Flashing #23 - Hardboiled

I love me some Raymond Chandler, and I apologize for simplifying his Farewell, My Lovely Marlowe, painting him as a racist, and placing him in a changing world. I do it with love, I promise.

This story may, once again, seem like a huge departure from the original memoir but I tried to take my character from that story and focus on the good things that he didn't realize he was missing - mainly family and love and stability. As I keep saying, loose interpretations is going to be an excuse I often use for this project.

I hope you dig it. I have to go write comics, now. I'll hopefully be posting some teaser art soon. Until then, feel free to investigate other Flashing stories on the main page.

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No-one ever understood Central Park quite like Charles Ives did. I don’t even think Olmsted and Vaux understood their own creation quite like Charles Ives. When you listen to “Central Park in the Dark” you hear those strings playing under everything. They’re haunting and they’re darkness and they’re death. They’re the woods. You hear fragments of “Hello My Baby” and “Washington Post March” in the distance, coming from the nightclubs over on Central Park West. It pulls you in, makes you feel safe, makes you forget about the strings. Makes you forget about the woods. But the woods come back. After a couple of seconds you find yourself back in the darkness. Alone. Floating. Frightened.

The kids these days don’t listen to ragtime. “Hello My Baby” is old people’s music. It’s all Sinatra and Duke Ellington and Perry Como coming from the clubs on Central Park West. But this body I’m looking down at now, the one with rope marks around its neck, the one with the clothes torn off and the knife cuts in the gut – this body makes me think the kids should be at least listening to Ives before walking through this park. Maybe they’d learn to stay away from these woods.
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6AM and the phone cuts through my hangover like a hacksaw against bone. I already know who’s on the other end, and if he’s calling me at 3AM his time it means he’s heard the news.

“Piers?” He pronouncing my name Pierce with a couple of Zs on the end for good measure. He’s obviously drunk. Or stoned. Or both.

“Speaking.”

“Is it true?”

We talk for an hour about his daughter. Johns keeps talking about his precious little baby and his innocent sweetheart. Each time he mentions her he neglects to say that she ran away to The Big City at the age of 16. I don’t remind him of that fact, however, because the guy’s obviously going through enough already. You’d think a tough guy farmer from The Plains wouldn’t cry so much but you probably haven’t heard Johns after a fifth and a dead daughter at his doorstep.

And then we get to the part of the conversation I always hate, “You need to find who did this.”

“This isn’t a runaway case anymore, Johns. This gets kicked to homicide. Police’ll work it out.”

Conversations always seem to end up here and they usually end up going one of two ways. The client could say that they paid me for a service and my job isn’t done yet. Heated words will be exchanged and I’ll get kicked-off the case. Or…

“I’ll pay you anything you want.”

I head to Crystal’s for a cup of coffee and a couple of scrambled eggs.
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Sergeant Marlowe sits behind his desk, filling out paper work and finishing his whisky. An old LA shamus that got sick of the scene out west and came to New York thinking it’ll be easier out here. He always smells of cigarettes, drink, and regret.

“You got any leads on the Johns case?”

He doesn’t even look up at me. “Yeah, we got the killer in lock down.”

For a city this big, crimes seem to be solved awfully quick most of the time. I stand at the doorway, waiting for more information, but Marlowe just buries his nose in his paperwork and tries to pretend that I don’t exist. “Anything else?” he finally asks, clicking his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

“Anything else would be nice.”

He lets out a sigh and rifles through his stack of papers. He pulls one from the bottom and looks over the details. “She was turning tricks in the park. Jim Brown wanted what she was offering but didn’t want to pay. He took it, by force, and killed her, for fun. The end.”

“You got a confession?”

“I have a signed piece of paper that says Jim Brown killed Marissa Johns. The end.”

“I take it Jim Brown is a negro?”

Marlowe looks up at me for the first time. He holds up the piece of paper with Jim Brown’s signature. “The. End.”

Crimes seem to get solved awfully quick in this town.
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The phone conversation with Richard Johns is hell. He cries the whole time. Nigger this and nigger that. Something about the conversation leads me to believe that Johns never used that word before tonight. I’m taking it he doesn’t believe this story anymore that I do. But this isn’t LA. In LA everything seems to be conspiracies and spoiled kids and illegal casinos and drug runners and, at the end of it all, a sack full of money. In this city, nine times out of ten it’s Nigger This And Nigger That and a high rate of solved cases. No-one can argue with results.

Johns sounds like a good man, though, and Marissa sounds like a confused girl. I stay on the phone with Johns longer than I should, promise things I should never promise, and, in the end, I tell him not to worry about the rest of the money. I didn’t really do any work. He would read it all in tomorrow’s paper, anyway. The headline would say, “Small-Town Girl Found Murdered In Central Park.”

The unpublished subheadline would say, “Nigger This and Nigger That.”

After I hang up I let myself imagine, for a moment, what I could have done if I found her before Nigger This And Nigger That. Could I have convinced her that life in Iowa wasn’t that bad? That there were people there who loved her? That she’d never get that kind of love in this city?

I stop thinking. Thinking’s never good in my line of work once the case is closed. I put Charles Ives on the record player and stare at my ceiling. I think about how easy life would be if everything really was Nigger This And Nigger That.

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