[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

He said, "Do as you damned please," put his hat on, flinched, took it off, and went out
carrying it in his hand.
An hour and a half later, at twenty minutes past five, Spade returned. He was cheerful. He
came in asking: "What makes you so hard to get along with, sweetheart?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you." He put a finger on the tip of Effie Perine's nose and flattened it. He put his
hands under her elbows, lifted her straight up, and kissed her chin. He set her down on the floor
again and asked: "Anything doing while I was gone?"
"Luke--what's his name?--at the Belvedere called up to tell you Cairo has returned. That
was about half an hour ago."
Spade snapped his mouth shut, turned with a long step, and started for the door.
"Did you find her?" the girl called.
"Tell you about it when I'm back," he replied without pausing and hurried out.
A taxicab brought Spade to the Belvedere within ten minutes of his departure from his
office. He found Luke in the lobby. The hotel-detective came grinning and shaking his head to
meet Spade. "Fifteen minutes late," he said. "Your bird has fluttered."
Spade cursed his luck.
"Checked out--gone bag and baggage," Luke said. He took a battered memorandum-book
from a vest-pocket, licked his thumb, thumbed pages, and held the book out open to Spade.
"There's the number of the taxi that hauled him. I got that much for you."
"Thanks." Spade copied the number on the back of an envelope. "Any forwarding
address?"
"No. He just come in carrying a big suitcase and went upstairs and packed and come
down with his stuff and paid his bill and got a taxi and went without anybody being able to hear
what he told the driver."
"How about his trunk?"
Luke's lower lip sagged. "By God," he said, "I forgot that! Come on."
They went up to Cairo's room. The trunk was there. It was closed, but not locked. They
raised the lid. The trunk was empty. Luke said: "What do you know about that!"
Spade did not say anything.
Spade went back to his office. Effie Perine looked up at him, inquisitively.
"Missed him," Spade grumbled and passed into his private room.
She followed him in. He sat in his chair and began to roll a cigarette. She sat on the desk
in front of him and put her toes on a corner of his chair-seat.
"What about Miss O'Shaughnessy?" she demanded.
"I missed her too," he replied, "but she had been there."
"On the La Paloma?"
"The La is a lousy combination," he said.
"Stop it. Be nice, Sam. Tell me."
He set fire to his cigarette, pocketed his lighter, patted her shins, and said: "Yes, La
Paloma. She got down there at a little after noon yesterday." He pulled his brows down. "That
means she went straight there after leaving the cab at the Ferry Building. It's only a few piers
away. The Captain wasn't aboard. His name's Jacobi and she asked for him by name. He was
uptown on business. That would mean he didn't expect her, or not at that time anyway. She
waited there till he came back at four o'clock. They spent the time from then till meal-time in his
cabin and she ate with him."
He inhaled and exhaled smoke, turned his head aside to spit a yellow tobacco-flake off
his lip, and went on: "After the meal Captain Jacobi had three more visitors. One of them was
Gutman and one was Cairo and one was the kid who delivered Gutman's message to you
yesterday. Those three came together while Brigid was there and the five of them did a lot of
talking in the Captain's cabin. It's hard to get anything out of the crew, but they had a row and
somewhere around eleven o'clock that night a gun went off there, in the Captain's cabin. The
watchman beat it down there, but the Captain met him outside and told him everything was all
right. There's a fresh bullet-hole in one corner of the cabin, up high enough to make it likely that
the bullet didn't go through anybody to get there. As far as I could learn there was only the one
shot. But as far as I could learn wasn't very far."
He scowled and inhaled smoke again. "Well, they left around midnight--the Captain and
his four visitors all together--and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from
the watchman. I haven't been able to get hold of the Custom-House-men who were on duty there
then. That's all of it. The Captain hasn't been back since. He didn't keep a date he had this noon
with some shipping-agents, and they haven't found him to tell him about the fire."
"And the fire?" she asked.
Spade shrugged. "I don't know. It was discovered in the hold, aft--in the rear
basement--late this morning. The chances are it got started some time yesterday. They got it out
all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody liked to talk about it much while the Captain's
away. It's the--"
The corridor-door opened. Spade shut his mouth. Effie Perine jumped down from the
desk, but a man opened the connecting door before she could reach it.
"Where's Spade?" the man asked.
His voice brought Spade up erect and alert in his chair. It was a voice harsh and rasping
with agony and with the strain of keeping two words from being smothered by the liquid
bubbling that ran under and behind them.
Effie Perine, frightened, stepped out of the man's way.
He stood in the doorway with his soft hat crushed between his head and the top of the
door-frame: he was nearly seven feet tall. A black overcoat cut long and straight and like a
sheath, buttoned from throat to knees, exaggerated his leanness. His shoulders stuck out, high,
thin, angular. His bony face--weather-coarsened, age-lined--was the color of wet sand and was
wet with sweat on cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and bloodshot and mad above lower lids
that hung down to show' pink inner membrane. Held tight against the left side of his chest by a
black-sleeved arm that ended in a yellowish claw was a brown-paper-wrapped parcel bound with
thin rope--an ellipsoid somewhat larger than an American football.
The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade. He
said, "You know--" and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever
else he said. He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself stiffly
straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls.
Spade, wooden-faced and nimble, sprang from his chair and caught the falling man.
When Spade caught him the man's mouth opened and a little blood spurted out, and the
brown-wrapped parcel dropped from the man's hands and rolled across the floor until a foot of
the desk stopped it. Then the man's knees bent and he bent at the waist and his thin body became
limber inside the sheath-like overcoat, sagging in Spade's arms so that Spade could not hold it up
from the floor.
Spade lowered the man carefully until he lay on the floor on his left side. The man's
eyes--dark and bloodshot, but not now mad--were wide open and still. His mouth was open as
when blood had spurted from it, but no more blood came from it, and all his long body was as
still as the floor it lay on.
Spade said: "Lock the door."
While Effie Perine, her teeth chattering, fumbled with the corridor-door's lock Spade
knelt beside the thin man, turned him over on his back, and ran a hand down inside his overcoat.
When he withdrew the hand presently it came out smeared with blood. The sight of his bloody
hand brought not the least nor briefest of changes to Spade's face. Holding that hand up where it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]