I moved out from under the wheel into the middle of the seat. She turned her body a little away from me as if to peer out of the window. Then she let herself fall backwards, without a sound, into my arms. Her head almost struck the wheel. Her eyes were closed, her face was dim. Then I saw that her eyes opened and flickered, the shine of them visible even in the darkness.
“Hold me close, you beast,” she said.
I put my arms around her loosely at first. Her hair had a harsh feeling against my face. I tightened my arms and lifted her up. I brought her face slowly up to my face. Her eyelids were flickering rapidly, like moth wings.
I kissed her tightly and quickly. Then a long slow clinging kiss. Her lips opened under mine. Her body began to shake in my arms.
“Killer,” she said softly, her breath going into my mouth.
I strained her against me until the shivering of her body was almost shaking mine. I kept on kissing her. After a long time she pulled her head away enough to say: “Where do you live?”
“Hobart Arms. Franklin near Kenmore.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Want to?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“What has Eddie Mars got on you?”
Her body stiffened in my arms and her breath made a harsh sound. Her head pulled back until her eyes, wide open, ringed with white, were staring at me.
“So that’s the way it is,” she said in a soft dull voice.
“That’s the way it is. Kissing is nice, but your father didn’t hire me to sleep with you.”
“You son of a bitch,” she said calmly, without moving.
I laughed in her face. “Don’t think I’m an icicle,” I said. “I’m not blind or without sense. I have warm blood like the next guy. You’re easy to take—too damned easy. What has Eddie Mars got on you?”
“If you say that again, I’ll scream.”
“Go ahead and scream.”
She jerked away and pulled herself upright, far back in the corner of the car.
“Men have been shot for little things like that, Marlowe.”
“Men have been shot for practically nothing. The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it.”
She fumbled in her bag and got a handkerchief out and bit on it, her head turned away from me. The tearing sound of the handkerchief came to me. She tore it with her teeth, slowly, time after time.
“What makes you think he has anything on me?” she whispered, her voice muffled by the handkerchief.
“He lets you win a lot of money and sends a gun-poke around to take it back for him. You’re not more than mildly surprised. You didn’t even thank me for saving it for you. I think the whole thing was just some kind of an act. If I wanted to flatter myself, I’d say it was at least partly for my benefit.”
“You think he can win or lose as he pleases.”
“Sure. On even money bets, four times out of five.”
“Do I have to tell you I loathe your guts, Mister Detective?”
“You don’t owe me anything. I’m paid off.”
She tossed the shredded handkerchief out of the car window. “You have a lovely way with women.”
“I liked kissing you.”
“You kept your head beautifully. That’s so flattering. Should I congratulate you, or my father?”
“I liked kissing you.”
Her voice became an icy drawl. “Take me away from here, if you will be so kind. I’m quite sure I’d like to go home.”
“You won’t be a sister to me?”
“If I had a razor, I’d cut your throat—just to see what ran out of it.”
“Caterpillar blood,” I said.
I started the car and turned it and drove back across the interurban tracks to the highway and so on into town and up to West Hollywood. She didn’t speak to me. She hardly moved all the way back. I drove through the gates and up the sunken driveway to the porte-cochere of the big house. She jerked the car door open and was out of it before it had quite stopped. She didn’t speak even then. I watched her back as she stood against the door after ringing the bell. The door opened and Norris looked out. She pushed past him quickly and was gone. The door banged shut and I was sitting there looking at it.
I turned back down the driveway and home.
24
The apartment house lobby was empty this time. No gunman waiting under the potted palm to give me orders. I took the automatic elevator up to my floor and walked along the hallway to the tune of a muted radio behind a door. I needed a drink and was in a hurry to get one. I didn’t switch the light on inside the door. I made straight for the kitchenette and brought up short in three or four feet. Something was wrong. Something on the air, a scent. The shades were down at the windows and the street light leaking in at the sides made a dim light in the room. I stood still and listened. The scent on the air was a perfume, a heavy cloying perfume.
There was no sound, no sound at all. Then my eyes adjusted themselves more to the darkness and I saw there was something across the floor in front of me that shouldn’t have been there. I backed, reached the wall switch with my thumb and flicked the light on.
The bed was down. Something in it giggled. A blonde head was pressed into my pillow. Two bare arms curved up and the hands belonging to them were clasped on top of the blond head. Carmen Sternwood on her back, in my bed, giggling at me. The tawny wave of her hair was spread out on the pillow as if by careful and artificial hand. Her slaty eyes peered me and had the effect, as usual, of peering from behind a barrel. She smiled. Her small sharp teeth glinted.
“Cute, aren’t I?” she said.
I said harshly: “Cute as a Filipino on Saturday night.”
I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight, then pulled my hat and coat off and threw them somewhere. All this time the soft giggling went on from the bed, that sound that made me think of rats behind a wainscoting in an old house.
“I bet you can’t even guess how I got in.”
I dug a cigarette out and looked at her with bleak eyes. “I bet I can. You came through the keyhole, just like Peter Pan.”
“Who’s he?”
“Oh, a fellow I used to know around the poolroom.”
She giggled. “You’re cute, aren’t you?” she said.
I began to say: “About that thumb—” but she was ahead of me. I didn’t have to remind her. She took her right hand from behind her head and started sucking the thumb and eyeing me with very round and naughty eyes.
“I’m all undressed,” she said, after I had smoked and stared at her for a minute.
“By God,” I said, “it was right at the back of my mind. I was groping for it. I almost had it, when you spoke. In another minute I’d have said ‘I bet you’re all undressed.’ I always wear my rubbers in bed myself in case I wake up with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it.”
“You’re cute.” She rolled her head a little, kittenishly. Then she took her left hand from under her head and took hold of the covers, paused dramatically, and swept them aside. She was undressed all right. She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl. The Sternwood girls were giving me both barrels that night.
I pulled a shred of tobacco off the edge of my lower lip.