You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.
He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes.
Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
I like games of chance, including women.
You mean something happened to him?” Her voice faded off into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.
The law is where you buy it and what you pay for it.
You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one.
Do I have to be polite?” I asked. “Or can I just be natural?
Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy. “Ever kill a man, Marlowe?” “Yes.” “Nasty feeling, isn’t it?” “Some people like it.” His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they looked vague. “How could they?
His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.
The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
The pursuit of knowledge, brother, is the askin’ of many questions.
The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on. I went back to my desk, dropped the bottle of whiskey back into the drawer, shut the drawer and sat down again.
I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog.
Tsk, tsk,” I said, not moving at all. “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail. Put it down and don’t be silly, Joe.
I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn’t know about it yet. It’s so hard for women – even nice women – to realise that their bodies are not irresistible.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.
No trial, no sensational headlines, no mud-slinging just to sell newspapers without the slightest regard for truth or fair play or for the feelings of innocent people.
Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.