Farewell, My Lovely

The Indian and Marlowe drive well beyond the city into an area called Stillwood Heights. They pull into the driveway of a building made of “stucco and glass brick, raw and modernistic and yet not ugly and altogether a swell place for a psychic consultant to hang out his shingle. Nobody would be able to hear any screams” (146). Inside, the secretary that Marlowe had spoken with on the phone greets him at a desk: “She had sleek coiled hair and a dark, thin, wasted Asiatic face” (147). She was wearing many rings, but “her hands were dry and dark and not young and not fit for rings” (147).

Marlowe lays the hundred-dollar bill on her desk and says that he can’t accept the money until he finds out why Amthor wants to employ him. She takes him to an octagonal room “draped in black velvet from floor to ceiling, with a high remote black ceiling that may have been of velvet too” (148). In the middle of the room is a table with a “milk white globe” on it (148). Marlowe stands waiting until “an invisible door on the far side of the room slid open and a man stepped through and the door closed behind him” (148).