***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator  – Yeah, Trouble, Trouble With A Big T

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

Those who have been following this series about the exploits of the famous Ocean City (located just south of Los Angeles then now incorporated into the county) private detective Michael Philip Marlin (hereafter just Marlin the way everybody when he became famous after the Galton case out on the coast) and his contemporaries in the private detection business like Freddy Vance, Charles Nicolas (okay, okay Clara too), Sam Archer, Miles Spade, Johnny Spain, know that he related many of these stories to his son, Tyrone Fallon, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tyrone later, in the 1970s, related these stories to the journalist who uncovered the relationship , Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a friend of my boyhood friend, Peter Paul Markin, who in turn related them to me over several weeks in the late 1980s. Despite that circuitous route I believe that I have been faithful to what Marlin presented to his son. In any case I take full responsibility for what follows.        

*******
As Michael Philip Marlin, 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 Jeter’s 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 named 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, the 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 was 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 something that needed hushing if it required his services.    

As Marlin entered old Jeter’s 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 Jeter.  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 Jeter disturbed. Apparently young Jeter, 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 who had to be paid off like the previous times. So Marlin 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 Marlin was that this dame, Leslie Lamour (yeah this was Hollywood remember and just the kind of name which Susan Smith or Jane Jones took when she stepped off the bus at Vine Street looking for some mythical drugstore), 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 Jeter had been the cause of  her father’s suicide back in ’29. Yeah, this case was not going to be the walk- over Marlin 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 Leslie’s apartment. That left a big hole in Marlin’s job since now there was nothing and nobody to negotiate with. Marty was out big dough and Leslie 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, Marlin was more than helpful in helping Leslie get over her loss. (Yes she had an alibi, airtight, and so no snooping cops were going to pin the crime on her even if it was her closet, maybe especially because it was her closet.)They shared a few nights of satin sheets at her place while Marlin figured out who was going to do the big step- off for young Jeter murder.

And Marlin did figure it out, figured it out pretty quickly once he found out that Marty was head-over-heels for Leslie 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 Marlin with a sweet .38. Marlin plugged him to give the state its best shot at Marty. So Marty was left holding the bag, no more than the bag since he was the last anybody heard scheduled for the big step –off at Q for the Jeter murder. Leslie, well as Leslies everywhere will do she walked away from whole thing leaving Marlin with nothing but a lingering sandalwood trail to remember her by. You say you never heard about all of this, about the Jeter 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.