The big sleep by Raymond Chandler

Author:Raymond Chandler
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Detectives, Mystery crime suspense, Los Angeles (Calif.) - Fiction, Political, Performing Arts, Hard-Boiled, Fiction, Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled, Blind, History & Criticism, Private investigators - California - Los Angeles - Fiction, California, Los Angeles, Philip (Fictitious character) - Fiction, Mystery & Detective - General, Private investigators, Detective and mystery stories, Screenplays, Los Angeles (Calif.), Philip (Fictitious character), Historical, Crime, Mystery & Detective - Historical, Literature: Classics, Film & Video, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Mystery, Detective, General, Marlowe, 20th Century American Novel And Short Story
ISBN: 9780394758282
Publisher: New York : Vintage Books, 1992.
Published: 1992-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

32

The gentle-eyed, horse-faced maid let me in the long gray and white upstairs sitting room with the ivory drapes tumbled extravagantly on the floor and the white carpet from wall to wall. A screen star’s boudoir, a place of charm and seduction, artificial as a wooden leg. It was empty at the moment. The door closed behind me with the unnatural softness of a hospital door. A breakfast table on wheels stood by the chaise-longue. Its silver glittered. There were cigarette ashes in the coffee cup. I sat down and waited.

It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

She went past me in long smooth strides and sat down on the edge of the chaise-longue. There was a cigarette in her lips, at the corner of her mouth. Her nails today were copper red from quick to tip, without half moons.

"So you’re just a brute after all," she said quietly, staring at me. "An utter callous brute. You killed a man last night. Never mind how I heard it. I heard it. And now you have to come out here and frighten my kid sister into a fit."

I didn’t say a word. She began to fidget. She moved over to a slipper chair and put her head back against a white cushion that lay along the back of the chair against the wall. She blew pale gray smoke upwards and watched it float towards the ceiling and come apart in wisps that were for a little while distinguishable from the air and then melted and were nothing. Then very slowly she lowered her eyes and gave me a cool, hard glance.

"I don’t understand you," she said. "I’m thankful as hell one of us kept his head the night before last. It’s bad enough to have a bootlegger in my past. Why don’t you for Christ’s sake say something?"

"How is she?"

"Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. Fast asleep. She always goes to sleep. What did you do to her?"

"Not a thing. I came out of the house after seeing your father and she was out in front. She had been throwing darts at a target on a tree. I went down to speak to her because I had something that belonged to her. A little revolver Owen Taylor gave her once. She took it over to Brody’s place the other evening, the evening he was killed. I had to take it away from her there. I didn’t mention it, so perhaps you didn’t know it."

The black Sternwood eyes got large and empty. It was her turn not to say anything.

"She was pleased to get her little gun back and she wanted me to teach her how to shoot and she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money.

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