Yeah, Trouble, Trouble With A Big T

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

As Philip Marlowe, Los Angeles’ rough-edged, hard-nosed, no nonsense windmill-chasing (skirt-chasing too) private eye drove up the main driveway of the vast Jeter estate, yes, those Jeters the ones who made fortune in the LaBrea tar sands oil money racket, he was trying, desperately trying to remember where he had heard or seen that bit about the rich, the very rich actually being different from you and me. As he turned up in front of the massive mansion named La Strada (they always names their estates something, something European as if to put paid to the point that they had made it) he finally remembered it was F. Scott Fitzgerald in a book he had read a few years back.

He also remembered that the rich, very rich, were not so very different from you and me when it came to crime, crime all the way up to murder. What was different is that they could afford, easily afford the fee in his case, to hush it all up and go on about their business. And since the private eye business, like everything else in the year 1939, was slow he was glad for a chance to make some office rent dough to get along for another month. He just wondered what kind of nastiness he was supposed to hush up this time, not murder, not from what he had heard through his police grapevine but some that needed hushing if it required his services.

As Marlowe entered old Jeters’ study, the guy who had actually made the money that got these digs, make the money walking over a mountain of human bones, including a couple of suicides when things got tough in 1929, he saw the living corpse that was what was left of one Herman Jeters. Human wreck or not, apparently he was feisty enough to want no trouble left surrounding his name before he passed on. Passed on and left his fortune to an errant son who seemingly was hell-bent on spending every last dime on wine, women and song.

Oh yeah and some high-end gambling too which is what had old Jeters disturbed. Apparently young Jeters, Jeff, had run up a sizable debt at Marty Bennett’s casino over in Santa Monica up the Pacific Coast Highway, something like 50k, and Marty, purely for professional pride and for good business practice was squeezing the old man for the dough. On top of that a dame, wouldn’t it figure, had her hooks into the young pup, planned to marry Jeff and live in splendor. Old Jeter had her down as just another gold-digging whore had to be paid off like the previous times. So Marlowe was on the case, on top of what a rich man wanted done when he had his wanting habits on.

What the old man did no tell Marlowe was that this dame, Harriet Harkness, was something to look at, something that he would take a run at himself if he got the slightest encouragement. She was in any case not in the market to be bought off for chump change, particularly since she was working with Marty Bennett on this Jeff project but also because old man Jeters had been the cause of her father’s suicide back in ’29. Yeah, this case was not going to be the walk over he thought.

First off things got just a little bit complicated when somebody put two, two slugs, into Jeff Jeter’s chest and stuffed him in a closet in Harriet’s apartment. That left a big hole in Marlowe’s job since now there was nothing and nobody to negotiate with. Marty was out big dough and Harriet was down for the count now that Jeff was by-by and so she was back on cheap street. Of course, while it was not strictly in the line of business, trouble business or otherwise Marlowe was more than helpful in helping Harriet get over her loss. They shared a few nights of satin sheets at her place while Marlowe figured out who was going to step off for young Jeters murder.

And Marlowe did figure it out, figured it out pretty quickly once he found out that Marty was head over heels for Harriet and got so daffy that he let his emotions get the best of him. He had hired Jeff’s chauffeur to do the deed and so Marlowe had to go mano y mano with the chauffer. Well not exactly hand to hand since that chauffer tried like hell to drill Marlowe with a sweet .38. So Marty was left holding the bag, no more than the bag since he was last anybody heard scheduled for the big step –off at Q for the Jeters murder. Harriet, well as Harriets will do she walked away from whole thing leaving Marlowe with nothing but a lingering sandalwood trail to remember her by. You say you never heard about all of this, about the Jeters murder. What did I tell you before the rich, the very rich are different, very different from you and me. The whole thing had the big hush on it, and I mean big.