A blonde head was pressed into my pillow. Two bare arms curved up and the hands belonging to them were clasped on top of the blond head.
Carmen Sternwood on her back, in my bed, giggling at me.
The tawny wave of her hair was spread out on the pillow as if by careful and artificial hand.
Her slaty eyes peered me and had the effect, as usual, of peering from behind a barrel.
She smiled.
Her small sharp teeth glinted.
"Cute, aren't I?" she said.
I said harshly: "Cute as a Filipino on Saturday night."
I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp.
There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover.
I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems.
I reached down and moved a knight, then pulled my hat and coat off and threw them somewhere.
All this time the soft giggling went on from the bed, that sound that made me think of rats behind a wainscoting in an old house.
"I bet you can't even guess how I got in."
I dug a cigarette out and looked at her with bleak eyes. "I bet I can. You came through the keyhole, just like Peter Pan."
"Who's he?"
"Oh, a fellow I used to know around the poolroom."
She giggled.
"You're cute, aren't you?" she said.
I began to say: "About that thumb — " but she was ahead of me.
I didn't have to remind her.
She took her right hand from behind her head and started sucking the thumb and eyeing me with very round and naughty eyes.
"I'm all undressed," she said, after I had smoked and stared at her for a minute.
"By God," I said, "it was right at the back of my mind. I was groping for it. I almost had it, when you spoke.
In another minute I'd have said
'I bet you're all undressed.'
I always wear my rubbers in bed myself in case I wake up with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it."
"You're cute." She rolled her head a little, kittenishly.
Then she took her left hand from under her head and took hold of the covers, paused dramatically, and swept them aside.
She was undressed all right.
She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl.
The Sternwood girls were giving me both barrels that night.
I pulled a shred of tobacco off the edge of my lower lip.
"That's nice," I said.
"But I've already seen it all.
Remember?
I'm the guy that keeps finding you without any clothes on."
She giggled some more and covered herself up again.
"Well, how did you get in?" I asked her.
"The manager let me in.
I showed him your card. I'd stolen it from Vivian.
I told him you told me to come here and wait for you.
I was — I was mysterious." She glowed with delight.
"Neat," I said. "Managers are like that.
Now I know how you got in, tell me how you're going to go out."
She giggled.
"Not going — not for a long time. . . .
I like it here. You're cute."
"Listen," I pointed my cigarette at her. "Don't make me dress you again.
I'm tired.