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?”