Police raid the Cahuilla Club as Canning flees abroad

The raid on the Cahuilla Club is the moment when Philip Marlowe’s private investigation and physical escape become a police case, but it does not deliver a clean resolution. Bernie Ohls’s men find evidence of violence, arrest Floyd Hanson, and learn what Wilberforce Canning had been trying to discover; Canning himself has already fled, leaving his identity and destination uncertain.

Background and Trigger

Marlowe’s inquiry had begun with a discrepancy about Nico Peterson’s death. Joe Green told him that Peterson had died in a hit-and-run on April 19 near a club in the Pacific Palisades, and the official file placed the accident on Latimer Road between eleven at night and midnight. Yet the body’s identification did not settle every question: Joe acknowledged that Peterson’s sister had identified the corpse at the morgue, while Marlowe pressed him on the distinction between seeing a body at the scene and officially identifying it. The identity became still less secure when Marlowe told Joe that someone had recently seen Peterson alive.

That disclosure weighed on Marlowe. He wondered whether bringing Joe into the matter had betrayed Clare Cavendish’s trust, but also believed that when the investigation stalled he had to force it forward. His later encounter with Canning and the men at the Cahuilla Club connected the unresolved Peterson question to a more immediate danger. After Marlowe escaped, he drove toward the gate despite his weakened condition and stopped at the first telephone booth he saw to call Bernie. The raid followed that call, although the precise instructions Marlowe gave are not recounted.

The Raid and Arrests

Bernie and his colleagues raided the Cahuilla Club and found Bartlett still on the grounds near the pool, unconscious from blood loss. The officers also had to make their way through a crowd of intoxicated Shriners. The scene brought the club’s private violence into contact with the disorder of its public gathering: the police were not entering an empty hideout but working through a busy, drunken crowd to reach the people and evidence left behind.

Hanson was arrested at his apartment in Bay City, where he was packing to leave. Bernie remarked that if Hanson had not been trying to take so many belongings, he might have had time to get away. The detail distinguishes Hanson’s failed escape from Canning’s successful one: Hanson remained long enough for the police to catch him, while Canning had already put distance between himself and the authorities. Bartlett’s condition, meanwhile, had a direct consequence for the investigation. Later, Bernie reported that Bartlett could not speak and that the wound Marlowe had inflicted had damaged an artery; the authorities therefore had little prospect of obtaining an account from him.

Canning’s Escape

By the time Bernie led a squad to Canning’s Hancock Park house that evening, Canning had gone. The household staff could provide a hurried sequence rather than a destination: he had returned home in a rush, ordered a bag packed, and had a car brought around to take him to the airport. The sudden departure suggested that he had acted quickly after the events at the club, but no witness supplied a confirmed explanation of what prompted him to leave at that exact moment.

The airport inquiry yielded a possible route, not a verified identity. One check-in employee thought she recognized Canning, but the name on the passenger record was not his, and she could not recall what name he had used. The flight was a direct connection to Toronto, with a further leg to London, England; the employee did not know which destination had appeared on his ticket. Bernie directed the Sheriff’s office to examine the passenger list for the Air Canada night flight to Toronto, while his men continued showing Canning’s photograph to airline staff. The evidence left open whether he had continued to London and under which identity he had travelled.

Revelations and Aftermath

Once taken downtown, Hanson proved willing to talk. He told investigators that the two Mexican men had been tortured for information and killed on Canning’s orders. He also offered to show the police where he and Bartlett had disposed of the bodies, in a lime pit at a remote corner of the club grounds. His account supplied the missing link between the violence at the club and Canning’s purpose: Bernie reasoned that Canning had wanted information from Marlowe and the two men about Nico Peterson. Peterson’s disappearance was therefore not an isolated puzzle but part of the pressure that had brought the men together at the club.

The raid produced arrests and a confession, but it did not close the case. Canning remained beyond the police’s reach, and the two Mexican men remained unidentified. In a later report, Bernie said there was no trace of Canning and that Bartlett could not speak; the newspapers had given the Cahuilla Club Case only a brief period of attention. The operation thus converts scattered suspicions into a partial account of Canning’s methods while leaving its central fugitive, the victims’ identities, and the Peterson mystery unresolved.