by Unknown
“You picked a nice sort of playmate.”
“Only that sort could have helped me,” she said simply, “if he had been loyal.”
“Yes, if.” Spade pinched his lower lip between finger and thumb and looked gloomily at her. The vertical creases over his nose deepened, drawing his brows together. “How bad a hole are you actually in?”
“As bad,” she said, “as could be.”
“Physical danger?”
“I’m not heroic. I don’t think there’s anything worse than death.”
“Then it’s that?”
“It’s that as surely as we’re sitting here”—she shivered—“unless you help me.”
He took his fingers away from his mouth and ran them through his hair.
“I’m not Christ,” he said irritably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin air.” He looked at his watch. “The day’s going and you’ve given me nothing to work with. Who killed Thursby?”
She put a crumpled handkerchief to her mouth and said, “I don’t know,” through it.
“Your enemies or his?”
“I don’t know. His, I hope, but I’m afraid—I don’t know.”
“How was he supposed to be helping you? Why did you bring him here from Hongkong?”
She looked at him with frightened eyes and shook her head in silence. Her face was haggard and pitifully stubborn.
Spade stood up, thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, and scowled down at her.
“This is hopeless,” he said savagely. “I can’t do anything for you. I don’t know what you want done. I don’t even know if you know what you want.”
She hung her head and wept.
He made a growling animal noise in his throat and went to the table for his hat.
“You won’t,” she begged in a small choked voice, not looking up, “go to the police?”
“Go to them!” he exclaimed, his voice loud with rage. “They’ve been running me ragged since four o’clock this morning. I’ve made myself God knows how much trouble standing them off. For what? For some crazy notion that I could help you. I can’t. I won’t try.” He put his hat on his head and pulled it down tight. “Go to them? All I’ve got to do is stand still and they’ll be swarming all over me. Well, now I’ll tell them what I know, and you’ll have to take your chances.”
She rose from the settee and held herself straight in front of him though her knees were trembling, and she held her white panic-stricken face up though she couldn’t hold the twitching muscles of mouth and chin still. She said:
“You’ve been patient. You’ve tried to help me. It is hopeless and useless, I suppose.” She stretched out her right hand. “I thank you for what you’ve tried to do. I—I’ll have to take my chances.”
Spade made the growling animal noise in his throat again and sat down on the settee.
“How much money have you got?” he asked.
The question startled her. Then she bit her lip and answered reluctantly:
“I’ve about five hundred dollars left.”
“Give it to me.”
She hesitated, looking timidly at him. He made angry gestures with eyebrows, mouth, hands and shoulders. She went into her bedroom, returning almost immediately with a thin sheaf of paper money in her hand.
He took the money from her, counted it, and said:
“There’s only four hundred here.”
“I had to keep some to live on,” she explained meekly, putting a hand to her breast.
“Can’t you get any more?”
“No.”
“You must have something you can raise money on,” he insisted.
“I’ve some rings, a little jewelry.”
“You’ll have to hock them,” he said, and held out his hand. “The Remedial’s the best place, Mission and Fifth.”
She bit her lip, looking pleadingly at him. His yellow-gray eyes were hard and implacable. Slowly she put her hand inside the neck of her green dress, brought out a slender roll of bills, and put them in his waiting hand.
He smoothed the bills out and counted them, four twenties, four tens, and a five. He returned two of the tens and the five to her. The others he put in his pocket. Then he stood up and said:
“I’m going out and see what I can do for you. I’ll be back as soon as I can, with the best news I can manage. I’ll ring four times—long, short, long, short—so you’ll know it’s me. You needn’t go to the door with me. I can let myself out.”
He left her standing in the middle of the room looking after him with dazed blue eyes.
Spade went into a reception room whose door bore the legend Wise, Merican & Wise. The red-haired girl at the switchboard said: “Oh, hello, Mr. Spade!”
“Hello, darling,” he replied. “Is Sid in?”
He stood beside her with a hand on her plump shoulder while she manipulated a plug and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Mr. Spade to see you, Mr. Wise.” She looked up at Spade. “Go right in.”
He squeezed her shoulder by way of acknowledgment, crossed the reception room to a dully lighted inner corridor, and passed down the corridor to a frosted door at its far end. He opened the door and went into an office where a small olive-skinned man with a tired oval face under thin dark hair dotted with dandruff sat behind an immense desk on which bales of paper were heaped.
The small man waved a cold cigar stub at Spade and said:
“Push a chair around. So Miles got his last night?” Neither his tired face nor his rather shrill voice held any emotion.
“Uh-huh. That’s what I came in about.” Spade frowned and cleared his throat. “I think I’m going to have to tell a coroner to go to hell, Sid. Can I hide behind the sanctity of my client’s identity and secrets and whatnot, like a priest or a lawyer?”
Sid Wise lifted his shoulders and lowered the ends of his mouth.
“Why not?” he said. “An inquest is not a court trial. You can try, anyway. You’ve gotten away with more than that before now.”
“I know, but Dundy’s getting snotty, and it’s a little bit thick this time. Get your hat, Sid, and we’ll go see the right people. I want to be safe.”
Sid Wise looked at the mass of papers on his desk and groaned, but he got up from his chair and went to the closet by the window.
“You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” he said as he took his hat from its hook.
Spade returned to his office at ten minutes past five that evening. Effie Perine was sitting at his desk reading Time. Spade sat on the desk and asked:
“Anything stirring?”
“Not here. You look like you’d swallowed the canary.”
Spade grinned contentedly.
“I think we’ve got a future. I always had an idea that if Miles would go off and die somewhere we’d stand a better chance of thriving. Will you take care of sending flowers for me?”
“I did.”
“You’re an invaluable angel. How’s your woman’s intuition today?”
“Why?”
“What do you think of Wonderly?”
“I’m for her,” the girl said without hesitation.
“She’s got too many names—Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”
“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phone book. That girl is all right, and you know it.”
“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. Then he chuckled. “Anyway, she’s given up seven hundred bucks in two days, and that’s all right.”
Effie Perine sat up straight and said:
“Sam, if that girl’s in trouble, and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”
Spade smiled unnaturally. Then he frowned. The frown also was unnatural. He opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of someone coming in at the corridor door stopped him.
Effie Perine rose and went into the outer office. Spade took off his hat and sat in his chair. The girl return
ed with a card: Mr. Joel Cairo.
“This guy is queer,” she said.
“In with him, then, darling,” said Spade.
Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fit his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came toward Spade with short mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.
Spade inclined his head at his visitor and then at a chair, saying: “Sit down, Mr. Cairo.”
Cairo bowed elaborately over his hat, said, “I thank you,” in a high-pitched thin voice, and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his ankles, placing his hat on his knees, and began to draw off his yellow gloves.
Spade rocked back in his chair and asked: “Now what can I do for you, Mr. Cairo?” The amiable negligence of his tone, his motion in the chair, were precisely as they had been when he had addressed the same question to Brigid O’Shaughnessy on the previous day.
Cairo turned his hat over, dropped his gloves into it, and placed it bottom up on the corner of the desk nearest him. Diamonds twinkled on the second and fourth fingers of his left hand, a ruby that matched the one in his tie even to the surrounding diamonds on the third finger of his right hand. His hands were soft and well cared for. Though they were not large, their flaccid bluntness made them seem clumsy. He rubbed his palms together, and said over the whispering sound they made:
“May a stranger offer his condolences for your partner’s unfortunate death?”
“Thanks.”
Cairo bowed.
“May I ask, Mr. Spade, if there was, as the newspapers inferred, a certain—ah—relationship between that unfortunate happening and the death a little later of the man Thursby?”
Spade said nothing in a blank-faced definite way.
Cairo rose and bowed. “I beg your pardon.” He sat down and placed his hands side by side, palms down, on the corner of the desk. “More than idle curiosity made me ask that, Mr. Spade. I am trying to recover an—ah—ornament that has been mislaid. I thought—I hoped—you could assist me.”
Spade nodded with eyebrows lifted to indicate attentiveness.
“The ornament is a statuette,” Cairo went on, selecting and mouthing his words carefully, “the black figure of a bird.”
Spade nodded again, with courteous interest.
“I am prepared to pay, on behalf of the figure’s rightful owner, the sum of five thousand dollars for its recovery.” Cairo raised one hand from the desk and touched a spot in the air with the broad-nailed tip of an ugly white forefinger. “I am prepared to promise that—what is the phrase?—no questions will be asked.” He put his hand on the desk beside the other and smiled blandly over them at the private detective.
“Five thousand is a lot of money,” Spade commented, looking meditatively at Cairo. “It—”
Fingers drummed lightly on the door.
When Spade had called, “Come in,” the door opened far enough to admit Effie Perine’s head and shoulders. She had put on a small dark felt hat and a dark coat with a gray fur collar.
“Is there anything else, Mr. Spade?” she asked.
“No. Good night. Lock the door when you go, will you?”
“Good night,” she said, and disappeared behind the closing door.
Spade turned his chair to face Cairo again, saying:
“It interests me some.”
The sound of the corridor door closing behind Effie Perine came to them.
Cairo smiled and took a short, compact flat black pistol out of an inner pocket.
“You will please,” he said, “clasp your hands together at the back of your neck.”
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
CAIRO’S POCKETS
OU WILL PLEASE clasp your hands together at the back of your neck.”
Events had broken rapidly for Samuel Spade, of the firm of Spade & Archer, private detectives.
Twenty-four hours earlier a Miss Wonderly, young and beautiful, had come to Spade and Archer for help in finding her younger sister who had left their New York home with a man named Floyd Thursby. Thursby was coming to Miss Wonderly’s hotel that night. Miles Archer went there to shadow him when he left, in hopes of thus being led to the sister.
At two o’clock the next morning Samuel Spade was awakened by the police. His partner had been shot and killed in an alley near Stockton and Bush streets. Spade went there, got what information he could from Detective-sergeant Polhaus, refused to give Polhaus any information beyond the name and description of the man Archer had been shadowing, and left without having gone within fifteen feet of his dead partner. At an all-night drugstore Spade telephoned his stenographer, Effie Perine, and sent her out to break the news to Archer’s wife, Iva.
Two hours later Polhaus and Lieutenant Dundy came to Spade’s apartment. Spade gave them short answers to their questions about his actions after leaving the alley and he refused to tell them for whom Miles Archer had been shadowing Thursby. He learned that Thursby had been killed in front of a Geary Street hotel shortly after he—Spade—had left the alley. Though Lieutenant Dundy suspected Spade of having killed Thursby to avenge his partner’s murder they parted on friendly, if somewhat formal, terms.
Iva Archer came to Spade’s office later that morning and asked him if he had killed her husband. Effie Perine told Spade she thought Iva had killed her husband so she could marry him, Spade.
Miss Wonderly phoned Spade from a California Street apartment to which she had moved, and he went to see her there. In a stormy interview she confessed that the story about her sister was untrue, that her real name was Brigid O’Shaughnessy and that Thursby had come to San Francisco with her from Hongkong. She begged Spade to help her, to shield her from the police and from another, graver danger. She would not tell him what this other danger was, except that if he did not help her she would certainly be killed. Spade finally agreed to help her and took what money she had left—five hundred dollars.
Late that afternoon into Spade’s office came Joel Cairo, a swarthy small man, perfumed, bejeweled and overdressed, to offer Spade five thousand dollars for the recovery of a black statuette of a bird. While Spade was questioning Cairo about the bird Effie Perine left for the day, locking the outer door behind her. Then Cairo took a pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Spade. He said:
“You will please clasp your hands together at the back of your neck.”
Spade did not look at the pistol. He raised his arms and, leaning back in his chair, intertwined the fingers of his two hands behind his head; but his eyes, holding no particular expression, remained focused on Cairo’s dark face.
Cairo coughed a little apologetic cough and smiled nervously with lips that had lost some of their redness. His dark eyes were humid and bashful and very earnest.
“I intend to search your office, Mr. Spade,” he said. “I warn you that if you attempt to prevent me I shall certainly shoot you.”
“Go ahead.” Spade’s voice was as empty of expression as his face.
“You will please stand,” the man with the pistol instructed him at whose thick chest the pistol was aimed. “I shall have to make sure that you are not armed.”
Spade stood up, pushing the chair back with his calves as he straightened his legs.
Cairo went around behind him. He changed the pistol from his right hand to his left. He lifted Spade’s coat tail and looked under it. Holding the pistol close to Spade’s back, he put his right hand around Spade’s side and patted his chest.
The Levantine face was then no more than six inches below and behind Spade’s right elbow.
Spade’s elbow dropped as
Spade spun to the right. Cairo’s face jerked back not far enough: Spade’s right heel on the patent-leathered toes anchored the smaller man in the elbow’s path. The elbow struck him beneath the cheekbone, staggering him so that he must have fallen had he not been held by Spade’s foot on his foot.
Spade’s elbow went on past the astonished face and straightened when Spade’s hand struck down at the pistol. Cairo let go the pistol the instant that Spade’s fingers touched it. The pistol was small in Spade’s hand.
Spade took his foot off Cairo’s to complete his about-face. With his left hand Spade gathered together the smaller man’s coat lapels—the ruby-set green tie bunching out over his knuckles—while his right hand stowed the captured pistol away in a coat pocket. Spade’s yellow-gray eyes were somber. His face was wooden except for a trace of sullenness around the mouth.
Cairo’s face was twisted with pain and chagrin. There were tears in his dark eyes. His skin was the complexion of polished lead except where the elbow had reddened his cheek.
Spade by means of his grip on the Levantine’s lapels turned him slowly and pushed him back until he was standing close in front of the chair he had lately occupied. A puzzled look replaced the look of pain in the lead-colored face.
Then Spade smiled. His smile was gentle, even dreamy.
His right shoulder lifted a few inches. His bent right arm was driven up by the shoulder’s lift. Fist, wrist, forearm, crooked elbow, and upper arm seemed all one rigid piece, with only the limber shoulder giving them motion. The fist struck Cairo’s face, covering for a moment one side of his chin, a corner of his mouth, and most of his cheek between cheek bone and jaw bone.
Cairo shut his eyes and was unconscious.
Spade lowered the limp body into the chair, where it lay with sprawled arms and legs, the head lolling back against the chair’s back, the mouth open.
Spade emptied the unconscious man’s pockets one by one, working methodically, moving the lax body when necessary, making a pile of the pocket’s contents on the desk. When the last pocket had been turned out he returned to his own chair, rolled and lighted a cigarette, and began to examine his spoils. He examined them with grave and unhurried thoroughness.