The High Window (Philip Marlowe, #3)

by Raymond Chandler

“You’re Marlowe?” I nodded. “I’m a little disappointed,” he said. “I rather expected something with dirty fingernails.” “Come inside,” I said, “and you can be witty sitting down.”

He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair.

“Don’t ask me things I don’t know. I can’t tell you the answers. And don’t ask me things I do know, because I won’t tell you the answers.

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

Her hair was as artificial as a night club lobby.

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.