a faint knowing smile

-------------------- [excerpt, The Big Sleep]


FOUR

A.G. Geiger's place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevard near Las Palmas.  

The entrance door was set far back in the middle and there was a copper trim on the windows, which were backed with Chinese screens, so I couldn't see into the store.  

There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows.  

I didn't know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.  The entrance door was plate glass, but I couldn't see much through that either, because the store was very dim.  A building entrance adjoined it on one side and on the other was a glittering credit jewelry establishment.  


The jeweler stood in his entrance, teetering on his heels and looking bored, a tall handsome white-haired Jew in lean dark clothes, with about nine carats of diamond on his right hand.  A faint knowing smile curved his lips when I turned into Geiger's store.  

I let the door close softly behind me and walked on a thick blue rug that paved the floor from wall to wall.  

There were blue leather easy chairs with smoke stands beside them.  A few sets of tooled leather bindings were set out on narrow polished tables, between book ends.  There were more tooled bindings in glass cases on the walls.  Nice-looking merchandise, the kind a rich promoter would buy by the yard and have somebody paste his bookplate in.  

At the back there was a grained wood partition with a door in the middle of it, shut.  In the corner made by the partition and one wall a woman sat behind a small desk with a carved wooden lantern on it.



     She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn't reflect any light.  She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn't often seen in bookstores.  She was an ash blonde with greenish eyes, beaded lashes, hair waved smoothly back from ears in which large jet buttons glittered.  Her fingernails were silvered.  In spite of her get-up she looked as if she would have a hall bedroom accent.


     She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen's lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair.  Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

     "Was it something?" she enquired.

     I had my horn-rimmed sunglasses on.  I put my voice high and let a bird twitter in it.  "Would you happen to have a Ben Hur 1860?"

     She didn't say:  "Huh?" but she wanted to.  She smiled bleakly.  "A first edition?"

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-30-