The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.
I didn’t have anything really exiting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger breath.
A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
It’s like this with us baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts... nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.
I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me.
There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.
No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront.
Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.
Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath.
What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.
We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return.
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?