The Dain Curse quotes

You said it so vapidly and sincerely and as if you were so sure that she would like your saying it. Remember? She put us out, but we’d both already got plastered on her sherry. But you weren’t tight enough to take the books.”

“I was afraid I’d read them and understand them,” I explained, “and then you’d have felt insulted.”

A Chinese boy brought us cold white wine.

“That’s not different,” he said.

“I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”

“Yeah, but what good does that do?”

“God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?”

“Relieves congestion,” I said.

“Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn’t have traffic problems. What do you know about this Gabrielle?”

Then he said: “You the man that been inquiring around about me?”

The sour odor of Italian wine was thick enough to be seen.

I considered, and said: “Yeah.”

They were the only live, human, real things in her face. There was warmth and there was beauty in her oval, olive-skinned face, but, except for the eyes, it was warmth and beauty that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality.

It was as if her face were not a face, but a mask that she had worn until it had almost become a face.

Even her mouth, which was a mouth to talk about, looked not so much like flesh as like a too perfect imitation of flesh, softer and redder and maybe warmer than genuine flesh, but not genuine flesh.

“To less than that, to words in an angry woman’s mouth.”

“It’s fellows like you that take all the color out of life.”

He sighed behind cigarette smoke. “Doesn’t Gabrielle’s being made the tool of her mother’s murder convince you of the necessity—at least the poetic necessity—of the curse?”

I switched off my lights, left my door open, and sat there in the dark, looking at the girl’s door and cursing the world.

I thought of Tad’s blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn’t there, and knew how he felt.

At a little before midnight Minnie Hershey, in hat and coat as if she had just come in from the street, returned to Gabrielle’s room. She didn’t seem to see me.

She walked up to me, her untroubled gaze holding my probably troubled one, and said evenly, just as if she had expected to find me there, had come there to find me:

“Take it. It is evidence. I killed him.”

Still looking straight into my eyes, she said:

Then I saw that I was standing with my legs apart, and that Joseph was lying between my feet, dead, with the dagger through his neck.

“Thank God he wasn’t really God,” I mumbled to myself.

A brown body in white brushed past me, and Minnie Hershey was throwing herself down in front of Gabrielle Leggett, crying:

He nodded, grinning, and said that he not only believed it but liked it.

“What a childish mind you’ve got,” I said.

“Let me tell you the story about the wolf that went to the little girl’s grandmother’s house and—”

There was no sun yet. My pants stuck disagreeably to my chilly legs. Water squinched in my torn shoes. I hadn’t had any breakfast. My cigarettes had got wet. My left knee ached from a twist it had got sliding down the ravine.

I cursed the detective business and slopped on along the path.

The path took me away from the sea for a while, across the neck of a wooded point that pushed the ocean back, down into a small valley, up the side of a low hill;

“Then it was an accident. That was a dangerous road to be walked in the dark.”

“I’ve stopped believing in accidents,” I said.

“And he had sent me an SOS. And there was the gun that had been fired in his room.”

“You’ve got a flighty mind. That’s no good in this business.

You don’t catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts.

You’ve got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click.”

The next room was quiet. I listened at the door and then tapped it. Mrs. Herman’s voice said: “Come in.”

She was sitting beside the bed making gaudy butterflies on a piece of yellowish cloth stretched on hoops.

Gabrielle Collinson sat in a rocking chair on the other side of the room, frowning at hands clasped in her lap—clasped hard enough to whiten the knuckles and spread the finger-ends. She had on the tweed clothes in which she had been kidnapped.

“I can’t,” I said. “It sounds normal as hell to me.

Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend.

Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions;

Evidence of goofiness is easily found: the more you dig into yourself, the more you turn up.

Nobody’s mind could stand the sort of examination you’ve been giving yours. Going around trying to prove yourself cuckoo!

It’s a wonder you haven’t driven yourself nuts.”

“

The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.

Did Dick have any news?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to encourage her to cut up on me. “

I don’t think so much of niceness that can be turned into nastiness by a little grief.

”

I went in again. A crumpled ball of white paper in the tray was all that remained of one bindle. The others weren’t in sight.

She was leaning back against her pillows, eyes half closed, as comfortable as a cat full of goldfish.

She smiled lazily at me and said:

“Who said anybody believed it?” I was trying to be bland. “I’m just telling you what we’ll go into court with. You’re a lawyer.

You know there’s not necessarily any connection between what’s true and what you go into court with⁠—or into the newspapers.

”

“You know I did. Why should you ask?”

“Detectives like questions they already know the answers to. Why did you come down here, Mrs. Haldorn?”

“Is that another whose answer you know?”

“But, damn it, that spoils it,” he complained, fighting to keep the uneasiness out of his eye, fighting to retain his usual lazily amused manner, and not making such a poor job of it.

“It’s no fun if I’m really cracked.”

When I got back to the house in the cove, Mickey and MacMan were sitting on the front steps. MacMan said, “Hello,” and Mickey said: “Get any fresh woman-scars while you were away? Your little playmate’s been asking for you.”