“All right,” I said. “Talk it up whoever you are. Whose pocket have I got my hand in now?”
“Maybe you’re a smart guy,” the harsh whisper said. “Maybe you would like to do yourself some good.”
“How much good?”
“Say about five C’s worth of good.”
“That’s grand,” I said. “Doing what?”
“Keeping your nose clean,” the voice said. “Want to talk about it?”
“Where, when, and who to?”
“Idle Valley Club. Morny. Any time you get here.”
“Who are you?”
A dim chuckle came over the wire. “Just ask at the gate for Eddie Prue.”
The phone clicked dead. I hung it up.
It was near eleven-thirty when I backed my car out of the garage and drove towards Cahuenga Pass.
17
About twenty miles north of the pass a wide boulevard with flowering moss in the parkways turned towards the foothills. It ran for five blocks and died—without a house in its entire length. From its end a curving asphalt road dove into the hills. This was Idle Valley.
Around the shoulder of the first hill there was a low white building with a tiled roof beside the road. It had a roofed porch and a floodlighted sign on it read: Idle Valley Patrol. Open gates were folded back on the shoulders of the road, in the middle of which a square white sign standing on its point said STOP in letters sprinkled with reflector buttons. Another floodlight blistered the space of road in front of the sign.
I stopped. A uniformed man with a star and a strapped-on gun in a woven leather holster looked at my car, then at a board on a post.
He came over to the car. “Good evening. I don’t have your car. This is a private road. Visiting?”
“Going to the club.”
“Which one?”
“Idle Valley Club.”
“Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. That’s what we call it here. You mean Mr. Morny’s place?”
“Right.”
“You’re not a member, I guess.”
“No.”
“I have to check you in. To somebody who is a member or to somebody who lives in the valley. All private property here, you know.”
“No gate crashers, huh?”
He smiled. “No gate crashers.”
“The name is Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Calling on Eddie Prue.”
“Prue?”
“He’s Mr. Morny’s secretary. Or something.”
“Just a minute, please.”
He went to the door of the building, and spoke. Another uniformed man inside, plugged in on a PBX. A car came up behind me and honked. The clack of a typewriter came from the open door of the patrol office. The man who had spoken to me looked at the honking car and waved it in. It slid around me and scooted off into the dark, a green long open convertible sedan with three dizzy-looking dames in the front seat, all cigarettes and arched eyebrows and go-to-hell expressions. The car flashed around a curve and was gone.
The uniformed man came back to me and put a hand on the car door. “Okay, Mr. Marlowe. Check with the officer at the club, please. A mile ahead on your right. There’s a lighted parking lot and the number on the wall. Just the number. Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. Check with the officer there, please.”
I said: “Why would I do that?”
He was very calm, very polite, and very firm. “We have to know exactly where you go. There’s a great deal to protect in Idle Valley.”
“Suppose I don’t check with him?”
“You kidding me?” His voice hardened.
“No. I just wanted to know.”
“A couple of cruisers would start looking for you.”
“How many are you in the patrol?”
“Sorry,” he said. “About a mile ahead on the right, Mr. Marlowe.”
I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the special badge pinned to his shirt. “And they call this a democracy,” I said.
