Floyd Hanson’s suicide while in custody is reported to Philip Marlowe in a late-night telephone call and later becomes part of his attempt to make Clare Cavendish face the human cost of the case. The immediate report is brief, but Marlowe’s account supplies its circumstances: Hanson made a rope from a torn bedsheet, attached it to a window bar, and died in a cell where the window was too low for him to hang clear of the floor. The death is presented not as an unexplained accident but as a deliberate act whose effort and duration trouble those who hear of it.

Circumstances and Discovery

The call comes after a punishing day. Philip Marlowe has gone to Barney’s Beanery and drunk six bourbons; Travis, the bartender, refuses to serve him more, takes his car keys, and helps him into a cab. Marlowe eventually reaches home and falls asleep fully clothed. In the middle of the night, the telephone jolts him awake. Disoriented, he initially mistakes its ring for a fire alarm and has trouble opening the front door before answering.

Bernie Ohls tells him that Floyd Hanson has just been found in his cell, hanging from a window bar. Hanson has torn a bedsheet into strips and twisted them together to make a rope. Because the window is not high enough, he cannot simply drop clear of the floor; the circumstances require him to keep his feet on the ground and his knees bent while he dies. The detail makes the death sound laborious rather than sudden. The report gives no motive for Hanson’s act, and neither the call nor Marlowe’s later account supplies one.

The Call and Its Immediate Aftermath

Bernie Ohls initially treats Hanson’s death with bleak humor, remarking that another potential source of information will no longer speak. His joke does not amount to indifference: his laughter is described as lacking enjoyment. Philip Marlowe answers that Ohls is all heart, but the exchange quickly turns from gallows humor to Marlowe’s condition. Ohls hears that Marlowe is drunk, and Marlowe struggles to make himself understood before the two men laugh again.

Even while intoxicated, Marlowe shifts the conversation to Bartlett, the older man he had shot in the knee during his own ordeal. Ohls says Bartlett is in a coma, has lost a great deal of blood, and is receiving transfusions; whether he will survive remains uncertain. Marlowe insists that Bartlett had nearly drowned him, while Ohls reproaches him for the severity of the shooting. The call thus places Hanson’s death beside another uncertain life, but it does not establish a direct connection between the two men’s fates. Instead, it shows how one piece of bad news arrives amid a wider sequence of violence and injury.

Marlowe’s Later Account to Clare Cavendish

When Philip Marlowe later speaks with Clare Cavendish, he lists Hanson’s death among the events she must confront. Clare asks what he means about Hanson, because the newspaper had presented a different account. Marlowe rejects the newspaper’s implication of an accidental death and recounts the bedsheet, the window bar, and the low window. He emphasizes the time and determination required by the method, forcing the death out of the newspaper’s compressed public version and into a concrete account of a person’s final actions.

Clare’s response is immediate: her face turns ashen, and she expresses pity for Hanson. Marlowe watches her, uncertain whether she is acting, then uses the death to press her about what she knows. He places it within a catalogue of the case’s brutality: Lynn Peterson has died painfully, two Mexican men have been beaten to death, and Wilberforce Canning has fled the country. Hanson’s suicide is therefore not offered as an isolated revelation. In Marlowe’s argument, it is one part of the accumulating damage that makes it impossible for Clare to treat the investigation as a tidy or distant affair. Her reaction suggests that the corrected account has made the death newly real to her, though the scene does not establish what she previously knew about Hanson.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Hanson’s death has an immediate investigative consequence: as Bernie Ohls’s dark joke implies, a man who might have supplied information is no longer available to speak. The evidence does not disclose what Hanson could have revealed, or whether his death was intended to conceal anything. The narrative leaves that uncertainty intact rather than assigning him a motive. Later, when Philip Marlowe calls Ohls about the Cahuilla Club case, there is no trace of Wilberforce Canning, Bartlett remains unable to speak in a coma, and the two dead Mexican men have not been identified. Those unresolved circumstances keep Hanson’s death within a larger aftermath marked by missing testimony and uncertain outcomes.

The event also exposes the gap between a public report and the physical circumstances Marlowe recounts. The newspaper account Clare has seen reduces Hanson’s death to an apparent accident; Marlowe’s fuller description changes its meaning by establishing that Hanson acted deliberately. His account does not explain why, but it insists on the work and endurance involved. That insistence matters in a novel where violence can be absorbed into case files, headlines, and investigators’ cynical exchanges. The scene briefly interrupts that flattening: a quip about lost testimony gives way to the difficult particulars of the death, and later the same particulars become a way of making Clare recognize the human consequences surrounding her.