***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator – Out In The Slumming Mean Streets -Take Two

 

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.        

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Yeah, you know all the names of the streets, Hollywood and Vine, Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, Rodeo Drive, and twenty others, streets where the American dream, celluloid version, was to come true for sweet sixteens from Omaha, Cincinnati, and, hell, Greenwood down in Mississippi too. All the towns where girls had 1940s dreams, Lana Turner dreams, meaning every town on the continent (and for black Mississippi girls, Greenwood girls, Lena Horne stormy weather dreams).  Guys, hulks too, with leading man cowboy or man-about-town dreams, from Toledo, Scranton and Biloxi. Every color, every sex, every religion, including those without, getting hopes up high as the sky after landing with a couple of dollars and the last of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the Greyhound bus station over on Vine.  (Or maybe some dusty, bedraggled hitchhike highway let-off point if he or she was in a hurry for fame and didn’t have the bus or train fare.) Hoping beyond hope that if they sat at just the right drugstore soda fountain at just the right time they would be “discovered.”

Problem, was, is, that the dream was fit to size for only a small number of those hordes who bussed in from Lansing, Yonker, and Portland (east or west take your pick), Clarksdale too. And that is where the knight in shining armor, the old wind-mill chaser, the old Los Angeles fixture private eye, Michael Philip Marlin, came in, came in to try and save one such weary female traveler cold before the lights went out, before the dream turned to bitter ashes. Worse before she turned up in some party-girl whorehouse working her way down to the streets to feed some “jones” some “john” fixe don her, some private “blue” movie for some rich, eccentric, weird producer where she was finally the “star”, or dead in some floating ravine because returning home to some forsaken white- picket fence reality was not an option after tinsel-town.   

Just in case you don’t know, private cops, more so than the public ones with their full petty cash drawer for their bevy of snitches on the payroll, depend on information from lots of places, have favors done for them from lots of people, with or without information. That is what caused our white knight Marlin to be out in the mean streets of Hollywood one night in 1940. Seems that a guy, a guy, Mike Davis, who ran the Dee-Drop Inn Diner over on Noon Street in the fair city of angels had done Marlin a few good turns and so he asked Marlin to look into a cold case, a case of a young black woman, Millie Jones, from back home down in the Delta who, stardust in her eyes, wound up face down in a forsaken ravine with about seven slashes across her body. Not a pretty sight.  (A cold case for the public police is one where they are clueless on how to solve it without having to leave their desks and dump it before it even has time to get looked at, most cases as it turned out.)

So Marlin asked around and got nowhere, got nowhere from the cops, from anybody who knew the girl, knew she had taken that “blue” movie marquee route after some pretty- boy son of a director put her on the nod (and gave her the clap too). Nada. Nada, until he accidently witnessed a strange scene just off of Knight Street where a young good-looking black woman with a lovely shape and long legs, Terry Blake, appeared to have been set up by somebody because when she went to out on the street to meet a man in a Cadillac, maybe a john, maybe a go-for, half of the Hollywood Precinct came out of the woodwork. (Yeah when there is the periodic cry of the citizenry for the cops to do something they stage these “easy arrests” to placate the public and then go back to sleep until the next outcry.)

On a hunch, out of some preternatural sense that this was a bad set-up, Marlin swooped her up before she open the door to the vehicle. A good hunch too because as things unfolded later, she was just a pigeon in the play. Naturally when money is involved (as Marlin also found out later she was supposed to pick up a cool fifty K from the man in the Caddy), and not just money, the fingers of Tripper Lamb had to be all over the deal. Tripper used his Club Capri over on Sunset Boulevard as a front for all his illegal operations; drugs, women, booze, numbers, and a special service for whatever Hollywood big-shot wanted, anything.

And that anything is how Terry almost got set-up for a five to ten count. Terry, fresh off the buses from down in Greenwood, Mississippi with “I’m as pretty as Lena Horne stardust in her eyes” but with not even a peanut butter sandwich as she left the bus at Vine needed a job and a place to stay. Now no question she was good- looking, an in demand “high yella” to boot and so one of Tripper’s gang who kept an eye out for such talent at bus stations, truck stop diners, drugstore soda fountains, and not surprisingly low-rent whorehouses swooped in on her with talk of meeting Hollywood stars, parties, maybe even a part in a movie. Terry said, well, that was what she was here for and so started her career as a “hostess” in one of Tripper’s clubs where high-rollers with a taste for black flesh congregated.

And to show her appreciation for her start and for a roof over her head Tripper asked Terry, pretty please asked her to do this little, little favor of picking up that bag of dough from a black Caddy on Knight Street. The set-up part, the craven throwing some hick black girl, even if beautiful, to the wolves though was a result of Tripper feeling some heat from the cops (his “cops on the take who informed him what was what ) who were feeling the heat from the tax-paying citizens of Los Angeles. Just using Terry to pay off old debts to the cops by giving them an easy collar and plenty of ink about busting that damn money laundering ring stuff that had half the town nervous about the next shoot-out.

Terry, once Marlin found out what the hell had come down and told her of her pigeon status, was mad as hell. And Marlin sensing a roll in the hay with a luscious dame if he helped out gathered in Terry’s anger. Gathered it too because no way, no way in hell was Tripper Lamb going to let some hick from wherever she was from bust up his operations once she confronted him, unwisely confronted him, unknown to Marlin, that she was ready to squawk to the newspaper boys who always craved a good corruption story and the local good citizens’ committee looking evidence of sin. Naturally Tripper had one of his gunsels, Big Nig, assigned to shut her up, shut her up permanently, and he almost did except Marlin coming up the street and noticing a flash car that did not belong on the edges of “from hunger” Flatley Street when the stardust came off from those who were thrown back on the heap after having their minute in the sun got the drop on the big guy (and he really was big, black, about six -five and two- fifty). After some gunplay the big guy fell, gone.  

After that incident Terry, on Marlin’s advice slipped out of sight (was holed up over in Ocean City in a friend of Marlin’s apartment). With Big Nig’s untimely demise it had become strictly a war between one Michael Philip Marlin and one John “Tripper” Lamb. Naturally Tripper came up short. He had tried to set up an ambush by luring Marlin over the Club Capri to have a chat and arrange a truce. Problem for Tripper was that Marlin had arrived an hour before the “meet” and had seen Tripper deploying his troops. Marlin just slipped around the loop and waited for Tripper in his office. Sat right at the big man’s desk as he came in, Tripper reached for his gun and Marlin, gun in hand already, put two in the gangster’s heart.     

As it turned out Marlin didn’t get that couple of rolls in the hay with Terry, although she was willing since he had saved her neck, had kept her from Millie’s fate, before he put her back on the bus to Greenwood but that was the breaks. It came out after Tripper Lamb’s demise that Millie had been on a downward spiral once some good- time walking daddy put her on the nod, and had turned her into a trick for sex perverts. Of course she had worked at one of Trippers’ high-roller clubs and one night she had gotten caught up with a weird guy and when she tried to resist his perversions he cut her six ways to Sunday. Terry blanched when she heard that story. So yeah, Marlin scraped the stardust off her, gave her bus-fare and eating money and put her on that bus to get her far away from the means slumming streets of the city of angels where she could not survive.