The Annotated Big Sleep Page 5

  I stood up and peeled off my coat and got a handkerchief out and mopped my face and neck and the backs of my wrists. St. Louis in August8 had nothing on that place. I sat down again and I felt automatically for a cigarette and then stopped. The old man caught the gesture and smiled faintly.

  “You may smoke, sir. I like the smell of tobacco.”

  I lit the cigarette9 and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a rathole. The faint smile pulled at the shadowed corners of his mouth.

  “A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy,” he said dryly. “You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There’s very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?”

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  The General half-closed his eyes. “They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”10

  I stared at him with my mouth open. The soft wet heat was like a pall around us. The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head. Then the butler came pushing back through the jungle with a teawagon, mixed me a brandy and soda, swathed the copper ice bucket with a damp napkin, and went away softly among the orchids. A door opened and shut behind the jungle.

  I sipped the drink. The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lip slowly across the other with a funereal absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands.

  “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?”

  “Sure, but there’s very little to tell.11 I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it.12 There isn’t much in my trade. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once. His chief investigator, a man named Bernie Ohls, called me and told me you wanted to see me. I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives.”

  “And a little bit of a cynic,” the old man smiled. “You didn’t like working for Wilde?”

  “I was fired. For insubordination.13 I test very high on insubordination, General.”

  “I always did myself, sir. I’m glad to hear it. What do you know about my family?”

  “I’m told you are a widower and have two young daughters, both pretty and both wild. One of them has been married three times, the last time to an ex-bootlegger who went in the trade by the name of Rusty Regan. That’s all I heard, General.”

  “Did any of it strike you as peculiar?”

  “The Rusty Regan part, maybe. But I always got along with bootleggers myself.”14

  He smiled his faint economical smile. “It seems I do too. I’m very fond of Rusty.15 A big curly-headed Irishman from Clonmel,16 with sad eyes and a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard.17 The first time I saw him I thought he might be what you are probably thinking he was, an adventurer who happened to get himself wrapped up in some velvet.”18

  “You must have liked him,” I said. “You learned to talk the language.”19

  He put his thin bloodless hands under the edge of the rug. I put my cigarette stub out and finished my drink.

  “He was the breath of life to me—while he lasted.20 He spent hours with me, sweating like a pig, drinking brandy by the quart and telling me stories of the Irish revolution.21 He had been an officer in the I.R.A.22 He wasn’t even legally in the United States.23 It was a ridiculous marriage of course, and it probably didn’t last a month, as a marriage. I’m telling you the family secrets, Mr. Marlowe.”

  “They’re still secrets,” I said. “What happened to him?”

  The old man looked at me woodenly. “He went away, a month ago. Abruptly, without a word to anyone. Without saying good-bye to me. That hurt a little, but he had been raised in a rough school. I’ll hear from him one of these days. Meantime I am being blackmailed again.”24

  I said: “Again?”

  He brought his hands from under the rug with a brown envelope in them. “I should have been very sorry for anybody who tried to blackmail me while Rusty was around. A few months before he came—that is to say about nine or ten months ago—I paid a man named Joe Brody five thousand dollars to let my younger daughter Carmen alone.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  He moved his thin white eyebrows. “That means what?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He went on staring at me, half frowning. Then he said: “Take this envelope and examine it. And help yourself to the brandy.”

  I took the envelope off his knees and sat down with it again. I wiped off the palms of my hands and turned it around. It was addressed to General Guy Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea25 Crescent, West Hollywood, California. The address was in ink, in the slanted printing engineers use. The envelope was slit. I opened it up and took out a brown card and three slips of stiff paper. The card was of thin brown linen, printed in gold: “Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger.” No address. Very small in the lower left-hand corner: “Rare Books and De Luxe26 Editions.” I turned the card over. More of the slanted printing on the back. “Dear Sir: In spite of the legal uncollectibility of the enclosed, which frankly represent gambling debts, I assume you might wish them honored. Respectfully, A. G. Geiger.”

  I looked at the slips of stiffish white paper. They were promissory notes filled out in ink, dated on several dates early in the month before, September. “On Demand I promise to pay to Arthur Gwynn Geiger or Order the sum of One Thousand Dollars ($1000.00) without interest. Value Received. Carmen Sternwood.”

  The written part was in a sprawling moronic handwriting with a lot of fat curlicues and circles for dots. I mixed myself another drink and sipped it and put the exhibit aside.

  “Your conclusions?” the General asked.

  “I haven’t any yet. Who is this Arthur Gwynn Geiger?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “What does Carmen say?”

  “I haven’t asked her. I don’t intend to. If I did, she would suck her thumb and look coy.”

  I said: “I met her in the hall. She did that to me. Then she tried to sit in my lap.”

  Nothing changed in his expression. His clasped hands rested peacefully on the edge of the rug, and the heat, which made me feel like a New England boiled dinner,27 didn’t seem to make him even warm.

  “Do I have to be polite?” I asked. “Or can I just be natural?”

  “I haven’t noticed that you suffer from many inhibitions, Mr. Marlowe.”

  “Do the two girls run around together?”

  “I think not. I think they go their separate and slightly divergent roads to perdition. Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat.28 Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had. Proceed.”

  “They’re well educated, I suppose. They know what they’re doing.”

  “Vivian went to good schools of the snob type and to college. Carmen went to half a dozen schools of greater and greater liberality,29 and ended up where she started. I presume they both had, and still have, all the usual vices. If I sound a little sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it is because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy.”30 He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, then opened them again suddenly. “I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four31 deserves all he gets.”

  I sipped my drink and nodded. The pulse in his lean gray throat throbbed visibly and yet so slowly that it was hardly a pulse at all. An old man two-thirds dead and still determined to believe he could take it.

  “Y
our conclusions?” he snapped suddenly.

  “I’d pay him.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a question of a little money against a lot of annoyance. There has to be something behind it. But nobody’s going to break your heart, if it hasn’t been done already. And it would take an awful lot of chiselers32 an awful lot of time to rob you of enough so that you’d even notice it.”

  “I have pride, sir,” he said coldly.

  “Somebody’s counting on that.33 It’s the easiest way to fool them. That or the police. Geiger can collect on these notes, unless you can show fraud. Instead of that he makes you a present of them and admits they are gambling debts, which gives you a defense, even if he had kept the notes. If he’s a crook, he knows his onions, and if he’s an honest man doing a little loan business on the side, he ought to have his money. Who was this Joe Brody you paid the five thousand dollars to?”

  “Some kind of gambler. I hardly recall. Norris would know. My butler.”

  “Your daughters have money in their own right, General?”

  “Vivian has, but not a great deal. Carmen is still a minor under her mother’s will. I give them both generous allowances.”

  I said: “I can take this Geiger off your back, General, if that’s what you want. Whoever he is and whatever he has. It may cost you a little money, besides what you pay me. And of course it won’t get you anything. Sugaring them never does. You’re already listed on their book of nice names.”

  “I see.” He shrugged his wide sharp shoulders in the faded red bathrobe. “A moment ago you said pay him. Now you say it won’t get me anything.”

  “I mean it might be cheaper and easier to stand for a certain amount of squeeze. That’s all.”

  “I’m afraid I’m rather an impatient man, Mr. Marlowe. What are your charges?”

  “I get twenty-five a day and expenses34—when I’m lucky.”

  “I see. It seems reasonable enough for removing morbid growths from people’s backs. Quite a delicate operation. You realize that, I hope. You’ll make your operation as little of a shock to the patient as possible? There might be several of them, Mr. Marlowe.”

  I finished my second drink and wiped my lips and my face. The heat didn’t get any less hot with the brandy in me. The General blinked at me and plucked at the edge of his rug.

  “Can I make a deal with this guy, if I think he’s within hooting distance of being on the level?”

  “Yes. The matter is now in your hands. I never do things by halves.”

  “I’ll take him out,” I said. “He’ll think a bridge fell on him.”35

  “I’m sure you will. And now I must excuse myself. I am tired.” He reached out and touched the bell on the arm of his chair. The cord was plugged into a black cable that wound along the side of the deep dark green boxes in which the orchids grew and festered. He closed his eyes, opened them again in a brief bright stare, and settled back among his cushions. The lids dropped again and he didn’t pay any more attention to me.

  I stood up and lifted my coat off the back of the damp wicker chair and went off with it among the orchids, opened the two doors and stood outside in the brisk October air getting myself some oxygen. The chauffeur over by the garage had gone away. The butler came along the red path with smooth light steps and his back as straight as an ironing board. I shrugged into my coat and watched him come.

  He stopped about two feet from me and said gravely: “Mrs. Regan would like to see you before you leave, sir. And in the matter of money the General has instructed me to give you a check for whatever seems desirable.”

  “Instructed you how?”

  He looked puzzled, then he smiled. “Ah, I see, sir. You are, of course, a detective. By the way he rang his bell.”

  “You write his checks?”

  “I have that privilege.”

  “That ought to save you from a pauper’s grave. No money now, thanks. What does Mrs. Regan want to see me about?”

  His blue eyes gave me a smooth level look. “She has a misconception of the purpose of your visit, sir.”

  “Who told her anything about my visit?”

  “Her windows command the greenhouse. She saw us go in. I was obliged to tell her who you were.”

  “I don’t like that,” I said.

  His blue eyes frosted.36 “Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir?”

  “No. But I’m having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.”37

  We stared at each other for a moment. He gave me a blue glare and turned away.

  1. This scene, as well as the meeting with Mrs. Regan in Chapter Three, is reworked from “The Curtain.” For TBS, Chandler inserted the setup for the blackmail plot of “Killer in the Rain” (Black Mask, 1935) and suppressed the plot of “The Curtain,” which will appear only in hints for the first half of TBS with the search for Rusty Regan (Dudley O’Mara in “The Curtain”). In the short story, finding the missing bootlegger is the detective’s task from the start.

  “THE AIR STEAMED”: FROM “THE CURTAIN”

  First published in Black Mask in 1936, this excerpt illustrates Chandler’s process of “cannibalizing” earlier stories as he constructed his novel.

  The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the greenhouse dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

  The butler, who was old and thin and very straight and white-haired, held branches of the plants back for me to pass, and we came to an opening in the middle of the place. A large reddish Turkish rug was spread down on the hexagonal flagstones. In the middle of the rug, in a wheelchair, a very old man sat with the traveling rug around his body and watched us come.

  Nothing lived in his face but the eyes. Black eyes, deep-set, shining, untouchable. The rest of his face was the leaden mask of death, sunken temples, a sharp nose, outward-turning earlobes, a mouth that was a thin white slit. He was wrapped partly in a reddish and very shabby bathrobe and partly in the rug. His hands had purple fingernails and were clasped loosely, motionless on the rug. He had a few scattered wisps of white hair on his skull.

  The butler said: “This is Mr. Carmady, General.”

  2. One of the many symbols of wealth and decadence adorning the Sternwood residence. Orchid-collecting fever swept England and America at the turn of the twentieth century. Edward Doheny, Sr.’s home, three miles from downtown at 8 Chester Place, sported a Tiffany-glass-and-steel-domed conservatory that housed Southern California’s first major orchid collection: more than five thousand specimens collected by Doheny’s wife, Estelle.

  In literature the flowers acquired associations of decay and disease. In J. K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), the sickly, impotent scion of an aristocratic family is smitten by their grotesque forms, “puffy leaves that seemed to be sweating blood and wine” and “sickly blooms” that appeared “ravaged by syphilis or leprosy.” His orchid fever ends in a fantastic dream encounter with a syphilitic orchid woman. In H. G. Wells’s 1894 horror story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid,” the carnivorous flower with roots “like fingers trying to get at you” drugs its victims with its heavy perfume, then sucks their blood.

  Orchids (from Robert Allen Rolfe and Charles Chamberlain Hurst, The Orchid Stud-Book [1909])

  3. Marlowe (no first name until Chapter Eleven) is the literary and moral center of the novels and has become an archetype in the American cultural imagination. But the wisecracking, hard-drinking, cynical private investigator—Bogey’s Marlowe, in a trench coat and fedora—bears only a passing resemblance to Chandler’s Marlowe. Marlowe will later remark of Joe Brody that “his voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.” There Marlowe thinks that a
rival hombre speaks rather like Bogey—stylized, artificial. So he can’t be taking that tone himself. Robert Mitchum also played him tough, though more faithfully wry, in the 1978 Hollywood version (“Meet Philip Marlowe. The toughest private eye who ever wore a trench coat, slapped a dame and split his knuckles on a jawbone,” read the poster). In fact, Chandler wrote that the actor who most resembled the Marlowe in his mind was Cary Grant, one of Hollywood’s most elegant and comely leading men.

  Cary Grant, Chandler’s idea of Marlowe

  The literary Marlowe steps out of an interesting array of sources.

  According to one version given by Chandler, “Marlowe just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person.” The pulp private eyes of Dime Detective, Black Mask, Detective Weekly, and so on gave the bum’s rush to the genteel amateur detectives of previous generations like Sherlock Holmes and Philo Vance (see Introduction for background, and note 19 on this page for those two in particular). The recurring hard-boiled detectives—Carroll John Daly’s Terry Mack (the first hard-boiled private investigator, or PI) and Race Williams, Erle Stanley Gardner’s Ed Jenkins, and Frederick Nebel’s Donahue, for example—were tough and taciturn, virile and violent, and not much else. They provided a very rough outline of the type that Chandler takes and drastically revises.

  Chandler’s biggest influence was unquestionably (and admittedly) Dashiell Hammett, whose Continental Op and Sam Spade first strode across the pages of Black Mask in 1923. Humphrey Bogart played Spade and Marlowe so similarly in the film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and TBS (1946) that People magazine could later ham-handedly laud “Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled private eyes—immortalized on-screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.” In fact, Marlowe’s character is markedly different in many ways from Spade’s. To be sure there are striking similarities: the characters happen to share the same precise height and general stolidity; rely on the smart-alecky turn of phrase; benefit from an uncultivated appeal to women; and disdain the opinions of cops and DAs. The biggest difference is that despite Hammett’s stylistic superiority to the other pulp writers, his Sam Spade actually is the hard-boiled PI that Marlowe only affects, at times, to be. We will see many specific overlaps and divergences as the novel unfolds.