SPADE, coming around the corner from the elevator at a few minutes past
six in the morning, saw yellow light glowing through the frosted glass
of his office-door. He halted abruptly, set his lips together, looked up
and down the corridor, and advanced to the door with swift quiet
strides.
He put his hand on the knob and turned it with care that permitted
neither rattle nor click. He turned the knob until it would turn no
farther: the door was locked. Holding the knob still, he changed hands,
taking it now in his left hand. With his right hand he brought his keys
out of his pocket, carefully, so they could not jingle against one
another. He separated the office-key from the others and, smothering the
others together in his palm, inserted the office-key in the lock. The
insertion was soundless. He balanced himself on the balls of his feet,
filled his lungs, clicked the door open, and went in.
Effie Perine sat sleeping with her head on her forearms, her forearms on
her desk. She wore her coat and had one of Spade’s overcoats wrapped
cape-fashion around her.
Spade blew his breath out in a muffled laugh, shut the door behind him,
and crossed to the inner door. The inner office was empty. He went over
to the girl and put a hand on her shoulder.
She stirred, raised her head drowsily, and her eyelids fluttered.
Suddenly she sat up straight, opening her eyes wide. She saw Spade,
smiled, leaned back in her chair, and rubbed her eyes with her fingers.
“So you finally got back?” she said. “What time is it?”
“Six o’clock. What are you doing here?”
She shivered, drew Spade’s overcoat closer around her, and yawned. “You
told me to stay till you got back or phoned.”
“Oh, you’re the sister of the boy who stood on the burning deck?”
“I wasn’t going to—” She broke off and stood up, letting his coat slide
down on the chair behind her. She looked with dark excited eyes at his
temple under the brim of his hat and exclaimed: “Oh, your head! What
happened?”
His right temple was dark and swollen.
“I don’t know whether I fell or was slugged. I don’t think it amounts to
much, but it hurts like hell.” He barely touched it with his fingers,
flinched, turned his grimace into a grim smile, and explained: “I went
visiting, was fed knockout-drops, and came to twelve hours later all
spread out on a man’s floor.”
She reached up and removed his hat from his head. “It’s terrible,” she
said. “You’ll have to get a doctor. You can’t walk around with a head
like that.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks, except for the headache, and that might be
mostly from the drops.” He went to the cabinet in the corner of the
office and ran cold water on a handkerchief. “Anything turn up after I
left?”
“Did you find Miss O’Shaughnessy, Sam?”
“Not yet. Anything turn up after I left?”
“The District Attorney’s office phoned. He wants to see you.”
“Himself?”
“Yes, that’s the way I understood it. And a boy came in with a
message—that Mr. Gutman would be delighted to talk to you before
five-thirty.”
Spade turned off the water, squeezed the handkerchief, and came away
from the cabinet holding the handkerchief to his temple. “I got that,”
he said. “I met the boy downstairs, and talking to Mr. Gutman got me
this.”
“Is that the G. who phoned, Sam?”
“Yes.”
“And what—?”
Spade stared through the girl and spoke as if using speech to arrange
his thoughts: “He wants something he thinks I can get. I persuaded him I
could keep him from getting it if he didn’t make the deal with me before
five-thirty. Then—uh-huh—sure—it was after I’d told him he’d have to
wait a couple of days that he fed me the junk. It’s not likely he
thought I’d die. He’d know I’d be up and around in ten or twelve hours.
So maybe the answer’s that he figured he could get it without my help in
that time if I was fixed so I couldn’t butt in.” He scowled. “I hope to
Christ he was wrong.” His stare became less distant. “You didn’t get any
word from the O’Shaughnessy?”
The girl shook her head no and asked: “Has this got anything to do with
her?”
“Something.”
“This thing he wants belongs to her?”
“Or to the King of Spain. Sweetheart, you’ve got an uncle who teaches
history or something over at the University?”
“A cousin. Why?”
“If we brightened his life with an alleged historical secret four
centuries old could we trust him to keep it dark awhile?”
“Oh, yes, he’s good people.”
“Fine. Get your pencil and book.”
She got them and sat in her chair. Spade ran more cold water on his
handkerchief and, holding it to his temple, stood in front of her and
dictated the story of the falcon as he had heard it from Gutman, from
Charles V’s grant to the Hospitallers up to—but no further than—the
enameled bird’s arrival in Paris at the time of the Carlist influx. He
stumbled over the names of authors and their works that Gutman had
mentioned, but managed to achieve some sort of phonetic likeness. The
rest of the history he repeated with the accuracy of a trained
interviewer.
When he had finished the girl shut her notebook and raised a flushed
smiling face to him. “Oh, isn’t this thrilling?” she said. “It’s—”
“Yes, or ridiculous. Now will you take it over and read it to your
cousin and ask him what he thinks of it? Has he ever run across anything
that might have some connection with it? Is it probable? Is it
possible—even barely possible? Or is it the bunk? If he wants more time
to look it up, O K, but get some sort of opinion out of him now. And for
God’s sake make him keep it under his hat.”
“I’ll go right now,” she said, “and you go see a doctor about that
head.”
“We’ll have breakfast first.”
“No, I’ll eat over in Berkeley. I can’t wait to hear what Ted thinks of
this.”
“Well,” Spade said, “don’t start boo-hooing if he laughs at you.”
* * * * *
After a leisurely breakfast at the Palace, during which he read both
morning papers, Spade went home, shaved, bathed, rubbed ice on his
bruised temple, and put on fresh clothes.
He went to Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s apartment at the Coronet. Nobody was
in the apartment. Nothing had been changed in it since his last visit.
He went to the Alexandria Hotel. Gutman was not in. None of the other
occupants of Gutman’s suite was in. Spade learned that these other
occupants were the fat man’s secretary, Wilmer Cook, and his daughter
Rhea, a brown-eyed fair-haired smallish girl of seventeen whom the
hotel-staff said was beautiful. Spade was told that the Gutman party had
arrived at the hotel, from New York, ten days before, and had not
checked out.
Spade went to the Belvedere and found the hotel-detective eating in the
hotel-café.
“Morning, Sam. Set down and bite an egg.” The hotel-detective stared at
Spade’s temple. “By God, somebody maced you plenty!”
“Thanks, I’ve had mine,” Spade said as he sat down, and then, referring
to his temple: “It looks worse than it is. How’s my Cairo’s conduct?”
“He went out not more than half an hour behind you yesterday and I ain’t
seen him since. He didn’t sleep here again last night.”
“He’s getting bad habits.”
“Well, a fellow like that alone in a big city. Who put the slug to you,
Sam?”
“It wasn’t Cairo.” Spade looked attentively at the small silver dome
covering Luke’s toast. “How’s chances of giving his room a casing while
he’s out?”
“Can do. You know I’m willing to go all the way with you all the time.”
Luke pushed his coffee back, put his elbows on the table, and screwed up
his eyes at Spade. “But I got a hunch you ain’t going all the way with
me. What’s the honest-to-God on this guy, Sam? You don’t have to kick
back on me. You know I’m regular.”
Spade lifted his eyes from the silver dome. They were clear and candid.
“Sure, you are,” he said. “I’m not holding out. I gave you it straight.
I’m doing a job for him, but he’s got some friends that look wrong to me
and I’m a little leery of him.”
“The kid we chased out yesterday was one of his friends.”
“Yes, Luke, he was.”
“And it was one of them that shoved Miles across.”
Spade shook his head. “Thursby killed Miles.”
“And who killed him?”
Spade smiled. “That’s supposed to be a secret, but, confidentially, I
did,” he said, “according to the police.”
Luke grunted and stood up saying: “You’re a tough one to figure out,
Sam. Come on, we’ll have that look-see.”
They stopped at the desk long enough for Luke to “fix it so we’ll get a
ring if he comes in,” and went up to Cairo’s room. Cairo’s bed was
smooth and trim, but paper in the wastebasket, unevenly drawn blinds,
and a couple of rumpled towels in the bathroom showed that the
chambermaid had not yet been in that morning.
Cairo’s luggage consisted of a square trunk, a valise, and a gladstone
bag. His bathroom-cabinet was stocked with cosmetics—boxes, cans, jars,
and bottles of powders, creams, unguents, perfumes, lotions, and tonics.
Two suits and an overcoat hung in the closet over three pairs of
carefully treed shoes.
The valise and smaller bag were unlocked. Luke had the trunk unlocked by
the time Spade had finished searching elsewhere.
“Blank so far,” Spade said as they dug down into the trunk.
They found nothing there to interest them.
“Any particular thing we’re supposed to be looking for?” Luke asked as
he locked the trunk again.
“No. He’s supposed to have come here from Constantinople. I’d like to
know if he did. I haven’t seen anything that says he didn’t.”
“What’s his racket?”
Spade shook his head. “That’s something else I’d like to know.” He
crossed the room and bent down over the wastebasket. “Well, this is our
last shot.”
He took a newspaper from the basket. His eyes brightened when
he saw it was the previous day’s _Call_. It was folded with the
classified-advertising-page outside. He opened it, examined that page,
and nothing there stopped his eyes.
He turned the paper over and looked at the page that had been folded
inside, the page that held financial and shipping news, the weather,
births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. From the lower left-hand
corner, a little more than two inches of the bottom of the second column
had been torn out.
Immediately above the tear was a small caption _Arrived Today_ followed
by:
12:20 A. M.—Capac from Astoria.
5:05 A. M.—Helen P. Drew from Greenwood.
5:06 A. M.—Albarado from Bandon.
The tear passed through the next line, leaving only enough of its
letters to make _from Sydney_ inferable.
Spade put the _Call_ down on the desk and looked into the wastebasket
again. He found a small piece of wrapping-paper, a piece of string, two
hosiery tags, a haberdasher’s sale-ticket for half a dozen pairs of
socks, and, in the bottom of the basket, a piece of newspaper rolled
into a tiny ball.
He opened the ball carefully, smoothed it out on the desk, and fitted it
into the torn part of the _Call_. The fit at the sides was exact, but
between the top of the crumpled fragment and the inferable _from Sydney_
half an inch was missing, sufficient space to have held announcement of
six or seven boats’ arrival. He turned the sheet over and saw that the
other side of the missing portion could have held only a meaningless
corner of a stock-broker’s advertisement.
Luke, leaning over his shoulder, asked: “What’s this all about?”
“Looks like the gent’s interested in a boat.”
“Well, there’s no law against that, or is there?” Luke said while Spade
was folding the torn page and the crumpled fragment together and putting
them into his coat-pocket. “You all through here now?”
“Yes. Thanks a lot, Luke. Will you give me a ring as soon as he comes
in?”
“Sure.”
* * * * *
Spade went to the Business Office of the _Call_, bought a copy of the
previous day’s issue, opened it to the shipping-news-page, and compared
it with the page taken from Cairo’s wastebasket. The missing portion had
read:
5:17 A. M.—Tahiti from Sydney and Papeete.
6:05 A. M.—Admiral Peoples from Astoria.
8:07 A. M.—Caddopeak from San Pedro.
8:17 A. M.—Silverado from San Pedro.
8:05 A. M.—La Paloma from Hongkong.
9:03 A. M.—Daisy Gray from Seattle.
He read the list slowly and when he had finished he underscored
_Hongkong_ with a fingernail, cut the list of arrivals from the paper
with his pocket-knife, put the rest of the paper and Cairo’s sheet into
the wastebasket, and returned to his office.
He sat down at his desk, looked up a number in the telephone-book, and
used the telephone.
“Kearny one four o one, please. . . . Where is the _Paloma_, in from
Hongkong yesterday morning, docked?” He repeated the question. “Thanks.”
He held the receiver-hook down with his thumb for a moment, released it,
and said: “Davenport two o two o, please. . . . Detective bureau,
please. . . . Is Sergeant Polhaus there? . . . Thanks. . . . Hello, Tom,
this is Sam Spade. . . . Yes, I tried to get you yesterday
afternoon. . . . Sure, suppose you go to lunch with me. . . . Right.”
He kept the receiver to his ear while his thumb worked the hook again.
“Davenport o one seven o, please. . . . Hello, this is Samuel Spade. My
secretary got a phone-message yesterday that Mr. Bryan wanted to see me.
Will you ask him what time’s the most convenient for him? . . . Yes,
Spade, S-p-a-d-e.” A long pause. “Yes. . . . Two-thirty? All right.
Thanks.”
He called a fifth number and said: “Hello, darling, let me talk to Sid?
. . . Hello, Sid—Sam. I’ve got a date with the District Attorney at
half-past two this afternoon. Will you give me a ring—here or
there—around four, just to see that I’m not in trouble? . . . Hell with
your Saturday afternoon golf: your job’s to keep me out of jail. . . .
Right, Sid. ’Bye.”
He pushed the telephone away, yawned, stretched, felt his bruised
temple, looked at his watch, and rolled and lighted a cigarette. He
smoked sleepily until Effie Perine came in.
* * * * *
Effie Perine came in smiling, bright-eyed and rosy-faced. “Ted says it
could be,” she reported, “and he hopes it is. He says he’s not a
specialist in that field, but the names and dates are all right, and at
least none of your authorities or their works are out-and-out fakes.
He’s all excited over it.”
“That’s swell, as long as he doesn’t get too enthusiastic to see through
it if it’s phoney.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t—not Ted! He’s too good at his stuff for that.”
“Uh-huh, the whole damned Perine family’s wonderful,” Spade said,
“including you and the smudge of soot on your nose.”
“He’s not a Perine, he’s a Christy.” She bent her head to look at her
nose in her vanity-case-mirror. “I must’ve got that from the fire.” She
scrubbed the smudge with the corner of a handkerchief.
“The Perine-Christy enthusiasm ignite Berkeley?” he asked.
She made a face at him while patting her nose with a powdered pink disc.
“There was a boat on fire when I came back. They were towing it out from
the pier and the smoke blew all over our ferry-boat.”
Spade put his hands on the arms of his chair. “Were you near enough to
see the name of the boat?” he asked.
“Yes. _La Paloma._ Why?”
Spade smiled ruefully. “I’m damned if I know why, sister,” he said.
15