventy-Four. Leaves here eleven-thirty. The train ain’t made up yet.”
“Thanks,” I said, and gave him the dollar. The subject’s baggage was still on the train, which was all I wanted to know.
I went back to the coffee shop and looked in through the glass wall.
Subject was reading her magazine and toying with coffee and a snail. I moved over to a phone booth and called a garage I knew well and asked them to send somebody for my car if I didn’t call again by noon. They’d done this often enough to have a spare key on hand. I went out to the car and got my overnight bag out of it and into a two-bit locker. In the enormous waiting room, I bought a round trip to San Diego and trotted back to the coffee shop once again.
Subject was in place, but no longer alone. A guy was across the table from her smiling and talking, and one look was enough to show that she knew him and regretted it. He was California from the tips of his port wine loafers to the buttoned and tieless brown and yellow checked shirt inside his rough cream sports jacket. He was about six feet one, slender, with a thin conceited face and too many teeth. He was twisting a piece of paper in his hand.
The yellow handkerchief in his outside breast pocket sprayed out like a small bunch of daffodils. And one thing was as clear as distilled water. The girl didn’t want him there.
He went on talking and twitching the paper. Finally he shrugged and got up from his chair. He reached over and ran a fingertip down her cheek. She jerked back. Then he opened the twisted paper and laid it carefully down in front of her. He waited, smiling.
Her eyes went down to it very, very slowly. Her eyes held on it. Her hand moved to take it, but his was quicker. He put it away in his pocket, still smiling. Then he took out one of those pocket notebooks with perforated pages, and wrote something with a clip pen and tore the sheet out and put that down in front of her. That she could have. She took it, read it, put it in her purse. At last she looked at him. And at last she smiled at him. My guess was that it took quite an effort. He reached across to pat her hand, then walked away from the table and out.
He shut himself in a phone booth, dialed, and talked for quite a while. He came out, found himself a redcap and went with the redcap to a locker. Out came a light oyster-white suitcase and a matching overnight case. The redcap carried them through the doors to the parking lot and followed him to a sleek two-toned Buick Roadmaster, the solid top convertible type that isn’t convertible. The redcap put the stuff in behind the tipped seat, took his money, went away. The guy in the sports coat and yellow handkerchief got in and backed his car out and then stopped long enough to put on dark glasses and light a cigarette. After that he was gone. I wrote down the license number and went back into the station.
The next hour was three hours long. The girl left the coffee shop and read her magazine in the waiting room. Her mind wasn’t on it. She kept turning back to see what she had read. Part of the time she didn’t read at all, just held the magazine and looked at nothing. I had an early morning edition of the evening paper and behind it I watched her and added up what I had in my head. None of it was solid fact. It just helped to pass the time.
The guy who had sat at the table with her had come off the train, since he had baggage. It could have been her train and he could have been the passenger that got off her car. Her attitude made it pretty clear that she didn’t want him around, and his that that was too bad but if she would glance at his piece of paper she would change her mind. And apparently she did. Since this happened after they got off the train when it could have happened more quietly before, then it followed that he didn’t have his piece of paper on the train.
At this point the girl got up abruptly and went to the newsstand and came back with a pack of cigarettes. She tore it open and lit one. She smoked awkwardly as if she wasn’t used to it, and while she smoked her attitude seemed to change, to become more flashy and hard, as if she was deliberately vulgarizing herself for some purpose. I looked at the wall clock: 10:47. I went on with my thinking.
The twist of paper had looked like a newspaper clipping. She had tried to grab it, he hadn’t let her. Then he had written some words on a piece of blank paper and given them to her and she had looked at him and smiled. Conclusion: the dream-boat had something on her and she had to pretend to like it.
Next point was that earlier on he had left the station and gone somewhere, perhaps to get his car, perhaps to get the clipping, perhaps anything you like. That meant he wasn’t afraid that she would run out on him, and that reinforced the idea that he hadn’t at that time disclosed everything he was holding up his sleeve but had disclosed some of it. Could be he wasn’t sure himself. Had to check. But now having shown her his hole card he had gone off in a Buick with his baggage. Therefore he was no longer afraid of losing her. Whatever held them together was strong enough to keep on holding them.
At 11:05 I tossed all this out of the window and started with a fresh premise. I got nowhere. At 11:10 the public address system said Number Seventy-Four on Track Eleven was now ready to receive passengers for Santa Ana, Oceanside, Del Mar and San Diego. A bunch of people left the waiting room, including the girl. Another bunch was already going through the gate. I watched her through and went back to the phone booths. I dropped my dime and dialed the number of Clyde Umney’s office.
Miss Vermilyea answered by giving the phone number only.
“This is Marlowe. Mr. Umney in?”
Her voice was formal saying: “I’m sorry, Mr. Umney is in court. May I take a message?”
“Am in contact and leaving by train for San Diego, or some intermediate stop. Can’t tell which yet.”
“Thank you. Anything else?”
“Yeah, the sun’s shining and our friend is no more on the lam than you are. She ate breakfast in the coffee shop which has a glass wall towards the concourse. She sat in the waiting room with a hundred and fifty other people. And she could have stayed on the train out of sight.”
“I have all that, thank you. I’ll get it to Mr. Umney as soon as possible. You have no firm opinion then?”
“I have one firm opinion. That you’re holding out on me.”
Her voice changed abruptly. Somebody must have left the office. “Listen, chum, you were hired to do a job. Better do it and do it right. Clyde Umney draws a lot of water in this town.”
“Who wants water, beautiful? I take mine straight with a beer chaser. I might make sweeter music if I was encouraged.”
“You’ll get paid, shamus—if you do a job. Not otherwise. Is that clear?”
“That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me, sweetheart. Goodbye now.”
“Listen, Marlowe,” she said with sudden urgency. “I didn’t mean to be rough with you. This is very important to Clyde Umney. If he doesn’t come through, he might lose a very valuable connection. I was just sounding off.”
“I liked it, Vermilyea. It did things to my subconscious. I’ll call in when I can.”
I hung up, went through the gate, down the ramp, walked about from here to Ventura to get to Track Eleven and climbed aboard a coach that was already full of the drifting cigarette smoke that is so kind to your throat and nearly always leaves you with one good lung. I filled and lit a pipe and added to the general frowst.
The train pulled out, dawdled interminably through the yards and the back stretches of East L.A., picked up a little speed and made its first stop at Santa Ana. Subject did not get off. At Oceanside and Del Mar the same. At San Diego I hopped off quickly, chartered a cab, and then waited eight minutes outside the old Spanish station for the redcaps to come out with the baggage. Then the girl came out too.
She didn’t take a cab. She crossed the street and rounded the corner to a U-Drive outfit and after a longish interval came out again looking disappointed. No driver’s license, no U-drive. You’d think she would have known that.
She took a cab this time and it did a U turn and started north. Mine did the same. I had a little difficulty with my driver about the tail job.
“That’s something you read about in books, mister. We don’t do it in Dago.”
I passed him a fin and the 4 × 2 1/2 photostat of my license. He looked them over, both of them. He looked off up the block.
“Okay, but I report it,” he said. “The dispatcher may report it to the Police Business Office. That’s the way it is here, chum.”
“Sounds like the kind of city I ought to live in,” I said. “And you’ve lost the tail. He turned left two blocks ahead.”
The driver handed me back my wallet. “Lost my left eye,” he said tersely. “What you think a two-way radiophone is for?” He picked it up and talked into it.
He turned left at Ash Street to Highway 101 and we merged with the traffic and kept going at a peaceable forty. I stared at the back of his head.
“You don’t have a worry in the world,” the driver told me over his shoulder. “This five is on top of the fare, huh?”
“Right. And why don’t I have a worry in the world?”
“The passenger’s going to Esmeralda. That’s twelve miles north of here on the ocean front. Destination, unless changed en route—and if it is I’ll get told—a hotel joint called the Rancho Descansado. That’s Spanish for relax, take it easy.”
“Hell, I didn’t need a cab at all,” I said.
“You got to pay for the service, mister. We ain’t buying groceries giving it away.”
“You Mexican?”
“We don’t call ourselves that, mister. We call ourselves Spanish-Americans. Born and raised in the USA. Some of us don’t hardly speak Spanish any more.”
“Es gran lástima,”
I said.
“Una lengua muchísima hermosa.”
He turned his head and grinned.
“Tiene Vd. razón, amigo. Estoy muy bien de acuerdo.”
We went on to Torrance Beach, through there and swung out towards the point. From time to time the hackie talked into his radiophone. He turned his head enough to speak to me again.
“You want to keep out of sight?”
“What about the other driver? Will he tell his passenger she’s being tailed?”
“He ain’t been told hisself. That’s why I asked you.”
“Pass him and get there ahead, if you can. That’s five more on the top.”
“A cinch. He won’t even see me. I can rib him later on over a bottle of Tecate.”
We went through a small shopping center, then the road widened and the houses on one side looked expensive and not new, while the houses on the other side looked very new and still not cheap. The road narrowed again and we were in a 25 mile zone. My driver cut to the right, wound through some narrow streets, jumped a stop sign, and before I had had time to size up where we were going, we were sliding down into a canyon with the Pacific glinting off to the left beyond a wide shallow beach with two lifeguard stations on open metal towers. At the bottom of the canyon the driver started to turn in through the gates, but I stopped him. A large sign, gold script on a green background, said:
El Rancho Descansado.