The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

head a tiny shake, smiling faintly. “I don’t—” she began. She was looking past my shoulder. “Oh, there you are, darling,” she said, her voice sounding a shade too loud, with too much forced warmth in it.
    I turned. A man was standing in the open doorway, holding the curtain aside with a raised hand, and for a moment I thought that he, like Everett the Third, might be about to deliver a ringing line from some old play. Instead he dropped the curtain and ambled forward, smiling at nothing in particular. He was a well-built fellow, not tall, slightly bow-legged, with broad shoulders and large square hands. He was dressed in cream jodhpurs, calfskin boots, a shirt so white it glowed, and a yellow silk cravat. Another sporty type. It was beginning to look like they did nothing here but play games.
    “Hot,” he said. “Damned hot.” As yet he had not so much as glanced in my direction. Clare Cavendish began to reach toward the jug of iced tea, but the man got there first, picked up the glass, half filled it from the jug, and emptied it in one swallow, his head thrown back. His hair was fine and straight and the color of pale oak. Scott Fitzgerald would have found a place for him in one of his bittersweet romances. Come to think of it, he looked a bit like Fitzgerald: handsome, boyish, with something in him that was fatally weak.
    Clare Cavendish watched him. She was biting her lip again. That mouth of hers, it really was a thing of beauty. “This is Mr. Marlowe,” she said. The man gave a start of pretend surprise and looked this way and that, holding the empty glass in his hand. At last he fixed on me and frowned slightly, as if he hadn’t noticed me before, as if I had been indistinguishable from the palm leaves and the gleaming glass all around. “Mr. Marlowe,” Clare Cavendish went on, “this is my husband, Richard Cavendish.”
    He beamed at me with a mixture of indifference and disdain. “Marlowe,” he said, turning the name over and examining it, as if it were a small coin of scant value. His smile became brighter still. “Why don’t you put down your hat.”
    I had forgotten I was holding it. I glanced around. Mrs. Cavendish stepped forward and took the hat from me and laid it on the table beside the glass jug. Inside the triangle formed by the three of us, the air seemed to crackle soundlessly, as if a current of static electricity were passing back and forth in it. Yet Cavendish appeared to be entirely at ease. He turned to his wife. “Have you offered the man a drink?”
    Before she could reply, I said, “She did, and I declined.”
    “You declined, did you?” Cavendish chuckled. “You hear that, sweetheart? The gentleman declined.” He poured more tea into the glass and drank it off, then put the glass down, grimacing. I noticed he was an inch or two shorter than his wife. “What kind of business are you in, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.
    This time Clare got in ahead of me. “Mr. Marlowe finds things,” she said.
    Cavendish ducked his head and gave her a sly, upward glance, thrusting his tongue hard into his cheek. Then he looked at me again. “What kind of things do you find, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.
    “Pearls,” his wife said quickly, again meaning to cut me off, though I hadn’t yet thought of a reply. “I lost that necklace you gave me—misplaced it, I mean.”
    Cavendish considered this, looking at the floor now, smiling pensively. “What’s he going to do,” he asked, addressing his wife without looking at her, “crawl around the bedroom floor, peer under the bed, poke his finger into mouse holes?”
    “Dick,” his wife said, and there was a pleading note in her voice, “it’s not important, really.”
    He gave her an exaggerated stare. “Not important? If I weren’t a gentleman, like Mr. Marlowe here, I’d be tempted to tell you how much that little trinket cost. Of course”—he turned to me, his voice becoming a drawl—“if I did, she’d tell you it was her