The High Window (Philip Marlowe, #3)

by Raymond Chandler

The room beyond was large and square and sunken and cool and had the restful atmosphere of a funeral chapel and something of the same smell.

Her coarse-grained coppery blond hair was not ugly in itself, but it was drawn back so tightly over her narrow head that it almost lost the effect of being hair at all.

She let me get to the door before she growled at my back: “You don’t like me very well, do you?” I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. “Does anybody?”

Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping. The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

His smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.

“A heart of gold, and the gold buried good and deep.”

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.

Fuzz grew out of his ears, far enough to catch a moth.

While he read it I smelled him from across the desk. He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.

He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.

Then he screwed his face up and his chin wobbled and his chest began to bounce in and out and a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness. He was laughing.

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.

He held an empty smeared glass in his hand. It looked as if somebody had been keeping goldfish in it.

“That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all,” I said.

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. She had eyes like strange sins.

She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.

She had a rich deep down around the ankles contralto that was pleasant to listen to.

“Class is a thing that has a way of dissolving rapidly in alcohol.

He had the fixed smile of polite idiocy on his face.

Dr. Carl Moss was a big burly Jew with a Hitler mustache, pop eyes and the calmness of a glacier.

The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.

out into the cheerless stuffy unused living room that made me feel like an embalmed corpse just to be in it.

There was a new expression on his face, something bright and shining and at the same time just a little silly. The expression of a weak man being proud.

“Put some rouge on your cheeks,” I told her. “You look like the snow maiden after a hard night with the fishing fleet.”

It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you.

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.