In honor of Thanksgiving tryptophan, I’m pulling this Big Sleep reflection from my personal archives. I wrote this back in 2015 after seeing the movie for the second time.
Perhaps the most famous story about the making of the Humphrey Bogart movie The Big Sleep is the unsolved puzzle of who killed chauffeur Owen Taylor. Brody seems genuine in his surprise at the idea of a second murder being laid at his feet. Eddie Marrs didn’t do it (or order it done) because he really didn’t seem to know about Geiger’s death until confronting Marlowe in Geiger’s house, and therefore would have no reason to harm Taylor. Karol the punk kid might have done it, believing that Taylor had killed Geiger, but if that’s the case what made him change his mind later and (incorrectly) blame Brody and kill him?
Actually that’s a valid question regardless. The day after Geiger’s murder, Karol is helping Brody clear out Geiger’s shop—but later guns down Brody, apparently as revenge. So maybe Karol was merely playing along with Brody long enough to get his departed boss’s affairs in order . . . or maybe Karol didn’t blame Brody until Marrs just happened to point Karol in that direction. Or maybe Carmen, vexed at not getting her way in Brody’s apartment, broke away from her sister and immediately called up Karol (knowing how to contact him through their long association via Geiger) and pinned the blame on Brody. Perhaps Carmen had even brought along Karol to begin with, to act as backup in case her attempt to retrieve the photos went wrong.
So it’s possible Karol killed Taylor (sure Taylor had killed Geiger) and then was later misled into thinking Brody was really the one who killed Geiger.
I can work out a better answer, though.
Agnes did it. Or had a hand in it. For reasons of her own she was tailing Brody that night and saw Brody knock out Taylor and steal from him; but Brody left thinking Taylor was still alive. Checking up on Brody’s actions, she found Taylor dead or near death and decided to take care of the evidence and set up the car-crash-into-the-ocean scenario.
It might go something like this:
Joe Brody wasn’t much of a man, try as she might to change this fact, but Agnes needed him. Not needed him in the cheap and helpless way of a desperate magazine heroine, like a sap, but in the practical way, the way a carpenter needs a hammer, as a tool to build the thing she needed, and who cared what happened to him after that, she could always get another at any dime store. They were common as dirt. So it wasn’t out of sentiment or grief or anything so childish as jealousy that she was tailing her man that night, driving around in her own car, a car he’d seen her in a hundred times before but which he never once noticed following him around all evening, he was just that stupid; no, it was pure, unvarnished self-interest that kept her on the road, carefully hanging back just the right amount to keep him in view without drawing attention to herself. She had an idea the fool was getting sweet on that spoiled rich floozy Carmen Sternworth, the one he was so eager to blackmail, and she needed to know if that was true so she could make the proper plans to snip the bud off that flower before it bloomed. It would not do at all if Joe Brody turned his head to another woman at this point. All her schemes depended on him being completely nuts about Agnes herself. They ended up at the Geiger house—no surprise. Pretty soon the money-bleeding floozy showed up too—again, no surprise. Life was sure a kick in the teeth—Agnes had always had to scrap and scrape for every last nickel, every red cent, despite how tough and smart and careful she was, but here was this walking store-window dummy without a brain in her head or a rat’s worth of sense, floating around high and carefree just because her daddy happened to have a ton of money. It was unfair, that’s what it was, that the stupid and worthless ended up wealthy while the harder you worked and the more you deserved a good shot the faster life seemed to knock you down the ladder before you could get anywhere. This time it looked like that shove was going to come, as it so often did, in the form of a man who did you wrong just when things were about to go right.
<Agnes leaves her car to spy from a better position; soon there is a gunshot, a scream, a flash; the chauffeur flees; Brody chases him; Agnes needs time to get back to her car but eventually finds Taylor in the car; Brody has already left, but she goes to the car window to see what’s happened>
The heap of humanity slumped over the steering wheel made a moan—maybe its last. She’d seen plenty of men get whopped in the head in her day, and knew sometimes you made it and sometimes you didn’t. Even the blows that didn’t take you right away could still do you in before you ever woke up enough to know it. Was this going to be one of those times? Agnes watched for a long moment, trying to decide what to do. Nobody was around to see, but at the first sign of anyone approaching she would scream. An easy story, especially for a woman, who would naturally be believed: she’d seen the car, parked in an odd place, and gotten out to see what was wrong, then stared at the man in shock until finally finding her voice. No trouble making that one stick, the way she’d lay it on if a witness appeared. Then the man in the driver’s seat had a convulsion—almost too small for the word, more like a shudder and a tremble—and wheezed once, then never again. Yes, he was dead, all right, and Brody had killed him, though the idiot didn’t know it. Knowing someone was alive when you left him won’t keep judge and jury from hanging you once they’re sure you’re the one who whacked him. But any business like that would get in Agnes’s way even more than a wandering eye and a useless heiress might. She wasn’t sure if anyone could tie Brody to the dead man or not, to point the investigation in his direction, but no need to take chances.
<Agnes gets the car to the right place, sets it up to roll to the pier, and leaves>
Just like a man not to clean up his own messes. And just like a woman, too, to clean it up for him and never even say a word to let him know what she’d done. You didn’t get any gratitude when you were a woman—either they didn’t know you’d done anything at all, because they were stupid, or they knew it but just took it for granted, smug and sure in their misbegotten belief that that’s what women were around for anyway, to clean up so men wouldn’t have to. Well, just you wait, Joe Brody, Agnes thought to herself with a smile, I’m gonna clean up all right!