Read The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel for Free Online Page A

epiphanies; I don’t think I’d have recognized a daffodil if I saw one. So when Clare Cavendish suggested a walk in the garden, I had to make an effort not to show how little the prospect excited me. But of course I said yes. If she had asked me to go on a hike in the Himalayas, I’d have put on a pair of mountain boots and followed her.
    After she had pulled the pin and tossed me that grenade about having seen the supposedly dead Peterson, she had gone off to change, leaving me to stand at one of those curved glass walls looking out at the little puffs of white cloud sailing in from the ocean. As she was excusing herself, she had laid three fingers briefly on my wrist, where I could still feel them. If I’d thought before there was something fishy about this whole business, I had a hundred-pound marlin to grapple with now.
    *   *   *
    After fifteen minutes or so and a couple more cigarettes, she came back dressed in a white linen suit with box shoulders and a calf-length skirt. She may have been Irish, but she had all the poise and cool grace of an English rose. She was wearing flat shoes, which made me taller than she was by an extra couple of inches, but I still had that feeling of looking up at her. She wore no jewelry, not even a wedding ring.
    She came up behind me quietly and said, “You probably don’t feel like walking, do you? But I have to get outside—my mind works better in the open air.”
    I might have asked why she needed to have her thinking apparatus in tip-top working order, but I didn’t.
    There was this to be said for the grounds of Langrishe Lodge: they were about as far from a wilderness as they could get and still be covered in greenery, or what would have been greenery if the summer hadn’t turned most of it brown. We set off along a gravel path that led away from the house at a right angle and headed straight as a stretch of railroad toward that stand of trees I’d seen from the road and, farther off, a few flashes of indigo that I knew must be the ocean. “All right, Mrs. Cavendish,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
    I had put more of a grating note into it than I’d meant to, and she gave me a quick sideways glance, her cheeks coloring a little in that way I was getting used to. I frowned and cleared my throat. I felt like a kid on his first date, everything I did a false move.
    We had gone a dozen paces before she spoke. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, “the way you can recognize people instantly, no matter where you are or what the circumstances? You’re walking through Union Station in a rush-hour crowd and you glimpse a face a hundred yards ahead, or maybe not even a face, just the set of someone’s shoulders, the tilt of a head, and immediately you know who it is, even if it’s a person you haven’t seen for years. How is that?”
    “Evolution, I guess,” I said.
    “Evolution?”
    “The need to distinguish friend from foe, even in the depths of the forest. We’re all instinct, Mrs. Cavendish. We think we’re sophisticated, but we’re not—we’re primitives.”
    She gave a faint laugh. “Well, maybe evolution will make something of us someday.”
    “Maybe. But you and I won’t be around to see it.”
    For a moment the sunlight seemed shadowed, and we walked on in a somber silence. “Nice, the oaks,” I said, nodding toward the line of trees ahead of us.
    “Beeches.”
    “Oh. Beeches, then.”
    “Shipped from Ireland, believe it or not, twenty years ago. Where nostalgia is concerned, my mother will spare no expense. They were saplings then, and look at them now.”
    “Yes, look at them now.” I needed a cigarette again, but again the surroundings frowned on the thought. “Where did you see Nico Peterson?” I said.
    She did not reply immediately. As she walked, she looked at the tips of her sensible shoes. “In San Francisco,” she said. “I was there on business—for the firm, you know. It was on Market Street, I was in a taxi, and there he