“None. All he did was hang around and bother her.”
“Mmm-hmm, but we can’t count on that. Tonight you have to keep him on the main floor from ten p.m. until one a.m.”
“That might be hard. He knows I want to punch him one on the beezer.”
“You’ll ply him with dago red and make him think he’s the cat’s meow.” Seeing Henny’s puzzlement, Spade added, “Pretend you’re acting in one of those Bohemian Club plays. Outwitting the villain who’s going to tie Pearl White to the railroad tracks.”
Henny started on his pie, laughing as he did. “OK.”
“Do you know exactly where Eberhard’s office is?”
“It takes up the back half of the second floor. Big inner office, with Spaulding in it all day, smaller outer office with one of the tellers sitting there during banking hours even though Uncle Collin is dead.”
“The elevator is where?”
“Fifteen feet away.”
“At night, is it left on the first floor, locked down with the door open? Stairs beside it?”
“Yes on both counts. Gino uses the stairs for his rounds.”
“Tonight make sure he doesn’t get off the ground floor.” Henny nodded and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “If I have to bonk him on the head to keep him there.”
“Good man. I’ll tell you all about it when it’s over.” Spade grinned. “Unless my foot slips and you end up reading about it in tomorrow morning’s Chronicle.”
25
Dago Red
At 9:32 p.m. hulking Mickey Linehan slammed down five cards faceup on a conference table cleared of everything except chips, cards, whiskey, money, and the players’ elbows.
“Boat!” he chortled with his idiot’s grin. “Jacks over nines. Read ’em and weep, gentlemen.”
Tall lean Woody Robinson shook the big head on his thin stalk of a neck and tossed in his hand. Phil Haultain followed suit. Spade was already turning his pant pockets inside out.
“I’m on the hog, but don’t let me bust up your little game, boys. Just so long as I went broke three hours from now.”
Mickey Linehan, making his half-wit’s face, said, “We done plucked you clean at... twelve forty-three a.m.”
Spade walked down the echoing third-floor hallway to the back stairs, took them down to the street so no one could clock him leaving the Flood Building.
In Pratt Place beside the Chinese social club Sam Spade crouched, leaped up. His gloved hands caught the bottom of the folded-up metal stairs. His weight dragged them down, unfolding them with a shriek of rusted iron. He climbed the three flights of fire escape to the waist-high parapet. On the far side of the flat black tarred roof he dropped lightly down three feet onto the similarly flat roof of California-Citizens Bank.
Shielding his flashlight so only a small circle of light showed, Spade illuminated the lock and hasp on the door of the weathered wooden shed that gave access to the bank’s elevator shaft. It was a solid brass Corbin padlock that weighed a pound.
“Not good,” Spade muttered to himself.
But his light picked out raw wood under the hasp, paint peeled and dried out despite San Francisco’s persistent fog.
“Better,” muttered Spade.
He took a short pry bar from under his mackinaw and inserted it behind the hasp, pulled down. The lock-and-hasp assembly fell onto the roof. Spade opened the shed door, shone his light inside.
There was an eighteen-inch-wide maintenance walkway around the two big wheels that filled the top of the shaft, over which the elevator cables passed. The air was heavy with the smell of lubricating grease.
Spade stepped in and shone his light down. The elevator’s roof was some twenty feet below Spade’s narrow walkway. He pulled up his shirt to unwind a length of rope from around his waist, tied one end around the bottom of one cable wheel, pulled hard to test the knot, grabbed the rope with both gloved hands, and stepped off the walkway. He lowered himself by arm strength alone.
When his booted feet touched the elevator roof his chest was level with the bottom of the second-floor elevator doors. He jammed his pry bar into the intersection, heaved sideways. The doors separated a few inches. He shoved the bar in farther, heaved again. The aperture widened. A third heave gave him an opening he could wriggle through. He listened at the top of the stairs to the muffled sound of male voices, a low burst of laughter. He grinned.
“Dago red,” he said to himself.
The door to Eberhard’s outer office was not locked. Spade went past the deserted secretary’s desk to the private office. He used his light on the door, his penknife on the lock, and was in. His light swept the room. There was a conference table of modest proportions with six chairs arranged around it. The light stopped on Eberhard’s executive-style rolltop desk.
“That’ll do it,” said Spade softly.
The roll curtain was down and locked. His penknife easily jimmied the lock. He slid up the curtain, heard the locking device on the pedestal drawers down each side of the desk click open. Rifled the pigeonholes. Flicked open the private locker pigeonhole with his penknife, stuffed the contents into one pocket of his mackinaw without looking at them.
From the double-depth pedestal drawer on the right-hand side of the desk he extracted three files, folded them, and stuffed them into his other coat pocket. He shut the drawers, returned everything to its original position, closed down the roll curtain to lock the drawers.
Spade paused again at the head of the stairs and was rewarded with faint male voices singing “Ukulele Lady” quite badly.
“Dago red indeed,” he muttered again, grinning.
He slid through the narrowly opened shaft doors to the roof of the elevator, grunted his way up his rope to the cable wheels, muscled himself up to crouch on the narrow catwalk, and used his knife to worry open the knot on his rope and haul it up.
On the roof he broke a wooden match into four short pieces and shoved one piece into each of the hasp’s screw holes, used a coin to tighten down the screws in their holes. He reversed his way back over two roofs and away.
It was just after midnight when Spade left the Sutter car to walk down Hyde Street. As he angled across the intersection a big black Buick sedan roared up Post toward him. He threw himself headlong into the gutter in front of his apartment house as the driver’s heavy revolver spat fire four times. The third of the shots neatly plucked Spade’s hat off his head and sent it rolling across the sidewalk. The sedan squealed downhill into Hyde and was gone.
Spade was on his feet and snatching up his hat before the car had disappeared. He twisted his key in the vestibule door lock, jerked it out, sprinted up the stairs before any window could be raised, any head thrust out in response to the shots.
The phone was ringing when he came into his apartment. He ignored it to cross the front room in the dark, part the curtains enough to peer down at the people in the street. They were pointing in various directions, none of them toward his darkened windows. The phone stopped ringing, started again. A uniformed policeman was using his key on the police call box on the corner.
Spade let the window curtain fall back into place. He put the papers purloined from Eberhard’s desk under the pillows of the sofa, removed his hat and mackinaw, and hung them on the hooks inside the front door. Ignoring the police sirens, the squeal of police car wheels, Spade poured himself a shot of Bacardi. He sat in his easy chair in the dark and smoked cigarettes and drank.
When he returned to the window a half hour later, only a few citizens now stood around in the street below, talking and gesturing. The police had departed without ringing his doorbell.