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

by Unknown

  “Can do. You know I’m willing to go all the way with you all the time.” Luke pushed his coffee back, put his elbows on the table, and screwed up his eyes at Spade. “But I got a hunch you ain’t going all the way with me. What’s the honest-to-God on this guy, Sam? You don’t have to kick back on me. You know I’m regular.”

  Spade lifted his eyes from the silver dome. They were clear and candid.

  “Sure, you are,” he said. “I’m not holding out. I gave you it straight. I’m doing a job for him, but he’s got some friends that look wrong to me and I’m a little leery of him.”

  “The kid we chased out yesterday was one of his friends?”

  “Yes, Luke, he was.”

  “And it was one of them that shoved Miles across?”

  Spade shook his head. “Thursby killed Miles.”

  “And who killed him?”

  Spade smiled.

  “That’s supposed to be a secret, but, confidentially, I did,” he said, “according to the police.”

  Luke grunted and stood up, saying:

  “You’re a tough one to figure out, Sam. Come on, we’ll have that look-see.”

  They stopped at the desk long enough for Luke to “fix it so we’ll get a ring if he comes in,” and then went up to Cairo’s room.

  Cairo’s bed was smooth and trim, but paper in the wastebasket, unevenly drawn blinds, and a couple of rumpled towels in the bathroom showed that the chambermaid had not yet been in it that morning.

  Cairo’s luggage consisted of a square trunk, a valise, and a Gladstone bag. His bathroom cabinet was well stocked with cosmetics—boxes, cans, jars, and bottles of powders, creams, unguents, perfumes, lotions, and tonics. Two suits and an overcoat hung in the closet over three pairs of carefully treed shoes.

  The valise and Gladstone bag were unlocked. Luke had the trunk unlocked by the time Spade had finished searching elsewhere.

  “Blank so far,” Spade said as they dug down into the trunk.

  They found nothing there to interest them.

  “Any particular thing we’re looking for?” Luke asked as he locked the trunk again.

  “No. He’s supposed to have come here from Constantinople. I’d like to know if he did. I haven’t seen anything that says he didn’t.”

  “What’s his racket?”

  Spade shook his head. “That’s something else I’d like to know.” He crossed the room and bent down over the wastebasket. “Well, this is our last shot.”

  He took a newspaper from the basket. His eyes brightened when he saw it was the previous day’s Call. It was folded with the classified advertising page outside. He opened it and examined that page. Nothing there stopped his eyes.

  He turned the paper over and looked at the page that had been folded inside, the page that held financial and shipping news, the weather, births, marriages, and deaths. From the lower left-hand corner, a little more than two inches of the bottom of the second column had been torn out.

  Immediately above the tear was a small caption, Arrived Today, followed by:

  12:20 a.m.—Capac from Astoria.

  5:05 a.m.—Helen P. Drew from Greenwood.

  5:06 a.m.—Albarado from Bandon.

  The tear passed through the next line, leaving only enough of its letters to make from Sydney inferable.

  Spade put the Call down on the desk and looked into the wastebasket again. He found a small piece of wrapping paper, a piece of string, two hosiery tags, a haberdasher’s sales ticket for a half dozen pair of socks, and, in the bottom of the basket, a piece of newspaper rolled into a tiny ball.

  He opened the ball carefully, smoothed it out on the desk, and fitted it into the torn part of the Call. The fit at the sides was exact, but between the top of the crumpled fragment and the inferable from Sydney, half an inch was missing, sufficient space to have held announcement of six or seven boats’ arrival. He turned the sheet over and saw that the other side of the missing portion could have held only the meaningless corner of a stockbroker’s advertisement.

  Luke, leaning over Spade’s shoulder, asked:

  “What’s this all about?”

  “Looks like the gent’s interested in a boat.”

  “Well, there’s no law against that, or is there?” Luke said while Spade was folding the torn page and the crumpled fragment together and putting them into his coat pocket. “You all through here now?”

  “Yes. Thanks a lot, Luke. Will you give me a ring at the office as soon as he comes in?”

  “Sure.”

  Spade went to the Business Office of the Call, bought a copy of the previous day’s issue, opened it to the shipping news page, and compared it with the page taken from Cairo’s wastebasket. The missing portion had read:

  5:17 a.m.—Tahiti from Sydney and Papeete.

  6:05 a.m.—Admiral Peoples from Astoria.

  8:07 a.m.—Caddopeak from San Pedro.

  8:17 a.m.—Silverado from San Pedro.

  8:05 a.m.—La Paloma from Hongkong.

  9:03 a.m.—Daisy Gray from Seattle.

  He read the list slowly, and when he had finished he underscored Hongkong with a forefinger nail, cut the list of arrivals from the paper with his pocketknife, put the rest of the paper and Cairo’s sheet into the wastebasket, and returned to his office.

  He sat down at his desk, looked up a number in the telephone directory, and used the telephone:

  “Kearney 1401, please … Where is the Paloma, in from Hongkong this morning, docked? …” He repeated the question. “Thanks.”

  He held the receiver hook down with his thumb for a moment, released it, and said:

  “Davenport 2020, please … Detective bureau, please … Is Sergeant Polhaus there? … Thanks … Hello, Tom, this is Sam Spade.… Yes, I tried to get you yesterday afternoon.… Sure … Suppose you go to lunch with me.… Right.”

  He kept the receiver to his ear while his thumb worked the hook again.

  “Davenport 0170, please … Hello, this is Samuel Spade. My secretary got a phone message yesterday that Mr. Bryan wants to see me. Will you ask him what time’s most convenient for him? … Yes, Spade, S-p-a-d-e.” A long pause. “Yes … Two-thirty, all right, thanks.”

  He called a fifth number and said:

  “Hello, darling. Let me talk to Sid? … Hello, Sid, Sam. I’ve got a date with the District Attorney at half past two this afternoon. Will you give me a ring around four—there or here or both—just to see that I’m not in trouble? … The hell with your Saturday-afternoon golf: your job’s to keep me out of jail.… Right, Sid. Bye.”

  He pushed the telephone away, yawned, stretched, felt his bruised temple, looked at his watch, and rolled and lighted a cigarette.

  He smoked sleepily until Effie Perine came in.

  She came in smiling, bright-eyed and rosy-faced.

  “Ted says it could be,” she reported, “and he hopes it is. He’s going to look it up some more. He says he’s not a specialist in that field, but the names and dates are all right, and at least none of your authorities or their works are out-and-out fictions. He’s all excited over it.”

  “That’s swell, as long as he doesn’t get too enthusiastic to see through it if it’s a lot of hooey.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t, not Ted! He’s too good at his stuff for that.”

  “Uh-huh, the whole damned Perine family’s wonderful,” Spade said, “including you and the smudge of soot on your nose.”

  “He’s not a Perine; he’s a Christy.” She bent her head to look at her nose in her vanity case mirror. “I must’ve got that from the fire.” She scrubbed the smudge with the corner of a handkerchief.

  “The Perine-Christy enthusiasm ignite Berkeley?” he asked.

  She made a face at him while patting her nose with a powdered pink disc.

  “There was a boat on fire when I came back. They were towing it out from the pier, and the smoke blew all over our ferryboat.”

  Spade put his hands on the arms of his chair.

&nb
sp; “Were you near enough to see the name of the boat?” he asked.

  “Yes. La Paloma. Why?”

  Spade smiled ruefully.

  “I’m damned if I know why, sister,” he said.

  CHAPTER XV

  OFFICIALS

  pade and Detective-sergeant Polhaus ate pickled pig’s-feet at one of John’s tables at the States Hof Brau.

  Polhaus, balancing pale bright jelly on a fork halfway between plate and mouth, said:

  “Hey, listen, Sam: forget about the other night. He was dead wrong, but you know anybody’s liable to lose their head if you ride them like that.”

  Spade looked thoughtfully at the police detective.

  “Was that what you wanted to see me about?” he asked.

  Polhaus nodded, put the forkful of jelly into his mouth, swallowed it, and qualified his nod: “Mostly.”

  “Dundy send you?”

  Polhaus made a disgusted mouth.

  “You know he didn’t. He’s as bullheaded as you are.”

  Spade smiled and shook his head.

  “No, he’s not, Tom,” he said. “He just thinks he is.”

  Tom scowled and chopped at his pig’s foot with his knife.

  “Ain’t you ever going to grow up?” he grumbled. “What’ve you got to beef about? He didn’t hurt you. You came out on top. What’s the sense of making a grudge of it? You’re just making a lot of grief for yourself.”

  Spade placed his knife and fork carefully together on his plate, and put his hands on the table beside his plate. His smile was faint and devoid of warmth.

  “With every bull in town working overtime trying to pile up grief for me a little more won’t hurt. I won’t even know it’s there.”

  Polhaus’s ruddiness deepened. He said:

  “That’s a swell thing to say to me.”

  Spade picked up his knife and fork and began to eat. Polhaus ate.

  Presently Spade asked:

  “See the boat on fire in the bay?”

  “I saw the smoke. Be reasonable, Sam. Dundy was wrong and he knows it. Why don’t you let it go at that?”

  “Think I ought to go around and tell him I hope my chin didn’t hurt his fist?”

  Polhaus cut savagely at his pig’s foot. Spade said:

  “Phil Archer been in with any more hot tips?”

  “Aw, hell, Dundy didn’t think you shot Miles, but what else could he do except run the lead down? You’d’ve done the same thing in his place, and you know it.”

  “Yes?” Malice glittered in Spade’s eyes. “What made him think I didn’t do it? What makes you think I didn’t? Or don’t you?”

  Polhaus’s ruddy face flushed again. He said:

  “Thursby shot Miles.”

  “You think he did.”

  “He did. That Webley was his, all right, and the slug in Miles came out of it.”

  “Sure?” Spade demanded.

  “Dead sure,” the police detective replied in the tone of one without the least doubt. “We got hold of a kid, a bellhop at his hotel, that had seen it in his room just that morning. He noticed it particular because he never saw one like it before. I never saw one. You say they don’t make them any more. It ain’t likely there’d be another around, and, anyway, if it wasn’t Thursby’s, what happened to his?” He started to put a piece of bread into his mouth, withdrew it, and asked: “You say you’ve seen them before. Where was that at?” He put the bread into his mouth.

  “In England before the war.”

  “Sure, there you are.”

  Spade nodded and said:

  “Then that leaves Thursby the only one I killed?”

  Polhaus squirmed a little in his chair, and his face was red and shiny.

  “—— sake, ain’t you ever going to forget that?” he complained earnestly. “That’s out. You know it as well as I do. You’d think you wasn’t a dick yourself, the way you bellyache over things. I suppose you don’t never pull the same stuff on anybody that we pulled on you?”

  “You mean that you tried to pull on me, Tom—just tried.”

  Polhaus swore under his breath and attacked the remainder of his pig’s foot.

  Spade said:

  “All right. You know it’s out, and I know it’s out. What does Dundy know?”

  “He knows it’s out.”

  “What woke him up?”

  “Aw, Sam, he never really thought you’d—” The irony in Spade’s smile checked Polhaus. He left the sentence incomplete and said: “We dug up Thursby’s record.”

  “Yes? Who was he?”

  Polhaus’s shrewd small brown eyes studied Spade’s face. Spade exclaimed irritably:

  “I wish to God I knew half as much about this business as you smart guys think I do.”

  “I wish we all did,” Polhaus grumbled. “Well, he was a St. Louis gunman the first we hear of him. He was picked up a lot back there for this and that, but he belonged to the Egan mob, so nothing much was ever done about any of it. I don’t know how come he left that shelter, but they got him once in New York for knocking over a row of stuss games—his twist turned him up—and was in a year before Fallon sprung him. A couple of years later he did a short hitch in Joliet for pistol-whipping another twist that had given him the needle, but after that he took up with Dixie Monahan, and didn’t have much trouble getting out whenever he happened to get in. That’s when Dixie was almost as big a shot as Nick the Greek in Chicago gambling. This Thursby was Dixie’s bodyguard, and he took the run-out with him when Dixie got in wrong with the rest of the boys over some debts he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay off. That was a couple of years back, about the time the Newport Beach Boating Club was shut up. I don’t know if Dixie had anything to do with that. Anyway, this is the first time him or Thursby’s been seen since.”

  “Dixie’s been seen?” Spade asked.

  Polhaus shook his head. “No.” His small eyes became sharp, prying. “Not unless you’ve seen him, or know somebody’s seen him.”

  Spade lounged back in his chair and began to make a cigarette.

  “I haven’t,” he said mildly. “This is all new stuff to me.”

  “I bet you.” Polhaus snorted.

  Spade grinned and asked:

  “Where’d you pick up all the news about Thursby?”

  “Some of it’s on the records. The rest—well, we got it here and there.”

  “From Cairo, for instance?” Now Spade’s eyes held the sharp, prying gleam.

  Polhaus put down his coffee cup and shook his head.

  “Not a word of it. You poisoned that guy for us.”

  Spade laughed.

  “You mean a couple of high-class sleuths like you and Dundy worked on that lily-of-the-valley all night and couldn’t crack him?”

  “What do you mean, all night?” Polhaus protested. “We worked on him for less than a couple of hours, saw we wasn’t getting anywheres, and let him go.”

  Spade laughed again and looked at his watch. He caught John’s eye and asked for their check.

  “I’ve got a date with the D.A. this afternoon,” he told Polhaus while they waited for his change.

  “He send for you?”

  “Yes.”

  Polhaus pushed his chair back and stood up, a barrel-bellied tall man, solid and phlegmatic.

  “You won’t be doing me any favor,” he said, “by telling him I’ve talked to you.”

  A lathy youth with salient ears ushered Spade into the District Attorney’s office. Spade went in smiling easily, saying easily:

  “Hello, Bryan.”

  District Attorney Bryan stood up and held his hand out across his desk. He was a blond man of medium stature, perhaps forty-five years old, with aggressive blue eyes behind black-ribboned nose glasses, the over large mouth of an orator, and a wide dimpled chin. When he said, “How do you do, Spade?” his voice was resonant with latent power.

  They shook hands and sat down.

  The District Attorney put his finger on one of the pearl button
s in a battery of four on his desk, said to the lathy youth who opened the door again, “Ask Mr. Thomas and Healy to come in,” and then, rocking back in his chair, addressed Spade pleasantly: “You and the police haven’t been hitting it off so well, have you?”

  Spade made a negligent gesture with the fingers of his right hand.

  “Nothing serious,” he said lightly. “Dundy gets too enthusiastic.”

  The door opened once more to admit two men. The one to whom Spade said, “Hello, Thomas,” was a sunburned stocky man of thirty with clothing and hair of a kindred unruliness. He clapped Spade on the shoulder with a freckled hand, asked, “How’s tricks?” and sat down beside him. The second man was younger and colorless. He took a seat a little apart from the three and balanced a stenographer’s notebook on his knee, holding a green pencil over it.

  Spade glanced his way, chuckled, and asked Bryan:

  “Anything I say will be used against me?”

  The District Attorney smiled.

  “That always holds good.” He took his glasses off, looked at them, and set them on his nose again. He looked through them at Spade and asked: “Who killed Thursby?”

  Spade said:

  “I don’t know.”

  Bryan rubbed his black eyeglass ribbon between thumb and fingers, and said knowingly:

  “Perhaps you don’t, but you certainly could make an excellent guess.”

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t.”

  The District Attorney raised his eyebrows.

  “I wouldn’t,” Spade repeated. He was tranquil. “My guess might be excellent, or it might be crummy, but Mrs. Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney, an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer.”

  “Why shouldn’t you, if you’ve nothing to conceal?”

  “Everybody,” Spade blandly responded, “has something to conceal.”

  “And you have—?”

  “My guesses, for one thing.”

  The District Attorney looked down at his desk, then up at Spade, settled his glasses more firmly on his nose, and said: