Free Red Wind by Raymond Chandler Page A

it, posing. It was a beautiful hand, without a ring. Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings.
    She turned her head and glanced at the stiff-eyed woman, beyond her towards the mob around the dance-floor. The orchestra went on being saccharine and monotonous.
    “I loathe these dives,” she said thinly. “They look as if they only existed after dark, like ghouls. The people are dissipated without grace, sinful without irony.” She lowered her hand to the white cloth. “Oh yes, the letters, what makes them so dangerous, blackmailer?”
    Mallory laughed. He had a ringing laugh with a hard quality in it, a grating sound. “You’re good,” he said. “The letters are not so much perhaps. Just sexy tripe. The memoirs of a schoolgirl who’s been seduced and can’t stop talking about it.”
    “That’s lousy,” Rhonda Farr said in a voice like iced velvet.
    “It’s the man they’re written to that makes them important,” Mallory said coldly. “A racketeer, a gambler, a fast money boy. And all that goes with it. A guy you couldn’t be seen talking to—and stay in the cream.”
    “I don’t talk to him, blackmailer. I haven’t talked to him in years. Landrey was a pretty nice boy when I knew him. Most of us have something behind us we’d rather not go into. In my case it is behind.”
    “Oh yes? Make mine strawberry,” Mallory said with a sudden sneer. “You just got through asking him to help you get your letters back.”
    Her head jerked. Her face seemed to come apart, to become merely a set of features without control. Her eyes looked like the prelude to a scream—but only for a second.
    Almost instantly she got her self-control back. Her eyes were drained of color, almost as gray as his own. She put the black cigarette holder down with exaggerated care, laced her fingers together. The knuckles looked white.
    “You know Landrey that well?” she said bitterly.
    “Maybe I just get around, find things out… Do we deal, or do we just go on snarling at each other?”
    “Where did you get the letters?” Her voice was still rough and bitter.
    Mallory shrugged. “We don’t tell things like that in our business.”
    “I had a reason for asking. Some other people have been trying to sell me these same damned letters. That’s why I’m here. It made me curious. But I guess you’re just one of them trying to scare me into action by stepping the price.”
    Mallory said: “No; I’m on my own.”
    She nodded. Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “That makes it nice. Perhaps some bright mind thought of having a private edition of my letters made. Photostats… Well, I’m not paying. It wouldn’t get me anywhere. I don’t deal, blackmailer. So far as I’m concerned you can go out some dark night and jump off the dock with your lousy letters!”
    Mallory wrinkled his nose, squinted down it with an air of deep concentration. “Nicely put, Miss Farr. But it doesn’t get us anywhere.”
    She said deliberately: “It wasn’t meant to. I could put it better. And if I’d thought to bring my little pearl-handled gun I could say it with slugs and get away with it! But I’m not looking for that kind of publicity.”
    Mallory held up two lean fingers and examined them critically. He looked amused, almost pleased. Rhonda Farr put her slim hand up to her white wig, held it there a moment, and dropped it.
     
    A man sitting at a table some way off got up at once and came towards them.
    He came quickly, walking with a light, lithe step and swinging a soft black hat against his thigh. He was sleek in dinner clothes.
    While he was coming Rhonda Farr said: “You didn’t expect me to walk in here alone, did you? Me, I don’t go to night-clubs alone.”
    Mallory grinned. “You shouldn’t ought to have to, baby,” he said dryly.
    The man came up to the table. He was small, neatly put together, dark. He had a little black