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I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.
Do you like orchids?” “Not particularly,” I said. The General half-closed his eyes. “They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”
The soft wet heat was like a pall around us.
I test very high on insubordination, General.”
Rusty Regan.
an adventurer who happened to get himself wrapped up in some velvet.”
the I.R.A.
West Hollywood, California.
The written part was in a sprawling moronic handwriting with a lot of fat curlicues and circles for dots.
Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless.
Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies.
Neither of them has any more moral sen...
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I never do things by halves.”
“Mrs. Regan
The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.
She was tall and rangy and strong-looking.
at.
When I looked back she had her lip between her teeth and was worrying it like a puppy at the fringe of a rug.
Sister thumb sucking. Her lip biting. He ear tugging.
He inclined his silver head and said politely: “I’m sorry, sir. I make many mistakes.” He closed the door against my back.
Her smile was now hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped.
She was as sore as an alderman with the mumps.
a pinseal wallet with gold corners
A big red interurban car grumbled past.
walking on the balls of his feet,
breathing with his mouth open,
I dropped my nickel and dialed his number
I flipped my wallet open on her desk and let her look at the buzzer pinned to the flap.
She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.
Medium height, fattish. Would weigh about a hundred and sixty pounds.
Medium height, one-sixty is fattish.
goes without a hat,
handsomely printed in handset type on fine paper.
A lending library of elaborate smut.
A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection.
From the police, district attorney, mob?
I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke
trench coat
jerkin
before I got in the groove.
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound.
menage.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.
Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees.
majolica
Marcel Proust.”
“A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.”
“Yes. I like roulette. All the Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life.
