The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.
The next hour was three hours long.
The trouble with cops is not that they’re dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something that they didn’t have before. Maybe it did once, but not anymore. They’re topped by too many smart minds.
The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars’ place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night-to see that the guests didn’t bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house.
Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.
Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition – hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid.
The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.
The tragedy of life, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
We were very much in love – the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.
There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican.
I’m a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn’t gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.
She came back with the glass and her fingers, cold from holding the glass, touched mine, and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly, as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and you have been in an enchanted valley.
She was a cute as a washtub.
Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case... He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions.
It was a nice walk, if you like grunting.
My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.
They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don’t find out they don’t know themselves.
A man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.