Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.
I wouldn’t say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors.
Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.
All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing.
I’m a copper,” he said. “Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style.
The room was empty. It was full of silence and the memory of a nice perfume.
Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake.
Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us – ” “This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.” “He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.
My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you.
I’m rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?
She’s a nice girl. Not my type.” “You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. “I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.” “They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.
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.