The Maltese Falcon Page 4

  “Not yet. I wanted to see you first.”

  “What—what would they think if they knew about the way I came to you—with those lies?”

  “It would make them suspicious. That’s why I’ve been stalling them till I could see you. I thought maybe we wouldn’t have to let them know all of it. We ought to be able to fake a story that will rock them to sleep, if necessary.”

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with the—the murders—do you?”

  Spade grinned at her and said: “I forgot to ask you that. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. Now what are we going to tell the police?”

  She squirmed on her end of the settee and her eyes wavered between heavy lashes, as if trying and failing to free their gaze from his. She seemed smaller, and very young and oppressed.

  “Must they know about me at all?” she asked. “I think I’d rather die than that, Mr. Spade. I can’t explain now, but can’t you somehow manage so that you can shield me from them, so I won’t have to answer their questions? I don’t think I could stand being questioned now. I think I would rather die. Can’t you, Mr. Spade?”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I’ll have to know what it’s all about.”

  She went down on her knees at his knees. She held her face up to him. Her face was wan, taut, and fearful over tight-clasped hands.

  “I haven’t lived a good life,” she cried. “I’ve been bad—worse than you could know—but I’m not all bad. Look at me, Mr. Spade. You know I’m not all bad, don’t you? You can see that, can’t you? Then can’t you trust me a little? Oh, I’m so alone and afraid, and I’ve got nobody to help me if you won’t help me. I know I’ve no right to ask you to trust me if I won’t trust you. I do trust you, but I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you now. Later I will, when I can. I’m afraid, Mr. Spade. I’m afraid of trusting you. I don’t mean that. I do trust you, but—I trusted Floyd and—I’ve nobody else, nobody else, Mr. Spade. You can help me. You’ve said you can help me. If I hadn’t believed you could save me I would have run away today instead of sending for you. If I thought anybody else could save me would I be down on my knees like this? I know this isn’t fair of me. But be generous, Mr. Spade, don’t ask me to be fair. You’re strong, you’re resourceful, you’re brave. You can spare me some of that strength and resourcefulness and courage, surely. Help me, Mr. Spade. Help me because I need help so badly, and because if you don’t where will I find anyone who can, no matter how willing? Help me. I’ve no right to ask you to help me blindly, but I do ask you. Be generous, Mr. Spade. You can help me. Help me.”

  Spade, who had held his breath through much of this speech, now emptied his lungs with a long sighing exhalation between pursed lips and said: “You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”

  She jumped up on her feet. Her face crimsoned painfully, but she held her head erect and she looked Spade straight in the eyes.

  “I deserve that,” she said. “I deserve it, but—oh!—I did want your help so much. I do want it, and need it, so much. And the lie was in the way I said it, and not at all in what I said.” She turned away, no longer holding herself erect. “It is my own fault that you can’t believe me now.”

  Spade’s face reddened and he looked down at the floor, muttering: “Now you are dangerous.”

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy went to the table and picked up his hat. She came back and stood in front of him holding the hat, not offering it to him, but holding it for him to take if he wished. Her face was white and thin.

  Spade looked at his hat and asked: “What happened last night?”

  “Floyd came to the hotel at nine o’clock, and we went out for a walk. I suggested that so Mr. Archer could see him. We stopped at a restaurant in Geary Street, I think it was, for supper and to dance, and came back to the hotel at about half-past twelve. Floyd left me at the door and I stood inside and watched Mr. Archer follow him down the street, on the other side.”

  “Down? You mean towards Market Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what they’d be doing in the neighborhood of Bush and Stockton, where Archer was shot?”

  “Isn’t that near where Floyd lived?”

  “No. It would be nearly a dozen blocks out of his way if he was going from your hotel to his. Well, what did you do after they had gone?”

  “I went to bed. And this morning when I went out for breakfast I saw the headlines in the papers and read about—you know. Then I went up to Union Square, where I had seen automobiles for hire, and got one and went to the hotel for my luggage. After I found my room had been searched yesterday I knew I would have to move, and I had found this place yesterday afternoon. So I came up here and then telephoned your office.”

  “Your room at the St. Mark was searched?” he asked.

  “Yes, while I was at your office.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.”

  “That means I’m not supposed to question you about it?”

  She nodded shyly.

  He frowned.

  She moved his hat a little in her hands.

  He laughed impatiently and said: “Stop waving the hat in my face. Haven’t I offered to do what I can?”

  She smiled contritely, returned the hat to the table, and sat beside him on the settee again.

  He said: “I’ve got nothing against trusting you blindly except that I won’t be able to do you much good if I haven’t some idea of what it’s all about. For instance, I’ve got to have some sort of a line on your Floyd Thursby.”

  “I met him in the Orient.” She spoke slowly, looking down at a pointed finger tracing eights on the settee between them. “We came here from Hongkong last week. He was—he had promised to help me. He took advantage of my helplessness and dependence on him to betray me.”

  “Betray you how?”

  She shook her head and said nothing.

  Spade, frowning with impatience, asked: “Why did you want him shadowed?”

  “I wanted to learn how far he had gone. He wouldn’t even let me know where he was staying. I wanted to find out what he was doing, whom he was meeting, things like that.”

  “Did he kill Archer?”

  She looked up at him, surprised. “Yes, certainly,” she said.

  “He had a Luger in a shoulder-holster. Archer wasn’t shot with a Luger.”

  “He had a revolver in his overcoat-pocket,” she said.

  “You saw it?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen it often. I know he always carries one there. I didn’t see it last night, but I know he never wears an overcoat without it.”

  “Why all the guns?”

  “He lived by them. There was a story in Hongkong that he had come out there, to the Orient, as a bodyguard to a gambler who had had to leave the States, and that the gambler had since disappeared. They said Floyd knew about his disappearing. I don’t know. I do know that he always went heavily armed and that he never went to sleep without covering the floor around his bed with crumpled newspaper so nobody could come silently into his room.”

  “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 irr
itably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin air.” He looked at his watch. “The day’s going and you’re giving 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 the pockets of his jacket, 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, 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 high 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 have done. 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 pinched her lower lip between her teeth 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 mouth, eyebrows, hands, and shoulders. She went into her bedroom, returning almost immediately with a sheaf of paper money in one 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 Remediai’s the best place—Mission and Fifth.”

  She looked pleadingly at him. His yellow-grey eyes were hard and implacable. Slowly she put her hand inside the neck of her 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 center of the floor 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 glass door at its far end. He opened the frosted glass 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 flourished a cold cigar-stub at Spade and said: “Pull a chair around. So Miles got the big one 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 clients’ secrets and identities and what-not, all the same priest or lawyer?”

  Sid Wise lifted his shoulders and lowered the ends of his mouth. “Why not? An inquest is not a court-trial. You can try, anyway. You’ve gotten away with more than that before this.”

  “I know, but Dundy’s getting snotty, and maybe it is 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 papers massed 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.”

  He 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 replied without hesitation.

  “She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “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. He chuckled. “Anyway she’s given up seven hundred smacks 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 was unnatural. He opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of someone’s entrance through 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 returned with an engraved 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 fitted 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 towards 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, cross
ing 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, dropping 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 condolences for your partner’s unfortunate death?”

  “Thanks.”

  “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—shall we say?—mislaid. I thought, and 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-corner and touched a spot in the air with the broad-nailed tip of an ugly forefinger. “I am prepared to promise that—what is the phrase?—no questions will be asked.” He put his hand on the desk again beside the other and smiled blandly over them at the private detective.

  “Five thousand is a lot of money,” Spade commented, looking thoughtfully at Cairo. “It—”