Nightmare Town Page 41

  Spade raised his eyebrows. “You were on good terms?”

  “Oh, yes. Our last fight had been patched up a couple of days before.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Thursday afternoon; three o’clock, I guess.”

  “Got any photographs of him?”

  “Yes.” She went to a table by one of the windows, pulled a drawer out, and turned toward Spade with a photograph in her hand.

  Spade looked at the picture of a thin face with deep-set eyes, a sensual mouth, and a heavily lined forehead topped by a disorderly mop of coarse blond hair.

  He put Haven’s photograph in his pocket and picked up his hat. He turned toward the door, halted. “What kind of poet is he? Pretty good?”

  She shrugged. “That depends on who you ask.”

  “Any of it around here?”

  “No.” She smiled. “Think he’s hiding between pages?”

  “You never can tell what’ll lead to what. I’ll be back some time. Think things over and see if you can’t find some way of loosening up a little more. ’Bye.”

  He walked down Post Street to Mulford’s book store and asked for a volume of Haven’s poetry.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I sold my last copy last week”—she smiled—“to Mr. Haven himself. I can order it for you.”

  “You know him?”

  “Only through selling him books.”

  Spade pursed his lips, asked, “What day was it?” He gave her one of his business cards. “Please. It’s important.”

  She went to a desk, turned the pages of a red-bound sales book, and came back to him with the book open in her hand. “It was last Wednesday,” she said, “and we delivered it to a Mr. Roger Ferris, 1981 Pacific Avenue.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he said.

  Outside, he hailed a taxicab and gave the driver Mr. Roger Ferris’s address.

  —

  THE PACIFIC AVENUE house was a four-story graystone set behind a narrow strip of lawn. The room into which a plump-faced maid ushered Spade was large and high-ceilinged.

  Spade sat down, but when the maid had gone away he rose and began to walk around the room. He halted at a table where there were three books. One of them had a salmon-colored jacket on which was printed in red an outline drawing of a bolt of lightning striking the ground between a man and a woman, and in black the words Colored Light, by Eli Haven.

  Spade picked up the book and went back to his chair.

  There was an inscription on the flyleaf—heavy, irregular characters written with blue ink:

  To good old Buck, who knew his colored lights, in memory of them there days. Eli

  Spade turned the pages at random and idly read a verse:

  STATEMENT

  Too many have lived

  As we live

  For our lives to be

  Proof of our living.

  Too many have died

  As we die

  For their deaths to be

  Proof of our dying.

  He looked up from the book as a man in dinner clothes came into the room. He was not a tall man, but his erectness made him seem tall even when Spade’s six feet and a fraction of an inch were standing before him. He had bright blue eyes undimmed by his fifty-some years, a sunburned face in which no muscle sagged, a smooth, broad forehead, and thick, short, nearly white hair. There was dignity in his countenance, and amiability.

  He nodded at the book Spade still held. “How do you like it?”

  Spade grinned, said, “I guess I’m just a mug,” and put the book down. “That’s what I came to see you about, though, Mr. Ferris. You know Haven?”

  “Yes, certainly. Sit down, Mr. Spade.” He sat in a chair not far from Spade’s. “I knew him as a kid. He’s not in trouble, is he?”

  Spade said, “I don’t know. I’m trying to find him.”

  Ferris spoke hesitantly, “Can I ask why?”

  “You know Gene Colyer?”

  “Yes.” Ferris hesitated again, then said, “This is in confidence. I’ve a chain of motion-picture houses through northern California, you know, and a couple of years ago when I had some labor trouble I was told that Colyer was the man to get in touch with to have it straightened out. That’s how I happened to meet him.”

  “Yes,” Spade said dryly, “a lot of people happen to meet Gene that way.”

  “But what’s he got to do with Eli?”

  “Wants him found. How long since you’ve seen him?”

  “Last Thursday he was here.”

  “What time did he leave?”

  “Midnight—a little after. He came over in the afternoon around half-past three. We hadn’t seen each other for years. I persuaded him to stay for dinner—he looked pretty seedy—and lent him some money.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred and fifty—all I had in the house.”

  “Say where he was going when he left?”

  Ferris shook his head. “He said he’d phone me the next day.”

  “Did he phone you the next day?”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve known him all his life?”

  “Not exactly, but he worked for me fifteen or sixteen years ago when I had a carnival company—Great Eastern and Western Combined Shows—with a partner for a while and then by myself. I always liked the kid.”

  “How long before Thursday since you’d seen him?”

  “Lord knows,” Ferris replied. “I’d lost track of him for years. Then, Wednesday, out of a clear sky, that book came, with no address or anything, just that stuff written in the front, and the next morning he called me up. I was tickled to death to know he was still alive and doing something with himself. So he came over that afternoon and we put in about nine hours talking about old times.”

  “Tell you much about what he’d been doing since then?”

  “Just that he’d been knocking around, doing one thing and another, taking the breaks as they came. He didn’t complain much; I had to make him take the hundred and fifty.”

  Spade stood up. “Thanks ever so much, Mr. Ferris. I—”

  Ferris interrupted him. “Not at all, and if there’s anything I can do, call on me.”

  Spade looked at his watch. “Can I phone my office?”

  “Certainly; there’s a phone in the next room, to the right.”

  Spade said, “Thanks,” and went out. When he returned he was rolling a cigarette. His face was wooden.

  “Any news?” Ferris asked.

  “Yes. Colyer’s called the job off. He says Haven’s body’s been found in some bushes on the other side of San Jose, with three bullets in it.” He smiled, adding mildly, “He told me he might be able to find out something through his connections.”

  —

  MORNING SUNSHINE, coming through the curtains that screened Spade’s office windows, put two fat, yellow rectangles on the floor and gave everything in the room a yellow tint.

  He sat at his desk, staring meditatively at a newspaper. He did not look up when Effie Perine came in from the outer office.

  She said, “Mrs. Haven is here.”

  He raised his head then and said, “That’s better. Push her in.”

  Mrs. Haven came in quickly. Her face was white and she was shivering in spite of her fur coat. She came straight to Spade and asked, “Did Gene kill him?”

  Spade said, “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve got to know,” she cried.

  Spade took her hands. “Here, sit down.” He led her to a chair. He asked, “Colyer tell you he’d called the job off?”

  She stared at him in amazement. “He what?”

  “He left word here last night that your husband had been found and he wouldn’t need me any more.”

  She hung her head and her words were barely audible. “Then he did.”

  Spade shrugged. “Maybe only an innocent man could’ve afforded to call it off then, or maybe he was guilty but had brains enough and nerve enough to—”

  She wa
s not listening to him. She was leaning toward him, speaking earnestly, “But, Mr. Spade, you’re not going to drop it like that? You’re not going to let him stop now?”

  While she was speaking his telephone bell rang. He said, “Excuse me,” and picked up the receiver. “Yes?…Uh-huh…. So?” He pursed his lips. “I’ll let you know.” He pushed the telephone aside slowly and faced Mrs. Haven again. “Colyer’s outside.”

  “Does he know I’m here?” she asked quickly.

  “Couldn’t say.” He stood up, pretending he was not watching her closely. “Do you care?”

  She pinched her lower lip between her teeth, said, “No,” hesitantly.

  “Fine. I’ll have him in.”

  She raised a hand as if in protest, then let it drop, and her white face was composed. “Whatever you want,” she said.

  Spade opened the door, said, “Hello, Colyer. Come on in. We were just talking about you.”

  Colyer nodded, and came into the office holding his Malacca stick in one hand, his hat in the other. “How are you this morning, Julia? You ought to’ve phoned me. I’d’ve driven you back to town.”

  “I—I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Colyer looked at her for a moment longer, then shifted the focus of his expressionless green eyes to Spade’s face. “Well, have you been able to convince her I didn’t do it?”

  “We hadn’t got around to that,” Spade said. “I was just trying to find out how much reason there was for suspecting you. Sit down.”

  Colyer sat down somewhat carefully, asked, “And?”

  “And then you arrived.”

  Colyer nodded gravely. “All right, Spade,” he said; “you’re hired again to prove to Mrs. Haven that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Gene,” she exclaimed in a choked voice, and held her hands out toward him appealingly. “I don’t think you did—I don’t want to think you did—but I’m so afraid.” She put her hands to her face and began to cry.

  Colyer went over to the woman. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ll kick it out together.”

  Spade went into the outer office, shutting the door behind him.

  Effie Perine stopped typing a letter.

  He grinned at her, said, “Somebody ought to write a book about people some time—they’re peculiar,” and went over to the water cooler. “You’ve got Wally Kellogg’s number. Call him up and ask him where I can find Tom Minera.”

  He returned to the inner office.

  Mrs. Haven had stopped crying. She said, “I’m sorry.”

  Spade said, “It’s all right.” He looked sidewise at Colyer. “I still got my job?”

  “Yes.” Colyer cleared his throat. “But if there’s nothing special right now, I’d better take Mrs. Haven home.”

  “Okay, but there’s one thing: according to the Chronicle you identified him. How come you were down there?”

  “I went down when I heard they’d found a body,” Colyer replied deliberately. “I told you I had connections.”

  Spade said, “All right; be seeing you,” and opened the door for them.

  When the corridor door closed behind them, Effie Perine said, “Minera’s at the Buxton on Army Street.”

  Spade said, “Thanks.” He went into the inner office to get his hat. On his way out he said, “If I’m not back in a couple of months tell them to look for my body there.”

  —

  SPADE WALKED DOWN a shabby corridor to a battered green door marked 411. The murmur of voices came through the door, but no words could be distinguished. He stopped listening and knocked.

  An obviously disguised male voice asked, “What is it?”

  “I want to see Tom. This is Sam Spade.”

  A pause, then: “Tom ain’t here.”

  Spade put a hand on the knob and shook the frail door. “Come on, open up,” he growled.

  Presently the door was opened by a thin, dark man of twenty-five or -six who tried to make his beady dark eyes guileless while saying, “I didn’t think it was your voice at first.” The slackness of his mouth made his chin seem even smaller than it was. His green-striped shirt, open at the neck, was not clean. His gray pants were carefully pressed.

  “You’ve got to be careful these days,” Spade said solemnly, and went through the doorway into a room where two men were trying to seem uninterested in his arrival.

  One of them leaned against the window-sill filing his fingernails. The other was tilted back in a chair with his feet on the edge of a table and a newspaper spread between his hands. They glanced at Spade in unison and went on with their occupations.

  Spade said cheerfully, “Always glad to meet any friends of Tom Minera’s.”

  Minera finished shutting the door and said awkwardly, “Uh—yes—Mr. Spade, meet Mr. Conrad and Mr. James.”

  Conrad, the man at the window, made a vaguely polite gesture with the nail file in his hand. He was a few years older than Minera, of average height, sturdily built, with a thick-featured, dull-eyed face.

  James lowered his paper for an instant to look coolly, appraisingly, at Spade and say, “How’r’ye, brother?” Then he returned to his reading. He was as sturdily built as Conrad, but taller, and his face had a shrewdness the other’s lacked.

  “Ah,” Spade said, “and friends of the late Eli Haven.”

  The man at the window jabbed a finger with his nail file, and cursed it bitterly. Minera moistened his lips, and then spoke rapidly, with a whining note in his voice. “But on the level, Spade, we hadn’t none of us seen him for a week.”

  Spade seemed mildly amused by the dark man’s manner.

  “What do you think he was killed for?”

  “All I know is what the paper says: his pockets was all turned inside out and there wasn’t much as a match on him.” He drew down the ends of his mouth. “But far as I know he didn’t have no dough. He didn’t have none Tuesday night.”

  Spade, speaking softly, said, “I hear he got some Thursday night.”

  Minera, behind Spade, caught his breath audibly.

  James said, “I guess you ought to know. I don’t.”

  “He ever work with you boys?”

  James slowly put aside his newspaper and took his feet off the table. His interest in Spade’s question seemed great enough, but almost impersonal. “Now, what do you mean by that?”

  Spade pretended surprise, “But you boys must work at something?”

  Minera came around to Spade’s side. “Aw, listen, Spade,” he said. “This guy Haven was just a guy we knew. We didn’t have nothing to do with rubbing him out; we don’t know nothing about it. You know we—”

  Three deliberate knocks sounded at the door.

  Minera and Conrad looked at James, who nodded, but by then Spade, moving swiftly, had reached the door and was opening it.

  Roger Ferris was there.

  Spade blinked at Ferris, Ferris at Spade. Then Ferris put out his hand and said, “I am glad to see you.”

  “Come on in,” Spade said.

  “Look at this, Mr. Spade.” Ferris’s hand trembled as he took a slightly soiled envelope from his pocket.

  Ferris’s name and address were typewritten on the envelope. There was no postage stamp on it. Spade took out the enclosure, a narrow slip of cheap white paper, and unfolded it. On it was typewritten:

  You had better come to Room 411 Buxton Hotel on Army St at 5 pm this afternoon on account of Thursday night.

  There was no signature.

  Spade said, “It’s a long time before five o’clock.”

  “It is,” Ferris agreed with emphasis. “I came as soon as I got that. It was Thursday night Eli was at my house.”

  Minera was jostling Spade, asking, “What is all this?”

  Spade held the note up for the dark man to read. He read it and yelled, “Honest, Spade, I don’t know nothing about that letter.”

  “Does anybody?” Spade asked.

  Conrad said, “No,” hastily.

  James
said, “What letter?”

  Spade looked dreamily at Ferris for a moment, then said, as if speaking to himself, “Of course, Haven was trying to shake you down.”

  Ferris’s face reddened. “What?”

  “Shakedown,” Spade repeated patiently; “money, blackmail.”

  “Look here, Spade,” Ferris said earnestly; “you don’t really believe what you said? What would he have to blackmail me on?”

  “ ‘To good old Buck,’ ”—Spade quoted the dead poet’s inscription—” ‘who knew his colored lights, in memory of them there days.’ ” He looked somberly at Ferris from beneath slightly raised brows. “What colored lights? What’s the circus and carnival slang term for kicking a guy off a train while it’s going? Red-lighting. Sure, that’s it—red lights. Who’d you red-light, Ferris, that Haven knew about?”

  Minera went over to a chair, sat down, put his elbows on his knees, his head between his hands, and stared blankly at the floor. Conrad was breathing as if he had been running.

  Spade addressed Ferris, “Well?”

  Ferris wiped his face with a handkerchief, put the handkerchief in his pocket, and said simply, “It was a shakedown.”

  “And you killed him.”

  Ferris’s blue eyes, looking into Spade’s yellow-gray ones, were clear and steady, as was his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I swear I did not. Let me tell you what happened. He sent me the book, as I told you, and I knew right away what that joke he wrote in the front meant. So the next day, when he phoned me and said he was coming over to talk over old times and to try to borrow some money for old times’ sake, I knew what he meant again, and I went down to the bank and drew out ten thousand dollars. You can check that up. It’s the Seaman’s National.”

  “I will,” Spade said.

  “As it turned out, I didn’t need that much. He wasn’t very big-time, and I talked him into taking five thousand. I put the other five back in the bank next day. You can check that up.”

  “I will,” Spade said.

  “I told him I wasn’t going to stand for any more taps, this five thousand was the first and the last. I made him sign a paper saying he’d helped in the—what I’d done—and he signed it. He left some time around midnight, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.”

  Spade tapped the envelope that Ferris had given him. “And how about this note?”