Free Red Wind by Raymond Chandler

hand hard on the table.
    “If anybody ever bothers you,” I said, “let me know.”
    I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.
    But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.
    When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn’t really anything to think about. I was sure.
    “To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said loud. “Just another four-flusher.”
    I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one, at the floating seagulls.
    They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.

BLACKMAILERS DON’T SHOOT
     
     
    I
     
    THE man in the powder-blue suit—which wasn’t powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar —was tall, with wide-set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth. His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory.
    He held a cigarette between the strong, precise fingers of one hand. He put the other hand flat on the white tablecloth, and said:
    “The letters will cost you ten grand, Miss Fair. That’s not too much.”
    He looked at the girl opposite him very briefly; then he looked across empty tables towards the heart-shaped space of floor where the dancers prowled under shifting colored lights.
    They crowded the customers around the dance-floor, so closely that the perspiring waiters had to balance themselves like tightrope walkers to get between the tables. But near where Mallory sat were only four people.
    A slim, dark woman was drinking a highball across the table from a man whose fat red neck glistened with damp bristles. The woman stared into her glass morosely, and fiddled with a big silver flask in her lap. Farther along two bored, frowning men smoked long thin cigars, without speaking to each other.
    Mallory said thoughtfully: “Ten grand does it nicely, Miss Farr.”
    Rhonda Fair was very beautiful. She was wearing, for this occasion, all black, except a collar of white fur, light as thistledown, on her evening wrap. Except also a white wig which, meant to disguise her, made her look very girlish. Her eyes were cornflower blue, and she had the sort of skin an old rake dreams of.
    She said nastily, without raising her head: “That’s ridiculous.”
    “Why is it ridiculous?” Mallory asked, looking mildly surprised and rather annoyed.
    Rhonda Farr lifted her face and gave him a look as hard as marble. Then she picked a cigarette out of a silver case that lay open on the table, and fitted it into a long slim holder, also black. She went on:
    “The love letters of a screen star? Not so much any more. The public has stopped being a sweet old lady in long lace panties.”
    A light danced contemptuously in her purplish-blue eyes. Mallory gave her a hard look.
    “But you came here to talk about them quick enough,” he said, “with a man you never heard of.”
    She waved the cigarette holder, and said: “I must have been nuts.”
    Mallory smiled with his eyes, without moving his lips. “No, Miss Farr. You had a damn’ good reason. Want me to tell you what it is?”
    Rhonda Farr looked at him angrily. Then she looked away, almost appeared to forget him. She held up her hand, the one with the cigarette holder, looked at