Benjamin Black: The Black-Eyed Blonde

It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it’s being watched. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the sidewalk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere. I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. She wore a hat, too, a skimpy affair that made it seem as if a small bird had alighted on the side of her hair and settled there happily. She looked left and right and left again — she must have been so good when she was a little girl — then crossed the sunlit street, treading gracefully on her own shadow.

So far it had been a lean season. I had done a week playing bodyguard to a guy who had flown in from New York on the clipper. He had a blue jaw and wore a gold wristband and a pinkie ring with a ruby in it as big as a boysenberry. He said he was a businessman and I decided to believe him. He was worried, and sweated a lot, but nothing happened and I got paid. Then Bernie Ohls in the Sheriff’s office put me in touch with a nice little old lady whose hophead son had pinched her late husband’s rare coin collection. I had to apply a little muscle to get the goods back, but nothing serious. There was a coin in there with the head of Alexander the Great on it, and another one showing Cleopatra in profile, with that big nose of hers — what did they all see in her?

The buzzer sounded to announce that the outer door had opened, and I heard a woman walk across the waiting room and pause a moment at the door of my office. The sound of high heels on a wooden floor always gets something going in me. I was about to call to her to come in, using my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me-I’m-a-detective voice, when she came in anyway, without knocking.

She was taller than she had seemed when I saw her from the window, tall and slender with broad shoulders and trim hips. My type, in other words. The hat she wore had a veil, a dainty visor of spotted black silk that stopped at the tip of her nose — and a nice tip it was, to a very nice nose, aristocratic but not too narrow or too long, and nothing at all like Cleopatra’s jumbo schnozzle. She wore elbow-length gloves, pale cream to match her jacket, and fashioned from the hide of some rare creature that had spent its brief life bounding delicately over Alpine crags. She had a good smile, friendly, so far as it went, and a little lopsided in an attractively sardonic way. Her hair was blond and her eyes were black, black and deep as a mountain lake, the lids exquisitely tapered at their outer corners. A blonde with black eyes — that’s not a combination you get very often. I tried not to look at her legs. Obviously the god of Tuesday afternoons had decided I deserved a little lift.

“The name is Cavendish,” she said.

I invited her to sit down. If I’d known it was me she was coming to call on, I would have brushed my hair and applied a dab of bay rum behind my earlobes. But she had to take me as I was. She didn’t seem to disapprove too much of what she was seeing. She sat down in front of my desk on the chair I had pointed her to and took off her gloves finger by finger, studying me with her steady black eyes.

“What can I do for you, Miss Cavendish?” I asked.

“Mrs.”

“Sorry — Mrs. Cavendish.”

“A friend told me about you.”

“Oh, yes? Good things, I hope.”

I offered her one of the Camels I keep in a box on my desk for clients, but she opened her patent leather purse and took out a silver case and flipped it open with her thumb. Sobranie Black Russian — what else? When I struck a match and offered it across the desk she leaned forward and bent her head, with dipped lashes, and touched a fingertip briefly to the back of my hand. I admired her pearl-pink nail polish, but didn’t say so. She sat back in the chair and crossed her legs under the narrow blue skirt and gave me that coolly appraising look again. She was taking her time in deciding what she should make of me.

“I want you to find someone,” she said.

“Right. Who would that be?”

“A man named Peterson — Nico Peterson.”

“Friend of yours?”

“He used to be my lover.”

If she expected me to swallow my teeth in shock, she was disappointed. “Used to be?” I said.

“Yes. He disappeared, rather mysteriously, without even saying goodbye.”

“When was this?”

“Two months ago.”

Why had she waited so long before coming to me? I decided not to ask her, or not yet, anyway. It gave me a funny feeling, being looked at by those cool eyes behind the veil’s transparent black mesh. It was like being watched through a secret window; watched, and measured.

“You say he disappeared,” I said. “You mean out of your life, or altogether?”

“Both, it seems.”

I waited for more, but she only leaned back a farther inch or so and smiled again. That smile: it was like something she had set a match to a long time ago and then left to smolder on by itself. She had a lovely upper lip, prominent, like a baby’s, soft-looking and a little swollen, as if she had done a lot of kissing recently, and not kissing babies, either. She must have sensed my unease about the veil, and put up a hand now and lifted it away from her face. Without it, the eyes were even more striking, a lustrous shade of seal-black that made something catch in my throat.

“So tell me about him,” I said, “your Mr. Peterson.”

“Tallish, like you. Dark. Handsome, in a weak sort of way. Wears a silly mustache, Don Ameche — style. Dresses nicely, or used to, when I had a say in the matter.”

She had taken a short ebony holder from her purse and was fitting the Black Russian into it. Deft, those fingers; slender, but with strength in them.

“What does he do?” I asked.

She glanced at me with a steely twinkle. “For a living, you mean?” She pondered the question. “He sees people,” she said.

This time I leaned back in my chair. “How do you mean?” I asked.

“Just what I say. Practically every time I saw him, he was about to leave urgently. I gotta see this guy. There’s this guy I gotta go see. ” She was a good mimic; I was beginning to get a picture of Mr. Peterson. He didn’t sound like her type.

“A busy fellow, then,” I said.

“His busyness had few results, I’m afraid. At any rate, not results that you’d notice, or that I noticed, anyway. If you ask him, he’ll tell you he’s an agent to the stars. The people he had to see so urgently were usually connected to one of the studios.”

It was interesting, the way she kept switching tenses. All the same, I had the impression that he was very much the past, for her, this Peterson bird. So why did she want him found?

“He’s in the movie business?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say in . Sort of scrabbling at the edges with his fingertips. He had some success with Mandy Rogers.”

“Should I know the name?”

“Starlet — ingénue, Nico would say. Think Jean Harlow without the talent.”

“Jean Harlow had talent?”

She smiled at that. “Nico is firmly of the belief that all his geese are swans.”

I got out my pipe and filled it. It struck me that the tobacco blend I was using had some Cavendish in it. I decided not to share this happy coincidence with her, imagining the jaded smile and the twitch of disdain at the corner of her mouth that would greet it.