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“I like them nasty,” I said. “The nasty ones have very simple minds.
I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. “Does anybody?” She threw her head back and opened her mouth wide and roared with laughter.
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.
“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.
“I’m sorry I took a swing at you. It probably wouldn’t have hurt much, if it had connected.”
Another screwball.
My face was stiff with thought, or with something that made my face stiff.
He had his dark glasses on again. That made him invisible.
“That’s Heathcliff,” the chauffeur said sourly. “Heathcliff?” “Cripes, that’s what they call the dog, Jack.” “Wuthering Heights?” I asked. “Now you’re double-talking again,” he sneered. “Look out—company.”
He looked me up and down, brilliant black eyes sweeping slowly and the silky fringes of long eyelashes following them.
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.
“And don’t tell me you wear a gun with your garden clothes.”
“Why, we’re in the same racket,” he said, looking up at me innocently, or as innocently as he could look through a pair of dark glasses.
We were in the same racket. So I wouldn’t chisel him. Just like that. I could have the key to his apartment and go in and make myself at home. I could wear his slippers and drink his liquor and lift up his carpet and count the thousand dollar bills under it. We were in the same racket.
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.
A tall man in dark clothes came out of the front door and leaned against the white wall. He looked very handsome. He had dark skin and a handsome head of iron-gray hair brushed back from his forehead.
I wondered what had happened to the hat. It hadn’t been up there. He must have got rid of it, thinking it was too conspicuous. His blond head was almost, but not quite, as bad.
Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.
He was scared. He wanted a friend, he wanted help. The fact that he picked me after so long a time and such little knowledge of me showed he didn’t know many people in the detective business.”
Maybe you’re going to need friends. A good word from a cop we know to be right might go a long way.”
He looked up, surprised. The girls at the pinball machine looked at me, surprised. I went over and looked at myself in the mirror behind the counter. I looked surprised.
“You are living in that district and you are borrowing fifteen dollars,” the Jew said sadly, and tore off my half of the ticket and counted out the money.
Now you take a Model T job like this—it takes a man to run it. Satisfied?”
“Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I’m sure you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good. Or until I’m hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not using any cyanide this evening.”
Hire Marlowe and get your house full of law. Why worry? Why be doubtful and confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cockeyed, careless, clubfooted, dissipated investigator. Philip Marlowe, Glenview 7537. See me and you meet the best cops in town. Why despair? Why be lonely? Call Marlowe and watch the wagon come.
“And as for me minding my own business and not minding yours,” I said, “it might be that my business and your business would get a little mixed up together. Through no fault of mine.”
But even the Pinkertons have to sleep, and Marlowe needed far, far more sleep than the Pinkertons. I went to bed.
effort,
“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.”
Give them a reasonable and plausible story and they go away cheerful. And the most reasonable and plausible story is always the truth.
“You wouldn’t notice the color of a hummingbird’s eye at fifty feet.
A man leaning out of a high window. A long time ago.
There was a sudden grave dignity in her over-emphasized chorus girl’s face.
That’s one nice thing about a business like mine. A little notoriety won’t hurt it at all.”
still calm, still level-eyed and so gravely contemptuous
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.
