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

by Unknown

  Spade blew smoke above the fat man’s head in a long slanting plume. He frowned thoughtfully at the ash-tipped end of his cigar. He replied deliberately:

  “I can’t say yes or no. There’s nothing certain about it either way, yet.” He looked up at the fat man and his frown faded. “It depends.”

  “It depends on—?”

  Spade shook his head. “If I knew what it depends on I could say yes or no.”

  The fat man took a mouthful from his glass, swallowed it, and suggested:

  “Maybe it depends on Joel Cairo?”

  Spade’s prompt, “Maybe,” was noncommittal. He drank.

  The fat man leaned forward until his belly stopped him. His smile was ingratiating, and so was his purring voice:

  “You could say then that the question is which one of them you’ll represent?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “It will be one or the other?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The fat man’s eyes glistened. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper, asking:

  “Who else is there?”

  Spade pointed his cigar at his own chest.

  “There’s me,” he said.

  The fat man leaned back in his chair and let his body go flaccid. He blew his breath out in a long contented gust.

  “That’s wonderful, sir,” he purred. “That’s wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he’s looking out for himself. Don’t we all? I don’t trust a man that says he’s not. And the man that’s telling the truth when he says he’s not I distrust most of all, because he’s an ass, and an ass that’s going contrary to the laws of nature.”

  Spade exhaled smoke. His face was politely attentive. He said:

  “Uh-huh. Now let’s talk about the black bird.”

  The fat man smiled benevolently at Spade.

  “Let’s,” he said. He squinted so that fat puffs crowding together left nothing visible of his eyes except a dark gleam. “Mr. Spade, have you any conception of how much money can be made out of that black bird?”

  “No.”

  The fat man leaned forward and put a bloated pink hand on the arm of Spade’s chair.

  “Well, sir, if I told you—if I told you half—you’d call me a liar.”

  Spade smiled. “No,” he said, “not even if I thought it. But if you don’t want to take the risk, just tell me what it is and I’ll figure out the profit.”

  The fat man laughed.

  “You couldn’t. You couldn’t do it, sir. Nobody could do it that hadn’t had a world of experience with things of that sort, and”—he paused impressively—“there aren’t any other things of that sort.” His bulbs jostled one another as he laughed again. He stopped laughing, abruptly. His fleshy lips hung a little apart, as laughter had left them. He stared at Spade with an intentness that suggested myopia. He asked: “You mean you don’t know what it is?” Amazement took the throatiness out of his voice.

  Spade made a careless gesture with his cigar.

  “Oh, hell,” he said lightly, “I know what it’s supposed to look like. I know the value in life and money you people put on it. I don’t know what it is.”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “Miss O’Shaughnessy?”

  “Yes. A lovely girl, sir.”

  “Uh-huh. No.”

  The fat man’s eyes were dark gleams in ambush behind pink puffs of flesh. He said indistinctly, “She must know,” and then, “And Cairo didn’t either?”

  “Cairo is cagey. He’s willing to buy it, but he won’t risk telling me anything I don’t know already.”

  The fat man moistened his lips with his tongue.

  “How much is he willing to buy it for?” he asked.

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  The fat man laughed scornfully. “Ten thousand. And dollars, mind you, not even pounds. That’s the Greek for you. Humph! And what did you say to that?”

  “I said if I turned it over to him I’d expect the ten thousand.”

  “Ah, yes, if. Nicely put, sir.” The fat man’s forehead squirmed in a flesh-blurred frown. “They must know,” he said only partly aloud, then: “Do they? Do they know what the bird is, sir? What is your impression?”

  “I can’t help you there,” Spade confessed. “There’s not much to go by. Cairo didn’t say he did, and he didn’t say he didn’t. She said she didn’t, but I took it for granted that she was lying.”

  “That was not an injudicious thing to do,” the fat man said, but his mind was obviously not on his words. He scratched his head. He frowned until his forehead was marked by raw red creases. He fidgeted in his chair as much as its size and his size permitted fidgeting. He shut his eyes, suddenly opened them wide, and said to Spade: “Maybe they don’t.” His bulbous pink face slowly lost its worried frown and then, more quickly, took on an expression of ineffable happiness. “If they don’t,” he cried, and again: “If they don’t, I’m the only one in the whole wide sweet world who does!”

  Spade drew his lips back in a tight smile.

  “I’m glad I came to the right place,” he said.

  The fat man smiled too, but somewhat vaguely. Happiness had gone out of his face, though he continued to smile, and caution had come into his eyes. His face was a watchful-eyed smiling mask held up between his thoughts and Spade. His eyes, avoiding Spade’s, shifted to the glass at Spade’s elbow. His face brightened.

  “By Gar, sir,” he said, “your glass is empty.”

  He got up and went to the table, and clattered glasses and siphon and bottle mixing two drinks. Spade was immobile in his chair until the fat man, with a flourish and a bow and a jocular, “Ah, this kind of medicine will never hurt you,” had handed him his refilled glass.

  Then Spade rose and stood close to the fat man, looking down at him. Spade’s eyes were hard and bright. He raised his glass. His voice was sharp, challenging:

  “Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.”

  The fat man chuckled, and they drank. The fat man sat down. He held his glass against his belly with both hands and smiled up at Spade. He said:

  “Well, sir, it’s surprising, but it well may be a fact that neither of them does know exactly what that bird is, and that nobody in all this whole wide sweet world knows what it is, saving and excepting only your humble servant, Casper Gutman, Esquire.”

  “Swell.” Spade stood with legs apart, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other holding his glass. “When you’ve told me, there’ll only be two of us who know.”

  “Mathematically correct, sir.” The fat man’s eyes twinkled. “But”—his smile spread—“I don’t know for certain that I’m going to tell you.”

  “Don’t be a damned fool,” Spade said patiently. “You know what it is. I know where it is. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Well, sir, where is it?”

  Spade ignored the question.

  The fat man bunched his lips, raised his eyebrows, and cocked his head a little to the left.

  “You see,” he said blandly, “I must tell you what I know, but you will not tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. No, no, I don’t think we can do business like that.”

  Spade’s face became pale and hard. He spoke rapidly in a low, furious voice:

  “Think again and think fast. I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or you are through. What are you wasting my time for? You and your lousy secret— I know exactly what that stuff is that they keep in the subtreasury vaults, but what good does that do me? I can get along without you. —— damn you. Maybe you could have got along without me if you’d kept clear of me. You can’t now. Not in San Francisco. You’ll come in or you’ll get out, and you’ll do it today.”

  He turned and with angry heedlessness tossed his glass on the table. The glass struck the wood, burst apart, and splashed its contents and glittering fragments over table a
nd floor. Spade, deaf and blind to the crash, wheeled to confront the fat man again.

  The fat man paid no more attention to the glass’s fate than Spade did: lips pursed, eyebrows raised, head cocked a little to the left, he had maintained his pink-faced blandness throughout Spade’s angry speech and he maintained it now.

  Spade said, still furious:

  “And another thing, I don’t want—”

  The door to Spade’s left opened. The boy who had admitted Spade came in. He shut the door, stood in front of it with his hands flat against his flanks, and looked at Spade. The boy’s eyes were wide open, and dark with wide pupils. Their gaze ran over Spade’s body from shoulders to knees, and up again to settle on the handkerchief whose maroon border peeped from the breast pocket of Spade’s brown coat.

  “Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him. He makes me nervous. I’ll kill him the first time he gets in my way. I’m afraid of him. I won’t give him an even break. I won’t give him a chance. I’ll kill him.”

  The boy’s lips twitched in a shadowy smile. He neither raised his eyes nor spoke.

  The fat man said tolerantly:

  “Well, sir, I must say you have a most violent temper.”

  “Temper?” Spade laughed crazily. He crossed to the chair on which he had dropped his hat, picked up the hat, and set it on his head. He held out a long arm that ended in a thick forefinger pointing at the fat man’s belly. His angry voice filled the room: “Think it over, and think like hell. You’ve got till five-thirty to do it in. Then you’re either in or out, for keeps.”

  He let his arm drop, scowled at the bland fat man for a moment, scowled at the boy, and went to the door through which he had entered. When he had opened the door he turned and said harshly:

  “Five-thirty, then the curtain.”

  The boy, staring at Spade’s chest, repeated the two words he had twice spoken in the Belvedere lobby. His voice was not loud. It was bitter.

  Spade went out and slammed the door.

  CHAPTER XII

  MERRY-GO-ROUND

  pade rode down from Gutman’s floor in an elevator. His lips were dry and rough in a face otherwise pale and damp. When he took out his handkerchief to wipe his face he saw his hand trembling. He grinned at it, and said, “Whew!” so loudly that the elevator operator turned his head and asked: “Sir?”

  Spade walked down Geary Street to the Palace Hotel, where he had luncheon. His face had lost its pallor, his lips their dryness, and his hand its tremor. He ate hungrily without haste, and then went to Sid Wise’s office.

  When Spade entered, Wise was biting a fingernail and staring at the window. He took his hand from his mouth, screwed his chair around to face Spade, and said:

  “ ’Lo. Push a chair up.”

  Spade moved a chair to the side of the big paper-laden desk and sat down.

  “Mrs. Archer come in?” he asked.

  “Yes.” The faintest of lights flickered in Wise’s eyes. “Going to marry the lady, Sammy?”

  Spade sighed irritably through his nose.

  “——! Now you start that,” he grumbled.

  A brief tired smile lifted the corners of the lawyer’s mouth.

  “If you don’t,” he said, “you’re going to have a job on your hands.”

  Spade looked up from the cigarette he was making and spoke sourly:

  “You mean you are? Well, that’s what you’re for. What did she tell you?”

  “About you?”

  “About anything I ought to know.”

  Wise ran his fingers through his hair, sprinkling dandruff down on his shoulders.

  “She told me she had tried to get a divorce from Miles so she could—”

  “I know all that,” Spade interrupted. “You can skip it. Get to the part I don’t know.”

  “How do I know how much she—?”

  “Quit stalling, Sid.” Spade held the flame of his lighter to the end of his cigarette. “What did she tell you that she wanted kept from me?”

  Wise looked reprovingly at Spade.

  “Now, Sammy,” he began, “that’s not—”

  Spade looked heavenward at the ceiling and groaned:

  “Dear God, he’s my own lawyer that’s got rich off me and I have to get down on my knees and beg him to tell me things.” He glowered at Wise. “What the hell do you think I sent her to you for?”

  Wise made a weary grimace.

  “Just one more client like you,” he complained, “and I’d be in a sanatarium, or San Quentin.”

  “You’d be with most of your clients. Did she tell you where she was the night he was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Following her husband.”

  Spade sat up straight and blinked. He exclaimed incredulously: “—— these women!” Then he laughed, relaxed, and asked: “Well, what did she see?”

  Wise shook his head.

  “Nothing much. When he came home for dinner that evening he told her he had a date with a girl at the St. Mark, taunting her, telling her that was her chance to get the evidence for the divorce she wanted. She thought at first that he was just trying to get under her skin. He knew—”

  “I know the family history,” Spade said. “Skip it. Tell me what she did.”

  “I will if you’ll give me a chance. After he had gone out she began to think that maybe he might have had that date. You know Miles. It would have been like him to—”

  “You can skip Miles’s character too.”

  “I oughtn’t to tell you a damned thing,” the lawyer said. “So she got their car from the garage and drove down to the St. Mark, sitting in the car across the street. She saw him come out of the hotel, and she saw that he was shadowing a man and a girl—she says she saw the same girl with you last night—who had come out just ahead of him. She knew then that he was working, had been kidding her. I suppose she was disappointed, and mad; she sounded that way when she told about it. She followed Miles long enough to be sure he was shadowing the pair, and then she went up to your rooms. You weren’t home.”

  “What time was that?” Spade asked.

  “When she got to your place? Between half past nine and ten, the first time.”

  “The first time?”

  “Yes. She drove around for half an hour or more after that, and then tried again. That would make it, say, ten-thirty. You were still out, so she drove back downtown and went to a movie to kill time until after midnight, when she thought she’d be more likely to find you in.”

  Spade frowned. “She went to a movie at ten-thirty?”

  “So she said. The one on Powell Street that stays open till one in the morning. She didn’t want to go home, she said, because she didn’t want to be there when Miles came home. That always made him mad, it seems, especially if it was around midnight. She stayed in the movie until it closed.” Wise’s words came out slower now and there was a sardonic glint in his tired eyes. “She says she had decided not to go back to your place then. She says she didn’t know whether you’d like having her drop in that late. So she went to Tait’s—the one on Ellis Street—had something to eat, and then went home, alone.”

  Wise rocked back in his chair and waited for Spade to speak. Spade’s face was expressionless. He asked:

  “You believe her?”

  “Don’t you?” Wise replied.

  “How do I know? How do I know it isn’t something you fixed up between you to tell me?”

  Wise smiled. “You don’t cash many checks for strangers, do you, Sammy?”

  “Not basketfuls. Well, then what? Miles wasn’t home. It was at least two o’clock by then.”

  “Miles wasn’t home,” Wise said. “That made her mad again, because he didn’t get home first to be made mad by her not being home first. So she took the car out of the garage again and went back to your place.”

  “And I wasn�
�t home. I was down looking at Miles’s corpse. ——! What a swell lot of merry-go-round riding. What next?”

  “She went home, and her husband was still not there, and while she was undressing your messenger came with the news of his death.”

  Spade didn’t speak until he had with great care rolled and lighted another cigarette. Then he said:

  “I think that’s an all-right spread. It seems to click with the known facts. It ought to hold.”

  Wise’s fingers, running through his hair again, combed more dandruff down on his shoulders. He studied Spade’s face with curious eyes, and asked:

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  Spade plucked the cigarette from between his lips.

  “I don’t believe it or disbelieve it, Sid. I don’t know a damned thing about it.”

  A wry smile twisted the lawyer’s mouth. He shrugged wearily and said:

  “That’s right, I’m selling you out. Why don’t you get an honest lawyer, one you can trust?”

  “Oh, that fellow’s dead.” Spade stood up. He sneered at Wise. “Getting touchy, huh? I haven’t got enough to think about; now I’ve got to remember to be polite to you. What did I do? Forget to genuflect when I came in?”

  Sid Wise smiled sheepishly.

  “You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” he said.

  Effie Perine was standing in the center of Spade’s outer office when he entered. She looked at him with worried brown eyes and asked:

  “What happened?”

  Spade’s face grew stiff.

  “What happened where?” he demanded.

  “Why didn’t she come?”

  Spade took two long steps and caught Effie Perine by the shoulders.

  “She didn’t get there?” he bawled into her frightened face.

  She shook her head violently from side to side.

  “I waited and waited, and she didn’t come, and I couldn’t get you on the phone, so I came down.”

  Spade jerked his hands from her shoulders, thrust them far down in his trouser pockets, said, “Another merry-go-round ride,” in a loud enraged voice, and strode into his private office. He came out again. “Phone your mother,” he commanded her. “See if she’s come yet.”