Nightmare Town: Stories (43 page)

The girl put her hands over her face and began to cry, “He didn’t have anything to do with it,” she blubbered through her hands. “He didn’t, and it would just make trouble for him.”

“Nice boy,” Dundy said. “So, to keep his name out of the newspapers, he runs off and leaves you alone with your murdered father.”

She took her hands away from her face. “Oh, but he had to,” she cried. “His wife is so jealous, and if she knew he had been with me again she’d certainly divorce him, and he hasn’t a cent in the world of his own.”

Dundy looked at Spade. Spade looked at the goggling Filipinos and jerked a thumb at the outer door. “Scram,” he said. They went out quickly.

“And who is this gem?” Dundy asked the girl.

“But he didn’t have any – “

“Who is he?”

Her shoulders drooped a little and she lowered her eyes. “His name is Boris Smekalov,” she said wearily.

“Spell it.”

She spelled it.

“Where does he live?”

“At the St. Mark Hotel.”

Does he do anything for a living except marry money?”

Anger came into her face as she raised it, but went away as quickly. “He doesn’t do anything,” she said.

Dundy wheeled to address the gray-faced man. “Get him.”

The gray-faced man grunted and went out.

Dundy faced the girl again. “You and this Smekalov in love with each other?”

Her face became scornful. She looked at him with scornful eyes and said nothing.

He said, “Now your father’s dead, will you have enough money for him to marry if his wife divorces him?” She covered her face with her hands.

He said, “Now your father’s dead, will -?”

Spade, leaning far over, caught her as she fell. He lifted her easily and carried her into the bedroom. When he came back he shut the door behind him and leaned against it. “Whatever the rest of it was,” he said, “the faint’s a phoney.”

“Everything’s a phoney,” Dundy growled.

Spade grinned mockingly, “There ought to be a law making criminals give themselves up.”

Mr. Bliss smiled and sat down at his brother’s desk by the window.

Dundy’s voice was disagreeable. “You got nothing to worry about,” he said to Spade. “Even your client’s dead and can’t complain. But if I don’t come across I’ve got to stand for riding from the captain, the chief, the newspapers, and heaven knows who all.”

“Stay with it,” Spade said soothingly; “you’ll catch a murderer sooner or later yet.” His face became serious except for the lights in his yellow-gray eyes. “I don’t want to run this job up any more alleys than we have to, but don’t you think we ought to check up on the funeral the housekeeper said she went to? There’s something funny about that woman.”

After looking suspiciously at Spade for a moment, Dundy nodded, and said, “Tom’ll do it.”

Spade turned about and, shaking his finger at Tom, said, “It’s a ten-to-one bet there wasn’t any funeral. Check on it… don’t miss a trick.”

Then he opened the bedroom door and called Mrs. Hooper. “Sergeant Polhaus wants some information from you,” he told her.

While Tom was writing down names and addresses that the woman gave him, Spade sat on the sofa and made and smoked a cigarette, and Dundy walked the floor slowly, scowling at the rug. With Spade’s approval, Theodore Bliss rose and rejoined his wife in the bedroom.

Presently Tom put his note book in his pocket, said, “Thank you,” to the housekeeper, “Be seeing you,” to Spade and Dundy, and left the apartment.

The housekeeper stood where he had left her, ugly, strong, serene, patient.

Spade twisted himself around on the sofa until he was looking into her deep-set, steady eyes. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, flirting a hand toward the door Tom had gone through. “Just routine.” He pursed his lips, asked, “What do you honestly think of this thing, Mrs. Hooper?”

She replied calmly, in her strong, somewhat harsh voice, “I think it’s the judgment of God.”

Dundy stopped pacing the floor.

Spade said, “What?”

There was certainty and no excitement in her voice: “The wages of sin is death.”

Dundy began to advance toward Mrs. Hooper in the manner of one stalking game. Spade waved him back with a hand which the sofa hid from the woman. His face and voice showed interest, but were now as composed as the woman’s. “Sin?” he asked.

She said, “’Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea.’” She spoke, not as if quoting, but as if saying something she believed.

Dundy barked a question at her: “What little one?”

She turned her grave gray eyes on him, then looked past him at the bedroom door.

“Her,” she said; “Miriam.”

Dundy frowned at her. “His daughter?”

The woman said, “Yes, his own adopted daughter.”

Angry blood mottled Dundy’s square face. “What the heck is this?” he demanded. He shook his head as if to free it from some clinging thing. “She’s not really his daughter?”

The woman’s serenity was in no way disturbed by his anger. “No. His wife was an invalid most of her life. They didn’t have any children.”

Dundy moved his jaws as if chewing for a moment and when he spoke again his voice was cooler. “What did he do to her?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I truly believe that when the truth’s found out you’ll see that the money her father – I mean her real father – left her has been -“

Spade interrupted her, taking pains to speak very clearly, moving one hand in small circles with his words. “You mean you don’t actually know he’s been gypping her? You just suspect it?”

She put a hand over her heart. “I know it here,” she replied calmly.

Dundy looked at Spade, Spade at Dundy, and Spade’s eyes were shiny with not altogether pleasant merriment. Dundy cleared his throat and addressed the woman again. “And you think this” – he waved a hand at the floor where the dead man had lain -“was the judgment of God, huh?”

“I do.”

He kept all but the barest trace of craftiness out of his eyes. “Then whoever did it was just acting as the hand of God?”

“It’s not for me to say,” she replied.

Red began to mottle his face again.

“That’ll be all right now,” he said in a choking voice, but by the time she reached the bedroom door his eyes became alert again and he called, “Wait a minute.” And when they were facing each other: “Listen, do you happen to be a Rosicrucian?”

“I wish to be nothing but a Christian.”

He growled, “All right, all right,” and turned his back on her. She went into the bedroom and shut the door. He wiped his forehead with the palm of his right hand and complained wearily, “Great Scott, what a family.”

Spade shrugged. “Try investigating your own some time.”

Dundy’s face whitened. His lips, almost colourless, came back tight over his teeth. He balled his fists and lunged toward Spade. “What do you -?” The pleasantly surprised look on Spade’s face stopped him. He averted his eyes, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue, looked at Spade again and away, essayed an embarrassed smile, and mumbled, “You mean any family. Uh-huh, I guess so.” He turned hastily toward the corridor door as the doorbell rang.

The amusement twitching Spade’s face accentuated his likeness to a blond satan.

An amiable, drawling voice came in through the corridor door: “I’m Jim Kittredge, Superior Court. I was told to come over here.”

Dundy’s voice: “Yes, come in.”

Kittredge was a roly-poly ruddy man in too-tight clothes with the shine of age on them. He nodded at Spade and said, “I remember you, Mr. Spade, from the Burke-Harris suit.”

Spade said, “Sure,” and stood up to shake hands with him.

Dundy had gone to the bedroom door to call Theodore Bliss and his wife. Kittredge looked at them, smiled at them amiably, said, “How do you do?” and turned to Dundy. “That’s them, all right.” He looked around as if for a place to spit, found none, and said, “It was just about ten minutes to four that the gentleman there came in the courtroom and asked me how long His Honor would be, and I told him about ten minutes, and they waited there; and right after court adjourned at four o’clock we married them.”

Dundy said, “Thanks.” He sent Kittredge away, the Blisses back to the bedroom, scowled with dissatisfaction at Spade, and said, “So what?”

Spade, sitting down again, replied, “So you couldn’t get from here to the Municipal Building in less than fifteen minutes on a bet, so he couldn’t’ve ducked back here while he was waiting for the judge, and he couldn’t have hustled over here to do it after the wedding and before Miriam arrived.”

The dissatisfaction in Dundy’s face increased. He opened his mouth, but shut it in silence when the gray-faced man came in with a tall, slender, pale young man who fitted the description the Filipino had given of Miriam Bliss’s companion.

The gray-faced man said, “Lieutenant Dundy, Mr. Spade, Mr. Boris – uh Smekalov.”

Dundy nodded curtly.

Smekalov began to speak immediately. His accent was not heavy enough to trouble his hearers much, though his r’s sounded more like w’s. “Lieutenant, I must beg of you that you keep this confidential. If it should get out it will ruin me, Lieutenant, ruin me completely and most unjustly. I am most innocent, sir, I assure you, in heart, spirit, and deed, not only innocent, but in no way whatever connected with any part of the whole horrible matter. There is no -“

“Wait a minute.” Dundy prodded Smekalov’s chest with a blunt finger. “Nobody’s said anything about you being mixed up in anything – but it’d have looked better if you’d stuck around.”

The young man spread his arms, his palms forward, in an expansive gesture. “But what can I do? I have a wife who -“ He shook his head violently. “It is impossible. I cannot do it.”

The gray-faced man said to Spade in an adequately subdued voice, “Goofy, these Russians.”

Dundy screwed up his eyes at Smekalov and made his voice judicial. “You’ve probably,” he said, “put yourself in a pretty tough spot.”

Smekalov seemed about to cry. “But only put yourself in my place,” he begged, “and you -“

“Wouldn’t want to.” Dundy seemed, in his callous way, sorry for the young man. “Murder’s nothing to play with in this country.”

“Murder! But I tell you, Lieutenant, I happen’ to enter into this situation by the merest mischance only. I am not -“

“You mean you came in here with Miss Bliss by accident?”

The young man looked as if he would like to say “Yes.” He said, “No,” slowly, then went on with increasing rapidity: “But that was nothing, sir, nothing at all. We had been to lunch. I escorted her home and she said, ‘Will you come in for a cocktail?’ and I would. That is all, I give you my word.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Could it not have happened so to you?” He moved his hands in Spade’s direction. “To you?”

Spade said, “A lot of things happen to me. Did Bliss know you were running around with his daughter?”

“He knew we were friends, yes.”

“Did he know you had a wife?”

Smekalov said cautiously, “I do not think so.”

Dundy said, “You know he didn’t.”

Smekalov moistened his lips and did not contradict the lieutenant.

Dundy asked, “What do you think he’d’ve done if he found out?”

“I do not know, sir.”

Dundy stepped close to the young man and spoke through his teeth in a harsh, deliberate voice, “What did he do when he found out?”

The young man retreated a step, his face white and frightened.

The bedroom door opened and Miriam Bliss came into the room. “Why don’t you leave him alone?” she asked indignantly. “I told you he had nothing to do with it. I told you he didn’t know anything about it.” She was beside Smekalov now and had one of his hands in hers. “You’re simply making trouble for him without doing a bit of good. I’m awfully sorry, Boris, I tried to keep them from bothering you.”

The young man mumbled unintelligibly.

“You tried, all right,” Dundy agreed. He addressed Spade: “Could it’ve been like this, Sam? Bliss found out about the wife, knew they had the lunch date, came home early to meet them when they came in, threatened to tell the wife, and was choked to stop him.” He looked sidewise at the girl. “Now, if you want to fake another faint, hop to it.”

The young man screamed and flung himself at Dundy, clawing with both hands. Dundy grunted – “Uh!” – and struck him in the face with a heavy fist. The young man went backward across the room until he collided with a chair. He and the chair went down on the floor together. Dundy said to the gray-faced man, “Take him down to the Hall – material witness.”

The gray-faced man said, “Oke,” picked up Smekalov’s hat, and went over to help pick him up.

Theodore Bliss, his wife, and the housekeeper had come to the door Miriam Bliss had left open. Miriam Bliss was crying, stamping her foot, threatening Dundy: “I’ll report you, you coward. You had no right to…” and so on. Nobody paid much attention to her; they watched the gray-faced man help Smekalov to his feet, take him away. Smekalov’s nose and mouth were red smears.