The young man mumbled unintelligibly.
“You tried, all right,” Dundy agreed. He addressed Spade: “Could it've been like this, Sam? Bliss found out about the wife, knew they had the lunch date, came home early to meet them when they came in, threatened to tell the wife, and was choked to stop him.” He looked sidewise at the girl. “Now, if you want to fake another faint, hop to it.”
The young man screamed and flung himself at Dundy, clawing with both hands. Dundy grunted —“Uh!” —and struck him in the face with a heavy fist. The young man went backwards across the room until he collided with a chair. He and the chair went down on the floor together. Dundy said to the gray-faced man, “Take him down to the Hall—material witness.”
The gray-faced man said, “Oke,” picked up Smekalov's hat, and went over to help pick him up.
Theodore Bliss, his wife, and the housekeeper had come to the door Miriam Bliss had left open. Miriam Bliss was crying, stamping her foot, threatening Dundy: “I'll report you, you coward. You had no right to . . .” and so on. Nobody paid much attention to her; they watched the gray-faced man help Smekalov to his feet, take him away. Smekalov's nose and mouth were red smears.
Then Dundy said, “Hush,” negligently to Miriam Bliss and took a slip of paper from his pocket. “I got a list of the calls from here today. Sing out when you recognize them.”
He read a telephone number.
Mrs. Hooper said, “That is the butcher. I phoned him before I left this morning.” She said the next number Dundy read was the grocer's.
He read another.
“That's the St. Mark,” Miriam Bliss said. “I called up Boris.” She identified two more numbers as those of friends she had called.
The sixth number, Bliss said, was his brother's office. “Probably my call to Elise to ask her to meet me.”
Spade said “Mine,” to the seventh number, and Dundy said, “That last one's police emergency.” He put the slip back in his pocket.
Spade said cheerfully, “And that gets us a lot of places.”
The doorbell rang.
Dundy went to the door. He and another man could be heard talking in voices too low for their words to be recognized in the living room.
The telephone rang. Spade answered it. “Hello. . . . No, this is Spade. Wait a min—All right.” He listened. “Right, I'll tell him. … I don't know. I'll have him call you. . . .
Right.”
When he turned from the telephone Dundy was standing, hands behind him, in the vestibule doorway. Spade said, “O'Gar says your Russian went completely nuts on the way to the Hall. They had to shove him into a strait-jacket.”
“He ought to been there long ago,” Dundy growled. “Come here.”
Spade followed Dundy into the vestibule. A uniformed policeman stood in the outer doorway.
Dundy brought his hands from behind him. In one was a necktie with narrow diagonal stripes in varying shades of green, in the other was a platinum scarfpin in the shape of a crescent set with small diamonds.
Spade bent over to look at three small, irregular spots on the tie. “Blood?”
“Or dirt,” Dundy said. “He found them crumpled up in a newspaper in the rubbish can on the corner.”
“Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said proudly; “there I found them, all wadded up in—” He stopped because nobody was paying any attention to him.
“Blood's better,” Spade was saying. “It gives a reason for taking the tie away. Let's go in and talk to people.”
Dundy stuffed the tie in one pocket, thrust his hand holding the pin into another. “Right —and we'll call it blood.”
They went into the living-room. Dundy looked from Bliss to Bliss's wife, to Bliss's niece, to the housekeeper, as if he did not like any of them. He took his fist from his pocket, thrust it straight out in front of him, and opened it to show the crescent pin lying in his hand. “What's that?” he demanded.
Miriam Bliss was the first to speak. “Why, it's Father's pin,” she said.
“So it is?” he said disagreeably. “And did he have it on today?”
“He always wore it.” She turned to the others for confirmation.
Mrs. Bliss said, “Yes,” while the others nodded.
“Where did you find it?” the girl asked.
Dundy was surveying them one by one again, as if he liked them less than ever. His face was red. “He always wore it,” he said angrily, “but there wasn't one of you could say, 'Father always wore a pin. Where is it?' No, we got to wait till it turns up before we can get a word out of you about it.”
Bliss said, “Be fair. How were we to know— ?”
“Never mind what you were to know,” Dundy said. “It's coming around to the point where I'm going to do some talking about what I know.” He took the green necktie from his pocket. “This is his tie?”
Mrs. Hooper said, “Yes, sir.”
Dundy said, “Well, it's got blood on it, and it's not his blood, because he didn't have a scratch on him that we could see.” He looked narrow-eyed from one to another of them. “Now, suppose you were trying to choke a man that wore a scarfpin and he was wrestling with you, and—”
He broke off to look at Spade.
Spade had crossed to where Mrs. Hooper was standing. Her big hands were clasped in front of her. He took her right hand, turned it over, took the wadded handkerchief from her palm, and there was a two-inch-long fresh scratch in the flesh.
She had passively allowed him to examine her hand. Her mien lost none of its tranquillity now. She said nothing.
“Well?” he asked.
“I scratched it on Miss Miriam's pin fixing her on the bed when she fainted,” the housekeeper said calmly.
Dundy's laugh was brief, bitter. “It'll hang you just the same,” he said.
There was no change in the woman's face. “The Lord's will be done,” she replied.:
Spade made a peculiar noise in his throat as he dropped her hand. “Well, let's see how we stand.” He grinned at Dundy. “You don't like that star-T, do you?”
Dundy said, “Not by a long shot.”
“Neither do I,” Spade said. “The Talbot threat was probably on the level, but that debt seems to have been squared. Now— Wait a minute.” He went to the telephone and called his office. “The tie thing looked pretty funny, too, for a while,” he said while he waited, “but I guess the blood takes care of that.”
He spoke into the telephone: “Hello, Effie. Listen: Within half an hour or so of the time Bliss called me, did you get any call that maybe wasn't on the level? Anything that could have been a stall… Yes, before… Think now.
He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Dundy, “There's a lot of deviltry going on in this world.”
He spoke into the telephone again: “Yes? . . . Yes . . . Kruger? . . . Yes. Man or woman? . . . Thanks. . . . No, I'll be through in half an hour. Wait for me and I'll buy your dinner. 'By.”
He turned away from the telephone. “About half an hour before Bliss phoned, a man called my office and asked for Mr. Kruger.”
Dundy frowned. “So what?”
“Kruger wasn't there.”
Dundy's frown deepened. “Who's Kruger?”
“I don't know,” Spade said blandly. “I never heard of him.” He took tobacco and cigarette papers from his pockets. “All right, Bliss, where's your scratch?”
Theodore Bliss said, “What?” while the others stared blankly at Spade.
“Your scratch,” Spade repeated in a consciously patient tone. His attention was on the cigarette he was making. “The place where your brother's pin gouged you when you were choking him.”
“Are you crazy?” Bliss demanded. “I was—”
“Uh-huh, you were being married when he was killed. You were not.” Spade moistened the edge of his cigarette paper and smoothed it with his forefingers.
Mrs. Bliss spoke now, stammering a little: “But he—but Max Bliss called—“
“Who says Max Bliss
called me?” Spade asked. “I don't know that. I wouldn't know his voice. All I know is a man called me and said he was Max Bliss. Anybody could say that.”
“But the telephone records here show the call came from here,” she protested.
He shook his head and smiled. “They show I had a call from here, and I did, but not that one. I told you somebody called up half an hour or so before the supposed Max Bliss call and asked for Mr. Kruger.” He nodded at Theodore Bliss. “He was smart enough to get a call from this apartment to my office on the record before he left to meet you.
She stared from Spade to her husband with dumfounded blue eyes.
Her husband said lightly, “It's nonsense, my dear. You know—“
Spade did not let him finish that sentence. “You know he went out to smoke a cigarette in the corridor while waiting for the judge, and he knew there were telephone booths in the corridor. A minute would be all he needed.” He lit his cigarette and returned his lighter to his pocket.
Bliss said, “Nonsense!” more sharply. “Why should I want to kill Max?” He smiled reassuringly into his wife's horrified eyes. “Don't let this disturb you, dear. Police methods are sometimes—”
“All right,” Spade said, “let's look you over for scratches.”
Bliss wheeled to face him more directly. “Damned if you will!” He put a hand behind him.
Spade, wooden-faced and dreamy-eyed, came forward.
Spade and Effie Ferine sat at a small table in Julius's Castle on Telegraph Hill. Through the window beside them ferryboats could be seen carrying lights to and from the cities' lights on the other side of the bay.
”. . . hadn't gone there to kill him, chances are,” Spade was saying; “just to shake him down for some more money; but when the fight started, once he got his hands on his throat, I guess, his grudge was too hot in him for him to let go till Max was dead. Understand, I'm just putting together what the evidence says, and what we got out of his wife, and the not much that we got out of him.”
Effie nodded. “She's a nice, loyal wife.”
Spade drank coffee, shrugged. “What for? She knows now that he made his play for her only because she was Max's secretary. She knows that when he took out the marriage license a couple of weeks ago it was only to string her along so she'd get him the photostatic copies of the records that tied Max up with the Graystone Loan swindle. She knows—Well, she knows she wasn't just helping an injured innocent to clear his good name.”
He took another sip of coffee. “So he calls on his brother this afternoon to hold San Quentin over his head for a price again, and there's a fight, and he kills him, and gets his wrist scratched by the pin while he's choking him. Blood on the tie, a scratch on his wrist—that won't do. He takes the tie off the corpse and hunts up another, because the absence of a tie will set the police to thinking. He gets a bad break there: Max's new ties are on the front of the rack, and he grabs the first one he comes to. All right. Now he's got to put it around the dead man's neck—or wait—he gets a better idea. Pull off some more clothes and puzzle the police. The tie'll be just as inconspicuous off as on, if the shirt's off too. Undressing him, he gets another idea. He'll give the police something else to worry about, so he draws a mystic sign he has seen somewhere on the dead man's chest.”
Spade emptied his cup, set it down, and went on: “By now he's getting to be a regular master-mind at bewildering the police. A threatening letter signed with the thing on Max's chest. The afternoon mail is on the desk. One envelope's as good as another so long as it's typewritten and has no return address, but the one from France adds a touch of the foreign, so out comes the original letter and in goes the threat. He's overdoing it now; see? He's giving us so much that's wrong that we can't help suspecting things that seem all right—the phone call, for instance.
“Well, he's ready for the phone calls now—his alibi. He picks my name out of the private detectives in the phone book and does the Mr. Kruger trick; but that's after he calls the blonde Elise and tells her that not only have the obstacles to their marriage been removed, but he's had an offer to go in business in New York and has to leave right away, and will she meet him in fifteen minutes and get married? There's more than just an alibi to that. He wants to make sure she is dead sure he didn't kill Max, because she knows he doesn't like Max, and he doesn't want her to think he was just stringing her along to get the dope on Max, because she might be able to put two and two together and get something like the right answer.
“With that taken care of, he's ready to leave. He goes out quite openly, with only one thing to worry about now—the tie and pin in his pocket. He takes the pin along because he's not sure the police mightn't find traces of blood around the setting of the stones, no matter how carefully he wipes it. On his way out he picks up a newspaper—buys one from the newsboy he meets at the street door—wads tie and pin up in a piece of it, and drops it in the rubbish can at the corner. That seems all right. No reason for the police to look for the tie. No reason for the street cleaner who empties the can to investigate a crumpled piece of newspaper, and if something does go wrong—what the deuce!—the murderer dropped it there, but he,
Theodore, can't be the murderer, because he's going to have an alibi.
“Then he jumps in his car and drives to the Municipal Building. He knows there are plenty of phones there and he can always say he's got to wash his hands, but it turns out he doesn't have to. While they're waiting for the judge to get through with a case he goes out to smoke a cigarette, and there you are—'Mr. Spade, this is Max Bliss and I've been threatened.'”
Effie Ferine nodded, then asked, “Why do you suppose he picked on a private detective instead of the police?”
“Playing safe. If the body had been found, meanwhile, the police might've heard of it and trace the call. A private detective wouldn't be likely to hear about it till he read it in the papers.”
She laughed, then said, “And that was your luck.”
“Luck? I don't know.” He looked gloomily at the back of his left hand. “I hurt a knuckle stopping him and the job only lasted an afternoon. Chances are whoever's handling the estate'll raise hob if I send them a bill for any decent amount of money.” He raised a hand to attract the waiter's attention. “Oh, well, better luck next time. Want to catch a movie or have you got something else to do?”
THE ASSISTANT MURDERER
GOLD ON THE DOOR, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.
The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk's scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor's feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold. An ugly office—the proprietor was uglier. His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat. These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features. One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked.
Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color. Veins had been broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes —small, deep-set and pale blue of iris—were bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.
A man of forty-something, ugly, sitting tilted back in his chair, feet on desk.
The gilt-labeled door opened and another man came into the office. Perhaps ten years younger than the man at the desk, he was, roughly speaking, everything that one was not. Fairly tall, slender, fair-skinned, brown-eyed, he would have been as little likely to catch your eye in a gambling house as in an art gallery. His clothes—suit and hat were gray—were fresh and properly pressed, and even fashionable in that inconspicuous manner which is one sort of taste. His face was likewise unobtrusive, which was surprising when you considered how narrowly it missed handsomeness through the least meagerness of mouth—a mark of the too cautious man.
Two steps into the office he hesitated, brown eyes glancing from shabby furnishings to ill-visaged proprietor. So much ugliness seemed to disconcert the man in gray. An apologetic smile began on his lips, as if he were about to murmur, “I beg your pardon, I'm in the wrong office.”
But when he finally spoke it was otherwise. He took another step forward, asking uncertainly:
“You are Mr. Rush?”
“Yeah.” The detective's voice was hoarse with a choking harshness that seemed to corroborate the heavy-cold testimony of his eyes. He put his feet down on the floor and jerked a fat, red hand at a chair. “Sit down, sir.”
The man in gray sat down, tentatively upright on the chair's front edge.
The Adventures Of Sam Spade Page 7
