“I’ll be here. I always am.”
“Hold me in your arms.”
The phone clicked, there was a buzzing sound, and then the line went dead.
I reached for my drink. I looked around the empty room—which was no longer empty. There was a voice in it, and a tall slim lovely woman. There was a dark hair on the pillow in the bedroom. There was that soft gentle perfume of a woman who presses herself tight against you, whose lips are soft and yielding, whose eyes are half blind.
The telephone rang again. I said: “Yes?”
“This is Clyde Umney, the lawyer. I don’t seem to have had any sort of satisfactory report from you. I’m not paying you to amuse yourself. I want an accurate and complete account of your activities at once. I demand to know in full detail exactly what you have been doing since you returned to Esmeralda.”
“Having a little quiet fun—at my own expense.”
His voice rose to a sharp cackle. “I demand a full report from you at once. Otherwise I’ll see that you get bounced off your license.”
“I have a suggestion for you, Mr. Umney. Why don’t you go kiss a duck?”
There were sounds of strangled fury as I hung up on him.
Almost immediately the telephone started to ring again.
I hardly heard it. The air was full of music
About the Author
RAYMOND CHANDLER was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 23, 1888, but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a free-lance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, he served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps (R.A.F.). In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing, publishing his first stories in Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Never a prolific writer, he published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.
