***Out In The Be-Bop Noir Night -The Red Wind-Take Two

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

 

Old sailors, old tars who have roamed all the seas, seven at last count, who have been in every port, been in every port gin mill, whorehouse and greasy spoon, claim that the red wind, a blood red wind coming from the land not that blue pink goodnight ocean sky wind  means nothing but trouble, trouble with a big T. Of course they assume all their troubles are land-bound but that is a separate question. Their take is this, and maybe they are right, that those red winds, the winds coming out of some Santa Ana enclave make people jittery, make them nervous, make them ready to do each and every thing they would not dream of doing in calmer times. Make Walter Mitty-types feisty ready to give hell and brimstone class war to their bosses (in their dreams anyway), make docile children rise up like Cain slayed Abel (and create mother pick-up messes worthy of such titantic struggles, make sweet mother home-makers reach for some rolling pin to level a miscreant, fill- in- the- blank. Make a woman practice with her trigger finger maybe at that same fill-in-the-blank. Just in case.

Yes that ill-wind, that hell wind seemingly from the bowels of the earth makes the citizenry of the city of angels, L.A. town, do screwy foul things right up to and including murder if need be. Philip Marlowe, the tough old gumshoe, the seedy, has-been private eye, the shamus, found reason to believe those old seadogs were on to something when the winds, the red winds, no question, blew across his city of angels, disrupted the old time Los Angeles night, his night, one October week back in 1939, back before the war made the whole town crazy with or without winds.        

Hell, to think of it, who would have thought that going out for a few cold ones, a few brews, to take the ever present swirling dust off the night at a newly opened corner bar in the neighborhood, the old Bunker Hill neighborhood where Marlowe called home would lead to murder. He had sat on his stool there minding his own business nursing his second beer when this guy Warden came in, came in looking for a dame. No, not some bar girl or some street tart but an upscale woman looking like something out of Vanity Fair and smelling, well, smelling of sandalwood. If anybody was asking, just a faint whiff of sandalwood behind the ears just like it is supposed to be applied. He asked the bar- tender and then Marlowe if they had seen such a twist (his term). They answered no, although Marlowe wished just then that he had. For his efforts in trying to meet that dame, for coming out of the red wind night howling outside, old brother Warden was waylaid and shot point blank by a guy also nursing a few drinks at one of the tables. That scene made no sense under normal circumstances but in the blood red night something was breezing ill. 

Naturally, after the police, the cops, in the person of one hard-nosed Homicide Detective Smythe who had no love for private dicks as he called them, especially Marlowe since the good detective had gotten his nose bent out of shape in the Gilbert murder case, finished rumbling him up, practically calling him the perpetrator, or in cahoots with the hard guy, our boy Marlowe was up for anything that would shed like on what the hell had happened before his eyes. See, not only did that lamster plug Warden but he wanted to put two between the eyes of one Philip Marlowe (and the newly minted bar- owner too) to erase any witnesses to his dastardly deed. Just for the record that barroom killing was nothing but a settling of old scores by a guy, Detroit Red, who believed, and believed correctly as it turned out that Warden had dropped a dime on him back East. A dime which sent him to Sing Sing for a nickel on an armed robbery rap and is of no further interest to us.

Except this, Marlowe, for professional pride, and rightly so, took umbrage at that notion that he could be rubbed out for drinking a friendly beer in his own damn neighborhood. He moreover was taken with the intriguing idea that some femme, some femme with that essence of sandalwood surrounding her was out in the red wind night. Maybe needing help, maybe needing windmill-chasing help, maybe needed some comfort between the sheets if it came to that. It was that kind of night, and he had those kinds of feelings. And so our boy traced Warden’s movements back from his entry into the barroom, back to his car, back to his apartment, and finally coming up with some clover, back to her.     

This is the way it went down. This Warden was nothing but a grifter, an ex-con with expensive habits, a dope thing. Inhaling more cocaine than he was selling, always a bad mix. He had landed in jail on some lightweight drug charge up in Oregon and did some time with Richard Baxter, yes, the Richard Baxter who controlled the whole political machine on the sunny slumming angels streets of the town. This Baxter, obviously did not want that hard fact of hard time known around town, among the many other little things that he wanted kept secret. Warden’s grift though was to get to Baxter through his wife Lola, the woman of the sandalwood night. See Baxter had picked her up on the rebound after her true love bit the dust down Mexico way flying stuff  (guess what stuff ) in and out.

That pilot love had been working off and on for Baxter as well until Baxter got wise to his old time flame relationship with Lola so wonder if you want to about the nature of that plane crash. No one, no one over the age of seven, would put it past Baxter. Warden, a resourceful sort in a crude way, stole a certain pearl necklace of Lola’s to grab some dough. In any case the pay-off to Warden was dough, big dough, for the pearl necklace that this fly boy had given Lola as sign of undying devotion. Lola was the woman Warden was looking to meet at the bar before he died in a hail of bullets.         

Lola, still without her necklace after the aborted meet with Warden, then hired Philip to retrieve the item and keep the recovery on the hush. Naturally Marlowe’s code of honor required that he adhere to that bargain, and find the necklace which he did. As well run a little off-hand romance with the lovely lonely, ethereal Lola. That dream about downy billows with that fragrance worked itself out nicely once she saw she could trust Marlowe. Baxter who had his tentacles everywhere in his domain found out about Lola and the pearls, the potential expose of his jail-bird time, and her little tryst with Marlowe and was determined to do something about the matter.

Men like Richard Baxter do not get where they wind up without walking over a pile of corpses and so he confronted Lola and Philip in her bedroom one night, gun in hand. Somehow Lola diverted Baxter’s attention long enough to let Marlowe to take a shot at him, a fatal shot, taking a couple of slugs herself in the melee. She died in Philip’s arms clutching that necklace. As for the necklace that old time fly boy love told Lola it had been worth big dough. Philip found out it was glass, worthless. Yes, Marlowe mused those navies were right, those dry red winds meant nothing but trouble, trouble with a big T.