Spade said cheerfully, “Always glad to meet any friends of Tom Minera’s.”
Minera finished shutting the door and said awkwardly, “Uh – yes – Mr. Spade, meet Mr. Conrad and Mr. James.”
Conrad, the man at the window, made a vaguely polite gesture with the nail file in his hand. He was a few years older than Minera, of average height, sturdily built, with a thick-featured, dull-eyed face.
James lowered his paper for an instant to look coolly, appraisingly, at Spade and say, “How’r’ye, brother?” Then he returned to his reading. He was as sturdily built as Conrad, but taller, and his face had a shrewdness the other’s lacked.
“Ah,” Spade said, “and friends of the late Eli Haven.”
The man at the window jabbed a finger with his nail file, and cursed it bitterly. Minera moistened his lips, and then spoke rapidly, with a whining note in his voice. “But on the level, Spade, we hadn’t none of us seen him for a week.”
Spade seemed mildly amused by the dark man’s manner.
“What do you think he was killed for?”
“All I know is what the paper says: his pockets was all turned inside out and there wasn’t much as a match on him.” He drew down the ends of his mouth. “But far as I know he didn’t have no dough. He didn’t have none Tuesday night.”
Spade, speaking softly, said, “I hear he got some Thursday night.”
Minera, behind Spade, caught his breath audibly.
James said, “I guess you ought to know. I don’t.”
“He ever work with you boys?”
James slowly put aside his newspaper and took his feet off the table. His interest in Spade’s question seemed great enough, but almost impersonal. “Now, what do you mean by that?”
Spade pretended surprise, “But you boys must work at something?”
Minera came around to Spade’s side. “Aw, listen, Spade,” he said. “This guy Haven was just a guy we knew. We didn’t have nothing to do with rubbing him out; we don’t know nothing about it. You know we -“
Three deliberate knocks sounded at the door.
Minera and Conrad looked at James, who nodded, but by then Spade, moving swiftly, had reached the door and was opening it.
Roger Ferris was there.
Spade blinked at Ferris, Ferris at Spade. Then Ferris put out his hand and said, “I am glad to see you.”
“Come on in,” Spade said.
“Look at this, Mr. Spade.” Ferris’s hand trembled as he took a slightly soiled envelope from his pocket.
Ferris’s name and address were typewritten on the envelope. There was no postage stamp on it. Spade took out the enclosure, a narrow slip of cheap white paper, and unfolded it. On it was typewritten:
There was no signature.
Spade said, “It’s a long time before five o’clock.”
“It is,” Ferris agreed with emphasis. “I came as soon as I got that. It was Thursday night Eli was at my house.”
Minera was jostling Spade, asking, “What is all this?”
Spade held the note up for the dark man to read. He read it and yelled, “”Honest, Spade, I don’t know nothing about that letter.”
“Does anybody?” Spade asked.
Conrad said, “No,” hastily.
James said, “What letter?”
Spade looked dreamily at Ferris for a moment, then said, as if speaking to himself, “Of course, Haven was trying to shake you down.”
Ferris’s face reddened. “What?”
“Shakedown,” Spade repeated patiently; “money, blackmail.”
“Look here, Spade,” Ferris said earnestly; “you don’t really believe what yon said? What would he have to blackmail me on?”
“’To good old Buck,’” – Spade quoted the dead poet’s inscription – “’who knew his coloured lights, in memory of them there days.’” He looked sombrely at Ferris from beneath slightly raised brows. “What coloured lights? What’s the circus and carnival slang term for kicking a guy off a train while it’s going? Red-lighting. Sure, that’s it- red lights. Who’d you red-light, Ferris, that Haven knew about?”
Minera went over to a chair, sat down, put his elbows on his knees, his head between his hands, and stared blankly at the floor. Conrad was breathing as if he had been running.
Spade addressed Ferris, “Well?”
Ferris wiped his face with a handkerchief, put the handkerchief in his pocket, and said simply, “It was a shakedown.”
“And you killed him.”
Ferris’s blue eyes, looking into Spade’s yellow-gray ones, were clear and steady, as was his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I swear I did not. Let me tell you what happened. He sent me the book, as I told you, and I knew right away what that joke he wrote in the front meant. So the next day, when he phoned me and said he was coming over to talk over old times and to try to borrow some money for old times’ sake, I knew what he meant again, and I went down to the bank and drew out ten thousand dollars. You can check that up. It’s the Seaman’s National.”
“I will,” Spade said.
“As it turned out, I didn’t need that much. He wasn’t very big-time, and I talked him into taking five thousand. I put the other five back in the bank next day. You can check that up.”
“I will,” Spade said.
“I told him I wasn’t going to stand for any more taps, this five thousand was the first and the last. I made him sign a paper saying he’d helped in the – what I’d done – and he signed it. He left some time around midnight, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.”
Spade tapped the envelope that Ferris had given him. “And how about this note?”
“A messenger boy brought it at noon, and I came right over. Eli had assured me he hadn’t said anything to anybody, but I didn’t know. I had to face it, whatever it was.”
Spade turned to the others, his face wooden. “Well?”
Minera and Conrad looked at James, who made an impatient grimace and said, “Oh, sure, we sent him the letter. Why not? We was friends of Eli’s and we hadn’t been able to find him since he went to put the squeeze to this baby, and then he turns up dead, so we kind of like to have the gent come over and explain things.”
“You knew about the squeeze?”
“Sure. We was all together when he got the idea.”
“How’d he happen to get the idea?” Spade asked.
James spread the fingers of his left hand. “We’d been drinking and talking – you know the way a bunch of guys will, about all they’d seen and done – and he told a yarn about once seeing a guy boot another off a train into a canon, and he happens to mention the name of the guy that done the booting – Buck Ferris. And somebody says, ‘What’s this Ferris look like?’ Eli tells him what he looked like then, saying he ain’t seen him for fifteen years; and whoever it is whistles ‘and says, ‘I bet that’s the Ferris that owns about half the movie joints in the state. I bet you he’d give something to keep that back trail covered!’
“Well, the idea kind of hit Eli. You could see that. He thought a little while and then he got cagey. He asked what this movie Ferris’s first name is, and when the other guy tells him, ‘Roger,’ he makes out he’s disappointed and says, ‘No, it ain’t him. His first name was Martin.’ We all give him the ha-ha and he finally admits he’s thinking of seeing the gent, and when he called me up Thursday around noon and says he’s throwing a party at Pogey Hecker’s that night, it ain’t no trouble to figure out what’s what.”
“What was the name of the gentleman who was red-lighted?”
“He wouldn’t say. He shut up tight. You couldn’t blame him.”
“Then nothing. He never showed up at Fogey’s. We tried to get him on the phone around two o’clock in the
