I appreciate all you're offering me.
It's just more than I could possibly take.
Doghouse Reilly never let a pal down that way.
I'm your friend. I won't let you down — in spite of yourself.
You and I have to keep on being friends, and this isn't the way to do it.
Now will you dress like a nice little girl?"
She shook her head from side to side.
"Listen," I plowed on, "you don't really care anything about me.
You're just showing how naughty you can be.
But you don't have to show me.
I knew it already.
I'm the guy that found — "
"Put the light out," she giggled.
I threw my cigarette on the floor and stamped on it.
I took a handkerchief out and wiped the palms of my hands.
I tried it once more.
"It isn't on account of the neighbors," I told her. "They don't really care a lot.
There's a lot of stray broads in any apartment house and one more won't make the building rock.
It's a question of professional pride.
You know — professional pride.
I'm working for your father.
He's a sick man, very frail, very helpless.
He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts.
Won't you please get dressed, Carmen?"
"Your name isn't Doghouse Reilly," she said. "It's Philip Marlowe.
You can't fool me."
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from.
Knights had no meaning in this game.
It wasn't a game for knights.
I looked at her again.
She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought.
One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly.
There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere.
She didn't know about it yet.
It's so hard for women — even nice women — to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.
I said: "I'm going out in the kitchen and mix a drink. Want one?"
"Uh-huh." Dark silent mystified eyes stared at me solemnly, the doubt growing larger in them, creeping into them noiselessly, like a cat in long grass stalking a young blackbird.
"If you're dressed when I get back, you'll get the drink. Okey?"
Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth.
She didn't answer me.
I went out to the kitchenette and got out some Scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs.
I didn't have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger's breath.
She hadn't moved when I got back with the glasses.
The hissing had stopped.
Her eyes were dead again. Her lips started to smile at me.
Then she sat up suddenly and threw all the covers off her body and reached.
"Gimme."
"When you're dressed.
Not until you're dressed."
I put the two glasses down on the card table and sat down myself and lit another cigarette. "Go ahead.