The Maltese Falcon (3 page)

“I guess so,” Spade agreed in a tone that was utterly meaningless, and went out of the alley.

In an all-night drug-store on the corner of Bush and Taylor Streets, Spade used a telephone.

“Precious,” he said into it a little while after he had given a number, “Miles has been shot…. Yes, he’s dead…. Now don’t get excited…. Yes…. You’ll have to break it to Iva…. No, I’m damned if I will. You’ve got to do it…. That’s a good girl…. And keep her away from the office…. Tell her I’ll see her—uh—some time…. Yes, but don’t tie me up to anything…. That’s the stuff. You’re an angel. ’Bye.”

Spade’s tinny alarmclock said three-forty when he turned on the light in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wine-glass and a tall bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. He put bottle and glass on the table, sat on the side of the bed facing them, and rolled a cigarette. He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street-doorbell rang. The hands of the alarmclock registered four-thirty.

Spade sighed, rose from the bed, and went to the telephone-box beside his bathroom door. He pressed the button that released the street-door-lock. He muttered, “Damn her,” and stood scowling at the black telephone-box, breathing irregularly while a dull flush grew in his cheeks.

The grating and rattling of the elevator-door opening and closing came from the corridor. Spade sighed again and moved towards the corridor-door. Soft heavy footsteps sounded on the carpeted
floor outside, the footsteps of two men. Spades face brightened. His eyes were no longer harassed. He opened the door quickly.

“Hello, Tom,” he said to the barrel-bellied tall detective with whom he had talked in Burritt Street, and, “Hello, Lieutenant,” to the man beside Tom. “Come in.”

They nodded together, neither saying anything, and came in. Spade shut the door and ushered them into his bedroom. Tom sat on an end of the sofa by the windows. The Lieutenant sat on a chair beside the table.

The Lieutenant was a compactly built man with a round head under short-cut grizzled hair and a square face behind a short-cut grizzled mustache. A five-dollar gold-piece was pinned to his necktie and there was a small elaborate diamond-set secret-society-emblem on his lapel.

Spade brought two wine-glasses in from the kitchen, filled them and his own with Bacardi, gave one to each of his visitors, and sat down with his on the side of the bed. His face was placid and uncurious. He raised his glass, and said, “Success to crime,” and drank it down.

Tom emptied his glass, set it on the floor beside his feet, and wiped his mouth with a muddy forefinger. He stared at the foot of the bed as if trying to remember something of which it vaguely reminded him.

The Lieutenant looked at his glass for a dozen seconds, took a very small sip of its contents, and put the glass on the table at his elbow. He examined the room with hard deliberate eyes, and then looked at Tom.

Tom moved uncomfortably on the sofa and, not looking up, asked: “Did you break the news to Miles’s wife, Sam?”

Spade said: “Uh-huh.”

“How’d she take it?”

Spade shook his head. “I don’t know anything about women.”

Tom said softly: “The hell you don’t.”

The Lieutenant put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. His greenish eyes were fixed on Spade in a peculiarly rigid stare, as
if their focus were a matter of mechanics, to be changed only by pulling a lever or pressing a button.

“What kind of gun do you carry?” he asked.

“None. I don’t like them much. Of course there are some in the office.”

“I’d like to see one of them,” the Lieutenant said. “You don’t happen to have one here?”

“No.”

“You sure of that?”

“Look around.” Spade smiled and waved his empty glass a little. “Turn the dump upside-down if you want. I won’t squawk—if you’ve got a search-warrant.”

Tom protested: “Oh, hell, Sam!”

Spade set his glass on the table and stood up facing the Lieutenant.

“What do you want, Dundy?” he asked in a voice hard and cold as his eyes.

Lieutenant Dundy’s eyes had moved to maintain their focus on Spade’s. Only his eyes had moved.

Tom shifted his weight on the sofa again, blew a deep breath out through his nose, and growled plaintively: “We’re not wanting to make any trouble, Sam.”

Spade, ignoring Tom, said to Dundy: “Well, what do you want? Talk turkey. Who in hell do you think you are, coming in here trying to rope me?”

“All right,” Dundy said in his chest, “sit down and listen.”

“I’ll sit or stand as I damned please,” said Spade, not moving.

“For Christ’s sake be reasonable,” Tom begged. “What’s the use of us having a row? If you want to know why we didn’t talk turkey it’s because when I asked you who this Thursby was you as good as told me it was none of my business. You can’t treat us that way, Sam. It ain’t right and it won’t get you anywheres. We got our work to do.”

Lieutenant Dundy jumped up, stood close to Spade, and thrust his square face up at the taller man’s.

“I’ve warned you your foot was going to slip one of these days,” he said.

Spade made a depreciative mouth, raising his eyebrows. “Everybody’s foot slips sometime,” he replied with derisive mildness.

“And this is yours.”

Spade smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ll do nicely, thank you.” He stopped smiling. His upper lip, on the left side, twitched over his eyetooth. His eyes became narrow and sultry. His voice came out deep as the Lieutenant’s. “I don’t like this. What are you sucking around for? Tell me, or get out and let me go to bed.”

“Who’s Thursby?” Dundy demanded.

“I told Tom what I knew about him.”

“You told Tom damned little.”

“I knew damned little.”

“Why were you tailing him?”

“I wasn’t. Miles was—for the swell reason that we had a client who was paying good United States money to have him tailed.”

“Who’s the client?”

Placidity came back to Spade’s face and voice. He said reprovingly: “You know I can’t tell you that until I’ve talked it over with the client.”

“You’ll tell it to me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly. “This is murder and don’t you forget it.”

“Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.”

Tom left the sofa and sat on the foot of the bed. His carelessly shaven mud-smeared face was tired and lined.

“Be reasonable, Sam,” he pleaded. “Give us a chance. How can we turn up anything on Miles’s killing if you won’t give us what you’ve got?”

“You needn’t get a headache over that,” Spade told him. “I’ll bury my dead.”

Lieutenant Dundy sat down and put his hands on his knees again. His eyes were warm green discs.

“I thought you would,” he said. He smiled with grim content “That’s just exactly why we came to see you. Isn’t it, Tom?”

Tom groaned, but said nothing articulate.

Spade watched Dundy warily.

“That’s just exactly what I said to Tom,” the Lieutenant went on “I said ‘Tom, I’ve got a hunch that Sam Spade’s a man to keep the family-troubles in the family.’ That’s just what I said to him.”

The wariness went out of Spade’s eyes. He made his eyes dull with boredom. He turned his face around to Tom and asked with great carelessness: “What’s itching your boy-friend now?”

Dundy jumped up and tapped Spade’s chest with the ends of two bent fingers.

“Just this,” he said, taking pains to make each word distinct, emphasizing them with his tapping finger-ends: “Thursby was shot down in front of his hotel just thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt Street.”

Spade spoke, taking equal pains with his words: “Keep your God-damned paws off me.”

Dundy withdrew the tapping fingers, but there was no change in his voice: “Tom says you were in too much of a hurry to even stop for a look at your partner.”

Tom growled apologetically: “Well, damn it, Sam, you did run off like that.”

“And you didn’t go to Archer’s house to tell his wife,” the Lieutenant said. “We called up and that girl in your office was there, and she said you sent her.”

Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its calmness.

Lieutenant Dundy raised his two bent fingers towards Spade’s chest, quickly lowered them, and said: “I give you ten minutes to get to a phone and do your talking to the girl. I give you ten minutes to get to Thursby’s joint—Geary near Leavenworth—you could do it easy in that time, or fifteen at the most. And that gives you ten or fifteen minutes of waiting before he showed up.”

“I knew where he lived?” Spade asked. “And I knew he hadn’t gone straight home from killing Miles?”

“You knew what you knew,” Dundy replied stubbornly. “What time did you get home?”

“Twenty minutes to four. I walked around thinking things over.”

The Lieutenant wagged his round head up and down. “We knew you weren’t home at three-thirty. We tried to get you on the phone. Where’d you do your walking?”

“Out Bush Street a way and back.”

“Did you see anybody that—?”

“No, no witnesses,” Spade said and laughed pleasantly. “Sit down, Dundy. You haven’t finished your drink. Get your glass, Tom.”

Tom said: “No, thanks, Sam.”

Dundy sat down, but paid no attention to his glass of rum.

Spade filled his own glass, drank, set the empty glass on the table, and returned to his bedside-seat.

“I know where I stand now,” he said, looking with friendly eyes from one of the police-detectives to the other. “I’m sorry I got up on my hind legs, but you birds coming in and trying to put the work on me made me nervous. Having Miles knocked off bothered me, and then you birds cracking foxy. That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re up to.”

Tom said: “Forget it.”

The Lieutenant said nothing.

Spade asked: “Thursby die?”

While the Lieutenant hesitated Tom said: “Yes.”

Then the Lieutenant said angrily: “And you might just as well know it—if you don’t—that he died before he could tell anybody anything.”

Spade was rolling a cigarette. He asked, not looking up: “What do you mean by that? You think I did know it?”

“I meant what I said,” Dundy replied bluntly.

Spade looked up at him and smiled, holding the finished cigarette in one hand, his lighter in the other.

“You’re not ready to pinch me yet, are you, Dundy?” he asked.

Dundy looked with hard green eyes at Spade and did not answer him.

“Then,” said Spade, “there’s no particular reason why I should give a damn what you think, is there, Dundy?”

Tom said: “Aw, be reasonable, Sam.”

Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set fire to it, and laughed smoke out.

“I’ll be reasonable, Tom,” he promised. “How did I kill this Thursby? I’ve forgotten.”

Tom grunted disgust. Lieutenant Dundy said: “He was shot four times in the back, with a forty-four or forty-five, from across the street, when he started to go in the hotel. Nobody saw it, but that’s the way it figures.”

“And he was wearing a Luger in a shoulder-holster,” Tom added. “It hadn’t been fired.”

“What do the hotel-people know about him?” Spade asked.

“Nothing except that he’d been there a week.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“What did you find on him? or in his room?”

Dundy drew his lips in and asked: “What’d you think we’d find?”

Spade made a careless circle with his limp cigarette. “Something to tell you who he was, what his story was. Did you?”

“We thought you could tell us that.”

Spade looked at the Lieutenant with yellow-grey eyes that held an almost exaggerated amount of candor. “I’ve never seen Thursby, dead or alive.”

Lieutenant Dundy stood up looking dissatisfied. Tom rose yawning and stretching.

“We’ve asked what we came to ask,” Dundy said, frowning over eyes hard as green pebbles. He held his mustached upper lip tight to his teeth, letting his lower lip push the words out. “We’ve told you more than you’ve told us. That’s fair enough. You know me, Spade. If you did or you didn’t you’ll get a square deal out of
me, and most of the breaks. I don’t know that I’d blame you a hell of a lot—but that wouldn’t keep me from nailing you.”

“Fair enough,” Spade replied evenly. “But I’d feel better about it if you’d drink your drink.”

Lieutenant Dundy turned to the table, picked up his glass, and slowly emptied it. Then he said, “Good night,” and held out his hand. They shook hands ceremoniously. Tom and Spade shook hands ceremoniously. Spade let them out. Then he undressed, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

When Spade reached his office at ten o’clock the following morning Effie Perine was at her desk opening the morning’s mail. Her boyish face was pale under its sunburn. She put down the handful of envelopes and the brass paper-knife she held and said: “She’s in there.” Her voice was low and warning.

“I asked you to keep her away,” Spade complained. He too kept his voice low.