The High Window

by Raymond Chandler

A red-throated hummingbird went into a scarlet bush beside the door, shook the long tubular blooms around a little, and zoomed off so fast he simply disappeared in the air.

Hoover collar

In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.

I was looking at the Brasher Doubloon.

the New Republic.

the mystery of how Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock had got her Brasher Doubloon back while I still had it in my pocket.

The wind was quiet out here and the valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as if they had been cut with an engraving tool.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

Inside was a small windowless anteroom on the furnishings of which a great deal of expense had been spared.

On the air of the room a rather heavy perfume struggled with the smell of death, and lost. Although defeated, it was still there.

man leaning out of a high window. A long time ago.

A man leaning out of a high window, a long time ago.

high window, a man leaning out--a long time ago.

A car tore down the street much too fast and skidded around the next corner. The thin shreds of a girl's laughter came back along the dark street as if the car had spilled them out in its rush.

The coinmaker's initials, E. B., are on the left wing of the eagle.

looked at the initials E. B. stamped into the left wing,

If your Brasher Doubloon is really at this moment upstairs, then the coin Phillips was hired to peddle was not a stolen coin. It was a counterfeit."

The idea was to counterfeit a rare and valuable gold coin,

And I know she didn't push anybody out of any window.

"And you didn't push Horace Bright out of any window," I said.

think maybe you think you killed Horace Bright.

He did actually fall, of course, but you were not the one that pushed him."

"You were made to think you had pushed him," I said. "It was done with care, deliberation and the sort of quiet ruthlessness you only find in a certain kind of woman dealing with another woman.

"that is a snapshot of Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock giving her first husband the heave out of his office window.

This is what Vannier has had for proof all these years.