The Lady in the Lake (Philip Marlowe, #4)

by Raymond Chandler

Half an hour and three or four cigarettes later a door opened behind Miss Fromsett’s desk and two men came out backwards laughing. A third man held the door for them and helped them laugh.

“Yah,” he said bitterly, “think I can’t smell a dick when I meet one?

I sat with my drink untouched in my hand. I like to drink, but not when people are using me for a diary.

He wore the same clothes he had worn that afternoon, with the addition of a leather jerkin which must have been new once, say about the time of Grover Cleveland’s first term.

The clerk on duty was an eggheaded man with no interest in me or in anything else. He wore parts of a white linen suit and he yawned as he handed me the desk pen and looked off into the distance as if remembering his childhood.

I was trying to make up my mind whether to try handling Lavery with a feather or go on using the back of my hand and edge of my tongue. I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn’t produce for me—and I didn’t think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.

Grayson put his bony hand out and I shook it. It felt like shaking hands with a towel rack.