Read Online Red Wind by Raymond Chandler - Free Book Online Page B

in this country. If you wanted them matched—three months at least. And this house would not do that sort of thing at all.”
    “It must be swell to be that snooty,” I said. I put a card under his black sleeve. “Give me a name that will—and not in three months—and maybe not exactly like them.”
    He shrugged, went away with the card, came back in five minutes and handed it back to me. There was something written on the back.
    The old Levantine had a shop on Melrose, a junk shop with everything in the window from a folding baby carriage to a French horn, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to one of those .44 Special Single Action Six-shooters they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers were tough.
    The old Levantine wore a skull cap and two pairs of glasses and a full beard. He studied my pearls, shook his head sadly, and said: “For twenty dollars, almost so good. Not so good, you understand. Not so good glass.”
    “How like will they look?”
    He spread his firm strong hands. “I am telling you the truth,” he said. “They would not fool a baby.”
    “Make them up,” I said. “With this clasp. And I want the others back too, of course.”
    “Yah. Two o’clock,” he said.
    Leon Valesanos, the little brown man from Uruguay, made the afternoon papers. He had been found hanging in an unnamed apartment. The police were investigating.
    At four o’clock I walked into the long cool bar of the Club Esquire and prowled along the row of booths until I found one where a woman sat alone. She wore a hat like a shallow soup plate with a very wide edge, a brown tailor-made suit with a severe mannish shirt and tie.
    I sat down beside her and slipped a parcel along the seat.
    “You don’t open that,” I said. “In fact you can slip it into the incinerator as is, if you want to.”
    She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. “Thanks.” Her face was very pale.
    I ordered a highball and the waiter went away. “Read the papers?”
    “Yes.”
    “You understand now about this fellow Copernik who stole your act? That’s why they won’t change the story or bring you into it.”
    “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Thank you, all the same. Please—please, show them to me.”
    I pulled a string of pearls out of the loosely wrapped tissue paper in my pocket and slid them across to her. The silver propeller clasp winked in the light of the wall bracket. The little diamond winked. The pearls were as dull as white soap. They didn’t even match in size.
    “You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my pearls.”
    The waiter came with my drink and she put her bag on them deftly. When he was gone she fingered them slowly once more, dropped them into the bag and gave me a dry mirthless smile.
    “As you said—I’ll keep the clasp.”
    I said slowly: “You don’t know anything about me. You saved my life last night and we had a moment, but it was just a moment. You still don’t know anything about me. There’s a detective downtown named Ybarra, a Mexican of the nice sort, who was on the job when the pearls were found in Waldo’s suitcase. That’s in case you would like to make sure—”
    She said: “Don’t be silly. It’s all finished. It was a memory. I’m too young to nurse memories. It may be all for the best. I loved Stan Phillips—but he’s gone—long gone.”
    I stared at her, didn’t say anything.
    She added quietly: “This morning my husband told me something I hadn’t known. We are to separate. So I have very little to laugh about today.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing to say. I may see you sometime. Maybe not. I don’t move much in your circle. Good luck.”
    I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment. “You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.
    “You drink it. That peppermint stuff will just make you sick.”
    I stood there a moment with a