Spade & Archer

14 The Eberhard Death

Apparently aimless, Samuel Spade wandered through the throng lying or sitting or picnicking on the grassy slope above the Fleishhacker Pool. Crowds of people in bathing costumes, summer frocks, and shirtsleeves were enjoying the warm, sunny day, rare out near the beach at the foot of Sloat Boulevard.

Spade was tieless, collarless, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, his suit coat slung over one shoulder with his forefinger hooked through the loop inside the back of the collar. The Chronicle for Saturday, September 12, 1925, was folded in a coat pocket.

He worked his way through the border of low pine trees and bushes to come up behind a mid-forties sandy-haired man standing at the edge of the vast outdoor plunge. The bright horizontal pattern of the man’s V-neck cricket sweater emphasized his thickening waist. A light breeze mingled the sharp salt tang of the ocean with the clean fragrance of the evergreens.

“What brings us out here on a sunny Saturday, Ray?”

Ray Kentzler turned to look at Spade. He had a square Germanic head and a pleasant broad-mouthed face with pale, smart, watchful eyes under blond brows.

“I’m working this one outside the system, Sam.”

“Fair enough. But who’s paying me, if it comes to that?”

“Oh, Bankers’ Life — if it comes to that.” He moved his head slightly. “C’mon, let’s walk; I’ve been wanting to get a gander at this place since it opened.”

“Largest outdoor pool in the country,” said Spade solemnly.

But Kentzler took his gibe at face value.

“Open maybe four months. Three city blocks long, nearly half a football field wide, six and a half million gallons of warmed circulating seawater. Twenty lifeguards on duty—”

“Who need rowboats to go out and get anyone who’s in trouble, the pool’s so big. If your wife was at one end, Ray, she wouldn’t be able to identify your kid at the other end.”

“Probably wouldn’t want to,” said Kentzler.

“They built it in the wrong place. It should be down the peninsula near Stanford, where they get hot weather.”

“I notice you have your coat off, Sam.”

“And in another hour, when that fog rolls in from the ocean, you’ll notice I have it back on again.”

They strolled through drifting adults and running kids, past tulip-shaped light fixtures on tall metal poles.

“Let me buy you a late lunch, Sam.”

At the bathhouse, 450 feet long, done in Italian Renaissance style, with a glazed tile roof and dining rooms on the second floor, they chose the room looking out toward the ocean rather than the one facing east over the pool toward Lake Merced. Their salads arrived, along with Boston clam chowder for Spade and oysters for Kentzler. The insurance man leaned across the table, his voice low and confidential.

“There’s a big life insurance policy at Bankers’ Life I can’t talk to anyone at the office about because we’ve privately agreed to settle even though we aren’t admitting it yet. But... I’m bothered. What do you know about the Collin Eberhard death?”

“What’s been in the papers. He was swimming in the bay out in front of the Neptune Bath House when he got into difficulty. Some witnesses say he was struggling against the current, others say he was just floating facedown. They rowed out in a small boat to rescue him, but he was already dead. The tabloids started hinting that there were rumors of irregularities at California-Citizens Bank, where he was founder and president.”

“Are you sure you didn’t memorize the papers?”

“Then they decided that he was financially ruined and because of that had taken out a very large life insurance policy in favor of his wife and then ingested a vial of poison. I don’t know what made them come up with that, but it sold a lot of newspapers.” Spade pulled the folded Chronicle from his suit coat pocket and slapped it on the table. “It still does. Today’s big question seems to be whether he died of suicide, accident, or natural causes.”

“Yeah. The autopsy was held seventeen hours after his death and the coroner held the inquest two weeks ago—”

“With you guys pushing for suicide. Because the policy hadn’t been in effect long enough for you to have to pay off if he killed himself, suicide would let you off the hook.”

“Can you blame us? This is a lot of money that would go to the widow, Sam — I mean a lot of money. Bankers’ Life’s money.”

Spade stopped spooning soup with an abrupt growl.

“I don’t blame anybody for anything. But I don’t work domestic cases, I don’t take pennies off dead men’s eyes, and I don’t pick the pockets of new widows.”

“What do you know about this one?”

“Nothing, Ray. Not a thing.”

“She’s nine years younger than Eberhard was. Married him seven — no, eight years ago, just about when he founded his little private bank. They were struggling. Just scraping by. Then four years ago the bank started growing, getting prosperous. He started getting rich. She was suddenly sitting pretty. A lot of money and no children. She didn’t want any.”

“Did he?”

Kentzler looked surprised. “I don’t know. But I do know that once you know rich, you don’t want to know poor again. I think she could be the sort of widow who’d fill up those pockets you talk about by defrauding the insurance company.”

“Dear, you’re in trouble at the bank and you’ve got this huge life insurance policy, so let me help you poison yourself?”

“You can laugh, but even so—”

“You’re saying there was?”

“What?”

“Collusion on her part?”

“How the hell do I know? I just want to find out one way or the other. If everything’s jake, then OK, the wife honestly should get her big payoff. If it’s suicide I want to keep her from getting one thin dime.”

“What do the forensics say?”

“Unclear. Natural causes, suicide, even murder — it could have been any of them. But who except the wife would benefit if it was murder, and how would she have rigged it? That’s why I dragged you down here today. You did such a good recovery job for us on that Pasadena bearer-bond theft—”

Spade grinned sardonically and returned to his chowder. Kentzler finished his oysters and began slathering butter on a warm, light-as-air popover.

“OK, I’ll skip the soft soap, Sam. I came to you because you’re tough, nasty, smart, and bullheaded. I’ll be sending a copy of the autopsy report over to your office on Monday.”

“It’s a man. He’s dead. That’s all I need to know unless something in the report shows that someone else made him dead.”

“There’s something screwy about the Eberhard death,” said Kentzler gloomily. “I just can’t put my finger on it. At the coroner’s inquest it was suggested that maybe he died of asphyxia with cerebral congestion. Or maybe he died of shock. Or maybe he died of a stroke.”

“Or maybe he died of old age at age forty-nine.”

“The only really sure thing about it is that Collin Eberhard did not die by drowning. No water in the lungs.”

“So he didn’t die by drowning.” Spade began rolling a cigarette while Kentzler called for the dessert menu. “But how do we get from there to suicide — or murder? I take it there was indeed cerebral congestion but no fracture of the cranial bones. Anything in the stomach to suggest that he was poisoned?”

“Nothing. But during the inquest the coroner said that a preparation of opium could produce cerebral congestion, kill you quickly, sometimes without leaving any mark on the stomach wall.”

“If he wanted to kill himself and hide the fact, why not just accidentally fall off a ferryboat some foggy night? If he was poisoned — and you say there’s no physical indication of that — I’d as lief say it was murder as suicide. But murder wouldn’t get Bankers’ Life off the hook, would it?”

“No,” mumbled Kentzler around a big mouthful of chocolate cake. “But the coroner’s jury was composed entirely of Eberhard’s friends, who ignored the puzzling details and said it was a stroke as a result of cerebral congestion that killed him. We have privately almost decided on a settlement with the wife, even though the possibility of poison has not been ruled out.”

“All I know about poisons is what I read in The Count of Monte Cristo when I was a kid. Take a small but increasingly larger dose of arsenic every day and you build up an immunity to it. I don’t even know if that’s true of arsenic, let alone opium.”

“Sausalito, four years ago,” said Kentzler. “You were involved in a case where two men were poisoned in connection with the gold theft off the San Anselmo.”

Spade’s face changed, darkened. “St. Clair McPhee,” he said. “Disappeared without a trace.”

“And that bothers you? After all this time?”

“I keep an almost-empty file on him,” Spade admitted almost ruefully. “I hate being made a sucker of. Someday I’ll figure out where he went, and how, and I’ll find him...” He shrugged. “It was the Marin coroner who said the two Portagees were poisoned, not me. I never even read his autopsy report.”

“Well, you’re going to read this one,” said Kentzler.

15 The Man with No Name

At 8:30 Monday morning Sam Spade bounded up the stairs to his office above Remedial Loans on Mission Street whistling “Gut Bucket Blues” slightly off-key. He found Effie Perine staring with uncomprehending eyes at an oblong of colored paper.

“What’s this, Sam?”

He went around behind her desk to look at it over her shoulder as if he had not stuck it between the pages of her shorthand pad after she had gone home on Friday night.

“A check for fifty bucks. Last week’s wages.”

“I don’t make fifty dollars a—”

“It’s nineteen twenty-five. Yesterday was your twenty-first birthday. Today you can vote. Today you can make fifty bucks a week. How was the surprise party your Greek friends threw for you Saturday?”

“How did you know about that?”

“Your mother called on Friday to make sure I wouldn’t have you working over the weekend.” He paused in the doorway of his office. “You’ll earn it, sister, and then some. Any calls?”

She slowly settled back in her chair. “No. But a document was delivered by messenger from Ray Kentzler.”

“It’s an autopsy report. Open a file on Eberhard, Collin. Leave the ‘Client’ space blank, but it’s Bankers’ Life.”

Her face lit up. “They’re saying he poisoned himself.”

“They’re probably wrong. But see can you round up the newspaper coverage on Eberhard since his death.”

Spade went down a long brown linoleum hallway on the ground floor of the Hall of Justice in Kearny Street, his footsteps echoing hollowly. Motes of suspended dust moved with him as he went in the door marked CORONEr’s OFFICE.

Behind the anteroom desk was a middle-aged woman with gray hair pulled into a bun held in place by a tortoise-shell comb. She wore a shapeless gingham apron frock with a square-cut collar. Flowers doing poorly on the left front corner of the desk did little to brighten the room.

She looked up from typing a form to ask sharply, “Yes?”

“Dr. Leland, please. About the Collin Eberhard autopsy.”

“The coroner is in conference. The chief deputy is in conference. The assistant deputies are in conference.”

“This is a public office. I’m a citizen. I’ll wait.” He took a chair against the wall, leaned back, stuck his legs out straight in front of him, crossed them at the ankles, and tipped his hat down over his eyes. He began to hum, very softly, “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

She said almost shrilly, “If you don’t stop that I’m going to call upstairs for a police officer to escort you—”

Spade lifted his hat to say, “Try Tom Polhaus in Homicide.”

He lowered the hat again. He resumed his humming. After long moments her chair creaked. He raised his hat brim enough to see her disappearing through the door behind her desk. Her dress was taut across an ample backside. He grinned, took off his hat.

Ten minutes later she reappeared, followed by a square, chunky man with a wide face and dark hair low on his forehead. He jerked a thumb at Spade. “You. In here.”

Spade sauntered across the room, bowing slightly to the woman as he passed. He followed the man through a suite of offices to a cubicle with no windows and a lot of paperwork on a battered blond-wood desk. The room smelled of cigar smoke and, very faintly, disinfectant. The square man sat down behind the desk. He did not offer to shake hands, instead tented his fingers, half-sneered as Spade sat down across from him.

“Assistant Deputy Coroner Adolf Klinger. We’re sick of you newshounds coming around with your lies and innuendos. The coroner’s jury has rendered its verdict upon the Eberhard matter. Natural causes. We have released the body for burial. Period.”

“Not a newshawk.” Spade laid a business card on the desk. “The autopsy report showed blood, not water, in Eberhard’s lungs, and serum blood in the right ventricle of his heart. So it was not a drowning. And there also was bleeding through the scalp.”

“And no lacerations,” snapped Klinger. “The blood was from the cerebral congestion that brought on the fatal stroke.”

“Did anyone ever follow up on the statement at the inquest that a lethal concoction of opium sometimes leaves no discernible trace in the stomach lining?”

Klinger sneered again. “No discernible trace. You said it yourself. No evidence of anything.” He stood up, jerked a thumb again, this time at the door. “Private op, huh? Take the air.”

In the drab, crowded detectives’ assembly room on the hall’s third floor Spade found Tom Polhaus and Dundy, both newly promoted to the San Francisco Homicide Detail.

“Congratulations, Sergeant Polhaus,” Spade said to Tom; then, to Dundy, with no trace of irony in his voice, “And congratulations on your promotion too, Lieutenant Dundy.”

Dundy looked at him suspiciously, said gruffly, “Thanks, Spade,” then couldn’t refrain from “What brings you here?”

“Collin Eberhard.”

“Oh. That.” Dundy gave a contemptuous bark of laughter. “That one’s dead and buried.”

“Just trying to drum up a little business. His widow’s going to be mighty well off if they can’t prove suicide.” Spade hooked a hip over the corner of a desk. “You boys got anything to add to what’s in Eberhard’s autopsy report?”

Dundy uttered something that sounded like “pfaw,” waved a dismissive hand, said, “I’m sure you’ll come up with some angle to make money off it, Spade. You always do.”

Spade nodded, said to Polhaus, “Let’s take a walk.”

They crossed Kearny Street to the gentle green slope of Portsmouth Square. It was another sunny September day, so they sat on the grass below the Stevenson monument.

“OK,” said Polhaus, “what’s this really about, Sam?”

“What I said. The Eberhard death. I’ve got a client.”

“The widow?”

“I couldn’t tell you even if she was.”

“If not her, then the insurance company,” said Polhaus with smug finality. “There’s no one else got enough money to pay you except the tabloids, and I don’t figure you’d work for them.”

“What do you have on Eberhard?”

Polhaus tipped his hat down over his eyes against the sun, gave a disgusted grunt. “Not a damned thing. Oh, I know the newspapers are still screaming about suicide because of something wrong at the bank or in his personal finances. Course we’d love to pin a murder rap on the widow, but I figure the coroner’s jury got it right. Cerebral congestion and a stroke.”

“Did you read the autopsy report?”

“Like the lieutenant said, that one’s dead and buried. Literally. They released the body for burial. Why don’t you go talk to the coroner’s office if you’re so all-fired interested?”

“I just came from there. All I got was a stiff-arm from an assistant coroner named Klinger.”

“Him. Their troubleshooter.” Tom chuckled; then unease entered his face. “Should we have an open file on Eberhard?”

Spade idly watched the hips of a stylishly dressed young matron pushing a pram up the walk that flanked the square.

“Even back in sixteen, when I went up to Seattle for Continental, people were bellyaching that San Francisco coroner’s inquests had the weight of a legal proceeding even though coroners weren’t trained in the law. That’s a perfect setup for a packed jury. This one was made up of pals of Eberhard.”

“I ain’t gonna cry over big insurance takin’ a K.O.”

“It came out at the inquest that a lethal dose of opium can be hard to detect in the stomach lining.”

“You’re grabbin’ at straws, Sam. Opium’s easy to get, right enough, but the wife wasn’t at the Neptune Bath House.”

“Maybe he did it himself. Maybe the newspapers are right.”

“In that case it was suicide and the Homicide Detail don’t care anyway ‘cause the guy made himself dead.” With a grunt Polhaus heaved himself to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants with both hands. He looked down at Spade. “You get something, Sam, you come to us with it first.”

“You’re starting to sound like Dundy. The case is dead and buried, but if it isn’t we want you to solve it for us.”

Polhaus started off down the slope. “Aw, go to hell.”

Spade chuckled and stubbed out his cigarette on Stevenson’s left foot.

The Neptune Bath House, for men only, was built back from the curved sandy beach just west of the Hyde Street Pier. It had a thirty-yard pool and shower, steam, massage, and locker rooms.

Spade paid his two bits for a swimsuit, towel, and locker he had no intention of using. He sat down on a bench. A half dozen affluent-looking men were changing in the locker room, several with setups of ice and ginger ale for the bottles of whiskey they had taken out of their lockers. The damp air was heavy with the smell of salt water and liniment.

Spade gestured the towel boy over. He was a kid of maybe fourteen, towheaded and skinny, with knobby knees and, like a Labrador puppy, feet too big for the rest of him.

“Whaddaya need, mister?”

“I hear some rich guy drowned out in the bay just off the bathhouse three weeks ago. Were you here that day?”

“Yeah.” The boy’s round blue eyes tried to look crafty. “What’s in it for me?”

Spade flipped him a quarter. He palmed it expertly, looked around, sat down on the bench.

Spade started rolling a cigarette, asked without looking up, “What’s your name, son?”

“Jerry.” He added in a wise guy voice, “What’s yours?”

“Sam. Tell me about it. Kids always know everything.”

Jerry’s face got excited. He darted his eyes around. “You think he didn’t drown? You think he was murdered?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Who do you suspect?”

“You.”

Jerry got a startled look on his face, then started to giggle and was no longer a wise guy, just a towheaded kid.

“I can’t see nobody putting poison in his own booze and then just goin’ out swimmin’. Wasn’t nobody done it to him neither. There was five or six of ’em smokin’ cigars an’ havin’ their drinks outta the bottle from Mr. Eberhard’s locker. They all would of died!”

“His locker always locked when he wasn’t around?”

“Sure. They all are. All these guys, they’re bankers an’ big industrialists an’ shipowners or somethin’.”

“All regulars? Any you didn’t know?”

Jerry didn’t have to think. “Only one guy. I saw him talkin’ with Mr. Eberhard over near the shower room where nobody could hear ’em like. Mr. Eberhard started out kinda red in the face. Then the other guy sorta sighed and shrugged an’ looked sheepish, and Mr. Eberhard looked pleased an’ took him over to have a drink with the others. None of them know him neither.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Dark hair, eyes that could sorta look right through you.”

“Big man? Little man? Fat? Thin? Young? Old?”

“Wouldn’t of weighed a whole lot, but sorta strong an’ quick lookin’ even so. Like maybe he played tennis or some-thin’.” Disdain entered Jerry’s voice. “He had little hands and feet, made him look like a dancer sort of. A — whadda they call them guys what live off of women?”

“A gigolo?”

“A gigolo! Yeah! That’s it! But he was sorta old for that. Not like them bankers, not old like that. Maybe old like you an’ my old man. They had their drinks; he went back out to the street while Mr. Eberhard was goin’ down to the beach.”

Spade stubbed out his cigarette and tossed the butt into a trash bucket. As he spun Jerry a silver dollar, a man across the room yelled, “Boy, bring me a couple of fresh towels chop-chop!”

Spade stopped at the Neptune Bath House office, but nobody admitted knowing anything about the stranger who had been there on the day of Eberhard’s death. Eberhard had not formally signed him in as a guest so there was no record of him. They refused to name the other men in the group that day.

16 The Grieving Widow

It was a four-story Pacific Heights brownstone, not quite a mansion, perched above the 2400 block of Broadway. Spade mounted a steep flight of stairs between trimmed boxwood hedges to a gleaming marble landing. The brass door knocker was polished to a high gloss. He used it.

After thirty seconds the ornate hardwood door was opened by a German woman in a maid’s uniform, unsmiling, eyes watchful, mouth determined. Spade removed his hat and proffered a card stating that he represented the Bankers’ Life Insurance Company.

He said pleasantly, “I have come concerning the policy we carried on the late Mr. Eberhard.”

“God rest his soul. I will see if Madame is at home.”

The door shut. Spade turned to look over Cow Hollow to the low whaleback hump of Alcatraz Island out in the bay. Below him a brown and white gaff-rigged ketch, made a toy by distance, was just entering the harbor between the long finger of jetty and the Marina Green. A dozen sailboats were in their berths at the San Francisco Yacht Club. The sun was still warm, but tendrils of fog were ghosting their way through the Golden Gate between Fort Point and the Marin headlands. A Matson steamship was heading out toward the open Pacific.

“Madame will see you now.”

On either side of the foyer, deeply carpeted, exquisitely appointed rooms fronting Broadway were illuminated by sunlight coming through open-curtained windows. Kitty-corner before one window was a Steinway baby grand with sheet music on its rack. Spade followed the German woman’s stout figure down a maroon hallway runner of intricate design. She knocked on the frame of an open doorway, stepped aside.

“You may go in.”

It was a library given over to dark leather-bound volumes. A woman sat in a leather armchair with an open book in her lap. A reading lamp was directed over her left shoulder, leaving her features in relative obscurity. On the reading table was a half-full cut glass cognac decanter and an empty snifter. Also a humidor and a crystal ashtray with a fresh, unlit corona del Ritz laid at an angle across it.

“Tea, Hilda,” the woman said. As the maid wordlessly withdrew, the woman held out a hand palm down, fingers bent: royalty bestowing a favor. Spade bowed over the hand, released it. He chose a French Chippendale chair with elaborate Louis XV decorations on arms and back.

“This was my husband’s hideaway from his responsibilities, mainly me. He would sit in here for hours on end, smoking costly cigars and sipping costly cognac and reading the Victorians with their insufferable sentimentality.” She shifted the volume in her lap. “The last book he was reading. Fitting. Bleak House.”

Evelyn Eberhard was a handsome woman except for faint bitter crow’s-feet at the corners of dark eyes deep set under exquisitely arched brows. She was pale of visage, her mouth was generous but thin lipped without discernible lip rouge, her hair youthfully cut, with pin curls at the temples.

“On those evenings I was barred from this room. I did not mind. I never liked it. But since Collin’s death I have often found myself in here. I wonder why?”

“Looking for a connection to whatever it was he withheld from you when he was alive.”

She looked surprised, even startled. “Freudian analysis from a” — she paused, then continued with subtle, not easily explained irony — “an insurance adjuster?”

Hilda silently wheeled in a tea wagon with a cozy-covered teapot on it, two Meissen china cups, silverware, milk and sugar in matching pitcher and bowl, lemon slices, small plates, and an assortment of tea cookies. She hovered as if about to pour.

“That will be all, Hilda.” Evelyn Eberhard added, an oddly sharp note in her voice, “And shut the door behind you.”

The maid departed, irritation in her movements.

The widow leaned forward to pour two cups of steaming Darjeeling. Her hands were long fingered, shapely. Her high-necked pale blue dress had ruffles at throat and wrists, a cinched waist that emphasized a shapely bosom. Crossed legs under the floor-length skirt suggested well-rounded thighs.

She chose milk and sugar; Spade, nothing. They sipped.

“Hilda was with Collin before our marriage. After the bank prospered, Collin became distant, he and I drifted apart. Hilda decided that I had become indifferent to his needs and wants, and would love to have Bankers’ Life refuse payment on the policy.”

“Were you indifferent?”

“In those later years, yes. We were in love at the outset. Ironically, when we became prosperous intimacy left our marriage. But Collin was an upright man. Which makes it unfair, you people trying to renege on your legal commitment to me.”

“There have been suggestions of irregularities at your husband’s bank and in his personal finances.”

“I know nothing of his financial activities except what is hinted at in the tabloids. Collin did not keep an office in our home.” She looked directly at him. “And should we stop sparring, you and me, Mr. Spade? You’re no insurance agent. You’re a private investigator with a shady reputation and a grubby little office on Mission Street above a loan company.”

Spade ignored this. “There have been hints of murder.”

“Murder, natural causes — they’d still have to pay off on anything except suicide.” Her low laugh had intimacy in it. “Unless you could convince the authorities that I poisoned him.”

“Did you?”

She leaned forward with a furious intensity that slopped tea into the saucer, which she held beneath her cup with her left hand, saying, “I won’t dignify that with a reply,” then immediately did so. “Women are barred from the Neptune Bath House.”

“Maybe you snuck in when no one was looking and gave him a good dose of asphyxia with cerebral congestion.”

Her laugh was full-bodied, not in keeping with her status as a widow. “I should be furious that you can make light of my husband’s death. But — the image...” She nodded as if to herself. “I think you’ll do.” She opened the humidor, held it out to Spade. “Would you like a cigar?”

He selected one; she picked up the corona del Ritz from the ashtray. Spade trimmed the ends with his penknife and lit both cigars with his lighter, hers first.

He said, “You’re unconventional. You work very hard to avoid the usual grieving-widow platitudes.” He gestured toward her left hand. “Only three weeks dead and no wedding band.”

“I was a woman trapped in a decaying marriage.”

“You think I’ll do for what?”

“My husband was a great friend of Charles Hendrickson Barber. Barber’s wife, Rose, has been a good friend since my marriage. She told me about your finding Henny before he could stow away on some ocean liner and said you kept it out of the papers. She recommended you. She said you were trustworthy.”

“Recommended me for what?”

“Collin was always a womanizer. Six months ago I became obsessed with identifying his then-current mistress because I believed the affair had become much deeper than a momentary infatuation, like the others. I believed he was finding with her, whoever she was, the — the comfort, the security, he once found with me.”

“I don’t do domestic,” said Spade almost automatically.

A dismissive gesture with her cigar. “I was not seeking grounds for divorce. I was defending my position as wife. I abandoned the idea for two reasons. First, I had a very good life even if there was no love left in it. Second, I came to realize that whatever decision Collin had been struggling with during the past year was related to business, not to his private affairs. Then, in quick order, he took out a huge insurance policy with me as beneficiary. Then he died. Then he was suddenly reputed to have been ruined financially.”

“Was he?”

“I have no idea. When the innuendo began about poison and suicide or, worse, murder, I realized that if he indeed had been ruined financially, suicide was possible and I might be denied the insurance money. Without that money I will lose everything I value. A life of ease. This house. My social position. Everything.”

“No idea who the mistress was?”

“None. She was surely not of our circle.” The thin lips twisted in a sudden, almost startling sneer. “I need you to find her. If he was in love with her, wouldn’t that make suicide much less likely? I will pay you of course.”

Spade stood, stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “Get me access to your husband’s records at the bank and I’ll find your mistress for you. She’ll be somewhere in his papers. Canceled checks paid to her, department store bills, a love nest somewhere, weekends at a Sonoma resort.”

“Impossible.” For the first time she rose. In the two-inch heels on her chic black patent leather shoes she was only some two inches shorter than Spade’s six-foot-and-a-fraction-inch height. “Not because I refuse. Because the bank insists his financial records cannot be viewed.”

“Not even by his widow?”

“Sometimes I think especially not by his widow.”

“Well, there are ways.” As if it were an afterthought he asked, “Did your husband have a friend, business aquaintance, what have you, who was about my age, dark hair, piercing eyes, built like a tennis player but with small, almost delicate hands and feet, maybe something of the dancer about him?”

She stood frowning, head cocked slightly in thought.

“Such a man was here one evening with Collin, in this room, for an hour or more. Just the one time, maybe a week before my husband’s death. There were raised voices, but that was all.”

“You couldn’t hear anything that was said?”

“I do not snoop at doors, Mr. Spade. Is he important?”

“Darned if I know. Probably not. But he was in the group at the Neptune Bath House that day. If your husband was trying to make some financial decision, this man might play into it.” He made an irritated gesture. “I need to get into those bank files, Mrs. Eberhard. I know a good attorney.”

“It’s in my interest that you see them, but the bank says no. In the face of that refusal I’m afraid to do anything that might hinder my getting the insurance money.”

“If you change your mind...”

She gave him her hand. A firm grip, warm fingers. “I will surely let you know,” she said.

17 Veiled Threats?

It was 2:55, five minutes before the official end of banking hours, when Spade went between flanking Doric pillars and through the inset decorative doorway of California-Citizens Bank at 832 California. Below the bank, at Grant, was Old St. Mary’s Church; above it, on Powell Street at the crest of the hill, the Fairmont Hotel. A streetcar slowly climbed past, its wheels clacking on the tracks.

Inside to the left, behind a cast-iron divider decorated with the figure of a miner panning for gold, was a desk with no one behind it and no papers upon it. Its brass plaque read:

Spade stood in line at the only teller’s window that was still open. By the time Spade’s turn had come an elderly uniformed bank guard had locked the front door and was letting out the last few patrons.

Spade told the teller, “I would like to speak with Vice President Spaulding concerning the bank’s late president.”

He was a slender youth with sandy hair that obviously resisted all efforts to tame it. He let his eyes slide sideways.

“Mr. Spaulding doesn’t seem to be at his desk. He may be gone for the night.”

“I have an appointment.”

Spade sat down in the armchair facing Spaulding’s desk. The youth fidgeted, closed his window, went through a door behind the cages, shutting it behind him. Spade heard the sound of an elevator. Five minutes later the teller returned, started closing out his cash drawer while managing not to look at Spade.

Two minutes after that a man in his forties came through the doorway behind the teller. He was of medium height, round faced, clean-shaven, nervous handed, slightly stoop shouldered, with receding black hair and a pince-nez on a cord fastened to his lapel buttonhole.

Spade stood, hand out. “Samuel Spade.”

Spaulding took his hand very briefly, gave it a single shake, released it. His hand was soft, moist, short fingered. He sat down behind his desk as if it were a bastion.

“I do not recall any appointment with anyone named Spade.”

Spade laid one of his business cards on the desk.

Spaulding read it, began shaking his head slowly. Perspiration shone on his forehead. His narrow mouth had gotten more and more pursed, as if he were tasting a lemon.

Spade said, “I have been hired to arrange a time when Mr. Eberhard’s personal and business records may be examined. She — ah, my client has a legitimate interest in these affairs.”

“She does not! No one outside this bank does. Bank records are always kept confidential. Always.”

“Not from Eberhard’s heir,” said Spade coldly.

Spaulding’s face cleared. He said in an almost smug voice, “The police have instructed us to open Mr. Eberhard’s records to no one until their investigation is complete.”

“This morning Lieutenant Dundy of the Homicide Detail told me the Eberhard matter was ‘dead and buried.’ His words.” Spade was genial. “So the bank has no legitimate reason to sequester the records from” — a pause for emphasis — “my client.”

Spaulding was shaking his head again, this time stubbornly.

“Let her take it up with our attorneys.”

Spade stood, nodded pleasantly, put on his hat. “If I have to take more direct steps you will find them very distressing.”

Spaulding was on his feet also, face flushed. “Are you making veiled threats against me? Against this financial institution? I’ll have you know that...”

But Spade had walked away, leaving the banker rigid behind his desk, haranguing thin air. The old guard opened the door, said out of the side of his mouth, “Nasty sort, ain’t he?”

Spade grinned. “So am I, my friend.”

As he started up California Street, a swaggering Italian youth hopped off a streetcar while it was still moving. Spade hunched as if lighting a cigarette so he could watch the youth trot slantwise across California to the bank.

“Lemme in, you old goat,” he yelled at the guard.

“Gino Mechetti,” muttered Spade. “After hours at that.”

It was after 6 when he got back to his office. There was an orderly sheaf of folded newspaper pages on the front corner of his desk, with a note: “Collin Eberhard coverage to date.” Beside it were four memo slips with messages and phone numbers on them. Standing beside the desk he flicked through them, apparently found nothing of importance, tossed them aside.

Spade left the office with the newspapers folded under one arm. On Market he caught an F car up Stockton, got off at Broadway. At O Sole Mio at 506 Broadway, a small Italian restaurant redolent with garlic and spices, he checked his hat and bundle of newspapers with the coat-check girl. A wide, curly-haired man named Romeo Mechetti came trotting up to shake Spade’s hand, then took him by the elbow to lead him to a table.

“Mama, she ask, ‘Why Sam never come see us no more since we open up our new place here?’ ”

“Got a living to make, Romeo,” said Spade. “It looks like you’re doing well up here above Chinatown.”

“Wait till you taste the food,” boasted Romeo.

Dinner was forty-five cents. It was good and there was plenty of it. Spade made up for his missed lunch with a salad; an antipasto platter of salami, celery, olives, carrots, and peppers; ravioli; tripe with sausage and beans. He drank red wine served in a coffee cup, as was usual at the North Beach family-owned Italian cafés, to disguise that the cup held vino, not coffee.

People ate, laughed, talked loudly, smoked until the air was heavy with fumes. Spade contributed his share, finished with genuine coffee and homemade cookies. Twice Romeo came by to chat; the second time he sat down.

“I never got no chance to thank you, Mr. Spade.”

“Thank me for what?”

“For what you done for my oldest boy, Gino. Since he got out he’s going straight.” Romeo clapped Spade on the back. “Best thing ever happened to him, you sending him away for those two years on that warehouse break-in. Now he’s got a real job, night-time security at a bank.”

“That’s good news, Romeo.” Spade seemed struck by a sudden thought. “You know, if you tell Gino to come by my office, I might have a little day work for him as well. He can make a buck or two.” He winked. “An honest buck or two.”

“Ei, Sam, gli piacerebbe!“ Romeo gave a great laugh. “Scusi, sometimes I forgetta you no Italian. Gino, I tell him to come by your office.”

Soon after, Spade retrieved hat and newspapers. He got off the Stockton car at Sutter, rode the trolley out to Hyde, walked down the steep incline to 891 Post. The clanking, groaning elevator deposited him at the fourth floor. Spade went around the corner and down the hall.

In the corner apartment he had rented the year before, Spade hung his hat and topcoat on hooks behind the door, went down a short hall that right-angled into the living room, switched on the white bowl light hanging from three gilded chains in the center of the ceiling. He tossed his newspapers on the sofa under the Post Street window.

From the kitchen he got a wine glass and a bottle of Bacardi. He set them on the floor beside a padded rocker angled in the corner, sat down, poured, sipped, rolled a cigarette. Only then did he start going through his sheaf of newspapers.

The battered alarm clock on the table in the far corner of the room read 1:22 when Spade tossed the last of the papers aside. The clock rested on Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook by the Austrian criminal investigator Hans Gross, published in English in London the year before.

Spade stood up, stretched, yawned, and groaned.

“Waste of time,” he muttered to himself.

He got green-and-white pajamas from the closet, went into the bathroom for his ablutions, came out wearing the pajamas, and lowered the wall bed. He turned out the overhead light, wound the alarm clock, and threw open both windows. Shocking gusts of cold fog-laden air swept in, bringing with it the mournful bellow of the Alcatraz foghorn. He was soon asleep.

18 Drawing Blood

When Spade came into his office the next morning Miles Archer had a hip hooked over the corner of Effie Perine’s desk, was leaning his jovial red face down close to hers, chuckling at something he was telling her.

“So the girl says to him, ‘I don’t drink anything but champagne, and he says—’ ”

“ ‘Lo, Miles,” said Spade. “When did you hit town?” Archer quickly straightened up like an errant schoolboy, paused, extended his hand. Behind his back Effie Perine was making exaggerated faces of relief. Spade and Archer shook.

“Two days ago. Iva’s with me. We came down to see my brother Phil over in the East Bay.”

“I see you’ve met my secretary, Effie Perine.” Archer looked over appreciatively at her. “Sure did.” He invested his comment with more meaning than his words carried. He turned back. “Ah... Iva asked could we buy you dinner tonight?”

Spade shrugged. “Sure. I’ll pick the spot.”

They talked for another minute as Spade walked him to the door. They shook hands again, then he was gone.

“How do you know him?” Effie Perine asked in a neutral voice.

“He’s with Burns up in Seattle. He’s good at taking down Commies on the docks. You want to come with us tonight—”

“I’ve got a date to go dancing,” she said too quickly.

Spade chuckled and went into his private office.

Gino Mechetti was in his mid-twenties, olive skinned with high cheekbones, black snapping eyes, and a mop of raven-black curls. He wore a cheap, flashy tie and a bright polo sweater under his suit coat. He turned to appreciate Effie Perine leaving Spade’s office, then turned back to the desk.

“My old man tells me you might have daytime work for me.”

“Nights at California-Citizens Bank, did your father say?”

“That’s it.” He waggled black level eyebrows, showed gleaming teeth in a broad grin. “Lotsa pretty Italian girls working there at the bank, you get my drift?” A hard light entered his eyes. “Mr. Spade, you wouldn’t never of tagged me with that right hand two years ago if my foot hadn’t of slipped.”

Spade nodded in solemn agreement. “Dark in that warehouse, that’s for sure. And like you said, your foot slipped.”

Seeing Spade roll a cigarette, Gino lit a cheap cigar with the desk lighter. Spade nodded as if to himself.

“Anyway, Gino, I got a tip that a mob of bank busters might hit Cal-Cit because security is lax since Eberhard drowned.”

Gino tipped back his head and blew out a plume of smoke.

“That’s a load of bunk! Me an’ another guy was hired right after he died. We trade off, night for night. They didn’t have no nighttime security before then.”

“Nothing to it, then,” said Spade. “But even so, for my report, I need your take on the bank’s security setup.”

Gino chuckled. “The bank itself is tough, but it shares a side wall with a Chinese social club that closes up around ten at night. In the alley next to it, Pratt Place, there’s a fire escape goes to the roof. It’s a three-foot drop from there to the bank’s roof and the service shed for the elevator shaft.”

Spade stubbed out his cigarette, grinned.

“I knew I was asking the right man.”

The handsome Italian youth chuckled. “I figure it’s part of my job to look around just so I know what’s what. That way, anyone tryin’ to crush into the bank, I’d pop ’em for sure.”

“Isn’t the elevator shed always locked?”

“Sure, but there’s locks and there’s locks.” Gino leaned forward to stub out his smelly cigar. “Nobody’s bustin’ in there, not after hours. Not with me on the job.”

Spade came around the desk to shake Gino’s hand warmly. Gino looked at the bill Spade had palmed off with the handshake.

“Hey, thanks, Mr. Spade!”

From his office door Spade watched Mechetti exit, went back inside. Effie Perine followed with her notebook and sat down in the armchair across from his swivel chair. He gave her the fixings to roll him a cigarette.

“He’s certainly a good-looking man,” she said primly.

“Yeah. I put him away for a couple of years on a warehouse job. He’s got the worm for sure.”

“The worm?”

“Wormy. Like a bad apple. Most ex-cons are. He’s got a larcenous mind, that boy, but now he’s night watchman at Eberhard’s bank. The bank’s being very snotty about anyone getting a look at Eberhard’s records, and I need to see them.”

“Don’t take chances, Sam. District Attorney Bryan would just love to put you into prison yourself.”

“He’s not liable to get the chance.”

Spade recounted his previous day’s work. It took longer to finish with the widow than with anything else because Effie Perine wanted to know all about what Evelyn Eberhard looked like and what she was wearing and what she said.

“A mistress? A man with no name?”

“The mistress and Mr. Nameless are two things that keep me from accepting natural causes for the death and closing out the case. A third is that the bank hired Gino after Eberhard died. The kid’s carrying a two-year felony rap. No legitimate banker should let him within a mile of the place. Fourth, the bank’s refusing to let anyone see Eberhard’s financial stuff.”

“Not even the widow?”

“Well, she’s very far from the traditional grieving widow. Six months ago she wanted to hire me to find the mistress. She gave that up, but then Eberhard went broke maybe, and then he died, maybe natural, maybe on purpose, maybe helped along. Now she wants me to find the mistress to help negate the suicide theory. Or maybe to hang any funny business about Eberhard’s death on her. I offered the widow a deal. Get me into the bank’s records, I’ll find you your mistress. But she’s too afraid of losing the insurance money to back me up.”

“Nothing about this case makes a whole lot of sense.”

“Yeah. Call Sid Wise’s office, see if he’s in.”

As she waited for central to pick up she said, “I liked it a lot better when Sid was just next door.”

Spade entered the pinkish office building on Sutter and Kearny just shy of 2 o’clock. He took the elevator up, went to suite 827, entered without knocking. In passing, he bent down to kiss Wise’s receptionist on the top of her head.

She giggled. “Mr. Wise said to go right on in, Mr. Spade.”

Sid Wise’s big desk was loaded with papers and files, but he had his swivel chair turned so he could look out at the Sutter Hotel across the street. There were the usual flecks of dandruff on the shoulders of his suit coat. He was biting a fingernail.

“One of these days you’ll draw blood,” said Spade.

Wise spun his chair around. He started a hand gesture toward the chair across from him, but Spade had already dragged it to the side of the desk. Wise frowned. He fidgeted.

“Everyone in town says you’re asking questions about the Eberhard death. That one’s zipped up and folded away, Sam.”

“Let me guess. The Neptune Bath House—”

“Doesn’t want any more bad publicity. Cal-Cit’s attorney says that you threatened a V.P. with—”

“I wanted a reaction, Sid. I got one.”

“You sure did. You also said the widow was your client.”

“Implied.”

“Then Assistant Deputy Coroner Klinger is saying—”

“They’re on record that Eberhard died of natural causes.”

“Jovanen over at Bankers’ Life wants you to stop snooping around while they decide whether to pay off the widow.”

“Doesn’t all of this make you just a little bit curious?”

“Lawyers are never paid just to get curious.”

“I am.”

“You have a client? This isn’t just Sam Spade trying to drum up business?”

“I haven’t had to do that for three years.” Spade’s smile was sardonic. “Not since you moved away from Mission Street and I started upgrading my client list. Ray Kentzler at Bankers’ Life hired me. Under the table. That’s why Jovanen doesn’t know anything about it.”

A speculative look came into the attorney’s eyes.

“So Eberhard’s death isn’t cut-and-dried after all.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” said Spade. “It’s supposed to be a secret, but the fact is they won’t open those files to anyone. Not even the widow. Questions of confidentiality, propriety, that sort of thing.” He leaned toward Wise and lowered his voice too dramatically for it to be genuine. “Want to represent her in this matter, Sid?”

Wise leaned back and looked up at the ceiling and got his faraway look in his eyes. “Yes and no. I’d love to have a widow who’s probably going to be rich for a client. But what if Evelyn Eberhard did have a hand in her husband’s death? And I get a lot of work from the Bankers Association through Charles Barber at Golden Gate Trust and I’m just waiting for that shoe to drop.” He shrugged regretfully. “So I have to pass.”

“Same thing Evelyn said when I offered her your services,” said Spade cheerily. “You two were made for each other. A pair of old maids.” His brows drew down. “I’ll get into those files my own way.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Sid Wise gloomily.

19 The Chest of Bergina

Spade and the Archers were at a front corner table for four in Julius Castle on Telegraph Hill. Far below, the ferryboats were toys moving between the Ferry Building and the Oakland and Sausalito ferry terminals. Lights glittered over the water from Berkeley and Emeryville. Above rose the round turretlike wooden structure that gave the restaurant its name. Iva Archer sighed.

“It’s very beautiful, Sam,” she said in a wistful voice.

“No prettier than Elliott Bay up at Seattle,” boomed Archer.

“Oh, Miles, hush,” she said.

“I wouldn’t argue with you,” said Spade.

They were each having the two-dollar dinner, Iva the fillet of sole with sauce Julius, Spade the tenderloin steak with zucchini Florentine, Archer the lamb chops.

Archer poured more Riesling into each of their glasses, leaned back, and patted his belly.

“You can sure pick the good places to eat, Sam.”

Spade leaned forward to light Iva’s cigarette, leaned back and drifted smoke into the air. “How’s your brother Phil?”

“Got all the work he can handle,” said Archer.

“Lawyer, isn’t he?” asked Spade.

“He wants Miles to come down here and go in with him,” said Iva. “Do all of his investigative work.”

“Or I might transfer down with Burns. Like you transferred up to Seattle with Continental before the war, Sam.”

“Well, good luck with whatever you decide,” said Spade.

“You know, seeing your office today, Sam, maybe I ought to go out on my own like you did.” He winked. “Get a pretty little girl to do all my — ah, paperwork...” He leaned forward, suddenly serious. “You ever think of taking in a partner, Sam?”

Spade shook his head. “Nope,” he said.

It was midafternoon when Spade stopped at Effie Perine’s desk to ask his standard, “Any calls?” She looked up and shook her head, then raised a detaining hand when he started toward the closed door of his inner office. He stopped abruptly, scowling.

“It’s not Miles Archer, is it? You know better than to put anyone in there when I’m not around.”

“Not Archer. A — a friend. Of mine.”

Spade dragged the other chair over to sit down.

“OK, sweetheart, out with it.”

Fingering the little jeweled gold locket she always wore, Effie Perine looked up at him, looked away almost shyly.

“Remember the day you found me mooning over this locket and I showed you how it folded open into a sort of cloverleaf—”

“With pictures of your mother and your father and their wedding day. Sure, I remember.”

“And a picture of my best friend...”

“Penny... Penny Chiotras. Penelope. She’s six years older than you, right? Like a big sister to you.” Off her surprised look, he added with a grin, “I never forget a pretty face.”

“She’s not just pretty. She’s beautiful. You’ll see.”

He frowned, gestured at the closed door to his office. “So she’s the one who—”

“Yes. She showed up at my birthday party on Saturday. She looked terrible, haunted, like she wanted to look over her shoulder all the time. I got her alone and finally got her to admit that a sinister Turk has been following her.”

“A Turk.” Spade said it flatly.

“In Greece, Dad and Penny’s father had opposed the Turks, like everyone else. But her father was a true revolutionary; he fought as an andarte. They’re sort of bandits. After the war ended he went back to fight them again, and regularly sent money to her mother until he was killed, at Smyrna in nineteen twenty-two. I think it was stolen Turkish money, so it stopped and she had to take in boarders to make ends meet. That’s when Penny moved out so there’d be another room to rent, and found a job. Something secretarial, she said. We always knew she was all right because she makes those regular deposits into her mother’s account. But nobody knows where she lives or works, and I hadn’t seen her since — until the party on Saturday.”

“She told you about this Turk and you believe her.”

Effie Perine raised a defiant chin. “Of course I believe her. She doesn’t so much see him as feel him behind her in the street. And she can’t tell me where she’s working or living, not now. It wouldn’t be safe for her or for me if I knew.”

“Everybody lies, darling. You just have to keep chipping away at them until they wear down and finally get so tired that they end up telling you the truth.”

“She’s not lying. She’s truly frightened.”

“How do we get from there to her hiding in my office?”

She met his yellowish eyes with her clear brown ones and said in a sudden defiant rush of words, “Not hiding. I told her you could help her, and she showed up after you went out and I was afraid she might not come back later, so I told her to wait in there, out of sight.” Effie Perine impulsively reached a hand toward his arm, withdrew it. “Just help her, Sam. Please.”

“If she’ll tell me enough of the truth so I know what’s going on.” He checked his watch. “Go on home, sweetheart. I’ll talk to your Penny. Just don’t come around bellyaching if things go bad later on.”

Penny Chiotras started up from the client’s chair beside Spade’s desk, embarrassment giving added color to her cheeks. She was quick of movement, with huge brown eyes and long, utterly black hair. Her face was strong boned yet softly feminine. She wore a stylish brown and tan satin frock with embroidery and an antique-looking Greek coin as a buckle ornament.

“Effie told me it was all right to wait in here for you.” Her voice was low, throaty, well modulated. “But I’m afraid that I’m imposing dreadfully on you, Mr. Spade.”

Spade, at his most bland, bowed slightly to her as he took the hand she held out to him. Her palm was dry, her grip strong. The little finger of her left hand had been broken and set badly. He went around his desk to his swivel chair, waved her back into the oaken armchair from which she had risen.

“No imposition, Miss Chiotras, you being Effie’s best friend and all.” His words seemed utterly sincere, but his eyes were assessing. “She said you were being followed by a sinister man.”

Even white teeth glinted between full parted lips.

“Hearing you say it makes it sound very melodramatic.”

Spade smiled pleasantly, making all of the V’s in his long face longer. He put his elbows on the desk blotter, tented his fingers in front of his chin, and was silent. The silence became demanding.

“I–I think I am being followed after work by a man who looks... foreign to me. I almost see him out of the corner of my eye just disappearing around a corner, if that makes any sense.”

“Sure it does. Effie said you think he’s a Turk.”

“He’s not wearing a red fez and slippers with curled-up toes and a scimitar in a sash at his waist, if that’s what you mean. But, yes, a man with black hair and a swarthy face and glittery eyes.”

“Why a Turk? Why not a Russian or Syrian or Montenegrin?”

“You’re laughing at me,” she said.

Spade’s smile again lengthened the V’s in his face. “Not even if I felt like it.” Then he repeated, “Why a Turk?”

“Because of the chest of Bergina. It’s spelled B-e-r-g-i-n-a, but b in Greek is spoken as v, so it’s pronounced Vergina. It’s supposed to be a gold-bound metal box.”

Spade picked up a pencil, drew a pad toward himself. “The chest of Bergina.” His eyes had gotten very attentive, but his voice was flat, without nuance. “What’s supposed to be in it?”

“No one knows. It was made by Greek artisans as a gift for Bergina, the sister of Alexander the Great.” She said almost defensively, “Everyone thought the sacking of Troy by the Greeks was just a legend until Heinrich Schliemann excavated the ruins. I have a letter from my father.”

She delved into a black French-tailored calfskin handbag, removed a letter that was written in Greek.

“It is dated 1920, but a man came to my mother’s house and gave it to her only a month ago.”

“This man with the letter was a Turk?”

“A Greek. He told my mother that he was a brigand in my father’s band of andartes and was with him at the end. He said he didn’t know what was in the letter, but it had been steamed open and clumsily glued shut again. He said he needed money.”

“Your mother give him any?”

“A little. She didn’t believe his story, but the letter is in my father’s handwriting. She gave me the letter on Saturday. On Monday the man started following me.” She opened the letter. “My father writes that he is in a little nameless town in the Balkans somewhere north of Greece. He says he knows where the chest of Bergina is hidden and that no one else does. He says it is his legacy to my mother and me.” She looked up. “If it’s real, wouldn’t the chest have immense monetary and historic value?”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t explain why a Turk would be tailing you around San Francisco five years later.”

“He writes that he is enclosing detailed directions to its hiding place. But there is nothing else, no directions, just the letter. But if the man following me thinks there were and finds out where I live, mightn’t he...” Her hands crumpled the letter. “I need to know I’m safe.”

Spade stood. “Where are you working?”

“I’m a secretary for Hartford and Cole. They’re in—”

“The Russ Building. Stocks and bonds. Go back to work, Miss Chiotras, leave at the usual time, go someplace you might go after work. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there.”

“I sometimes eat at the Gypsy Tea Shop in Grant Avenue.”

“Good. Afterward, walk up to Sutter. Window-shop. Go along Powell, walk through Union Square to Stockton. Take at least a half hour, then go to a movie at the Cameo, on Market between Fifth and Sixth. Then go home. If anyone’s following you he’ll have to show himself during that time.”

Spade frankly appraised her, her face, her body. A possessive gleam came into his eyes.

“But I’ll have to know where you live.”

“No!” She cried. She looked very young, very vulnerable.

“You have to promise that you won’t try to follow me home.” Spade shrugged, said blandly, “OK. No reason to do so.”

“I–I trust you, but if he should follow you and...” Spade tossed his pencil into the air, let it fall on the desk.

“Nobody can follow me without me seeing him. Come to the office tomorrow morning on your way to work. I’ll know more then.”

20 Shadow Man

The Gypsy Tea Shop in Grant, half a block above O’Farrell, was tricked out to look like a fortune-teller’s duikerrin room, where palms are read and psychic readings given. The crystal shades of the hanging lamps tinkled whenever the door was opened. On the side walls were framed Greek icons of the Virgin Mary, Saint Nicholas, and Saint Constantine. Pinned to the back wall was a diaphanous red, yellow, and purple skirt spread wide to add color to the room. On a corner table was a crystal ball made pastel by the votive candles glowing behind it.

Penny Chiotras sat at a window table alone. In profile her face looked tranquil, untroubled, but the tendons of the hand raising her teacup were taut with tension. She left money on the table, issued into busy Grant Avenue. Without looking around, she walked up toward Sutter two blocks above, following instructions.

“Good girl,” muttered Sam Spade approvingly.

He waited until she was lost from view in the evening press of strollers, then left his recessed entryway across from the tearoom. For the next thirty minutes she followed instructions, but then instead of going down toward Market and the Cameo Theater, she went into the front entrance of the St. Mark Hotel across Powell from Union Square.

“Not so good,” Spade muttered.

He got into the front cab in the taxi line, reached over the back of the seat to give the goateed driver a silver dollar.

“Go around the block, cap, and pull up just beyond Mason.”

The driver checked his rearview, grinned as he drifted his cab away from the curb.

“I don’t suppose you remember me, Mr. Spade, but I drove you all over hell and gone last year behind a Flip doorman who was shakin’ down guests stayin’ at the Baltimore Hotel with ladies not their wives.”

“Sure. Erle, isn’t it? I recognize the goatee.”

As they rounded the corner into Post, Penny Chiotras issued from the side entrance of the St. Mark. She checked the street, then walked to Powell and caught a down cable car to Market. But not to the Cameo Theater. Instead, she went down a block to Mission, boarded a number 11 streetcar, rode it all the way to the end of the line at Twenty-fourth and Hoffman in the Outer Mission, nestled below Diamond Heights in usually fog-free Noe Valley.

She waited outside the car until it started its return trip, jumped aboard when it was already moving, got off at Dolores and Twenty-third. Spade told the cabbie to wait, then followed her.

Penny ducked into Severn, one of three narrow halfblock alleys that run off Twenty-third between Dolores and Church. By the dim streetlight he watched her go up the stairs of a narrow wooden row house of uncertain color. He waited until a roller shade was pulled down in the third-floor front window on the left. Pale light went on behind it. When the light went out Spade returned to his waiting cab, went home and to bed and to sleep.

At 8 a.m. he was explaining to Effie Perine, “I told her I would tail her last night, see if anyone was behind her. I waited outside the Russ Building, where she says she’s a stockbroker’s secretary, picked her up, shadowed her. No one. Nothing.” Spade spread his hands wide to show how devoid of shadowers the back trail had been. “She ditched me at the St. Mark instead of going to the Cameo Theater. And what she told me doesn’t hold up. No sinister men ducking around corners.” His smile was without humor. “Except me.”

“Ditched you?” asked Effie Perine in an unbelieving voice.

She handed him the cigarette she had rolled for him; he lit it with a match from the desktop dispenser. She was frowning.

“So you don’t believe her,” she said.

“That she’s scared, yeah. That a Turk is shadowing her, no — at least not last night. She told me a wild tale about a gold-bound chest that’s supposed to be from the time of Alexander the Great, but—”

“The chest of Bergina!” exclaimed Effie Perine.

“Not you too,” Spade growled in mock disgust.

“It’s true Greek legend. Alexander was one of the greatest Greeks, a real hero to our people. Bergina was his sister. But how does that tie in with Penny’s father?”

“She showed me a letter written in Greek, said it was her father’s handwriting, said it was dated nineteen twenty. She said it was delivered to her mother last month by a man who said he had been a brigand in her father’s revolutionary band. Said he got some money from her ma and disappeared.”

Effie Perine’s mouth drew up almost primly. “Delivered? By hand? Five years late?”

“You don’t like it either, huh? The letter supposedly says her father found the chest and that it would be his legacy to his family. All I know, darling, is that her story about the Turk is hooey. I think the chest is hooey. She made me promise I wouldn’t follow her home because he only knows where she works. That’s hooey too. If he can pick her up at the one place he can follow her to the other.” An unholy glow came into his eyes. “I’d better follow her home tonight after all, see what’s so—”

“Don’t you dare!” Her eyes were flashing. “It would be a — a betrayal of trust.”

“Like all the trust she’s giving me? Nu-uh, sister.”

“So that’s it? That’s all you’re going to do for her?”

“Are all Greeks as hard to get along with as you are?” asked Spade. “I’ll follow her again tonight, just to make sure.”

The phone rang. Effie Perine reached across the desk, picked up the receiver, said, “Samuel Spade Investigations.” She listened for a moment, said, “I’ll see if he’s come in yet,” put her hand over the mouthpiece, said, “Ray Kentzler.”

Spade took the phone. “Jovanen finally figure out that I’m on the payroll?”

“He did indeed, and hit the roof. Even wanted me to pay you out of my own pocket! I talked him out of that, but you’re off the case.”

“You’re the one wanted me on it.”

“I was tilting at windmills.”

“Well, I’ve got a couple of feelers out, but since I don’t work for you anymore, Ray, I’ll just have to let ’em drop.”

He hung up. Effie Perine was wide-eyed.

“You quit?”

“Was fired.” Without a pause he said, “Those Cal-Cit bank records are the key, darling. They’d tell us what we really have to know: did Eberhard suddenly go broke, and if he did, why?”

“What difference does it make? We don’t have a client.”

“Give the merry widow a call, tell her I need her backing to get into those bank records if I’m going to find out the truth about how and why her husband died and be able to prove he didn’t commit suicide. Tell her I’ll find the mistress at the same time.”

The phone rang again. Effie Perine went through her standard formula, again covered the mouthpiece, said, “Charles Hendrickson Barber this time, sounding angry.”

He took the phone from her, said into it, “It’s Spade.”

The banker’s voice was cold and tight.

“I’m calling you on behalf of the Banking Commission, Spade. We want to know what the devil you’re playing at.”

“Yes, nice to hear from you too, Mr. Barber. I’ll be at your office in half an hour.” He hung up without waiting for a reply. “Progress,” he told Effie Perine. “I’ll get more out of Barber than he’ll get out of me.” He was on his feet. “Your Penny’s coming in this morning to find out if I saw anyone shadowing her last night. Tell her no, but that I’ll try again tonight. Tell her no more silly little tricks like ditching me. See can you get her to open up about a few things. Maybe take her to lunch for a nice girl-to-girl chat.”

21 That Fire’s Out

Tobias Krieger led Spade through the labyrinth of bank offices to the door bearing the legend:

In four years the minor bank official’s pencil mustache had flourished and thickened over his pink upper lip. He knocked on Barber’s door. A voice rumbled from within. Krieger opened it. Barber, now sixty-four, was still walrus mustached, distinguished, tall, thick. He stood up behind his ten-foot-long teak desk and bellowed.

“Get out!”

Krieger evaporated. Spade crossed to the padded hardwood chair in front of the desk, sat down.

“It’s been what, Charles? A bit over four years?”

“Goddamn your insolence, Spade!”

Spade leaned forward, took a cigar from the box on Barber’s desk, sniffed it, took out his penknife, cut off the end, and lit it with the fancy lighter on the desk.

“Insolence? I don’t work for you. I don’t work for your bank. I don’t work for the Banking Commission.”

Barber slowly sat back down, still outraged. “One phone call to City Hall and you don’t work for anybody, Spade.”

“If it comforts you to think so.” Spade leaned back, blew luxurious smoke into the air. “But I’m the boy who kept your son out of trouble and your family name out of the newspapers.”

“That was four years ago. I don’t owe you a thing now.”

“Tell your wife that.”

“Leave Rose out of this! She has nothing to do with it.”

“If it comforts you to think so.” Spade made as if to rise. “Just leave me out of it too, Barber.”

“Sit down, damn it, man.” The banker’s voice had taken on a querulous note. “I’m under a lot of pressure on this. You running all over town asking questions, alienating people, upsetting people—”

“Somebody has to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Eberhard’s death. Who else is doing anything about it?”

Barber was getting hot again.

“I resent your implication, sir! Collin Eberhard was a great good friend of mine, and poor Evelyn is a dear friend of my Rose. If there was something irregular about his death I would be the first one urging a full investigation. The very first. But that is not the case. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of death by strictly natural causes.”

Spade puffed his cigar. “You mean that a roomful of Eberhard’s cronies returned a finding of death by natural causes so his widow would get that big insurance payout.”

“Collin had an eye for the ladies and led Evelyn a pretty dance over the years with his string of mistresses. It’s only right she should be... comfortable now.”

“Who was the most recent one?” Spade asked it idly.

“A gentleman doesn’t inquire into such things.”

“Was Eberhard ruined financially?”

“Not Collin! He was addicted to gold speculation, but—”

“Gold specie, like the San Anselmo’s missing gold coins?”

“Of course not. And don’t tell me you’re still looking for the San Anselmo gold four years later.”

“I’m still looking for the man who stole it.”

Barber chuckled. “Well, it wasn’t Collin. He speculated in gold-mining stocks, and he was shrewd, no man shrewder.”

“If he was ruined, somebody was shrewder.”

“Damnable lies by the tabloids.” Barber made a sweeping gesture. “You aren’t stirring up this mud for the newspapers, are you, Spade? No one else could have any reason to hire you.”

“So all of this bellowing and blustering is to find out who I’m working for? You should have just asked.” Spade knocked ash off his cigar. “Until two hours ago, Ray Kentzler at Bankers’ Life. Now, nobody. Jovanen canned me.”

“But— but—” Barber was almost stuttering. “Jovanen was asking the commission if we had hired you.”

“Jovanen didn’t know. Kentzler hired me under the table to find out if there was something fishy about Eberhard’s death.”

Barber leaned back, hands laced across his middle, and said in a relieved voice, “Then that’s the end of it.”

“Nope. The cops have closed the file on Eberhard’s death and someone with a lot of influence is trying to keep it closed. When I started asking questions everyone was suddenly shy, or had amnesia, or was hostile. The coroner says natural causes, hands me off to his troubleshooter. The insurance company finds out I’m working for them and fires me. California-Citizens throws me out on my ear. Now you tell me the Banking Commission wants me to desist. And the Neptune Bath House won’t even tell me which of Eberhard’s pals were with him on the day he died.”

“I was, for one,” said Barber unexpectedly. “Collin looked glum when he arrived, but not suicidal. And after he talked with some chap off in the corner he looked like his horse had come in at Tanforan. Got out his bottle, insisted we all have a drink with him.” He shook his head. “No. No suicide there.”

“Poison in his drink?”

“Hell, man, we all drank from the same bottle. We’d have all gone down. Do you have a single fact that says it was not from natural causes?”

“Yeah, two. First, the man who was huddled off in the corner with Eberhard. He drank with you, easy to drop something into Eberhard’s glass. I bet you don’t even know his name.”

Barber was frowning, enmity forgotten.

“Now I think of it, it’s strange Collin didn’t introduce him.”

“A week before Eberhard died this guy was at the house. In the study. Evelyn Eberhard heard raised voices but no words. I think he was in business with Eberhard.”

Barber shook his head contemptuously. “That gigolo?”

“Second, Cal-Cit won’t open Eberhard’s financial records.”

“Damn it, man, the tabloids—”

“—will be yelling about some other crisis in the body politic in another week.”

Barber shook his head. “Bankers are notoriously conservative, Spade, and adverse publicity is bad for business.”

“Why not at least open the books for the cops? They’re good at keeping secrets for the power people in this town.”

“Since there is no active investigation of Collin’s death, the police couldn’t get a judge to issue a warrant.”

“What about your precious Banking Commission?”

“Like the D.A., we have no probable cause for such a demand. California-Citizens Bank is solvent. And powerful.”

“Why refuse his widow access to her husband’s accounts? She’s his heir after all.” Spade paused, a suddenly speculative look on his face. “She is his heir, isn’t she?”

“Of course she’s his heir. Who else could it be? The will hasn’t been made public, but I’m sure Evelyn... Hmph. Damned odd Evelyn hasn’t mentioned it to Rose, now you say it. She could initiate legal action to become administratrix of Collin’s affairs, but it would be messy... damned messy.”

“I spoke with her about that. She doesn’t want to do it.”

Barber looked relieved again.

“Tell you what, Spade. I’ll drop by California-Citizens informally, have a chat with Vice President Spaulding. Banker to banker, learn what I can. He’s acting president for the moment. Evelyn at least should be able to see those records.”

As Spade emerged into Montgomery Street, a low voice called urgently behind him.

“Mr. Spade.”

It was Henny Barber, no longer the gangly kid Spade had hauled out of the San Anselmo’s lifeboat four years before. Now a sturdy youth of twenty-one, conservatively dressed. He grabbed Spade’s hand and wrung it with a ferocious fervor.

“I heard you’d been summoned by Pater for a dressing-down.” He drew Spade almost furtively up the street. “I’m dying of boredom and I’m hoping there is something, anything, I can do to help you in your investigation of Mr. Eberhard’s death.”

“Aren’t you already working at Golden Gate Trust?”

“Not a real position. Just looking over shoulders.”

“You knew the Eberhards, didn’t you?”

“He was an unofficial uncle when I was growing up. I liked him.” Henny grinned. “I like Aunt Ev a lot better.”

“OK,” said Spade. “You want to help, go get a tellertrainee job at California-Citizens Bank. Tell your old man you want to try it there — but don’t tell him it came from me.”

His face lit up. “Undercover? At Uncle Collin’s bank?”

“Just for a few days. When can you be in place?”

“Tomorrow. Banks always need tellers.”

“Don’t be disappointed if nothing happens,” said Spade.

Effie Perine, watering the vase of African violets she kept on her desk, answered Spade’s inevitable “Any calls?” with “Three, nothing important. But a beautiful Chinese girl was in.”

His eyes quickened. “Chinese? They usually go to their own people for help. She want an appointment? Leave a name?”

“No appointment. She said her name was Mai-lin Choi and that she is here on a student permit that’s running out. She has to go back — to China, I guess — but said she’d return.”

“That sounds straight enough. The Chinese Exclusion Act bars all Chinese except teachers and students and diplomats and the clergy from entering the country from China. I doubt we’ll hear from her again.”

He made a beckoning gesture, went into his private office.

“How was your lunch with Penny?”

Effie Perine didn’t meet his eyes. “I had a sandwich at my desk. She had to get to work.”

“That’s it? Open up. It’s like pulling teeth.”

“She is playing some game, isn’t she?” Her face was troubled. “She told me the same things she told you and said she’ll come in tomorrow morning again to find out if you learn anything tonight. She promised no more games.”

“Still a believer?”

“She’s honestly scared, Sam.” She made a visible effort to change topics. “How did it go with Barber?”

“That fire’s out.” He smiled without mirth. “He’s going to talk to Cal-Cit Bank tomorrow. Did you get the merry widow?”

“The housekeeper said she was out.”

“Keep trying.”

Effie Perine returned to the outer office. Spade smoked cigarettes, various expressions passing across his face. He finally left, stopping at Effie Perine’s desk to tell her he’d make sure that no terrible Turks were following Penny that night.

22 Everybody Lies

Spade was in a coffee shop across Montgomery when Penny Chiotras emerged from the Russ Building’s ornate front entrance at 5:07 p.m. She went down to Bush, turned toward Grant Avenue and the Gypsy Tea Shop. No one followed her, not even Spade. He left a dime on the counter, dodged quitting-time traffic to the Russ Building to consult the directory beside the elevator bank.

“Six, please.”

Spade left the elevator, went down the sixth-floor hall to a lighted pebbled-glass door that read HARTFORD & COLE in blocky capitals, with STOCKS AND BONDS below in smaller cursive writing.

A tall sharp-featured dark-haired man already wearing his hat was coming from an inner office, pulling on a tweed topcoat.

“I was hoping to catch one of your employees before she left,” said Spade. “Penny Chiotras.”

“Sorry, chap, you’re a month too late.” He belatedly stuck out his hand. “Desmond Cole, junior partner of the firm.”

Spade shook. “Eric Gough.”

“Like the street?”

“He was a great-uncle.”

“Native son? A rarity. Anyway, Penny’s mother died, she had to relocate to Brentwood over in the East Bay to look after her aging father. We hated to lose her. Penny was a whiz.”

“My secretary quit, and I remembered Collin Eberhard some time ago was raving about how competent Miss Chiotras was.” Spade smiled ruefully. “I was hoping to steal her from you.”

“Penny started out as a secretary right enough, but she soon became a de facto broker, near as damn to swearing. We were urging her to get her own license when she had to leave. We specialize in timber and mineral stocks — copper, tin, silver, and gold, and she had the touch. She handled some of Collin’s speculative gold-mining stocks and his bank prospered mightily because of her during the past four years—” He broke off, looking guilty. “I shouldn’t be telling you all of this, but I guess it doesn’t matter now that Eberhard is dead and Penny has moved on.”

Spade walked brisky over to Grant Avenue to take up his position in the same convenient doorway across from the Gypsy Tea Shop. Penny was there, went through the same routine, except this time she actually went to the movies. Spade followed her to Noe Valley, saw her safely into her apartment, went home himself. He set his alarm for 6 a.m.

When Penny emerged from Severn Place at 8:30 the next morning Spade was loitering in a little market in Twenty-third Street. Against the morning chill Penny wore a woolen cloche hat and a worn calf-length coat over a cheap working-girl’s frock. Spade laid a nickel on the counter by the cash register.

“Use your phone?”

The gray-haired heavy-faced German shopkeeper waved a hand. “You wouldn’t believe the people use that phone, and without offering me no nickel either.”

Spade gave central his number. While he waited he picked out an apple, laid down another nickel.

Effie Perine’s voice said, “Samuel Spade Investigations.”

“Me. When Penny gets there, tell her nobody was behind her last night and that I feel she has nothing to worry about. But give her my apartment address and the phone number. If she sees anyone, she should get somewhere safe and let me know right away. Day or night.”

Her voice was low, relieved. “Thanks, Sam.” Then she added, “When I came in the phone was ringing. Charles Barber. He wants you to meet him for lunch at the Bohemian Club. I think he wants to apologize for yesterday.” Excitement entered her voice. “They say you have to spend years on the waiting list just to become a member.”

“And no women allowed, ever.”

“Not even as waitresses?” Then her voice changed, got catty. “They have women at the Bohemian Grove up on the Russian River during their two-week summer camp up there. At least lots of girls stay in Guerneville cabins that are close by.”

“What would your mother say if she heard you talking that way, sweetheart? Tell Barber I’ll be there at noon.”

Spade went down Severn Place eating his apple, turned in at the narrow row house that in the morning light proved to be a paint-peeling gray. He climbed five worn wooden steps.

There were six name tags to the right of the front door, two per floor. Apartment 3A was Drosos. Apartment 3B was Donant. No Chiotras. The front door was unlocked. He went in.

Backed up against the wall inside the door was a battered Queen Anne — style library table with mail strewn across it. Nothing for Chiotras. Nothing for Drosos. Spade dropped his apple core on top of discarded mail in a wastebasket beside the table, without stealth climbed to the third floor.

The hallway ran straight back to a communal bathroom at the far end, where the toilet, tub, and sink would be. Halfway down were facing doors, 3A to the left, 3B to the right. It was in the window of 3A that lights had gone on and the roller shade had been lowered after Penny had entered the building.

Spade laid an ear to the door of 3B, heard a radio playing “Sleepy Time Gal.” He stepped quickly across the hall, tapped on the panel of 3A while fingering his keys. No response. The third key worked. He glanced over his shoulder, slid through the half-opened door, closed it without sound.

He was in a small, narrow apartment. An easy chair with frayed arms and the fiber-and-hardwood magazine stand beside it were the only furniture in the front room. Behind it was a chest-high wooden counter topped with oilcloth enclosing a minuscule kitchen with a stained porcelain sink, a two-burner stove, and two chairs shoved under a two-by-three kitchen table.

Behind that a closed three-wing hardwood screen with a floral-patterned cretonne panel and two-way hinges partitioned off the final bit of space. Spade folded back one of the end wings. Hooks on the inside of it held a bath towel, a hand towel, a woolly robe. Inside on the floor were fuzzy slippers.

It took Spade only twenty minutes to methodically search the entire place, inch by inch, using quick eyes that missed nothing and surprisingly delicate fingers that probed everything. In the kitchen, no icebox, no dishes in the sink. A slightly warm coffeepot on the stove. A bread box with half a loaf in it, butter and jam and three eggs on the shelf over the drainboard, a can of Lipton’s coffee. Plate, cup, saucer, one set of cutlery.

The space created by the hardwood screen was just large enough to hold a single bed, a chest of drawers, and a battered wardrobe. Between the bed and the wall was a cheap suitcase, empty. On top of the chest of drawers were a few cosmetics and a bar of bath soap wrapped in a washcloth. The chest held a meager array of neatly folded blouses and underclothes.

The wardrobe held one hat, two scarves, and three skirts on hangers, all the same size. There was only one dress, the expensive brown and tan silk frock with the Greek gold coin as a buckle ornament Penny had worn to his office on her first visit.

Spade found no papers, no checkbook, no money or jewelry, no rent or utility receipts. No phone, no books, no magazines, no radio. No crumpled letter written in Greek. No chest of Bergina. Apart from the silk frock, nothing to suggest that anyone named Chiotras lived there. Nor anyone named Drosos. But on the shelf of the magazine stand beside the easy chair were two dozen newspaper clippings about the Eberhard death.

Just as Spade slipped out of 3A the radio in 3B went silent. He palmed the knob, began knocking on the door he had just closed as a thin, slightly haggard blond woman in a cloth coat emerged from 3B. She held the hand of a girl of four or five, who was carrying a doll. The girl wore a woolen coat, a two-color hockey cap with a pom-pom and a matching scarf with a knit fringe. Blond curls peeped out from beneath the cap.

Spade had turned with an ingratiating smile. “I wonder if you might know where I could reach Mrs. Drosos.”

“Miss Drosos,” the blond woman corrected automatically. The little girl was examining Spade with gravity, clutching her doll to her chest. The woman absently patted her head. “Julia Drosos.” Her voice bore traces of erstwhile refinement.

“Yes, ma’am. We got her letter, you see.”

“About a job?” she asked quickly.

“Her professional qualifications sound fine, but we need a little more personal information.”

“I’m Beverly Donant. I — we, my husband and I — we don’t know Julia well, she’s lived here only a month. She’s all alone in this world. She was caring for her aged mother down in Santa Barbara, and after the poor woman died she found herself bursting into tears all the time. She wants work taking care of children. Some youth and gaiety in her life after all that heartbreak.”

“This would be a nanny situation for a well-to-do family down the peninsula.”

Beverly Donant’s smile illuminated her long, narrow face, made her suddenly pretty. The daughter smiled with her. She had her mother’s same radiant smile.

“I’m sure Julia would be just right for the job,” Beverly Donant said enthusiastically. “She’s stayed with my little Jenny twice when Tom and I went to the movies.”

“She sings me songs and tells me stories,” said Jenny.

“Stories about ancient Greece?” asked Spade.

“Greece!” exclaimed Beverly Donant. “I should have known! All that life and vitality, all that long black hair and those dark eyes and that lovely complexion. I thought maybe Irish, but Greek fits even better.”

“She sounds like just the person we’re looking for.”

26 At the Bohemian Club

Spade went up slanting Taylor Street to the unmarked entry-way of a red brick building half covered with ivy. At the top of eight wide marble steps was a foyer with, to the right, a four-foot cast-bronze owl standing on a bronze life-size human skull.

Charles Hendrickson Barber’s heavy but mellifluous orator’s voice said, “The owl was done in nineteen thirteen by Jo Mora.”

The difference in Barber’s attitude from the day before was marked. The banker shook Spade’s hand warmly, then led him past an unattended reception desk and down a long hall lined with framed photographs of the Bohemian Club’s earlier days.

“It started out in eighteen seventy-two with rooms on Pine Street above the old California Market. In the eighteen nineties they expanded to a better suite of rooms, at one hundred thirty Post, between Kearny and Dupont Alley. But that burned down in the fire after the nineteen oh six quake. In oh seven the club started over again, like everyone else in the San Francisco of that day. Then we moved into this building, and I believe here we’ll stay.”

They came to a bank of three elevators, whose brass doors were decorated with ornate scrollwork. A craggy-faced man, beautifully dressed, came out of one of the elevators with a marked, crabwise limp. He greeted Barber effusively, shook Spade’s hand as if truly delighted to meet him, and went his way.

“We keep rooms on the upper floors for the use of club members from out of town,” explained Barber.

He led Spade through the lounge, a sprawling room with a carpeted floor and twenty-foot-tall windows facing Taylor Street. Drawn back from them were heavy wine drapes; closed over them were gossamer white net curtains. Four men were seated in leather armchairs dotted around the room, reading newspapers with cups of coffee on round end tables beside them.

“The founding members were journalists and artists and musicians and writers who lamented the lack of culture in post — gold rush San Francisco. They wanted something like the Century Club in New York, the vie bohème. But pretty soon, for financial reasons, they had to start admitting prominent businessmen.”

“Writers and artists and musicians never make any money.”

Barber ignored Spade’s words to walk almost majestically down the room. He paused in the wide entrance to a modest dining room.

A serious-faced white-aproned man dressed otherwise in black came up to greet them. Barber addressed him as Reginald and asked for a table away from the others.

“Certainly, Mr. Barber,” said Reginald gravely.

The surprisingly plain dining room was three quarters full of San Francisco movers and shakers, a few of whom Spade knew by sight. Barber was greeted by most of them. They were seated.

“Yep,” Spade said, “no women. Effie’ll be delighted.”

“My wife isn’t. She’s never been inside the place.”

He broke and buttered a sourdough roll; Spade sipped ice water. A waiter appeared, hovered. Barber said the minute steak was edible. Spade said that was fine; Barber ordered for both.

“How’s Henny doing these days? He must be out of the university by now,” said Spade, bland faced.

Barber banged the linen tablecloth in delight.

“He graduated with honors from Berkeley in June. Between the social whirl and tennis, I’ve had him coming down to the bank and observing, part-time of course — have to avoid the nepotism issue. I’ve wanted him to start out as a teller and learn the ropes. It’s paying off. Yesterday he came to me and said he’d like to apply for a teller’s position at somebody else’s bank besides mine, so he could advance on his own merits.”

“So he’s gotten the urge for adventure out of his blood.”

“Has he? He took his degree in literature. His mother and I offered him a year in Europe to soak up some culture, but he said if he went to Europe it would be to climb the Matterhorn. He’s been trying his hand on Half Dome in Yosemite, scaring his mother half to death. I think he enjoys doing it.”

“And how is the good Mrs. Barber?”

“More involved in her charity work than ever.”

Barber leaned in, lowered his voice.

“I had a long discussion with Spaulding yesterday about Cal-Cit’s refusal of access to Collin’s financial papers. He says it’s because of embarrassment, plain and simple. They were sloppy in their controls on certain accounts that — that Collin was intimately involved in.”

“Those accounts have to do with mining stocks?”

“How did you know that?”

The waiter appeared with their meals. Spade cut into his steak, gestured across the table at Barber with the knife.

“I talked with Eberhard’s broker. He said Eberhard — and his bank — got wealthy on speculative gold-mining-stock investments during the past four years. Before that—”

“Before that both Collin and his bank were struggling.” Barber grimaced. “Spaulding says they’re embarrassed because the bank stopped monitoring their dealings with the mining syndicate on Collin’s word that he was monitoring both his investments and the bank’s very closely.”

“It was unwise banking procedures, nothing more?”

“So Spaulding says. I have no, er, solid reason to disbelieve him.”

“Then why the stonewall with Eberhard’s widow?”

“They’re waiting for the insurance situation to resolve itself.” He met Spade’s eyes. “I’m waffling, aren’t I?”

“Yeah.”

Barber glanced around, leaned closer again.

“There are some things that continue to bother me. But... we can’t discuss them here.”

He gestured to the waiter, signed the chit. Their exit from the dining room was again a progression, with nods and waves and handshakes and polite comments from the wealthy and powerful in the room. In the doorway Reginald materialized.

“Brandy and cigars in the library, Reginald.”

“Very good, Mr. Barber.”

After leaving the elevator at the second-floor foyer, Barber and Spade turned left through a wide doorway into the library. All four walls, between windows and doors, were lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Around three sides of the room was a balcony with a waist-high railing.

There was a single window in the right-hand wall that looked down on Taylor Street. In front of the window was a bookcase topped by an ancient-looking three-foot-high brass statue of some fierce-eyed predatory bird with its beak broken off or worn away by time.

“A falcon?” Spade asked.

“An owl. It is a replica of an ancient Athenian owl acquired for the club by Henry Norse Stephens during a trip to Greece in nineteen eleven. The owl is the symbol of the Bohemian Club.”

“Why?” asked Spade bluntly.

“Um — the — er — the owl sees through darkness to— too...”

“To truth?”

“Yes. To truth. And from truth comes knowledge.”

“And from knowledge comes wisdom?”

“That’s it. Wisdom. That’s why the club slogan is ‘Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.’ ”

Spade moved farther into the library. “I don’t see the connection with the weaving spiders,” he said.

“Wisdom only comes from contemplation and discussion of philosophical views, not from business. So, no business here.”

“I read somewhere that during medieval times, even the Renaissance, the owl was the symbol of evil because it was the bird of darkness.”

Down the center of the room, on a pinkish Turkish rug laid over a green carpet, were several hardwood tables on which lay several open reference volumes. There were three more windows in the long Post Street wall, with gauzy lace curtains to cut the glare. Below the high ceiling were three ornate chandeliers, each with twenty electric candles in brass candelabras.

In front of the center window were pairs of leather armchairs faced at comfortable angles to each other. Beside each chair was a brass floor lamp and a smoking table.

Reginald appeared with a tray bearing brandy snifters, a cut glass decanter of cognac, and a silver humidor. He set the tray down on a large table in the front corner of the room, bowed, departed. They selected cigars, poured cognac, moved to two of the padded leather armchairs, sat down. They toasted each other, sipped, drifted fragrant smoke into the air.

“OK,” said Spade, “nothing illegal about Cal-Cit’s banking practices. But if everything is on the up-and-up, why deny the widow access? Why not make the will public?”

“Spaulding tried to reiterate that it was confidential bank business. I said I was the president of a bank myself, and knew better. Plus I was a member of the Banking Commission. Then he tried to say the police had told them not to release any information. Then he tried to refer me to counsel. I said I was talking with him, right then and there, face-to-face. He finally opened up about the mining stocks. Under Collin’s direction the bank had lent money to a Sacramento-based Blue Sky Mining and Development Syndicate, run by a speculator named Devlin St. James, so they could develop mines in the Sierra.”

“What does St. James look like?” demanded Spade quickly.

“Apart from Collin, nobody ever met him. Communication was by telephone or letter. For each new mine the syndicate borrowed ten thousand dollars on a note from Cal-Cit co-signed by St. James and endorsed by the syndicate. After a mine was developed the bank loan was repaid with interest and a fifteen-percent commission override. In return the syndicate kept very heavy deposits in the bank, which were vital to Cal-Cit’s financial health.”

Spade swirled his snifter. “Ring around the rosy.”

“But then Eberhard died and the syndicate, and St. James, drew out all of the money they had on deposit. The bank panicked. Spaulding, as acting president, tried to call in the syndicate’s notes. The syndicate said all of the money had been spent in developing new mines.”

“So of course the bank tried to seize the syndicate’s assets,” said Spade, “and there weren’t any.”

“Just a storefront office on a Sacramento side street with a filing cabinet and a chair and a desk and a typewriter and a telephone. A dollar-a-day clerk to answer the phone and type the letters he was told to type. If anyone came around asking, St. James was in the High Sierra searching out new mines to lease.”

“They get a description of St. James from the clerk?”

“He was hired by an employment agency.”

“And the agency was hired by letter?”

“By phone, actually. How do you know all of this, Spade?”

“You know banking. I know con games and frauds. Your Devlin St. James is the mystery man you saw at the Neptune Bath House, and was the man arguing with Eberhard at his home. He somehow got Eberhard to help him run a shell game with the bank’s money and Eberhard’s money and his own money from some source — I’m pretty sure not from gold mines.”

“I refuse to believe that Collin Eberhard was a crook!”

“He’s dead, so we can’t ask him.”

Barber mopped his face, gulped the last of his cognac.

“Yes, Collin is dead. And St. James is gone, the syndicate is gone, the syndicate’s records — including the names and locations of the mines — are gone. The bank’s money is gone. If that gets out there will be a panic among their depositors. So I feel their actions reflect incompetence, not anything illegal.”

Spade drained his own snifter, shook his head.

“I could almost buy that everyone was conned. Almost. But it doesn’t work. Spaulding has to be in on the fraud now, or Eberhard was before his death, or both. Otherwise Cal-Cit would be seeking criminal indictments from the state attorney general and opening up their books. And then there’s Evelyn Eberhard.”

“Surely Evelyn wasn’t involved.”

“Not involved. Defrauded. As Eberhard’s heir, she would step into his controlling interest in the bank and could demand to see the books. If they showed Eberhard was ruined, she would get the insurance money and nothing more. And be glad to get it. If he wasn’t ruined, then somebody’s been cooking the books.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“There’s something I can do about it,” said Spade.

24 Seven Lies

When the key turned in the lock, Spade was sitting in Penny’s easy chair reading the clippings about Eberhard’s death. His empty coffee mug was perched on one frayed arm of the chair.

Penny came through the door, turned and closed and locked it before she registered that the lights were on. She whirled, her face going deathly pale and her mouth becoming a round O of terror when she saw someone sitting in the armchair.

“Don’t yell. You’ll wake little Jenny across the hall.”

She recognized him. Fire replaced fear in her eyes.

“I thought I could trust you! Instead you followed me here after you promised you wouldn’t. You lied to me.”

“As you lied to me.” Spade tossed the clippings back onto the magazine stand, stood up, and carried his empty mug around the linoleum-topped counter to the tiny kitchen. He refilled his mug from the pot on the stove, raised it. “Coffee?”

Penny shook her head. Her eyes were hostile. He poured a second mug anyway, set his on the counter, hers on the chair arm.

She burst out, “What do you mean I lied to you? I didn’t want you to know where I lived, but I told you where I worked.”

“You haven’t worked there for a month,” said Spade.

Her magnificent dark eyes dulled. Moving like a suddenly old woman, she groped her way to the armchair, sat, and then, despite her refusal, began greedily drinking thick, hot coffee.

“Let’s stop playing games,” said Spade in a softer voice. “Let’s stop accusing each other of things. Just tell me the truth, Penny, so I’ll know what I’m dealing with.”

“I have been telling you the truth!”

Spade snatched up the sheaf of clippings on the Eberhard death from the magazine table beside her chair. “These say you’re lying.” He slammed them down again. “To your mother. To Effie. To me. To everyone. Want me to list all the lies?”

“They weren’t lies. They were—”

“One” — Spade folded in his left thumb — “the Turk that’s supposed to be following you. There is no Turk.” He folded down his forefinger. “Two. The chest of Bergina. Maybe there is a chest. Maybe your father even wrote to you about it. But it has nothing to do with you either way.” He folded down his index finger. “Three. You told me you were a secretary at Hartford and Cole. You started out that way right enough, but by the time you quit you were a de facto broker.” He folded down the ring finger. “Four. You told Cole you had to care for your aged father. Your father is dead.” The little finger. “Five—”

“Stop it!” she cried.

“Five,” he repeated inexorably, his left hand now a closed fist. “You moved in here under a false name — Julia Drosos.”

He opened his left hand, then folded in his right thumb.

“Six. You told Beverly Donant across the hall that your mother had died down in Santa Barbara and you had come up here because being there made you sad.” Folded the right forefinger. “Seven. You told her you were looking for work as a nanny for little children like her Jenny.” Right index finger. “Eight.”

Her mouth twisted with some deep emotion, perhaps anger.

“What about your lies to Beverly? That you were looking for someone to take care of the small children of a wealthy family outside the city? I should have known better, but I so much wanted to get away from here and be safe and—”

She stopped, on the edge of tears. The harsh lines drawn in Spade’s face eased. His voice was once again soft.

“You’re right. Seven lies are plenty.” He took a turn around the room, stopped in front of her again. “But don’t you see? Now that we’ve cut through all the evasions, you have to tell me the truth.”

“I–I have nothing to tell you.”

Spade rolled and lit his first cigarette since she had entered the room. He looked at her through the drifting smoke.

“OK, I’ll tell you.”

He swept the clippings off the magazine stand and sat down on the edge of it so he could loom over her.

“Three years ago your father was killed in Anatolia — unless that’s a lie too. Anyway, the money stopped. Your mother had to take in boarders. You moved out, found a room somewhere, and became a secretary for Hartford and Cole, who specialized in timber and mineral stocks — copper, tin, silver, gold.”

Animation lit her face. “I told Effie I was working—”

“Yeah. But not where. And not where you were living. You had a head for the business, so pretty soon you were handling bits and pieces of some of Hartford and Cole’s accounts like a bona fide broker. ‘Near as damn to swearing’ is the way Cole put it to me. One of the accounts was Eberhard’s.”

“Even if that were so, it doesn’t mean that I—”

“Of course it does.” He dropped the butt of his cigarette hissing into her half-empty mug. “Eberhard started an affair with you, God knows it would be easy enough to want to, and then told them he wanted you handling more of his work.”

Penny put her hands over her ears, as if she didn’t want to hear him. Spade gave a jeering laugh and leaned closer still and put even more steel into his voice.

“He came to trust you. To tell you things he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell his wife. She knew he had a mistress. A few months ago she wanted to hire me to find out who you were, to save her marriage. Now she wants me to find you and throw you to the wolves. I think you knew that the money Devlin St. James was investing wasn’t coming from any gold mines. I think you know, or at least suspect, maybe from things Eberhard had told you, that Eberhard was murdered.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head.

“Hear no evil? See no evil? Speak no evil?” He gave his jeering laugh again. “Not this time, sister. You came to me in the first place because Effie had told you I was looking into the Eberhard death, and you either wanted to sidetrack me or use me as protection against whoever’s out there looking for you.”

She raised her eyes to his. “I don’t know anything.”

He stared at her for long moments, then frustration and anger faded to resignation. He put a thick, wedge-shaped hand under her chin and raised her face so she had to look up at him from clear dark eyes. He bent and gently kissed her on the lips.

“Good-bye, Penny,” he said.

When Effie Perine entered Sam Spade’s inner office the next morning at 8 o’clock, he was slouched behind his desk, dull eyed, smoking a cigarette. The bottle of Manhattan cocktail that was usually in the lower drawer stood empty on the desk. A dozen paper cups were crumpled in the wastebasket beside it. Butts overflowed the ashtray onto the blotter. The open window behind Spade’s head swirled and eddied ash like wind from the bay eddied the summer fog on Mission Street below the window.

Spade raised bloodshot eyes at her entrance. His face was lined. The hand holding his smoked-down cigarette shook slightly when he smeared it out among the other butts in the ashtray.

“ ‘Lo, snip,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice. “I got hootched up like a bat last night.”

“I never would have known.” Then her sprightly voice changed to gravity. “Any reason?”

He didn’t speak. She dropped the bottle into the half-full wastebasket, followed it with the butts from the ashtray. She took a cloth draped over the S-shaped pipe under the sink and wiped the ash off the desk. Spade’s bloodshot eyes followed her as she started for the door with the wastebasket.

He said to her back, “I’m dropping the Eberhard case.”

She turned back in the doorway, shocked.

“But Sam, didn’t you read the memo? Mrs. Eberhard has accepted your offer — to trade the name of her husband’s mistress for her cooperation in trying to get into the Cal-Cit bank records.”

“I saw it.” He gestured at the wastebasket she was holding. “I filed it.”

She took a step closer, then stopped.

He said, “I’m dropping Penny’s case too.”

She responded instantly, putting her knuckles on the desktop so she could lean across it toward him.

“That’s rotten, Sam!” Her eyes were flashing. “She’s in danger, you said so yourself. You can’t just—”

“Can and am.” His voice was sullen. “Too many lies. She made her bed with them, let her lie in it. Or die in it.”

She began, “You’re despic—” then caught herself. Her eyes widened. She began, “What? Are you—”

“I don’t know, angel,” he said with an almost shocking frankness. “I just can’t...” He said again, “Too many lies.”

After a long moment she picked up the wastebasket and left quietly, as from a sickroom, shutting the door behind her.

For half an hour Spade rolled and smoked one cigarette after another while the chill wind through the window whipped the curtains and mussed his pale brown hair. Stubborn thoughts and emotions played across his face as they only did when he was alone. Anger gave way to mulish determination, replaced by irritation, by resignation, finally by a sort of acceptance.

He stood, crossed the office in long strides, threw open the door, crossed to Effie Perine’s desk, said in a rush of words, “You’re right, damn you. I can’t walk away from her. I’m — I can’t let anything happen to her.”

He took hat and topcoat from the rack beside the office door on which appeared SAMUEL SPADE backward on the glass and left.

Three hours later Spade, clear-eyed and quick of step, emerged from the Turkish bath above the billiards hall at 47 Golden Gate Avenue. He walked down to catch a streetcar at Taylor and Market, where the Golden Gate Theatre advertised its current variety acts. It was fifteen minutes shy of noon.

At fifteen minutes past noon, Henny Barber, dressed in a banker’s conservative suit and dull tie, turned from the counter of Van’s Grill on California and Grant with his corned-beef sandwich, apple pie, and coffee. He stopped dead when he saw Spade drinking coffee at his table.

“Eat,” said Spade. “You’re the one with the half-hour lunch break. Is anybody using Eberhard’s office these days?”

“Spaulding. He’s declared himself acting president of the bank, and he’s in Uncle Collin’s office all day every day.”

“Like he’s making sure nobody else gets in there? Maybe like there’s paperwork in there he can’t let anyone else see?”

“Just like that,” agreed Henny in a surprised voice.

“Can you arrange to stay late tonight?” Spade leaned forward. “After hours?”

Henny said around a big bite of corned-beef sandwich, “Sure, easy. I’ll just make sure that my cash fails to balance. Old man Spaulding is death on balancing to the penny. Two nights ago he made Renata Ferrano so nervous that she kept making simple arithmetic errors and had to stay until eleven o’clock to balance out. She told me the night security guy kept bothering her.”

“Gino Mechetti,” said Spade.

Henny was again surprised. “How did you know that?”

Spade grinned and pulled down a lower eyelid with a finger. “She say how many security rounds Gino made while she was there?”

“None. All he did was hang around and bother her.”

“Mmm-hmm, but we can’t count on that. Tonight you have to keep him on the main floor from ten p.m. until one a.m.”

“That might be hard. He knows I want to punch him one on the beezer.”

“You’ll ply him with dago red and make him think he’s the cat’s meow.” Seeing Henny’s puzzlement, Spade added, “Pretend you’re acting in one of those Bohemian Club plays. Outwitting the villain who’s going to tie Pearl White to the railroad tracks.”

Henny started on his pie, laughing as he did. “OK.”

“Do you know exactly where Eberhard’s office is?”

“It takes up the back half of the second floor. Big inner office, with Spaulding in it all day, smaller outer office with one of the tellers sitting there during banking hours even though Uncle Collin is dead.”

“The elevator is where?”

“Fifteen feet away.”

“At night, is it left on the first floor, locked down with the door open? Stairs beside it?”

“Yes on both counts. Gino uses the stairs for his rounds.”

“Tonight make sure he doesn’t get off the ground floor.” Henny nodded and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “If I have to bonk him on the head to keep him there.”

“Good man. I’ll tell you all about it when it’s over.” Spade grinned. “Unless my foot slips and you end up reading about it in tomorrow morning’s Chronicle.”

25 Dago Red

At 9:32 p.m. hulking Mickey Linehan slammed down five cards faceup on a conference table cleared of everything except chips, cards, whiskey, money, and the players’ elbows.

“Boat!” he chortled with his idiot’s grin. “Jacks over nines. Read ’em and weep, gentlemen.”

Tall lean Woody Robinson shook the big head on his thin stalk of a neck and tossed in his hand. Phil Haultain followed suit. Spade was already turning his pant pockets inside out.

“I’m on the hog, but don’t let me bust up your little game, boys. Just so long as I went broke three hours from now.”

Mickey Linehan, making his half-wit’s face, said, “We done plucked you clean at... twelve forty-three a.m.”

Spade walked down the echoing third-floor hallway to the back stairs, took them down to the street so no one could clock him leaving the Flood Building.

In Pratt Place beside the Chinese social club Sam Spade crouched, leaped up. His gloved hands caught the bottom of the folded-up metal stairs. His weight dragged them down, unfolding them with a shriek of rusted iron. He climbed the three flights of fire escape to the waist-high parapet. On the far side of the flat black tarred roof he dropped lightly down three feet onto the similarly flat roof of California-Citizens Bank.

Shielding his flashlight so only a small circle of light showed, Spade illuminated the lock and hasp on the door of the weathered wooden shed that gave access to the bank’s elevator shaft. It was a solid brass Corbin padlock that weighed a pound.

“Not good,” Spade muttered to himself.

But his light picked out raw wood under the hasp, paint peeled and dried out despite San Francisco’s persistent fog.

“Better,” muttered Spade.

He took a short pry bar from under his mackinaw and inserted it behind the hasp, pulled down. The lock-and-hasp assembly fell onto the roof. Spade opened the shed door, shone his light inside.

There was an eighteen-inch-wide maintenance walkway around the two big wheels that filled the top of the shaft, over which the elevator cables passed. The air was heavy with the smell of lubricating grease.

Spade stepped in and shone his light down. The elevator’s roof was some twenty feet below Spade’s narrow walkway. He pulled up his shirt to unwind a length of rope from around his waist, tied one end around the bottom of one cable wheel, pulled hard to test the knot, grabbed the rope with both gloved hands, and stepped off the walkway. He lowered himself by arm strength alone.

When his booted feet touched the elevator roof his chest was level with the bottom of the second-floor elevator doors. He jammed his pry bar into the intersection, heaved sideways. The doors separated a few inches. He shoved the bar in farther, heaved again. The aperture widened. A third heave gave him an opening he could wriggle through. He listened at the top of the stairs to the muffled sound of male voices, a low burst of laughter. He grinned.

“Dago red,” he said to himself.

The door to Eberhard’s outer office was not locked. Spade went past the deserted secretary’s desk to the private office. He used his light on the door, his penknife on the lock, and was in. His light swept the room. There was a conference table of modest proportions with six chairs arranged around it. The light stopped on Eberhard’s executive-style rolltop desk.

“That’ll do it,” said Spade softly.

The roll curtain was down and locked. His penknife easily jimmied the lock. He slid up the curtain, heard the locking device on the pedestal drawers down each side of the desk click open. Rifled the pigeonholes. Flicked open the private locker pigeonhole with his penknife, stuffed the contents into one pocket of his mackinaw without looking at them.

From the double-depth pedestal drawer on the right-hand side of the desk he extracted three files, folded them, and stuffed them into his other coat pocket. He shut the drawers, returned everything to its original position, closed down the roll curtain to lock the drawers.

Spade paused again at the head of the stairs and was rewarded with faint male voices singing “Ukulele Lady” quite badly.

“Dago red indeed,” he muttered again, grinning.

He slid through the narrowly opened shaft doors to the roof of the elevator, grunted his way up his rope to the cable wheels, muscled himself up to crouch on the narrow catwalk, and used his knife to worry open the knot on his rope and haul it up.

On the roof he broke a wooden match into four short pieces and shoved one piece into each of the hasp’s screw holes, used a coin to tighten down the screws in their holes. He reversed his way back over two roofs and away.

It was just after midnight when Spade left the Sutter car to walk down Hyde Street. As he angled across the intersection a big black Buick sedan roared up Post toward him. He threw himself headlong into the gutter in front of his apartment house as the driver’s heavy revolver spat fire four times. The third of the shots neatly plucked Spade’s hat off his head and sent it rolling across the sidewalk. The sedan squealed downhill into Hyde and was gone.

Spade was on his feet and snatching up his hat before the car had disappeared. He twisted his key in the vestibule door lock, jerked it out, sprinted up the stairs before any window could be raised, any head thrust out in response to the shots.

The phone was ringing when he came into his apartment. He ignored it to cross the front room in the dark, part the curtains enough to peer down at the people in the street. They were pointing in various directions, none of them toward his darkened windows. The phone stopped ringing, started again. A uniformed policeman was using his key on the police call box on the corner.

Spade let the window curtain fall back into place. He put the papers purloined from Eberhard’s desk under the pillows of the sofa, removed his hat and mackinaw, and hung them on the hooks inside the front door. Ignoring the police sirens, the squeal of police car wheels, Spade poured himself a shot of Bacardi. He sat in his easy chair in the dark and smoked cigarettes and drank.

When he returned to the window a half hour later, only a few citizens now stood around in the street below, talking and gesturing. The police had departed without ringing his doorbell.

Spade had just lowered the wall bed when the phone rang for the sixth time. He picked it up from its place on the bedside table, atop Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America.

“Spade,” he said.

Effie Perine’s voice said, “Penny is here. She’s been here for hours. She’s terrified. She needs you, Sam.”

Spade sat down on the edge of the bed. “Put her on.”

After long moments Penny’s voice came, small and hesitant.

“I saw him. On Market Street.” Her voice steadied, strengthened as she talked. “And he saw me.”

“When?”

“Around nine o’clock. I was just crossing Market when I saw him walking toward me, very fast. I–I jumped on a passing car. He tried to get on, but it was moving too fast and the doors were shut. I rode it to Sixth Avenue in the Richmond, got off, and ran out here to Effie’s place. I–I’ve been here ever since. If he should think to come here—”

“Put Effie back on,” said Spade soothingly.

“I’m here,” said Effie Perine.

“How’s your mother with all these shenanigans?”

She got closer to the phone. “She’s worried, maybe a little scared, but she’s always been strong for Penny.”

“OK, make sure all the doors and windows are locked till I get there. Call the Monroe Hotel out on Sacramento Street and reserve a room for a Mary Kutina, that’s K-u-t-i-n-a. I don’t think he’d try to crush his way in there, but if you see anyone hanging around call the cops and report a Peeping Tom.”

Spade hung up, got central, gave the operator Davenport 1000. A man’s gruff voice answered. “Bluebird Cabs.”

“Eight nine one Post Street, ten minutes,” said Spade.

He started out of the apartment, grabbing his hat and the mackinaw. He stopped, wiggled his fingers through the entry and exit holes in his hat, tossed it aside, and got another. It was tan and did not go with the rest of his clothes.

26 Penny

The Monroe Hotel was between Van Ness and Franklin at the lower edge of Pacific Heights. Spade had money in hand for the cabdriver. He hurried into the hotel so fast, with Penny in tow, that she was on the sidewalk a bare five seconds.

The clerk was a slightly bug-eyed man with an old-fashioned monocle on a velvet cord that passed through the lapel buttonhole of his three-piece suit. He had a judging face, a tightly trimmed sandy mustache, slim fingers that drummed nervously on the desktop.

“May we help you, sir?” His voice was supercilious.

Spade spun the hotel register around, wrote “Mary Kutina, City,” in a bold slashing hand, saying without looking up, “My secretary phoned ahead for a reservation for Miss Kutina.”

The clerk’s eyes took in Spade’s disreputable appearance, Penny’s frightened eyes and cloche hanging precariously to the side of her head, the cheap frock under a calf-length coat that had seen better days. The eyes slid to the lobby clock.

“I think not, sir.” His voice just avoided having a sneer in it. “We are not that kind of hotel.”

“You are now,” said Spade. “Tell your house dick, Skip LeGrande, that Sam is stashing a witness for a day or two.” He tossed money on the counter, reached across to the keyboard and snagged a key, held it up, said, “Three three three.”

Spade put their hats on the shelf of the closet inside the door, hung up their coats. When he turned, Penny was standing in the middle of the room with a dazed look on her face, as if she couldn’t remember where she was or how she had gotten there.

“Sit down, precious,” Spade said.

She sat down obediently in the closest chair in that same all-at-once-boneless way with which she had sat when Spade had braced her the night before. Her face was pale, exhaustion rimmed her eyes with red and made their lids seem transparent.

Spade half-filled two glasses with water from the sink, set them down on the table beside Penny’s chair, poured generous doses of dark liquid into each glass from a curved, leather-covered metal flask off his hip. He kept one glass for himself, put the other into her hand. He clinked his glass to hers.

“Success to crime,” he said.

She shuddered. “Can’t we drink to something else?”

“To truth,” said Spade. This time she drank, greedily, as she had drunk the at-first-refused coffee at her apartment.

“I’m just so tired of running and hiding and lying all the time,” she said. “Of being so scared for so long I can’t remember what it’s like to not be scared.”

“The running and hiding and lying are all finished,” said Spade. “You’re going to tell me all about it — all about it — and then I’ll fix whatever is broken.”

“Is that a promise?” She had a sort of hope in her voice.

“Guaranteed.”

She took another slug of her drink. He darkened it with more bourbon. She started talking, her voice getting stronger.

“You had almost all of it right last night, Sam. I was working at Hartford and Cole as a secretary and they let me start handling little jobs a broker would usually do. Collin was one of their main clients. Almost immediately he started taking me out on the sly and wining and dining me. He was twenty years older than I, I knew he was married, but he didn’t seem to care about it so I didn’t either. Pretty soon he took me to bed.”

“And made sure you handled more of his business?”

“Yes. And set me up in an apartment at eleven fifty-five Leavenworth.”

“Hmm. Three-story brownstone at the corner of Sacramento?”

“Yes. I — it meant I could send more money to my mother. Last night you made it sound like it was cold and calculating and commercial. It wasn’t like that. Not for either one of us.”

“I said that to try and shake the truth out of you.”

“I guess you’ve succeeded,” she said with a wan smile. “Collin took me places on the weekends. Sonoma. Carmel. I was handling most of his gold-mining stocks by then. A few months ago he changed. He was wrestling with a decision. At first I didn’t know if it was about me or the bank, but then he started to talk about his worries and a man named Devlin St. James.”

Spade hiked his chair a little closer. His eyes had taken on a yellow glow. “When was the first time you saw St. James?”

“I never did. Not while Collin was alive. At the time Collin told me that St. James had come to him four years ago with a lot of illegal money. He needed someone to front it for him, turn it legitimate. Collin was desperate, he and the bank were floundering, that cash would save them.”

Spade made a cigarette, poured bourbon from his flask.

“Collin said yes to St. James. He even came up with a plan. He set up a gold-mining syndicate that existed only on paper so they could run the money through the syndicate’s accounts at the bank.”

“What did he mean by a lot of money?”

“Seventy-five thousand.”

Spade’s eyes narrowed. “Where did the money come from?”

“A bootlegging syndicate in Half Moon Bay. There were no mines, there never had been any mines. Collin said the bootleggers brought the liquor down from Canada and offloaded it into small boats outside the eleven mile limit. Some got caught, but nobody could betray the syndicate because none of the men knew who they really were working for.”

“A sweet setup,” mused Spade. “You run illicit profits from bootlegging through a tame bank as if they are legitimate profits from a gold-mining enterprise. Nothing can go wrong — unless your tame banker gets cold feet.”

She made a small distressed sound in her throat.

“I hate to think of Collin that way but, yes, he was the tame banker, and I suppose you could say he got cold feet. He told me that St. James was also violent and unpredictable and liked to brag of killing people who got in his way.”

Spade’s frown put deep creases between his eyebrows, as if he were chasing elusive memories. “Bootlegging syndicate... seventy-five thousand.” He stopped, shrugged, nodded. “Go on.”

“Collin finally decided to have it out with St. James at home, with his wife in the next room. That way, he said, St. James couldn’t do anything violent and unpredictable.”

“But a week or so later Eberhard was dead.”

“Collin was usually waiting for me at the apartment when I got home from work, but on that day this slender insignificant-looking man I had never seen before was sitting in the living room. He just said that Collin was dead, nothing more. I sort of collapsed into a chair, I was so shocked and so... devastated. It was only later that I realized this was less than an hour after Collin had died.”

“St. James must have gone straight to your apartment from the Neptune Bath House.” Spade’s frown had deepened. “But Eberhard was alive when St. James left the bathhouse.”

“He took my hand like he was going to — to comfort me and then...” She held out her left hand with its badly set little finger. “He twisted my finger and broke it. He laughed and said if I ever told anyone about him he would kill my mother, and then Effie, and then me.”

She stopped there, drained her glass, set it aside.

“I panicked. I jerked free and ran down the stairs and jumped aboard an outbound streetcar. I got off in Jordan Heights and got my finger set at the Nurses’ Training School there.”

“Set badly.”

“I didn’t care. That night I got a room at the Y.W.C.A. boarding home in O’Farrell Street. At six the next morning I hid in the Russ Building ladies’ room until Hartford and Cole opened. I went in, told them my lies, and got my last paycheck and left. I hated it, they had been so good to me, but I needed that money and I knew I had to get it right away. I knew St. James would come looking for me there.”

“You’re a survivor, sweetheart,” said Spade admiringly.

“Barely.” She tried another weak smile. “I chose the apartment on Severn Place because I thought he’d never find me out there in Noe Valley. Which meant more lies.”

“Why didn’t you go to the East Bay or down the peninsula?”

“I would have had to have gone to a stage terminal or a ferry terminal. I’d be in the open. Exposed. So I hid in my apartment. But a month went by and I was running out of money. So I went to Effie’s on her birthday and she told me about working for you and that you were looking into Collin’s death. So I–I told you that tale about my father finding the chest of Bergina and that a mysterious Turk was after me. The chest is real, I believe, but my father never wrote me about it. I just wanted you to keep me and my mother and Effie safe.”

“Well, they’re safe in their homes and you’re safe here. Take all your meals in your room. Don’t talk to anyone.”

“Can’t — can’t you stay?” There was panic in her voice. “I–I saw him, Sam! He saw me! He chased me. With murder in his face...”

He put his arms around her to comfort her. “You poor kid.”

She pressed herself tight against him, her arms went around the back of his neck. His arms came up, went around her body. She clung to him. What was simple comfort seemed suddenly to be something more for both of them, surprising both of them, but then seemed inevitable.

His hands moved over her like electricity. She kissed him, openmouthed. He lifted her effortlessly off her feet and carried her to the bed. His eyes burned. When he spoke his voice was thick with a passion that seemed to go beyond protecting her, beyond wanting her, to something deeper.

“I won’t let him hurt you ever again, Penny,” Sam Spade said. “Not now. Not ever.”

27 Five Murders

Spade entered his office at 10 a.m. His eyes were clear; he was freshly bathed and shaved. His blue broadcloth dress shirt had a new soft white collar, his gray silk tie a conservative pattern. As usual, his gray woolen worsted suit, though expensive, fit him indifferently. He carried a briefcase.

Effie Perine was on her feet as he came through the door.

“How is she? Is she OK? Is she safe?”

“Yes on all counts. She’s in room three three three at the Monroe Hotel as Mary Kutina.” He set down his briefcase. “Roll me a cigarette, that’s a darling.”

As she did he prodded the briefcase with his shoe.

“I raided the bank last night, late. I haven’t had a chance to look over my haul yet. With any luck they won’t even know the stuff is gone. Not until it’s too late.”

She handed him his cigarette, lit it. He went on.

“And St. James tried an ambush last night outside my apartment.” In response to her shocked look he added, “All he did was shoot a hole in my hat.”

“But that’s crazy! How did he even know who you were? Earlier Penny saw him and he chased her and—”

“Over three hours earlier. Plenty of time to try to gun me down when I got home.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Anyway, sweetheart, Penny’s been so elusive because she had become Eberhard’s mistress and was ashamed to let you know about it.”

“Penny? A kept woman? I–I can’t believe it.”

“Oh, it’s true, right enough. It started out as a way to get money for her mother, but it turned into something else. Toward the end Eberhard was telling her everything.”

Spade told Effie Perine about the money Devlin St. James had brought to the bank and the phony gold-mining scheme worked out by Eberhard to front for it.

“Just an hour after Eberhard died St. James was breaking Penny’s little finger. He planned to kill her too.”

“Too?” demanded Effie Perine. “But Eberhard was still alive when St. James left the Neptune Bath House.”

“Yeah, so the only way he could have known it that soon was if he had set it up so he’d be gone when it happened.” Spade scooped up his briefcase. “Dig out that four-year-old autopsy report from the Marin coroner’s office, the one I never read. Those two Portagees were poisoned. I want to know if it was opium.”

Her eyes went round. “You think Devlin St. James is the St. Clair McPhee who masterminded the San Anselmo robbery?”

“Yeah.” His face tightened, became almost ferocious. “Four years off and on I’ve been looking for that bird. Now here he is, back again. The money he corrupted Eberhard with is the seventy-five thousand bucks from the San Anselmo. I should have caught it sooner, but I never saw McPhee and I haven’t seen St. James even now. He tried to kill me back then because I cost him fifty thousand in gold bullion. He tried to kill me last night ’cause I’m taking apart his gold-mining scam.”

She looked at him with worried eyes. “What are you going to do, Sam? To protect yourself?”

“Stop him before he stops me.”

Five minutes later Effie Perine entered Spade’s inner office with the Marin County autopsy report. Spade had papers spread across his desk, cigarette ash already drifting across them.

“Thanks, darling. Call Evelyn Eberhard and tell her to be at Sid’s office at one thirty, then call Sid and tell him he has to cancel whatever else he might have on. Then go out to the Monroe Hotel. Change cabs two or three times, have the last one drop you a block from the hotel. You know the drill. Collect Penny, take her home with you, and feed her.”

“What do I tell her?”

“That by tonight she’ll be safe.”

Both Wise and Spade stood when Evelyn Eberhard was ushered into Wise’s office. She was dressed in black, as befit a widow. But her silk sheath had a collarless neckline, and the bands and sash bows at the waist were a shocking flesh-pink color. The briefcase was beside Spade’s chair.

“Mrs. Eberhard, meet Sid Wise, your new attorney.” They both looked surprised, but Wise extended his hand.

“Delighted, Mrs. Eberhard,” he said.

She was looking at Spade with fire in her eyes.

“I did not come here to hire an attorney, Mr. Spade.”

“You can expect client-attorney confidentiality even if you later decide to seek other counsel,” said Wise.

She sat down, removed her stylish clipped velour hat. It also was black, but without the widow’s veil that was de rigueur for mourning. She crossed her legs, showing knee.

“Isn’t anyone going to offer me a cigar?”

Spade gravely brought a corona del Ritz from his inner suit-coat pocket. He offered it to her with a flourish.

“George Sand to the very end,” he observed.

She took the cigar with a low laugh.

“How sweet. You remembered.” Spade gave a slight bow. He was holding his lighter to the tip of the corona when she said, “All right, who was his mistress and where can I find her?”

“Forget the mistress. She’s irrelevant.”

Abruptly, any playfulness Evelyn had shown was gone. She started to rise, said angrily, “This meeting is over.”

“Sit down,” snapped Spade, sudden iron in his voice.

She looked astounded. Sid Wise looked astounded. But she sat back down. Spade stood, started to lift his briefcase.

“Since I don’t represent Mrs. Eberhard,” Wise said quickly, “I have to see these papers before you show them to her.”

“You’re now my attorney,” she said just as quickly.

“I withdraw my offer of representation,” said Wise.

“Jesus God!” Spade burst out. He leaned his hips against the windowsill so he could take in the lawyer and the widow. Then he pointed at Evelyn. “All you want to do is get back at the girl who stole your favorite toy.” He pointed at Wise. “You, you’re afraid of losing your license. Neither one of you seems to give a damn about what the mistress has to say about Eberhard’s death.”

Evelyn began, “My husband was not a toy. That woman—”

“—can give testimony proving he was murdered. Not by you.”

The words hung in the air for long moments before Wise demanded, “How?” at the same time Evelyn demanded, “Who?”

“How? Poison. Opium in his drink at the Neptune Bath House. Who? Devlin St. James.”

They looked at each other blankly. Wise said, “Who’s he?”

The widow said, “Why did he do it?”

“Why do they always do it? For the money.”

“Wait a minute, Sam.” Sid’s lawyer’s mind seemed to be getting belatedly back in gear. “Why do you posit murder, and why opium? There was no indication of poison in the autopsy.”

“Four years ago the Marin County coroner found opium in two dead men. He did a good job; it can’t always be found.”

“Ah.” Wise eased back in his swivel chair. “The San Anselmo heist. I see. Devlin St. James is St. Clair McPhee.”

“Yeah. I finally have a chance of sticking him with those four murders from back then with this murder now.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” said Evelyn weakly.

Spade got his briefcase. “You don’t have to. Let’s go.”

As the trio went past him, the young man who had been a teller the last time Spade had officially been in California-Citizens Bank started up from his chair.

“Wait! You aren’t allowed in there.”

But Spade had flung open the door to Eberhard’s office and the others had crowded in behind. Spaulding stood up from behind Eberhard’s desk. His face was red with anger. He barked at the bewildered young man behind them, “Call the guards!” To Spade he blustered, “We’ll see what the bank’s attorneys have to say about this outrage.” He reached for the phone.

“Why don’t you stamp your foot?” said Evelyn Eberhard.

“As her husband’s heir,” said Spade, “and thus majority stockholder in this bank, Mrs. Eberhard is replacing you and all of the other officials, effective immediately.”

“But she isn’t the bank’s majority stockholder,” said Spaulding with a suddenly smug look on his face. He turned to Evelyn, who was still gaping at Spade. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Eberhard, but the bank felt that the terms of your husband’s last will and testament made it too delicate for disclosure at this time. Since you’re here, however, I can tell you that the will leaves you the house, but his holdings in the bank go to—”

“To his widow, like the will says,” said Spade.

“I don’t know how you learned of the first will, but that will was superseded by one dated just a week before Mr. Eberhard’s death.”

From his briefcase Spade brought out a sheaf of papers like a magician bringing a rabbit out of a top hat and tossed them on the table. Wise sat down, looking numb. Spaulding was still standing, looking indignant.

“Here’s the original,” Spade said. “And the forged one you’ve been planning to palm off on everyone as genuine.”

“That’s impossible!” Spaulding was feverishly unlocking desk drawers. “You — you burgled this office! The police—”

“Mrs. Eberhard, was I acting with your permission when I secured these documents for safekeeping?”

“Certainly,” said Evelyn Eberhard.

“How big a piece of the pie did St. James offer you to help steal the bank away from her, Spaulding?” asked Spade.

“That is a libelous canard that—”

“Not that it matters. Within the hour St. James will be arrested for committing five murders, and you will be arrested as accessory before and after the fact of one of them.”

“Fi— five murders?” Spaulding’s face had turned ashen. He sank back down in the swivel chair.

“Get out from behind my desk!” snapped Evelyn Eberhard.

Spade laughed aloud. “Never get between a widow and her husband’s money.”

She shot Spade an angry look, then had to chuckle herself. Numbly, Spaulding obeyed her. Evelyn sat down in his place. There was ownership in her movements.

“Five murders,” repeated Spade. “Eberhard and four men in Sausalito four years ago. There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.” He cocked a heel on the desktop, looked at Spaulding. “You might have a chance to get out from under the murder-accessory rap for a lesser charge of embezzlement if you turn up St. James for us — right now. Otherwise Mrs. Eberhard will bring civil suit against you for... what, Sid?”

“Fiduciary mismanagement for a start.” Wise warmed to his task. “There are some interesting statutes that—”

“Eleven fifty-five Leavenworth,” said Spaulding very quickly. “Third floor, rear corner apartment. He... he’s waiting for my call about finalizing the money transfers.”

“Damn!” Spade was at the desk, snatching up the phone. To central he snapped, “Connect me to the Homicide Detail in the Hall of Justice. Quick.” His hand over the receiver, he said to Evelyn, “Your husband’s love nest...”

He removed his hand.

“Tom? Get over to eleven fifty-five Leavenworth, right now... Yeah, that’s right, up behind Grace Cathedral. Go in quiet but go in quick. The murderer of Collin Eberhard is in the third-floor rear corner apartment, waiting for a telephone call... Yeah, I’m sure. Bird calling himself Devlin St. James... That’s right... St. James. Also, under the name St. Clair McPhee he’s good for that slaughter over in Sausalito four years ago. Surround the place before you go in or he’ll give you the slip. Don’t let Dundy hog all the glory.”

His left thumb depressed the receiver hook for a long moment, released it. He gave central a number. When he heard Effie Perine’s voice, he brought the phone closer to his mouth. There was elation in his voice.

“You have Penny with you there at your mother’s?” He nodded. “Good. It’s all over, sweetheart. I’ll get out there eventually.”

28 Effie

Tom Polhaus was leaning against a side wall with his arms folded on his chest and an embarrassed look on his face. Dundy was holding a lace window curtain aside to contemplate the looming bulk of Grace Cathedral in the next block. Phels, heavy bodied with a deeply lined grayish face, was sitting in a velour-upholstered davenport chair, hands hanging down between spread thighs, staring at the floor.

Sam Spade was striding up and down the room. His face was red and the veins at the sides of his thick throat were swelling dangerously as he raged at the three Homicide detectives.

“What do you mean you missed him?”

“He wasn’t here, Sam,” said Tom with chagrin in his voice. “His clothes and everything was still here, but he wasn’t.”

“Did you come in like I said? Quick but quiet?”

Dundy said, “How we come in don’t matter. He was tipped.”

“Who was going to tip him, Dundy?”

“Spaulding.”

“Spaulding didn’t tip anyone. Sid Wise is sitting on his chest right now waiting for someone to come take him away.”

A detective with his hat on, known to Spade only as Mack, burst open the splintered front door.

“Lieutenant, the fire escape is right beside the bathroom window of the first-floor rear apartment, and it rattles like crazy, anybody uses it. Before the tenant went out for lunch, he heard us runnin’ up the stairs yellin’ we was the police, then heard someone comin’ down the fire escape, fast. Uh... it was him, Lieutenant. St. James. He took off down the alley afoot.”

“How you went in don’t matter?” demanded Spade bitterly.

“How was we to know it wasn’t you sendin’ us on another of your wild-goose chases, Spade? You should of come to us sooner.”

Spade’s grimace deepened the V’s of his face.

“I hope to God you’ve got men in the bus and train and ferry terminals, got ’em checking hired cars, got ’em—”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll get to all that. But—”

“Get to all that?”

Dundy’s voice was defensive. “All I’ve got even now is your phone call to Tom. I ain’t talked to Spaulding yet. I ain’t seen nothing like proof of anything. I ain’t seen the two wills. I don’t even know why this St. James was livin’ here.”

Spade took another frustrated turn around the room.

“Eberhard was keeping his mistress in this apartment. With the lease paid up, what safer place for St. James to hole up? With her story and Spaulding’s story you’ll have enough to—”

“How much can we trust some cheap tart who was just in it for the money? Maybe she was even in cahoots with St. James.”

Spade started across the room toward him, white-faced. Big Tom Polhaus got in his way, arms wide. He spoke in a low voice.

“Where’s the girl, Sam?”

The tension went out of Spade. “I’ve got her stashed.”

“Gimme her name so we can check her out,” said Dundy.

“I keep telling you, this St. James is deadly. Go out and find her yourself. I’m not stopping you.”

Spade parked his hire car at the curb in front of a two-story brick building in the 300 block of the Richmond District’s Ninth Avenue. On the small square stoop a glazed Greek pot held a wide-spreading ficus plant. A riot of daisies crowded the living room windowsill planter. He rang the doorbell.

The door was opened by a dark-haired handsome woman in her early forties. Her face broke into a smile when she saw Spade. He bowed slightly to her. “Mrs. Perine.”

“I’m so glad this terrible thing is finally over,” she said. “Effie’s in the front room. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

As she went down the hall to the kitchen Spade entered the living room. Effie Perine stood up from a low-slung Coxwell chair in one corner. She echoed what her mother had said.

“I’m so glad it’s all over, Sam. So is Penny.”

Spade stopped in the middle of the bright, cheery room. An Oriental carpet was on the gleaming hardwood floor. Framed photos crowded the foot-square taboret under the front window; its lower shelf was crammed with books. Gold-threaded tassels hung from the armrests of the upholstered Chesterfield.

“It isn’t quite over,” said Spade uneasily. “Not yet. But Penny’s safe enough here.”

“But she isn’t here!”

In two quick strides he had Effie Perine by her upper arms, was almost shaking her. “Not here?”

“After we ate she decided to go get her things from her apartment out in Noe Valley. She said she wanted to close that chapter of her life for good.” Effie Perine rubbed her arms through her sweater. “What — what’s wrong, Sam?”

“St. James is still on the loose. The cops missed him. How long ago did she leave?”

“Two hours. Should I—”

“If she calls from the Donants’ across the hall tell her to stay there with them with the door locked till I get there.”

Spade ran up the five worn steps and through the unlatched front door, took the interior stairs two at a time. Thin glass sharded under his feet: the third-floor hallway light had been broken. He followed his torch: the Donants’ door was locked. Penny’s door drifted open to his touch. He turned off his torch.

Vague light from the street showed him the easy chair and the magazine stand beside it. Undisturbed, as was the kitchen behind its counter. The bedroom’s three-wing screen was closed.

Spade folded back one wing to blackness, went in with no more noise than a cat crossing a carpet. Here was the coppery smell of blood. He lit his torch. Its light found the chest of drawers. The battered wardrobe. The cheap suitcase between the side wall and the narrow single bed.

Penny was on the bed, naked, violated. Her head was strained back into the blood-soaked pillow. Her throat was slit. Her face was distorted. Her lip rouge was smeared grotesquely around her mouth. Spade pulled the blanket up over her, stood beside her, head lowered, breathing hard.

The creak of the apartment door gave him animation once more. He killed the torch, in darkness and silence went past the screen, past the kitchen counter, death in his movements.

But it was Effie Perine who stood in the middle of the front room, hands clenched into fists on drawn-back wrists. She gave a little startled cry when she saw Spade, then started toward him.

“Sam! I got a cab, I had to come, I couldn’t stand not knowing. Where is she? Is she...”

The muscles stood out like marbles along his jaw. His eyes glittered redly in the dim light. He jerked his head toward the bedroom.

“She’s in there.”

She tried to dart past him. He grabbed her by the upper arms, spun her around against the magazine stand.

“She’s dead.” He paused, said again, “She is dead.” Effie Perine gave a little cry, again tried to get past him. He held her effortlessly, as if she were a rag doll. “You don’t want to go in there. You don’t want to see it. He forced her back on the bed. He put his hands on her. Then he slit her throat.”

Spade flung himself away from her, stood in the middle of the room with his back to her, legs wide, head drawn down between thick shoulders, hands clenched at his sides.

“Don’t trust me, Effie. I don’t want anyone to trust me. Not now. Not ever.”

Finally he turned to face her. She was standing beside the chair, hands hanging laxly at her sides, tears pouring down her cheeks. She made no attempt to stop them, as if she did not know that she was crying.

Spade said softly, “I’ll take you home. Dundy would hound you forever if he knew you’d been here, so you never were.”

She finally wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. “I was never here,” she repeated in a soft, obedient voice.

29 The Third Woman

Spade was in his armchair, a glass of Bacardi on the floor beside him. He was freshly bathed, cleanly shaven, wearing slacks and a gray plaid flannel shirt open at the throat. His lion-yellow eyes were dead, without animation.

The street doorbell rang. His head came up. He stood, tossing The Great Gatsby that he wasn’t reading onto the sofa. He crossed the room to the telephone box beside the bathroom door that connected to the downstairs door.

“Who is it?”

“Tom Polhaus.”

“Is Dundy with you?”

“No.”

Spade pressed the button that released the street-door lock, went into the kitchen, and poured a second glass of Bacardi. He set it on the table beside the lowered made-up wall bed.

When he heard the elevator door rattling open and closed down the hall, he stood framed in his open apartment doorway, almost at attention, as if to make sure that Dundy was not sneaking down the hall behind Polhaus.

“He ain’t with me Sam,” said Tom bluntly.

“He send you?”

“Yeah. You ain’t been to your office for ten days.”

Spade stood aside, let Tom enter past him. He gestured at the drink on the table beside the bed, returned to his easy chair. The bedsprings squeaked under Tom’s weight. They faced each other across the breadth of the room like adversaries taking each other’s measure.

Tom picked up his drink. They toasted silently, drank. Polhaus looked exhausted and bulky in his topcoat and the hat he had not yet removed. With an abrupt movement, he took it off and dropped it on the bed beside him.

“You’re gonna have to talk to Dundy sometime, Sam. We need your statement signed.”

“I’ll talk to you. I won’t talk to Dundy.”

“You will if you expect to keep operating in this town.”

“Not now. Not yet.” Spade drank, added without emphasis or emotion, “If I saw him now I’d kill him.”

Polhaus leaned back, opening his arms so abruptly some of his drink slopped over his knuckles.

“For hell’s sake, Sam! It would of happened anyway. Spaulding says he didn’t know nothing about the Eberhard murder, and I believe him. He went along with the forged will because St. James offered him a lot of money, pure and simple.”

Spade sprang to his feet to point hotly at Polhaus across the room. “Penny’d still be alive if Dundy’d done his job!”

Tom was on his feet also. He drained his glass, set it on the table. “There’s no talking to you. If you’d of told us where she was we’d of had her safely in custody...”

The look on Spade’s face, the tension in his body, stopped the policeman cold. But it was Spade who looked away.

“You know he wouldn’t have moved on it. Not Dundy, not for me. And Penny wasn’t at Effie’s, where she was supposed to be.”

“If you’d of called us when you knew she’d gone to the Severn Place apartment—”

“She was dead an hour before I knew where she was.”

Polhaus started to speak, stopped. Spade sat, started rolling a cigarette. He said evenly, “Any word on St. James?”

Polhaus looked embarrassed. “When we, ah, finally got moving on it we found an eyewitness saw him on a ferry to Oakland. Dead end. But first thing Mrs. Eberhard did when she took over at the bank, she hired Continental to find the murderer of her husband. She’s spending a lot of money on it.”

“Is it doing any good?”

Polhaus leaned forward, suddenly intent, his coat opening so the gun holstered under his left arm could be seen. “St. James bought a train ticket to New York. By the time Continental got that the train was already past Salt Lake City. They had agents waiting in Denver. He wasn’t on it. He could of got off anywhere, Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City — if he got on at Oakland in the first place. So they’ve lost him, for now.”

“Good,” said Spade.

“Good? I’d of thought you’d want to see him—”

“I want him for myself,” said Spade gutturally

Tom seemed to be waiting for him to say more. He didn’t. Polhaus shrugged, stood, jammed his hat back on his head.

“I’ll see you at the hall in the morning, right? We gotta get that statement signed.” Spade was silent. “Right, Sam? I’ll make sure Dundy ain’t around.”

After a long moment Spade said, “I’ll be there.”

For ten minutes after Polhaus left Spade walked around the apartment, his chin jutting, his eyes gleaming red. He stubbed out his cigarette, didn’t roll another, didn’t take any more Bacardi. Finally the muscles knotted along his jaw relaxed. The fire in his eyes was replaced by a leaden indifference.

The street doorbell rang again. The indifference left Spade’s face. The gleam returned to his eyes.

“Dundy, for a dollar,” he said aloud.

He crossed to the front door once again, pressed the button that released the street-door lock. When the rattle of the elevator could be heard he stood in the opened doorway as he had while waiting for Polhaus. But soft footfalls, those of a woman, came up the hall from the elevator. A frown gouged deep lines between his eyes.

Iva Archer swept around the corner. Her big blue eyes were round and guileless as ever. The smile on her generous red mouth was ripe with promise.

“Iva.” He said it gravely, without moving aside. She tried to see around him into the apartment.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Where’s Miles?”

“You’re no fun!” she exclaimed pettishly. “If you must know we’ve been here for a week, looking around again. You know, what we talked about over dinner that night. He went back up to Seattle this morning. Do we have to talk out here in the hall, Sam, with the neighbors listening?”

Spade stepped back. She went into the living room.

“I stayed over to do some shopping. Spokane has no fashion sense.” She turned in a circle, displaying her coat. It had deep fur cuffs and a wide fur band around the lower back and sides. “Like it? Velana suede trimmed with Mendoza fur and lined with silk crepe.”

“Yeah, stunning.”

“It’s a design by the famous Parisian couturier Paul Poiret.” She buried her hands sensuously in the wide fur collar. “Aren’t you going to buy a girl a drink?”

Spade went into the kitchen, got another glass, and poured rum into it. By the time he returned she had thrown her coat carelessly across the sofa and was standing by the bed. She was wearing a silk dress, navy blue with beige trimming, that had a softly bloused bodice giving a generous glimpse of her bosom.

“Another copy of a Poiret original.”

Spade’s face was cold, rock hard, but he let his eyes run deliberately up and down her finely honed body. She preened under that gaze. He gave her the Bacardi, got his own. Standing beside the bed, they clinked glasses.

“To us,” said Iva.

“Sure, why the hell not?” said Spade. They drank.

“I have to go back up to Spokane in the morning.” There was an open challenge in her voice, her eyes. “I checked my luggage at the train station and didn’t keep the hotel room.”

“Sure, why the hell not?” said Spade again.

He went to lock the apartment door. There was a tired finality in his movements. Before going back up the hall he rested his forehead against the doorframe for a moment.

When Sam Spade returned to the living room Iva Archer already was carefully removing her designer dress.