the big sleep

------------------- [excerpt, Raymond Chandler]

     I stood on the step breathing my cigarette smoke and looking down a succession of terraces with flowerbeds and trimmed trees to the high iron fence with gilt spears that hemmed in the estate.  

A winding driveway dropped down between retaining walls to the open iron gates.  Beyond the fence the hill sloped for several miles.  

On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money.  

Most of the field was public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood.  But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day.  

The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what had made them rich.  If they wanted to.  I didn't suppose they would want to.



     I walked down a brick path from terrace to terrace, followed along inside the fence and so out of the gates to where I had left my car under a pepper tree on the street.  Thunder was crackling in the foothills now and the sky above them was purple-black.  It was going to rain hard.  The air had the damp foretaste of rain.  

I put the top up on my convertible before I started downtown.



     She had lovely legs.  I would say that for her.  They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father.  He was probably just trying me out; the job he had given me was a lawyer's job.  

Even if Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger, Rare Books and De Luxe Editions, turned out to be a blackmailer, it was still a lawyer's job.  


Unless there was a lot more to it than met the eye.  At a casual glance I thought I might have a lot of fun finding out.

____________________________

The Big Sleep
novel written by Raymond Chandler
published 1939, Alfred A. Knopf

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