***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator   – The China Doll-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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No question Michael Philip Marlin, hard-headed, no nonsense, tough as nails private investigator was a “homer,” was a guy who felt right at home in the sun-drenched back streets and alleys of his native Los Angeles (really Ocean City, formerly an independent town but since incorporated into the blob sprawl of the city of angels, but that was when he was a kid in those white-washed faux adobe tenements and came of age on their hard-edged streets). He knew the players, the Hollywood producers, the oil executives, the old California money hidden behind the walled fortresses up in the hills with no number, no need for addresses, the new Okie money made in the massive transportation swirl and being Okies made a big display of front, cars, servants and numbered houses on well-thought of streets. Yeah, Okie front.       

He knew the bit players too, the wannabe starlets ready to take off their clothes the minute they hit town on the last Greyhound bus from Omaha, Springfield, Toledo, and points east. The press shills hustling those big- time promoters to place copy about their latest can’t miss wonder boy. The shady landlords who let anything go out as long as the clients kept the noise down, the hard-hearted repos men and failed insurance men, the small shopkeepers trying to squeeze a penny. Knew the bouncers at half the gin mills in town, likewise the house dicks in the run-down hotel (he/they called them no tell hotels with a laugh), knew and used the intelligence of the newsies. Yeah, he knew all the flotsam and jetsam of the city before it was swamped with every person without a permanent home or just with a permanent itch to not have such a home.           

Marlin knew, had to, the cops, good and bad, mostly bad or indifferent, knew the guys on the take to the new wave bad boys from the east who decided to settle in the sun and reap the profits in style and knew the guys who knew the score and kept quiet. Yeah he knew the hot spots and the low- life dens, knew Hollywood, knew Inglewood, knew all the vastness of the city in the days before the tourists and Okies came and ate up the land. Knew it before the ill-winds of World War II and the vast monies hanging around to be spent by those money-starved Okies. Knew it to be exact.

Time were tough though all around in those years before the war money came booming into his city of angels, his east of Eden, and the private- eye game was no exception. So every once in a while to keep himself in coffee and cakes he needed to take an outside job. Sometimes it was grabbing the graveyard shift as a house- peeper over at Jackie Craig’s Taft Hotel and sometimes he had to take out –of-town jobs. This one is about one of those out-of-town jobs, about a Frisco town job, always a tough dollar town and this time was no exception. Worst it involved dealing with the denizens of that town’s bustling and crowded Chinatown district, also always a very tough dollar. After the last episode in such a district, the Yellow Dog case he called it, where he almost single-handedly got himself in the center of a drug war, opium, with rare jade involved as well, and wasted a couple of guys on the way out he had avoided chop suey joints in LA like the plague.      

It wasn’t like Marlowe had something against the yellow race, against the Chinese, although he probably if he thought about it shared the same bewilderment at that exotic race, and the same prejudices as the average Anglo- Californian when confronted with a swarm of them. He didn’t have time to wonder how they got here, who brought them, or the fact that their coolie labor had built half the west but just that there were so many of them. What bothered him though, bothered him in a professional way too, was that they were so secretive, so clannish and closed- mouthed that you could not get a straight answer from them to push your investigation forward. That was the case here, the case he called the China Doll case.  

Marlin had been hired by a woman, a young Chinese woman, Lillian Chou, who wanted to know why her house, her summer house over in Pacifica had been vandalized not once but twice. Miss Chou told Marlin that she did not live there much, a few weeks now and then, since her father died and passed on the property to her and had not been on the premises when the vandals wreaked havoc on the premises. She told him that she had been living in the East after attending college, Wellesley, along with a number of familiar daughters from the Chinese elite in now occupied China. Her concern however had been for a caretaker, a trusted employee of her father’s who had come with the place, and who had been beaten within an inch of his life on the second invasion. That time the thieves had taken everything that was not nailed down, everything including some priceless rare jade jewelry handed down from her mother. She wanted Marlin’s services to find at least find the jade and her employee’s attackers because he had done similar work on that Yellow Dog case. Moreover Freddie Ching had recommended him to her after the cops had essentially blown off the case as just another tong war episode. (Miss Chou’s late father, an importer, was well known to the San Francisco police for his various, uh, enterprises, stolen jewelry, sex- trafficking, opium, coolie laborers, whatever could be sold in the import-export markets).

That is where things started right off to get dicey. Miss Chou gave him little information since she had spent most of her time back East. That included trying to shed her Chinese origins as much as possible to fit in with the other Anglicized Chinese. Marlin pulled a few connections through Freddie Ching, the man to see in Frisco town on any China-tinged issue and was able to find out that Miss Chou’s father had made enemies in his time but also many friends, among them Sonny Dell. Sonny the number one Anglo drug trafficker in Northern California, the number one guy in the lucrative opium and heroin markets. Her father had made arrangements with Sonny to allow him to use his beachfront house in Pacifica to bring in his materials from the Far East in return for a big cut of the profits. That arrangement had, unknown to Marlin, extended beyond her father’s death through the employment of the trusted caretaker, Sung Ling, That caretaker though was the weak link in the chain down from Sonny. Ling had wanted to tell Miss Chou about the set-up but Sonny would not let him. And for his efforts he got beaten within an inch of his life and the house was ransacked to make it look like a robbery was the motivation.        

Marlin’s life became a great deal harder after coming by this information since all parties to the Pacifica house arrangements, including Sonny Dell, were keen to keep the commerce moving. One night over on Post Street Marlin learned how serious that big-time operator was about his interests when three gunsels hired by one Sonny Dell tried to waylay him, waylay him the only way they knew with slugs flying. The Frisco gunsel talent pool apparently had taken a nosedive since after a few shots of his own two of the boys lay dead on the street and the third hightailed it for parts unknown. That little shoot-out however put him no closer to the missing jade although it cleared up the mystery of who had beaten Miss Chou’s caretaker.

Sonny’s guns were not the only ones that he had to run up  against since nothing involving Chinatown escaped the purview of the tong leaders in that locale. Lee Chang, another powerful figure in Chinatown who had the Chinese end of the arrangement with Sonny just then and had no interest in seeing his newfound profit center disrupted by a white man working for some princess. So Marin also had to go rat-a-tat-tat with some of Chang’s boys. Par for the Frisco course.

Here is the screwy part though Miss Chou had been privy to what was happening at her estate from the start. She in fact had an arrangement with Sonny where he could use the premises in exchange for shipping weapons and other materials to China to aid in the struggle against the Japanese who had occupied the main areas of China. She used Marlin as a shield to find out what had happened to her caretaker who not only worked for Sonny but as a patriotic Chinaman for Miss Chou’s operation. Moreover there never was any jade, or rather that jade had long before been turned in cash by Miss Chou and used to pay for arms for the resistance back in China. Marlin when he heard that news after confronting Miss Chou once he realized that Sonny, Chang or one of their agents had to have spoken to her about his whereabouts left her place in disgust. Later he thought that a couple of lives could have been saved, a lot of trouble could have been avoided if Miss Chou another one of those damn secretive members of the yellow race had leveled with him. In any case since Lee Chang had some unfinished business with Marlin as a result a certain Chinatown shoot-out, he was avoiding chop suey joints in Frisco as well, staying far away indeed.