Lee Marvin and the Long Night Read online

  Lee Marvin and the Long Night

  Someone once let me have it straight; a guy by the name of Dupree. He was dying, bleeding out in a crummy warehouse in downtown Oakland. I got the whole story while he choked on his own blood. Everything I thought I knew: the city, my little tin-pot detective agency, even Lola who use to sing at the Flim Flam Club; it was all just somebody’s dream. Even me, Lee Marvin, I’m just somebody’s memory of an actor named Lee Marvin.

  I sound like the actor, look like him, and hell, I even dress like him circa the early nineteen sixties in a movie called The Killers. But I’m not that Lee Marvin. That Lee Marvin fought on Iwo Jima, got shot in the ass, came home and spent the rest of his life as an actor. I think he even won an Oscar. Those experiences are not mine. They’re his.

  I’m a different horse altogether. I work for a man named Leonard Giles. He created me. I live in Harbor City, San Francisco. I solve cases, right wrongs, and face the thugs and punks that Leonard Giles wanted me to face on a weekly basis, usually Friday night. Cold dames, hot lead, and me, Lee Marvin, living out a fantasy of danger that seemed too real when I looked in the mirror and tried to figure out where to start with the iodine the next morning.

  I talk to myself a lot. I’m real. I exist. And what I know about the other side, the world of Leonard Giles, doesn’t mean much to me here in Harbor City, city by the bay.

  The two-bit hoods and hookers of Harbor City are nothing but somebody’s imagination. How many ‘somebodies’ I never knew; I never asked.

  Every time a dame walked into my office at the Hampton Building, it was because a man named Leonard Giles wanted me to rescue her, or catch her and yeah, a lot of the time, kiss her. So sometimes I rescued, sometimes I caught, and sometimes I kissed. Maybe because I wanted to. I can’t blame him for everything.

  Like I said, I talk to myself a lot. Right now I’m waiting for the sun to come up over Oakland, on the other side of the bay. It’s still dark out. Streets are quiet and foggy. There’s a little lamp on near my reading chair, where I read about the world of Leonard Giles. I chip some ice, fix a scotch, lose the gray jacket, and loosen the dark tie I always wear. Finally I kick off my hard-soled shoes and wait.

  If the sun rises over San Francisco this morning in about an hour or so, then I’ll fry some eggs and figure out what to do next.

  It all began about eight o’clock the night before. I was on my way to the Flim Flam Club after spending a long day not answering a phone I suspected might be broken. I thought I’d have a drink, talk to Sully, maybe catch Rita’s act (Rita’s the skirt who replaced Lola). At least, that was the plan.

  But then I got the not-so-sweet end of a snub nose from a guy who talked British in an alley. He tried to ask me nicely if I’d come with him to meet his boss about a ‘spot of work’, (his words, not mine.) But nice isn’t something I’m used to especially when guns are used for punctuation, so I told him to drift. In a flash, his larger, less polite business associate had me against the wall and a second later, the second after the ringing blow to the base of my skull, I’m slipping into that warm bath of unconsciousness.

  I wake up in San Jose; San Jose airport to be exact, in a big room where the word ‘gold’ played a big part in every sentence the decorator uttered. I check my watch; the little hand says nine and the big one seems caught in the middle, unable to commit to either side of the hour. I rub my skull and think about pushing somebody’s face in. The light is dim in here, and the shadows that surround our spotlight of high-backed chair warmth do their part to make me feel uneasy and remind me that my gun, a gift from Leonard Giles, is gone.

  Across the table, a fat man in fancy clothes and a crown swirls a gold-flecked goblet of claret. I know it’s claret because seconds later, in a voice that could only be described as bombastic, the fat man tells me it is and that I should try it. Wadsworth, the upturned-nose waiter type, gray at the temples and bald on top, decants some claret into my goblet, pouring from a special basket encasing the bottle. Ritzy, but I prefer Chianti. Also I like to know that the Chianti I’m drinking is the same one on the table in front of me, with the candle sticking out of it. Hey, I may be a simple gumshoe, but I know what I like.

  The gulp I take, which I can tell offends the fat man, does little to mitigate the ache at the back of my head. But it’s a start. We don’t say much until the fat man cuts his first bite from a Chateaubriand so big and beautiful a chorus girl could live off it for a week. I have one to match and so does a mouse of a man seated next to me.

  “Now, Mr. Marvin is it?” begins the fat man as he cuts another wad from his steak, still chewing the last, savoring it as though it were the Hope Diamond of steaks. Holding the meat on a thin golden fork, he takes a sip of claret, pronounces it excellent and continues.

  “Now Mr. Marvin, we have needs for which we must enlist your aid.” I assume he means the royal ‘we’ because he’s wearing a crown.

  “I don’t work for guys, kings or criminals, who sap me, giant steak notwithstanding.”

  “Quite, I’m sure.” The fat man pauses for the next bite, chews, then wipes his mouth with a pup-tent sized napkin. “And I do insist on two things. The Pommes de Lyon, cursed French dish if ever there was, but you simply must try them, and I further insist that you please, never again in our presence, refer to a Chateaubriand as fine as this cut as a ‘steak’. You insult both myself and the chef. As to not working for our royal personage, well that’s a matter altogether different and one I might shed more light upon presently. But first, the potatoes. Wadsworth, please!”

  Wadsworth moves forward with a copper dish full of mashed potatoes. I fork into ‘em and contemplate telling Henry that they’re the best mashed spuds I’ve ever eaten. I’m sure that would upset him, but I wipe my mouth with a large starched white napkin and prepare to shoot off my mouth anyway, but the fat man beats me to the punch.

  “Honestly Mr. Marvin, you’re not going to finish. I’ve never trusted a man who cannot gustate with the best of them, and I, ahem, am the best. Please, more sautéed asparagus in truffle butter? It’s good for the…”

  “I’m not a big eater whoever you are. I don’t go in for the fancy stuff. Ham sandwich, cup of coffee, that’s me. Also, the play acting is spoiling the mood. What is it that you want besides food? I don’t like people who impersonate other people, including kings, and then ask us all to play along. It makes the rest of us feel stupid.”

  “Interesting, Mr. Marvin,” says the mouse man. “Aren’t we all ‘play-acting’ at being someone else in ‘this’ world?” At ‘this’ my blood runs cold. I’m one of the very few people, hell in fact the only one I’m aware of, who knows the truth about the other side – the world of Leonard Giles. The real world.

  “I don’t follow you…”

  “You do. No lies, Mr. Marvin. They are a waste of time and for all of us, time is running out.” I don’t know what that means but I suspect mouse man does, and it scares the hell out of me. I light a cigarette as Henry continues to cut slices from his Chateaubriand, savoring every bite, his eyes fluttering as he chews.

  Mouse man continues, “You see Mr. Marvin, I know what the man called Dupree told you all those years ago. I too was once a nobody who knew nothing, such as you were. I worked in a shoe store, selling beautiful women fine shoes. It delighted my owner Kevin Richter – he was my Leonard Giles – to torment me with ladies so utterly beguiling. I could not possibly tell you of the love I have for the arches, heels and calves of beautiful women.

  “Day after day, beauties like Jane Russell, Dolores Del Rio and Wendy Neutron, paraded into my shoe store to both titillate and torment me. To make me tremble as I grasped feet so soft it was as if they had been sculpted
from the stuff of passing clouds. I watched, sweating tiny beads of perspiration as they crossed impossibly long legs as time seemed to wallow in thick maple syrup. They were statues too gloriously sculpted for such an insignificant as myself.

  “And I helped them, me the little clown, slave to queens of the cinema, beaten with eyelashes and stiletto heels all for the amusement of my owner. Obviously he had a shoe fetish. And then one day Kevin came into the store. He entered our world. Did Leonard Giles ever do that Mr. Marvin? Ever come in and act out a part in his little fantasies? Play at being your partner, maybe even your Moriarty?”

  I tried to remember any hoods named Moriarty.

  “His gratification, Kevin’s that is, was in torturing me, not himself. Maybe once long ago, watching these beauties squeeze into pumps and stilettos had done something for him, but ‘The Long Night’, as he called it had changed him. Now, he told me frankly, he rather enjoyed simply torturing me.

  “And the greatest rack he could stretch me on, his words not mine, was to tell me the truth of ‘The Long Night’; the truth about the other side. So I killed him. I hit him with a ladies heel, almost like a spike, a Charles David I think it was. I hit him and kept on hitting him until the blood mixed with his laughter. That damned high-pitched squealing laughter. Of course he didn’t really die. He wasn’t really there, just his mind was. Just his imagination and desire running loose inside our world, or ‘The Construct’ I think he called it… He enjoyed letting me know that the shoes, the shoe store, and Dolores Del Rio were nothing but the whims of his sick and twisted imagination. For me, Norton Morris, hell began.”

  “Torture unimaginable in a thousand ways as moments spun in on themselves and revealed whole news vistas and possibilities of real pain never before imagined. Kevin Richter became the torturer of his dreams.”

  I felt sorry for the mouse man Norton Morris, I really did. I listened as all the horror he experienced at the hands of Kevin Richter came out onto the table. Picking my teeth absently and drinking a cup of black coffee Wadsworth brought me, I tried to imagine it. Somehow the golden room, the dark shadows, the thick quiet of the carpet and the soft green velvet drapes that covered immense windows, seemed to make the horror something that happened to someone else, not the little man in front of me. The fat man burped unapologetically at the conclusion.

  “And then I found a way to jump,” continued Norton Morris. “The pain, the torture, everything Mr. Kevin Richter could conceive, clarified my thinking. Reduced it to viscous transparency like clarified butter if you will.” The fat man roused from a brief doze and seemed to take an interest in this.

  “Where once my artificial personality – the mind that Kevin Richter had delighted in when he designed me using a ‘menu’ as he called it – had been a solid thing with its own weight and logic, now it was free.” Norton Morris took a sip of claret and continued to stare at me. He didn’t blink much.

  “A menu,” he said disgustedly. “An extensive one, but a menu nonetheless, like I was some common dish from a greasy spoon. He made me as weak, and as strong as he had always wanted to be – ladies shoes, feet, power- I’m sure Freud could have run amok inside his mind.

  “But my mind, whereas it had once been like a soft chunk of butter, now thanks to the heat and torture of Mr. Richter’s regimen, clarified, and spread out, dripping into the crevices of the mainframe. I, Norton Morris, humble purveyor of fine ladies shoes, leapt out of time.

  “Not really though. I thought I had at first; that I could go backwards, forwards, wherever I chose. But I was wrong. Instead it was more like leaping into a book. Picking up books and turning to random pages and beginning to read. A Manhattan Shoe Salesman in King Arthur’s Court, as it was. I spent time with Henry,” he indicated the fat man with an overly respectful nod. “My third or fourth leap I think; someone’s erotic fantasy of Tudor England, forgotten in ‘The Long Night’. We became friends – my first real friend, Henry the Eighth. I showed him how to leap. With my help of course.”

  “Yes, with your help…imagine the thought,” erupted the monarch. “I still cannot conceive of it. I will always be loyal King Harry to my subjects. Not some nonesuch make-em-up hoogely boogely as he would have me believe. But the worlds I’ve seen, this place tonight, ‘tis far different from Whitehall and court. And then there is the opportunity. Tell him Mr. Morris, of our grand scheme and how he can play a part.”

  Morris flared first with fear, and then softened to anger. He was afraid King Henry might spill the beans. Then I knew, no matter what they told me, they weren’t playing straight.

  “Mr. Marvin. We are but characters in a book on a ‘Long Night’. I could tell you things. Things your mind, with all the restrictions of its place within The Construct, might never grasp. But suffice it to say we want to leave the library in which we find ourselves.”

  “And you can help us,” said King Henry the Eighth.

  I wondered if he meant royal ‘us’. Either way I didn’t like where they were heading.

  “You can unlock the door to the library. You see…”

  I cut Norton Morris off.

  “What if there is no library? What if there is no other side…” I’d had enough. I had a bad feeling, the kind you get when it’s too late and you know you should be home, or anywhere but the alley you’re in.

  “There is another side. It exists. And Dupree, the man who bled to death on that floor in Oakland, told you about that other side.” Morris looked at me expectantly. He was proud he’d played his hole card.

  “Yeah, what of it? You weren’t there!” I shot back, angry and hard, not liking what I heard in my own voice. “You didn’t see his eyes. He was a man just like you and me. Sure this world might be made up, just bits and dreams of someone I’ve never met, ones and zeros he told me. But Dupree was intelligent. He knew he was dying. Just like this steak and wine, this coffee and these cigarettes, damn you. It’s real, or real enough, and tomorrow the sun will rise and life will go on inside… inside. Inside what, I don’t know, but it’s enough for me Jack.”

  “Your owner, Mr. Marvin; he was somehow a very important man. His name was Leonard Giles, and I think he sent you a message through Dupree. A message letting you know there’s an outside world.”

  “So what of it?”

  “The ‘what of it’ is…” began Henry the Eighth.

  “Is that he trusted you.” Morris cut Henry off with a dismissive wave. “Trusted you to do something with that information, and the only thing I can think of is that he wants you to get out. To find him.” Morris Norton’s eyes were watery and emphatic. I wanted to believe him. The knight inside me, the one that Leonard Giles had ordered up on that greasy spoon menu, wanted to save somebody in trouble, even if I didn’t like it. But something didn’t smell right.

  “And how do you figure into it?” I asked. “I haven’t heard from Leonard Giles in a long time. Richter, for that matter, what happened to him? It’s like they forgot us or went to sleep. Maybe they put their toys away and grew up, maybe we should stay in the box or they might just decide to throw us out with the rest of the garbage.”

  “Dupree was a simulation,” said Norton Morris angrily. His hand was starting to show. “The story: A two bit break-in man who witnessed a murder and came to you for help. What a thrilling detective story, Mr. Marvin. And then there was the dame, Dupree’s girl. Long legs, auburn hair. When you told her he got it in the warehouse, she cried into your shoulder and you kissed her, and you felt like…like…”

  “Like dirt,” I said, because I did. “I felt like dirt because I took advantage of her. Dupree was human, just like you. Just like me.”

  But Morris wasn’t having any of it. “Then how do I know? How does little Norton Morris, shoe clerk, know about that adventure? And how do I know King Henry the Eighth, and why are we here at this five star restaurant eating Chateaubriand and waiting for our Baked Alaska at eleven thirty on a Thursday evening? How do I know, Mr. Marvin?”

  �
�Because it’s a trick or something. Or I’m still in the gutter, dying after I got that tap on the skull by your boys. Or I’m someone else’s…”

  “Dream, Mr. Marvin. Dream. I know because I was one. I was one until I clarified… like butter,” again Henry seemed to take interest with a simple grunt. “And I dripped down onto and throughout all the pages of all the stories that ever were.”

  Things were getting weird. I had to play for time and find my gun. There was something bad about Norton Morris. Something not to be trifled with. I needed to find my gun and drill these two bit clowns. Protect someone. Someone like Dupree’s girl. And then there was ‘The Long Night’.

  “And why should you care,” I growled, “whether I get to the outside or not?” I eyed Henry as I said it. Maybe I could play one joker off the other. Both probably wanted all the power and none of the sharing.

  But it was Morris who answered. “I don’t care for any other reason than the concept of escape. Escape is enough for me, Mr. Marvin. Escape is enough for me.”

  “Enough that you’d kill for it?” Little white tufts of hair glowed in contrast to the florid bloom that exploded across his face as he reached into his coat. And now I knew two things. One, regardless of King Henry the Eighth, Norton Morris was in charge. And two, Norton Morris was a killer.

  He pointed my gun at me. I didn’t like that. I had pointed it at others from time to time, men mostly, and the occasional dame more devil than doll. But I never knew what it was like to look down that yawning barrel of infinity. There was something about my gun. It wasn’t just a roscoe used by a punk detective like myself who got by more on luck than hunches or good detective work. There was something final about that cold dark bore hole. Something that said, “I don’t just kill you. I delete you.”

  “Ahem, Mr. Morris, this is indeed bad form. Wadsworth hasn’t even arrived with our figgy pudding!”

  “Shut up Henry, or you’ll get it before he does,” said Norton Morris through clenched teeth. “Down below, a DC Six is due to start its engines before the bay completely socks in with fog. It’s the mail flight to Los Angeles. We’re getting on it, you, me, and Henry. And then we’re going somewhere.” He hefted my gun towards the windows and the tarmac below.