Red Wind by Raymond Chandler Read Free Book Online Page A

face. It might have been the hot wind, but I didn’t think so.
    We were in the living-room of the house.
    We sat down and looked at each other across a dark floor, on which a few Navajo rugs and a few dark Turkish rugs made a decorating combination with some well-used overstuffed furniture. There was a fireplace, a small baby grand, a Chinese screen, a tall Chinese lantern on a teakwood pedestal, and gold net curtains against lattice windows. The windows to the south were open. A fruit tree with a whitewashed trunk whipped about outside the screen, adding its bit to the noise from across the street.
    The big man eased back into a brocaded chair and put his slippered feet on a footstool. He kept his right hand where it had been since I met him—on his gun.
    The brunette hung around in the shadows and a bottle gurgled and her temple bells gonged in her ears.
    “It’s all right, honeybunch,” the man said. “It’s all under control. Somebody bumped somebody off and this lad thinks we’re interested. Just sit down and relax.”
    The girl tilted her head and poured half a tumbler of whisky down her throat. She sighed, said, “Goddam,” in a casual voice, and curled up on a davenport. It took all of the davenport. She had plenty of legs. Her gilded toenails winked at me from the shadowy corner where she kept her self quiet from then on.
    I got a cigarette out without being shot at, lit it and went into my story. It wasn’t all true, but some of it was. I told them about the Berglund Apartments and that I had lived there and that Waldo was living there in Apartment 31 on the floor below mine and that I had been keeping an eye on him for business reasons.
    “Waldo what?” the blond man put in. “And what business reasons?”
    “Mister,” I said, “ have you no secrets?” He reddened slightly.
    I told him about the cocktail lounge across the street from the Berglund and what had happened there. I didn’t tell him about the printed bolero jacket or the girl who had worn it. I left her out of the story altogether.
    “It was an undercover job—from my angle,” I said. “If you know what I mean.” He reddened again, bit his teeth. I went on: “I got back from the city hall without telling anybody I knew Waldo. In due time, when I decided they couldn’t find out where he lived that night, I took the liberty of examining his apartment.”
    “Looking for what?” the big man said thickly.
    “For some letters. I might mention in passing there was nothing there at all—except a dead man. Strangled and hanging by a belt to the top of the wall bed—well out of sight. A small man, about forty-five, Mexican or South American, well-dressed in a fawn-colored—”
    “That’s enough,” the big man said. “I’ll bite, Dalmas. Was it a blackmail job you were on?”
    “Yeah. The funny part was this little brown man had plenty of gun under his arm.”
    “He wouldn’t have five hundred bucks in twenties in his pocket, of course? Or are you saying?”
    “He wouldn’t. But Waldo had over seven hundred in currency when he was killed in the cocktail bar.”
    “Looks like I underrated this Waldo,” the big man said calmly. “He took my guy and his payoff money, gun and all. Waldo have a gun?”
    “Not on him.”
    “Get us a drink, honeybunch,” the big man said. “Yes, I certainly did sell this Waldo person shorter than a bargain-counter shirt.”
    The brunette unwound her legs and made two drinks with soda and ice. She took herself another gill without trimmings, wound herself back on the davenport. Her big glittering black eyes watched me solemnly.
    “Well, here’s how,” the big man said, lifting his glass in salute. “I haven’t murdered anybody, but I’ve got a divorce suit on my hands from now on. You haven’t murdered anybody, the way you tell it, but you laid an egg down at police headquarters. What the hell! Life’s a lot of trouble, anyway you look at it. I’ve still got honeybunch, here. She’s