The simple art of murder by Raymond Chandler

Author:Raymond Chandler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Detective and mystery stories - Authorship, Detective and mystery stories, Mystery & Detective, Political, Hard-Boiled, Fiction, American, Authorship, General
ISBN: 9780394757650
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1988-09-12T08:55:49.042834+00:00

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PICKUP ON NOON STREET

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ONE

The man and the girl walked slowly, close together, past a dim stencil sign that said: Surprise Hotel. The man wore a purple suit, a Panama hat over his shiny, slicked-down hair. He walked splay-footed, soundlessly.

The girl wore a green hat and a short skirt and sheer stockings, four-and-a-half inch French heels. She smelled of Midnight Narcissus.

At the corner the man leaned close, said something in the girl’s ear. She jerked away from him, giggled.

“You gotta buy liquor if you take me home, Smiler.”

“Next time, baby. I’m fresh outa dough.”

The girl’s voice got hard. “Then I tells you goodbye in the next block, handsome.”

“Like hell, baby,” the man answered.

The arc at the intersection threw light on them. They walked across the street far apart. At the other side the man caught the girl’s arm. She twisted away from him.

“Listen, you cheap grifter!” she shrilled. “Keep your paws down, see! Tinhorns are dust to me. Dangle!”

“How much liquor you gotta have, baby?”

“Plenty.”

“Me bein’ on the nut, where do I collect it?”

“You got hands, ain’t you?” the girl sneered. Her voice dropped the shrillness. She leaned close to him again. “Maybe you got a gun, big boy. Got a gun?”

“Yeah. And no shells for it.”

“The goldbricks over on Central don’t know that.”

“Don’t be that way,” the man in the purple suit snarled. Then he snapped his fingers and stiffened. “Wait a minute. I got me a idea.”

He stopped and looked back along the street toward the dim stencil hotel sign. The girl slapped a glove across his chin caressingly. The glove smelled to him of the perfume, Midnight Narcissus.

The man snapped his fingers again, grinned widely in the dim light. “If that drunk is still holed up in Doc’s place—I collect. Wait for me, huh?”

“Maybe, at home. If you ain’t gone too long.”

“Where’s home, baby?”

The girl stared at him. A half-smile moved along her full lips, died at the corners of them. The breeze picked a sheet of newspaper out of the gutter and tossed it against the man’s leg. He kicked at it savagely.

“Calliope Apartments. Four-B, Two-Forty-Six East Forty-Eight. How soon you be there?”

The man stepped very close to her, reached back and tapped his hip. His voice was low, chilling.

“You wait for me, baby.”

She caught her breath, nodded. “Okey, handsome. I’ll wait.”

The man went back along the cracked sidewalk, across the intersection, along to where the stencil sign hung out over the street. He went through a glass door into a narrow lobby with a row of brown wooden chairs pushed against the plaster wall. There was just space to walk past them to the desk. A bald-headed colored man lounged behind the desk, fingering a large green pin in his tie.

The Negro in the purple suit leaned across the counter and his teeth flashed in a quick, hard smile. He was very young, with a thin, sharp jaw, a narrow bony forehead, the flat brilliant eyes of the gangster. He said softly: “That pug with the husky voice still here? The guy that banked the crap game last night.

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