a late dinner

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


I unlocked the door and stepped into the still warm darkness and stood there, dripping quietly on the floor and listening to the rain.  I groped to a lamp and lit it.

     The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of embroidered silk were gone from the wall.  I hadn't counted them, but the spaces of brown plaster stood out naked and obvious.  I went a little farther and put another lamp on.  

I looked at the totem pole.  At its foot, beyond the margin of the Chinese rug, on the bare floor another rug had been spread.  It hadn't been there before.  Geiger's body had.  Geiger's body was gone.



     That froze me.  I pulled my lips back against my teeth and leered at the glass eye in the totem pole.  I went through the house again.  Everything was exactly as it had been.  Geiger wasn't in his flounced bed or under it or in his closet.  

He wasn't in the kitchen or the bathroom.  

That left the locked door on the right of the hall.  One of Geiger's keys fitted the lock.  The room inside was interesting, but Geiger wasn't in it.  It was interesting because it was so different from Geiger's room.  

It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man's toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks.  The bed was narrow and looked hard and had a maroon batik cover.  The room felt cold.  


I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole.  I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door.  I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged.  Whoever had done it had meant business.  Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.



     It wasn't the law.  They would have been there still, just about getting warmed up with their pieces of string and chalk and their cameras and dusting powders and their nickel cigars.  

They would have been very much there.  

It wasn't the killer.  He had left too fast.  He must have seen the girl.  He couldn't be sure she was too batty to see him.  He would be on his way to distant places.  I couldn't guess the answer, but it was all right with me if somebody wanted Geiger missing instead of just murdered.  

It gave me a chance to find out if I could tell it leaving Carmen Sternwood out.  I locked up again, choked my car to life and rode off home to a shower, dry clothes and a late dinner.

______________________

Raymond Chandler
publisher:  Knopf, 1939

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