“Going into the army. Leaving him an open field.”
“He isn’t due back from Tacoma until tomorrow...”
“I’m booked on the four oh five stage to Seattle.”
“To hell with you, Sam Spade,” Iva Archer said viciously.
The engines growled and shook; white water boiled up around the stern of the Eliza Anderson as she backed away from the ramshackle Victoria, British Columbia, slip. Fog, wet as rain, already had swept most of the passengers off the darkening deck into the cabin for their three-hour trip down Puget Sound to Seattle.
A dark-haired man just shy of forty turned from the coffee urn with a steaming mug in one hand. He had a trim mustache over a wide mouth, narrow, amused eyes under level brows, a strong jaw, a small faded scar on his left cheek. Before exiting he set down his coffee and cinched up the belt of his ulster.
Sam Spade, who had been leaning against the bulkhead midcabin, sauntered out after him. Moisture immediately beaded Spade’s woolen knit cap, the turned-up collar of his mackinaw.
The man was standing at the rail, mug in hand, staring down at the wind-tossed water. A glow came into Spade’s eyes. His upper lip twitched in what could have been a smile. He leaned on the railing beside the other man.
“Mr. Flitcraft, I presume?”
The man dropped his mug overboard.
Charles Pierce slid warily through the doorway like a cat entering a strange room. He relaxed fractionally when he saw a bottle of Johnnie Walker whiskey and two glasses on a tray on the table. Spade was at the sink running water into a pitcher. The room was simple, comfortable, homey, with a private bath.
“I want to get this over with,” said Pierce in a high, clear voice. “Not that I have anything to feel guilty about.”
They touched glasses. Spade said, “Success to crime.”
“There’s no crime involved here. Nothing like that.”
Without obvious irony Spade said, “Five years ago, in 1916, a man named Robert Flitcraft did a flit in Tacoma. Before leaving his real estate office to go to luncheon, he made an engagement for a round of golf at four o’clock that afternoon. He didn’t keep the engagement. Nobody ever saw him again.”
Pierce downed half his drink. Spade’s hands had been rolling a cigarette. He lit it, looked through the drifting smoke with candid eyes.
“The police got nowhere. Flitcraft’s wife came to our Seattle office. She said she and her husband were on good terms, said they had two boys, five and three, said he drove a new Packard, said he had a successful real estate business and a net worth of two hundred thousand dollars. I was assigned to the case. I could find no secret vices, no other woman, no hidden bank accounts, no sign Flitcraft had been putting his affairs in order. He vanished with no more than fifty bucks in his pocket. He was just gone, like your lap when you stand up.”
“What he did makes perfect sense! He—”
“When I went into the army in nineteen seventeen he was still missing. Last week his wife came in to tell us a friend of hers had seen him here in Spokane.”
Spade rubbed his jutting chin as if checking his shave.
“Now we have Charles Pierce living in a Spokane suburb with his wife of two years and an infant son. He sells new cars, nets twenty-five thousand a year, belongs to the country club, plays golf most afternoons at four o’clock during the season. His wife doesn’t look like Flitcraft’s wife, but they’re more alike than different. Afternoon bridge, salad recipes...”
Pierce was fidgeting. “What are you getting at?”
“I was sent here to find and identify the man our informant thought was Flitcraft. I’ve done that. Charles Pierce is Robert Flitcraft. No definite instructions beyond that, but there’s the bigamy question. Wife here, wife in Tacoma. Kids from both marriages...” For the first time Spade ad dressed Pierce directly as Flitcraft. “Of course since you left your first wife extremely well fixed you could claim you thought that after all this time she would have divorced you in absentia—”
“I was on my way to lunch.” He paused. “A steel beam fell from a new office building and hit the sidewalk right beside me.”
“A beam.” Spade’s voice was without inflection.
“A chip of concrete flew up...” His hand absently touched the faint scar on his left cheek. “I was more shocked than scared. I was a good husband, a good father, I was doing everything right, and none of it meant a damned thing if a beam could fall off a building and kill me.”
“As if someone had taken the lid off life and let you see how it really worked?” Spade pinched his lower lip, frowned, drew his brows together. “No logic, no fairness, only chance.” His frown disappeared. “Sure. By getting in step with what you thought was life you got out of step with real life.”
“You do get it! I decided that if my life was merely a collection of random incidents, I would live it randomly. That afternoon I went to Seattle, caught a boat to San Francisco. For the next few years I wandered around and finally ended up back in the Northwest. I got a chance to buy into an auto dealership here in Spokane, met my wife, got married, had a son...” He grinned almost sheepishly. “I like the climate.”
“Three things not in my report,” said Spade.
Ralph Dudley, resident supervisor of Continental’s Seattle office, was in his seventies, fifty years on the job, white of mustache, pink of face. His kindly eyes behind rimless spectacles were misleading; they never changed expression, not even when he sent his ops out to face danger, sometimes death.
“First item,” said Spade. “Nobody’s said so, but before Flitcraft disappeared Mrs. Cahill made a play for him. An affair wouldn’t have fit in with his view of what the good citizen-husband-father did so he turned her down. She didn’t like that. So when she spotted him in Spokane she couldn’t wait to try and make as much trouble for him as she could.”
Dudley said in mild-voiced skepticism, “I see.”
“Second item. Flitcraft was afraid his first wife wouldn’t get what he did. She didn’t. She just figures he played a dirty trick on her so she’s going to get a quiet divorce.” Merriment lit his face. “Flitcraft doesn’t get it either. He adjusted to falling beams. When no more beams fell he adjusted back again.”
“You mentioned three things, Spade.”
“Flitcraft is my last case.”
Dudley turned his swivel chair to stare out the window. Half a dozen mosquito-fleet ferries were churning their various ways across Elliott Bay between the Seattle waterfront and the distant irregular green rectangle of Blake Island.
Dudley told the window, “In nineteen seventeen you couldn’t wait for us to get into the war. Disregarding my direct order, you went over the border to enlist in the First Canadian Division.” He turned to look at Spade. “While training in England you took up competitive pistol shooting. You made some records.”
“The pistol made the records. All I did was point it and make it go bang,” said Spade. “Eight-shot thirty-eight Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. Only three hundred of them ever got made because they jammed in combat, but they were so accurate on the firing range they got banned from competition shooting.”
Dudley went on coldly as if Spade hadn’t spoken.
“You were assigned to the Seventh Battalion of the Second Infantry Brigade and saw action in the trenches of the Lens-Arras sector of France. You were wounded. You got a medal. Upon your return, against my better judgment, I took you back.” His voice took on a nasty edge. “A competitive pistol shot, a war hero, and suddenly you don’t like guns. Suddenly you’re quitting the detective trade. Do you mind telling me why? Or have you just lost your stomach for real man’s work?”