Read Online The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler - Free Book Online Page B

by nerves.
    She half smiled at me. She said: “Hello,” in a thin, brittle voice. “Wha—what—?” That tailed off and she went back to the thumb.
    “Remember me?” I said. “Doghouse Reilly, the man that grew too tall. Remember?”
    She nodded and a quick jerky smile played across her face.
    “Let’s go in,” I said. “I’ve got a key. Swell, huh?”
    “Wha—wha—?”
    I pushed her to one side and put the key in the door and opened it and pushed her in through it. I shut the door again and stood there sniffing. The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamps, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum—all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.
    The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick. I rolled a cigarette in my fingers and pushed some books out of the way and sat on the end of the black desk. I lit my cigarette, puffed a plume of smoke and watched the thumb and tooth act for a while in silence. Carmen stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the principal’s office.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked her finally.
    She picked at the cloth of her coat and didn’t answer.
    “How much do you remember of last night?”
    She answered that—with a foxy glitter rising at the back of her eyes. “Remember what? I was sick last night. I was home.” Her voice was a cautious throaty sound that just reached my ears.
    “Like hell you were.”
    Her eyes flicked up and down very swiftly.
    “Before you went home,” I said. “Before I took you home. Here. In that chair”—I pointed to it—“on that orange shawl. You remember all right.”
    A slow flush crept up her throat. That was something. She could blush. A glint of white showed under the clogged gray irises. She chewed hard on her thumb.
    “You—were the one?” she breathed.
    “Me. How much of it stays with you?”
    She said vaguely: “Are you the police?”
    “No. I’m a friend of your father’s.”
    “You’re not the police?”
    “No.”
    She let out a thin sigh. “Wha—what do you want?”
    “Who killed him?”
    Her shoulders jerked, but nothing more moved in her face. “Who else—knows?”
    “About Geiger? I don’t know. Not the police, or they’d be camping here. Maybe Joe Brody.”
    It was a stab in the dark but it got a yelp out of her. “Joe Brody! Him!”
    Then we were both silent. I dragged at my cigarette and she ate her thumb.
    “Don’t get clever, for God’s sake,” I urged her. “This is a spot for a little old-fashioned simplicity. Did Brody kill him?”
    “Kill who?”
    “Oh, Christ,” I said.
    She looked hurt. Her chin came down an inch. “Yes,” she said solemnly. “Joe did it.”
    “Why!”
    “I don’t know.” She shook her head, persuading herself that she didn’t know.
    “Seen much of him lately?”
    Her hands went down and made small white knots. “Just once or twice. I hate him.”
    “Then you know where he lives.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you don’t like him any more?”
    “I hate him!”
    “Then you’d like him for the spot.”
    A little blank again. I was going too fast for her. It was hard not to. “Are you willing to tell the police it was Joe Brody?” I probed.
    Sudden panic flamed all over her face. “If I can kill the nude photo angle, of course,” I added soothingly.
    She giggled. That gave me a nasty feeling. If she had screeched or wept or even nosedived to the floor in a dead