From The Big Sleep
“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?”
