Free The Big Bite by Charles Williams Page B

into the entry hall, but it hadn’t actually registered until now. The house was air-conditioned. I could feel the coolness penetrating my sweaty shirt. It was fine after the sticky heat outside, but there was another angle to it I didn’t like at all. The doors and windows would be tightly closed all the time it was turned on, so it wasn’t going to be merely a matter of unlatching a screen. It wasn’t good. I glanced swiftly around, studying the room.
    It was a long one. At the far end was a raised fireplace with a copper hood. To the left of it was an open doorway which apparently led into a study or library because I could see rows of books along the wall and the front end of a mounted sailfish. At the right was the hallway which went on through to the rest of the house. Some chairs and a small sectional sofa were scattered about that end, before the fireplace, but the focal point of the room was nearer the center where a long custom-built sofa was backed up against the drapes of the front window. A coffee table and three large chairs faced it in a rough semicircle, and it was probable this was the part of the room generally used when only a few people were present because it faced the large rear window overlooking the patio. It looked good to me. At each end of the sofa there was a table with a big, red-shaded lamp on it. The lamp cords disappeared behind the sofa. I made a mental note I’d probably need a three-way outlet plug. There was a whispering sound like that of slippers on carpet. I turned just as Mrs. Cannon came into the room from the hallway.
    When she saw me, she stopped. Her eyes widened a little, and I knew she recognized me. I didn’t care now, because I was in, and I was too busy anyway trying to keep from staring at her to worry about it.
    Striking, Purvis had said. She was, but he hadn’t scratched the surface.
    The other time had been just a flashing glimpse at dusk, and that photograph hadn’t amounted to much more than an inventory. She was wearing bullfighter’s pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up; the blue-black hair was cut rather short and it swirled carelessly about a slender oval face the color of honey or good pale vermouth. She was a construction job from the ground up without being overdone about it anywhere—just medium height and rather slim and with only a touch of that overblown calendar-girl effect above the sucked-in waist—but if you had to look twice to be sure that wasn’t Manolete inside those pants you were in bad shape and ought to see an optometrist or psychiatrist before you got any worse. The pants themselves were black and very smooth, and what they did to her thighs—or vice versa—should happen more often. Below them her legs were bare and honey-colored and she wore bullfighter’s slippers. Break it up, I thought; in another two seconds you won’t know whether to say hello or charge .
    It was her eyes, however, that could throw the match in the gasoline. They were large and very lovely, fringed with long dark lashes, and they were brown—not soft or fawn-like, but self-possessed and cool with a hint of the devil in them, a devil not too well tied up and only half asleep. You had an impression that if she ever really turned them on you with that sidelong come-hither out of the corners and from under the lashes she could roll your shirt up your back like a window-blind. Mrs. Cannon was a large order of girl; she may have killed her husband, but I was willing to bet he’d never been bored when he was alive.
    She recognized me; she was off guard for just an instant and I saw the sudden wariness in her eyes. Then she recovered and murmured politely, “Good morning, Mr.—ah—”
    “Harlan,” I said. “John Harlan.”
    “Oh,” she said. “I thought Geraldine said a Mr. Warren. I couldn’t imagine— Won’t you sit down, Mr. Harlan?”
    She flowed forward like warm honey poured out of a jug and took one of the big chairs facing the sofa.