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

by Unknown

  “Five thousand is a lot of money.”

  She smiled as if she thought he was jesting, but when, instead of smiling, he looked gravely at her, her smile became confused, faint, and presently vanished. In its place came a hurt, bewildered look.

  “Surely you’re not really considering it,” she said.

  “Why not? Five thousand is a lot of money.”

  “But, Mr. Spade, you promised to help me.” Her hands were on his arm. “I trusted you. You can’t—” She broke off, took her hands from his sleeve and worked them together.

  Spade smiled gently into her troubled eyes.

  “Don’t let’s try to figure out how much you’ve trusted me,” he said. “I promised to help you, but you didn’t tell me anything about a black bird.”

  “But you must have known, or—or you wouldn’t have told me about it. You do know now. You won’t, you can’t, treat me that way.” Her eyes were cobalt blue prayers.

  “Five thousand,” he said for the third time, “is a lot of money.”

  She lifted her shoulders and hands and let them fall in a gesture that accepted defeat.

  “It is,” she agreed in a small dull voice. “It is far more than I could ever offer you, if I must bid for your loyalty.”

  Spade laughed. His laughter was brief and somewhat bitter.

  “That is good,” he said, “coming from you. What have you given me besides money? Have you given me any of your confidence? Any of the truth? Any help in helping you? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else? Well, if I’m peddling it, why shouldn’t I let it go to the highest bidder?”

  “I’ve given you all the money I have.” Tears glistened in her white-ringed eyes. Her voice was hoarse, vibrant. “I’ve thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost. What else is there?” She suddenly moved close to him on the settee and cried angrily: “Can I buy you with my body?”

  Their faces were a few inches apart.

  Spade took her face between his hands and he kissed her mouth roughly and contemptuously.

  Then he sat back and said: “I’ll think it over.” His face was hard and furious.

  She sat still holding her numb face where his hands had left it.

  He stood up and said: “——! There’s no sense to this.”

  He took two steps toward the fireplace and stopped, glowering at the burning logs, grinding his teeth together.

  She did not move.

  He turned to face her. The two vertical lines over her nose were deep clefts between red welts.

  “I don’t give a damn about your honesty,” he told her, trying to make himself speak calmly. “I don’t care what kind of tricks you’re up to, or what your secrets are. But I’ve got to have something to show that you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do know. Please believe that I do, and that it’s all for the best, and—”

  “Show me,” he ordered. “I’m willing to help you. I’ve done what I could so far. If necessary I’ll go ahead blindfolded, but I can’t do it without confidence in you. You’ve got to convince me that you know what it’s all about, that you’re not simply fiddling around by guess and by God, hoping it’ll come out all right somehow in the end.”

  “Can’t you trust me just a little longer?”

  “How much is a little? And what are you waiting for?”

  She bit her lip and looked down.

  “I must talk to Joel Cairo,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “You can see him tonight,” Spade said, looking at his watch. “His show will be out in a little while. We can get him on the phone at his hotel.”

  She raised her eyes, alarmed.

  “But he can’t come here. I can’t let him know where I am. I’m afraid.”

  “My place,” Spade suggested.

  She hesitated, working her lips together, then asked:

  “Do you think he’d come there?”

  Spade nodded.

  “All right,” she exclaimed, jumping up, her eyes large and bright. “Shall we go now?”

  She went into the next room. Spade went to the table in the corner and silently pulled the drawer out. The drawer held two packs of playing cards, a pad of bridge score-cards, a brass screw, a piece of red string, and a gold pencil. He had closed the drawer and was lighting a cigarette when she returned wearing a small dark hat and gray kidskin coat, carrying his hat and coat.

  Their taxicab drew up behind a dark sedan that stood directly in front of Spade’s street door. Iva Archer was alone in the sedan, sitting at the wheel. Spade lifted his hat to her and went indoors with Brigid O’Shaughnessy. In the lobby he halted beside one of the benches and asked:

  “Do you mind waiting here a moment? I won’t be long.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said, sitting down. “You needn’t hurry.”

  Spade went out to the sedan.

  When he had opened the sedan door Iva spoke rapidly:

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Sam. Can’t I come in?” Her face was pale and nervous.

  “Not now.”

  Iva clicked her teeth together and asked sharply: “Who is she?”

  “I’ve only a minute, Iva,” Spade said patiently. “What is it?”

  “Who is she?” she repeated, nodding at the apartment building door.

  He looked away from her, down the street. In front of a garage on the next corner an undersized youth of twenty or twenty-one in neat gray cap and overcoat loafed with his back against a wall. Spade frowned and returned his gaze to Iva’s insistent face.

  “What is the matter?” he asked. “Has anything happened? You oughtn’t to be here at this time of night.”

  “I’m beginning to believe that,” she complained. “You told me I oughtn’t to come to the office, and now I oughtn’t come here. Do you mean I oughtn’t chase after you? If that’s what you mean why don’t you say it right out?”

  “Now, Iva, you’ve got no right to take that attitude.”

  “I know I haven’t. I haven’t any rights at all, it seems, where you’re concerned. I thought I did. I thought your pretending to love me gave me some right, but—”

  Spade said wearily:

  “This is no time to be arguing about that, precious. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  “I can’t talk to you here, Sam. Can’t I come in?”

  “Not now.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  Spade said nothing.

  She made a thin line of her mouth, squirmed around straight behind the wheel, and started the engine, staring angrily ahead.

  When the sedan began to move Spade said, “Good night, Iva,” closed the door, and stood at the curb with his hat in his hand until it had been driven away. Then he went indoors again.

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy rose smiling cheerfully from the bench and they went up to his apartment.

  CHAPTER VII

  G IN THE AIR

  n his bedroom that was a living-room now the wall bed was up, Spade took Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s hat and coat, made her comfortable in a padded rocking chair, and, after looking up the number in the telephone directory, called the Hotel Belvedere. Cairo had not yet returned from the theater. Spade left his telephone number with the request that Cairo call him as soon as he came in.

  Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminaries, without any introductory remarks, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened three years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact tone, devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important to relate each detail exactly as it had happened. His eyes while he talked looked at memories over her shoulder.

  At the beginning she listened with only partial attentiveness, obviously more surprised by the story than interested in it, her curiosity more engaged with his purpose in telling the story than with the story he told; but presently
, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully, and held her, and she became still and receptive.

  A man named Flitcraft had left his real estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement a bare half hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and one three. He owned his home in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard car, already paid for, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

  Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time of his vanishing. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting his affairs in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been completed the day after that on which he vanished. There was nothing to show that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His time for months past could be at least roughly accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman, though of course either was possible.

  “He went, like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

  When he had reached this point in his story the telephone bell rang.

  “Hello,” he said into the instrument. “Mr. Cairo? This is Spade. Can you come up to my place, Post Street, now? Yes, I think it is.” He looked at the girl, pursed his lips, and then said quickly: “Miss O’Shaughnessy is here and wants to see you.”

  She frowned a little and stirred in her chair, but said nothing.

  Spade put down the telephone and told her:

  “He’ll be up in a few minutes. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the national detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man who resembled her husband in Spokane. I went over there for her. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, had all the trimmings that go with that kind of success, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.”

  Spade hadn’t been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade’s room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make its reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody about it before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.

  “I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn’t want any scandal, and after the trick he had played on her, the way she looked at it, she didn’t want him. So she divorced him on the quiet, and everything was swell all around.

  “Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he had passed an office building—or the skeleton of one—that was being put up. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories to the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk, a piece of brick or cement, was chipped off and flew up and struck him on the cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger, thoughtfully, almost affectionately, while he told me about it.

  “He was frightened, of course, he said, but he was more shocked than frightened. It was as if somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.

  “He had been a good citizen, a good husband, and a good father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was the sort of man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean, orderly, sane, responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen, could be wiped out between real estate office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard, like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

  “It wasn’t the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never again know peace until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had finished his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam; he would change his life at random simply by going off. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them provided for, and his love for them wasn’t of the sort that would make absence from them painful.

  “He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For two or three years he roamed around the country and then returned to the Northwest, settling in Spokane. Presently he married. His second wife didn’t look like his first, and you could find more points of difference than of likeness between them; but both were the sort of women who play fair golf and bridge, take pains with their guest rooms, and welcome new salad recipes. He felt that what he had done was reasonable. He regretted none of it. I don’t think that he was conscious of having stepped back naturally into the groove he had left in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it that I like best. He had adjusted himself to the falling beam, and then no more beams had fallen, and he had adjusted himself to their not falling.”

  “How perfectly fascinating,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said. She left her chair and stood in front of him, close. Her eyes were wide and deep. “I don’t have to tell you how utterly at a disadvantage you’ll have me, with him here, if you choose.”

  Spade smiled slightly without separating his lips.

  “No, you don’t have to tell me that,” he agreed.

  “And you know I’d never have placed myself in this position if I hadn’t trusted you completely?” Her thumb and finger twisted a black button on his blue coat.

  Spade said, “That again,” with mock resignation.

  “But you know it’s so,” she insisted.

  “No, I don’t know it.” He patted the hand that was twisting the button. “My asking for reasons why I should trust you brought us here. Don’t let’s get ourselves confused. You don’t have to trust me, anyway, as long as you can persuade me to trust you.”

  She studied his face. Her nostrils quivered.

  Spade laughed. He patted her hand again and said:

  “Don’t worry about that now. He’ll be here in a moment. Get your business with him over, and then we’ll see how we stand.”

  “And you’ll let me go about it in my own way?”

  “Of course.”

  She turned her hand under his so that her fingers pressed his. She said softly:

  “You’re a God-send.”

  Spade said: “Don’t overdo it.”

  She looked reproachfully at him, though smiling, and returned to the padded rocker.

  Joel Cairo was excited. His dark eyes seemed all irides, and his high-pitched thin-voiced words were tumbling out before Spade had got the door half open.

  “That boy is out there watching the house, Mr. Spade, that boy you showed me, or to whom you showed me, in front of the theater. What am I to understand from that, Mr. Spade? I came here in good faith, with no thought of tricks or traps.”

  “You were asked in good faith.” Spade frowned
thoughtfully. “But I ought to’ve guessed that he might show up. He saw you come in?”

  “Naturally. I could have gone on, but that seemed pointless, since you had already let him see us together.”

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy came into the passageway behind Spade and asked anxiously: “What boy? What is it?”

  Cairo removed his black hat from his head, bowed stiffly, and said in a prim voice:

  “If you do not know, ask Mr. Spade. I know nothing about it except through him.”

  “A kid who’s been trying to tail me around town all evening.” Spade spoke carelessly over his shoulder, not turning to face the girl. “Come on in, Cairo. There’s no use standing here talking for all the neighbors.”

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy grasped Spade’s arm above the elbow and demanded:

  “Did he follow you to my apartment?”

  “No. I shook him before that. Then I suppose he came back here to try to pick me up again.”

  Cairo, holding his black hat to his belly with both hands, had come into the passageway. Spade shut the corridor door behind him, and they went into the living-room. There Cairo bowed stiffly over his hat once more and said:

  “I am delighted to see you again, Miss O’Shaughnessy.”

  “I was sure you would be, Joe,” she replied, giving him her hand.

  He made a formal bow over it and released it quickly.

  She sat in the padded rocker she had occupied before. Cairo sat in the armchair by the table. Spade, when he had hung Cairo’s hat and coat in the closet, sat on an end of the sofa in front of the windows and began to roll a cigarette.

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy said to Cairo:

  “Sam told me about your offer for the falcon. How soon can you have the money ready?”

  Cairo’s eyebrows twitched. He smiled. “It is ready.” He continued to smile at the girl for a little while after he had spoken, and then looked at Spade.

  Spade was lighting his cigarette. His face was placid.

  “In cash?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Cairo replied.

  She frowned, put her tongue between her lips, withdrew it, and asked: