This Is a Simplified, Mid-To-Upper-Intermediate-Level Version, Unabridged

1

Red Wind

By Raymond Chandler

(This is a simplified, mid-to-upper-intermediate-level version, unabridged)

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana winds that come down through the mountains, blow through Los Angeles, curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every drinking party ends in a fight. Quiet little wives feel the edge of a kitchen knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen; you can even get a full glass of beer in a cocktail lounge. I was getting one, in a new place across the street from the apartment house where l lived. It had been open about a week and it wasn't doing any business. The young guy behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.

There was only one other customer, a drunk sitting at the bar with his back to the door. He had money in front of him, coins, about two dollars' worth. He was drinking whiskey in small glasses and he was all by himself, in a world of his own. I sat farther along the bar and got my glass of beer and said, “You certainly pour a nice, full glass of beer, buddy. I will say that for you.”

“We just opened up," the guy said. “We got to build up business. Been in before, haven't you, mister?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Live around here?”

“In the Berglund Apartments, across the street,” I said. “And the name is Philip Marlowe.”

“Thanks, mister. Mine's Lew Petrolio.” He moved close to me across the bar. “Know that guy?”

“No.”

“He ought to go home. I ought to call a taxi and send him home. He's doing his next week's drinking too soon.”

“A night like this,” I said. “Let him alone.”

“It's not good for him,” my bartender said, frowning at me.

“WHISKEY!” the drunk said, without looking up. He snapped his fingers, instead of banging on the bar ― no doubt to avoid disturbing his little collection of coins.

The bartender ― just a young kid, really ― looked at me. “Should I?”

“Whose stomach is it? Not mine.”

The kid poured him another straight whiskey and I think he put a little water in it down behind the bar, because when he came up with the drink, he looked as guilty as if he’d kicked his grandmother. The drunk guy paid no attention. He lifted coins off his little pile with the exact care of an expert surgeon.

The young bartender came back and put more beer in my glass. Outside, the wind howled. Every once in a while it blew the front door of the bar open a few inches. It was a heavy door.

The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.”

“Hollywood might like to hear that line,” I said.

Just then we had another customer. A car had stopped outside, and then the swinging door opened. A man came in who looked in a little hurry. He held the door and looked around the place quickly with shiny, dark eyes. He was pretty big, dark, and good-looking. His clothes were dark, and he had a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. He looked cool as well as under some kind of tension. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself, only not at all cool.

He looked at the drunk’s back. The drunk was playing with his empty glasses, moving them around. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of seats which went down the other side of the bar. They were all empty. Then he came in, walking down past where the drunk sat, swaying and talking to himself, and spoke to the bartender.

“Seen a lady in here, buddy? Tall, pretty, brown hair, in a short white jacket over a blue silk dress. Wearing a wide straw hat.” He had a tight voice l didn't like.

“No, sir. Nobody like that's been in,” the bar kid said.

“Thanks. Straight scotch. Make it fast, will you?”

The kid gave it to him and the fellow paid and then drank it quickly in one gulp and started to go out.

He took three or four steps and stopped, facing the drunk. The drunk was grinning. He took a gun out from somewhere so fast I hardly saw it. He held the gun steady and he didn't look any drunker than I was. The tall dark guy stood quite still and then his head moved back a little and then he was still again.

A car sped by outside. The drunk's gun was a .22 automatic. It made a couple of loud pops and a little smoke came out.

“So long, Waldo,” the drunk said. Then he pointed the gun at the barman and me.

The new customer, the dark stranger, took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor, face first. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the noise he made.

The drunk stood up and put his coins into a pocket and moved towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn't have a gun. I hadn't thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The kid behind the bar didn't move or make the slightest sound.

The drunk felt the door lightly with his shoulder, keeping his eyes on us, then went through it backwards. When it was wide open, a strong blast of air blew in and lifted the hair of the man on the floor. The drunk said: “Poor Waldo. I bet I gave him a headache.”

The door swung shut. I started to rush to it — from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn’t matter. He had gotten into the car that Waldo had left outside, and when I got to the sidewalk it was already turning around the nearby corner. I didn’t get the license number.

There were people and cars up and down the block as usual. Nobody acted as if a gun had gone off. The wind was making enough noise to make the hard quick pop of a .22 sound like a slammed door, even if anyone had heard it. I went back into the cocktail bar.

The kid hadn't moved, even yet. He just stood with his hands flat on the bar, leaning over a little and looking down at the dark guy's back. The dark guy hadn't moved either. I bent down and felt his neck artery. He wouldn't move — ever. The kid's face had as much expression as meat in a butcher shop and was about the same color. His eyes were more angry than shocked.

I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling and said angrily:

“Get on the phone."

“Maybe he's not dead," the kid said.

“When they use a .22 that means they don't make mistakes. Where's the phone?"

“I don't have one. I got enough expenses without that. Boy, can l kick eight hundred bucks in the face!"

“You own this place?"

“I did, till this happened."

He pulled his white coat off and his apron and came around the end of the bar. “I'm locking this door,” he said, taking keys out. He went out, pulled the door closed and then locked it from the outside. I bent down again and rolled Waldo over. At first I couldn't even see where the shots had gone in. Then I could. A couple of tiny holes in his coat, over his heart. There was a little blood on his shirt.

The drunk was everything you could ask for as a killer. A professional. The police came in about eight minutes. The bartender was back behind the bar by then. He had his white coat on again and he was counting his money in the cash register and putting it in his pocket and making notes in a little book.

I sat at the edge of one of the seats and smoked a cigarette and watched Waldo's face get deader and deader. I wondered who the girl in the blue dress was, why Waldo had left the engine of his car running outside, why he was in a hurry, and whether the drunk had been waiting for him or had been there by accident.

The police boys came in perspiring. All of them were big, dumb and badly dressed. I knew I would have trouble with them; police never like private detectives. One of them — he looked like the biggest one — came over and bent down to feel Waldo's pulse.

“Seems to be dead,” he said. “Oh, yeah, I see where they went in. Very good work. Did you two see him get shot?”

I said yes. The kid behind the bar said nothing. I told them about it, that the killer had left in Waldo's car. The big cop took Waldo's wallet out, looked through it quickly and whistled. “Plenty of money, but no driver's license.” He put the wallet back.

“Go ahead, take the money, we’ll close our eyes. Better yet, let's all divide it up,” I said, just to have something to say.

“Oh, a wise guy, huh? How about I divide up your face with my fist?”

“What's the matter, you want to start a war? Old Waldo can't use the money any more. We could buy flowers.”

“How would you like to spend the night in jail, smart guy? Or maybe wake up under a bus somewhere?”

I looked away and said nothing. The wind was making everybody crazy, this red wind that felt like the inside of an oven.

In another minute a homicide truck stopped outside with its siren on, and four men came inside, two detectives, a photographer and a laboratory man. I didn't know either of the detectives. You can be in the business a long time and not know all the men on a big city force.

One of them was a short, dark, quiet, smiling man, with black hair and intelligent eyes. The other one was a different story — big, ugly, with a red nose and red eyes. He looked like a heavy drinker; a heavy drinker with a bad temper. He sat down across from me and his partner got the kid up in the front. The fingerprint man and the photographer began their work.

“I'm Detective Lieutenant Copernik. Give,” he said. He had emptied Waldo's wallet and pockets and put everything into a large handkerchief on the table. I saw a lot of cash, keys, cigarettes, another handkerchief, not much else.

I showed him my detective's ID.

“Philip Marlowe, huh? You here on business?”

“Drinking business,” I said. “I live just across the street in the Berglund.”

“Know this kid up front?”

“I've been in here once since he opened up.”

“See anything funny about him now?”

“No.”

“He doesn't look too worried about what happened, does he? Never mind. Just tell the story.”

I told it — three times. Once for him to get the outline, once for him to get the details, and once for him to see if I had told everything too easily. At the end he said: “This woman interests me. And the killer called the guy Waldo, yet didn't seem to be sure in any way he would be in. I mean, if Waldo wasn’t sure the woman would be here, nobody could be sure Waldo would be here.”

“That's pretty deep,” I said.

He studied me. I wasn't smiling. “Sounds like revenge, don't it? Don't sound planned. No getaway except by accident. A guy don't leave his car unlocked much in this town. And the killer works in front of two good witnesses. I don't like that.”

“I don’t like being a witness. The pay’s too low.”

He grinned. His teeth were dirty. “Was the killer drunk, really?”

“With shooting like that? No.”

“Me too. Well, it’s a simple job. The guy will have a police record and he’s left plenty of fingerprints. Even if we don’t have his photo on file we’ll identify him in hours. He had something on Waldo, but he wasn’t meeting Waldo tonight. Waldo just dropped in to ask about a woman he had a date with and had missed connections with. It’s a hot night and this wind would kill a girl’s face. She might want to drop in somewhere to wait. So the killer feeds Waldo two in the heart and gets away and don’t worry about you two guys at all. It’s that simple.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s so simple it stinks,” Copernik said.

He took his hat off and ran his hand through his dirty blond hair and then put his head in his hands. He had a long, mean horse face. He ghot a handkerchief out and wiped it., and then the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair – he looked worse with it combed – and put his hat back on.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“Yeah? What?”

“This Waldo knew just how the girl was dressed. So he must already have been with her tonight..”

“So what? Maybe he had to go to the can. And when he came back she’s gone. Maybe she changed her mind about him.”

“That’s right,” I said.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way an ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Bolero jacket over a blue silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was. And I might have said blue dress, but never blue silk dress.

After a while two men came in with a stretcher. Lew Petrolio was still polishing his glass and talking to the short dark detective.

Eventually we all went down to Police Headquarters.

Petrolio was all right when they checked on him. His father had given him $1000 to go into business, and he had used it to open the bar. That was it. It was all over after an hour.

TWO

I got back to my street around 9 pm. I loked up and down the block before I went into the Berglund. The cocktail bar, farther down on the other side of the street, was dark, with a nose or two against the glass, but no crowds. People had seen the police and the ambulance, but they didn’t know what had happened. The wind was still blowing, oven–hot, swirling dust and pieces of paper everywhere.

I went into the lobby of my apartment building and rode the elevator up to my floor. The automatic door slid open and I stepped out to see a tall young woman standing there waiting. She was incredibly beautiful ― one look, and was ready to do anything for her. She had curly brown hair under a straw hat, and wide blue eyes and long eyelashes. She wore a blue dress that have been silk, simple but quietly elegant and beautifully shaped. Over it she wore what might have been a bolero jacket. This was Waldo’s friend ― no doubt about it.