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

by Unknown

  He scowled and inhaled smoke again.

  “Well, they left at around midnight, the Captain and his four visitors, all together, and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from the watchman. I haven’t been able to get hold of the Custom House men who were on duty there then. That’s all of it. The Captain hasn’t been back since. He didn’t keep a date this noon with some shipping agents, and they haven’t found him to tell him about the fire.”

  “And the fire?”

  Spade shrugged. “I don’t know. It was discovered in the hold, aft—in the rear basement—late this morning. The chances are it got started sometime yesterday. They got it out all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody would talk about it much while the captain’s away. It’s the—”

  The corridor door opened. Spade shut his mouth. Effie Perine jumped down from the desk, but a man opened the connecting door before she could reach it.

  “Where’s Spade?” he asked.

  His voice brought Spade up erect and alert in his chair. It was a voice harsh and rasping with agony and with the strain of keeping two words from being smothered by the liquid bubbling that ran under and behind them.

  Effie Perine, frightened, stepped out of the man’s way.

  He stood in the doorway with his soft dark hat crushed between his head and the top of the door-frame: he was nearly seven feet tall. A black overcoat cut long and straight like a sheath, buttoned from throat to knees, exaggerated his leanness. His shoulders stuck out, high, thin and angular. His bony face—weather-coarsened, age-lined—was the color of damp sand and was damp with sweat on cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and bloodshot and mad above lower lids that hung down to show pink inner membrane.

  Held tight against the left side of his chest by a black-sleeved forearm that ended in a yellowish claw was a brown-paper-wrapped parcel, bound with thin rope—an ellipsoid somewhat larger than an American football.

  The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade.

  He said, “You have,” and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said.

  He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself straight, rigid, and not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls.

  Spade, wooden-faced and nimble, sprang from his chair and caught the falling man. When Spade caught him the man’s mouth opened and a little blood spurted out and the brown-wrapped parcel dropped from the man’s hands and rolled across the floor until a foot of the desk stopped it. Then the man’s knees bent, and he bent at the waist and his thin body became limber inside the sheathlike overcoat, sagging in Spade’s arms so that Spade could not hold it up from the floor.

  Spade lowered the man gently until he lay on the floor on his left side. The man’s eyes, dark and bloodshot but not now mad, were wide open and still. His mouth was open as when blood had spurted from it, but no more blood came from it, and all his long body was as still as the floor on which it lay.

  Spade said:

  “Lock the door.”

  While Effie Perine, her teeth chattering, fumbled with the corridor door’s lock, Spade knelt beside the thin man, turned him over on his back and ran a hand down inside his overcoat. When he withdrew his hand presently it came out smeared with blood. The sight of his bloody hand brought not the least nor briefest of changes in Spade’s face.

  Holding that hand up where it would touch nothing, he took his lighter out of his pocket with his other hand. He snapped on the flame and held the flame close to first one and then the other of the thin man’s eyes. The eyes—lids, balls, irises and pupils—remained frozen, immobile.

  Spade extinguished the flame and returned the lighter to his pocket. He moved on his knees around to the man’s side, and using his one clean hand, unbuttoned the tubular overcoat and opened it. The inside of the overcoat was wet with blood and the double-breasted blue jacket beneath it was sodden. The jacket’s lapels where they crossed over the man’s chest and both sides of his coat immediately below that point were mangled as if chewed.

  Spade rose and went to the washbowl in the outer office.

  Effie Perine, wan and trembling and holding herself upright by means of a hand and her back against the door, whispered:

  “Is—is he—?”

  “Yes. He’s been shot through the chest, maybe half a dozen times.”

  Spade began to wash his hands.

  “Oughtn’t we—?” she began, but he cut her short.

  “It’s too late for a doctor now, and I’ve got to think before we do anything.” He finished washing his hands and began to rinse the bowl. “He couldn’t have gone far with those in him. If he— Why in hell couldn’t he have stood up long enough to tell us something?” He frowned at the girl, rinsed his hands again and picked up a towel. “Pull yourself together. For God’s sake, don’t get sick on me now.” He threw the towel down and ran fingers through his hair. “We’ll have a look at that bundle.”

  He went into the inner office again, stepped over the dead man’s legs, and picked up the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. When he felt its weight his eyes glowed. He put it on his desk, turning it over so that the knotted part of the rope was uppermost. The knot was hard and tight. He took out his pocket knife and cut the rope.

  The girl had left the door and, edging around the dead man with her face turned away, had come to Spade’s side. As she stood there, with her hands on a corner of the desk, watching him pull the rope loose and push aside the brown paper, excitement began to supplant nausea in her face.

  “Do you think it is?” she whispered.

  “We’ll soon know,” Spade said, his big fingers busy with the inner husk of coarse gray paper, three sheets thick, that the brown paper’s removal had revealed. Though his face was hard and dull his eyes were shining.

  When he had put the gray paper out of his way he had an egg-shaped mass of pale excelsior wadded tight. His fingers tore the wad apart and then he had the foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal and shiny where its polish was not dulled by wood-dust and fragments of excelsior.

  Spade laughed. He put a hand down on the bird, a hand whose wide-spread fingers had ownership in their curving. He put his other arm around Effie Perine and crushed her body to his.

  “We’ve got the damned thing, angel,” he said.

  “Ouch! You’re hurting me!”

  He took his arm away from her, picked the black bird up in both hands, and shook it to dislodge clinging excelsior. Then he stepped back, holding it up in front of him, blowing dust off it, regarding it triumphantly.

  Effie Perine made a horrified face and screamed, pointing at his feet.

  He looked down at his feet. His last backward step had brought his left heel into contact with the dead man’s hand, pinching a quarter inch of flesh at a side of the palm between heel and floor.

  Spade jerked his foot away from the hand.

  The telephone bell rang.

  He nodded at the girl. She turned to the desk, and put the receiver to her ear. She said:

  “Hello … Yes … Who? … Oh, yes!” Her eyes became large. “Yes … Yes … Hold the line.…” Her mouth suddenly stretched wide and fearful. She cried, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” into the telephone. She rattled the hook and cried, “Hello!” twice. Then she sobbed and jumped around to face Spade, who was close beside her now.

  “It was Miss O’Shaughnessy!” she said wildly. “She wants you. She’s in danger. She’s at the Alexandria. Her voice was—oh, it was awful, Sam!—and something happened to her before she could finish. Go help her, Sam!”

  Spade put the falcon on the desk and scowled gloomily.

  “I’ve got to take care of this fellow first,” he said, pointing his thumb at the thin corpse on the floor.

  She beat his chest with her fists, crying:

  “No, you’ve got to go to her. Don’t you see, Sam? He had the thing that was hers, and he came to you wi
th it. Don’t you see? He was helping her, and they killed him, and now she’s—Oh, you’ve got to go, Sam.”

  “All right.” Spade pushed her away and bent over his desk, putting the black bird back into its nest of excelsior, bending the paper around it, working swiftly, making a larger and clumsy package. “As soon as I’ve gone, phone the police. Tell them how it happened, but don’t drag any names in. You don’t know. I got the phone call, and I told you I had to go out, but I didn’t say where.” He cursed the rope for being tangled, yanked it into straightness, and began to bind up the package.

  “Forget this thing. Tell it as it happened, but forget he had a bundle.” He chewed his lower lip. “Unless they pin you down. If they seem to know about it, you’ll have to admit it. But that’s not likely. If they do, then I took the bundle away with me, unopened.” He finished tying the knot, and straightened up with the parcel under his left arm. “Get it straight, now. Everything happened the way it happened, but without this dingus unless they already know about it. Don’t deny it—just don’t mention it. And I got the phone call—not you. And you don’t know anything about anybody else having any connection with this fellow. You don’t know anything about him, and you can’t talk about my business until you see me. Got it?”

  “Yes, Sam. Who—do you know who he is?”

  He grinned wolfishly.

  “Uh-uh,” he said, “but I’d guess he was Captain Jacobi, late master of La Paloma.” He picked up his hat and put it on. He looked thoughtfully at the dead man and then around the room.

  “Hurry, Sam,” the girl begged.

  “Sure,” he promised absent-mindedly, “I’ll hurry. Might not hurt to get those few scraps of excelsior off the floor before the police come. And maybe you ought to try to get hold of Sid. No.” He rubbed his chin. “We’ll leave him out of it for a while. It’ll look better. I’d keep the door locked till they come.” He took his hand away from his chin and rubbed her cheek.

  “You’re a damned good man, sister,” he said, and went out.

  Chapter XVII

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  arrying the parcel lightly under his arm, walking briskly, with only the ceaseless shifting of his eyes denoting wariness, Spade went, partly by way of an alley and a narrow court, from his office-building to Kearney and Post streets, where he hailed a passing taxicab. The taxicab carried him to the Pickwick Stage terminal in Fifth Street.

  He checked his parcel at the Parcel Room there, put the check into a stamped envelope, wrote M. F. Holland and a San Francisco Post Office box number on the envelope, sealed it, and dropped it into a mail box. Then he entered another taxicab and was driven to the Alexandria Hotel.

  Spade went up to suite 12-C and knocked on the door.

  The door was opened, when he had knocked a second time, by a small fair-haired girl in a shimmering yellow dressing gown, a small girl whose face was white and dim, and who clung desperately to the inner knob with both hands and gasped:

  “You’re Mr. Spade?”

  Spade said, “Yes,” and caught her as she swayed.

  Her body arched back over his arm, and her head dropped straight back, so that her short fair hair hung down from her scalp and her slender throat was a firm curve from chin to chest.

  Spade slid his supporting arm higher up her back and bent to get his other arm under her knees, but she stirred, resisting, and between parted lips that barely moved blurred words came:

  “No! Ma’e me wal’!”

  Spade made her walk. He kicked the door shut and he walked her up and down the green-carpeted room, from wall to wall. One of his arms around her small body—that hand under her armpit—his other hand gripping her other arm, held her erect when she stumbled, checked her swaying, kept urging her forward, but made her tottering legs bear all of her weight they could bear.

  They walked across and across the floor, the girl faltering, with incoordinate steps; Spade surely, on the balls of his feet, with balance unaffected by her staggering. Her face was chalk-white and eyeless; his sullen, with eyes hardened to watch everywhere at once.

  He talked to her, monotonously:

  “That’s the stuff. Left, right, left, right. That’s the stuff. One, two, three, four, now we turn.” He shook her as they turned from the wall. “Now back again. One, two, three, four. Hold your head up. That’s the stuff. Good girl. Left, right, left, right. Now we turn again.” He shook her again. “Walk, walk, walk, walk. One, two, three, four. That’s the girl. Now we go around.” He shook her, more roughly, and increased their pace. “That’s the trick. Left, right, left, right. Speed it up. We’re in a hurry. One, two, three …”

  She shuddered, and swallowed audibly. Spade began to chafe her arm and side, and he bent his mouth nearer her ear.

  “That’s fine. You’re doing fine. One, two, three, four. Faster, faster, faster, faster. That’s it. Step, step, step, step. Pick them up and lay them down. That’s the stuff. What’d they do, dope you? The same stuff they gave me?”

  Her eyelids twitched up then for an instant over dulled golden-brown eyes, and she managed to say all of, “Yes,” except the final consonant.

  They walked the floor, the girl almost trotting now to keep up with Spade, Spade slapping and kneading her flesh through yellow silk with both hands, talking and talking while his eyes remained hard and aloof and watchful.

  “Left, right, left, right, left, right, turn. That’s the girl. One, two, three, four. Keep the chin up. That’s the stuff.…”

  Her lids lifted again, a bare fraction of an inch, and under them her eyes moved dully from side to side.

  “That’s fine,” he said, crisply, dropping his monotone. “Keep them open! Open them wide, wide!” He shook her.

  She moaned in protest, but her lids went further up, though her eyes still were without inner light.

  He raised his hand and slapped her cheek half a dozen times in quick succession.

  She moaned again and tried to break away from him. His arm held her, swept her along beside him from wall to wall.

  “Keep walking,” he ordered in a harsh voice, and then: “Who are you?”

  Her, “Rhea Gutman,” was thick, but intelligible.

  “The daughter?”

  “Yes.” Now she was no farther from the final consonant than sh.

  “Where’s Brigid?”

  She twisted convulsively around in his arms and caught at one of his hands with both of hers.

  He pulled his hand away quickly and looked at it. Across its back was a thin red scratch, an inch and a half or more in length.

  “What the hell?” he growled, and examined her hands. Her left hand was empty. In her right hand, when he opened it, lay a three-inch jade-headed steel bouquet pin. “What the hell?” he growled again, and held the pin up in front of her eyes.

  When she saw the pin she whimpered and opened her dressing gown. She pushed aside the cream-colored pajama coat under it, and showed him her body below her left breast—white flesh crisscrossed with thin red lines, dotted with tiny red dots, where the pin had scratched and punctured it.

  “To keep me awake … to walk … till you came … She said you’d come … were so long coming!” She swayed.

  Spade tightened his arm around her and said:

  “Walk!”

  She fought against the arm, squirming around to face him again.

  “No … tell you … sleep … you go to her.…”

  “Brigid?” he demanded.

  “Yes … took her … Burlingame … 26 Ancho … hurry … too late.”

  Her head fell over on her shoulder.

  Spade pushed her head up, roughly.

  “Who took her? Your father?”

  “Yes … Wilmer … Cairo …” She writhed, and her eyelids twitched but did not open. “… kill her …”

  Her head fell over again, and again he pushed it up.

  “Who shot Jacobi?”

  She did not seem to hear the question. She tried pitifully to hold her head up,
to open her eyes. She mumbled: “Go … she …”

  He shook her brutally.

  “Stay awake till the doctor comes.”

  Fear opened her eyes and pushed for a moment the cloudiness from her face.

  “No, no,” she cried thickly, “Father … kill me … swear you won’t … he’d know … I did … for her … promise you won’t … sleep … all right … morning.”

  He shook her again.

  “You’re sure you can sleep it off all right?”

  “Ye’.” Her head fell down.

  “Where’s your bed?”

  She tried to raise a hand, but the effort had become too much for her before the hand pointed at anything except the floor. With a sigh of a tired child she let her whole body relax and crumple.

  Spade caught her up in his arms, scooped her up as she sank, and, holding her easily against his chest, went to the nearest of the three doors.

  He turned the knob far enough to release the catch, pushed the door open with his foot, and went into a passageway that ran past an open bathroom door to a bedroom. He looked into the bathroom, saw it was empty, and carried the girl into the bedroom. Nobody was there, but the clothing that was visible, and things on the chiffonier, said it was a man’s room.

  Spade carried the girl back to the green-carpeted room and tried the opposite door. Through it he passed into another passageway, past another empty bathroom, and into a bedroom that was feminine in its accessories.

  He turned back the bedclothes and laid the girl on the bed, removed her slippers, raised her a little to slide the yellow dressing gown off, fixed a pillow under her head, and put the covers up over her.

  Then he opened the room’s two windows and stood with his back to them, staring at the sleeping girl. Her breathing was heavy but not troubled. He frowned and looked around, working his lips together. Twilight was dimming the room. He stood there in the weakening light for perhaps five minutes. Finally he shook his thick sloping shoulders impatiently and went out, leaving the outer door unlocked.