***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – Gringo Blood  

 

 

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out).

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

One never really associates our tough guy private detective, Stubs Lane, our primo gumshoe, out in the slumming streets of Los Angeles when that port of call was just a dusty burg out in the desert's edge (and the ocean's edge too) with women, women to get involved with romantically and not just some twist who is good for a night or two under the downy billows. Oh sure, Stubs liked women, maybe even had loved one or two in his time, and he was certainly not that way, you know, what did they use to call it, oh yeah, “light on his feet,” no way, not like some Hollywood houseboy or something like that but women are kind of used merely as flowery backdrop. Yeah like in some of those Chandler novels and short stories as damsels in distress or low-down femmes fatales, nothing to get excited over except in that dogged pursuit of some kind of rough justice in this wicked old world. Certainly Stubs was not some closet feminist waiting to proclaim some rough equality of sexes by his very actions. No that was not part of his code.

However every once in a while, and the story ahead is one of them, a past love, a past forlorn or at least unattainable love interest shows up to give us a glimpse of what our man was up to before he got so dogged about that rough justice kick. Naturally, that love interest, Bess, was unattainable back in the day, although a flicker, maybe more than a flicker, remained as the two were reunited under trying circumstances after some time has elapsed. The reason that Bess was unattainable by the way was very easily understood, if not by Stubs then by the reader. She was in love with another man, let's call him Spanish Johnny just to keep things easy, a man who also happened to be our man's best friend back in the day. A guy, a professional politician with some money, who could give Bess things, lots of things. Coming from nowhere with nothing that is what she wanted. So let's just say that Bess played the percentages in the struggle for plenty of life's goods and it came out Johnny. Stubs to the rear.

That long ago romance would have stayed there, stayed down in the embers, except Johnny got himself killed, got murdered, got murdered at close range in his office and everything pointed, on the surface anyway, to a professional hit. A professional hit ordered by the governmental machinery in power in town who wanted to eliminate Johnny because he wanted to end the endemic corruption our 1930s city of angels. To upset their gravy train. But appearances are deceiving, some things just don't add with the evidence at hand. And Stubs has an uneasy feeling that there was something amiss with the political hit theory.

The percentages were against that idea, although the city's political machine was ready to move might and main, including a standard roughing up of Stubs, a serious third degree as it came out later, to keep the lid on things just in case. Or maybe just because they could do it. Here is where things went awry though, awry after a few false leads and a few bodies piled up, Stubs finally coped to what happened on that murderous day when Spanish Johnny took his hit. Seems Johnny was playing footsie with the help, having affair (and previous affairs) and Bess, tried and true Bess, couldn't take that hard fact anymore and so she put two slugs in him to show her displeasure. Johnny lived long enough to mess up the evidence to keep Bess in the clear so Bess must have had, in the end, as big hold over Johnny as she had over Stubs. Stubs let her walk, walk free out of some sense of friendship for the wishes of a fallen brother. And Bess? Well Bess tried to rekindle that old flame thing with Stubs, that old flame thing that had suddenly flickered out cold back when there were choices to be made. Jesus.