Spade & Archer: the prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The maltese falcon

by Joe Gores

  The girl shook her head no and asked: "Has this got anything to do with her?"

  "Something."

  "This thing he wants belongs to her?"

  "Or to the King of Spain. Sweetheart, you've got an uncle who teaches history or something over at the University?"

  "A cousin. Why?"

  "If we brightened his life with an alleged historical secret four centuries old could we trust him to keep it dark awhile?"

  "Oh, yes, he's good people."

  "Fine. Get your pencil and book."

  She got them and sat in her chair. Spade ran more cold water on his handkerchief and, holding it to his temple, stood in front of her and dictated the story of the falcon as he had heard it from Gutman, from Charles V's grant to the Hospitallers up to--but no further than--the enameled bird's arrival in Paris at the time of the Carlist influx. He stumbled over the names of authors and their works that Gutman had mentioned, but managed to achieve some sort of phonetic likeness. The rest of the history he repeated with the accuracy of a trained interviewer.

  When he had finished the girl shut her notebook and raised a flushed smiling face to him. "Oh, isn't this thrilling?" she said. "It's--"

  "Yes, or ridiculous. Now will you take it over and read it to your cousin and ask him what he thinks of it? Has he ever run across anything that might have some connection with it? Is it probable? Is it possible-- even barely possible? Or is it the bunk? If he wants more time to look it up, O.K., but get some sort of opinion out of him now. And for God's sake make him keep it under his hat."

  "I'll go right now," she said, "and you go see a doctor about that head."

  "We'll have breakfast first."

  "No, I'll eat over in Berkeley. I can't wait to hear what Ted thinks of this."

  "Well," Spade said, "don't start boo-hooing if he laughs at you."

  After a leisurely breakfast at the Palace, during which he read both morning papers, Spade went home, shaved, bathed, rubbed ice on his bruised temple, and put on fresh clothes.

  He went to Brigid O'Shaughnessy's apartment at the Coronet. Nobody was in the apartment. Nothing had been changed in it since his last visit.

  He went to the Alexandria Hotel. Gutman was not in. None of the other occupants of Gutman's suite was in. Spade learned that these other occupants were the fat man's secretary, Wilmer Cook, and his daughter Rhea, a brown-eyed fair-haired smallish girl of seventeen whom the hotelstaff said was beautiful. Spade was told that the Gutman party had arrived at the hotel, from New York, ten days before, and had not checked out.

  Spade went to the Belvedere and found the hotel-detective eating in the hotel-café.

  "Morning, Sam. Set down and bite an egg." The hotel-detective stared at Spade's temple. "By God, somebody maced you plenty!"

  "Thanks, I've had mine," Spade said as he sat down, and then, referring to his temple: "It looks worse than it is. How's my Cairo's conduct?"

  "He went out not more than half an hour behind you yesterday and I ain't seen him since. He didn't sleep here again last night."

  "He's getting bad habits."

  "WelI, a fellow like that alone in a big city. Who put the slug to you, Sam?"

  "It wasn't Cairo." Spade looked attentively at the small silver dome covering Luke's toast. "How's chances of giving his room a casing while he's out?"

  "Can do. You know I'm willing to go all the way with you all the time." Luke pushed his coffee back, put his elbows on the table, and screwed up his eyes at Spade. "But I got a hunch you ain't going all the way with me. What's the honest-to-God on this guy, Sam? You don't have to kick back on me. You know' I'm regular."

  Spade lifted his eyes from the silver dome. They were clear and candid. "Sure, you are," he said. "I'm not holding out. I gave you it straight. I'm doing a job for him, but he's got some friends that look w'rong to me and I'm a little leery of him."

  "The kid we chased out yesterday was one of his friends."

  "Yes, Luke, he was."

  "And it was one of them that shoved Miles across."

  Spade shook his head. "Thursby killed Miles."

  "And who killed him?"

  Spade smiled. "That's supposed to be a secret, but, confidentially, I did," he said, "according to the police."

  Luke grunted and stood up saying: "You're a tough one to figure out, Sam. Come on, we'll have that look-see."

  They stopped at the desk long enough for Luke to "fix it so we'll get a ring if he comes in," and went up to Cairo's room. Cairo's bed was smooth and trim, but paper in wastebasket, unevenly drawn blinds, and a couple of rumpled towels in the bathroom showed that the chambermaid had not yet been in that morning.

  Cairn's luggage consisted of a square trunk, a valise, and a gladstone bag. His bathroom-cabinet was stoekcd with cosmetics--boxes, cans, jars, and bottles of powders, creams, ungents, perfumes, lotions, and tonics. Two suits and an overcoat hung in the closet over three pairs of carefully treed shoes.

  The valise and smaller bag were unlocked. Luke had the trunk unlocked by the time Spade had finished searching elsewhere.

  "Blank so far," Spade said as they dug down into the trunk.

  They found nothing there to interest them.

  "Any particular thing we're supposed to be looking for?" Luke asked as he locked the trunk again.

  "No. He's supposed to have come here from Constantinople. I'd like to know if he did. I haven't seen anything that says he didn't."

  "What's his racket?"

  Spade shook his head. "That's something else I'd like to know." He crossed the room and bent down over the wastebasket. "Well, this is our last shot."

  He took a newspaper from the basket. His eyes brightened when he saw it was the previous day's Call. It was folded with the classified-advertising-page outside. He opened it, examined that page, and nothing there stopped his eyes.

  He turned the paper over and looked at the page that had been folded inside, the page that held financial and shipping news, the weather, births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. From the lower left-hand corner, a little more than two inches of the bottom of the second column had been torn out.

  Immediately above the tear was a small caption Arrived Today followed by:

  12:20 A. M.--Capac from Astoria.

  5:05 A. M.--Helen P. Drew from Greenwood.

  5:06 A. M.--Albarado from Bandon.

  The tear passed through the next line, leaving only enough of its letters to make from Sydney inferable.

  Spade put the Call down on the desk and looked into the wastebasket again. He found a small piece of wrapping-paper, a piece of string, two hosiery tags, a haberdasher's sale-ticket for half a dozen pairs of socks, and, in the bottom of the basket, a piece of newspaper rolled into a tiny ball.

  He opened the ball carefully, smoothed it out on the desk, and fitted it into the torn part of the Call. The fit at the sides was exact, but between the top of the crumpled fragment and the inferable from Sydney half an inch was missing, sufficient space to have held announcement of six or seven boats' arrival. He turned the sheet over and saw that the other side of the missing portion could have held only a meaningless corner of a stockbroker's advertisement.

  Luke, leaning over his shoulder, asked: "What's this all about?"

  "Looks like the gent's interested in a boat."

  "Well, there's no law against that, or is there?" Luke said while Spade was folding the torn page and the crumpled fragment together and putting them into his coat-pocket. "You all through here now?"

  "Yes. Thanks a lot, Luke. Will you give me a ring as soon as he comes in?"

  "Sure."

  Spade went to the Business Office of the Call, bought a copy of the previous day's issue, opened it to the shipping-news-page, and compared it with the page taken from Cairo's wastebasket. The missing portion had read:

  5:17 A. M.--Tahiti from Sydney and Papeete.

  6:05 A. M.--Admiral Peoples from Astoria.

  8:07 A. M.--Caddopeak from San Pedro.

&nbs
p; 8:17 A. M.--Silverado from San Pedro.

  8:05 A. M.--La Paloma from Hongkong.

  9:03 A. M.--Daisy Gray from Seattle.

  He read the list slowly and when he had finished he underscored Hongkong with a fingernail, cut the list of arrivals from the paper with his pocket-knife, put the rest of the paper and Cairo's sheet into the wastebasket, and returned to his office.

  He sat down at his desk, looked up a number in the telephone-book, and used the telephone.

  "Kearny one four o one, please Where is the Paloma, in from Hongkong yesterday morning, docked?" He repeated the question. "Thanks."

  He held the receiver-hook down with his thumb for a moment, released it, and said: "Davenport two o two o, please. . . . Detective bureau, please. . . . Is Sergeant Polhaus there? . . . Thanks. . . . Hello, Tom, this is Sam Spade. . . . Yes, I tried to get you yesterday afternoon.

  Sure, suppose you go to lunch with me. . . . Right."

  He kept the receiver to his ear while his thumb worked the hook again.

  "Davenport o one seven o, please Hello, this is Samuel Spade. My secretary got a phone-message yesterday that Mr. Bryan wanted to see me. Will you ask him what time's the most convenient for him? . . . Yes, Spade, S-p-a-d-e." A long pause. "Yes. . . . Two-thirty? All right. Thanks."

  He called a fifth number and Said: "Hello, darling, let me talk to Sid? . . . Hello, Sid--Sam. I've got a date with the District Attorney at half-past two this afternoon. Will you give me a ring--here or there-- around four, just to see that I'm not in trouble? . . . Hell with your Saturday afternoon golf: your job's to keep me out of jail. . . . Right, Sid. 'Bye."

  He pushed the telephone away, yawned, stretched, felt his bruised temple, looked at his watch, and rolled and lighted a cigarette. He smoked sleepily until Effie Perine came in.

  Effie Perine came in smiling, bright-eyed and rosy-faced. "Ted says it could be," she reported, "and he hopes it is. He says he's not a specialist in that field, but the names and dates are all right, and at least none of your authorities or their works are out-and-out fakes. He's all excited over it."

  "That's swell, as long as he doesn't get too enthusiastic to see through it if it's phoney."

  "Oh, he wouldn't--not Ted! He's too good at his stuff for that."

  "Uh-huh, the whole damned Perine family's wonderful," Spade said, "including you and the smudge of soot on your nose."

  "He's not a Perine, he's a Christy." She bent her head to look at her nose in her vanity-case-mirror. "I must've got that from the fire." She scrubbed the smudge with the corner of a handkerchief.

  "The Perine-Christy enthusiasm ignite Berkeley?" he asked.

  She made a face at him while patting her nose with a powdered pink disc. "There was a boat on fire when I came back. They were towing it out from the pier and the smoke blew all over our ferry-boat."

  Spade put his hands on the arms of his chair. "Were you near enough to see the name of the boat?" he asked.

  "Yes. La Paloma. Why?"

  Spade smiled ruefully. "I'm damned if I know why, sister," he said.

  XV.

  Every Crackpot

  Spade and Detective-sergeant Polhaus ate pickled pigs' feet at one of big John's tables at the States Hof Brau.

  Polhaus, balancing pale bright jelly on a fork half-way between plate and mouth, said: "Hey, listen, Sam! Forget about the other night. He was dead wrong, but you know anybody's liable to lose their head if you ride them thataway."

  Spade looked thoughtfully at the police-detective. "Was that what you wanted to see me about?" he asked.

  Polhaus nodded, put the forkful of jelly into his mouth, swallowed it, and qualified his nod: "Mostly."

  "Dundy send you?"

  Polhaus made a disgusted mouth. "You know he didn't. He's as bullheaded as you are."

  Spade smiled and shook his head. "No, he's not, Tom," he said. "He just thinks he is."

  Tom scowled and chopped at his pig's foot with a knife. "Ain't you ever going to grow up?" he grumbled. "What've you got to beef about? He didn't hurt you. You came out on top. What's the sense of making a grudge of it? You're just making a lot of grief for yourself."

  Spade placed his knife and fork carefully together on his plate, and put his hands on the table beside his plate. His smile was faint and devoid of warmth. "With every bull in town working overtime trying to pile up grief for me a little more won't hurt. I won't even know it's there."

  Polhaus's ruddiness deepened. He said: "That's a swell thing to say to me."

  Spade picked up his knife and fork and began to eat. Polhaus ate.

  Presently Spade asked: "See the boat on fire in the bay?"

  "I saw the smoke. Be reasonable. Sam. Dundy was wrong and he knows it. Why don't you let it go at that?"

  "Think I ought to go around and tell him I hope my chin didn't hurt his fist?"

  Polhaus cut savagely into his pig's foot.

  Spade said: "Phil Archer been in with any more hot tips?"

  "Aw, hell! Dundy didn't think you shot Miles, but what else could he do except run the lead down? You'd've done the same thing in his place, and you know it."

  "Yes?" Malice glittered in Spade's eyes. "What made him think I didn't do it? What makes you think I didn't? Or don't you?"

  Polhaus's ruddy face flushed again. He said: "Thursby shot Miles."

  "You think he did."

  "He did. That Webley was his, and the slug in Miles came out of it."

  "Sure?" Spade demanded.

  "Dead sure," the police-detective replied. "We got hold of a kid--a bellhop at Thursby's hotel--that had seen it in his room just that morning. He noticed it particular because he'd never saw one just like it before. I never saw one. You say they don't make them any more. It ain't likely there'd be another around and--anyway--if that wasn't Thursby's what happened to his? And that's the gun the slug in Miles come out of." He started to put a piece of bread into his mouth, withdrew it, and asked: "You say you've seen them before: where was that at?" He put the bread into his mouth.

  "In England before the war."

  "Sure, there you are."

  Spade nodded and said: "Then that leaves Thursby the only one I lilled."

  Polhaus squirmed in his chair and his face was red and shiny. "Christ's sake, ain't you never going to forget that?" he complained earnestly. "That's out. You know it as well as I do. You'd think you wasn't a dick yourself the way you bellyache over things. I suppose you don't never pull the same stuff on anybody that we pulled on you?"

  "You mean that you tried to pull on me, Tom--just tried."

  Polhaus swore under his breath and attacked the remainder of his pig's foot.

  Spade said: "All right. You know it's out and I know it's out. What does Dundy know?"

  "He knows it's out."

  "What woke him up?"

  "Aw, Sam, he never really thought you'd--" Spade's smile checked Polhaus. He left the sentence incomplete and said: "We dug up a record on Thursby."