The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  She broke off with a startled hand to her mouth as the office door opened.

  The man who had opened the door came in a step, said, “Oh, excuse me,” hastily took his brown hat from his head, and backed out.

  “It’s all right, Miles,” Spade told him. “Come in. Miss Wonderly, this is Mr. Archer, my partner.”

  Miles Archer came into the office again, shutting the door behind him, ducking his head and smiling at Miss Wonderly, making a vaguely polite gesture with the hat in his hand.

  He was of medium height, solidly built, wide in the shoulders, thick in the neck, with a jovial, heavy-jawed red face and some gray in his close-trimmed hair. He was apparently as many years past forty as Spade was past thirty.

  Spade said:

  “Miss Wonderly’s sister ran away from New York with a fellow named Floyd Thursby. They’re here. Miss Wonderly has seen Thursby, and has a date with him tonight. Maybe he’ll bring her sister with him. The chances are he won’t. Miss Wonderly wants us to help her find her sister and get her away from him and back home.” He looked at Miss Wonderly. “Right?”

  “Yes,” she replied indistinctly.

  The embarrassment that had gradually been driven away by Spade’s ingratiating smiles and nods and assurances was pinkening her face again. She looked at the bag in her lap and picked nervously at it with a gloved finger.

  Spade winked solemnly at his partner.

  Miles Archer came forward to stand at a corner of the desk. While the girl looked at her bag he looked at her. His little brown eyes ran their bold, appraising gaze from her lowered face to her feet and up to her face again. Then he looked at Spade and made a silent whistling mouth of appreciation.

  Spade raised two fingers from the arm of his chair in a brief warning gesture and said:

  “Well, that should be easily enough managed. It’s simply a matter of having a man at the hotel this evening to shadow him away when he leaves, and to keep on shadowing him till he leads us to your sister. If she comes with him, so much the better.”

  Archer said: “Yeh.” His voice was heavy, coarse.

  Miss Wonderly looked up quickly at Spade, puckering her forehead between her eyebrows.

  “Oh, but you must be careful.” Anxiety quivered in her voice. Her lips shaped the words with little nervous jerks. “I’m deathly afraid of him, and of what he might do. She’s so young, his bringing her here from New York is such a serious— Mightn’t he—mightn’t he do—something to her?”

  Spade smiled and patted the arms of his chair.

  “Just leave that to us,” he said. “We’ll know how to handle him.”

  “But mightn’t he?” she insisted.

  “There’s always a chance.” Spade nodded judicially. “But you can trust us to take care of that.”

  “I do trust you,” she said earnestly, “but I want you to know he’s a dangerous man. I honestly don’t believe he’d stop at anything. I don’t believe he’d hesitate to—to kill Corinne if he thought it necessary to save himself. Mightn’t he do that?”

  “You didn’t threaten him with arrest, did you?”

  “I told him all I wanted was to get Corinne home before Mama and Papa came, so they’d never know what she had done. I swore to him that I’d never say a word to them about it if he’d help me do that, but that if he didn’t Papa would certainly have him punished. I—I don’t suppose he believed me, altogether.”

  “Can he cover up by marrying her?” Archer asked.

  The girl blushed and said in confusion:

  “He has a wife and three children in England. Corinne wrote me that, to explain why she’d gone off with him.”

  “They usually do,” Spade said, “though not always in England.” He leaned forward to reach for a pencil and pad of paper lying on the desk. “What does he look like?”

  “He’s thirty-five, perhaps, and as tall as you, and either naturally dark or quite sunburned. His hair is dark, too, and he has thick eyebrows. He talks in a rather loud, blustery way, and has a nervous, irritable manner. He gives an impression of being—of violence.”

  Spade, scribbling on the pad, asked without looking up: “What color eyes?”

  “They’re bluish gray, and watery, though not in a weak way. And—oh, yes—he has a marked cleft in his chin.”

  “Thin, medium, or heavy built?”

  “Quite athletic. He’s broad-shouldered and carries himself erect, what you would call a decidedly military carriage. He had on a light gray suit and a gray hat when I saw him this morning.”

  “What does he do for a living?” Spade asked as he pushed the pad back and laid down the pencil.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had the slightest idea.”

  “When’s he coming to see you?”

  “At eight this evening.”

  “All right, Miss Wonderly. We’ll have a man there. It’ll help if—”

  “Mr. Spade, could either you or Mr. Archer?” She made an appealing gesture with both hands. “Could either of you look after it personally? I don’t mean that the man you send wouldn’t be capable, but, oh! I am so afraid of what might happen to Corrine. I’m afraid of him. Could you? I’d expect to be charged more, of course.” She opened her handbag with nervous fingers and put two hundred-dollar bills on Spade’s desk. “Will that be enough now?”

  “Yeh,” Archer said, “and I’ll handle it myself.”

  Miss Wonderly stood up, impulsively holding a hand out to him.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” she exclaimed, and then gave Spade the hand, repeating, “Thank you.”

  “Not at all,” Spade said over it. “Glad to. It’ll help some if you either wait for Thursby downstairs or come down with him when he leaves.”

  “I will,” she promised, and thanked the partners again.

  “And don’t look for me,” Archer cautioned her. “I’ll see you all right.”

  Spade went to the outer door with Miss Wonderly. When he came back to his desk Archer nodded at the hundred-dollar bills there, growled complacently, “They’re right enough,” picked one up, folded it, and tucked it in a vest pocket. “And they had brothers in her bag.”

  Spade pocketed the other bill before he sat down. Then he said:

  “Well, don’t dynamite her too much. What do you think of her?”

  “She’s a sweet job. And you telling me not to dynamite her.” Archer guffawed suddenly, without merriment. “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.” He put his hands in his pants pockets and teetered back on his heels.

  “You’ll play hell with her, you will.” Spade grinned wolfishly, showing the edge of teeth far back in his jaw. “You’ve got brains, yes, you have.” He began making a cigarette.

  CHAPTER II

  DEATH IN THE FOG

  telephone bell rang in darkness. The third time it rang bedsprings creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:

  “Hello … Yes, speaking … Dead? … Yes … Fifteen minutes. Thanks.”

  A switch clicked and a white bowl, hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center, filled the room with light.

  Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed. He scowled thoughtfully at the telephone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.

  Cold, steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn’s dull moaning. A tinny alarm clock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, which lay facedown on the table, held its hands at five minutes past two.

  Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of the tan flakes down into curving paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer e
dge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends, holding it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.

  He picked up the pigskin and nickel lighter that had been knocked off the table, worked it, and with the cigarette burning in a corner of his mouth stood up.

  He took off his pajamas. The smooth thickness of his arms, legs and body, the sag of his big, rounded shoulders, made his body look like a bear’s. It looked like a shaved bear’s; his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly smooth and pink.

  He scratched the back of his neck and began to dress. He put on a thin white union suit, gray socks, black garters, and dark brown shoes. When he had laced his shoes he picked up the telephone, called Graystone 4500, and ordered a taxicab. He put on a green-striped white shirt, a soft white collar, a green necktie, the gray suit he had worn that day, a loose tweed overcoat, and a dark gray hat.

  The street door bell rang as he switched off the light.

  Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night fog, thin, clammy and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at windows.

  Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare, ugly stairs, went to the parapet and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street.

  An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if it had been blown out, and ran away. Not far from the tunnel’s mouth a man was hunkered on his heels before a billboard that held advertisements of a moving picture and gasoline across the front of a gap between two store buildings. The hunkered man’s head was bent almost to the sidewalk so he could look under the billboard. A hand flat on the sidewalk, a hand clenched on the billboard’s green wooden frame, held him in this grotesque position.

  Two other men stood awkwardly close together at one end of the billboard, peeping through the few inches of space between it and the building at that end. The building at the other end had a blank gray sidewall that looked down on the lot behind the billboard. Lights flickered on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights.

  Spade turned from the parapet and walked up Bush Street to the alley where men were grouped. A uniformed policeman, chewing gum under an enamel sign that said Burritt St. in white against dark blue, put out an arm and asked:

  “What do you want here?”

  “I’m Sam Spade. Tom Polhaus phoned me.”

  “Sure you are.” The policeman’s arm went down. “I didn’t know you at first. Well, they’re back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bad business.”

  “Bad enough,” Spade agreed, and went up the alley.

  Halfway up it, not far from the entrance, a dark ambulance stood. Behind the ambulance, on the left, the alley was bounded by a waist-high fence, three strips of rough boarding. From the fence dark ground fell away steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below.

  A ten-foot length of the fence’s top rail had been torn from a post at one end, and hung dangling from the other. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder stuck out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back. Two men stood over him. One of them held an electric torch’s beam on the dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope.

  One of them hailed Spade, “Hello, Sam,” and clambered up to the alley, his shadow running up before him. He was a barrel-bellied tall man with shrewd, small eyes, a thick mouth, and carelessly shaven dark jowls. His shoes, knees, hands and chin were daubed with brown loam.

  “I figured you’d want to see it before we took him away,” he said as he stepped over the broken fence.

  “Yes. Thanks, Tom,” Spade said. “What happened?”

  He put an elbow on a fence post and looked down at the men below, nodding to those who nodded to him.

  Tom Polhaus poked his own left breast with a dirty finger.

  “Got him right through the pump, with this.” He took a fat revolver from his coat pocket and held it out to Spade. Mud inlaid the depressions in the revolver’s surface. “A Webley. English, ain’t it?”

  Spade took his elbow from the fence post and leaned down to look at the weapon, but he did not touch it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Webley-Fosbery semi-automatic revolver. That’s it. Thirty-eight, eight shot. They don’t make them any more. How many gone out of it?”

  “One shot.” Tom poked his breast again. “He must’ve been dead when he cracked the fence.” He raised the muddy revolver. “You’ve seen this before?”

  Spade nodded.

  “I’ve seen Webley-Fosberys,” he said indifferently, and then spoke rapidly: “He was shot up here, huh? Standing where you are, with his back to the fence. The man that shot him stands here.” He went around in front of Tom and raised a hand breast-high with leveled forefinger. “Lets him have it and Miles goes back, taking the top off the fence and going on through and down till the rock catches him. That it?”

  “That’s it,” Tom replied slowly, working his brows together. “The shot burnt his coat.”

  “Who found him?”

  “The man on the beat, Shilling. He was coming down Bush, and just as he got here a machine turning around threw headlights up here and he saw the top rail off. So he came up and found him.”

  “What about the machine that was turning around?”

  “Not a damned thing about it, Sam. Shilling didn’t pay much attention to it, not knowing anything was wrong. He says nobody didn’t come out of here during the time it took him to come down from Powell, or he’d’ve seen them. The only other way out would be under the billboard on Stockton. Nobody went that way. The fog’s got the ground soggy, and the only marks are where Miles slid down and where this here gun rolled.”

  “Didn’t anybody hear the shot?”

  “For the love of God, Sam, we only just got here. Somebody must’ve heard it, when we find them.” He turned and put a leg over the fence. “Coming down for a look at him before he’s moved?”

  Spade said: “No.”

  Tom halted astride the fence to look back at Spade with surprised, small eyes.

  Spade said: “You’ve seen him. You’d see everything I could.”

  Tom, still looking at Spade, nodded doubtfully and withdrew his leg over the fence.

  “His gun was tucked away on his hip,” he said. “It hadn’t been fired. There was a hundred and sixty-some bucks in his clothes. Was he working, Sam?”

  Spade, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded.

  Tom asked: “Well?”

  “He was supposed to be tailing a fellow named Floyd Thursby,” Spade said, and described Thursby as Miss Wonderly had described him.

  “What for?”

  Spade put his hands into his overcoat pockets and blinked sleepy eyes at Tom.

  Tom repeated impatiently: “What for?”

  “He was an Englishman, maybe. I don’t know what his game was, exactly. We were trying to find out where he lived.” Spade grinned softly and took a hand from his pocket to pat Tom’s shoulder. “Don’t crowd me.” He put the hand in his pocket again. “I’m going out to break the news to Miles’s wife.” He turned away.

  Tom, scowling, opened his mouth, closed it without having said anything, cleared his throat, put the scowl off his face and spoke with a husky sort of gentleness:

  “It’s tough, him getting it like that. Miles had his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must’ve had his good points, too.”

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

  In an all-night dr
ugstore on the corner of Bush and Taylor streets Spade used a telephone.

  “Precious,” he said into it sometime after he had given central 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 alarm clock 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 wineglass and a tall, dark bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. Then he put bottle and glass on the table, sat down 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 alarm clock stood at four thirty.

  He 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 being opened and closed came from the corridor. Spade sighed again and moved toward the corridor door. Soft, heavy footsteps sounded on the carpeted floor outside, the footsteps of two men. Spade’s 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 him. “Come in.”

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