The High Window (Philip Marlowe, #3)

by Raymond Chandler

The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes.

I went into the bar and sank into a leather bar seat packed with down. Glasses tinkled gently, lights glowed softly, there were quiet voices whispering of love, or ten per cent, or whatever they whisper about in a place like that.

A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse one of the barmen. He cursed him in a loud clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rhumba music like a shovel through snow.

The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman. The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing in his face but pallor. Then he turned to me and said: “Yes, sir?” “I want to talk to a fellow named Eddie Prue.” “So?” “He works here,” I said. “Works here doing what?” His voice was perfectly level and as dry as dry sand. “I understand he’s the guy that walks behind the boss. If you know what I mean.” “...

“A dry martini will do.” “A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.” “Okay.” “Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?” “Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.” “On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?” “Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.” “Thank you, sir,” he said. “A dry martini.” He took three steps away from me and then came back and leaned across the bar and said: “I made a mistake in a drink. The gentleman was telling me about it.” “I heard him.” “He was telling me about it as gentlemen tell you about things like that. As big shot directors like to point out to you your little errors. And you heard him.” “Yeah,” I said, wondering how long this was going to go on. “He made himself heard—the gentleman did. So I come over here and practically insult you.” “I got the idea,” I sai...

The customers seemed to like corny music in there. Perhaps they were all tired out trying to be ahead of the minute in the place where they worked.

I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase. It seemed like a lot of copper.

“Just think,” I said. “Poor old Marlowe with lead buttons on his vest.”

It was just as hot in Pasadena as the day before and the big dark red brick house on Dresden Avenue looked just as cool and the little painted Negro waiting by the hitching block looked just as sad. The same butterfly landed on the same hydrangea bush—or it looked like the same one—the same heavy scent of summer lay on the morning, and the same middle-aged sourpuss with the frontier voice opened to my ring. She led me along the same hallways to the same sunless sunroom. In it Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock sat in the same reed chaise-longue and as I came into the room she was pouring herself a slug from what looked like the same port bottle but was more probably a grandchild.

I said: “You’re not tough. You just think you’re tough. You been living too long with people that are scared of you. Wait’ll you meet up with some law. Those boys are professionals. You’re just a spoiled amateur.”