“They took you down to the Hall?”
“Oh, yes, and they asked me loads of questions, but it was all—you know—routine.”
Spade rubbed his palms together. “Swell,” he said and then frowned, “though I guess they’ll think up plenty to put to me when we meet. That damned Dundy will, anyway, and Bryan.” He moved his shoulders. “Anybody you know, outside of the police, come around?”
“Yes.” She sat up straight. “That boy—the one who brought the message from Gutman—was there. He didn’t come in, but the police left the corridor door open while they were there and I saw him standing there.”
“You didn’t say anything?”
“Oh, no. You had said not to. So I didn’t pay any attention to him and the next time I looked he was gone.”
Spade grinned at her. “Damned lucky for you, sister, that the coppers got there first.”
“Why?”
“He’s a bad egg, that lad—poison. Was the dead man Jacobi?”
“Yes.”
He pressed her hands and stood up. “I’m going to run along. You’d better hit the hay. You’re all in.”
She rose. “Sam, what is—?”
He stopped her words with his hand on her mouth. “Save it till Monday,” he said. “I want to sneak out before your mother catches me and gives me hell for dragging her lamb through gutters.”
Midnight was a few minutes away when Spade reached his home. He put his key into the street door’s lock. Heels clicked rapidly on the sidewalk behind him. He let go the key and wheeled. Brigid O’Shaughnessy ran up the steps to him. She put her arms around him and hung on him, panting: “Oh, I thought you’d never come!” Her face was haggard, distraught, shaken by the tremors that shook her from head to foot.
With the hand not supporting her he felt for the key again, opened the door, and half lifted her inside. “You’ve been waiting?” he asked.
“Yes.” Panting spaced her words. “In a—doorway—up the—street.”
“Can you make it all right?” he asked. “Or shall I carry you?”
She shook her head against his shoulder. “I’ll be—all right—when I—get where—I can—sit down.”
They rode up to Spade’s floor in the elevator and went around to his apartment. She left his arm and stood beside him—panting, both hands to her breast—while he unlocked his door. He switched on the passageway light. They went in. He shut the door and, with his arm around her again, took her back towards the living-room. When they were within a step of the living-room door the light in the living-room went on.
The girl cried out and clung to Spade.
Just inside the living-room door fat Gutman stood smiling benevolently at them. The boy Wilmer came out of the kitchen behind them. Black pistols were gigantic in his small hands. Cairo came from the bathroom. He too had a pistol.
Gutman said: “Well, sir, we’re all here, as you can see for yourself. Now let’s come in and sit down and be comfortable and talk.”
XVIII
The Fall-Guy
Spade, with his arms around Brigid O’Shaughnessy, smiled meagerly over her head and said: “Sure, we’ll talk.”
Gutman’s bulbs jounced as he took three waddling backward steps away from the door.
Spade and the girl went in together. The boy and Cairo followed them in. Cairo stopped in the doorway. The boy put away one of his pistols and came up close behind Spade.
Spade turned his head far around to look down over his shoulder at the boy and said: “Get away. You’re not going to frisk me.”
The boy said: “Stand still. Shut up.”
Spade’s nostrils went in and out with his breathing. His voice was level. “Get away. Put your paw on me and I’m going to make you use the gun. Ask your boss if he wants me shot up before we talk.”
“Never mind, Wilmer,” the fat man said. He frowned indulgently at Spade. “You are certainly a most headstrong individual. Well, let’s be seated.”
Spade said, “I told you I didn’t like that punk,” and took Brigid O’Shaughnessy to the sofa by the windows. They sat close together, her head against his left shoulder, his left arm around her shoulders. She had stopped trembling, had stopped panting. The appearance of Gutman and his companions seemed to have robbed her of that freedom of personal movement and emotion that is animal, leaving her alive, conscious, but quiescent as a plant.
Gutman lowered himself into the padded rocking chair. Cairo chose the armchair by the table. The boy Wilmer did not sit down. He stood in the doorway where Cairo had stood, letting his one visible pistol hang down at his side, looking under curling lashes at Spade’s body. Cairo put his pistol on the table beside him.
Spade took off his hat and tossed it to the other end of the sofa. He grinned at Gutman. The looseness of his lower lip and the droop of his upper eyelids combined with the v’s in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr’s. “That daughter of yours has a nice belly,” he said, “too nice to be scratched up with pins.”
Gutman’s smile was affable if a bit oily.
The boy in the doorway took a short step forward, raising his pistol as far as his hip. Everybody in the room looked at him. In the dissimilar eyes with which Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo looked at him there was, oddly, something identically reproving. The boy blushed, drew back his advanced foot, straightened his legs, lowered the pistol and stood as he had stood before, looking under lashes that hid his eyes at Spade’s chest. The blush was pale enough and lasted for only an instant, but it was startling on his face that habitually was so cold and composed.
Gutman turned his sleek-eyed fat smile on Spade again. His voice was a suave purring. “Yes, sir, that was a shame, but you must admit that it served its purpose.”
Spade’s brows twitched together. “Anything would’ve,” he said. “Naturally I wanted to see you as soon as I
