Free The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel by Benjamin Black

had fooled me and angled around the corner of the Permanent Insurance Company building and was shining full on the windshield and, of course, the steering wheel. I opened all four windows and drove off fast to get a breeze going, but it didn’t help. What would have happened, I wondered, if somehow the English Pilgrims and not the Spaniards had landed first on this coast? I guess they’d have prayed for rain and low temperatures and the Lord would have heeded them.
    It was cooler at the Palisades, where the ocean was close. I had to ask directions a couple of times before I found the Cahuilla Club. The entrance was up a leafy road at the end of a long high wall with bougainvillea blossoms spilling over it. The gates weren’t electrified, as I’d expected they would be. They were tall, ornate, and gilded. They were open, too, but just inside them a striped wooden pole blocked the way. The gatekeeper stepped out of his little hut and gave me a cheesy look. He was a young fellow in a spiffy beige uniform and a cap with braid on the peak. He had a pin head on top of a long neck and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a Ping-Pong ball when he swallowed.
    I said I was there to see the manager.
    “You got an appointment?” I told him no, and he screwed up his mouth in a funny way and asked my name. I showed him my card. He frowned at it for a long time, as if the information it contained was written in hieroglyphics. He did that thing with his mouth again—it was a kind of soundless gagging—and went into the lodge and spoke briefly on the phone, reading from my card, then came back and pressed a button and the barrier came up. “Keep to the left, where it says ‘Reception,’” he said. “Mr. Hanson will be waiting for you.”
    The drive wound its way beside a long, high wall with hanging masses of bougainvillea. The blossoms here came in a variety of shades, pink, crimson, a delicate mauve. Someone sure was fond of the stuff. There were other things growing, gardenias, and honeysuckle, the odd jacaranda, and orange trees filled the air with their sweet-sharp fragrance.
    The reception area was a log cabin affair with lots of squinty little windows and a red carpet in front of the door. I stepped inside. The air had a piney tang, and flute music was playing softly through hidden speakers in the ceiling. There was no one at the desk, a large and venerable item with stacks of drawers with brass handles and a rectangle of green leather set into the top, the kind of thing an Indian chief might have signed away his tribal lands on. Various items of Americana stood about: a full-length Indian headdress on a special stand, an antique silver spittoon, an ornate saddle on another stand. On the walls were mounted bows and arrows of various designs and sizes, a pair of ivory-handled pistols, and framed photographs by Edward Curtis of noble-looking braves and their dreamy-eyed squaws. I was having a close-up gander at one of these studies—tepees, a campfire, a circle of women with papooses—when I heard a soft step behind me.
    “Mr. Marlowe?”
    Floyd Hanson was tall and slim, with a long, narrow head and oiled black hair brushed smoothly back and with a fetching touch of gray at each temple. He wore high-waisted white slacks with a crease you could cut your finger on, tasseled loafers, a white shirt with a laid-back collar, and a sleeveless sweater in a pattern of big gray diamonds. He stood with his left hand in the side pocket of his slacks and regarded me with a quizzical eye, as if there was something faintly comical about me that he was too polite to laugh at. I suspected it wasn’t personal, that this was how he looked at most things that came under his careful scrutiny.
    “That’s me,” I said. “Philip Marlowe.”
    “What can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe? Marvin, our gateman, tells me you’re a private investigator—is that so?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I used to work for the DA’s office, a long time