SPADE went into the Hotel Sutter and telephoned the Alexandria. Gutman
was not in. No member of Gutman’s party was in. Spade telephoned the
Belvedere. Cairo was not in, had not been in that day.
Spade went to his office.
A swart greasy man in notable clothes was waiting in the outer room.
Effie Perine, indicating the swart man, said: “This gentleman wishes to
see you, Mr. Spade.”
Spade smiled and bowed and opened the inner door. “Come in.” Before
following the man in Spade asked Effie Perine: “Any news on that other
matter?”
“No, sir.”
The swart man was the proprietor of a moving-picture-theater in Market
Street. He suspected one of his cashiers and a doorman of colluding to
defraud him. Spade hurried him through the story, promised to “take care
of it,” asked for and received fifty dollars, and got rid of him in less
than half an hour.
When the corridor-door had closed behind the showman Effie Perine came
into the inner office. Her sunburned face was worried and questioning.
“You haven’t found her yet?” she asked.
He shook his head and went on stroking his bruised temple lightly in
circles with his fingertips.
“How is it?” she asked.
“All right, but I’ve got plenty of headache.”
She went around behind him, put his hand down, and stroked his temple
with her slender fingers. He leaned back until the back of his head over
the chair-top rested against her breast. He said: “You’re an angel.”
She bent her head forward over his and looked down into his face.
“You’ve got to find her, Sam. It’s more than a day and she—”
He stirred and impatiently interrupted her: “I haven’t got to do
anything, but if you’ll let me rest this damned head a minute or two
I’ll go out and find her.”
She murmured, “Poor head,” and stroked it in silence awhile. Then she
asked: “You know where she is? Have you any idea?”
The telephone-bell rang. Spade picked up the telephone and said:
“Hello. . . . Yes, Sid, it came out all right, thanks. . . . No. . . .
Sure. He got snotty, but so did I. . . . He’s nursing a gambler’s-war
pipe-dream. . . . Well, we didn’t kiss when we parted. I declared my
weight and walked out on him. . . . That’s something for you to worry
about. . . . Right. ’Bye.” He put the telephone down and leaned back in
his chair again.
Effie Perine came from behind him and stood at his side. She demanded:
“Do you think you know where she is, Sam?”
“I know where she went,” he replied in a grudging tone.
“Where?” She was excited.
“Down to the boat you saw burning.”
Her eyes opened until their brown was surrounded by white. “You went
down there.” It was not a question.
“I did not,” Spade said.
“Sam,” she cried angrily, “she may be—”
“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