The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [15]
He smoothed the bills out and counted them—four twenties, four tens, and a five. He returned two of the tens and the five to her. The others he put in his pocket. Then he stood up and said: “I’m going out and see what I can do for you. I’ll be back as soon as I can with the best news I can manage. I’ll ring four times—long, short, long, short—so you’ll know it’s me. You needn’t go to the door with me. I can let myself out.”
He left her standing in the center of the floor looking after him with dazed blue eyes.
Spade went into a reception-room whose door bore the legend Wise, Merican & Wise. The red-haired girl at the switchboard said: “Oh, hello, Mr. Spade.”
“Hello, darling,” he replied. “Is Sid in?”
He stood beside her with a hand on her plump shoulder while she manipulated a plug and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Mr. Spade to see you, Mr. Wise.” She looked up at Spade. “Go right in.”
He squeezed her shoulder by way of acknowledgment, crossed the reception-room to a dully lighted inner corridor, and passed down the corridor to a frosted glass door at its far end. He opened the frosted glass door and went into an office where a small olive-skinned man with a tired oval face under thin dark hair dotted with dandruff sat behind an immense desk on which bales of paper were heaped.
The small man flourished a cold cigar-stub at Spade and said: “Pull a chair around. So Miles got the big one last night?” Neither his tired face nor his rather shrill voice held any emotion.
“Uh-huh, that’s what I came in about.” Spade frowned and cleared his throat. “I think I’m going to have to tell a coroner to go to hell, Sid. Can I hide behind the sanctity of my clients’ secrets and identities and what-not, all the same priest or lawyer?”
Sid Wise lifted his shoulders and lowered the ends of his mouth. “Why not? An inquest is not a court-trial. You can try, anyway. You’ve gotten away with more than that before this.”
“I know, but Dundy’s getting snotty, and maybe it is a little bit thick this time. Get your hat, Sid, and we’ll go see the right people. I want to be safe.”
Sid Wise looked at the papers massed on his desk and groaned, but he got up from his chair and went to the closet by the window. “You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” he said as he took his hat from its hook.
Spade returned to his office at ten minutes past five that evening. Effie Perine was sitting at his desk reading Time. Spade sat on the desk and asked: “Anything stirring?”
“Not here. You look like you’d swallowed the canary.”
He grinned contentedly. “I think we’ve got a future. I always had an idea that if Miles would go off and die somewhere we’d stand a better chance of thriving. Will you take care of sending flowers for me?”
“I did.”
“You’re an invaluable angel. How’s your woman’s intuition today?”
“Why?”
“What do you think of Wonderly?”
“I’m for her,” the girl replied without hesitation.
“She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”
“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phone-book. That girl is all right, and you know it.”
“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. He chuckled. “Anyway she’s given up seven hundred smacks in two days, and that’s all right.”
Effie Perine sat up straight and said: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”
Spade smiled unnaturally. Then he frowned. The frown was unnatural. He opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of someone’s entrance through the corridor-door stopped him.
Effie Perine rose and went into the outer office. Spade took off his hat and sat in his chair. The girl returned with an engraved card—Mr. Joel Cairo.
“This guy is queer,” she said.
“In with him, then, darling,” said Spade.
Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.