Nightmare Town

And then he had stumbled upon the Yusts’ cache. He had known, as all Dime knew, that the Kootenai River – winding down from British Columbia to spend most of its four hundred miles in Montana and Idaho before returning to the province of its birth to join the great Columbia – was the moving road along which came much liquor, to be relayed to Spokane, not far away. That was a matter of common knowledge, and Owen Sack of all men had no desire for more particular knowledge of the river traffic.

Why, then, had his luck sent him blundering upon the place where that liquor was concealed until ready for its overland journey? And at a time when the Yusts were there to witness his discovery? And then, as if that were not enough in itself, the Prohibition enforcement officers had swooped down on that hiding-place within a week.

Now the Yusts suspected him of having informed; it was but a matter of time before their stupid brains would be convinced of that fact; then they would strike – with a gun. A pellet of metal would drive through Owen Sack’s tissues as one had driven through Cardwell’s…

He got up from the chair and set about packing such of his belongings as he intended taking with him – to where? It didn’t matter. One place was like another – a little of peace and comfort, and then the threat of another gun, to send him elsewhere. Baltimore, New South Wales, north Queensland, Brazil, California, here – thirty years of it! He was old now and his legs were stiff for flight, but running had become an integral part of him.

He packed a little breathlessly, his fingers fumbling clumsily in their haste.

Dusk was thickening in the valley of the Kootenai when Owen Sack, bent beneath the blanketed pack across his shoulders, tramped over the bridge into Dime. He had remained in his cabin until the last minute, so that he might catch the stage which would carry him to the railroad just before it left, avoiding farewells or embarrassing meetings. He hurried now.

But, again, luck ran against him.

As he turned the corner of the New Dime Hotel toward the stage terminus – two doors beyond Henny Upshaw’s soft-drink parlour and poolroom – he spied Rip Yust coming down the street toward him. Yust’s face, he could see, was red and swollen, and Yust’s walk was a swagger. Yust was drunk.

Owen Sack halted in the middle of the sidewalk, and realised immediately that that was precisely the wrong thing to do. Safety lay – if safety lay anywhere now – in going on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, cursing himself for this open display of his desire to avoid the other, but nevertheless unable to keep his legs from hurrying him across the dusty roadway. Perhaps, he thought, Rip Yust’s whisky-clouded eyes would not see him hurrying toward the stage depot with a pack on his back. But even while the hope rose in him he knew it for a futile, childish one.

Rip Yust did see him, and came to the curb on his own side of the street, to bellow:

“Hey, you! Where you going?”

Owen Sack became motionless, a frightened statue. Fear froze his mind – fear and thoughts of Cardwell.

Yust grinned stupidly across the street, and repeated:

“Where you going?”

Owen Sack tried to answer, to say something – safety seemed to lie in words – but, though he did achieve a sound, it was inarticulate, and would have told the other nothing, even if it had travelled more than ten feet from the little man’s throat.

Yust laughed boomingly. He was apparently in high good humour.

“Now, you mind what I told you this afternoon,” he roared, wagging a thick forefinger at Owen Sack. “If I find that you done it -“

The thick forefinger flashed back to tap the left breast of his coat.

Owen Sack screamed at the suddenness of the gesture – a thin, shrill scream of terror, which struck amusingly upon the big man’s drunken fancy.

Laughter boomed out of his throat again, and his gun came into his hand. His brother’s arrest and Owen Sack’s supposed part in that arrest were, for the time, forgotten in his enjoyment of the little man’s ridiculous fright.

With the sight of the gun, Owen Sack’s last shred of sanity departed. Terror had him fast. He tried to plead, but his mouth could not frame the words. He tried to raise both his hands high above his head in the universal posture of submission, a posture that had saved him many times before. But the strap holding his pack hampered him. He tried to loosen the strap, to fling it off.

To the alcohol-muddled eyes and brain of the man across the street Owen Sack’s right hand was trying to get beneath his coat on the left side. Rip Yust could read but one meaning into that motion – the little man was going for his gun.

The weapon in Yust’s hand spat flame!

Owen Sack sobbed. Something struck him heavily on one side. He fell, sat down on the sidewalk, his eyes wide and questioning and fixed upon the smoking gun across the street.

Somebody, he found, was bending over him. It was Henny Upshaw, in front of whose establishment he had fallen. Owen Sack’s eyes went back to the man on the opposite curb, who, cold sober now, his face granite, stood awaiting developments, the gun still in his hand.

Owen Sack didn’t know whether to get up, to remain still, or to lie down. Upshaw had struck him aside in time to save him from the first bullet; but suppose the big man fired again?

“Where’d he get you?” Upshaw was asking.

“What’s that?”

“Now take it easy,” Upshaw advised. “You’ll be all right! I’ll get one of the boys to help me with you.”

Owen Sack’s fingers wound into one of Upshaw’s sleeves.

“Wh – what happened?” he asked.

“Rip shot you, but you’ll be all right. Just lay -“

Owen Sack released Upshaw’s sleeve, and his hands went feeling about his body, exploring. One of them came away red and sticky from his right side, and that side – where he had felt the blow that had taken him off his feet – was warm and numb.

“Did he shoot me?” he demanded in an excited screech.

“Sure, but you’re all right,” Upshaw soothed him, and beckoned to the men who were coming slowly into the street, drawn forward by their curiosity, but retarded in their approach by the sight of Yust, who still stood, gun in hand, waiting to see what happened next.

“My God!” Owen Sack gasped in utter bewilderment. “And it ain’t no worse than that!”

He bounded to his feet – his pack sliding off – eluded the hands that grasped at him, and ran for the door of Upshaw’s place. On a shelf beneath the cash register he found Upshaw’s black automatic, and, holding it stiffly in front of him at arm’s length, turned back to the street.

His china-blue eyes were wide with wonder, and from out of his grinning mouth issued a sort of chant:

“All these years I been running,

And it ain’t no worse than that!

All these years I been running,

And it ain’t no worse than that!”

Rip Yust, crossing the roadway now, was in the middle when Owen Sack popped out of Upshaw’s door.

The onlookers scattered. Rip’s revolver swung up, and roared. A spray of Owen Sack’s straw-coloured hair whisked back.

He giggled, and fired three times, rapidly. None of the bullets hit the big man. Owen Sack felt something burn his left arm. He fired again, and missed.

“I got to get closer,” he told himself aloud.

He walked across the sidewalk – the automatic held stiffly before him – stepped down into the roadway, and began to stride toward where pencils of fire sprang to meet him from Yust’s gun.

And as the little man strode he chanted his silly chant, and fired, fired, fired… Once something tugged at one of his shoulders, and once at his arm – above where he had felt the burn – but he did not even wonder what it was.

When he was within ten feet of Rip Yust, that man turned as if to walk away, took a step, his big body curved suddenly in a grotesque arc, and he slid down into the sand of the roadway.

Owen Sack found that the weapon in his own hand was empty, had been empty for some time. He turned around. Dimly he made out the broad doorway of Upshaw’s place. The ground clung to his feet, trying to pull him down, to hold him back, but he gained the doorway, gained the cash register, found the shelf, and returned the automatic to it.

Voices were speaking to him, arms were around him. He ignored the voices, shook off the arms, reached the street again. More hands to be shaken off. But the air lent him strength. He was indoors again, leaning over the firearm showcase in Jeff Hamline’s store.

“I want the two biggest handguns you got, Jeff, and a mess of cartridges. Fix ‘em up for me and I’ll be back to get ‘em in a little while.”

He knew that Jeff answered him, but he could not separate Jeff’s words from the roaring in his head.

The warmer air of the street once more. The ankle-deep dust of the roadway pulling at his feet. The opposite sidewalk. Doc Johnstone’s door. Somebody helping him up the narrow stairs. A couch or table under him; he could see and hear better now that he was lying down.

“Fix me up in a hurry, Doc! I got a lot of things to tend to.”

The doctor’s smooth professional voice:

“You’ve nothing to attend to for a while except taking care of yourself.”

“I got to travel a lot, Doc. Hurry!”

“You’re all right, Sack. There’s no need of your going away. I saw Yust down you first from my window, and half a dozen others saw it. Self-defence if there ever was a case of it!”

“’Tain’t that!” A nice man was Doc, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. “I got a lot of places to go to, a lot of men I got to see.”

“Certainly. Certainly. Just as soon as you like.”

“You don’t understand, Doc!” The doc was talking to him like he was a child to be humoured, or a drunk. “My God, Doc! I got to back-track my whole life, and I ain’t young no more. There’s men I got to find in Baltimore, and Australia, and Brazil, and California, and God knows where – all. And some of ‘em will take a heap of finding. I got to do a lot of shootin’. I ain’t young no more, and it’s a mighty big job. I got to get going! You got to hurry me up, Doc! You got to…”

Owen Sack’s voice thickened to a mumble, to a murmur, and subsided.

TOM, DICK, OR HARRY

I don’t know whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head – naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the colour and texture of Manila paper – propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.

Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.

I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.

“I want a list of the stuff yon lost,” I told Toplin, “but first -“

“Stuff?” Toplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”

Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.

“Now, Frank, don’t get excited,” she soothed him.

Phyllis Toplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.

The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.

“Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”

“So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.

“Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”

That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt – always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.

“Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”

“Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewellery – the valuable pieces – home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang.”

“What time was this?”

“Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda” – nodding at the blond maid – “came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He -“

“Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”

“Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my – my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and -“

“When I saw him and the revolver in his hand” – Toplin took the story away from his servant – “it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again – no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed – he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word – just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”

“How bad did he bang your leg?”

“Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”

“Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.

“No, sir.”

“Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”

None of them had.

“What happened after he locked you in the closet?”

“Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”

“Who’s McBirney?”

“The janitor.”

“How’d he happen along with a policeman?”

“He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there – keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver – until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and – and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”

“How long were you in the closet?”

“Ten minutes – maybe fifteen.”

“What sort of looking man was the robber?”

“Short and thin and -“

“How short?”

“About your height, or maybe shorter.”

“About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?”

“Oh, I don’t know – maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny.”

“How old?”

“Not more than twenty-two or -three.”

“Oh, Papa,” Phyllis objected, “he was thirty, or near it!”

“What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Toplin.

“Twenty-five, I’d say.”

“And you?” to the maid.

“I don’t know exactly, sir, but he wasn’t very old.”

“Light or dark?”

“He was light,” Toplin said. “He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish.”

“More of a light brown,” Phyllis amended.

“Maybe, but it was light.”

“What colour eyes?”

“I don’t know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow.”

“How would you describe the part of his face you could see?”

“Pale, and kind of weak-looking – small chin. But you couldn’t see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down.”

“How was he dressed?”

“A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves – silk ones.”

“Shabby or neat?”

“Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled.”

“What sort of gun?”

Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.

“Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic a thirty-eight.”

“Would you folks know him if you saw him again?”

“Yes,” they agreed.

I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.

“I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when.” I got the list half an hour later.

“Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth’s apartment?” I asked.

“702, two floors above.”

I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.

“Miss Eveleth?”

“Yes.”

“I’m from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewellery, and I’m looking for information about the robbery.”

She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.

“This is some of my information.”

“How did it happen?”

“A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, ‘Inside, kid!’

“I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.

“’Where’s the fire escape?’ he asked.

“The fire escape doesn’t come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn’t find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn’t like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But – well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I’m concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn’t seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn’t find him here.”

“How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?”

“Oh, it couldn’t have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time.”

“What did Mr. Robber look like?”

“Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days’ growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue clothes, with black cloth gloves.”

“How old?”

“Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face.”

“Notice his eyes?”

“Blue; his hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap, was very light yellow, almost white.”

“What sort of voice?”

“Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on.”

“Know him if you’d see him again?”

“Yes, indeed!” She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. “My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!”

From Miss Eveleth’s apartment I went down to the office on the first floor, where I found McBirney, the janitor, and his wife, who managed the apartment building. She was a scrawny little woman with the angular mouth and nose of a nagger; he was big, broad-shouldered, with sandy hair and moustache, good-humoured, shiftless red face, and genial eyes of a pale and watery blue.

He drawled out what he knew of the looting.

“I was fixin’ a spigot on the fourth floor when I heard the shot. I went up to see what was the matter, an’ just as I got far enough up the front stairs to see the Toplins’ door, the fella came out. We seen each other at the same time, an’ he aims his gun at me. There’s a lot o’ things I might of done, but what I did do was to duck down an’ get my head out o’ range. I heard him run upstairs, an’ I got up just in time to see him make the turn between the fifth and sixth floors.

“I didn’t go after him. I didn’t have a gun or nothin’, an’ I figured we had him cooped. A man could get out o’ this buildin’ to the roof of the next from the fourth floor, an’ maybe from the fifth, but not from any above that; an’ the Toplins’ apartment is on the fifth. I figured we had this fella. I could stand in front of the elevator an’ watch both the front an’ back stairs; an’ I rang for the elevator, an’ told Ambrose, the elevator boy, to give the alarm an’ run outside an’ keep his eye on the fire escape until the police came.

“The missus came up with my gun in a minute or two, an’ told me that Martinez – Ambrose’s brother, who takes care of the switchboard an’ the front door – was callin’ the police. I could see both stairs plain, an’ the fella didn’t come down them; an’ it wasn’t more’n a few minutes before the police – a whole pack of ‘em – came from the Richmond Station. Then we let the Toplins out of the closet where they were, an’ started to search the buildin’. An’ then Miss Eveleth came runnin’ down the stairs, her face an’ dress all bloody, an’ told about him bein’ in her apartment; so we were pretty sure we’d land him. But we didn’t. We searched every apartment in the buildin’, but didn’t find hide nor hair of him.”

“Of course you didn’t!” Mrs. McBirney said unpleasantly. “But if you had -“

“I know,” the janitor said with the indulgent air of one who has learned to take his pannings as an ordinary part of married life, “if I’d been a hero an’ grabbed him, an’ got myself all mussed up. Well, I ain’t foolish like old man Toplin, gettin’ himself plugged in the foot, or Blanche Eveleth, gettin’ her nose busted. I’m a sensible man that knows when he’s licked – an’ I ain’t jumpin’ at no guns!”

“No! You’re not doing anything that -“

This Mr. and Mrs. stuff wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I cut in with a question to the woman. “Who is the newest tenant you have?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jerald – they came the day before yesterday.”

“What apartment?”

“704 – next door to Miss Eveleth.”

“Who are these Jeralds?”

“They come from Boston. He told me he came out here to open a branch of a manufacturing company. He’s a man of at least fifty, thin and dyspeptic – looking.”

“Just him and his wife?”

“Yes. She’s poorly too – been in a sanatorium for a year or two.”

“Who’s the next newest tenant?”

“Mr. Heaton, in 535. He’s been here a couple of weeks, but he’s down in Los Angeles right now. He went away three days ago and said he would be gone for ten or twelve days.”

“What does he look like and what does he do?”

“He’s with a theatrical agency and he’s kind of fat and red-faced.”

“Who’s the next newest?”

“Miss Eveleth. She’s been here about a month.”

“And the next?”

“The Wageners in 923. They’ve been here going on two months.”

“What are they?”

“He’s a retired real-estate agent. The others are his wife and son Jack – a boy of maybe nineteen. I see him with Phyllis Toplin a lot.”

“How long have the Toplins been here?”

“It’ll be two years next month.”

I turned from Mrs. McBirney to her husband.

“Did the police search all these people’s apartments?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We went into every room, every alcove, an’ every closet from cellar to roof.”

“Did you get a good look at the robber?”

“Yeah. There’s a light in the hall outside of the Toplins’ door, an’ it was shinin’ full on his face when I saw him.”

“Could he have been one of your tenants?”

“No, he couldn’t.”

“Know him if you saw him again?”

“You bet.”

“What did he look like?”

“A little runt, a light-complected youngster of twenty-three or -four in an old blue suit.”

“Can I get hold of Ambrose and Martinez – the elevator and door boys who were on duty last night – now?”

The janitor looked at his watch.

“Yeah. They ought to be on the job now. They come on at two.”

I went out into the lobby and found them together, matching nickels.

They were brothers, slim, bright-eyed Filipino boys. They didn’t add much to my dope.

Ambrose had come down to the lobby and told his brother to call the police as soon as McBirney had given him his orders, and then he had to beat it out the back door to take a plant on the fire escapes. The fire escapes ran down the back and one side wall. By standing a little off from the corner of those walls, the Filipino had been able to keep his eyes on both of them, as well as on the back door.

There was plenty of illumination, he said, and he could see both fire escapes all the way to the roof, and he had seen nobody on them.

Martinez had given the police a rap on the phone and had then watched the front door and the foot of the front stairs. He had seen nothing.

I had just finished questioning the Filipinos when the street door opened and two men came in. I knew one of them: Bill Garren, a police detective on the Pawnshop Detail. The other was a small blond youth all flossy in pleated pants, short, square-shouldered coat, and patent-leather shoes with fawn spats to match his hat and gloves. His face wore a sullen pout. He didn’t seem to like being with Garren.

“What are you up to around here?” the detective hailed me.

“The Toplin doings for the insurance company,” I explained.

“Getting anywhere?” he wanted to know.

“About ready to make a pinch,” I said, not altogether in earnest and not altogether joking.

“The more the merrier,” he grinned. “I’ve already made mine,” nodding at the dressy youth. “Come on upstairs with us.”

The three of us got into the elevator and Ambrose carried us to the fifth floor. Before pressing the Toplin bell, Garren gave me what he had.

“This lad tried to soak a ring in a Third Street shop a little while ago – an emerald and diamond ring that looks like one of the Toplin lot. He’s doing the clam now; he hasn’t said a word – yet. I’m going to show him to these people; then I’m going to take him down to the Hall of Justice and get words out of him – words that fit together in nice sentences and everything!”

The prisoner looked sullenly at the floor and paid no attention to this threat. Garren rang the bell and the maid Hilda opened the door. Her eyes widened when she saw the dressy boy, but she didn’t say anything as she led us into the sitting-room, where Mrs. Toplin and her daughter were. They looked up at us.

“Hello, Jack!” Phyllis greeted the prisoner.

“’Lo, Phyl,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

“Among friends, huh? Well, what’s the answer?” Garren demanded of the girl.

She put her chin in the air and although her face turned red, she looked haughtily at the police detective.

“Would you mind removing your hat?” she asked.

Bill isn’t a bad bimbo, but he hasn’t any meekness. He answered her by tilting his hat over one eye and turning to her mother.

“Ever see this lad before?”

“Why, certainly!” Mrs. Toplin exclaimed. “That’s Mr. Wagener who lives upstairs.”

“Well,” said Bill, “Mr. Wagener was picked up in a hock shop trying to get rid of this ring.” He fished a gaudy green and white ring from his pocket. “Know it?”

“Certainly!” Mrs. Toplin said, looking at the ring. “It belongs to Phyllis, and the robber -“ Her mouth dropped open as she began to understand. “How could Mr. Wagener -?”

“Yes, how?” Bill repeated.

The girl stepped between Garren and me, turning her back on him to face me. “I can explain everything,” she announced.

That sounded too much like a movie subtitle to be very promising, but –

“Go ahead,” I encouraged her.

“I found that ring in the passageway near the front door after the excitement was over. The robber must have dropped it. I didn’t say anything to Papa and Mamma about it, because I thought nobody would ever know the difference, and it was insured, so I thought I might as well sell it and be in that much money. I asked Jack last night if he could sell it for me and he said he knew just how to go about it. He didn’t have anything to do with it outside of that, but I did think he’d have sense enough not to try to pawn it right away!”

She looked scornfully at her accomplice.

“See what you’ve done!” she accused him.

He fidgeted and pouted at his feet.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bill Garren said sourly. “That’s a nifty! Did you ever hear the one about the two Irishmen that got in the Y.W.C.A. by mistake?”

She didn’t say whether she had heard it or not.

“Mrs. Toplin,” I asked, “making allowances for the different clothes and the unshaven face, could this lad have been the robber?”

She shook her head with emphasis. “No! He could not!”

“Set your prize down, Bill,” I suggested, “and let’s go over in a corner and whisper things at each other.”

“Right.”

He dragged a heavy chair to the centre of the floor, sat Wagener on it, anchored him there with handcuffs – not exactly necessary, but Bill was grouchy at not getting his prisoner identified as the robber – and then he and I stepped out into the passageway. We could keep an eye on the sitting-room from there without having our low-voiced conversation overheard.

“This is simple,” I whispered into his big red ear. “There are only five ways to figure the lay. First: Wagener stole the stuff for the Toplins. Second: the Toplins framed the robbery themselves and got Wagener to peddle it. Third: Wagener and the girl engineered the deal without the old folks being in on it. Fourth: Wagener pulled it on his own hook and the girl is covering him up. Fifth: she told us the truth. None of them explains why your little playmate should have been dumb enough to flash the ring downtown this morning, but that can’t be explained by any system. Which of the five do you favour?”

“I like ‘em all,” he grumbled. “But what I like most is that I’ve got this baby right – got him trying to pass a hot ring. That suits me fine. You do the guessing. I don’t ask for any more than I’ve got.”

“It doesn’t irritate me any either,” I agreed. “The way it stands the insurance company can welsh on the policies – but I’d like to smoke it out a little further, far enough to put away anybody who has been trying to run a hooligan on the North American. We’ll clean up all we can on this kid, stow him in the can, and then see what further damage we can do.”

“All right,” Garren said. “Suppose you get hold of the janitor and that Eveleth woman while I’m showing the boy to old man Toplin and getting the maid’s opinion.”

I nodded and went out into the corridor, leaving the door unlocked behind me. I took the elevator to the seventh floor and told Ambrose to get hold of McBirney and send him to the Toplins’ apartment. Then I rang Blanche Eveleth’s bell.

“Can you come downstairs for a minute or two?” I asked her. “We’ve a prize who might be your friend of last night.”

“Will I?” She started toward the stairs with me. “And if he’s the right one, can I pay him back for my bartered beauty?”

“You can,” I promised. “Go as far as you like, so you don’t maul him too badly to stand trial.”

I took her into the Toplins’ apartment without ringing the bell, and found everybody in Frank Toplin’s bedroom. A look at Garren’s glum face told me that neither the old man nor the maid had given him a nod on the prisoner.

I put the finger on Jack Wagener. Disappointment came into Blanche Eveleth’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” she said. “That’s not he.”

Garren scowled at her. It was a pipe that if the Toplins were tied up with young Wagener, they wouldn’t identify him as the robber. Bill had been counting on that identification coming from the two outsiders – Blanche Eveleth and the janitor – and now one of them had flopped.

The other one rang the bell just then and the maid brought him in.

I pointed at Jack Wagener, who stood beside Garren staring sullenly at the floor.

“Know him, McBirney?”

“Yeah, Mr. Wagener’s son, Jack.”

“Is he the man who shooed you away with a gun last night?”

McBirney’s watery eyes popped in surprise.

“No,” he said with decision, and began to look doubtful.

“In an old suit, cap pulled down, needing a shave – could it have been him?”

“No-o-o-o,” the janitor drawled, “I don’t think so, though it – You know, now that I come to think about it, there was something familiar about that fella, an’ maybe – By cracky, I think maybe you’re right – though I couldn’t exactly say for sure.”

“That’ll do!” Garren grunted in disgust.

An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn’t worth a damn one way or the other. Even positive and immediate identifications aren’t always the goods. A lot of people who don’t know any better – and some who do, or should – have given circumstantial evidence a bad name. It is misleading sometimes. But for genuine, undiluted, pre-war untrustworthiness, it can’t come within gunshot of human testimony. Take any man you like – unless he is the one in a hundred thousand with a mind trained to keep things straight, and not always even then – get him excited, show him something, give him a few hours to think it over and talk it over, and then ask him about it. It’s dollars to doughnuts that you’ll have a hard time finding any connection between what he saw and what he says he saw. Like this McBirney – another hour and he’d be ready to gamble his life on Jack Wagener’s being the robber.

Garren wrapped his fingers around the boy’s arm and started for the door.

“Where to, Bill?” I asked.

“Up to talk to his people. Coming along?”

“Stick around a while,” I invited. “I’m going to put on a party. But first, tell me, did the coppers who came here when the alarm was turned in do a good job?”

“I didn’t see it,” the police detective said. “I didn’t get here until the fireworks were pretty well over, but I understand the boys did all that could be expected of them.”

I turned to Frank Toplin. I did my talking to him chiefly because we – his wife and daughter, the maid, the janitor, Blanche Eveleth, Garren and his prisoner, and I – were grouped around the old man’s bed and by looking at him I could get a one-eyed view of everybody else.

“Somebody has been kidding me somewhere,” I began my speech. “If all the things I’ve been told about this job are right, then so is Prohibition. Your stories don’t fit together, not even almost. Take the bird who stuck you up. He seems to have been pretty well acquainted with your affairs. It might be luck that he hit your apartment at a time when all of your jewellery was on hand, instead of another apartment, or your apartment at another time. But I don’t like luck. I’d rather figure that he knew what he was doing. He nicked you for your pretties, and then he galloped up to Miss Eveleth’s apartment. He may have been about to go downstairs when he ran into McBirney, or he may not. Anyway, he went upstairs, into Miss Eveleth’s apartment, looking for a fire escape. Funny, huh? He knew enough about the place to make a push-over out of the stick-up, but he didn’t know there were no fire escapes on Miss Eveleth’s side of the building.

“He didn’t speak to you or to McBirney, but he talked to Miss Eveleth, in a bass voice. A very, very deep voice. Funny, huh? From Miss Eveleth’s apartment he vanished with every exit watched. The police must have been here before he left her apartment and they would have blocked the outlets first thing, whether McBirney and Ambrose had already done that or not. But he got away. Funny, huh? He wore a wrinkled suit, which might have been taken from a bundle just before he went to work, and he was a small man. Miss Eveleth isn’t a small woman, but she would be a small man. A guy with a suspicious disposition would almost think Blanche Eveleth was the robber.”

Frank Toplin, his wife, young Wagener, the janitor, and the maid were gaping at me. Garren was sizing up the Eveleth girl with narrowed eyes, while she glared white-hot at me. Phyllis Toplin was looking at me with a contemptuous sort of pity for my feeble-mindedness.

Bill Garren finished his inspection of the girl and nodded slowly.

“She could get away with it,” he gave his opinion, “indoors and if she kept her mouth shut.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Exactly, my eye!” Phyllis Toplin exploded. “Do you two correspondence-school detectives think we wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a woman dressed in man’s clothes? He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his face – real hair, if you know what I mean. Do you think he could have fooled us with false whiskers? This happened, you know, it’s not in a play!”

The others stopped gaping, and heads bobbed up and down.

“Phyllis is right.” Frank Toplin backed up his offspring. “He was a man – no woman dressed like one.”

His wife, the maid, and the janitor nodded vigorous endorsements.

But I’m a bull-headed sort of bird when it comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.

“Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.

She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.

“All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”

Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the more she screamed at me the nastier she got. She didn’t have any words I hadn’t heard before, but she fitted them together in combinations that were new to me. I stood as much of it as I could.

Then I knocked her over with a punch in the mouth.

“Here! Here!” Bill Garren yelled, grabbing my arm.

“Save your strength, Bill,” I advised him, shaking his hand off and going over to yank the Eveleth person up from the floor. “Your gallantry does you credit, but I think you’ll find Blanche’s real name is Tom, Dick, or Harry.”

I hauled her (or him, whichever you like) to his or her feet and asked it: “Feel like telling us about it?”

For answer I got a snarl.

“All right,” I said to the others, “in the absence of authoritative information I’ll give you my dope. If Blanche Eveleth could have been the robber except for the beard and the difficulty of a woman passing for a man, why couldn’t the robber have been Blanche Eveleth before and after the robbery by using a – what do you call it? – strong depilatory on his face, and a wig? It’s hard for a woman to masquerade as a man, but there are lots of men who can get away with the feminine role. Couldn’t this bird, after renting his apartment as Blanche Eveleth and getting everything lined up, have stayed in his apartment for a couple of days letting his beard grow? Come down and knock the job over? Beat it upstairs, get the hair off his face, and get into his female rig in, say, fifteen minutes? My guess is that he could. And he had fifteen minutes. I don’t know about the smashed nose. Maybe he stumbled going up the stairs and had to twist his plans to account for it – or maybe he smacked himself intentionally.”

My guesses weren’t far off, though his name was Fred – Frederick Agnew Rudd. He was known in Toronto, having done a stretch in the Ontario Reformatory as a boy of nineteen, caught shoplifting in his she-make-up. He wouldn’t come through, and we never turned up his gun or the blue suit, cap, and black gloves, although we found a cavity in his mattress where he had stuffed them out of the police’s sight until later that night, when he could get rid of them. But the Toplin sparklers came to light piece by piece when we had plumbers take apart the drains and radiators in apartment 702.

ONE HOUR

One

This is Mr. Chrostwaite,” Vance Richmond said.

Chrostwaite, wedged between the arms of one of the attorney’s large chairs, grunted what was perhaps meant for an acknowledgment of the introduction. I grunted back at him, and found myself a chair.

He was a big balloon of a man – this Chrostwaite – in a green plaid suit that didn’t make him look any smaller than he was. His tie was a gaudy thing, mostly of yellow, with a big diamond set in the centre of it, and there were more stones on his pudgy hands. Spongy fat blurred his features, making it impossible for his round purplish face to even hold any other expression than the discontented hoggishness that was habitual to it. He reeked of gin.

“Mr. Chrostwaite is the Pacific Coast agent for the Mutual Fire Extinguisher Manufacturing Company,” Vance Richmond began, as soon as I had got myself seated. “His office is on Kearny Street, near California. Yesterday, at about two forty-five in the afternoon, he went to his office, leaving his machine – a Hudson touring car – standing in front, with the engine running. Then minutes later, he came out. The car was gone.”

I looked at Chrostwaite. He was looking at his fat knees, showing not the least interest in what his attorney was saying. I looked quickly back at Vance Richmond; his clean gray face and lean figure were downright beautiful beside his bloated client.

“A man named Newhouse,” the lawyer was saying, “who was the proprietor of a printing establishment on California Street, just around the corner from Mr. Chrostwaite’s office, was run down and killed by Mr. Chrostwaite’s car at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets, five minutes after Mr. Chrostwaite had left the car to go into his office. The police found the car shortly afterward, only a block away from the scene of the accident – on Montgomery near Clay.

“The thing is fairly obvious. Someone stole the car immediately after Mr. Chrostwaite left it; and in driving rapidly away, ran down Newhouse; and then, in fright, abandoned the car. But here is Mr. Chrostwaite’s position; three nights ago, while driving perhaps a little recklessly out -“

“Drunk,” Chrostwaite said, not looking up from his plaid knees; and though his voice was hoarse, husky – it was the hoarseness of a whisky-burned throat – there was no emotion in his voice.

“While driving perhaps a little recklessly out Van Ness Avenue,” Vance Richmond went on, ignoring the interruption, “Mr. Chrostwaite knocked a pedestrian down. The man wasn’t badly hurt, and he is being compensated very generously for his injuries. But we are to appear in court next Monday to face a charge of reckless driving, and I am afraid that this accident of yesterday, in which the printer was killed, may hurt us.

“No one thinks that Mr. Chrostwaite was in his car when it killed the printer – we have a world of evidence that he wasn’t. But I am afraid that the printer’s death may be made a weapon against us when we appear on the Van Ness Avenue charge. Being an attorney, I know just how much capital the prosecuting attorney – if he so chooses – can make out of the really, insignificant fact that the same car that knocked down the man on Van Ness Avenue killed another man yesterday. And, being an attorney, I know how likely the prosecuting attorney is to so choose. And he can handle it in such a way that we will be given little or no opportunity to tell our side.

“The worst that can happen, of course, is that, instead of the usual fine, Mr. Chrostwaite will be sent to the city jail for thirty or sixty days. That is bad enough, however, and that is what we wish to -“

Chrostwaite spoke again, still regarding his knees.

“Damned nuisance!” he said.

“That is what we wish to avoid,” the attorney continued. “We are willing to pay a stiff fine, and expect to, for the accident on Van Ness Avenue was clearly Mr. Chrostwaite’s fault. But we -“

“Drunk as a lord!” Chrostwaite said.

“But we don’t want to have this other accident, with which we had nothing to do, given a false weight in connection with the slighter accident. What we want then, is to find the man or men who stole the car and ran down John Newhouse. If they are apprehended before we go to court, we won’t be in danger of suffering for their act. Think you can find them before Monday?”

“I’ll try,” I promised; “though it isn’t -“

The human balloon interrupted me by heaving himself to his feet, fumbling with his fat jewelled fingers for his watch.

“Three o’clock,” he said. “Got a game of golf for three-thirty.” He picked up his hat and gloves from the desk. “Find ‘em, will you? Damned nuisance going to jail!”

And he waddled out.

Two

From the attorney’s office, I went down to the Hall of Justice, and, after hunting around a few minutes, found a policeman who had arrived at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a few seconds after Newhonse had been knocked down.

“I was just leaving the Hall when I seen a bus scoot around the corner at Clay Street,” this patrolman – a big sandy-haired man named Coffee – told me. “Then I seen people gathering around, so I went up there and found this John Newhouse stretched out. He was already dead. Half a dozen people had seen him hit, and one of ‘em had got the license number of the car that done it. We found the car standing empty just around the corner on Montgomery Street, pointing north. There was two fellows in the car when it hit Newhouse, but nobody saw what they looked like. Nobody was in it when we found it.”

“In what direction was Newhouse walking?”

“North along Kearny Street, and he was about three-quarters across Clay when he was knocked. The car was coming north on Kearny, too, and turned east on Clay. It mightn’t have been all the fault of the fellows in the car – according to them that seen the accident. Newhouse was walking across the street looking at a piece of paper in his hand. I found a piece of foreign money-paper money – in his hand, and I guess that’s what he was looking at. The lieutenant tells me it was Dutch money – a hundred-florin note, he says.”

“Found out anything about the men in the car?”

“Nothing! We lined up everybody we could find in the neighbourhood of California and Kearny Streets – where the car was stolen from – and around Clay and Montgomery Streets – where it was left at. But nobody remembered seeing the fellows getting in it or getting out of it. The man that owns the car wasn’t driving it – it was stole all right, I guess. At first I thought maybe there was something shady about the accident. This John Newhouse had a two – or three-day-old black eye on him. But we run that out and found that he had an attack of heart trouble or something a couple days ago, and fell, fetching his eye up against a chair. He’d been home sick for three days – just left his house half an hour or so before the accident.”

“Where’d he live?”

“On Sacramento Street – way out. I got his address here somewhere.”

He turned over the pages of a grimy memoranda book, and I got the dead man’s house number, and the names and addresses of the witnesses to the accident that Coffee had questioned.

That exhausted the policeman’s information, so I left him.

Three

My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details – and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.

Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment – only three blocks from the Hall of Justice – and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.

Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the pressroom in the rear.

The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried-looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirt-sleeves, checking off figures in a ledger against others on a batch of papers before him.

I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk, pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.

“This is awful!” he said. “What with one thing and another, we’re heels over head in work, and I got to fool with these books that I don’t know anything at all about, and -“

He broke off to pick up the telephone, which had jingled.

“Yes… This is Soules… We’re working on them now… I’ll give ‘em to you by Monday noon at the least… I know! I know! But the boss’s death set us back. Explain that to Mr. Chrostwaite. And… And I’ll promise you that we’ll give them to you Monday morning, sure!”

Soules slapped the receiver irritably on its hook and looked at me.

“You’d think that since it was his own car that killed the boss, he’d have decency enough not to squawk over the delay!”

“Chrostwaite?”

“Yes – that was one of his clerks. We’re printing some leaflets for him – promised to have ‘em ready yesterday – but between the boss’s death and having a couple new hands to break in, we’re behind with everything. I’ve been here eight years, and this is the first time we ever fell down on an order – and every damned customer is yelling his head off. If we were like most printers they’d be used to waiting; but we’ve been too good to them. But this Chrostwaite! You’d think he’d have some decency, seeing that his car killed the boss!”

I nodded sympathetically, slid a cigar across the desk, and waited until it was burning in Soilless mouth before I asked:

“You said something about having a couple new hands to break in. How come?”

“Yes. Mr. Newhouse fired two of our printers last week – Fincher and Keys. He found that they belonged to the I.W.W., so he gave them their time.”

“Any trouble with them or anything against them except that they were Wobblies?”

“No – they were pretty good workers.”

“Any trouble with them after he fired them?” I asked.

“No real trouble, though they were pretty hot. They made red speeches all over the place before they left.”

“Remember what day that was?”

“Wednesday of last week, I think. Yes, Wednesday, because I hired two new men on Thursday.”

“How many men do you work?”

“Three, besides myself.”

“Was Mr. Newhouse sick very often?”

“Not sick enough to stay away very often, though every now and then his heart would go back on him, and he’d have to stay in bed for a week or ten days. He wasn’t what you could call real well at any time. He never did anything but the office work – I run the shop.”

“When was he taken sick this last time?”

“Mrs. Newhouse called up Tuesday morning and said he had had another spell, and wouldn’t be down for a few days. He came in yesterday – which was Thursday – for about ten minutes in the afternoon, and said he would be back on the job this morning. He was killed just after he left.”

“How did he look – very sick?”

“Not so bad. He never looked well, of course, but I couldn’t see much difference from usual yesterday. This last spell hadn’t been as bad as most, I reckon – he was usually laid up for a week or more.”

“Did he say where he was going when he left? The reason I ask is that, living out on Sacramento Street, he would naturally have taken a car at that street if he had been going home, whereas he was run down on Clay Street.”

“He said he was going up to Portsmouth Square to sit in the sun for half an hour or so. He had been cooped up indoors for two or three days, he said, and he wanted some sunshine before he went back home.”

“He had a piece of foreign money in his hand when he was hit. Know anything about it?”

“Yes. He got it here. One of our customers – a man named Van Pelt – came in to pay for some work we had done yesterday afternoon while the boss was here. When Van Pelt pulled out his wallet to pay his bill, this piece of Holland money – I don’t know what you call it – was among the bills. I think he said it was worth something like thirty-eight dollars. Anyway, the boss took it, giving Van Pelt his change. The boss said he wanted to show the Holland money to his boys – and he could have it changed back into American money later.”

“Who is this Van Pelt?”

“He’s a Hollander – is planning to open a tobacco importing business here in a month or two. I don’t know much about him outside of that.”

“Where’s his home, or office?”

“His office is on Bush Street, near Sansome.”

“Did he know that Newhouse had been sick?”

“I don’t think so. The boss didn’t look much different from usual.”

“What’s this Van Pelt’s full name?”

“Hendrik Van Pelt.”

“What does he look like?”

Before Soules could answer, three evenly spaced buzzes sounded above the rattle and whirring of the presses in the back of the shop.

I slid the muzzle of my gun – I had been holding it in my lap for five minutes – far enough over the edge of the desk for Ben Soules to see it.

“Put both of your hands on top of the desk,” I said.

He put them there.

The pressroom door was directly behind him, so that, facing him across the desk, I could look over his shoulder at it. His stocky body served to screen my gun from the view of whoever came through the door, in response to Soules’s signal.

I didn’t have long to wait.

Three men -black with ink – came to the door, and through it into the little office. They strolled in careless and casual, laughing and joking to one another.

But one of them licked his lips as he stepped through the door. Another’s eyes showed white circles all around the irises. The third was the best actor – but he held his shoulders a trifle too stiffly to fit his otherwise careless carriage.

“Stop right there!” I barked at them when the last one was inside the office – and I brought my gun up where they could see it.

They stopped as if they had all been mounted on the same pair of legs.

I kicked my chair back, and stood up.

I didn’t like my position at all. The office was entirely too small for me. I had a gun, true enough, and whatever weapons may have been distributed among these other men were out of sight. But these four men were too close to me; and a gun isn’t a thing of miracles. It’s a mechanical contraption that is capable of just so much and no more.

If these men decided to jump me, I could down just one of them before the other three were upon me. I knew it, and they knew it.

“Put your hands up,” I ordered, “and turn around!”

None of them moved to obey. One of the inked men grinned wickedly; Soules shook his head slowly; the other two stood and looked at me.

I was more or less stumped. You can’t shoot a man just because he refuses to obey an order – even if he is a criminal. If they had turned around for me, I could have lined them up against the wall, and, being behind them, have held them safe while I used the telephone.

But that hadn’t worked.

My next thought was to back across the office to the street door, keeping them covered, and then either stand in the door and yell for help, or take them into the street, where I could handle them. But I put that thought away as quickly as it came to me.

These four men were going to jump me – there was no doubt of that. All that was needed was a spark of any sort to explode them into action. They were standing stiff-legged and tense, waiting for some move on my part. If I took a step backward – the battle would be on.

We were close enough for any of the four to have reached out and touched me. One of them I could shoot before I was smothered – one out of four. That meant that each of them had only one chance out of four of being the victim – low enough odds for any but the most cowardly of men.

I grinned what was supposed to be a confident grin – because I was up against it hard – and reached for the telephone: I had to do something! Then I cursed myself! I had merely changed the signal for the onslaught. It would come now when I picked up the receiver.

But I couldn’t back down again – that, too, would be a signal – I had to go through with it.

The perspiration trickled across my temples from under my hat as I drew the phone closer with my left hand.

The street door opened! An exclamation of surprise came from behind me.

I spoke rapidly, without taking my eyes from the four men in front of me.

“Quick! The phone! The police!”

With the arrival of this unknown person – one of Newhouse’s customers, probably – I figured I had the edge again. Even if he took no active part beyond calling the police in, the enemy would have to split to take care of him – and that would give me a chance to pot at least two of them before I was knocked over. Two out of four – each of them had an even chance of being dropped – which is enough to give even a nervy man cause for thinking a bit before he jumps.

“Hurry!” I urged the newcomer.

“Yes! Yes!” he said – and in the blurred sound of the ‘s’ there was evidence of foreign birth.

Keyed up as I was, I didn’t need any more warning than that.

I threw myself sidewise – a blind tumbling away from the spot where I stood. But I wasn’t quite quick enough.

The blow that came from behind didn’t hit me fairly, but I got enough of it to fold up my legs as if the knees were hinged with paper – and I slammed into a heap on the floor…

Something dark crashed toward me. I caught it with both hands. It may have been a foot kicking at my face. I wrung it as a washerwoman wrings a towel.

Down my spine ran jar after jar. Perhaps somebody was beating me over the head. I don’t know. My head wasn’t alive. The blow that had knocked me down had numbed me all over. My eyes were no good. Shadows swam to and fro in front of them – that was all. I struck, gouged, tore at the shadows. Sometimes I found nothing. Sometimes I found things that felt like parts of bodies. Then I would hammer at them, tear at them. My gun was gone.

My hearing was no better than my sight – or not so good. There wasn’t a sound in the world. I moved in a silence that was more complete than any silence I had ever known. I was a ghost fighting ghosts.

I found presently that my feet were under me again, though some squirming thing was on my back, and kept me from standing upright: A hot, damp thing like a hand was across my face.

I put my teeth into it. I snapped my head back as far as it would go. Maybe it smashed into the face it was meant for. I don’t know. Anyhow the squirming thing was no longer on my back.

Dimly I realised that I was being buffeted about by blows that I was too numb to feel. Ceaselessly, with head and shoulders and elbows and fists and knees and feet, I struck at the shadows that were around me…

Suddenly I could see again – not clearly – but the shadows were taking on colours; and my ears came back a little, so that grunts and growls and curses and the impact of blows sounded in them. My straining gaze rested upon a brass cuspidor six inches or so in front of my eyes. I knew then that I was down on the floor again.

As I twisted about to hurl a foot into a soft body above me, something that was like a burn, but wasn’t a burn, ran down one leg – a knife. The sting of it brought consciousness back into me with a rush.

I grabbed the brass cuspidor and used it to club a way to my feet – to club a clear space in front of me. Men were hurling themselves upon me. I swung the cuspidor high and flung it over their heads through the frosted glass door into California Street.

Then we fought some more.

But you can’t throw a brass cuspidor through a glass door into California Street between Montgomery and Kearny without attracting attention – it’s too near the heart of daytime San Francisco. So presently – when I was on the floor again with six or eight hundred pounds of flesh hammering my face into the boards – we were pulled apart, and I was dug out of the bottom of the pile by a squad of policemen.

Big sandy-haired Coffee was one of them, but it took a lot of arguing to convince him that I was the Continental operative who had talked to him a little while before.

“Man! Man!” he said, when I finally convinced him. “Them lads sure – God! – have worked you over! You got a face like a wet geranium!”

I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny.

I looked out of the one eye which was working just now at the five men lined up across the office – Soules, the three inky printers, and the man with the blurred ‘s,’ who had started the slaughter by tapping me on the back of the head.

He was a rather tall man of thirty or so, with a round ruddy face that wore a few bruises now. He had been, apparently, rather well-dressed in expensive black clothing, but he was torn and ragged now. I knew who he was without asking – Hendrik Van Pelt.

“Well, man, what’s the answer?” Coffee was asking me.

By holding one side of my jaw firmly with one hand I found that I could talk without too much pain.

“This is the crowd that ran down Newhouse,” I said, “and it wasn’t an accident. I wouldn’t mind having a few more of the details myself, but I was jumped before I got around to all of them. Newhouse had a hundred-florin note in his hand when he was run down, and he was walking in the direction of police headquarters – was only half a block away from the Hall of Justice.

“Soules tells me that Newhouse said he was going up to Portsmouth Square to sit in the sun. But Soules didn’t seem to know that Newhouse was wearing a black eye – the one you told me you had investigated. If Soules didn’t see the shiner, then it’s a good bet that Soules didn’t see Newhouse’s face that day!

“Newhouse was walking from his printing shop toward police headquarters with a piece of foreign paper money in his hand – remember that!

“He had frequent spells of sickness, which, according to friend Soules, always before kept him at home for a week or ten days at a time. This time he was laid up for only two and a half days.

“Soules tells me that the shop is three days behind with its orders, and he says that’s the first time in eight years they’ve ever been behind. He blames Newhouse’s death – which only happened yesterday. Apparently, Newhouse’s previous sick spells never delayed things – why should this last spell?

“Two printers were fired last week, and two new ones hired the very next day – pretty quick work. The car with which Newhouse was run down was taken from just around the corner, and was deserted within quick walking distance of the shop. It was left facing north, which is pretty good evidence that its occupants went south after they got out. Ordinary car thieves wouldn’t have circled back in the direction from which they came.

“Here’s my guess: This Van Pelt is a Dutchman, and he had some plates for phoney hundred-florin notes. He hunted around until he found a printer who would go in with him. He found Soules, the foreman of a shop whose proprietor was now and then at home for a week or more at a time with a bad heart. One of the printers under Soules was willing to go in with them. Maybe the other two turned the offer down. Maybe Soules didn’t ask them at all. Anyhow, they were discharged, and two friends of Soules were given their places.

“Our friends then got everything ready, and waited for Newhouse’s heart to flop again. It did – Monday night. As soon as his wife called up next morning and said he was sick, these birds started running off their counterfeits. That’s why they fell behind with their regular work. But this spell of Newhouse’s was lighter than usual. He was up and moving around within two days, and yesterday afternoon he came down here for a few minutes.

“He must have walked in while all of our friends were extremely busy in some far corner. He must have spotted some of the phoney money, immediately sized up the situation, grabbed one bill to show the police, and started out for police headquarters – no doubt thinking he had not been seen by our friends here.

“They must have got a glimpse of him as he was leaving, however. Two of them followed him out. They couldn’t, afoot, safely knock him over within a block or two of the Hall of Justice. But, turning the corner, they found Chrostwaite’s car standing there with idling engine. That solved their getaway problem. They got in the car and went on after Newhouse. I suppose the original plan was to shoot him – but he crossed Clay Street with his eyes fastened upon the phoney money in his hand. That gave them a golden chance. They piled the car into him. It was sure death, they knew his bum heart would finish the job if the actual collision didn’t kill him. Then they deserted the car and came back here.

“There are a lot of loose ends to be gathered in – but this pipe-dream I’ve just told you fits in with all the facts we know – and I’ll bet a month’s salary I’m not far off anywhere. There ought be a three-day crop of Dutch notes cached somewhere! You people -“

I suppose I’d have gone on talking forever – in the giddy, head-swimming intoxication of utter exhaustion that filled me – if the big sandy-haired patrolman hadn’t shut me off by putting a big hand across my mouth.

“Be quiet, man,” he said, lifting me out the chair, and spreading me flat on my back on the desk. “I’ll have an ambulance here in a second for you.”

The office was swirling around in front of my one open eye – the yellow ceiling swung down toward me, rose again, disappeared, came back in odd shapes. I turned my head to one side to avoid it, and my glance rested upon the white dial of a spinning clock.

Presently the dial came to rest, and I read it – four o’clock.

I remembered that Chrostwaite had broken up our conference in Vance Richmond’s office at three, and I had started to work.

“One full hour!” I tried to tell Coffee before I went to sleep.

The police wound up the job while I was lying on my back in bed. In Van Pelt’s office on Bush Street they found a great bale of hundred-florin notes. Van Pelt, they learned, had a considerable reputation in Europe as a high-class counterfeiter. One of the printers came through, stating that Van Pelt and Soules were the two who followed Newhouse out of the shop, and killed him.

WHO KILLED BOB TEAL?

Teal was killed last night.”

The Old Man-the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager – spoke without looking at me. His voice was as mild as his smile, and gave no indication of the turmoil that was seething in his mind.

If I kept quiet, waiting for the Old Man to go on, it wasn’t because the news didn’t mean anything to me. I had been fond of Bob Teal – we all had. He had come to the Agency fresh from college two years before; and if ever a man had the makings of a crack detective in him, this slender, broad-shouldered lad had. Two years is little enough time in which to pick up the first principles of sleuthing, but Bob Teal, with his quick eye, cool nerve, balanced head, and whole-hearted interest in the work, was already well along the way to expertness. I had an almost fatherly interest in him, since I had given him most of his early training.

The Old Man didn’t look at me as he went on. He was talking to the open window at his elbow.

“He was shot with a thirty-two, twice, through the heart. He was shot behind a row of signboards on the vacant lot on the northwest corner of Hyde and Eddy Streets, at about ten last night. His body was found by a patrolman a little after eleven. The gun was found about fifteen feet away. I have seen him and I have gone over the ground myself. The rain last night wiped out any leads the ground may have held, but from the condition of Teal’s clothing and the position in which he was found, I would say that there was no struggle, and that he was shot where he was found, and not carried there afterward. He was lying behind the signboards, about thirty feet from the sidewalk, and his hands were empty. The gun was held close enough to him to singe the breast of his coat. Apparently no one either saw or heard the shooting. The rain and wind would have kept pedestrians off the street, and would have deadened the reports of a thirty-two, which are not especially loud, anyway.”

The Old Man’s pencil began to tap the desk, its gentle clicking setting my nerves on edge. Presently it stopped, and the Old Man went on:

“Teal was shadowing a Herbert Whitacre – had been shadowing him for three days. Whitacre is one of the partners in the firm Ogburn and Whitacre, farm-development engineers. They have options on a large area of land in several of the new irrigation districts. Ogburn handles the sales end, while Whitacre looks after the rest of the business, including the bookkeeping.

“Last week Ogburn discovered that his partner had been making false entries. The books show certain payments made on the land, and Ogburn learned that these payments had not been made. He estimates that the amount of Whitacre’s thefts may be anywhere from one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty thousand dollars. He came in to see me three days ago and told me all this, and wanted to have Whitacre shadowed in an endeavour to learn what he has done with the stolen money. Their firm is still a partnership, and a partner cannot be prosecuted for stealing from the partnership, of course. Thus, Ogburn could not have his partner arrested, but he hoped to find the money, and then recover it through civil action. Also he was afraid that Whitacre might disappear.

“I sent Teal out to shadow Whitacre, who supposedly didn’t know that his partner suspected him. Now I am sending you out to find Whitacre. I’m determined to find him and convict him if I have to let all regular business go and put every man I have on this job for a year. You can get Teal’s reports from the clerks. Keep in touch with me.”

All that, from the Old Man, was more than an ordinary man’s oath written in blood.

In the clerical office I got the two reports Bob had turned in. There was none for the last day, of course, as he would not have written that until after he had quit work for the night. The first of these two reports had already been copied and a copy sent to Ogburn; a typist was working on the other now.

In his reports Bob had described Whitacre as a man of about thirty-seven, with brown hair and eyes, a nervous manner, a smooth-shaven, medium-complexioned face, and rather small feet. He was about five feet eight inches tall, weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds, and dressed fashionably, though quietly. He lived with his wife in an apartment on Gough Street. They had no children. Ogburn had given Bob a description of Mrs. Whitacre: a short, plump, blond woman of something less than thirty.

Those who remember this affair will know that the city, the detective agency, and the people involved all had names different from the ones I have given them. But they will know also that I have kept the facts true. Names of some sort are essential to clearness, and when the use of the real names might cause embarrassment, or pain even, pseudonyms are the most satisfactory alternative.

In shadowing Whitacre, Bob had learned nothing that seemed to be of any value in finding the stolen money. Whitacre had gone about his usual business, apparently, and Bob had seen him do nothing downright suspicious. But Whitacre had seemed nervous, had often stopped to look around, obviously suspecting that he was being shadowed without being sure of it. On several occasions Bob had had to drop him to avoid being recognised. On one of these occasions, while waiting in the vicinity of Whitacre’s residence for him to return, Bob had seen Mrs. Whitacre – or a woman who fit the description Ogburn had given – leave in a taxicab. Bob had not tried to follow her, but he made a memorandum of the taxi’s license number.

These two reports read and practically memorised, I left the Agency and went down to Ogburn & Whitacre’s suite in the Packard Building. A stenographer ushered me into a tastefully furnished office, where Ogburn sat at a desk signing mail. He offered me a chair. I introduced myself to him, a medium-sized man of perhaps thirty-five, with sleek brown hair and the cleft chin that is associated in my mind with orators, lawyers, and salesmen.

“Oh, yes!” he said, pushing aside the mail, his mobile, intelligent face lighting up. “Has Mr. Teal found anything?”

“Mr. Teal was shot and killed last night.”

He looked at me blankly for a moment out of wide brown eyes, and then repeated: “Killed?”

“Yes,” I replied, and told him what little I knew about it.

“You don’t think -“ he began when I had finished, and then stopped. “You don’t think Herb would have done that?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think Herb would commit murder! He’s been jumpy the last few days, and I was beginning to think he suspected I had discovered his thefts, but I don’t believe he would have gone that far, even if he knew Mr. Teal was following him. I honestly don’t!”

“Suppose,” I suggested, “that sometime yesterday Teal found where he had put the stolen money, and then Whitacre learned that Teal knew it. Don’t you think that under those circumstances Whitacre might have killed him?”

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “but I’d hate to think so. In a moment of panic Herb might – but I really don’t think he would.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Yesterday. We were here in the office together most of the day. He left for home a few minutes before six. But I talked to him over the phone later. He called me up at home at a little after seven, and said he was coming down to see me, wanted to tell me something. I thought he was going to confess his dishonesty, and that maybe we would be able to straighten out this miserable affair. His wife called up at about ten. She wanted him to bring something from downtown when he went home, but of course he was not there. I stayed in all evening waiting for him, but he didn’t -“

He stuttered, stopped talking, and his face drained white.

“My God, I’m wiped out!” he said faintly, as if the thought of his own position had just come to him. “Herb gone, money gone, three years’ work gone for nothing! And I’m legally responsible for every cent he stole. God!”

He looked at me with eyes that pleaded for contradiction, but I couldn’t do anything except assure him that everything possible would be done to find both Whitacre and the money. I left him trying frantically to get his attorney on the telephone.

From Ogburn’s office I went up to Whitacre’s apartment. As I turned the corner below into Gough Street I saw a big, hulking man going up the apartment house steps, and recognised him as George Dean. Hurrying to join him, I regretted that he had been assigned to the job instead of some other member of the police detective Homicide Detail. Dean isn’t a bad sort, but he isn’t so satisfactory to work with as some of the others; that is, you can never be sure that he isn’t holding out some important detail so that George Dean would shine as the clever sleuth in the end. Working with a man of that sort, you’re bound to fall into the habit – which doesn’t make for teamwork.

I arrived in the vestibule as Dean pressed Whitacre’s bell-button.

“Hello,” I said. “You in on this?”

“Uh-huh. What d’you know?”

“Nothing. I just got it.”

The front door clicked open, and we went together up to the Whitacres’ apartment on the third floor. A plump, blond woman in a light blue house-dress opened the apartment door. She was rather pretty in a thick-featured, stolid way.

“Mrs. Whitacre?” Dean inquired.

“Yes.”

“Is Mr. Whitacre in?”

“No. He went to Los Angeles this morning,” she said, and her face was truthful.

“Know where we can get in touch with him there?”

“Perhaps at the Ambassador, but I think he’ll be back by tomorrow or the next day.”

Dean showed her his badge.

“We want to ask you a few questions,” he told her, and with no appearance of astonishment she opened the door wide for us to enter. She led us into a blue and cream living-room where we found a chair apiece. She sat facing us on a big blue settle.

“Where was your husband last night?” Dean asked.

“Home. Why?” Her round blue eyes were faintly curious.

“Home all night?”

“Yes, it was a rotten rainy night. Why?” She looked from Dean to me.

Dean’s glance met mine, and I nodded an answer to the question that I read there.

“Mrs. Whitacre,” he said bluntly, “I have a warrant for your husband’s arrest.”

“A warrant? For what?”

“Murder.”

“Murder?” It was a stifled scream.

“Exactly, an’ last night.”

“But -but I told you he was -“

“And Ogburn told me,” I interrupted, leaning forward, “that you called up his apartment last night, asking if your husband was there.”

She looked at me blankly for a dozen seconds, and then she laughed, the clear laugh of one who has been the victim of some slight joke.

“You win,” she said, and there was neither shame nor humiliation in either face or voice. “Now listen” – the amusement had left her – “I don’t know what Herb has done, or how I stand, and I oughtn’t to talk until I see a lawyer. But I like to dodge all the trouble I can. If you folks will tell me what’s what, on your word of honour, I’ll maybe tell you what I know, if anything. What I mean is, if talking will make things any easier for me, if you can show me it will, maybe I’ll talk – provided I know anything.”

That seemed fair enough, if a little surprising. Apparently this plump woman who could lie with every semblance of candour, and laugh when she was tripped up, wasn’t interested in anything much beyond her own comfort.

“You tell it,” Dean said to me.

I shot it out all in a lump.

“Your husband had been cooking the books for some time, and got into his partner for something like two hundred thousand dollars before Ogburn got wise to it. Then he had your husband shadowed, trying to find the money. Last night your husband took the man who was shadowing him over on a lot and shot him.”

Her face puckered thoughtfully. Mechanically she reached for a package of popular-brand cigarettes that lay on a table behind the settle, and proffered them to Dean and me. We shook our heads. She put a cigarette in her mouth, scratched a match on the sole of her slipper, lit the cigarette, and stared at the burning end. Finally she shrugged, her face cleared, arid she looked up at us,

“I’m going to talk,” she said. “Never got any of the money, and I’d be a chump to make a goat of myself for Herb. He was all right, but if he’s run out and left me flat, there’s no use of me making a lot of trouble for myself over it. Here goes: I’m not Mrs. Whitacre, except on the register. My name is Mae Landis. Maybe there is a real Mrs. Whitacre, and maybe not. I don’t know. Herb and I have been living together here for over a year.

“About a month ago he began to get jumpy, nervous, even worse than usual. He said he had business worries. Then a couple of days ago I discovered that his pistol was gone from the drawer where it had been kept ever since we came here, and that he was carrying it. I asked him: ‘What’s the idea?’ He said he thought he was being followed, and asked me if I’d seen anybody hanging around the neighbourhood as if watching our place. I told him no; I thought he was nutty.

“Night before last he told me that he was in trouble, and might have to go away, and that he couldn’t take me with him, but would give me enough money to take care of me for a while. He seemed excited, packed his bags so they’d be ready if he needed them in a hurry, and burned up all his photos and a lot of letters and papers. His bags are still in the bedroom, if you want to go through them. When he didn’t come home last night I had a hunch that he had beat it without his bags and without saying a word to me, much less giving me any money – leaving me with only twenty dollars to my name and not even much that I could hock, and with the rent due in four days.”

“When did you see him last?”

“About eight o’clock last night. He told me he was going down to Mr. Ogburn’s apartment to talk some business over with him, but he didn’t go there. I know that. I ran out of cigarettes – I like Elixir Russians, and I can’t get them uptown here – so I called up Mr. Ogburn’s to ask Herb to bring some home with him when he came, and Mr. Ogburn said he hadn’t been there.”

“How long have you known Whitacre?” I asked.

“Couple of years, I guess. I think I met him first at one of the beach resorts.”

“Has he got any people?”

“Not that I know of. I don’t know a whole lot about him. Oh, yes! I do know that he served three years in prison in Oregon for forgery. He told me that one night when he was lushed up. He served them under the name of Barber, or Barbee, or something like that. He said he was walking the straight and narrow now.”

Dean produced a small automatic pistol, fairly new-looking in spite of the mud that clung to it, and handed it to the woman.

“Ever see that?”

She nodded her blond head. “Yep! That’s Herb’s or its twin.”

Dean pocketed the gun again, and we stood up.

“Where do I stand now?” she asked. “You’re not going to lock me up as a witness or anything, are you?”

“Not just now,” Dean assured her. “Stick around where we can find you if we want you, and you won’t be bothered. Got any idea which direction Whitacre’d be likely to go in?”

“No.”

“We’d like to give the place the once-over. Mind?”

“Go ahead,” she invited. “Take it apart if you want to. I’m coming all the way with you people.”

We very nearly did take the place apart, but we found not a thing of value. Whitacre, when he had burned the things that might have given him away, had made a clean job of it.

“Did he ever have any pictures taken by a professional photographer?” I asked just before we left.

“Not that I know of.”

“Will you let us know if you hear anything or remember anything else that might help?”

“Sure,” she said heartily; “sure.”

Dean and I rode down in the elevator in silence, and walked out into Gough Street.

“What do you think of all that?” I asked when we were outside.

“She’s a lil, huh?” He grinned. “I wonder how much she knows. She identified the gun an’ gave us that dope about the forgery sentence up north, but we’d of found out them things anyway. If she was wise she’d tell us everything she knew we’d find out, an’ that would make her other stuff go over stronger. Think she’s dumb or wise?”

“We won’t guess,” I said. “We’ll slap a shadow on her and cover her mail. I have the number of a taxi she used a couple days ago. We’ll look that up too.”

At a corner drug store I telephoned the Old Man, asking him to detail a couple of the boys to keep Mae Landis and her apartment under surveillance night and day; also to have the Post Office Department let us know if she got any mail that might have been addressed by Whitacre. I told the Old Man I would see Ogburn and get some specimens of the fugitive’s writing for comparison with the woman’s mail.

Then Dean and I set about tracing the taxi in which Bob Teal had seen the woman ride away. Half an hour in the taxi company’s office gave us the information that she had been driven to a number on Greenwich Street. We went to the Greenwich Street address.

It was a ramshackle building, divided into apartments or flats of a dismal and dingy sort. We found the landlady in the basement: a gaunt woman in soiled gray, with a hard, thin-lipped mouth and pale, suspicious eyes. She was rocking vigorously in a creaking chair and sewing on a pair of overalls, while three dirty kids tussled with a mongrel puppy up and down the room.

Dean showed his badge, and told her that we wanted to speak to her in privacy. She got up to chase the kids and their dog out, and then stood with hands on hips facing us.

“Well, what do you want?” she demanded sourly.

“Want to get a line on your tenants,” Dean said. “Tell us about them.”

“Tell you about them?” She had a voice that would have been harsh enough even if she hadn’t been in such a peevish mood. “What do you think I got to say about ‘em? What do you think I am? I’m a woman that minds her own business! Nobody can’t say that I don’t run a respectable -“

This was getting us nowhere.

“Who lives in number one?” I asked.

“The Auds – two old folks and their grandchildren. If you know anything against them, it’s more’n them that has lived with ‘em for ten years does!”

“Who lives in number two?”

“Mrs. Codman and her boys, Frank and Fred. They been here three years, and -“

I carried her from apartment to apartment, until finally we reached a second-floor one that didn’t bring quite so harsh an indictment of my stupidity for suspecting its occupants of whatever it was that I suspected them of.

“The Quirks live there.” She merely glowered now, whereas she had had a snippy manner before. “And they’re decent people, if you ask me!”

“How long have they been here?”

“Six months or more.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“I don’t know.” Sullenly: “Travels, maybe.”

“How many in the family?”

“Just him and her, and they’re nice quiet people, too.”

“What does he look like?”

“Like an ordinary man. I ain’t a detective, I don’t go ‘round snoopin’ into folks’ faces to see what they look like, and prying into their business. I ain’t -“

“How old a man is he?”

“Maybe between thirty-five and forty, if he ain’t younger or older.”

“Large or small?”

“He ain’t as short as you and he ain’t as tall as this feller with you,” glaring scornfully from my short stoutness to Dean’s big hulk, “and he ain’t as fat as neither of you.”

“Moustache?”

“No.”

“Light hair?”

“No.” Triumphantly: “Dark.”

“Dark eyes, too?”

“I guess so.”

Dean, standing off to one side, looked over the woman’s shoulder at me. His lips framed the name “Whitacre.”

“Now how about Mrs. Quirk – what does she look like?” I went on.

“She’s got light hair, is short and chunky, and maybe under thirty.”

Dean and I nodded our satisfaction at each other; that sounded like Mae Landis, right enough.

“Are they home much?” I continued.

“I don’t know,” the gaunt woman snarled sullenly, and I knew she did know, so I waited, looking at her, and presently she added grudgingly: “I think they’re away a lot, but I ain’t sure.”

“I know,” I ventured, “they are home very seldom, and then only in the daytime – and you know it.”

She didn’t deny it, so I asked: “Are they in now?”

“I don’t think so, but they might be.”

“Let’s take a look at the joint,” I suggested to Dean.

He nodded and told the woman: “Take us up to their apartment an’ Janlock the door for us.”

“I won’t!” she said with sharp emphasis. “You got no right goin’ into folks’ homes unless you got a search warrant. You got one?”

“We got nothin’.” Dean grinned at her. “But we can get plenty if you want to put us to the trouble. You run this house; you can go into any of the flats any time you want, an’ you can take us in. Take us up, an’ we’ll lay off you; but if you’re going to put us to a lot of trouble, then you’ll take your chances of bein’ tied up with the Quirks, an’ maybe sharin’ a cell with ‘em. Think that over.”

She thought it over, and then, grumbling and growling with each step, took us up to the Quirks’ apartment. She made sure they weren’t at home, then admitted us.

The apartment consisted of three rooms, a bath, and a kitchen, furnished in the shabby fashion that the ramshackle exterior of the building had prepared us for. In these rooms we found a few articles of masculine and feminine clothing, toilet accessories, and so on. But the place had none of the marks of a permanent abode: there were no pictures, no cushions, none of the dozens of odds and ends of personal belongings that are usually found in homes. The kitchen had the appearance of long disuse; the interiors of the coffee, tea, spice, and flour containers were clean.

Two things we found that meant something: a handful of Elixir Russian cigarettes on a table; and a new box of.32 cartridges – ten of which were missing – in a dresser drawer.

All through our searching the landlady hovered over us, her pale eyes sharp and curious; but now we chased her out, telling her that, law or no law, we were taking charge of the apartment.

“This was or is a hide-out for Whitacre and his woman all right,” Dean said when we were alone. “The only question is whether he intended to lay low here or whether it was just a place where he made preparations for his getaway. I reckon the best thing is to have the captain put a man in here night and day until we turn up Brother Whitacre.”

“That’s safest,” I agreed, and he went to the telephone in the front room to arrange it.

After Dean was through phoning, I called up the Old Man to see if anything new had developed.

“Nothing new,” he told me. “How are you coming along?”

“Nicely. Maybe I’ll have news for you this evening.”

“Did you get those specimens of Whitacre’s writing from Ogburn? Or shall I have someone else take care of it?”

“I’ll get them this evening,” I promised.

I wasted ten minutes trying to reach Ogburn at his office before I looked at my watch and saw that it was after six o’clock. I found his residence listed in the telephone directory, and called him there.

“Have you anything in Whitacre’s writing at home?” I asked. “I want to get a couple of samples – would like to get them this evening, though if necessary I can wait until tomorrow.”

“I think I have some of his letters here. If you come over now I’ll give them to you.”

“Be with you in fifteen minutes,” I told him.

“I’m going down to Ogburn’s,” I told Dean, “to get some of Whitacre’s scribbling while you’re waiting for your man to come from headquarters to take charge of this place. I’ll meet you at the States as soon as you can get away. We’ll eat there, and make our plans for the night.”

“Uh-huh,” he grunted, making himself comfortable in one chair, with his feet on another, as I let myself out.

Ogburn was dressing when I reached his apartment, and had his collar and tie in his hand when he came to the door to let me in.

“I found quite a few of Herb’s letters,” he said as we walked back to his bedroom.

I looked through the fifteen or more letters that lay on a table, selecting the ones I wanted, while Ogburn went on with his dressing.

“How are you progressing?” he asked presently.

“So-so. Heard anything that might help?”

“No, but just a few minutes ago I happened to remember that Herb used to go over to the Mills Building quite frequently. I’ve seen him going in and out often, but never thought anything of it. I don’t know whether it is of any importance or -“

I jumped out of my chair.

“That does it!” I cried. “Can I use your phone?”

“Certainly. It’s in the hallway, near the door.” He looked at me in surprise. “It’s a slot phone; have you a nickel in change?”

“Yes.” I was going through the bedroom door.

“The switch is near the door,” he called after me, “if you want a light. Do you think -“

But I didn’t stop to listen to his questions. I was making for the telephone, searching my pockets for a nickel. And, fumbling hurriedly with the nickel, I muffed it – not entirely by accident, for I had a hunch that I wanted to work out. The nickel rolled away down the carpeted hallway. I switched on the light, recovered the nickel, and called the “Quirks’” number. I’m glad I played that hunch.

Dean was still there.

“That joint’s dead.” I sang. “Take the landlady down to headquarters, and grab the Landis woman, too. I’ll meet you there – at headquarters.”

“You mean it?” he rumbled.

“Almost,” I said, and hung up the receiver.

I switched off the hall light and, whistling a little tune to myself, walked back to the room where I had left Ogburn. The door was not quite closed. I walked straight up to it, kicked it open with one foot, and jumped back, •hugging the wall.

Two shots – so close together that they were almost one – crashed.

Flat against the wall, I pounded my feet against the floor and wainscot, and let out a medley of shrieks and groans that would have done credit to a carnival wild-man.

A moment later Ogburn appeared in the doorway, a revolver in his hand, his face wolfish. He was determined to kill me. It was my life or his, so –

I slammed my gun down on the sleek, brown top of his head.

When he opened his eyes, two policemen were lifting him into the back of a patrol wagon.

I found Dean in the detectives’ assembly-room in the Hall of Justice.

“The landlady identified Mae Landis as Mrs. Quirk,” he said. “Now what?”

“Where is she now?”

“One of the policewomen is holding both of them in the captain’s office.”

“Ogburn is over in the Pawnshop Detail office,” I told him. “Let’s take the landlady in for a look at him.”

Ogburn sat leaning forward, holding his head in his hands’ and staring sullenly at the feet of the uniformed man who guarded him, when we took the gaunt landlady in to see him.

“Ever see him before?” I asked her.

“Yes” – reluctantly – “that’s Mr. Quirk.”

Ogburn didn’t look up, and he paid not the least attention to any of us.

After we had told the landlady that she could go home, Dean led me back to a far corner of the assembly-room, where we could talk without disturbance.

“Now spill it!” he burst out. “How come all the startling developments, as the newspaper boys call ‘em?”

“Well, first-off, I knew that the question ‘Who killed Bob Teal?’ could have only one answer. Bob wasn’t a boob! He might possibly have let a man he was trailing lure him behind a row of billboards on a dark night, but he would have gone prepared for trouble. He wouldn’t have died with empty hands, from a gun that was close enough to scorch his coat. The murderer had to be somebody Bob trusted, so it couldn’t be Whitacre. Now Bob was a conscientious sort of lad, and he wouldn’t have stopped shadowing Whitacre to go over and talk with some friend. There was only one man who could have persuaded him to drop Whitacre for a while, and that one man was the one he was working for – Ogburn.

“If I hadn’t known Bob, I might have thought he had hidden behind the billboards to watch Whitacre; but Bob wasn’t an amateur. He knew better than to pull any of that spectacular gumshoe stuff. So there was nothing to it but Ogburn!

“With all that to go on, the rest was duck soup. All the stuff Mae Landis gave us – identifying the gun as Whitacre’s, and giving Ogburn an alibi by saying she had talked to him on the phone at ten o’clock – only convinced me that she and Ogburn were working together. When the landlady described ‘Quirk’ for us, I was fairly certain of it. Her description would fit either Whitacre or Ogburn, but there was no sense to Whitacre’s having the apartment on Greenwich Street, while if Ogburn and the Landis woman were thick, they’d need a meeting-place of some sort. The rest of the box of cartridges there helped some too.

“Then tonight I put on a little act in Ogburn’s apartment, chasing a nickel along the floor and finding traces of dried mud that had escaped the cleaning-up he no doubt gave the carpet and clothes after he came home from walking through the lot in the rain. We’ll let the experts decide whether it could be mud from the lot on which Bob was killed, and the jury can decide whether it is.

“There are a few more odds and ends – like the gun. The Landis woman said Whitacre had had it for more than a year, but in spite of being muddy it looks fairly new to me. We’ll send the serial number to the factory, and find when it was turned out.

“For motive, just now all I’m sure of is the woman, which should be enough. But I think that when Ogburn and Whitacre’s books are audited, and their finances sifted, we’ll find something there. What I’m banking on strong is that Whitacre will come in, now that he is cleared of the murder charge.”

And that is exactly what happened.

Next day Herbert Whitacre walked into Police Headquarters at Sacramento and surrendered.

Neither Ogburn nor Mae Landis ever told what they knew, but with Whitacre’s testimony, supported by what we were able to pick up here and there, we went into court when the time came and convinced the jury that the facts were these:

Ogburn and Whitacre had opened their farm-development business as a plain swindle. They had options on a lot of land, and they planned to sell as many shares in their enterprise as possible before the time came to exercise their options. Then they intended packing up their bags and disappearing. Whitacre hadn’t much nerve, and he had a clear remembrance of the three years he had served in prison for forgery; so to bolster his courage, Ogburn had told his partner that he had a friend in the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., who would tip him off the instant official suspicion was aroused.

The two partners made a neat little pile out of their venture, Ogburn taking charge of the money until the time came for the split-up. Meanwhile, Ogburn and Mae Landis – Whitacre’s supposed wife – had become intimate, and had rented the apartment on Greenwich Street, meeting there afternoons when Whitacre was busy at the office, and when Ogburn was supposed to be out hunting fresh victims. In this apartment Ogburn and the woman had hatched their little scheme, whereby they were to get rid of Whitacre, keep all the loot, and clear Ogburn of criminal complicity in the affairs of Ogburn & Whitacre.

Ogburn had come into the Continental office and told his little tale of his partner’s dishonesty, engaging Bob Teal to shadow him. Then he had told Whitacre that he had received a tip from his friend in Washington that an investigation was about to be made. The two partners planned to leave town on their separate ways the following week. The next night Mae Landis told Whitacre she had seen a man loitering in the neighborhood, apparently watching the building in which they lived. Whitacre – thinking Bob a Post Office inspector – had gone completely to pieces, and it had taken the combined efforts of the woman and his partner – apparently working separately – to keep him from bolting immediately. They persuaded him to stick it out another few days.

On the night of the murder, Ogburn, pretending scepticism of Whitacre’s story about being followed, had met Whitacre for the purpose of learning if he really was being shadowed. They had walked the streets in the rain for an hour. Then Ogburn, convinced, had announced his intention of going back and talking to the supposed Post Office inspector, to see if he could be bribed. Whitacre had refused to accompany his partner, but had agreed to wait for him in a dark doorway.

Ogburn had taken Bob Teal over behind the billboards on some pretext, and had murdered him. Then he had hurried back to his partner, cryirig: “My God! He grabbed me and I shot him. We’ll have to leave!”

Whitacre, in blind panic, had left San Francisco without stopping for his bags or even notifying Mae Landis. Ogburn was supposed to leave by another route. They were to meet in Oklahoma City ten days later, where Ogburn – after getting the loot out of the Los Angeles banks where he had deposited it under various names – was to give Whitacre his share, and then they were to part for good.

In Sacramento next day Whitacre had read the newspapers, and had understood what had been done to him. He had done all the bookkeeping; all the false entries in Ogburn & Whitacre’s books were in his writing. Mae Landis had revealed his former criminal record, and had fastened the ownership of the gun – really Ogburn’s – upon him. He was framed completely! He hadn’t a chance of clearing himself.

He had known that his story would sound like a far-fetched and flimsy lie; he had a criminal record. For him to have surrendered and told the truth would have been merely to get himself laughed at.

As it turned out, Ogburn went to the gallows, Mae Landis is now serving a fifteen-year sentence, and Whitacre, in return for his testimony and restitution of the loot, was not prosecuted for his share in the land swindle.

A MAN CALLED SPADE

Samuel Spade put his telephone aside and looked at his watch. It was not quite four o’clock. He called, “Yoo-hoo!”

Effie Ferine came in from the outer office. She was eating a piece of chocolate cake.

“Tell Sid Wise I won’t be able to keep that date this afternoon,” he said.

She put the last of the cake into her mouth and licked the tips of her forefinger and thumb. “That’s the third time this week.”

When he smiled, the V’s of his chin, mouth, and brows grew longer. “I know, but I’ve got to go out and save a life.” He nodded at the telephone. “Somebody’s scaring Max Bliss.”

She laughed. “Probably somebody named John D. Conscience.”

He looked up at her from the cigarette he had begun to make. “Know anything I ought to know about him?”

“Nothing you don’t know. I was just thinking about the time he let his brother go to San Quentin.”

Spade shrugged. “That’s not the worst thing he’s done.” He lit his cigarette, stood up, and reached for his hat. “But he’s all right now. All Samuel Spade clients are honest, God-fearing folk. If I’m not back at closing time just run along.”

He went to a tall apartment building on Nob Hill, pressed a button set in the frame of a door marked 10K. The door was opened immediately by a burly dark man in wrinkled dark clothes. He was nearly bald and carried a gray hat in one hand.

The burly man said, “Hello, Sam.” He smiled, but his small eyes lost none of their shrewdness. “What are you doing here?”

Spade said, “Hello, Tom.” His face was wooden, his voice expressionless. “Bliss in?”

“Is he!” Tom pulled down the corners of his thick-lipped mouth. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

Spade’s brows came together. “Well?”

A man appeared in the vestibule behind Tom. He was smaller than either Spade or Tom, but compactly built. He had a ruddy, square face and a close-trimmed, grizzled moustache. His clothes were neat. He wore a black bowler perched on the back of his head.

Spade addressed this man over Tom’s shoulder. “Hello, Dundy.”

Dundy nodded briefly and came to the door. His blue eyes were hard and prying.

“What is it?” he asked Tom.

“B-l-i-s-s, M-a-x,” Spade spelled patiently. “I want to see him. He wants to see me. Catch on?”

Tom laughed. Dundy did not. Tom said, “Only one of you gets your wish.” Then he glanced sidewise at Dundy and abruptly stopped laughing. He seemed uncomfortable.

Spade scowled. “All right,” he demanded irritably; “is he dead or has he killed somebody?”

Dundy thrust his square face up at Spade and seemed to push his words out with his lower lip. “What makes you think either?”

Spade said, “Oh, sure! I come calling on Mr. Bliss and I’m stopped at the door by a couple of men from the police Homicide Detail, and I’m supposed to think I’m just interrupting a game of rummy.”

“Aw, stop it, Sam,” Tom grumbled, looking at neither Spade nor Dundy. “He’s dead.”

“Killed?”

Tom wagged his head slowly up and clown. He looked at Spade now. “What’ve you got on it?”

Spade replied in a deliberate monotone, “He called me up this afternoon – say at five minutes to four – I looked at my watch after he hung up and there was still a minute to go – and said somebody was after his scalp. He wanted me to come over. It seemed real enough to him – it was up in his neck all right.” He made a small gesture with one hand. “Well, here I am.”

“Didn’t say who or how?” Dundy asked.

Spade shook his head. “No. Just somebody had offered to kill him and he believed them, and would I come over right away.”

“Didn’t he -?” Dundy began quickly.

“He didn’t say anything else,” Spade said. “Don’t you people tell me anything?”

Dundy said curtly, “Come in and take a look at him.”

Tom said, “It’s a sight.”

They went across the vestibule and through a door into a green and rose living-room.

A man near the door stopped sprinkling white powder on the end of a glass-covered small table to say, “Hello, Sam.”

Spade nodded, said, “How are you, Phels?” and then nodded at the two men who stood talking by a window.

The dead man lay with his mouth open. Some of his clothes had been taken off. His throat was puffy and dark. The end of his tongue showing in a corner of his mouth was bluish, swollen. On his bare chest, over the heart, a five-pointed star had been outlined in black ink and in the centre of it a T.

Spade looked down at the dead man and stood for a moment silently studying him. Then he asked, “He was found like that?”

“About,” Tom said. “We moved him around a little.” He jerked a thumb at the shirt, undershirt, vest, and coat lying on a table. “They were spread over the floor.”

Spade rubbed his chin. His yellow-gray eyes were dreamy. “When?”

Tom said, “We got it at four-twenty. His daughter gave it to us.” He moved his head to indicate a closed door. “You’ll see her.”

“Know anything?”

“Heaven knows,” Tom said wearily. “She’s been kind of hard to get along with so far.” He turned to Dundy. “Want to try her again now?”

Dundy nodded, then spoke to one of the men at the window. “Start sifting his papers, Mack. He’s supposed to’ve been threatened.”

Mack said, “Right.” He pulled his hat down over his eyes and walked toward a green secretaire in the far end of the room.

A man came in from the corridor, a heavy man of fifty with a deeply lined, grayish face under a broad-brimmed black hat. He said, “Hello, Sam,” and then told Dundy, “He had company around half past two, stayed just about an hour. A big blond man in brown, maybe forty or forty-five. Didn’t send his name up. I got it from the Filipino in the elevator that rode him both ways.”

“Sure it was only an hour?” Dundy asked.

The gray-faced man shook his head. “But he’s sure it wasn’t more than half past three when he left. He says the afternoon papers came in then, and this man had ridden down with him before they came.” He pushed his hat back to scratch his head, then pointed a thick finger at the design inked on the dead man’s breast and asked somewhat plaintively, “What the deuce do you suppose that thing is?”

Nobody replied. Dundy asked, “Can the elevator boy identify him?”

“He says he could, but that ain’t always the same thing. Says he never saw him before.” He stopped looking at the dead man. “The girl’s getting me a list of his phone calls. How you been, Sam?”

Spade said he had been all right. Then he said slowly, “His brother’s big and blond and maybe forty or forty-five.”

Dundy’s blue eyes were hard and bright. “So what?” he asked.

“You remember the Graystone Loan swindle. They were both in on it, but Max eased the load over on Theodore and it turned out to be one to fourteen years in San Quentin.”

Dundy was slowly wagging his head up and down. “I remember now. Where is he?”

Spade shrugged and began to make a cigarette.

Dundy nudged Tom with an elbow. “Find out.”

Tom said, “Sure, but if he was out of here at half past three and this fellow was still alive at five to fou r-“

“And he broke his leg so he couldn’t duck back in,” the gray-faced man said jovially.

“Find out,” Dundy repeated.

Tom said, “Sure, sure,” and went to the telephone.

Dundy addressed the gray-faced man: “Check up on the newspapers; see what time they were actually delivered this afternoon.”

The gray-faced man nodded and left the room.

The man who had been searching the secretaire said, “Uh-huh,” and turned around holding an envelope in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other.

Dundy held out his hand. “Something?”

The man said, “Uh-huh,” again and gave Dundy the sheet of paper.

Spade was looking over Dundy’s shoulder.

It was a small sheet of common white paper bearing a pencilled message in neat, undistinguished handwriting:

When this reaches you I will be too close for you to escape – this time. We will balance our accounts – for good.

The signature was a five-pointed star enclosing a T, the design on the dead man’s left breast.

Dundy held out his hand again and was given the envelope. Its stamp was French. The address was typewritten:

MAX BLISS, ESQ.

AMSTERDAM APARTMENTS,

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. U.S.A.

“Postmarked Paris,” he said, “the second of the month.” He counted swiftly on his fingers. “That would get it here today, all right.” He folded the message slowly, put it in the envelope, put the envelope in his coat pocket. “Keep digging,” he told the man who found the message.

The man nodded and returned to the secretaire.

Dundy looked at Spade. “What do you think of it?”

Spade’s brown cigarette wagged up and down with the words. “I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it.”

Tom put down the telephone. “He got out the fifteenth of last month,” he said. “I got them trying to locate him.”

Spade went to the telephone, called a number, and asked for Mr. Darrell. Then: “Hello, Harry, this is Sam Spade… Fine. How’s Lil?… Yes… Listen, Harry, what does a five-pointed star with a capital T in the middle mean?… What? How do you spell it?… Yes, I see… And if you found it on a body?… Neither do I… Yes, and thanks. I’ll tell you about it when I see you… Yes, give me a ring… Thanks… ‘Bye.”

Dundy and Tom were watching him closely when he turned from the telephone. He said, “That’s a fellow who knows things sometimes. He says it’s a pentagram with a Greek tan – t-a-u – in the middle; a sign magicians used to use. Maybe Rosicrucians still do.”

“What’s a Rosicrucian?” Tom asked.

“It could be Theodore’s first initial, too,” Dundy said.

Spade moved his shoulders, said carelessly, “Yes, but if he wanted to autograph the job it’d have been just as easy for him to sign his name.”

He then went on more thoughtfully, “There are Rosicrucians at both San Jose and Point Loma. I don’t go much for this, but maybe we ought to look them up.”

Dundy nodded.

Spade looked at the dead man’s clothes on the table. “Anything in his pockets?”

“Only what you’d expect to find,” Dundy replied. “It’s on the table there.”

Spade went to the table and looked down at the little pile of watch and chain, keys, wallet, address book, money, gold pencil, handkerchief, and spectacle case beside the clothing. He did not touch them, but slowly picked up, one at a time, the dead man’s shirt, undershirt, vest, and coat. A blue necktie lay on the table beneath them. He scowled irritably at it. “It hasn’t been worn,” he complained.

Dundy, Tom, and the coroner’s deputy, who had stood silent all this while by the window – he was a small man with a slim, dark, intelligent face – came together to stare down at the unwrinkled blue silk.

Tom groaned miserably. Dundy cursed under his breath. Spade lifted the necktie to look at its back. The label was a London haberdasher’s.

Spade said cheerfully, “Swell. San Francisco, Point Loma, San Jose, Paris, London.”

Dundy glowered at him.

The gray-faced man came in. “The papers got here at three-thirty, all right,” he said. His eyes widened a little. “What’s up?” As he crossed the room toward them he said, “I can’t find anybody that saw Blondy sneak back in here again.” He looked uncomprehendingly at the necktie until Tom growled, “It’s brand-new”; then he whistled softly.

Dundy turned to Spade. “The deuce with all this,” he said bitterly. “He’s got a brother with reasons for not liking him. The brother just got out of stir. Somebody who looks like his brother left here at half past three. Twenty-five minutes later he phoned you he’d been threatened. Less than half an hour after that his daughter came in and found him dead – strangled.” He poked a finger at the small, dark-faced man’s chest. “Right?”

“Strangled,” the dark-faced man said precisely, “by a man. The hands were large.”

“O.K.” Dundy turned to Spade again. “We find a threatening letter. Maybe that’s what he was telling you about, maybe it was something his brother said to him. Don’t let’s guess. Let’s stick to what we know. We know he -“

The man at the secretaire turned around and said, “Got another one.” His mien was somewhat smug.

The eyes with which the five men at the table looked at him were identically cold, unsympathetic.

He, nowise disturbed by their hostility, read aloud:

“Dear Bliss:

I am writing this to tell you for the last time that I want my money back, and I want it back by the first of the month, all of it. If I don’t get it I am going to do something about it, and you ought to be able to guess what I mean. And don’t think I am kidding.

Yours truly,

Daniel Talbot.”

He grinned. “That’s another T for you.” He picked up an envelope. “Postmarked San Diego, the twenty-fifth of last month.” He grinned again. “And that’s another city for you.”

Spade shook his head. “Point Loma’s down that way,” he said.

He went over with Dundy to look at the letter. It was written in blue ink on white stationery of good quality, as was the address on the envelope, in a cramped, angular handwriting that seemed to have nothing in common with that of the pencilled letter.

Spade said ironically, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Dundy made an impatient gesture. “Let’s stick to what we know,” he growled.

“Sure,” Spade agreed. “What is it?”

There was no reply.

Spade took tobacco and cigarette papers from his pocket. “Didn’t somebody say something about talking to a daughter?” he asked.

“We’ll talk to her.” Dundy turned on his heel, then suddenly frowned at the dead man on the floor. He jerked a thumb at the small, dark-faced man. “Through with it?”

“I’m through.”

Dundy addressed Tom curtly: “Get rid of it.” He addressed the gray-faced man: “I want to see both elevator boys when I’m finished with the girl.”

He went to the closed door Tom had pointed out to Spade and knocked on it.

A slightly harsh female voice within asked, “What is it?”

“Lieutenant Dundy. I want to talk to Miss Bliss.”

There was a pause; then the voice said, “Come in.”

Dundy opened the door and Spade followed him into a black, gray, and silver room, where a big-boned and ugly middle-aged woman in black dress and white apron sat beside a bed on which a girl lay.

The girl lay, elbow on pillow, cheek on hand, facing the big-boned, ugly woman. She was apparently about eighteen years old. She wore a gray suit. Her hair was blond and short, her face firm-featured and remarkably symmetrical. She did not look at the two men coming into the room.

Dundy spoke to the big-boned woman, while Spade was lighting his cigarette: “We want to ask you a couple of questions, too, Mrs. Hooper. You’re Bliss’s housekeeper, aren’t you?”

The woman said, “I am.” Her slightly harsh voice, the level gaze of her deep-set gray eyes, the stillness and size of her hands lying in her lap, all contributed to the impression she gave of resting strength.

“What do you know about this?”

“I don’t know anything about it. I was let off this morning to go over to Oakland to my nephew’s funeral, and when I got back you and the other gentlemen were here and – and this had happened.”

Dundy nodded, asked, “What do you think about it?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she replied simply.

“Didn’t you know he expected it to happen?”

Now the girl suddenly stopped watching Mrs. Hooper. She sat up in bed, turning wide, excited eyes on Dundy, and asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I said. He’d been threatened. He called up Mr. Spade” – he indicated Spade with a nod – “and told him so just a few minutes before he was killed.”

“But who -?” she began.

“That’s what we’re asking you,” Dundy said. “Who had that much against him?”

She stared at him in astonishment. “Nobody would -“

This time Spade interrupted her, speaking with a softness that made his words seem less brutal than they were. “Somebody did.” When she turned her stare on him he asked, “You don’t know of any threats?”

She shook her head from side to side with emphasis.

He looked at Mrs. Hooper. “You?”

“No sir,” she said.

He returned his attention to the girl. “Do you know Daniel Talbot?”

“Why, yes,” she said. “He was here for dinner last night.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know, except that he lives in San Diego, and he and father had some sort of business together. I’d never met him before.”

“What sort of terms were they on?”

She frowned a little, said slowly, “Friendly.”

Dundy spoke: “What business was your father in?”

“He was a financier.”

“You mean a promoter?”

“Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

“Where is Talbot staying, or has he gone back to San Diego?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does he look like?”

She frowned again, thoughtfully. “He’s kind of large, with a red face and white hair and a moustache.”

“Old?”

“I guess he must be sixty; fifty-five at least”

Dundy looked at Spade, who put the stub of his cigarette in a tray on the dressing table and took up the questioning. “How long since you’ve seen your uncle?”

Her face flushed. “You mean Uncle Ted?”

He nodded.

“Not since,” she began, and bit her lip. Then she said, “Of course, you know. Not since he first got out of prison.”

“He came here?”

“Yes.”

“To see your father?”

“Of course.”

“What sort of terms were they on?”

She opened her eyes wide. “Neither of them is very demonstrative,” she said, “but they are brothers, and Father was giving him money to set him up in business again.”

“Then they were on good terms?”

“Yes,” she replied in the tone of one answering an unnecessary question.

“Where does he live?”

“On Post Street,” she said, and gave a number.

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. He was shy, you know, about having been in prison -“ She finished the sentence with a gesture of one hand.

Spade addressed Mrs. Hooper: “You’ve seen him since?”

“No, sir.”

He pursed his lips, asked slowly, “Either of you know he was here this afternoon?”

They said “No” together.

“Where did -?”

Someone knocked on the door.

Dundy said, “Come in.”

Tom opened the door far enough to stick his head in. “His brother’s here,” he said.

The girl, leaning forward, called, “Oh, Uncle Ted!”

A big blond man in brown appeared behind Tom. He was sunburned to an extent that made his teeth seem whiter, his clear eyes bluer, than they were.

He asked, “What’s the matter, Miriam?”

“Father’s dead,” she said, and began to cry.

Dundy nodded at Tom, who stepped out of Theodore Bliss’s way and let him come into the room.

A woman came in behind him, slowly, hesitantly. She was a tall woman in her late twenties, blond, not quite plump. Her features were generous, her face pleasant and intelligent. She wore a small brown hat and a mink coat.

Bliss put an arm around his niece, kissed her forehead, sat on the bed beside her. “There, there,” he said awkwardly.

She saw the blond woman, stared through her tears at her for a moment, then said, “Oh, how do you do, Miss Barrow.”

The blond woman said, “I’m awfully sorry to -“

Bliss cleared his throat, and said, “She’s Mrs. Bliss now. We were married this afternoon.”

Dundy looked angrily at Spade. Spade, making a cigarette, seemed about to laugh.

Miriam Bliss, after a moment’s surprised silence, said, “Oh, I do wish you all the happiness in the world.” She turned to her uncle while his wife was murmuring, “Thank you,” and said, “And you too, Uncle Ted.”

He patted her shoulder and squeezed her to him. He was looking questioningly at Spade and Dundy.

“Your brother died this afternoon,” Dundy said. “He was murdered.”

Mrs. Bliss caught her breath. Bliss’s arm tightened around his niece with a little jerk, but there was not yet any change in his face. “Murdered?” he repeated uncomprehendingly.

“Yes.” Dundy put his hands in his coat pockets. “You were here this afternoon.”

Theodore Bliss paled a little under his sunburn, but said, “I was,” steadily enough.

“How long?”

“About an hour. I got here about half-past two and – “ He turned to his wife. “It was almost half-past three when I phoned you, wasn’t it?”

She said, “Yes.”

“Well, I left him right after that.”

“Did you have a date with him?” Dundy asked.

“No. I phoned his office” – he nodded at his wife – “and was told he’d left for home, so I came on up. I wanted to see him before Elise and I left, of course, and I wanted him to come to the wedding, but he couldn’t. He said he was expecting somebody. We sat here and talked longer than I had intended, so I had to phone Elise to meet me at the Municipal Building.” After a thoughtful pause, Dundy asked, “What time?”

“That we met there?” Bliss looked inquiringly at his wife, who said, “It was quarter to four.” She laughed a little. “I got there first and I kept looking at my watch.”

Bliss said very deliberately, “It was a few minutes after four that we were married. We had to wait for Judge Whitefield – about ten minutes, and it was a few more before we got started – to get through with the case he was hearing. You can check it up – Superior Court, Part Two, I think.”

Spade whirled around and pointed at Tom. “Maybe you’d better check it up.”

Tom said, “Oke,” and went away from the door.

“If that’s so, you’re all right, Mr. Bliss,” Dundy said, “but I have to ask you these things. Now, did your brother say who he was expecting?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything about having been threatened?”

“No. He never talked much about his affairs to anybody, not even to me. Had he been threatened?”

Dundy’s lips tightened a little. “Were you and he on intimate terms?”

“Friendly, if that’s what you mean.”

“Are you sure?” Dundy asked. “Are you sure neither of you held any grudge against the other?”

Theodore Bliss took his arm free from around his niece. Increasing pallor made his sunburned face yellowish. He said, “Everybody here knows about my having been in San Quentin. You can speak out, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“It is,” Dundy said, and then, after a pause, “Well?”

Bliss stood up, “Well, what?” he asked impatiently. “Did I hold a grudge against him for that? No. Why should I? We were both in it. He could get out; I couldn’t. I was sure of being convicted whether he was or not. Having him sent over with me wasn’t going to make it any better for me. We talked it over and decided I’d go it alone, leaving him outside to pull things together. And he did. If you look up his bank account you’ll see he gave me a check for twenty-five thousand dollars two days after I was discharged from San Quentin, and the registrar of the National Steel Corporation can tell you a thousand shares of stock have been transferred from his name to mine since then.”

He smiled apologetically and sat down on the bed again. “I’m sorry. I know you have to ask things.”

Dundy ignored the apology. “Do you know Daniel Talbot?” he asked.

Bliss said, “No.”

His wife said, “I do; that is, I’ve seen him. He was in the office yesterday.”

Dundy looked her up and down carefully before asking, “What office?”

“I am – I was Mr. Bliss’s secretary, and -“

“Max Bliss’s?”

“Yes, and a Daniel Talbot came in to see him yesterday afternoon, if it’s the same one.”

“What happened?”

She looked at her husband, who said, “If you know anything, for heaven’s sake tell them.”

She said, “But nothing really happened. I thought they were angry with each other at first, but when they left together they were laughing and talking, and before they went Mr. Bliss rang for me and told me to have Trapper – he’s the bookkeeper – make out a check to Mr. Talbot’s order.”

“Did he?”

“Oh, yes. I took it in to him. It was for seventy-five hundred and some dollars.”

“What was it for?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“If you were Bliss’s secretary,” Dundy insisted, “you must have some idea of what his business with Talbot was.”

“But I haven’t,” she said. “I’d never even heard of him before.”

Dundy looked at Spade. Spade’s face was wooden. Dundy glowered at him, then put a question to the man on the bed: “What kind of necktie was your brother wearing when you saw him last?”

Bliss blinked, then stared distantly past Dundy, and finally shut his eyes. When he opened them he said, “It was green with – I’d know it if I saw it. Why?”

Mrs. Bliss said, “Narrow diagonal stripes of different shades of green. That’s the one he had on at the office this morning.”

“Where does he keep his neckties?” Dundy asked the housekeeper.

She rose, saying, “In a closet in his bedroom. I’ll show you.”

Dundy and the newly married Blisses followed her out.

Spade put his hat on the dressing table and asked Miriam Bliss, “What time did you go out?” He sat on the foot of her bed.

“Today? About one o’clock. I had a luncheon engagement for one and I was a little late, and then I went shopping, and then -“ She broke off with a shudder.

“And then you came home at what time?” His voice was friendly, matter-of-fact.

“Some time after four, I guess.”

“And what happened?”

“I f-found Father lying there and I phoned – I don’t know whether I phoned downstairs or the police, and then I don’t know what I did. I fainted or had hysterics or something, and the first thing I remember is coming to and finding those men here and Mrs. Hooper.” She looked him full in the face now.

“You didn’t phone a doctor?”

She lowered her eyes again. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Of course you wouldn’t, if you knew he was dead,” he said casually. She was silent.

“You knew he was dead?” he asked.

She raised her eyes and looked blankly at him. “But he was dead,” she said.

He smiled. “Of course; but what I’m getting at is, did you make sure before you phoned?”

She put her hand to her throat. “I don’t remember what I did,” she said earnestly. “I think I just knew he was dead.”

He nodded understandingly. “And if you phoned the police it was because you knew he had been murdered.”

She worked her hands together and looked at them and said, “I suppose so. It was awful. I don’t know what I thought or did.”

Spade leaned forward and made his voice low and persuasive. “I’m not a police detective, Miss Bliss. I was engaged by your father – a few minutes too late to save him. I am, in a way, working for you now, so if there is anything I can do – maybe something the police wouldn’t – “ He broke off as Dundy, followed by the Blisses and the housekeeper, returned to the room. “What luck?”

Dundy said, “The green tie’s not there.” His suspicious gaze darted from Spade to the girl. “Mrs. Hooper says the blue tie we found is one of half a dozen he just got from England.”

Bliss asked, “What’s the importance of the tie?”

Dundy scowled at him. “He was partly undressed when we found him. The tie with his clothes had never been worn.”

“Couldn’t he have been changing clothes when whoever killed him came, and was killed before he had finished dressing?”

Dundy’s scowl deepened. “Yes, but what did he do with the green tie? Eat it?”

Spade said, “He wasn’t changing clothes. If you’ll look at the shirt collar you’ll see he must’ve had it on when he was choked.”

Tom came to the door. “Checks all right,” he told Dundy. “The judge and a bailiff named Kittredge say they were there from about a quarter to four till five or ten minutes after. I told Kittredge to come over and take a look at them to make sure they’re the same ones.”

Dundy said, “Right,” without turning his head and took the pencilled threat signed with the T in a star from his pocket. He folded it so only the signature was visible. Then he asked, “Anybody know what this is?”

Miriam Bliss left the bed to join the others in looking at it. From it they looked at one another blankly.

“Anybody know anything about it?” Dundy asked.

Mrs. Hooper said, “It’s like what was on poor Mr. Bliss’s chest, but – “ The others said, “No.”

“Anybody ever seen anything like it before?”

They said they had not.

Dundy said, “All right. Wait here. Maybe I’ll have something else to ask you after a while.”

Spade said, “Just a minute. Mr. Bliss, how long have you known Mrs. Bliss?”

Bliss looked curiously at Spade. “Since I got out of prison,” he replied somewhat cautiously. “Why?”

“Just since last month,” Spade said as if to himself. “Meet her through your brother?”

“Of course – in his office. Why?”

“And at the Municipal Building this afternoon, were you together all the time?”

“Yes, certainly.” Bliss spoke sharply. “What are you getting at?”

Spade smiled at him, a friendly smile. “I have to ask things,” he said.

Bliss smiled too. “It’s all right.” His smile broadened. “As a matter of fact, I’m a liar. We weren’t actually together all the time. I went out into the corridor to smoke a cigarette, but I assure you every time I looked through the glass of the door I could see her still sitting in the courtroom where I had left her.”

Spade’s smile was as light as Bliss’s. Nevertheless, he asked, “And when you weren’t looking through the glass you were in sight of the door? She couldn’t’ve left the courtroom without your seeing her?”

Bliss’s smile went away. “Of course she couldn’t,” he said, “and I wasn’t out there more than five minutes.”

Spade said, “Thanks,” and followed Dundy into the living-room, shutting the door behind him.

Dundy looked sidewise at Spade. “Anything to it?”

Spade shrugged.

Max Bliss’s body had been removed. Besides the man at the secretaire and the gray-faced man, two Filipino boys in plum-coloured uniforms were in the room. They sat close together on the sofa.

Dundy said, “Mack, I want to find a green necktie. I want this house taken apart, this block taken apart, and the whole neighbourhood taken apart till you find it. Get what men you need.”

The man at the secretaire rose, said, “Right,” pulled his hat down over his eyes, and went out.

Dundy scowled at the Filipinos. “Which of you saw the man in brown?”: The smaller stood up. “Me, sir.”

Dundy opened the bedroom door and said, “Bliss.”

Bliss came to the door.

The Filipino’s face lighted up. “Yes, sir, him.”

Dundy shut the door in Bliss’s face. “Sit down.” The boy sat down hastily.

Dundy stared gloomily at the boys until they began to fidget. Then, “Who else did you bring up to this apartment this afternoon?”

They shook their heads in unison from side to side. “Nobody else, sir,” the smaller one said. A desperately ingratiating smile stretched his mouth wide across his face.

Dundy took a threatening step toward them. “Nuts!” he snarled. “You brought up Miss Bliss.”

The larger boy’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I bring them up. I think you mean other people.” He too tried a smile.

‘Dundy was glaring at him. “Never mind what you think I mean. Tell me what I ask. Now, what do you mean by ‘them’?”

The boy’s smile died under the glare. He looked at the floor between his feet and said, “Miss Bliss and the gentleman.”

“What gentleman? The gentleman in there?” He jerked his head toward the door he had shut on Bliss.

“No, sir. Another gentleman, not an American gentleman.” He had raised his head again and now brightness came back into his face. “I think he is Armenian.”

“Why?”

“Because he not like us Americans, not talk like us.”

Spade laughed, asked, “Ever seen an Armenian?”

“No, sir. That is why I think -“ He shut his mouth with a click as Dundy made a growling noise in his throat.

“What’d he look like?” Dundy asked.

The boy lifted his shoulders, spread his hands. “He tall, like this gentleman.” He indicated Spade. “Got dark hair, dark moustache. Very” – he frowned earnestly – “very nice clothes. Very nice-looking man. Cane, gloves, spats even, and -“

“Young?” Dundy asked.

The head went up and down again. “Young, yes, sir.”

“When did he leave?”

“Five minutes,” the boy replied.

Dundy made a chewing motion with his jaws, then asked, “What time did they come in?”

The boy spread his hands, lifted his shoulders again. “Four o’clock – maybe ten minutes after.”

“Did you bring anybody else up before we got here?”

The Filipinos shook their heads in unison once more.

Dundy spoke out the side of his mouth to Spade: “Get her.”

Spade opened the bedroom door, bowed slightly, said, “Will you come out a moment, Miss Bliss?”

“What is it?” she asked wearily.

“Just for a moment,” he said, holding the door open. Then he suddenly added, “And you’d better come along, too, Mr. Bliss.”

Miriam Bliss came slowly into the living-room followed by her uncle, and Spade shut the door behind them. Miss Bliss’s lower lip twitched a little when she saw the elevator boys. She looked apprehensively at Dundy.

He asked, “What’s this fiddlededee about the man that came in with you?”

Her lower lip twitched again. “Wh – what?” She tried to put bewilderment on her face. Theodore Bliss hastily crossed the room, stood for a moment before her as if he intended to say something, and then, apparently changing his mind, took up a position behind her, his arms crossed over the back of a chair.

“The man who came in with you,” Dundy said harshly, rapidly. “Who is he? Where is he? Why’d he leave? Why didn’t you say anything about him?”

The girl put her hands over her face and began to cry, “He didn’t have anything to do with it,” she blubbered through her hands. “He didn’t, and it would just make trouble for him.”

“Nice boy,” Dundy said. “So, to keep his name out of the newspapers, he runs off and leaves you alone with your murdered father.”

She took her hands away from her face. “Oh, but he had to,” she cried. “His wife is so jealous, and if she knew he had been with me again she’d certainly divorce him, and he hasn’t a cent in the world of his own.”

Dundy looked at Spade. Spade looked at the goggling Filipinos and jerked a thumb at the outer door. “Scram,” he said. They went out quickly.

“And who is this gem?” Dundy asked the girl.

“But he didn’t have any – “

“Who is he?”

Her shoulders drooped a little and she lowered her eyes. “His name is Boris Smekalov,” she said wearily.

“Spell it.”

She spelled it.

“Where does he live?”

“At the St. Mark Hotel.”

Does he do anything for a living except marry money?”

Anger came into her face as she raised it, but went away as quickly. “He doesn’t do anything,” she said.

Dundy wheeled to address the gray-faced man. “Get him.”

The gray-faced man grunted and went out.

Dundy faced the girl again. “You and this Smekalov in love with each other?”

Her face became scornful. She looked at him with scornful eyes and said nothing.

He said, “Now your father’s dead, will you have enough money for him to marry if his wife divorces him?” She covered her face with her hands.

He said, “Now your father’s dead, will -?”

Spade, leaning far over, caught her as she fell. He lifted her easily and carried her into the bedroom. When he came back he shut the door behind him and leaned against it. “Whatever the rest of it was,” he said, “the faint’s a phoney.”

“Everything’s a phoney,” Dundy growled.

Spade grinned mockingly, “There ought to be a law making criminals give themselves up.”

Mr. Bliss smiled and sat down at his brother’s desk by the window.

Dundy’s voice was disagreeable. “You got nothing to worry about,” he said to Spade. “Even your client’s dead and can’t complain. But if I don’t come across I’ve got to stand for riding from the captain, the chief, the newspapers, and heaven knows who all.”

“Stay with it,” Spade said soothingly; “you’ll catch a murderer sooner or later yet.” His face became serious except for the lights in his yellow-gray eyes. “I don’t want to run this job up any more alleys than we have to, but don’t you think we ought to check up on the funeral the housekeeper said she went to? There’s something funny about that woman.”

After looking suspiciously at Spade for a moment, Dundy nodded, and said, “Tom’ll do it.”

Spade turned about and, shaking his finger at Tom, said, “It’s a ten-to-one bet there wasn’t any funeral. Check on it… don’t miss a trick.”

Then he opened the bedroom door and called Mrs. Hooper. “Sergeant Polhaus wants some information from you,” he told her.

While Tom was writing down names and addresses that the woman gave him, Spade sat on the sofa and made and smoked a cigarette, and Dundy walked the floor slowly, scowling at the rug. With Spade’s approval, Theodore Bliss rose and rejoined his wife in the bedroom.

Presently Tom put his note book in his pocket, said, “Thank you,” to the housekeeper, “Be seeing you,” to Spade and Dundy, and left the apartment.

The housekeeper stood where he had left her, ugly, strong, serene, patient.

Spade twisted himself around on the sofa until he was looking into her deep-set, steady eyes. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, flirting a hand toward the door Tom had gone through. “Just routine.” He pursed his lips, asked, “What do you honestly think of this thing, Mrs. Hooper?”

She replied calmly, in her strong, somewhat harsh voice, “I think it’s the judgment of God.”

Dundy stopped pacing the floor.

Spade said, “What?”

There was certainty and no excitement in her voice: “The wages of sin is death.”

Dundy began to advance toward Mrs. Hooper in the manner of one stalking game. Spade waved him back with a hand which the sofa hid from the woman. His face and voice showed interest, but were now as composed as the woman’s. “Sin?” he asked.

She said, “’Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea.’” She spoke, not as if quoting, but as if saying something she believed.

Dundy barked a question at her: “What little one?”

She turned her grave gray eyes on him, then looked past him at the bedroom door.

“Her,” she said; “Miriam.”

Dundy frowned at her. “His daughter?”

The woman said, “Yes, his own adopted daughter.”

Angry blood mottled Dundy’s square face. “What the heck is this?” he demanded. He shook his head as if to free it from some clinging thing. “She’s not really his daughter?”

The woman’s serenity was in no way disturbed by his anger. “No. His wife was an invalid most of her life. They didn’t have any children.”

Dundy moved his jaws as if chewing for a moment and when he spoke again his voice was cooler. “What did he do to her?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I truly believe that when the truth’s found out you’ll see that the money her father – I mean her real father – left her has been -“

Spade interrupted her, taking pains to speak very clearly, moving one hand in small circles with his words. “You mean you don’t actually know he’s been gypping her? You just suspect it?”

She put a hand over her heart. “I know it here,” she replied calmly.

Dundy looked at Spade, Spade at Dundy, and Spade’s eyes were shiny with not altogether pleasant merriment. Dundy cleared his throat and addressed the woman again. “And you think this” – he waved a hand at the floor where the dead man had lain -“was the judgment of God, huh?”

“I do.”

He kept all but the barest trace of craftiness out of his eyes. “Then whoever did it was just acting as the hand of God?”

“It’s not for me to say,” she replied.

Red began to mottle his face again.

“That’ll be all right now,” he said in a choking voice, but by the time she reached the bedroom door his eyes became alert again and he called, “Wait a minute.” And when they were facing each other: “Listen, do you happen to be a Rosicrucian?”

“I wish to be nothing but a Christian.”

He growled, “All right, all right,” and turned his back on her. She went into the bedroom and shut the door. He wiped his forehead with the palm of his right hand and complained wearily, “Great Scott, what a family.”

Spade shrugged. “Try investigating your own some time.”

Dundy’s face whitened. His lips, almost colourless, came back tight over his teeth. He balled his fists and lunged toward Spade. “What do you -?” The pleasantly surprised look on Spade’s face stopped him. He averted his eyes, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue, looked at Spade again and away, essayed an embarrassed smile, and mumbled, “You mean any family. Uh-huh, I guess so.” He turned hastily toward the corridor door as the doorbell rang.

The amusement twitching Spade’s face accentuated his likeness to a blond satan.

An amiable, drawling voice came in through the corridor door: “I’m Jim Kittredge, Superior Court. I was told to come over here.”

Dundy’s voice: “Yes, come in.”

Kittredge was a roly-poly ruddy man in too-tight clothes with the shine of age on them. He nodded at Spade and said, “I remember you, Mr. Spade, from the Burke-Harris suit.”

Spade said, “Sure,” and stood up to shake hands with him.

Dundy had gone to the bedroom door to call Theodore Bliss and his wife. Kittredge looked at them, smiled at them amiably, said, “How do you do?” and turned to Dundy. “That’s them, all right.” He looked around as if for a place to spit, found none, and said, “It was just about ten minutes to four that the gentleman there came in the courtroom and asked me how long His Honor would be, and I told him about ten minutes, and they waited there; and right after court adjourned at four o’clock we married them.”

Dundy said, “Thanks.” He sent Kittredge away, the Blisses back to the bedroom, scowled with dissatisfaction at Spade, and said, “So what?”

Spade, sitting down again, replied, “So you couldn’t get from here to the Municipal Building in less than fifteen minutes on a bet, so he couldn’t’ve ducked back here while he was waiting for the judge, and he couldn’t have hustled over here to do it after the wedding and before Miriam arrived.”

The dissatisfaction in Dundy’s face increased. He opened his mouth, but shut it in silence when the gray-faced man came in with a tall, slender, pale young man who fitted the description the Filipino had given of Miriam Bliss’s companion.

The gray-faced man said, “Lieutenant Dundy, Mr. Spade, Mr. Boris – uh Smekalov.”

Dundy nodded curtly.

Smekalov began to speak immediately. His accent was not heavy enough to trouble his hearers much, though his r’s sounded more like w’s. “Lieutenant, I must beg of you that you keep this confidential. If it should get out it will ruin me, Lieutenant, ruin me completely and most unjustly. I am most innocent, sir, I assure you, in heart, spirit, and deed, not only innocent, but in no way whatever connected with any part of the whole horrible matter. There is no -“

“Wait a minute.” Dundy prodded Smekalov’s chest with a blunt finger. “Nobody’s said anything about you being mixed up in anything – but it’d have looked better if you’d stuck around.”

The young man spread his arms, his palms forward, in an expansive gesture. “But what can I do? I have a wife who -“ He shook his head violently. “It is impossible. I cannot do it.”

The gray-faced man said to Spade in an adequately subdued voice, “Goofy, these Russians.”

Dundy screwed up his eyes at Smekalov and made his voice judicial. “You’ve probably,” he said, “put yourself in a pretty tough spot.”

Smekalov seemed about to cry. “But only put yourself in my place,” he begged, “and you -“

“Wouldn’t want to.” Dundy seemed, in his callous way, sorry for the young man. “Murder’s nothing to play with in this country.”

“Murder! But I tell you, Lieutenant, I happen’ to enter into this situation by the merest mischance only. I am not -“

“You mean you came in here with Miss Bliss by accident?”

The young man looked as if he would like to say “Yes.” He said, “No,” slowly, then went on with increasing rapidity: “But that was nothing, sir, nothing at all. We had been to lunch. I escorted her home and she said, ‘Will you come in for a cocktail?’ and I would. That is all, I give you my word.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Could it not have happened so to you?” He moved his hands in Spade’s direction. “To you?”

Spade said, “A lot of things happen to me. Did Bliss know you were running around with his daughter?”

“He knew we were friends, yes.”

“Did he know you had a wife?”

Smekalov said cautiously, “I do not think so.”

Dundy said, “You know he didn’t.”

Smekalov moistened his lips and did not contradict the lieutenant.

Dundy asked, “What do you think he’d’ve done if he found out?”

“I do not know, sir.”

Dundy stepped close to the young man and spoke through his teeth in a harsh, deliberate voice, “What did he do when he found out?”

The young man retreated a step, his face white and frightened.

The bedroom door opened and Miriam Bliss came into the room. “Why don’t you leave him alone?” she asked indignantly. “I told you he had nothing to do with it. I told you he didn’t know anything about it.” She was beside Smekalov now and had one of his hands in hers. “You’re simply making trouble for him without doing a bit of good. I’m awfully sorry, Boris, I tried to keep them from bothering you.”

The young man mumbled unintelligibly.

“You tried, all right,” Dundy agreed. He addressed Spade: “Could it’ve been like this, Sam? Bliss found out about the wife, knew they had the lunch date, came home early to meet them when they came in, threatened to tell the wife, and was choked to stop him.” He looked sidewise at the girl. “Now, if you want to fake another faint, hop to it.”

The young man screamed and flung himself at Dundy, clawing with both hands. Dundy grunted – “Uh!” – and struck him in the face with a heavy fist. The young man went backward across the room until he collided with a chair. He and the chair went down on the floor together. Dundy said to the gray-faced man, “Take him down to the Hall – material witness.”

The gray-faced man said, “Oke,” picked up Smekalov’s hat, and went over to help pick him up.

Theodore Bliss, his wife, and the housekeeper had come to the door Miriam Bliss had left open. Miriam Bliss was crying, stamping her foot, threatening Dundy: “I’ll report you, you coward. You had no right to…” and so on. Nobody paid much attention to her; they watched the gray-faced man help Smekalov to his feet, take him away. Smekalov’s nose and mouth were red smears.

Then Dundy said, “Hush,” negligently to Miriam Bliss and took a slip of paper from his pocket. “I got a list of the calls from here today. Sing out when you recognize them.”

He read a telephone number.

Mrs. Hooper said, “That is the butcher. I phoned him before I left this morning.” She said the next number Dundy read was the grocer’s.

He read another.

“That’s the St. Mark,” Miriam Bliss said. “I called up Boris.” She identified two more numbers as those of friends she had called.

The sixth number, Bliss said, was his brother’s office. “Probably my call to Elise to ask her to meet me.”

Spade said, “Mine,” to the seventh number, and Dundy said, “That last one’s police emergency.” He put the slip back in his pocket.

Spade said cheerfully, “And that gets us a lot of places.”

The doorbell rang.

Dundy went to the door. He and another man could be heard talking in voices too low for their words to be recognised in the living room.

The telephone rang. Spade answered it. “Hello… No, this is Spade. Wait a min- All right.” He listened. “Right, I’ll tell him… I don’t know. I’ll have him call you… Right.”

When he turned from the telephone Dundy was standing, hands behind him, in the vestibule doorway. Spade said, “O’Gar says your Russian went completely nuts on the way to the Hall. They had to shove him into a strait-jacket.”

“He ought to been there long ago,” Dundy growled. “Come here.”

Spade followed Dundy into the vestibule. A uniformed policeman stood in the outer doorway.

Dundy brought his hands from behind him. In one was a necktie with narrow diagonal stripes in varying shades of green, in the other was a platinum scarfpin in the shape of a crescent set with small diamonds.

Spade bent over to look at three small, irregular spots on the tie. “Blood?”

“Or dirt,” Dundy said. “He found them crumpled up in a newspaper in the rubbish can on the corner.”

“Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said proudly; “there I found them, all wadded up in -“ He stopped because nobody was paying any attention to him.

“Blood’s better,” Spade was saying. “It gives a reason for taking the tie away. Let’s go in and talk to the people.”

Dundy stuffed the tie in one pocket, thrust his hand holding the pin into another. “Right – and we’ll call it blood.”

They went into the living-room. Dundy looked from Bliss to Bliss’s wife, to Bliss’s niece, to the housekeeper, as if he did not like any of them. He took his fist from his pocket, thrust it straight out in front of him, and opened it to show the crescent pin lying in his hand. “What’s that?” he demanded.

Miriam Bliss was the first to speak. “Why, it’s Father’s pin,” she said.

“So it is?” he said disagreeably. “And did he have it on today?”

“He always wore it.” She turned to the others for confirmation.

Mrs. Bliss said, “Yes,” while the others nodded.

“Where did you find it?” the girl asked.

Dundy was surveying them one by one again, as if he liked them less than ever. His face was red. “He always wore it,” he said angrily, “but there wasn’t one of you could say, ‘Father always wore a pin. Where is it?’ No, we got to wait till it turns up before we can get a word out of you about it.”

Bliss said, “Be fair. How were we to know -?”

“Never mind what you were to know,” Dundy said. “It’s coming around to the point where I’m going to do some talking about what I know.” He took the green necktie from his pocket. “This is his tie?”

Mrs. Hooper said, “Yes, sir.”

Dundy said, “Well, it’s got blood on it, and it’s not his blood because he didn’t have a scratch on him that we could see.” He looked narrow-eyed from one to another of them. “Now, suppose you were trying to choke a man that wore a scarfpin and he was wresting with you, and -“

He broke off and looked at Spade.

Spade had crossed to where Mrs. Hooper was standing. Her big hands were clasped in front of her. He took her right hand, turned it over, took the wadded handkerchief from her palm, and there was a two-inch-long fresh scratch in the flesh.

She had passively allowed him to examine her hand. Her mien lost none of its tranquillity now. She said nothing.

“Well?” he asked.

“I scratched it on Miss Miriam’s pin fixing her on the bed when she fainted,” the housekeeper said calmly.

Dundy’s laugh was brief, bitter. “It’ll hang you just the same,” he said.

There was no change in the woman’s face. “The Lord’s will be done,” she replied.

Spade made a peculiar noise in his throat as he dropped her hand. “Well, let’s see how we stand.” He grinned at Dundy. “You don’t like that star – T, do

you?

Dundy said, “Not by a long shot.”

“Neither do I,” Spade said. “The Talbot threat was probably on the level, but that debt seems to have been squared. Now – Wait a minute.” He went to the telephone and called his office. “The tie thing looked pretty funny, too, for a while,” he said while he waited, “but I guess the blood took care of that.”

He spoke into the telephone: “Hello, Effie. Listen: Within half an hour or so of the time Bliss called me, did you get any call that maybe wasn’t on the level? Anything that could have been a stall… Yes, before… Think now.”

He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Dundy, “There’s a lot of deviltry going on in this world.”

He spoke into the telephone again: “Yes?… Yes… Kruger?… Yes. Man or woman?… Thanks… No, I’ll be through in half an hour. Wait for me and I’ll buy your dinner. ‘Bye.”

He turned away from the telephone. “About half an hour before Bliss phoned, a man called my office and asked for Mr. Kruger.”

Dundy frowned. “So what?”

“Kruger wasn’t there.”

Dundy’s frown deepened. “Who’s Kruger?”

“I don’t know,” Spade said blandly. “I never heard of him.” He took tobacco and cigarette papers from his pockets. “All right, Bliss, where’s your scratch?”

Theodore Bliss said, “What?” while the others stared blankly at Spade.

“Your scratch,” Spade repeated in a consciously patient tone. His attention was on the cigarette he was making. “The place where your brother’s pin gouged you when you were choking him.”

“Are you crazy?” Bliss demanded. “I was -“

“Uh-huh, you were being married when he was killed. You were not.” Spade moistened the edge of his cigarette paper and smoothed it with his forefingers.

Mrs. Bliss spoke now, stammering a little: “But h e- but Max Bliss called -“

“Who says Max Bliss called me?” Spade said. “I don’t know that. I wouldn’t know his voice. All I know is a man called me and said he was Max Bliss. Anybody could say that.”

“But the telephone records here show the call came from here,” she protested.

He shook his head and smiled. “They show I had a call from here, and I did, but not that one. I told you somebody called up half an hour or so before the supposed Max Bliss call and asked for Mr. Kruger.” He nodded at Theodore Bliss. “He was smart enough to get a call from this apartment to my office on the record before he left to meet you.”

She stared from Spade to her husband with dumbfounded blue eyes.

Her husband said lightly, “It’s nonsense, my dear. You know -“

Spade did not let him finish that sentence. “You know he went out to smoke a cigarette in the corridor while waiting for the judge, and he knew there were telephone booths in the corridor. A minute would be all he needed.” He lit his cigarette and returned his lighter to his pocket.

Bliss said, “Nonsense!” more sharply. “Why should I want to kill Max?” He smiled reassuringly into his wife’s horrified eyes. “Don’t let this disturb you, dear. Police methods are sometimes -“

“All right,” Spade said, “let’s look you over for scratches.”

Bliss wheeled to face him more directly. “Damned if you will!” He put a hand behind him.

Spade, wooden-faced and dreamy-eyed, came forward.

Spade and Effie Ferine sat at a small table in Julius’s Castle on Telegraph Hill. Through the window beside them ferryboats could be seen carrying lights to and from the cities’ lights on the other side of the bay.

“… hadn’t gone there to kill him, chances are,” Spade was saying; “just to shake him down for some more money; but when the fight started, once he got his hands on his throat, I guess, his grudge was too hot in him for him to let go till Max was dead. Understand, I’m just putting together what the evidence says, and what we got out of his wife, and the not much that we got out of him.”

Effie nodded. “She’s a nice, loyal wife.”

Spade drank coffee, shrugged. “What for? She knows now that he made his play for her only because she was Max’s secretary. She knows that when he took out the marriage license a couple of weeks ago it was only to string her along so she’d get him the photostatic copies of the records that tied Max up with the Graystone Loan swindle. She knows – Well, she knows she wasn’t just helping an injured innocent to clear his good name.”

He took another sip of coffee. “So he calls on his brother this afternoon to hold San Quentin over his head for a price again, and there’s a fight, and he kills him, and gets his wrist scratched by the pin while he’s choking him. Blood on the tie, a scratch on the wrist – that won’t do. He takes the tie off the corpse and hunts up another, because the absence of a tie will set the police to thinking. He gets a bad break there: Max’s new ties are on the front of the rack, and he grabs the first one he comes to. All right. Now he’s got to put it around the dead man’s neck – or wait – he gets a better idea. Pull off some more clothes and puzzle the police. The tie’ll be just as inconspicuous off as on, if the shirt’s off too. Undressing him, he gets another idea. He’ll give the police something else to worry about, so he draws a mystic sign he has seen somewhere on the dead man’s chest.”

Spade emptied his cup, set it down, and went on: “By now he’s getting to be a regular master-mind at bewildering the police. A threatening letter signed with the thing on Max’s chest. The afternoon mail is on the desk. One envelope’s as good as another so long as it’s typewritten and has no return address, but the one from France adds a touch of the foreign, so out comes the original letter and in goes the threat. He’s overdoing it now; see? He’s giving us so much that’s wrong that we can’t help suspecting things that seem all right – the phone call, for instance.

“Well, he’s ready for the phone calls now – his alibi. He picks my name out of the private detectives in the phone book and does the Mr. Kruger trick; but that’s after he calls the blond Elise and tells her that not only have the obstacles to their marriage been removed, but he’s had an offer to go in business in New York and has to leave right away, and will she meet him in fifteen minutes and get married? There’s more than just an alibi to that. He wants to make sure she is dead sure he didn’t kill Max, because she knows he doesn’t like Max, and he doesn’t want her to think he was just stringing her along to get the dope on Max, because she might be able to put two and two together and get something like the right answer.

“With that taken care of, he’s ready to leave. He goes out quite openly, with only one thing to worry about now – the tie and pin in his pocket. He takes the pin along because he’s not sure the police mightn’t find traces of blood around the setting of the stones, no matter how carefully he wipes it. On his way out he picks up a newspaper – buys one from the newsboy he meets at the street door – wads tie and pin up in a piece of it, and drops it in the rubbish can at the corner. That seems all right. No reason for the police to look for the tie. No reason for the street cleaner who empties the can to investigate a crumpled piece of newspaper, and if something does go wrong – what the deuce! – the murderer dropped it there, but he, Theodore, can’t be the murderer, because he’s going to have an alibi.

“Then he jumps in his car and drives to the Municipal Building. He knows there are plenty of phones there and he can always say he’s got to wash his hands, but it turns out he doesn’t have to. While they’re waiting for the judge to get through with a case he goes out to smoke a cigarette, and there you are – ‘Mr. Spade, this is Max Bliss and I’ve been threatened.’”

Effie Ferine nodded, then asked, “Why do you suppose he picked on a private detective instead of the police?”

“Playing safe. If the body had been found, meanwhile, the police might’ve heard of it and traced the call. A private detective wouldn’t be likely to hear about it till he read it in the papers.”

She laughed, then said, “And that was your luck.”

“Luck? I don’t know.” He looked gloomily at the back of his left hand. “I hurt a knuckle stopping him and the job only lasted an afternoon. Chances are whoever’s handling the estate’ll raise hob if I send them a bill for any decent amount of money.” He raised a hand to attract the waiter’s attention. “Oh, well, better luck next time. Want to catch a movie or have you got something else to do?”

TOO MANY HAVE LIVED

The man’s tie was as orange as a sunset. He was a large man, tall and meaty, without softness. The dark hair parted in the middle, flattened to his scalp, his firm, full cheeks, the clothes that fit him with noticeable snugness, even the small pink ears flat against the side of his head – each of these seemed but a differently coloured part of one same smooth surface. His age could have been thirty-five or forty-five.

He sat beside Samuel Spade’s desk, leaning forward a little over his Malacca stick, and said, “No, I want you to find out what happened to him. I hope you never find him.” His protuberant green eyes stared solemnly at Spade.

Spade rocked back in his chair. His face – given a not unpleasantly Satanic cast by the V’s of his bony chin, mouth, nostrils, and thickish brows – was as politely interested as his voice. “Why?”

The green-eyed man spoke quietly, with assurance, “I can talk to you, Spade. You’ve the sort of reputation I want in a private detective. That’s why I am here.”

Spade’s nod committed him to nothing.

The green-eyed man said, “And any fair price is all right with me.” Spade nodded as before. “And with me,” he said, “but I’ve got to know ‘what you want to buy. You want to find out what happened to this – uh – Eli Haven, but you don’t care what it is?”

The green-eyed man lowered his voice, but there was no other change in mien. “In a way I do. For instance, if you found him and fixed it so he stayed away for good, it might be worth more money.”

“You mean even if he didn’t want to stay away?”

The green-eyed man said, “Especially.”

Spade smiled and shook his head. “Probably not enough more money – the way you mean it.” He took his long, thick-fingered hands from the arms of his chair and turned their palms up. “Well, what’s it all about, Colyer?”

Colyer’s face reddened a little, but his eyes maintained their unblinking cold stare. “This man’s got a wife. I like her. They had a row last week and he blew. If I can convince her he’s gone for good, there’s a chance she’ll divorce him.”

“I’d want to talk to her,” Spade said. “Who is this Eli Haven?”

“He’s a bad egg. He doesn’t do anything. Writes poetry or something.”

“What can you tell me about him that’ll help?”

“Nothing Julia, his wife, can’t tell you. You’re going to talk to her.” Colyer stood up. “I’ve got connections. Maybe I can get something for you through them later.”

A small-Boned woman of twenty-five or -six opened the apartment door. Her powder-blue dress was trimmed with silver buttons. She was full-bosomed but slim, with straight shoulders and narrow hips, and she carried herself with a pride that would have been cockiness in one less graceful.

Spade said, “Mrs. Haven?”

She hesitated before saying, “Yes.”

“Gene Colyer sent me to see you. My name’s Spade. I’m a private detective. He wants me to find your husband.”

“And have you found him?”

“I told him I’d have to talk to you first.”

Her smile went away. She studied his face gravely, feature by feature, then she said, “Certainly,” and stepped back, drawing the door back with her.

When they were seated in facing chairs in a cheaply furnished room overlooking a playground where children were noisy, she asked, “Did Gene tell you why he wanted Eli found?”

“He said if you knew he was gone for good maybe you’d listen to reason.”

She said nothing.

“Has he ever gone off like this before?”

“Often.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s a swell man,” she said dispassionately, “when he’s sober; and when he’s drinking he’s all right except with women and money.”

“That leaves him a lot of room to be all right in. What does he do for a living?”

“He’s a poet,” she replied, “but nobody makes a living at that.”

“Well?”

“Oh, he pops in with a little money now and then. Poker, races, he says. I don’t know.”

“How long’ve you been married?”

“Four years, almost.” She smiled mockingly.

“San Francisco all the time?”

“No, we lived in Seattle the first year and then came here.”

“He from Seattle?”

She shook her head. “Some place in Delaware.”

“What place?”

“I don’t know.”

Spade drew his thickish brows together a little. “Where are you from?”

She said sweetly, “You’re not hunting for me.”

“You act like it,” he grumbled. “Well, who are his friends?”

“Don’t ask me!”

He made an impatient grimace. “You know some of them,” he insisted.

“Sure. There’s a fellow named Minera and a Louis James and somebody he calls Conny.”

“Who are they?”

“Men,” she replied blandly. “I don’t know anything about them. They phone or drop by to pick him up, or I see him around town with them. That’s all I know.”

“What do they do for a living? They can’t all write poetry.”

She laughed. “They could try. One of them, Louis James, is a member of Gene’s staff, I think. I honestly don’t know any more about them than I’ve told you.”

“Think they’d know where your husband is?”

She shrugged. “They’re kidding me if they do. They still call up once in a while to see if he’s turned up.”

“And these women you mentioned?”

“They’re not people I know.”

Spade scowled thoughtfully at the floor, asked, “What’d he do before he started not making a living writing poetry?”

“Anything – sold vacuum cleaners, hoboed, went to sea, dealt blackjack, railroaded, canning houses, lumber camps, carnivals, worked on a newspaper – anything.”

“Have any money when he left?”

“Three dollars he borrowed from me.”

“What’d he say?”

She laughed. “Said if I used whatever influence I had with God while he was gone he’d be back at dinnertime with a surprise for me.”

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-coloured 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 Coloured 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 coloured lights, in memory of those 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 labour 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 Ferine 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 was 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 yon 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 Ferine 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 Ferine 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 Hip,” 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 yon said? What would he have to blackmail me on?”

“’To good old Buck,’” – Spade quoted the dead poet’s inscription – “’who knew his coloured lights, in memory of them there days.’” He looked sombrely at Ferris from beneath slightly raised brows. “What coloured 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?”