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It was an old and settled city, as such things go in California. Its buildings seemed to belong to its hills, to lean with some security on the past.
Wrought-iron chandeliers hung like giant black bunches of withered grapes from the high ceiling.
He regarded me in silence for a moment, stroking his prow of a nose.
The angry wheezing in the passages of her head sounded like a ghost in a ruined house.
Curlyhead talked and acted like a pro, or at least a gifted amateur with a vocation.
In the harsh sunlight his face was a grainy white, and puffy like boiled rice.
She came toward my table, clutching her shiny leather purse as if it was a token of respectability.
There were flecks of gray in her carefully waved black hair, like little shards of iron.
His grin showed all his remaining teeth.
Like other performers, he had a public face and a private one. Each of them was slightly phony, but the private face suited him better.
The ugliness rose like smoke in the room, spreading to its far corners, fouling the light at the window.
He was like a moving piece of countryside on the edge of my headlight beam.
The Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir.
He smiled a money smile.
He had a cruel nose and under it the kind of mouth that smiles by stretching horizontally.
There was nothing there but the switchboard, staring like a wall of empty eyes.
It was a .32 revolver, a little nickel-plated suicide gun.
Sheila’s tears passed like a summer shower.
He raised his eyes over my head as if he could see a mountain of gold in the distance.
