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

with a sudden fervent throb in her voice, “how I love it here.”
    We had come out of the trees, onto the beach. The sand was close-packed, and walking on it was not difficult. I knew how out of place I must look, in my dark suit and hat. Clare made me stop and held on to my forearm with one hand as she leaned down to take off her shoes. I thought about what would happen if she was to lose her balance and fall against me, so that I had to catch her in the crook of my arm. It was the kind of fool thought that would come into a man’s head on such occasions. We walked on. She linked her arm through mine again. She was carrying her shoes in her other hand, dangling from the tips of two fingers. There should have been music, a big whoosh of soupy violins, and some guy with a vowel at the end of his name crooning about the sea and the sand and the summer wind and you  …
    “Who was it that told you about me?” I asked. I wasn’t really all that interested, but I wanted to talk about something besides Nico Peterson for a while.
    “A friend.”
    “Yes, you said—but what friend?”
    She bit her lip again. “Someone you know quite well, actually.”
    “Oh?”
    “Linda Loring.”
    That came like a smack in the chops. “You know Linda Loring?” I asked, trying not to sound too surprised—trying not to sound anything. “How?”
    “Oh, from here and there. Ours is a very small world, Mr. Marlowe.”
    “You mean the world of the rich?”
    Was she blushing again? She was. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose that is what I mean.” She paused. “I can’t help it that I have some money, you know.”
    “It’s not my business to blame anyone for anything,” I said, too quickly.
    She smiled and looked sideways into my eyes. “I thought that’s precisely what your business was,” she said.
    My mind was still on Linda Loring. A butterfly the size of a chicken was flapping its wings somewhere in the region of my diaphragm. “I thought Linda was in Paris,” I said.
    “She is. I spoke to her on the telephone. We call each other now and then.”
    “To check up on the latest gossip among the international set, I suppose.”
    She smiled and squeezed my arm against her side reprovingly. “Something like that.”
    We came to a sort of lean-to, like a bus shelter, standing at the edge of the soft sand where the beach met the low dunes. Inside it there was a bench made from a few roughly cut planks, well weathered by the salt wind. “Let’s sit for a moment,” Clare said.
    It was pleasant there, in the shade, with a nice breeze coming up from the water. “This must be a private beach,” I said.
    “Yes, it is. How did you know?”
    I knew because if it had been public, a shelter like this would have been so fouled and littered we wouldn’t have dreamed of sitting in it. Clare Cavendish, I told myself, was one of those people the world shields from its own awfulness.
    “So you told Linda about Nico disappearing and then suddenly resurrecting himself, right?” I said.
    “I didn’t tell her as much as I’ve told you.”
    “You haven’t told me very much.”
    “I’ve admitted to you that Nico and I were lovers.”
    “You think a girl like Linda wouldn’t have guessed that? Come on, Mrs. Cavendish.”
    “I wish you’d call me Clare.”
    “Sorry, but I don’t think I can do that.”
    “Why not?”
    I disengaged my arm from hers and stood up. “Because you’re my client, Mrs. Cavendish. All this”—I waved a hand to take in the shelter, the beach, those busy little birds down at the water’s edge where the pebbles hissed in the wash as if they were on the boil—“all this is very nice, and pretty, and friendly. But the fact is, you came to me with some story about your boyfriend disappearing and you being anxious to trace him, poor thing though he was. Then it turns out Mr. Peterson had done the biggest disappearing trick of all, which you, for whatever reasons of your own, failed to tell me about. Then