Chapter VI: Part 6

“She went down there,” he said in a surly voice. “She wasn’t taken. She went down there instead of to your house when she learned the boat was in. Well, what the hell? Am I supposed to run around after my clients begging them to let me help them?”

“But, Sam, when I told you the boat was on fire!”

“That was at noon and I had a date with Polhaus and another with Bryan.”

She glared at him between tightened lids. “Sam Spade,” she said, “you’re the most contemptible man God ever made when you want to be. Because she did something without confiding in you you’d sit here and do nothing when you know she’s in danger, when you know she might be—”

Spade’s face flushed. He said stubbornly: “She’s pretty capable of taking care of herself and she knows where to come for help when she thinks she needs it, and when it suits her.”

“That’s spite,” the girl cried, “and that’s all it is! You’re sore because she did something on her own hook, without telling you. Why shouldn’t she? You’re not so damned honest, and you haven’t been so much on the level with her, that she should trust you completely.”

Spade said: “That’s enough of that.”

His tone brought a brief uneasy glint into her hot eyes, but she tossed her head and the glint vanished. Her mouth was drawn taut and small. She said: “If you don’t go down there this very minute, Sam, I will and I’ll take the police down there.” Her voice trembled, broke, and was thin and wailing. “Oh, Sam, go!”

He stood up cursing her. Then he said: “Christ! It’ll be easier on my head than sitting here listening to you squawk.” He looked at his watch. “You might as well lock up and go home.”

She said: “I won’t. I’m going to wait right here till you come back.”

He said, “Do as you damned please,” put his hat on, flinched, took it off, and went out carrying it in his hand.

* * * * *

An hour and a half later, at twenty minutes past five, Spade returned. He was cheerful. He came in asking: “What makes you so hard to get along with, sweetheart?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” He put a finger on the tip of Effie Perine’s nose and flattened it. He put his hands under her elbows, lifted her straight up, and kissed her chin. He set her down on the floor again and asked: “Anything doing while I was gone?”

“Luke—what’s his name?—at the Belvedere called up to tell you Cairo has returned. That was about half an hour ago.”

Spade snapped his mouth shut, turned with a long step, and started for the door.

“Did you find her?” the girl called.

“Tell you about it when I’m back,” he replied without pausing and hurried out.

A taxicab brought Spade to the Belvedere within ten minutes of his departure from his office. He found Luke in the lobby. The hotel-detective came grinning and shaking his head to meet Spade. “Fifteen minutes late,” he said. “Your bird has fluttered.”

Spade cursed his luck.

“Checked out—gone bag and baggage,” Luke said. He took a battered memorandum-book from a vest-pocket, licked his thumb, thumbed pages, and held the book out open to Spade. “There’s the number of the taxi that hauled him. I got that much for you.”

“Thanks.” Spade copied the number on the back of an envelope. “Any forwarding address?”

“No. He just come in carrying a big suitcase and went upstairs and packed and come down with his stuff and paid his bill and got a taxi and went without anybody being able to hear what he told the driver.”

“How about his trunk?”

Luke’s lower lip sagged. “By God,” he said, “I forgot that! Come on.”

They went up to Cairo’s room. The trunk was there. It was closed, but not locked. They raised the lid. The trunk was empty.

Luke said: “What do you know about that!”

Spade did not say anything.

* * * * *

Spade went back to his office. Effie Perine looked up at him, inquisitively.

“Missed him,” Spade grumbled and passed into his private room.

She followed him in. He sat in his chair and began to roll a cigarette. She sat on the desk in front of him and put her toes on a corner of his chair-seat.

“What about Miss O’Shaughnessy?” she demanded.

“I missed her too,” he replied, “but she had been there.”

“On the _La Paloma_?”

“_The La_ is a lousy combination,” he said.

“Stop it. Be nice, Sam. Tell me.”

He set fire to his cigarette, pocketed his lighter, patted her shins, and said: “Yes, _La Paloma_. She got down there at a little after noon yesterday.” He pulled his brows down. “That means she went straight thereafter leaving the cab at the Ferry Building. It’s only a few piers away. The Captain wasn’t aboard. His name’s Jacobi and she asked for him by name. He was uptown on business. That would mean he didn’t expect her, or not at that time anyway. She waited there till he came back at four o’clock. They spent the time from then till meal-time in his cabin and she ate with him.”

He inhaled and exhaled smoke, turned his head aside to spit a yellow tobacco-flake off his lip, and went on: “After the meal Captain Jacobi had three more visitors. One of them was Gutman and one was Cairo and one was the kid who delivered Gutman’s message to you yesterday. Those three came together while Brigid was there and the five of them did a lot of talking in the Captain’s cabin. It’s hard to get anything out of the crew, but they had a row and somewhere around eleven o’clock that night a gun went off there, in the Captain’s cabin. The watchman beat it down there, but the Captain met him outside and told him everything was all right. There’s a fresh bullet-hole in one corner of the cabin, up high enough to make it likely that the bullet didn’t go through anybody to get there. As far as I could learn there was only the one shot. But as far as I could learn wasn’t very far.”

He scowled and inhaled smoke again. “Well, they left around midnight—the Captain and his four visitors all together—and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from the watchman. I haven’t been able to get hold of the Custom-House-men who were on duty there then. That’s all of it. The Captain hasn’t been back since. He didn’t keep a date he had this noon with some shipping-agents, and they haven’t found him to tell him about the fire.”

“And the fire?” she asked.

Spade shrugged. “I don’t know. It was discovered in the hold, aft—in the rear basement—late this morning. The chances are it got started some time yesterday. They got it out all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody liked to talk about it much while the Captain’s away. It’s the—”

The corridor-door opened. Spade shut his mouth. Effie Perine jumped down from the desk, but a man opened the connecting door before she could reach it.

“Where’s Spade?” the man asked.

His voice brought Spade up erect and alert in his chair. It was a voice harsh and rasping with agony and with the strain of keeping two words from being smothered by the liquid bubbling that ran under and behind them.

Effie Perine, frightened, stepped out of the man’s way.

He stood in the doorway with his soft hat crushed between his head and the top of the door-frame: he was nearly seven feet tall. A black overcoat cut long and straight and like a sheath, buttoned from throat to knees, exaggerated his leanness. His shoulders stuck out, high, thin, angular. His bony face—weather-coarsened, age-lined—was the color of wet sand and was wet with sweat on cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and bloodshot and mad above lower lids that hung down to show pink inner membrane. Held tight against the left side of his chest by a black-sleeved arm that ended in a yellowish claw was a brown-paper-wrapped parcel bound with thin rope—an ellipsoid somewhat larger than an American football.

The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade. He said, “You know—” and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said. He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself stiffly straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls.

Spade, wooden-faced and nimble, sprang from his chair and caught the falling man. When Spade caught him the man’s mouth opened and a little blood spurted out, and the brown-wrapped parcel dropped from the man’s hands and rolled across the floor until a foot of the desk stopped it. Then the man’s knees bent and he bent at the waist and his thin body became limber inside the sheathlike overcoat, sagging in Spade’s arms so that Spade could not hold it up from the floor.

Spade lowered the man carefully until he lay on the floor on his left side. The man’s eyes—dark and bloodshot, but not now mad—were wide open and still. His mouth was open as when blood had spurted from it, but no more blood came from it, and all his long body was as still as the floor it lay on.

Spade said: “Lock the door.”

* * * * *

While Effie Perine, her teeth chattering, fumbled with the corridor-door’s lock Spade knelt beside the thin man, turned him over on his back, and ran a hand down inside his overcoat. When he withdrew the hand presently it came out smeared with blood. The sight of his bloody hand brought not the least nor briefest of changes to Spade’s face. Holding that hand up where it would touch nothing, he took his lighter out of his pocket with his other hand. He snapped on the flame and held the flame close to first one and then the other of the thin man’s eyes. The eyes—lids, balls, irises, and pupils—remained frozen, immobile.

Spade extinguished the flame and returned the lighter to his pocket. He moved on his knees around to the dead man’s side and, using his one clean hand, unbuttoned and opened the tubular overcoat. The inside of the overcoat was wet with blood and the double-breasted blue jacket beneath it was sodden. The jacket’s lapels, where they crossed over the man’s chest, and both sides of his coat immediately below that point, were pierced by soggy ragged holes.

Spade rose and went to the wash-bowl in the outer office.

Effie Perine, wan and trembling and holding herself upright by means of a hand on the corridor-door’s knob and her back against its glass, whispered: “Is—is he—?”

“Yes. Shot through the chest, maybe half a dozen times.” Spade began to wash his hands.

“Oughtn’t we—?” she began, but he cut her short: “It’s too late for a doctor now and I’ve got to think before we do anything.” He finished washing his hands and began to rinse the bowl. “He couldn’t have come far with those in him. If he—Why in hell couldn’t he have stood up long enough to say something?” He frowned at the girl, rinsed his hands again, and picked up a towel. “Pull yourself together. For Christ’s sake don’t get sick on me now!” He threw the towel down and ran fingers through his hair. “We’ll have a look at that bundle.”

He went into the inner office again, stepped over the dead man’s legs, and picked up the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. When he felt its weight his eyes glowed. He put it on his desk, turning it over so that the knotted part of the rope was uppermost. The knot was hard and tight. He took out his pocket-knife and cut the rope.

The girl had left the door and, edging around the dead man with her face turned away, had come to Spade’s side. As she stood there—hands on a corner of the desk—watching him pull the rope loose and push aside brown paper, excitement began to supplant nausea in her face. “Do you think it is?” she whispered.

“We’ll soon know,” Spade said, his big fingers busy with the inner husk of coarse grey paper, three sheets thick, that the brown paper’s removal had revealed. His face was hard and dull. His eyes were shining. When he had put the grey paper out of the way he had an egg-shaped mass of pale excelsior, wadded tight. His fingers tore the wad apart and then he had the foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal and shiny where its polish was not dulled by wood-dust and fragments of excelsior.

Spade laughed. He put a hand down on the bird. His wide-spread fingers had ownership in their curving. He put his other arm around Effie Perine and crushed her body against his. “We’ve got the damned thing, angel,” he said.

“Ouch!” she said, “you’re hurting me.”

He took his arm away from her, picked the black bird up in both hands, and shook it to dislodge clinging excelsior. Then he stepped back holding it up in front of him and blew dust off it, regarding it triumphantly.

Effie Perine made a horrified face and screamed, pointing at his feet.

He looked down at his feet. His last backward step had brought his left heel into contact with the dead man’s hand, pinching a quarter-inch of flesh at a side of the palm between heel and floor. Spade jerked his foot away from the hand.

The telephone-bell rang.

He nodded at the girl. She turned to the desk and put the receiver to her ear. She said: “Hello. . . . Yes. . . . Who? . . . Oh, yes!” Her eyes became large. “Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Hold the line. . . .” Her mouth suddenly stretched wide and fearful. She cried: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” She rattled the prong up and down and cried, “Hello!” twice. Then she sobbed and spun around to face Spade, who was close beside her by now. “It was Miss O’Shaughnessy,” she said wildly. “She wants you. She’s at the Alexandria—in danger. Her voice was—oh, it was awful, Sam!—and something happened to her before she could finish. Go help her, Sam!”

Spade put the falcon down on the desk and scowled gloomily. “I’ve got to take care of this fellow first,” he said, pointing his thumb at the thin corpse on the floor.

She beat his chest with her fists, crying: “No, no—you’ve got to go to her. Don’t you see, Sam? He had the thing that was hers and he came to you with it. Don’t you see? He was helping her and they killed him and now she’s—Oh, you’ve got to go!”

“All right.” Spade pushed her away and bent over his desk, putting the black bird back into its nest of excelsior, bending the paper around it, working rapidly, making a larger and clumsy package. “As soon as I’ve gone phone the police. Tell them how it happened, but don’t drag any names in. You don’t know. I got the phone-call and I told you I had to go out, but I didn’t say where.” He cursed the rope for being tangled, yanked it into straightness, and began to bind the package. “Forget this thing. Tell it as it happened, but forget he had a bundle.” He chewed his lower lip. “Unless they pin you down. If they seem to know about it you’ll have to admit it. But that’s not likely. If they do then I took the bundle away with me, unopened.” He finished tying the knot and straightened up with the parcel under his left arm. “Get it straight, now. Everything happened the way it did happen, but without this dingus unless they already know about it. Don’t deny it—just don’t mention it. And I got the phone-call—not you. And you don’t know anything about anybody else having any connection with this fellow. You don’t know anything about him and you can’t talk about my business until you see me. Got it?”

“Yes, Sam. Who—do you know who he is?”

He grinned wolfishly. “Uh-huh,” he said, “but I’d guess he was Captain Jacobi, master of _La Paloma_.” He picked up his hat and put it on. He looked thoughtfully at the dead man and then around the room.

“Hurry, Sam,” the girl begged.

“Sure,” he said absent-mindedly, “I’ll hurry. Might not hurt to get those few scraps of excelsior off the floor before the police come. And maybe you ought to try to get hold of Sid. No.” He rubbed his chin. “We’ll leave him out of it awhile. It’ll look better. I’d keep the door locked till they come.” He took his hand from his chin and rubbed her cheek. “You’re a damned good man, sister,” he said and went out.

17

SATURDAY NIGHT

CARRYING the parcel lightly under his arm, walking briskly, with only the ceaseless shifting of his eyes to denote wariness, Spade went, partly by way of an alley and a narrow court, from his office-building to Kearny and Post Streets, where he hailed a passing taxicab.

The taxicab carried him to the Pickwick Stage terminal in Fifth Street. He checked the bird at the Parcel Room there, put the check into a stamped envelope, wrote _M. F. Holland_ and a San Francisco Post Office box-number on the envelope, sealed it, and dropped it into a mail-box. From the stage-terminal another taxicab carried him to the Alexandria Hotel.

Spade went up to suite 12–C and knocked on the door. The door was opened, when he had knocked a second time, by a small fair-haired girl in a shimmering yellow dressing-gown—a small girl whose face was white and dim and who clung desperately to the inner doorknob with both hands and gasped: “Mr. Spade?”

Spade said, “Yes,” and caught her as she swayed.

Her body arched back over his arm and her head dropped straight back so that her short fair hair hung down her scalp and her slender throat was a firm curve from chin to chest.

Spade slid his supporting arm higher up her back and bent to get his other arm under her knees, but she stirred then, resisting, and between parted lips that barely moved blurred words came: “No! Ma’ me wa’!”

Spade made her walk. He kicked the door shut and he walked her up and down the green-carpeted room from wall to wall. One of his arms around her small body, that hand under her armpit, his other hand gripping her other arm, held her erect when she stumbled, checked her swaying, kept urging her forward, but made her tottering legs bear all her weight they could bear. They walked across and across the floor, the girl falteringly, with incoördinate steps, Spade surely on the balls of his feet with balance unaffected by her staggering. Her face was chalk-white and eyeless, his sullen, with eyes hardened to watch everywhere at once.

He talked to her monotonously: “That’s the stuff. Left, right, left, right. That’s the stuff. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, now we turn.” He shook her as they turned from the wall. “Now back again. One, two, three, four. Hold your head up. That’s the stuff. Good girl. Left, right, left, right. Now we turn again.” He shook her again. “That’s the girl. Walk, walk, walk, walk. One, two, three, four. Now we go around.” He shook her, more roughly, and increased their pace. “That’s the trick. Left, right, left, right. We’re in a hurry. One, two, three. . . .”

She shuddered and swallowed audibly. Spade began to chafe her arm and side and he put his mouth nearer her ear. “That’s fine. You’re doing fine. One, two, three, four. Faster, faster, faster, faster. That’s it. Step, step, step, step. Pick them up and lay them down. That’s the stuff. Now we turn. Left, right, left, right. What’d they do—dope you? The same stuff they gave me?”

Her eyelids twitched up then for an instant over dulled golden-brown eyes and she managed to say all of “Yes” except the final consonant.

They walked the floor, the girl almost trotting now to keep up with Spade, Spade slapping and kneading her flesh through yellow silk with both hands, talking and talking while his eyes remained hard and aloof and watchful. “Left, right, left, right, left, right, turn. That’s the girl. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Keep the chin up. That’s the stuff. One, two . . .”

Her lids lifted again a bare fraction of an inch and under them her eyes moved weakly from side to side.

“That’s fine,” he said in a crisp voice, dropping his monotone. “Keep them open. Open them wide—wide!” He shook her.

She moaned in protest, but her lids went farther up, though her eyes were without inner light. He raised his hand and slapped her cheek half a dozen times in quick succession. She moaned again and tried to break away from him. His arm held her and swept her along beside him from wall to wall.

“Keep walking,” he ordered in a harsh voice, and then: “Who are you?”

Her “Rhea Gutman” was thick but intelligible.

“The daughter?”

“Yes.” Now she was no farther from the final consonant than _sh_.

“Where’s Brigid?”

She twisted convulsively around in his arms and caught at one of his hands with both of hers. He pulled his hand away quickly and looked at it. Across its back was a thin red scratch an inch and a half or more in length.

“What the hell?” he growled and examined her hands. Her left hand was empty. In her right hand, when he forced it open, lay a three-inch jade-headed steel bouquet-pin. “What the hell?” he growled again and held the pin up in front of her eyes.

When she saw the pin she whimpered and opened her dressing-gown. She pushed aside the cream-colored pajama-coat under it and showed him her body below her left breast—white flesh criss-crossed with thin red lines, dotted with tiny red dots, where the pin had scratched and punctured it. “To stay awake . . . walk . . . till you came. . . . She said you’d come . . . were so long.” She swayed.

Spade tightened his arm around her and said: “Walk.”

She fought against his arm, squirming around to face him again. “No . . . tell you . . . sleep . . . save her . . .”

“Brigid?” he demanded.

“Yes . . . took her . . . Bur-Burlingame . . . twenty-six Ancho . . . hurry . . . too late . . .” Her head fell over on her shoulder.

Spade pushed her head up roughly. “Who took her there? Your father?”

“Yes . . . Wilmer . . . Cairo.” She writhed and her eyelids twitched but did not open. “. . . kill her.” Her head fell over again, and again he pushed it up.

“Who shot Jacobi?”

She did not seem to hear the question. She tried pitifully to hold her head up, to open her eyes. She mumbled: “Go . . . she . . .”

He shook her brutally. “Stay awake till the doctor comes.”

Fear opened her eyes and pushed for a moment the cloudiness from her face. “No, no,” she cried thickly, “father . . . kill me . . . swear you won’t . . . he’d know . . . I did . . . for her . . . promise . . . won’t. . . sleep . . . all right . . . morning . . .”

He shook her again. “You’re sure you can sleep the stuff off all right?”

“Ye’.” Her head fell down again.

“Where’s your bed?”

She tried to raise a hand, but the effort had become too much for her before the hand pointed at anything except the carpet. With the sigh of a tired child she let her whole body relax and crumple.

Spade caught her up in his arms—scooped her up as she sank—and, holding her easily against his chest, went to the nearest of the three doors. He turned the knob far enough to release the catch, pushed the door open with his foot, and went into a passageway that ran past an open bathroom-door to a bedroom. He looked into the bathroom, saw it was empty, and carried the girl into the bedroom. Nobody was there. The clothing that was in sight and things on the chiffonier said it was a man’s room.

Spade carried the girl back to the green-carpeted room and tried the opposite door. Through it he passed into another passageway, past another empty bathroom, and into a bedroom that was feminine in its accessories. He turned back the bedclothes and laid the girl on the bed, removed her slippers, raised her a little to slide the yellow dressing-gown off, fixed a pillow under her head, and put the covers up over her.

Then he opened the room’s two windows and stood with his back to them staring at the sleeping girl. Her breathing was heavy but not troubled. He frowned and looked around, working his lips together. Twilight was dimming the room. He stood there in the weakening light for perhaps five minutes. Finally he shook his thick sloping shoulders impatiently and went out, leaving the suite’s outer door unlocked.

* * * * *

Spade went to the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company’s station in Powell Street and called Davenport 2020. “Emergency Hospital, please. . . . Hello, there’s a girl in suite twelve C at the Alexandria Hotel who has been drugged. . . . Yes, you’d better send somebody to take a look at her. . . . This is Mr. Hooper of the Alexandria.”

He put the receiver on its prong and laughed. He called another number and said: “Hello, Frank. This is Sam Spade. . . . Can you let me have a car with a driver who’ll keep his mouth shut? . . . To go down the peninsula right away. . . . Just a couple of hours. . . . Right. Have him pick me up at John’s, Ellis Street, as soon as he can make it.”

He called another number—his office’s—held the receiver to his ear for a little while without saying anything, and replaced it on its hook.

He went to John’s Grill, asked the waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes, ate hurriedly, and was smoking a cigarette with his coffee when a thick-set youngish man with a plaid cap set askew above pale eyes and a tough cheery face came into the Grill and to his table.

“All set, Mr. Spade. She’s full of gas and rearing to go.”

“Swell.” Spade emptied his cup and went out with the thick-set man. “Know where Ancho Avenue, or Road, or Boulevard, is in Burlingame?”

“Nope, but if she’s there we can find her.”

“Let’s do that,” Spade said as he sat beside the chauffeur in the dark Cadillac sedan. “Twenty-six is the number we want, and the sooner the better, but we don’t want to pull up at the front door.”

“Correct.”

They rode half a dozen blocks in silence. The chauffeur said: “Your partner got knocked off, didn’t he, Mr. Spade?”

“Uh-huh.”

The chauffeur clucked. “She’s a tough racket. You can have it for mine.”

“Well, hack-drivers don’t live forever.”

“Maybe that’s right,” the thick-set man conceded, “but, just the same, it’ll always be a surprise to me if I don’t.”

Spade stared ahead at nothing and thereafter, until the chauffeur tired of making conversation, replied with uninterested yeses and noes.

* * * * *

At a drug-store in Burlingame the chauffeur learned how to reach Ancho Avenue. Ten minutes later he stopped the sedan near a dark corner, turned off the lights, and waved his hand at the block ahead. “There she is,” he said. “She ought to be on the other side, maybe the third or fourth house.”

Spade said, “Right,” and got out of the car. “Keep the engine going. We may have to leave in a hurry.”

He crossed the street and went up the other side. Far ahead a lone street-light burned. Warmer lights dotted the night on either side where houses were spaced half a dozen to a block. A high thin moon was cold and feeble as the distant street-light. A radio droned through the open windows of a house on the other side of the street.

In front of the second house from the corner Spade halted. On one of the gateposts that were massive out of all proportion to the fence flanking them a 2 and a 6 of pale metal caught what light there was. A square white card was nailed over them. Putting his face close to the card, Spade could see that it was a _For Sale or Rent_ sign. There was no gate between the posts. Spade went up the cement walk to the house. He stood still on the walk at the foot of the porch-steps for a long moment. No sound came from the house. The house was dark except for another pale square card nailed on its door.

Spade went up to the door and listened. He could hear nothing. He tried to look through the glass of the door. There was no curtain to keep his gaze out, but inner darkness. He tiptoed to a window and then to another. They, like the door, were uncurtained except by inner darkness. He tried both windows. They were locked. He tried the door. It was locked.

He left the porch and, stepping carefully over dark unfamiliar ground, walked through weeds around the house. The side-windows were too high to be reached from the ground. The back door and the one back window he could reach were locked.

Spade went back to the gatepost and, cupping the flame between his hands, held his lighter up to the _For Sale or Rent_ sign. It bore the printed name and address of a San Mateo real-estate-dealer and a line penciled in blue: _Key at 31_.

Spade returned to the sedan and asked the chauffeur: “Got a flashlight?”

“Sure.” He gave it to Spade. “Can I give you a hand at anything?”

“Maybe.” Spade got into the sedan. “We’ll ride up to number thirty-one. You can use your lights.”

Number 31 was a square grey house across the street from, but a little farther up than, 26. Lights glowed in its downstairs-windows. Spade went up on the porch and rang the bell. A dark-haired girl of fourteen or fifteen opened the door. Spade, bowing and smiling, said: “I’d like to get the key to number twenty-six.”

“I’ll call Papa,” she said and went back into the house calling: “Papa!”

A plump red-faced man, bald-headed and heavily mustached, appeared, carrying a newspaper.

Spade said: “I’d like to get the key to twenty-six.”

The plump man looked doubtful. He said: “The juice is not on. You couldn’t see anything.”

Spade patted his pocket. “I’ve a flashlight.”

The plump man looked more doubtful. He cleared his throat uneasily and crumpled the newspaper in his hand.

Spade showed him one of his business-cards, put it back in his pocket, and said in a low voice: “We got a tip that there might be something hidden there.”

The plump man’s face and voice were eager. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll go over with you.”

A moment later he came back carrying a brass key attached to a black and red tag. Spade beckoned to the chauffeur as they passed the car and the chauffeur joined them.

“Anybody been looking at the house lately?” Spade asked.

“Not that I know of,” the plump man replied. “Nobody’s been to me for the key in a couple of months.”

The plump man marched ahead with the key until they had gone up on the porch. Then he thrust the key into Spade’s hand, mumbled, “Here you are,” and stepped aside.

Spade unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was silence and darkness. Holding the flashlight—dark—in his left hand, Spade entered. The chauffeur came close behind him and then, at a little distance, the plump man followed them. They searched the house from bottom to top, cautiously at first, then, finding nothing, boldly. The house was empty—unmistakably—and there was nothing to indicate that it had been visited in weeks.

* * * * *

Saying, “Thanks, that’s all,” Spade left the sedan in front of the Alexandria. He went into the hotel, to the desk, where a tall young man with a dark grave face said: “Good evening, Mr. Spade.”

“Good evening.” Spade drew the young man to one end of the desk. “These Gutmans—up in twelve C—are they in?”

The young man replied, “No,” darting a quick glance at Spade. Then he looked away, hesitated, looked at Spade again, and murmured: “A funny thing happened in connection with them this evening, Mr. Spade. Somebody called the Emergency Hospital and told them there was a sick girl up there.”

“And there wasn’t?”

“Oh, no, there was nobody up there. They went out earlier in the evening.”

Spade said: “Well, these practical-jokers have to have their fun. Thanks.”

He went to a telephone-booth, called a number, and said: “Hello. . . . Mrs. Perine? . . . Is Effie there? . . . Yes, please. . . . Thanks.

“Hello, angel! What’s the good word? . . . Fine, fine! Hold it. I’ll be out in twenty minutes. . . . Right.”

* * * * *

Half an hour later Spade rang the doorbell of a two-story brick building in Ninth Avenue. Effie Perine opened the door. Her boyish face was tired and smiling. “Hello, boss,” she said. “Enter.” She said in a low voice: “If Ma says anything to you, Sam, be nice to her. She’s all up in the air.”

Spade grinned reassuringly and patted her shoulder.

She put her hands on his arm. “Miss O’Shaughnessy?”

“No,” he growled. “I ran into a plant. Are you sure it was her voice?”

“Yes.”

He made an unpleasant face. “Well, it was hooey.”

She took him into a bright living-room, sighed, and slumped down on one end of a Chesterfield, smiling cheerfully up at him through her weariness.

He sat beside her and asked: “Everything went O K? Nothing said about the bundle?”

“Nothing. I told them what you told me to tell them, and they seemed to take it for granted that the phone-call had something to do with it, and that you were out running it down.”

“Dundy there?”

“No. Hoff and O’Gar and some others I didn’t know. I talked to the Captain too.”

“They took you down to the Hall?”

“Oh, yes, and they asked me loads of questions, but it was all—you know—routine.”

Spade rubbed his palms together. “Swell,” he said and then frowned, “though I guess they’ll think up plenty to put to me when we meet. That damned Dundy will, anyway, and Bryan.” He moved his shoulders. “Anybody you know, outside of the police, come around?”

“Yes.” She sat up straight. “That boy—the one who brought the message from Gutman—was there. He didn’t come in, but the police left the corridor-door open while they were there and I saw him standing there.”

“You didn’t say anything?”

“Oh, no. You had said not to. So I didn’t pay any attention to him and the next time I looked he was gone.”

Spade grinned at her. “Damned lucky for you, sister, that the coppers got there first.”

“Why?”

“He’s a bad egg, that lad—poison. Was the dead man Jacobi?”

“Yes.”

He pressed her hands and stood up. “I’m going to run along. You’d better hit the hay. You’re all in.”

She rose. “Sam, what is—?”

He stopped her words with his hand on her mouth. “Save it till Monday,” he said. “I want to sneak out before your mother catches me and gives me hell for dragging her lamb through gutters.”

* * * * *

Midnight was a few minutes away when Spade reached his home. He put his key into the street-door’s lock. Heels clicked rapidly on the sidewalk behind him. He let go the key and wheeled. Brigid O’Shaughnessy ran up the steps to him. She put her arms around him and hung on him, panting: “Oh, I thought you’d never come!” Her face was haggard, distraught, shaken by the tremors that shook her from head to foot.

With the hand not supporting her he felt for the key again, opened the door, and half lifted her inside. “You’ve been waiting?” he asked.

“Yes.” Panting spaced her words. “In a—doorway—up the—street.”

“Can you make it all right?” he asked. “Or shall I carry you?”

She shook her head against his shoulder. “I’ll be—all right—when I—get where—I can—sit down.”

They rode up to Spade’s floor in the elevator and went around to his apartment. She left his arm and stood beside him—panting, both hands to her breast—while he unlocked his door. He switched on the passageway light. They went in. He shut the door and, with his arm around her again, took her back towards the living-room. When they were within a step of the living-room-door the light in the living-room went on.

The girl cried out and clung to Spade.

Just inside the living-room-door fat Gutman stood smiling benevolently at them. The boy Wilmer came out of the kitchen behind them. Black pistols were gigantic in his small hands. Cairo came from the bathroom. He too had a pistol.

Gutman said: “Well, sir, we’re all here, as you can see for yourself. Now let’s come in and sit down and be comfortable and talk.”

18

THE FALL-GUY

SPADE, with his arms around Brigid O’Shaughnessy, smiled meagerly over her head and said: “Sure, we’ll talk.”

Gutman’s bulbs jounced as he took three waddling backward steps away from the door.

Spade and the girl went in together. The boy and Cairo followed them in. Cairo stopped in the doorway. The boy put away one of his pistols and came up close behind Spade.

Spade turned his head far around to look down over his shoulder at the boy and said: “Get away. You’re not going to frisk me.”

The boy said: “Stand still. Shut up.”

Spade’s nostrils went in and out with his breathing. His voice was level. “Get away. Put your paw on me and I’m going to make you use the gun. Ask your boss if he wants me shot up before we talk.”

“Never mind, Wilmer,” the fat man said. He frowned indulgently at Spade. “You are certainly a most headstrong individual. Well, let’s be seated.”

Spade said, “I told you I didn’t like that punk,” and took Brigid O’Shaughnessy to the sofa by the windows. They sat close together, her head against his left shoulder, his left arm around her shoulders. She had stopped trembling, had stopped panting. The appearance of Gutman and his companions seemed to have robbed her of that freedom of personal movement and emotion that is animal, leaving her alive, conscious, but quiescent as a plant.

Gutman lowered himself into the padded rocking chair. Cairo chose the armchair by the table. The boy Wilmer did not sit down. He stood in the doorway where Cairo had stood, letting his one visible pistol hang down at his side, looking under curling lashes at Spade’s body. Cairo put his pistol on the table beside him.

Spade took off his hat and tossed it to the other end of the sofa. He grinned at Gutman. The looseness of his lower lip and the droop of his upper eyelids combined with the v’s in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr’s. “That daughter of yours has a nice belly,” he said, “too nice to be scratched up with pins.”

Gutman’s smile was affable if a bit oily.

The boy in the doorway took a short step forward, raising his pistol as far as his hip. Everybody in the room looked at him. In the dissimilar eyes with which Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo looked at him there was, oddly, something identically reproving. The boy blushed, drew back his advanced foot, straightened his legs, lowered the pistol and stood as he had stood before, looking under lashes that hid his eyes at Spade’s chest. The blush was pale enough and lasted for only an instant, but it was startling on his face that habitually was so cold and composed.

Gutman turned his sleek-eyed fat smile on Spade again. His voice was a suave purring. “Yes, sir, that was a shame, but you must admit that it served its purpose.”

Spade’s brows twitched together. “Anything would’ve,” he said. “Naturally I wanted to see you as soon as I had the falcon. Cash customers—why not? I went to Burlingame expecting to run into this sort of a meeting. I didn’t know you were blundering around, half an hour late, trying to get me out of the way so you could find Jacobi again before he found me.”

Gutman chuckled. His chuckle seemed to hold nothing but satisfaction. “Well, sir,” he said, “in any case, here we are having our little meeting, if that’s what you wanted.”

“That’s what I wanted. How soon are you ready to make the first payment and take the falcon off my hands?”

Brigid O’Shaughnessy sat up straight and looked at Spade with surprised blue eyes. He patted her shoulder inattentively. His eyes were steady on Gutman’s. Gutman’s twinkled merrily between sheltering fat-puffs. He said: “Well, sir, as to that,” and put a hand inside the breast of his coat.

Cairo, hands on thighs, leaned forward in his chair, breathing between parted soft lips. His dark eyes had the surface-shine of lacquer. They shifted their focus warily from Spade’s face to Gutman’s, from Gutman’s to Spade’s.

Gutman repeated, “Well, sir, as to that,” and took a white envelope from his pocket. Ten eyes—the boy’s now only half obscured by his lashes—looked at the envelope. Turning the envelope over in his swollen hands, Gutman studied for a moment its blank white front and then its back, unsealed, with the flap tucked in. He raised his head, smiled amiably, and scaled the envelope at Spade’s lap.

The envelope, though not bulky, was heavy enough to fly true. It struck the lower part of Spade’s chest and dropped down on his thighs. He picked it up deliberately and opened it deliberately, using both hands, having taken his left arm from around the girl. The contents of the envelope were thousand-dollar bills, smooth and stiff and new. Spade took them out and counted them. There were ten of them. Spade looked up smiling. He said mildly: “We were talking about more money than this.”

“Yes, sir, we were,” Gutman agreed, “but we were talking then. This is actual money, genuine coin of the realm, sir. With a dollar of this you can buy more than with ten dollars of talk.” Silent laughter shook his bulbs. When their commotion stopped he said more seriously, yet not altogether seriously: “There are more of us to be taken care of now.” He moved his twinkling eyes and his fat head to indicate Cairo. “And—well, sir, in short—the situation has changed.”

While Gutman talked Spade had tapped the edges of the ten bills into alignment and returned them to their envelope, tucking the flap in over them. Now, with forearms on knees, he sat hunched forward, dangling the envelope from a corner held lightly by finger and thumb down between his legs. His reply to the fat man was careless: “Sure. You’re together now, but I’ve got the falcon.”

Joel Cairo spoke. Ugly hands grasping the arms of his chair, he leaned forward and said primly in his high-pitched thin voice: “I shouldn’t think it would be necessary to remind you, Mr. Spade, that though you may have the falcon yet we certainly have you.”

Spade grinned. “I’m trying to not let that worry me,” he said. He sat up straight, put the envelope aside—on the sofa—and addressed Gutman: “We’ll come back to the money later. There’s another thing that’s got to be taken care of first. We’ve got to have a fall-guy.”

The fat man frowned without comprehension, but before he could speak Spade was explaining: “The police have got to have a victim—somebody they can stick for those three murders. We—”

Cairo, speaking in a brittle excited voice, interrupted Spade. “Two—only two—murders, Mr. Spade. Thursby undoubtedly killed your partner.”

“All right, two,” Spade growled. “What difference does that make? The point is we’ve got to feed the police some—”

Now Gutman broke in, smiling confidently, talking with good-natured assurance: “Well, sir, from what we’ve seen and heard of you I don’t think we’ll have to bother ourselves about that. We can leave the handling of the police to you, all right. You won’t need any of our inexpert help.”

“If that’s what you think,” Spade said, “you haven’t seen or heard enough.”

“Now come, Mr. Spade. You can’t expect us to believe at this late date that you are the least bit afraid of the police, or that you are not quite able to handle—”

Spade snorted with throat and nose. He bent forward, resting forearms on knees again, and interrupted Gutman irritably: “I’m not a damned bit afraid of them and I know how to handle them. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The way to handle them is to toss them a victim, somebody they can hang the works on.”

“Well, sir, I grant you that’s one way of doing it, but—”

“‘But’ hell!” Spade said. “It’s the only way.” His eyes were hot and earnest under a reddening forehead. The bruise on his temple was liver-colored. “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been through it all before and expect to go through it again. At one time or another I’ve had to tell everybody from the Supreme Court down to go to hell, and I’ve got away with it. I got away with it because I never let myself forget that a day of reckoning was coming. I never forget that when the day of reckoning comes I want to be all set to march into headquarters pushing a victim in front of me, saying: ‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal.’ As long as I can do that I can put my thumb to my nose and wriggle my fingers at all the laws in the book. The first time I can’t do it my name’s Mud. There hasn’t been a first time yet. This isn’t going to be it. That’s flat.”

Gutman’s eyes flickered and their sleekness became dubious, but he held his other features in their bulbous pink smiling complacent cast and there was nothing of uneasiness in his voice. He said: “That’s a system that’s got a lot to recommend it, sir—by Gad, it has! And if it was anyway practical this time I’d be the first to say: ‘Stick to it by all means, sir.’ But this just happens to be a case where it’s not possible. That’s the way it is with the best of systems. There comes a time when you’ve got to make exceptions, and a wise man just goes ahead and makes them. Well, sir, that’s just the way it is in this case and I don’t mind telling you that I think you’re being very well paid for making an exception. Now maybe it will be a little more trouble to you than if you had your victim to hand over to the police, but”—he laughed and spread his hands—“you’re not a man that’s afraid of a little bit of trouble. You know how to do things and you know you’ll land on your feet in the end, no matter what happens.” He pursed his lips and partly closed one eye. “You’ll manage that, sir.”

Spade’s eyes had lost their warmth. His face was dull and lumpy. “I know what I’m talking about,” he said in a low, consciously patient, tone. “This is my city and my game. I could manage to land on my feet—sure—this time, but the next time I tried to put over a fast one they’d stop me so fast I’d swallow my teeth. Hell with that. You birds’ll be in New York or Constantinople or some place else. I’m in business here.”

“But surely,” Gutman began, “you can—”

“I can’t,” Spade said earnestly. “I won’t. I mean it.” He sat up straight. A pleasant smile illuminated his face, erasing its dull lumpishness. He spoke rapidly in an agreeable, persuasive tone: “Listen to me, Gutman. I’m telling you what’s best for all of us. If we don’t give the police a fall-guy it’s ten to one they’ll sooner or later stumble on information about the falcon. Then you’ll have to duck for cover with it—no matter where you are—and that’s not going to help you make a fortune off it. Give them a fall-guy and they’ll stop right there.”

“Well, sir, that’s just the point,” Gutman replied, and still only in his eyes was uneasiness faintly apparent. “Will they stop right there? Or won’t the fall-guy be a fresh clue that as likely as not will lead them to information about the falcon? And, on the other hand, wouldn’t you say they were stopped right now, and that the best thing for us to do is leave well enough alone?”

A forked vein began to swell in Spade’s forehead. “Jesus! you don’t know what it’s all about either,” he said in a restrained tone. “They’re not asleep, Gutman. They’re lying low, waiting. Try to get that. I’m in it up to my neck and they know it. That’s all right as long as I do something when the time comes. But it won’t be all right if I don’t.” His voice became persuasive again. “Listen, Gutman, we’ve absolutely got to give them a victim. There’s no way out of it. Let’s give them the punk.” He nodded pleasantly at the boy in the doorway. “He actually did shoot both of them—Thursby and Jacobi—didn’t he? Anyway, he’s made to order for the part. Let’s pin the necessary evidence on him and turn him over to them.”

The boy in the doorway tightened the corners of his mouth in what may have been a minute smile. Spade’s proposal seemed to have no other effect on him. Joel Cairo’s dark face was open-mouthed, open-eyed, yellowish, and amazed. He breathed through his mouth, his round effeminate chest rising and falling, while he gaped at Spade. Brigid O’Shaughnessy had moved away from Spade and had twisted herself around on the sofa to stare at him. There was a suggestion of hysterical laughter behind the startled confusion in her face.

Gutman remained still and expressionless for a long moment. Then he decided to laugh. He laughed heartily and lengthily, not stopping until his sleek eyes had borrowed merriment from his laughter. When he stopped laughing he said: “By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are!” He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “Yes, sir, there’s never any telling what you’ll do or say next, except that it’s bound to be something astonishing.”

“There’s nothing funny about it.” Spade did not seem offended by the fat man’s laughter, nor in any way impressed. He spoke in the manner of one reasoning with a recalcitrant, but not altogether unreasonable, friend. “It’s our best bet. With him in their hands, the police will—”

“But, my dear man,” Gutman objected, “can’t you see? If I even for a moment thought of doing it—But that’s ridiculous too. I feel towards Wilmer just exactly as if he were my own son. I really do. But if I even for a moment thought of doing what you propose, what in the world do you think would keep Wilmer from telling the police every last detail about the falcon and all of us?”

Spade grinned with stiff lips. “If we had to,” he said softly, “we could have him killed resisting arrest. But we won’t have to go that far. Let him talk his head off. I promise you nobody’ll do anything about it. That’s easy enough to fix.”

The pink flesh on Gutman’s forehead crawled in a frown. He lowered his head, mashing his chins together over his collar, and asked: “How?” Then, with an abruptness that set all his fat bulbs to quivering and tumbling against one another, he raised his head, squirmed around to look at the boy, and laughed uproariously. “What do you think of this, Wilmer? It’s funny, eh?”

The boy’s eyes were cold hazel gleams under his lashes. He said in a low distinct voice: “Yes, it’s funny—the son of a bitch.”

Spade was talking to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “How do you feel now, angel? Any better?”

“Yes, much better, only”—she reduced her voice until the last words would have been unintelligible two feet away—“I’m frightened.”