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| Daylight Noir |
| Photographs by Catherine Corman |
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“Give me the money.”
The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain pounded above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock’s green-tinged tower was far above us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping city. Her black-gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She leaned towards me.
“I’m leaving, copper. I’m on my way.”
At the opening of The Lady In The Lake, Raymond Chandler writes: “The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart.” Here’s Los Angeles playing the role of a Utopia—rubber sidewalks!—always on the verge of being rescinded, and melted back down in favor of guns or vehicles. If California’s place in American history is as a destination that is therefore also an ending, a dream-voyage’s foreclosure before tipping into the Pacific, Manifest Destiny become Manifest Distress, then Los Angeles is a bluff, a tenuous proposition, a place built so quickly that everyone’s nerves are still jangled from its sudden appearance and the obligation to act as though it actually exists. Notice Chandler’s first hesitation—the Treloar “was, and is,” on Olive—might his readers fear it had moved?
While we’re conducting this interrogation, who is that hatless pale man anyway, watching the work? He only has a face like a building superintendent, though of course there’s nothing in this remark that prevents him actually being one. More important, perhaps, is the man describing the man, the man obviously also watching, the Chandler-Marlowe presence that suffuses the scene in its omnipresent-unacknowledged, pale-shading-to-invisible way. What’s his stake in the Treloar and its rubber sidewalk? Hard to say, except that in Chandler the hardboiled style becomes above all a way of seeing, not so far from photography itself. Philip Marlowe’s ease of access across boundaries, his passage again and again into the scenes of love, strife and murder that fill Chandler’s books, reveal him as a kind of camera, or ghost. Making his elusive visitations, Marlowe becomes a presence whose movements, though momentarily subject to the holding actions of policemen or of human desire, are ultimately too lightly bound by these strictures to be more than briefly delayed. “Murder-a-day Marlowe” has always got another appointment to keep, another room or street to occupy in his insomniac catalogue of the false permanence of human arrangements. And, since this is Los Angeles, what he witnesses in the flash-bulb sunlight, the visionary, hallucinatory sunlight, is also the false permanence of the places these human lives have come to occupy, and the false indifference of those places to the human catastrophes enacted within their walls and borders. If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style. Remove the dead bodies, and the living ones, as Catherine Corman has done in her own supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places, and the force of Chandler’s insight becomes even more terrifyingly urgent: these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes, to keep them from being piled unbearably atop one another, they are actively trying to forget us. And what is a ghost, finally, but a kind of building superintendent? At least until the whole place is disassembled and converted into vehicles and guns.
—Jonathan Lethem
“We go west,” she said, “through the Beverly Hills and then father on.”
I let the clutch in and drifted around the corner to go south to Sunset. Dolores got one of her long brown cigarettes out.
“Did you bring a gun?” she asked.
“Then a year ago Orrin came out to work for the Cal-Western Aircraft Company in Bay City. He didn’t have to. He had a good job in Wichita. I guess he just sort of wanted to come out here to California. Most everybody does.”
Most of the field was public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn’t suppose they would want to.
“Who runs this town?”
Silence.
“I heard a gambler named Laird Brunette put up thirty grand to elect the Mayor. I heard he owns the Belvedere Club and both the gambling ships out on the water.”
“Might be.”
I told him what had happened at Florian’s and why. He stared at me solemnly and shook his bald head.
“A nice quiet place Sam run too,” he said. “Ain’t nobody been knifed there in a month.”
I went into the Hotel Metropole, strolled over to the big horseshoe cigar counter to light one of my cigarettes and then sat down in one of the old brown leather chairs in the lobby.
A blond man in a brown suit, dark glasses and the now familiar hat came into the lobby and moved unobtrusively among the potted palms and the stucco arches to the cigar counter. He bought a package of cigarettes and broke it open standing there, using the time to lean his back against the counter and give the lobby the benefit of his eagle eye.
He picked up his change and went over and sat down with his back to a pillar. He tipped his hat down over his dark glasses and seemed to go to sleep with an unlighted cigarette between his lips.
“Name’s Oppenheimer.”
“Jules Oppenheimer?”
He nodded. “Right. Have a cigar.” He held one out to me. I showed my cigarette. He threw the cigar into the pool, then frowned. “Memory’s going,” he said sadly. “Wasted fifty cents. Oughtn’t to do that.”
“You run this studio,” I said.
He nodded absently. “Ought to have saved that cigar.”
He changed his clothes and we ate dinner at Musso’s about five-thirty. No drinks. He caught the bus on Cahuenga and I drove home thinking about this and that. His empty suitcase was on my bed where he had unpacked it and put his stuff in a lightweight job of mine. His had a gold key which was in one of the locks. I locked the suitcase up empty and tied the key to the handle and put it on the high shelf in my clothes closet. It didn’t feel quite empty, but what was in it was no business of mine.
“They seem to be a family things happen to. A big Buick belonging to one of them is washing about in the surf off Lido fish pier.”
I held the telephone tight enough to crack it. I also held my breath.
“Yeah,” Ohls said cheerfully. “A nice new Buick sedan all messed up with sand and sea water . . . Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a guy inside it.”
Click here to order Daylight Noir, Catherine Corman's book of photographs of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. You can see more from the series at daylightnoir.com.
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