Read The Way Some People Die for Free Online Page B

with the girl if you find her?”
    “Take her home to mother.”
    “That will be fun.”
    “What girl is that?” a woman’s voice demanded.
    I had been watching Dowser so closely that I hadn’t noticed her. He had a quality of unacted violence that held the attention. Now I saw her through the mirror standing in a doorway to my right, like somebody’s conception of a Greek goddess painted in a frame. Probably her own. She moved into the room with white silk evening pajamas tossing about her ankles, a girl so colorless in hair and skin that she might have been albino. Except for the dark blue eyes.
    They passed me over coolly. “What girl, Danny?”
    “Mind your own business.”
    I said: “Galley Lawrence. Know her?”
    “Shut up, you.”
    The girl took up a cheesecake pose on the edge of the snooker table. “Cert’ny I know her.” The voice was flat and rasping, as incongruous from those fine lips as a peacock’s screech from a peacock. “I heard she was in Palm Springs. How come I never get to go to Palm Springs, Danny?”
    He walked towards her quietly, speaking more softly than before: “What was that, Irene? You heard about Galley Lawrence someplace, huh?”
    “Sandra down at the Beach Club. She said she saw Galley in Palm Springs last night.”
    “Where?”
    “Some bar, she didn’t say.”
    “Who with?” His right arm was straight at his side, the fingers opening and closing at the end of it.
    “Not Joey. I know you’re looking for Joey so I asked her. Some other male, she thought it was some actor. Sandra said he was cute.”
    “Cute, huh?
You’re
cute. Why didn’t you tell me, ‘Rene?” He reached up suddenly and took her chin in his hand, clenching it hard.
    She struck his arm down. “Don’t handle me, you monkey. I was minding my own business, like you said.”
    His fingers kept on working. “So you bust out with your business in front of this jerk.”
    “He’s cute,” she said in a bored deadly whine, and shifted her look to me. “Danny can’t get away with rough stuff on account of he isn’t cute.”
    “I think he’s cute.” I was getting bored myself.
    The bulged eyes swiveled to me and back to the girl on the green table. She was hugging her knees as if she found them lovable. Her blue eyes met him levelly.
    His left hand jerked up with the pewter mug, and the buttermilk spattered her face.
    “All right,” she said, dripping white from the point of her chin. “You’ll buy me a whole new outfit,
two
new outfits. Tonight you take me to Ciro’s. Tomorrow I go to Westmore’s for the works.”
    “I’ll give you the works,” he said slowly. “I’ll drop you off the Santa Monica pier.”
    But he stood back as she swung her legs down. Her high-heeled gilt slippers hammered across the room. He followed her at a distance, shorter and much older and not nearly so beautiful.
    “We might as well sit down,” Blaney said. “It goes on like this all the time.” The girl had given us something in common, though I didn’t know exactly what it was.
    Judas went away. Blaney and I sat at the bar, one empty stool and the gun in the space between us. He wouldn’t talk, so I amused myself reading the labels on the bottles in the racks. Dowser had everything, including Danziger Goldwasser and pre-World-War Green River.
    He came back ten minutes later, wearing a different suit. His mouth was red and slightly swollen, as if somebody had been chewing on it.
    “Nice-looking girl,” I said, hoping to needle him.
    He was feeling too good to be needled. “I got a proposition for you, Archer.” He even laid an arm across my shoulders. “A business proposition.”
    I stood up, placing my shoulders out of his reach. “You have a very peculiar business approach.”
    “Forget it.” As if I had apologized to him. “Put the gun away, Blaney. You’re working for old lady Lawrence, you said. You do a job for me instead, what do you say.”
    “Churning buttermilk?”
    He took it without