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The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.
The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.
There was nothing in that for me, so I let it drift with the current.
grinned at her with my head on one side. She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. “I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,” she snapped. “And I don’t like your manners.” “I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to
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“What do they look like—grapefruit?” she enquired tartly.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
there was a thick pinkish Chinese rug in which a gopher could have spent a week without showing his nose above the nap.
There was an overtone of strain in her smile. It wasn’t a smile at all. It was a grimace. She just thought it was a smile.
I took my dark glasses off and tapped them delicately on the inside of my left wrist. If you can weigh a hundred and ninety pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best.
Her black hair was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.
five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate,
The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check.”
Brody took a gun out of the cigar box and pointed it at my nose. I looked at the gun. It was a black Police .38. I had no argument against it at the moment.
His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.
“I knew damn well you were trouble,” she snapped at me. “I told Joe to watch his step.” “It’s not his step, it’s the back of his lap he ought to watch,” I said.
People who spend their money for second-hand sex jags are as nervous as dowagers who can’t find the rest room.
I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.
It was one of those solid old-fashioned houses
which it used to be the thing to move bodily to new locations as the city grew westward. Wilde came of an old Los Angeles family and had probably been born in the house when it was on West Adams or Figueroa or St. James Park.
It gave the impression that Geiger had been killed the night before, that Brody had been killed about an hour later, and that Captain Cronjager had solved both murders while lighting a cigarette.
I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling.
I was thinking about going out to lunch and that life was pretty flat and that it would probably be just as flat if I took a drink and that taking a drink all alone at that time of day wouldn’t be any fun anyway.
It might have annoyed him, but business is business, and you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes.
He was a very small man, not more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher’s thumb.
You know what Canino will do—beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling.”
He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look.
