She was sitting very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, her chin level, her small bright teeth shining between her parted lips.
Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes.
She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn't have the pose of unconsciousness.
She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it.
Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn't change her expression or even move her lips.
She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings.
They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars.
She wasn't wearing anything else.
She had a beautiful body, small, lithe, compact, firm, rounded.
Her skin in the lamplight had the shimmering luster of a pearl.
Her legs didn't quite have the raffish grace of Mrs. Regan's legs, but they were very nice.
I looked her over without either embarrassment or ruttishness.
As a naked girl she was not there in that room at all. She was just a dope.
To me she was always just a dope.
I stopped looking at her and looked at Geiger.
He was on his back on the floor, beyond the fringe of the Chinese rug, in front of a thing that looked like a totem pole.
It had a profile like an eagle and its wide round eye was a camera lens. The lens was aimed at the naked girl in the chair.
There was a blackened flash bulb clipped to the side of the totem pole.
Geiger was wearing Chinese slippers with thick felt soles, and his legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him wore a Chinese embroidered coat, the front of which was mostly blood.
His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most lifelike thing about him.
At a glance none of the three shots I heard had missed.
He was very dead.
The flash bulb was the sheet lightning I had seen. The crazy scream was the doped and naked girl's reaction to it. The three shots had been somebody else's idea of how the proceedings might be given a new twist.
The idea of the lad who had gone down the back steps and slammed into a car and raced away.
I could see merit in his point of view.
A couple of fragile gold-veined glasses rested on a red lacquer tray on the end of the black desk, beside a pot-bellied flagon of brown liquid.
I took the stopper out and sniffed at it.
It smelled of ether and something else, possibly laudanum.
I had never tried the mixtare but it seemed to go pretty well with the Geiger menage.
I listened to the rain hitting the roof and the north windows.
Beyond was no other sound, no cars, no siren, just the rain beating. I went over to the divan and peeled off my trench coat and pawed through the girl's clothes. There was a pale green rough wool dress of the pull-on type, with half sleeves.
I thought I might be able to handle it.
I decided to pass up her underclothes, not from feelings of delicacy, but because I couldn't see myself putting her pants on and snapping her brassiere.
I took the dress over to the teak chair on the dais.
Miss Sternwood smelled of ether also, at a distance of several feet.
The tinny chuckling noise was still coming from her and a little froth oozed down her chin.
I slapped her face.
She blinked and stopped chuckling.
I slapped her again.
"Come on," I said brightly. "Let's be nice. Let's get dressed."
She peered at me, her slaty eyes as empty as holes in a mask. "Gugutoterell," she said.
I slapped her around a little more. She didn't mind the slaps. They didn't bring her out of it.
I set to work with the dress.
She didn't mind that either.
She let me hold her arms up and she spread her fingers out wide, as if that was cute.
I got her hands through the sleeves, pulled the dress down over her back, and stood her up.
She fell into my arms giggling.
I set her back in the chair and got her stockings and shoes on her.
"Let's take a little walk," I said.
"Let's take a nice little walk."