The Carny Caper- With Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely In Mind

 

By Sam Lowell

Whatever you do don’t let anybody kid you that the life of a real life private detective, shamus, gumshoe, keyhole peeper, private dick or the thousand and one other names I have been called in my life is anything like you see on film, or the television or what you read in those paperback books with the lurid covers showing a some half-naked broad showing just enough cleavage to whet the appetite and some steely-eyed guy with felt hat and a smoking gun coming out of all hands going round and round. Maybe a dead bad guy body on the ground to show that said private dick was doing his job before taking home the prize. And if anybody asks you why I said that then just tell them Ray Robertson (Raymond on my Riverdale Police Department-issues license but Ray to clients and friends alike) a guy who has been on the mean streets of private detection for the past twenty years told you the skinny, told you true, told you in twenty years he never had a case that was close to all that fiction jazz. Never.    

Like a lot of P.I.s (my preferred name from my profession but you call it what you will since you will anyway especially those ill-disposed youth, or former youth now sated with age who lived and died by the names thrown out in those lurid books which never included P.I among them) I started out in the service, in the Army, as Military Police, an MP in the mid-1970s after I got out of high school but that duty was mostly breaking up Saturday night fights at the Enlisted Men’s Club and cleaning up traffic accidents some caused by that same Saturday drunk business. After I got out of the service I tried to get on the Staties here in Massachusetts but didn’t make the grade on the written test to go forward in the training. Tests, written tests not physical tests, were never my strong side. So I latched onto a job with the Gloversville Police which wasn’t as exacting. I did that for a five years until they got themselves a new chief who was all show and who didn’t want to tackle the cocaine problem that was growing in the town (not just the drug itself but the B&Es, the robberies, the A&Bs those clowns did to get their dope money from honest if poor citizens who expected better protection that to have what they had to live with in the neighborhoods day to day get brushed under the rug by some promotion happy chief). So I left that job, that town and good riddance. They still have their drug problem in that town but now it is heroin, and that hot-shot chief turned out to be all front and they still have him there running the show sucking wind.

After taking a couple of courses to catch up on stuff, a few laws, what you can touch and what you can’t which comes under official police work I applied for and got my P.I. license from the Riverdale Police. I grabbed a small office in the old Lawrence Lowell factory building by the river for the cheap rent since the place was seriously in need of repair but I figured anybody who needed my services was not worried about the building, the office décor or the plain desk, two chairs and a couple of wooden file cabinets that had been left behind when the mill went under, went south for the cheap labor and didn’t look back. Didn’t even bother to take the cranky old furniture such as it was. Let me tell you this once I got my license unlike the stuff you see and hear the Chief here told me straight out that he never wanted to hear word one about me messing with anything that even smelled like it involved a police matter, even trying to fix a parking ticket for some bozo client. You know what though the Chief who is still at it although he is close to retirement now could have saved his breathe because I never even stumbled on to as much as a fixed parking ticket in the past twenty years and I have had plenty of cases to keep me going.    

Sure I read all those books, those paperback detective books that I was telling you about before with the half-naked broads and brawny P.Is. And I have re-read them, one recently that I want to tell you about since that particular book is why I am on my high-horse today. I don’t know about the academic part, about where these guys stood in over-all literature but I heard they stood pretty high. I’m talking about Dashiell Hammett, the commie writer who took the fall for Joe Stalin back in the 1950s and spent a few months in jail for not answering questions like a real American would have then and Raymond Chandler who didn’t start writing detective stuff until later in his life, sold insurance of something before. Those guys who best work was before my time, way before, back in the 1930s and 1940s at least that seems to have been when they did their best work had a way of putting a story together that kept me reading until I was done, finished and then I would re-read it again. That was why I wanted to be a cop, a guy who solved the ugly problems of the world. Maybe too like Chandler’s Marlowe I was tilting at windmills myself. Like I said I believed that was what being a cop was about-fixing the ills of society as best you could.    

Every once on a while I get on a kick to re-read those guys and so one night after having been on the road all day trying to find out the whereabouts of a guy who had skipped out on his alimony payments and the irate wife though he might be in Providence where he had grown up hanging around his mother’s house (he wasn’t I never did find him, or didn’t find him before the wife said the hell with him it wasn’t worth the money she was paying me to keep tabs on him) I was too dogged to do any paperwork on that case so I grabbed an old moth-eaten frayed copy of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, the paperback edition with that fetching red-headed doll with her dress half off her shoulder and a snub-nosed gun in her hand that wouldn’t scare a ten-year old kid, a guy on the ground looking very dead and felt-hatted Marlowe with hands up like he was heading for the bastinado. Naturally once I settled into my bed in my studio apartment after having a good stiff drink, the first and last of the day, I read the whole thing through again, this maybe the tenth time I had read it since I was a kid.        

That night’s reading is what got my goat. Let me give a couple of  the highlights and you will know that it was nothing but hogwash, nothing but Chandler blowing smoke, maybe even making fun of the profession since real life guys like me, and there were guys like me then doing the nasty little jobs the coppers couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. Something was wrong about the whole set-up that was for sure. Figure all this action in the book took place in the 1930s although in detective fiction the times aren’t that important, not as important as the continuous action, except the cars then were to die for and I wish I had one of those early Hudsons. Figure L.A. and that is important because some guy said Chandler wrote about that town, about the slumming streets, before it got out of hand like today like nobody’s business.

Marlowe was walking along minding his own business and he see this monster of a guy Moose looking like he just got out of stir, from his complexion Marlowe could tell that he had been in a while, which he had once they met. Moose was kind of shaking his head. Couldn’t figure out what happened to the gin mill that he used to hang out in with his honey, his Velma, a torch-singer and maybe a good time girl on the side. Maybe a broad who took a few guys in the back alley and “played the flute” on them, gave them a smile on their faces. Moose wouldn’t be a guy who cared as long as she tossed the dough his way, and gave him that smile too. But that was then. Nobody knew who the hell Velma was, or cared. The big guy didn’t like that and wasted a guy, a black guy, for not providing the information he was looking for fast enough, or maybe just enough.  Marlowe stepped up to the plate whether he liked it or not. He would find Moose’s Velma, find her no matter what.      

Naturally in Hollywood, then, now, anytime, Velma could have been anything from dead in some potter’s graveyard to the Queen of Sheba. After eight years, so you know why he had that deep prison pallor, Moose’s tough inside eight years, though the trail was as cold as ice. So Marlowe worked his way back, worked back to the rummy wife of the guy that used to own the gin mill when Velma worked there. That mere fact of visiting the old hag, plying her with liquor too, nice touch, Marlowe, wish I had thought of that on a few cases, set off murder and mayhem. See Velma had moved up in the world, had once she unburdened herself of Moose and his pimp ways hit the jackpot, got herself a Mayfair swell, an older guy with plenty of dough, and plenty of forgiveness too when Velma, not exactly a tramp but close, got her wanting habits on. That life was worth protecting, worth killing a pile of guys better that Moose for if you couldn’t figure it out already. And the prime target turned out to be Marlowe. Why? Well he stirred up the pot, he threatened the gravy train. Three people, a guy who could identify photos of Velma back in her back alley tramp days, an emissary from Velma to Marlowe over some bogus story about lost rare jade jewelry stolen in some bogus heist, and that rummy wife took the fall for being in the way, for knowing too much.

And it almost became Marlowe too as in the final show-down at his place, at that run-down studio where Velma played her final hand. Or thought she was playing her final hand. All she did that time was waste old Moose, threw five big slugs into his stomach, who she had actually snitched on for the crime that got him those eight hard years and needed him quieted.   Marlowe only got shot at, missed of course, or the writer has to go to another character in a new series and break a sweat. She got away, for a while, until some P.I. in Baltimore hearing her voice on the radio or seeing her on some gin mill stage and putting two and two together cornered her and she killed herself rather than face the music. But as far as the story goes here is what is amazing. This Velma must have had something men couldn’t resist because while Moose didn’t die with a smile on his face it was close, that rich old goat she married was ready to put up with anything even a column of lovers at her door as long as she stayed with him, and Marlowe, well, Marlowe had had his moments too once he got a whiff of that jasmine or whatever she was wearing that drove every guy, even street-wise guys to distraction.         

But see that is all the story, and a good one. Here is where it breaks down, here is where the so-called romance of the profession gets an unwarranted jump start. Marlowe spent about half the book finding or being around dead people. First the guy who could identify Velma, then Velma’s emissary, then the rummy wife and of course in the end the Moose. I never had one dead body case. Like I said that was police business and not only was it made clear to me to stay away but there would have been no percentages in it for me. If I had run up against that many dead bodies in a case I would have been fired, no question. Then there is the question of Marlowe holding out on the coppers in favor of his clients. Never happens. If they need to warn you off a case you are off it. Period. Nor, as happened to Marlowe, do you wind up in the slammer as a material witness. You are walking down cheap street wondering where you will get the dough for next week’s room rent, or whether you can wash dishes at Jerry Bob’s Diner to grab a bit to eat.

The biggest fake thing though is how many times Marlowe took a bonk on the head, or got roughed up. More times than an NFL football player, and for chump change. And you know now about the concussions too. You couldn’t last in the profession twenty minutes much less twenty years if you took that much punishment in each case. Better off being a repo-man. The only real stuff in the whole story when you think about it is that bottle of cheap whisky in the bottom drawer of that office desk, the ten thousand crushed cigarette butts, the gallons of cold coffee, the ratty food on the run, and the running around in circles like on that Providence case I mentioned. Not enough for a real life story, okay.

Once I got to bed after finishing Farewell, My Lovely, I was tossing and turning for a while because I was racking my brain trying to remember my most dangerous case, the one that I want to put up against Marlowe’s. The only one I could think of was what I will call here to give it a name the carny caper.

Here is how it played out.

Three or four years ago I was sitting in my office watching the dust gather ever thicker thinking that after about fifteen years of plugging away at private investigation I still was sitting in that same minimalism furnished back alley office in a run-down building ready for the wrecker’s ball if there was an real justice in the world in a run-down part of town, the old textile factory district long gone south and then overseas back in the 1950s sometime, in the run-down town of Riverdale which never really got back on its feet after the mills went belly up. And me, Ray Robertson, kind of followed the pattern running down the string of a short money career when I spent most of my time dunning people for rent money, repo-ing cars, a few peep-hole jobs when anybody gave a damn about adultery and gave a damn about getting the goods on the adulterers when you needed much more than mere incompatibility to get yourself out of a tough loveless marriage, and maybe a skipped trance, a missing person job where the family didn’t mind spending a few dollars, usually just a few before they handed it over to the police which they were trying to avoid like the plague.

I would always tell them straight up that if a person went missing, skipped out leaving no forwarding address that no mere mortal private investigator was going to find them and that they were better off just filing a missing person’s report with the police and see what happened. So, yeah, between life’s disappointments and watching the dust accumulate I was in a touchy mood. The only upbeat thing was the essential detective tool, the bottom drawer of the desk whiskey bottle to chase the blues away. The only change in that drawer was whether it was in the money Chivas Regal or cheap street looking for my next paying job Johnny Walker Black which was hiding there.

I was just reaching for my luncheon shot of Johnny Walker Black when this thirty-something blonde, at least the look was blonde but you never know with blondes about how blond they really are until you get under the sheets with them and investigate other parts of their anatomy for the truth, trim and fit looking with just that faint beginning of crow’s feet around the eyes they scares a woman to hell, gets then thinking surgery and about twelve thousand other things, dressed in off the rack stuff, a dress from Macy’s maybe, which told me right away that this was not going to be a situation where I could abandon the office, the building, the town for the bright lights of the big city came walking in the door after a light knock. Old as I am I immediately thought of bedroom sheets and tussles, she had that look, the look that after a couple of drinks she would not let you down. It didn’t hurt that among the baubles of jewelry on her hands and wrists there was no wedding ring. Hey a trained P.I. notices those things.                   

Jenny, Jenny Pringle was her name. I asked her to sit down and tell me why she had come to my precincts. She had been referred to me by a woman from Gloversville where she was from, Gladys North, a name I recognized from the couple of times I had to run down her ex-husband for alimony and child support in the days before the government got serious about making guys pay up, or else. That Gladys while not a great looker, and I had a couple of tumbles in the hay so that idea rested in the back of my mind as the Jenny told her hard luck story. Seems that her daughter Jessica, about sixteen so I was pretty right on Jenny’s age, and something of wayward hellion to her had run away with the carnival, had fallen for some roustabout named Jamie Jason, maybe in his early twenties, who had some kind of spell on the kid as they headed off to parts unknown.

Jenny confessed that Jessica was no sixteen year old kid in a lot of ways since she had had to raise her herself after her deadbeat husband took off with some floozy (her word) when Jessica was eight and she had subsequently divorced him-no contest but no dough either since she could never catch up with him. (I took note of that divorced status of Jenny’s for future reference just in case you forgot about that.)  Jenny knew that Jessica had been into dope and drinking the past year or so. Smelled it on her breathe more than one night when she tried to cover it up with Listerine her clothes occasionally wreaked of marijuana  but you know how kids are. She also knew that Jessica had given up her virginity in the recent past because she had found condoms, a vibrator, and some birth control pills in her bureau drawer a few months before when she was putting away some of Jessica’s clothes.

Jenny asked me what I could do, how long it would take, how much money would be involved. I gave her my standard go to the police missing report routine but she said she did not want Jessica to wind up in reform school or anything like that so she wanted to keep the police out of it. When I gave her my rates and how long I thought it would take Jenny quickly added up the numbers in her head and gave me a pained look. She, as usual for me, told me she didn’t have a lot of money but then gave me a wicked look and said maybe we could make some other arrangements to pay the freight. I let that slide but you can figure out what the deal was, figure it out easy.   

So after giving me a hundred dollar retainer (and after a pained look another look like she hoped we could work something else out which I also let slide for the moment) I was on the case. As missing person cases go this one had an easy start since everybody around Riverdale knew that each spring Jim Benson’s Wild West Carnival hit Mechanicsville for two weeks and then headed out to the western part of the state, out to Springfield. So I made plans to head out there after I checked with Angelica, Jessica’s best friend, from the neighborhood over in Gloversville to see what she knew about what happened to Jessica.

One thing you can bet your last dollar on is that any, and I mean any, teenage girl, maybe guys too but I don’t know about that, will confide every last detail, including sex stuff like giving guys blow jobs to avoid chancing getting pregnant rather than conventional sexual intercourse and kinky twists, to their closest girlfriend. And that girlfriend if approached in the right way meaning kind of causally will spill that information if it will “help her friend.” So Angelica told me that one night, the first Saturday the carnival was open, she, Jessica and another girl, Sandra, who had a car went to Gloversville with the sole purpose, after checking out the rides, games, and horrible food, of getting picked up by some guys. Jessica was in particular “hot to trot” that night since she had over the previous several months been sexually active starting with her first boyfriend, Steve, from school. Angelica said Jessica told her she really liked sex and when she told me that I knew I was in for something, some tough going because if I knew my carny guys this Jaime probably already had Jessica working, doing tricks to keep them in clover.                      

With that information I headed to Springfield to see what was what. I got there one Monday morning when the fairgrounds were just coming alive with night owl people who were getting ready for the next day’s suckers, that is just the way carny people are. I asked around for Big Jim and was directed to a trailer at the edge of the fairgrounds. Big Jim greeted me with the frown every carny man does when he smells copper, even private copper. After I showed him my license I asked him about Jaime and about whether Jessica was with him, and why I was looking for her.

Big Jim told me that the pair had split the first week of the engagement in Springfield for New York City he said, said also that Jessica liked being around the carny but that Jaimie had a big idea for them in New York so had grabbed his pay and said he would catch up with the show as it headed out to Western New York. My heart sunk for I knew from other cases P.I.s told me about when we gather for our annual national conventions that it could only mean that Jaime planned to put her on the street, probably Times Square, probably had her all doped up and probably would abandon her once he saw the next best thing come along. Might even sell her to some pimp if he was moving on. I asked Big Jim if I could talk to some other of the carny people to see if they knew anything. He said no, he had given me all the information he had.

Naturally once I left the trailer I asked around for people who knew Jaime. I didn’t get far and this is where whatever you see and hear about fictional detectives forget about it. Every decent size carny has some strange exotic performers, sword-swallowers, stuff like that. Strong geeky looking giants too. Before I got too far along in my questioning out of the blue appeared Mighty Max a behemoth. Big Jim had sent him out to stop me bothering his people. Now with fictional detectives I would have taken a beating and then when I recovered (quickly) continued to pursue the truth. Here is the reality check. Once I saw Mighty Max I headed for the exit, though it better to live to fight another day.       

As for Jessica I never found her before the money ran out, and after that a few dates with Jenny to clear the books. Jenny then decided to turn it over to the missing person’s bureau and that was that for us, and the case. A couple of months later just for curiosity’s sake I had a private eye I knew in Cleveland check to see if Jaime had rejoined the carny. No. And, no, Jessica as far as I know never was found, never came back home. True story.