Nightmare Town: Stories (45 page)

Mrs. Haven came in quickly. Her face was white and she was shivering in spite of her fur coat. She came straight to Spade and asked, “Did Gene kill him?”

Spade said, “I don’t know.”

“I’ve got to know,” she cried.

Spade took her hands. “Here, sit down.” He led her to a chair. He asked, “Colyer tell you he’d called the job off?”

She stared at him in amazement. “He what?”

“He left word here last night that your husband had been found and he wouldn’t need me any more.”

She hung her head and her words were barely audible. “Then he did.”

Spade shrugged. “Maybe only an innocent man could’ve afforded to call it off then, or maybe he was guilty but had brains enough and nerve enough to -“

She was not listening to him. She was leaning toward him, speaking earnestly, “But, Mr. Spade, you’re not going to drop it like that? You’re not going to let him stop now?”

While she was speaking his telephone bell rang. He said, “Excuse me,” and picked up the receiver. “Yes?… Uh-huh… So?” He pursed his lips. “I’ll let you know.” He pushed the telephone aside slowly and faced Mrs. Haven again. “Colyer’s outside.”

“Does he know I’m here?” she asked quickly.

“Couldn’t say.” He stood up, pretending he was not watching her closely. “Do you care?”

She pinched her lower lip between her teeth, said, “No,” hesitantly.

“Fine. I’ll have him in.”

She raised a hand as if in protest, then let it drop, and her white face was composed. “Whatever you want,” she said.

Spade opened the door, said, “Hello, Colyer. Come on in. We were just talking about you.”

Colyer nodded, and came into the office holding his Malacca stick in one hand, his hat in the other. “How are you this morning, Julia? You ought to’ve phoned me. I’d’ve driven you back to town.”

“I – I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Colyer looked at her for a moment longer, then shifted the focus of his expressionless green eyes to Spade’s face. “Well, have you been able to convince her I didn’t do it?”

“We hadn’t got around to that,” Spade said. “I was just trying to find out how much reason there was for suspecting you. Sit down.”

Colyer sat down somewhat carefully, asked, “And?”

“And then you arrived.”

Colyer nodded gravely. “All right, Spade,” he said; “you’re hired again to prove to Mrs. Haven that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Gene,” she exclaimed in a choked voice, and held her hands out toward him appealingly. “I don’t think yon did – I don’t want to think you did – but I’m so afraid.” She put her hands to her face and began to cry.

Colyer went over to the woman. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ll kick it out together.”

Spade went into the outer office, shutting the door behind him.

Effie Ferine stopped typing a letter.

He grinned at her, said, “Somebody ought to write a book about people some time – they’re peculiar,” and went over to the water cooler. “You’ve got Wally Kellogg’s number. Call him up and ask him where I can find Tom Minera.”

He returned to the inner office.

Mrs. Haven had stopped crying. She said, “I’m sorry.”

Spade said, “It’s all right.” He looked sidewise at Colyer. “I still got my job?”

“Yes.” Colyer cleared his throat. “But if there’s nothing special right now, I’d better take Mrs. Haven home.”

“Okay, but there’s one thing: according to the Chronicle you identified him. How come you were down there?”

“I went down when I heard they’d found a body,” Colyer replied deliberately. “I told you I had connections.”

Spade said, “All right; be seeing you,” and opened the door for them.

When the corridor door closed behind them, Effie Ferine said, “Minera’s at the Buxton on Army Street.”

Spade said, “Thanks.” He went into the inner office to get his hat. On his way out he said, “If I’m not back in a couple of months tell them to look for my body there.”

Spade walked down a shabby corridor to a battered green door marked 411. The murmur of voices came through the door, but no words could be distinguished. He stopped listening and knocked.

An obviously disguised male voice asked, “What is it?”

“I want to see Tom. This is Sam Spade.”

A pause, then: “Tom ain’t here.”

Spade put a hand on the knob and shook the frail door. “Come on, open Hip,” he growled.

Presently the door was opened by a thin, dark man of twenty-five or -six who tried to make his beady dark eyes guileless while saying, “I didn’t think it was your voice at first.” The slackness of his mouth made his chin seem even smaller than it was. His green-striped shirt, open at the neck, was not clean. His gray pants were carefully pressed.

“You’ve got to be careful these days,” Spade said solemnly, and went through the doorway into a room where two men were trying to seem uninterested in his arrival.

One of them leaned against the window-sill filing his fingernails. The other was tilted back in a chair with his feet on the edge of a table and a newspaper spread between his hands. They glanced at Spade in unison and went on with their occupations.

Spade said cheerfully, “Always glad to meet any friends of Tom Minera’s.”

Minera finished shutting the door and said awkwardly, “Uh – yes – Mr. Spade, meet Mr. Conrad and Mr. James.”

Conrad, the man at the window, made a vaguely polite gesture with the nail file in his hand. He was a few years older than Minera, of average height, sturdily built, with a thick-featured, dull-eyed face.

James lowered his paper for an instant to look coolly, appraisingly, at Spade and say, “How’r’ye, brother?” Then he returned to his reading. He was as sturdily built as Conrad, but taller, and his face had a shrewdness the other’s lacked.

“Ah,” Spade said, “and friends of the late Eli Haven.”

The man at the window jabbed a finger with his nail file, and cursed it bitterly. Minera moistened his lips, and then spoke rapidly, with a whining note in his voice. “But on the level, Spade, we hadn’t none of us seen him for a week.”

Spade seemed mildly amused by the dark man’s manner.

“What do you think he was killed for?”

“All I know is what the paper says: his pockets was all turned inside out and there wasn’t much as a match on him.” He drew down the ends of his mouth. “But far as I know he didn’t have no dough. He didn’t have none Tuesday night.”

Spade, speaking softly, said, “I hear he got some Thursday night.”

Minera, behind Spade, caught his breath audibly.

James said, “I guess you ought to know. I don’t.”

“He ever work with you boys?”

James slowly put aside his newspaper and took his feet off the table. His interest in Spade’s question seemed great enough, but almost impersonal. “Now, what do you mean by that?”

Spade pretended surprise, “But you boys must work at something?”

Minera came around to Spade’s side. “Aw, listen, Spade,” he said. “This guy Haven was just a guy we knew. We didn’t have nothing to do with rubbing him out; we don’t know nothing about it. You know we -“

Three deliberate knocks sounded at the door.

Minera and Conrad looked at James, who nodded, but by then Spade, moving swiftly, had reached the door and was opening it.

Roger Ferris was there.

Spade blinked at Ferris, Ferris at Spade. Then Ferris put out his hand and said, “I am glad to see you.”

“Come on in,” Spade said.

“Look at this, Mr. Spade.” Ferris’s hand trembled as he took a slightly soiled envelope from his pocket.

Ferris’s name and address were typewritten on the envelope. There was no postage stamp on it. Spade took out the enclosure, a narrow slip of cheap white paper, and unfolded it. On it was typewritten:

You had better come to Room 411 Buxton Hotel on Army St at 5 pm this afternoon on account of Thursday night.

There was no signature.

Spade said, “It’s a long time before five o’clock.”

“It is,” Ferris agreed with emphasis. “I came as soon as I got that. It was Thursday night Eli was at my house.”

Minera was jostling Spade, asking, “What is all this?”

Spade held the note up for the dark man to read. He read it and yelled, “”Honest, Spade, I don’t know nothing about that letter.”

“Does anybody?” Spade asked.

Conrad said, “No,” hastily.

James said, “What letter?”

Spade looked dreamily at Ferris for a moment, then said, as if speaking to himself, “Of course, Haven was trying to shake you down.”

Ferris’s face reddened. “What?”

“Shakedown,” Spade repeated patiently; “money, blackmail.”

“Look here, Spade,” Ferris said earnestly; “you don’t really believe what yon said? What would he have to blackmail me on?”

“’To good old Buck,’” – Spade quoted the dead poet’s inscription – “’who knew his coloured lights, in memory of them there days.’” He looked sombrely at Ferris from beneath slightly raised brows. “What coloured lights? What’s the circus and carnival slang term for kicking a guy off a train while it’s going? Red-lighting. Sure, that’s it-red lights. Who’d you red-light, Ferris, that Haven knew about?”

Minera went over to a chair, sat down, put his elbows on his knees, his head between his hands, and stared blankly at the floor. Conrad was breathing as if he had been running.

Spade addressed Ferris, “Well?”

Ferris wiped his face with a handkerchief, put the handkerchief in his pocket, and said simply, “It was a shakedown.”

“And you killed him.”

Ferris’s blue eyes, looking into Spade’s yellow-gray ones, were clear and steady, as was his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I swear I did not. Let me tell you what happened. He sent me the book, as I told you, and I knew right away what that joke he wrote in the front meant. So the next day, when he phoned me and said he was coming over to talk over old times and to try to borrow some money for old times’ sake, I knew what he meant again, and I went down to the bank and drew out ten thousand dollars. You can check that up. It’s the Seaman’s National.”

“I will,” Spade said.

“As it turned out, I didn’t need that much. He wasn’t very big-time, and I talked him into taking five thousand. I put the other five back in the bank next day. You can check that up.”

“I will,” Spade said.

“I told him I wasn’t going to stand for any more taps, this five thousand was the first and the last. I made him sign a paper saying he’d helped in the – what I’d done – and he signed it. He left some time around midnight, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.”

Spade tapped the envelope that Ferris had given him. “And how about this note?”

“A messenger boy brought it at noon, and I came right over. Eli had assured me he hadn’t said anything to anybody, but I didn’t know. I had to face it, whatever it was.”

Spade turned to the others, his face wooden. “Well?”

Minera and Conrad looked at James, who made an impatient grimace and said, “Oh, sure, we sent him the letter. Why not? We was friends of Eli’s and we hadn’t been able to find him since he went to put the squeeze to this baby, and then he turns up dead, so we kind of like to have the gent come over and explain things.”

“You knew about the squeeze?”

“Sure. We was all together when he got the idea.”

“How’d he happen to get the idea?” Spade asked.

James spread the fingers of his left hand. “We’d been drinking and talking – you know the way a bunch of guys will, about all they’d seen and done – and he told a yarn about once seeing a guy boot another off a train into a canon, and he happens to mention the name of the guy that done the booting – Buck Ferris. And somebody says, ‘What’s this Ferris look like?’ Eli tells him what he looked like then, saying he ain’t seen him for fifteen years; and whoever it is whistles ‘and says, ‘I bet that’s the Ferris that owns about half the movie joints in the state. I bet you he’d give something to keep that back trail covered!’

“Well, the idea kind of hit Eli. You could see that. He thought a little while and then he got cagey. He asked what this movie Ferris’s first name is, and when the other guy tells him, ‘Roger,’ he makes out he’s disappointed and says, ‘No, it ain’t him. His first name was Martin.’ We all give him the ha-ha and he finally admits he’s thinking of seeing the gent, and when he called me up Thursday around noon and says he’s throwing a party at Pogey Hecker’s that night, it ain’t no trouble to figure out what’s what.”

“What was the name of the gentleman who was red-lighted?”

“He wouldn’t say. He shut up tight. You couldn’t blame him.”

“Then nothing. He never showed up at Fogey’s. We tried to get him on the phone around two o’clock in the morning, but his wife said he hadn’t been home, so we stuck around till four or five and then decided he had given us a run-around, and made Pogey charge the bill to him, and beat it. I ain’t seen him since – dead or alive.”

Spade said mildly. “Maybe. Sure you didn’t find Eli later that morning, taking him riding, swap him bullets for Ferris’s five thou, dump him in the -?”