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

by Unknown

  The lieutenant was a compactly built man with a round head under short-cut grizzled hair and a square face behind a short-cut grizzled mustache. A five-dollar gold piece was pinned to his necktie, and there was a small, elaborate diamond-set secret-society emblem on his lapel.

  Spade brought two wineglasses in from the kitchen, filled them and his own with Bacardi, gave one to each of his guests, and sat down with his on the side of the bed. Spade’s face was placid and incurious. He raised his glass, said, “Success to crime,” and drank it down.

  Tom emptied his glass, set it on the floor beside him, and wiped his mouth with the back of a muddy finger. He stared at the foot of the bed as if he were trying to remember something of which it vaguely reminded him.

  The lieutenant looked at his glass for a dozen seconds, took a very small sip of the rum, and put the glass on the table at his elbow. He examined the room with hard, deliberate eyes, and then looked at Tom.

  Tom moved uncomfortably on the sofa and without looking up asked:

  “Did you break the news to Miles’s wife, Sam?”

  Spade said: “Uh-huh.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  Spade shook his head. “I don’t know anything about women.”

  Tom said softly: “The hell you don’t!”

  The lieutenant put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. His greenish eyes looked at Spade with a peculiarly rigid stare, as if their focus was a matter of mechanics, to be changed only by pulling a lever or pressing a button.

  “What kind of a gun do you carry?” he asked.

  “None. I don’t like them much. There are some in the office, of course.”

  “I’d like to see one of them,” the lieutenant said. “You don’t happen to have one here?”

  “No.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Look around.” Spade smiled and waved his empty glass a little. “Turn the dump upside-down if you want. I won’t squawk, if you’ve got a search warrant.”

  Tom protested: “Oh, hell, Sam!”

  Spade put his glass on the table and stood up facing the lieutenant.

  “What do you want, Dundy?” he asked in a voice hard and cold as his eyes.

  Lieutenant Dundy’s eyes had moved to maintain their focus on Spade’s. Only his eyes had moved.

  Tom shifted his bulk on the sofa again, blew a deep breath out through his nose, and growled plaintively:

  “We’re not wanting to make any trouble, Sam.”

  Spade, ignoring Tom, said to Dundy:

  “Well, what do you want? Talk turkey. Who in hell do you think you are, coming in here trying to rope me?”

  “All right,” Dundy said in his chest. “Now sit down and listen.”

  “I’ll sit or stand as I damned please,” said Spade, not moving.

  “For God’s sake be reasonable,” Tom begged. “What’s the use of us having a row? If you want to know why we didn’t talk turkey, it’s because when I asked you who this Thursby was you as good as told me it was none of my business. You can’t treat us that way, Sam. It ain’t right, and it won’t get you anywheres. We got our work to do.”

  Lieutenant Dundy jumped up, stood close to Spade, and thrust his square, pink face up at the taller man’s.

  “I’ve told you before your foot was going to slip one of these days.”

  Spade made a deprecative mouth, raising his eyebrows.

  “Everybody’s foot slips sometime,” he said with derisive mildness.

  “And maybe this is your time?”

  Spade smiled and shook his head.

  “No. I’ll do nicely, thank you.” He stopped smiling. His upper lip, on the left side, twitched over his eyetooth. His eyes became narrow and sultry. His voice came out deep as the lieutenant’s. “I don’t like this. What are you sucking around for? Tell me, or get out and let me go to bed.”

  “Who’s Thursby?” Dundy snapped.

  “I told Tom what I knew about him.”

  “You told Tom damned little.”

  “I knew damned little.”

  “Why were you tailing him?”

  “I wasn’t. Miles was, for the swell reason that we had a client who was paying good United States money to have him tailed.”

  “Who’s the client?”

  Placidity came back to Spade’s face and voice.

  “Now, now,” he said reprovingly. “You know I can’t tell you that until I’ve talked it over with the client.”

  “You’ll tell it to me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly. “This is murder, and don’t forget it.”

  “Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.”

  Tom came over and sat on the foot of the bed. His carelessly shaven mud-smeared face was tired and lined.

  “Be reasonable, Sam,” he pleaded. “Give us a chance. How can we turn up anything on Miles’s killing if you won’t give us what you’ve got?”

  “You needn’t get a headache over that,” Spade told him. “I’ll bury my dead.”

  Lieutenant Dundy sat down and put his hands on his knees again. His eyes were warm green discs.

  “I thought you would,” he said. He smiled with grim content. “That’s just exactly why we came to see you. Isn’t it, Tom?”

  Tom groaned, but said nothing articulate.

  Spade watched Dundy warily.

  “That’s just what I said to Tom,” the lieutenant went on. “I said, ‘Tom, I’ve got a hunch that Sam Spade’s a man to keep the family troubles in the family.’ That’s just what I said to him.”

  Spade put the wariness out of his eyes. He made them look bored. He turned his face to Tom and asked with great carelessness:

  “What’s itching your boy friend now?”

  Dundy jumped up and tapped Spade’s chest with the ends of two bent fingers.

  “Just this,” he said, taking pains to make each word very distinct, emphasizing them with repeated taps: “Thursby was shot down in front of his hotel just thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt Street.”

  Spade spoke, taking equal pains with his words:

  “Keep your—damned dirty paws off me.”

  Dundy withdrew the tapping fingers, but there was no change in his voice.

  “Tom says you were in too much of a hurry to even stop for a look at your partner.”

  Tom growled apologetically: “Well, damn it, Sam, you did run off like that.”

  “You didn’t go to Archer’s house to tell his wife,” the lieutenant’s accusing voice went on. “We called up and that girl in your office was there, and said you sent her.”

  Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its blankness.

  Lieutenant Dundy raised the two bent fingers toward the private detective’s chest, quickly lowered them, and said:

  “I give you ten minutes to get to a phone and do your talking to the girl. I give you ten to fifteen minutes to get to Thursby’s joint—Geary near Leavenworth—you could do it easy in that time. And that gives you ten or fifteen minutes of waiting before he showed up.”

  “I knew where he lived?” Spade asked. “And I knew he hadn’t gone straight home after killing Miles?”

  “You knew what you knew,” Dundy replied stubbornly. “What time did you get home?”

  “Twenty minutes to four. I walked around thinking things over.”

  The lieutenant wagged his round head up and down.

  “We knew you weren’t home at three-thirty,” he said. “We tried to get you on the phone. Where’d you do your walking?”

  “Out Bush Street a way and back.”

  “Did you see anybody that—?”

  “No. No witnesses,” Spade said and laughed, but pleasantly now. “Sit down, Dundy. You haven’t finished your drink. Get your glass, Tom.”

  Tom said: “No, thanks.”

  Dundy sat down, but paid no attention to
his glass of rum.

  Spade filled his own glass, drank, put the empty glass on the table, and resumed his seat on the side of the bed.

  “I know where I stand now,” he said, looking with friendly eyes from one police detective to the other. “I’m sorry I got up on my hind legs. But you birds made me nervous, coming in and trying to put the work on me. Having Miles knocked off bothered me, and then you birds cracking foxy. That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re up to.”

  Tom said: “Forget it.”

  The lieutenant said nothing.

  Spade asked: “Thursby dead?”

  While the lieutenant hesitated Tom said: “Yes.”

  Then the lieutenant said angrily: “And you might just as well know it—if you don’t—that he died before he could tell anybody anything.”

  Spade was rolling a cigarette. He asked, without looking up:

  “What do you mean by that? You think I did know it?”

  “I meant what I said,” Dundy replied bluntly.

  Spade looked up at him and smiled, holding the finished cigarette in one hand, his lighter in the other.

  “You’re not ready to pinch me yet, are you, Dundy?” he asked.

  Dundy shook his head no.

  “Then,” said Spade, “there’s no particular reason why I should give a damn what you think, is there?”

  Dundy looked at Spade with hard green eyes and said nothing.

  Tom said: “Aw, be reasonable, Sam.”

  Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set fire to it, and laughed smoke out.

  “I’ll be reasonable, Tom,” he promised. “How’d I kill this Thursby? I’ve forgotten.”

  Tom grunted disgust. Lieutenant Dundy said:

  “He was shot four times in the back, with a .44 or .45, from across the street, when he started to go into his hotel. That’s the way it figures, though nobody saw it.”

  “And he was wearing a Lüger in a shoulder holster,” Tom added. “And it hadn’t been fired.”

  “What do the hotel people know about him?” Spade asked.

  “Nothing except that he’d been there a week.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  “What did you find on him? Or in his room?”

  Dundy drew his lips in and asked:

  “What’d you think we’d find?”

  Spade made a careless motion with his limp cigarette.

  “Something to tell you who he was, what his store was. Did you?”

  “We thought you could tell us that.”

  Spade looked at the lieutenant with yellow-gray eyes that held an almost exaggerated amount of candor.

  “I’ve never seen Thursby,” he said, “dead or alive.”

  Lieutenant Dundy stood up looking dissatisfied. Tom rose yawning and stretching.

  “We’ve asked what we came to ask,” Dundy said, frowning over eyes hard as green pebbles. He held his mustached upper lip tight against his teeth, letting his lower lip push the words out. “We’ve told you more than you’ve told us. That’s fair enough. You know me, Spade. If you did or you didn’t you’ll get a square deal out of me, and most of the breaks. I don’t know that I’d blame you a hell of a lot for dropping him, but that won’t keep me from nailing you.”

  “Fair enough,” Spade agreed evenly. “But I’d feel better about it if you’d drink your drink.”

  Lieutenant Dundy turned to the table, picked up his glass, and slowly drained it. Then he said, “Good night,” and held out his hand. They shook hands with marked formality. Tom and Spade shook hands with marked formality. Spade let them out. Then he undressed, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

  CHAPTER III

  THREE WOMEN

  hen Spade reached his office at ten the following morning Effie Perine was at her desk opening the morning mail. Her boy’s face was pale under its sunburn. She put down the handful of envelopes and the paperknife she held, and said: “She’s in there.” Her voice was low and warning.

  “I asked you to keep her away,” Spade complained irritably, though he too kept his voice low.

  Effie Perine’s brown eyes opened wide and her voice was sharp as his:

  “Yes, but you didn’t tell me how.” Her eyelids went together a little, and her shoulders drooped. “Don’t be cranky, Sam,” she said wearily. “I had her all night.”

  Spade came over and stood beside the girl, putting a hand on her hair, smoothing it away from the part.

  “Sorry, angel, I haven’t—”

  He broke off as the inner door opened.

  “Hello, Iva,” he said to the woman who had opened it.

  “Oh, Sam!” she said.

  She was a blonde woman of a few years more than thirty. Her facial prettiness was perhaps five years past its best moment. Her body, for all its sturdiness, was finely modeled and exquisite. She wore black clothes from hat to shoes. They had as mourning an impromptu air.

  Having spoken, she stepped back from the door and stood waiting for Spade. He took his hand from Effie Perine’s head and entered the inner office, shutting the door.

  Iva came quickly to him, raising her face for his kiss. Her arms were around him before his held her. When they had kissed he made a little motion as if to release her, but she pressed her face to his chest and began to sob.

  He stroked her round back, saying: “Poor darling.”

  His voice was tender. His eyes, squinting at the desk that had been his partner’s, across the room from his own, were angry. He drew his lips back over his teeth in an impatient grimace and turned his chin aside to avoid contact with the crown of her hat.

  “Did you send for Miles’s brother?” he asked.

  “Yes. He came over this morning.” The words were blurred by her sobbing and his coat against her mouth.

  He grimaced again and bent his head for a surreptitious look at the watch on his wrist. His left arm was around her, the hand on her left shoulder. His cuff was pulled back far enough to leave the watch exposed. It showed ten-thirteen.

  The woman stirred in his arms and raised her face again. Her blue eyes were wet, round, and white-ringed. Her mouth was moist.

  “Oh, Sam,” she moaned, “did you kill him?”

  Spade stared at her with bulging eyes. His bony jaw sagged. He took his arms from around her and stepped back out of her arms. He scowled at her and cleared his throat.

  She held her arms up as he had left them. Anguish clouded her eyes, partly closed them under eyebrows pulled up at the inner ends. Her soft damp red lips trembled.

  Spade laughed a harsh syllable. “Ha,” and went to the buff-curtained window. He stood there with his back to her, looking through the curtain into the court, until she started toward him. Then he turned quickly and went to his desk. He sat down, put his elbows on the desk, his chin between his fists, and looked at her. His yellowish eyes glittered between narrowed lids.

  “Who,” he asked coldly, “put that bright idea into your head?”

  “I thought—” She put a hand to her mouth and fresh tears filled her eyes. She came to stand beside the desk, moving with easy sure-footed grace in black slippers whose smallness and heel-height were extreme. “Be kind to me, Sam,” she said humbly.

  He laughed at her, his eyes still glittering. “You killed my husband, Sam, be kind to me.” He clapped his palms together and said: “Great God!”

  She began to cry audibly, holding a white handkerchief to her face.

  He got up and stood close behind her. He put his arms around her. He kissed her neck between ear and coat collar. He said: “Now, Iva, don’t.” His face was expressionless.

  When she had stopped crying he put his mouth to her ear and murmured: “You shouldn’t have come here today, precious. It wasn’t wise. You can’t stay. You ought to be home.”

  She turned around in his arms to face him, asking:

  “You’ll come tonight?”

  He shook his head gently.

  “Not tonight.” />
  “Soon?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  He kissed her mouth, led her to the door, opened it, said “Good-bye, Iva,” bowed, shut the door, and returned to his desk.

  He took tobacco and cigarette papers from his vest pockets, but did not roll a cigarette. He sat holding the papers in one hand, the tobacco in the other, and looked with brooding eyes at his dead partner’s desk.

  Effie Perine opened the door and came in. Her brown eyes were uneasy. Her voice was careless. She asked: “Well?”

  Spade said nothing. His brooding gaze did not move from his partner’s desk.

  The girl frowned and came around to his side.

  “Well,” she asked in a louder voice, “how did you and the widow make out?”

  “She thinks I shot Miles,” he said, only his lips moving.

  “So you could marry her?”

  Spade made no reply to that.

  The girl took his hat from his head and put it on the desk, then leaned over and took the tobacco sack and the papers from his inert fingers.

  “The police think I shot Thursby,” he said.

  “Who is he?” she asked, separating a paper from the packet, sifting tobacco into it.

  “Who do you think I shot?” he asked.

  When she ignored the question he said: “Thursby’s the guy Miles was supposed to be shadowing for the Wonderly girl.”

  Her thin fingers finished shaping the cigarette. She licked it, smoothed it, twisted the ends, and placed it between Spade’s lips.

  He said, “Thanks, honey,” put an arm around her slim waist and rested his cheek wearily against her hip, shutting his eyes.

  “Are you going to marry Iva?” she asked, looking down at his pale brown hair.

  “Don’t be silly,” he muttered. The unlighted cigarette bobbed up and down with the movement of his lips.

  “She doesn’t think it’s silly. Why should she, the way you’ve played around with her?”

  He sighed and said: “I wish to God I’d never seen her.”

  “Maybe you do now.” A trace of spitefulness came into the girl’s voice. “But there was a time.”

  “I never know what to do or say to women, except that way,” he grumbled. “And then I didn’t like Miles.”