Long cool woman

Saturday night in Los Angeles is when the city takes off its respectable face and puts on luminous lipstick. No expert, but I’d peg it as Christian Louboutin Ronron Silky Satin. A muted, medium-dark magenta purple shade with a soft shine.

As in la chatte noire ronronne.

I was downtown on a little freelance business for the FBI, which is what they called it when they wanted a private dick three months behind on rent to a mug named Big Sal to sit in a rat-infested gin joint and look like he belonged there. The place was on the West Side, a bootlegger’s paradise where the whiskey came in unlabelled bottles and the clientele came in wanted posters.

I’d been sitting there for two hours next to my new pal Charlie, nursing a glass of rye that tasted like somebody had filtered a radiator through a dead badger’s liver. Every table had a moll, every moll had a gangster, every gangster had a gun and every gun had a reason to be nervous. Charlie, who was keeping an eye on me while pretending not to be obvious about it, looked liked he had been carelessly assembled from spare parts of spare mobsters.

I was supposed to be collecting evidence. Instead, I was collecting a hangover for tomorrow morning. I was just about to call the D.A. and tell him the whole operation smelled like the office fridge in a men’s shelter when I heard the voice.

Well. Not a voice so much as a velvet glove slapping the face of God. A silk stocking wrapped around a blackjack. Two .45s were sitting in shoulder holsters under my jacket, but suddenly all the guns in that room might as well have been spent water pistols. She was standing under the blue neon, and the neon came off worse for the comparison.

I immediately regretted my fashion choice for what I had thought was going to be an assignment where I might have to get my hands a little dirty. The suit hung on me like it had hung in my closet: a wrinkle-mapped tweed number that looked like it had survived two world wars and a bad divorce. It had.

It was a garment woven from pure cynicism, a heavy wool-blend fortress meant to keep the world out and the secrets in. The shoulders were padded wide enough to carry the weight of this city’s sins, though mostly they just collected dandruff and lint from the unfiltered Camels I favoured.

The colour was a faded charcoal, the precise shade of an honest man’s conscience after 20 years as a detective for hire. It had a permanent crease down the trousers that hadn’t seen an iron since Pearl Harbor, and a left lapel that sagged from the weight of a rusted brass badge I kept pinned to the underside just to remind myself who I used to be.

Like the life I was living, the whole stinking ensemble didn’t fit so much as it draped over me like a shroud, smelling faintly of stale bourbon, rain-soaked pavement and the perfume of a dame who had promised me the truth but delivered a bullet instead. It was a suit built for a man who spent his nights lurking in shadows and his days dodging Big Sal — a threadbare piece of armour for a battle I was losing one button at a time. Have gun, will unravel.

I was short of cash, short of hope and short of breath from chasing suspects who usually turned out to be a stiff breeze blowing a crisp hundred-dollar bill just out of my reach. This city had a way of cutting a man down to size, and right then, I felt about as tall as a discarded Camel butt drowning in a gutter. Unfiltered.

She was tall. Five-nine. Five-ten if the heels were feeling frisky. Legs that went on longer than a list of Epstein file redactions. Eyes that could have gotten a confession out of a pathological brick wall. Everything about her was long except my ability to think straight.

She was wearing black. Black enough to make midnight look like a nervous amateur. The dress clung to her like it had been served with a subpoena and refused to testify. She was a long cool woman in a black dress that fit closer than a second coat of paint.

The fabric was pure liquid sin, clinging to every dangerous curve with a desperate devotion, moving when she moved and whispering secrets whenever she took a step. It had a neckline that went down to her ankles and a hemline that started somewhere around her thoughts — both of them completely unprincipled.

She had a playground for eyes and the kind of face that could have made half the leading men of Hollywood consider giving heterosexuality a shot. Removed her elbow-length opera gloves and gave me a smile Cesar Romero could have felt in my hip pocket. And he would have, too, given half a chance.

Just one look. That’s all it took. One smile and she could have poured me straight out of a cocktail shaker into a glass made entirely of bad intentions. My temperature went up, my pulse went into manic Buddy Rich mode, and somewhere in the back of my skull a tiny man in a fedora quietly resigned. Because I’m easy come, easy go. Little high, little low.

She glided toward the corner table with the dangerous, slow-motion sway of a panther tracking its dinner through tall grass. Thing is, I still didn’t know whether that dinner would be me or David Attenborough, who seemed to be narrating the encounter from behind a cocktail umbrella.

Every stride was a calculated rhythm, a smooth and predatory roll of the hips that seemed to slow down time itself and make the floorboards under her feet regret they weren’t closer to the ground. It wasn’t a walk; it was an ambush in slow motion.

The black silk of her dress shifted against her with a soft, menacing hiss, mimicking the hypnotic cadence of a jungle cat closing in for the kill. Heads turned so fast in her wake you could hear the neck vertebrae popping like cheap bubble wrap, but she didn’t look left or right.

She kept her eyes locked on that empty gin joint booth inside my head, her movements effortless, fluid, and packed with enough quiet menace to make a loaded .38 feel like a cap gun. By the time she finally slid onto the cracked vinyl seat beside me, like a heavy velvet curtain falling on a bad play, the entire room was holding its breath, just waiting to see who she was going to sink her claws into first. La chatte noire ronronne.

“I hope you’re able, boy,” Charlie growled. “Because I’m telling you, she knows where it’s at.”

I didn’t know where it was at. At that moment I wasn’t even sure where my legs were at. She was touching something but it wasn’t my leg. That long, cool woman had it all. And by all, I mean all. Had it all.

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me.

“You Spade or Marlowe?” she asked. Her speaking voice was surprisingly low and smoky, like a saxophone played in a damp basement.

“Sweetheart, we’ll have to check the sign on my office door sometime,” I said, theatrically lighting a match with a thumbnail to give my hands something to do besides shake. “Unless someone changed it while I was busy taking in your ankle straps. What’s on your mind, sister, besides my immediate ruin?”

She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing into two slits of cold green ice. “See, I have a problem, Mr. Gumshoe. And it’s the kind of problem that doesn’t go away with an apology or a peck on the cheek.”

I caught her drift and it was so thick I considered building a snow fort.

“Most of them don’t,” I muttered, blowing a smoke ring that hovered between us like a miniature noose. “They usually take cash. Fifty a day plus expenses. What’s the payload?”

Then the sirens started and the room exploded.

Men ran for the doors. Women ran for the windows. Charlie ran directly into a table and kept going as if the table had insulted his mother. Chairs flew. Bottles shattered. Somebody fired a gun, and somebody else fired one back, which was the sort of conversational exchange that passed for culture in that neighbourhood.

The D.A. grabbed my left hand. The dame grabbed my right. For a second I was standing between justice and temptation, and temptation had the better perfume.

“Don’t be scared,” I told her. She didn’t look scared. She looked amused. Now I was scared. “You’re gonna be spared,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t be. It was a ridiculous thing to say. Men like me never get spared. Men like me get beaten up in alleys, thrown through windows, wake up married to women who own a pair of chihuahuas named Bogey and Bacall.

But there she was, holding my hand while the sirens screamed and the gunfire cracked and the whole rotten city seemed to be collapsing around us.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted forgiveness. Not from the D.A. Not from the FBI. Not from God, the police or the United States House of Representatives. I wanted forgiveness from whatever poor mook was in charge of handing out second chances to private detectives drowning in the kind of deep, murky water you know you shouldn’t swim in … and then, Bismillah, you realize you already have your trunks on.

Outside, Los Angeles was still lying through its teeth. It just lay there in the gutter, breathing heavily and smelling of wet cardboard and burnt coffee. It was a town where the shadows had shadows and the cops were just criminals with better dental plans. The streets were slick with the grease of a million broken promises, reflecting the smoggy sky like a cracked mirror in a dive-bar bathroom.

“We shouldn’t be doing this, Spade,” she murmured, her voice now sounding like a saxophone played underwater.

“We shouldn’t be doing a lot of things, doll,” I said, adjusting the brim of my fedora to hide the fact that I’d missed a spot shaving. “But the night is young and the sidewalk isn’t going to walk itself.”

I guided her out into the drizzle. The city swallowed us whole, the damp concrete soaking through the soles of my wingtips as we stepped over a puddle that mirrored the neon gloom above. We walked into the dark, two silhouettes fading into the smog, running away from a past that was already catching up, or maybe just looking for a diner that was still serving hash browns. Attenborough’s insufferable narration was fading in the distance. Somewhere, a dog barked.

“It’s Marlowe, by the way. Spade is a complete dick. But then, so am I. I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”

That last sentence sounded a tad condescending when I thought about it later.

“Louis Renault,” she said, extending a beautifully manicured hand and a pair of handcuffs. “Captain Louis Renault. Put these on.”

“Louis,” I said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me.