MISS WONDERLY, in a belted green crêpe silk dress, opened the door of
apartment 1001 at the Coronet. Her face was flushed. Her dark red hair,
parted on the left side, swept back in loose waves over her right
temple, was somewhat tousled.
Spade took off his hat and said: “Good morning.”
His smile brought a fainter smile to her face. Her eyes, of blue that
was almost violet, did not lose their troubled look. She lowered her
head and said in a hushed, timid voice: “Come in, Mr. Spade.”
She led him past open kitchen-, bathroom-, and bedroom-doors into a
cream and red living-room, apologizing for its confusion: “Everything is
upside-down. I haven’t even finished unpacking.”
She laid his hat on a table and sat down on a walnut settee. He sat on a
brocaded oval-backed chair facing her.
She looked at her fingers, working them together, and said: “Mr. Spade,
I’ve a terrible, terrible confession to make.”
Spade smiled a polite smile, which she did not lift her eyes to see, and
said nothing.
“That—that story I told you yesterday was all—a story,” she stammered,
and looked up at him now with miserable frightened eyes.
“Oh, that,” Spade said lightly. “We didn’t exactly believe your story.”
“Then—?” Perplexity was added to the misery and fright in her eyes.
“We believed your two hundred dollars.”
“You mean—?” She seemed to not know what he meant.
“I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,” he
explained blandly, “and enough more to make it all right.”
Her eyes suddenly lighted up. She lifted herself a few inches from the
settee, settled down again, smoothed her skirt, leaned forward, and
spoke eagerly: “And even now you’d be willing to—?”
Spade stopped her with a palm-up motion of one hand. The upper part of
his face frowned. The lower part smiled. “That depends,” he said. “The
hell of it is, Miss—— Is your name Wonderly or Leblanc?”
She blushed and murmured: “It’s really O’Shaughnessy—Brigid
O’Shaughnessy.”
“The hell of it is, Miss O’Shaughnessy, that a couple of murders”—she
winced—“coming together like this get everybody stirred up, make the
police think they can go the limit, make everybody hard to handle and
expensive. It’s not—”
He stopped talking because she had stopped listening and was waiting for
him to finish.
“Mr. Spade, tell me the truth.” Her voice quivered on the verge of
hysteria. Her face had become haggard around desperate eyes. “Am I to
blame for—for last night?”
Spade shook his head. “Not unless there are things I don’t know about,”
he said. “You warned us that Thursby was dangerous. Of course you lied
to us about your sister and all, but that doesn’t count: we didn’t
believe you.” He shrugged his sloping shoulders. “I wouldn’t say it was
your fault.”
She said, “Thank you,” very softly, and then moved her head from side to
side. “But I’ll always blame myself.” She put a hand to her throat. “Mr.
Archer was so—so alive yesterday afternoon, so solid and hearty and—”
“Stop it,” Spade commanded. “He knew what he was doing. They’re the
chances we take.”
“Was—was he married?”
“Yes, with ten thousand insurance, no children, and a wife who didn’t
like him.”
“Oh, please don’t!” she whispered.
Spade shrugged again. “That’s the way it was.” He glanced at his watch
and moved from his chair to the settee beside her. “There’s no time for
worrying about that now.” His voice was pleasant but firm. “Out there a
flock of policemen and assistant district attorneys and reporters are
running around with their noses to the ground. What do you want to do?”
“I want you to save me from—from it all,” she replied in a thin
tremulous voice. She put a timid hand on his sleeve. “Mr. Spade, do they
know about me?”
“Not yet. I wanted to see you first.”
“What—what would they think if they knew about the way I came to
you—with those lies?”
“It would make them suspicious. That’s why I’ve been stalling them till
I could see you. I thought maybe we wouldn’t have to let them know all
of it. We ought to be able to fake a story that will rock them to sleep,
if necessary.”
“You don’t think I had anything to do with the—the murders—do you?”
Spade grinned at her and said: “I forgot to ask you that. Did you?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Now what are we going to tell the police?”
She squirmed on her end of the settee and her eyes wavered between heavy
lashes, as if trying and failing to free their gaze from his. She seemed
smaller, and very young and oppressed.
“Must they know about me at all?” she asked. “I think I’d rather die
than that, Mr. Spade. I can’t explain now, but can’t you somehow manage
so that you can shield me from them, so I won’t have to answer their
questions? I don’t think I could stand being questioned now. I think I
would rather die. Can’t you, Mr. Spade?”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I’ll have to know what it’s all about.”
She went down on her knees at his knees. She held her face up to him.
Her face was wan, taut, and fearful over tight-clasped hands.
“I haven’t lived a good life,” she cried. “I’ve been bad—worse than you
could know—but I’m not all bad. Look at me, Mr. Spade. You know I’m not
all bad, don’t you? You can see that, can’t you? Then can’t you trust me
a little? Oh, I’m so alone and afraid, and I’ve got nobody to help me if
you won’t help me. I know I’ve no right to ask you to trust me if I
won’t trust you. I do trust you, but I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you
now. Later I will, when I can. I’m afraid, Mr. Spade. I’m afraid of
trusting you. I don’t mean that. I do trust you, but—I trusted Floyd
and—I’ve nobody else, nobody else, Mr. Spade. You can help me. You’ve
said you can help me. If I hadn’t believed you could save me I would
have run away today instead of sending for you. If I thought anybody
else could save me would I be down on my knees like this? I know this
isn’t fair of me. But be generous, Mr. Spade, don’t ask me to be fair.
You’re strong, you’re resourceful, you’re brave. You can spare me some
of that strength and resourcefulness and courage, surely. Help me, Mr.
Spade. Help me because I need help so badly, and because if you don’t
where will I find anyone who can, no matter how willing? Help me. I’ve
no right to ask you to help me blindly, but I do ask you. Be generous,
Mr. Spade. You can help me. Help me.”
Spade, who had held his breath through much of this speech, now emptied
his lungs with a long sighing exhalation between pursed lips and said:
“You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good.
It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice
when you say things like ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”
She jumped up on her feet. Her face crimsoned painfully, but she held
her head erect and she looked Spade straight in the eyes.
“I deserve that,” she said. “I deserve it, but—oh!—I did want your
help so much. I do want it, and need it, so much. And the lie was in the
way I said it, and not at all in what I said.” She turned away, no
longer holding herself erect. “It is my own fault that you can’t believe
me now.”
Spade’s face reddened and he looked down at the floor, muttering: “Now
you are dangerous.”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy went to the table and picked up his hat. She came
back and stood in front of him holding the hat, not offering it to him,
but holding it for him to take if he wished. Her face was white and
thin.
Spade looked at his hat and asked: “What happened last night?”
“Floyd came to the hotel at nine o’clock, and we went out for a walk. I
suggested that so Mr. Archer could see him. We stopped at a restaurant
in Geary Street, I think it was, for supper and to dance, and came back
to the hotel at about half-past twelve. Floyd left me at the door and I
stood inside and watched Mr. Archer follow him down the street, on the
other side.”
“Down? You mean towards Market Street?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what they’d be doing in the neighborhood of Bush and
Stockton, where Archer was shot?”
“Isn’t that near where Floyd lived?”
“No. It would be nearly a dozen blocks out of his way if he was going
from your hotel to his. Well, what did you do after they had gone?”
“I went to bed. And this morning when I went out for breakfast I saw the
headlines in the papers and read about—you know. Then I went up to
Union Square, where I had seen automobiles for hire, and got one and
went to the hotel for my luggage. After I found my room had been
searched yesterday I knew I would have to move, and I had found this
place yesterday afternoon. So I came up here and then telephoned your
office.”
“Your room at the St. Mark was searched?” he asked.
“Yes, while I was at your office.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to
tell you that.”
“That means I’m not supposed to question you about it?”
She nodded shyly.
He frowned.
She moved his hat a little in her hands.
He laughed impatiently and said: “Stop waving the hat in my face.
Haven’t I offered to do what I can?”
She smiled contritely, returned the hat to the table, and sat beside him
on the settee again.
He said: “I’ve got nothing against trusting you blindly except that I
won’t be able to do you much good if I haven’t some idea of what it’s
all about. For instance, I’ve got to have some sort of a line on your
Floyd Thursby.”
“I met him in the Orient.” She spoke slowly, looking down at a pointed
finger tracing eights on the settee between them. “We came here from
Hongkong last week. He was—he had promised to help me. He took
advantage of my helplessness and dependence on him to betray me.”
“Betray you how?”
She shook her head and said nothing.
Spade, frowning with impatience, asked: “Why did you want him shadowed?”
“I wanted to learn how far he had gone. He wouldn’t even let me know
where he was staying. I wanted to find out what he was doing, whom he
was meeting, things like that.”
“Did he kill Archer?”
She looked up at him, surprised. “Yes, certainly,” she said.
“He had a Luger in a shoulder-holster. Archer wasn’t shot with a Luger.”
“He had a revolver in his overcoat-pocket,” she said.
“You saw it?”
“Oh, I’ve seen it often. I know he always carries one there. I didn’t
see it last night, but I know he never wears an overcoat without it.”
“Why all the guns?”
“He lived by them. There was a story in Hongkong that he had come out
there, to the Orient, as bodyguard to a gambler who had had to leave the
States, and that the gambler had since disappeared. They said Floyd knew
about his disappearing. I don’t know. I do know that he always went
heavily armed and that he never went to sleep without covering the floor
around his bed with crumpled newspaper so nobody could come silently
into his room.”
“You picked a nice sort of playmate.”
“Only that sort could have helped me,” she said simply, “if he had been
loyal.”
“Yes, if.” Spade pinched his lower lip between finger and thumb and
looked gloomily at her. The vertical creases over his nose deepened,
drawing his brows together. “How bad a hole are you actually in?”
“As bad,” she said, “as could be.”
“Physical danger?”
“I’m not heroic. I don’t think there’s anything worse than death.”
“Then it’s that?”
“It’s that as surely as we’re sitting here”—she shivered—“unless you
help me.”
He took his fingers away from his mouth and ran them through his hair.
“I’m not Christ,” he said irritably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin
air.” He looked at his watch. “The day’s going and you’re giving me
nothing to work with. Who killed Thursby?”
She put a crumpled handkerchief to her mouth and said, “I don’t know,”
through it.
“Your enemies or his?”
“I don’t know. His, I hope, but I’m afraid—I don’t know.”
“How was he supposed to be helping you? Why did you bring him here from
Hongkong?”
She looked at him with frightened eyes and shook her head in silence.
Her face was haggard and pitifully stubborn.
Spade stood up, thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and
scowled down at her. “This is hopeless,” he said savagely. “I can’t do
anything for you. I don’t know what you want done. I don’t even know if
you know what you want.”
She hung her head and wept.
He made a growling animal noise in his throat and went to the table for
his hat.
“You won’t,” she begged in a small choked voice, not looking up, “go to
the police?”
“Go to them!” he exclaimed, his voice loud with rage. “They’ve been
running me ragged since four o’clock this morning. I’ve made myself God
knows how much trouble standing them off. For what? For some crazy
notion that I could help you. I can’t. I won’t try.” He put his hat on
his head and pulled it down tight. “Go to them? All I’ve got to do is
stand still and they’ll be swarming all over me. Well, I’ll tell them
what I know and you’ll have to take your chances.”
She rose from the settee and held herself straight in front of him
though her knees were trembling, and she held her white panic-stricken
face up high though she couldn’t hold the twitching muscles of mouth and
chin still. She said: “You’ve been patient. You’ve tried to help me. It
is hopeless, and useless, I suppose.” She stretched out her right hand.
“I thank you for what you have done. I—I’ll have to take my chances.”
Spade made the growling animal noise in his throat again and sat down on
the settee. “How much money have you got?” he asked.
The question startled her. Then she pinched her lower lip between her
teeth and answered reluctantly: “I’ve about five hundred dollars left.”
“Give it to me.”
She hesitated, looking timidly at him. He made angry gestures with
mouth, eyebrows, hands, and shoulders. She went into her bedroom,
returning almost immediately with a sheaf of paper money in one hand.
He took the money from her, counted it, and said: “There’s only four
hundred here.”
“I had to keep some to live on,” she explained meekly, putting a hand to
her breast.
“Can’t you get any more?”
“No.”
“You must have something you can raise money on,” he insisted.
“I’ve some rings, a little jewelry.”
“You’ll have to hock them,” he said, and held out his hand. “The
Remedial’s the best place—Mission and Fifth.”
She looked pleadingly at him. His yellow-grey eyes were hard and
implacable. Slowly she put her hand inside the neck of her dress,
brought out a slender roll of bills, and put them in his waiting hand.
He smoothed the bills out and counted them—four twenties, four tens,
and a five. He returned two of the tens and the five to her. The others
he put in his pocket. Then he stood up and said: “I’m going out and see
what I can do for you. I’ll be back as soon as I can with the best news
I can manage. I’ll ring four times—long, short, long, short—so you’ll
know it’s me. You needn’t go to the door with me. I can let myself out.”
He left her standing in the center of the floor looking after him with
dazed blue eyes.
* * * * *
Spade went into a reception-room whose door bore the legend _Wise,
Merican & Wise_. The red-haired girl at the switchboard said: “Oh,
hello, Mr. Spade.”
“Hello, darling,” he replied. “Is Sid in?”
He stood beside her with a hand on her plump shoulder while she
manipulated a plug and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Mr. Spade to see you,
Mr. Wise.” She looked up at Spade. “Go right in.”
He squeezed her shoulder by way of acknowledgment, crossed the
reception-room to a dully lighted inner corridor, and passed down the
corridor to a frosted glass door at its far end. He opened the frosted
glass door and went into an office where a small olive-skinned man with
a tired oval face under thin dark hair dotted with dandruff sat behind
an immense desk on which bales of paper were heaped.
The small man flourished a cold cigar-stub at Spade and said: “Pull a
chair around. So Miles got the big one last night?” Neither his tired
face nor his rather shrill voice held any emotion.
“Uh-huh, that’s what I came in about.” Spade frowned and cleared his
throat. “I think I’m going to have to tell a coroner to go to hell, Sid.
Can I hide behind the sanctity of my clients’ secrets and identities and
what-not, all the same priest or lawyer?”
Sid Wise lifted his shoulders and lowered the ends of his mouth. “Why
not? An inquest is not a court-trial. You can try, anyway. You’ve gotten
away with more than that before this.”
“I know, but Dundy’s getting snotty, and maybe it is a little bit thick
this time. Get your hat, Sid, and we’ll go see the right people. I want
to be safe.”
Sid Wise looked at the papers massed on his desk and groaned, but he got
up from his chair and went to the closet by the window. “You’re a son of
a gun, Sammy,” he said as he took his hat from its hook.
* * * * *
Spade returned to his office at ten minutes past five that evening.
Effie Perine was sitting at his desk reading _Time_. Spade sat on the
desk and asked: “Anything stirring?”
“Not here. You look like you’d swallowed the canary.”
He grinned contentedly. “I think we’ve got a future. I always had an
idea that if Miles would go off and die somewhere we’d stand a better
chance of thriving. Will you take care of sending flowers for me?”
“I did.”
“You’re an invaluable angel. How’s your woman’s intuition today?”
“Why?”
“What do you think of Wonderly?”
“I’m for her,” the girl replied without hesitation.
“She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “Wonderly, Leblanc, and she
says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”
“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phone-book. That girl is
all right, and you know it.”
“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. He chuckled. “Anyway
she’s given up seven hundred smacks in two days, and that’s all right.”
Effie Perine sat up straight and said: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble
and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never
forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”
Spade smiled unnaturally. Then he frowned. The frown was unnatural. He
opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of someone’s entrance through
the corridor-door stopped him.
Effie Perine rose and went into the outer office. Spade took off his hat
and sat in his chair. The girl returned with an engraved card—_Mr. Joel
Cairo_.
“This guy is queer,” she said.
“In with him, then, darling,” said Spade.
Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was
black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A
square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed
against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to
narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers
fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The
uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a
black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with
short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of _chypre_ came with him.
Spade inclined his head at his visitor and then at a chair, saying: “Sit
down, Mr. Cairo.”
Cairo bowed elaborately over his hat, said, “I thank you,” in a
high-pitched thin voice and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his
ankles, placing his hat on his knees, and began to draw off his yellow
gloves.
Spade rocked back in his chair and asked: “Now what can I do for you,
Mr. Cairo?” The amiable negligence of his tone, his motion in the chair,
were precisely as they had been when he had addressed the same question
to Brigid O’Shaughnessy on the previous day.
Cairo turned his hat over, dropping his gloves into it, and placed it
bottom-up on the corner of the desk nearest him. Diamonds twinkled on
the second and fourth fingers of his left hand, a ruby that matched the
one in his tie even to the surrounding diamonds on the third finger of
his right hand. His hands were soft and well cared for. Though they were
not large their flaccid bluntness made them seem clumsy. He rubbed his
palms together and said over the whispering sound they made: “May a
stranger offer condolences for your partner’s unfortunate death?”
“Thanks.”
“May I ask, Mr. Spade, if there was, as the newspapers inferred, a
certain—ah—relationship between that unfortunate happening and the
death a little later of the man Thursby?”
Spade said nothing in a blank-faced definite way.
Cairo rose and bowed. “I beg your pardon.” He sat down and placed his
hands side by side, palms down, on the corner of the desk. “More than
idle curiosity made me ask that, Mr. Spade. I am trying to recover
an—ah—ornament that has been—shall we say?—mislaid. I thought, and
hoped, you could assist me.”
Spade nodded with eyebrows lifted to indicate attentiveness.
“The ornament is a statuette,” Cairo went on, selecting and mouthing his
words carefully, “the black figure of a bird.”
Spade nodded again, with courteous interest.
“I am prepared to pay, on behalf of the figure’s rightful owner, the sum
of five thousand dollars for its recovery.” Cairo raised one hand from
the desk-corner and touched a spot in the air with the broad-nailed tip
of an ugly forefinger. “I am prepared to promise that—what is the
phrase?—no questions will be asked.” He put his hand on the desk again
beside the other and smiled blandly over them at the private detective.
“Five thousand is a lot of money,” Spade commented, looking thoughtfully
at Cairo. “It—”
Fingers drummed lightly on the door.
When Spade had called, “Come in,” the door opened far enough to admit
Effie Perine’s head and shoulders. She had put on a small dark felt hat
and a dark coat with a grey fur collar.
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
“No. Good night. Lock the door when you go, will you?”
Spade turned in his chair to face Cairo again, saying: “It’s an
interesting figure.”
The sound of the corridor-door’s closing behind Effie Perine came to
them.
Cairo smiled and took a short compact flat black pistol out of an inner
pocket. “You will please,” he said, “clasp your hands together at the
back of your neck.”
5