Farewell, My Lovely Read Online Free PDF

"Ain't you got a photo of her--from her folks?"
    That troubled her. Every girl has a photo somewhere, if it's only in short dresses with a bow in her hair. I should have had it.
    "I ain't beginnin' to like you again," the woman said almost quietly.
    I stood up with my glass and went over and put it down beside hers on the end table.
    "Pour me a drink before you kill the bottle."
    She reached for the glass and I turned and walked swiftly through the square arch into the dining room, into the hall, into the cluttered bedroom with the open trunk and the spilled tray. A voice shouted behind me. I plunged ahead down into the right side of the trunk, felt an envelope and brought it up swiftly.
    She was out of her chair when I got back to the living room, but she had only taken two or three steps. Her eyes had a peculiar glassiness. A murderous glassiness.
    "Sit down," I snarled at her deliberately. "You're not dealing with a simple-minded lug like Moose Malloy this time."
    It was a shot more or less in the dark, and it didn't hit anything. She blinked twice and tried to lift her nose with her upper lip. Some dirty teeth showed in a rabbit leer.
    "Moose? The Moose? What about him?" she gulped.
    "He's loose," I said. "Out of jail. He's wandering, with a forty-five gun in his hand. He killed a nigger over on Central this morning because he wouldn't tell him where Velma was. Now he's looking for the fink that turned him up eight years ago."
    A white look smeared the woman's face. She pushed the bottle against her lips and gurgled at it. Some of the whiskey ran down her chin.
    "And the cops are looking for him," she said and laughed. "Cops. Yah!"
    A lovely old woman. I liked being with her. I liked getting her drunk for my own sordid purposes. I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me. You find almost anything under your hand in my business, but I was beginning to be a little sick at my stomach.
    I opened the envelope my hand was clutching and drew out a glazed still. It was like the others but it was different, much nicer. The girl wore a Pierrot costume from the waist up. Under the white conical hat with a black pompon on the top, her fluffed out hair had a dark tinge that might have been red. The face was in proffle but the visible eye seemed to have gaiety in it. I wouldn't say the face was lovely and unspoiled. I'm not that good at faces. But it was pretty. People had been nice to that face, or nice enough for their circle. Yet it was a very ordinary face and its prettiness was strictly assembly line. You would see a dozen faces like it on a city block in the noon hour.
    Below the waist the photo was mostly legs and very nice legs at that. It was signed across the lower right hand corner: "Always yours--Velma Valento."
    I held it up in front of the Florian woman, out of her reach. She lunged but came short.
    "Why hide it?" I asked.
    She made no sound except thick breathing. I slipped the photo back into the envelope and the envelope into my pocket.
    "Why hide it?" I asked again. "What makes it different from the others? Where is she?"
    "She's dead," the woman said. "She was a good kid, but she's dead, copper. Beat it."
    The tawny mangled brows worked up and down. Her hand opened and the whiskey bottle slid to the carpet and began to gurgle. I bent to pick it up. She tried to kick me in the face. I stepped away from her.
    "And that still doesn't say why you hid it," I told her. "When did she die? How?"
    "I am a poor sick old woman," she grunted. "Get away from me, you son of a bitch."
    I stood there looking at her, not saying anything, not thinking of anything particular to say. I stepped over to her side after a moment and put the flat bottle, now almost empty, on the table at her side.
    She was staring down at the carpet. The radio droned pleasantly in the corner. A car went by outside. A fly buzzed in a window. After a long time she moved one lip over the other and spoke to the floor, a meaningless jumble of words from which nothing