“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 Sa
n 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?”
THEY CAN ONLY HANG YOU ONCE
Samuel Spade said: “My name is Ronald Ames. I want to see Mr. Binnett—Mr. Timothy Binnett.”
“Mr. Binnett is resting now, sir,” the butler replied hesitantly.
“Will you find out when I can see him? It’s important.” Spade cleared his throat. “I’m-uh-just back from Australia, and it’s about some of his properties there.”
The butler turned on his heel while saying “I’ll see, sir,” and was going up the front stairs before he had finished speaking.
Spade made and lit a cigarette.
The butler came downstairs again. “I’m sorry; he can’t be disturbed now, but Mr. Wallace Binnett—Mr. Timothy’s nephew—will see you.”
Spade said, “Thanks,” and followed the butler upstairs.
Wallace Binnett was a slender, handsome, dark man of about Spade’s age—thirty-eight—who rose smiling from a brocaded chair, said, “How do you do, Mr. Ames?” waved his hand at another chair, and sat down again. “You’re from Australia?”
“Got in this morning.”
“You’re a business associate of Uncle Tim’s?”
Spade smiled and shook his head. “Hardly that, but I’ve some information I think he ought to have—quick.”
Wallace Binnett looked thoughtfully at the floor, then up at Spade. “I’ll do my best to persuade him to see you, Mr. Ames, but, frankly, I don’t know.”
Spade seemed mildly surprised. “Why?”
Binnett shrugged. “He’s peculiar sometimes. Understand, his mind seems perfectly all right, but he has the testiness and eccentricity of an old man in ill health and—well—at times he can be difficult.”
Spade asked slowly: “He’s already refused to see me?”
“Yes.”
Spade rose from his chair. His blond satan’s face was expressionless.
Binnett raised a hand quickly. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to make him change his mind. Perhaps if?” His dark eyes suddenly became wary. “You’re not simply trying to sell him something, are you?”
“No.”
The wary gleam went out of Binnett’s eyes. “Well, then, I think I can—”
A young woman came in crying angrily, “Wally, that old fool has—” She broke off with a hand to her breast when she saw Spade.
Spade and Binnett had risen together. Binnett said suavely: “Joyce, this is Mr. Ames. My sister-in-law, Joyce Court.”
Spade bowed.
Joyce Court uttered a short, embarrassed laugh and said: “Please excuse my whirlwind entrance.” She was a tall, blue-eyed, dark woman of twenty-four or -five with good shoulders and a strong, slim body. Her features made up in warmth what they lacked in regularity. She wore wide-legged blue satin pajamas.
Binnett smiled good-naturedly at her and asked: “Now what’s all the excitement?”
Anger darkened her eyes again and she started to speak. ; Then she looked at Spade and said: “But we shouldn’t bore Mr. Ames with our stupid domestic affairs. If?” She hesitated.
Spade bowed again. “Sure,” he said, “certainly.”
“I won’t be a minute,” Binnett promised, and left the room with her.
Spade went to the open doorway through which they had vanished and, standing just inside, listened. Their footsteps became inaudible. Nothing else could be heard. Spade was standing there—his yellow-gray eyes dreamy—when he heard the scream. It was a woman’s scream, high and shrill with terror. Spade was through the doorway when he heard the shot. It was a pistol shot, magnified, reverberated by walls and ceilings.
Twenty feet from the doorway Spade found a staircase, and went up it three steps at a time. He turned to the left. Halfway down the hallway a woman lay on her back on the floor.
Wallace Binnett knelt beside her, fondling one of her hands desperately, crying in a low, beseeching voice: “Darling, Molly, darling!”
Joyce Court stood behind him and wrung her hands while tears streaked her cheeks.
The woman on the floor resembled Joyce Court but was older, and her face had a hardness the younger one’s had not.
“She’s dead, she’s
been killed,” Wallace Binnett said incredulously, raising his white face towards Spade. When Binnett moved his head Spade could see the round hole in the woman’s tan dress over her heart and the dark stain which was rapidly spreading below it.
Spade touched Joyce Court’s arm. “Police, emergency hospital—phone,” he said. As she ran towards the stairs he addressed Wallace Binnett: “Who did—”
A voice groaned feebly behind Spade.
He turned swiftly. Through an open doorway he could see an old man in white pajamas lying sprawled across a rumpled bed. His head, a shoulder, an arm dangled over the edge of the bed. His other hand held his throat tightly. He groaned again and his eyelids twitched, but did not open.
Spade lifted the old man’s head and shoulders and put them up on the pillows. The old man groaned again and took his hand from his throat. His throat was red with half a dozen bruises. He was a gaunt man with a seamed face that probably exaggerated his age.
A glass of water was on a table beside the bed. Spade put water on the old man’s face and, when the old man’s eyes twitched again, leaned down and growled softly: “Who did it?”
The twitching eyelids went up far enough to show a narrow strip of blood-shot gray eyes. The old man spoke painfully, putting a hand to his throat again: “A man—he—” He coughed.
Spade made an impatient grimace. His lips almost touched the old man’s ear. “Where’d he go?” His voice was urgent.
A gaunt hand moved weakly to indicate the rear of the house and fell back on the bed.
The butler and two frightened female servants had joined Wallace Binnett beside the dead woman in the hallway.
“Who did it?” Spade asked them.
They stared at him blankly.
“Somebody look after the old man,” he growled, and went down the hallway.
At the end of the hallway was a rear staircase. He descended two flights and went through a pantry into the kitchen. He saw nobody. The kitchen door was shut but, when he tried it, not locked. He crossed a narrow back yard to a gate that was shut, not locked. He opened the gate. There was nobody in the narrow alley behind it.
Crime Stories Page 86