Spade had just lowered the wall bed when the phone rang for the sixth time. He picked it up from its place on the bedside table, atop Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America.
“Spade,” he said.
Effie Perine’s voice said, “Penny is here. She’s been here for hours. She’s terrified. She needs you, Sam.”
Spade sat down on the edge of the bed. “Put her on.”
After long moments Penny’s voice came, small and hesitant.
“I saw him. On Market Street.” Her voice steadied, strengthened as she talked. “And he saw me.”
“When?”
“Around nine o’clock. I was just crossing Market when I saw him walking toward me, very fast. I–I jumped on a passing car. He tried to get on, but it was moving too fast and the doors were shut. I rode it to Sixth Avenue in the Richmond, got off, and ran out here to Effie’s place. I–I’ve been here ever since. If he should think to come here—”
“Put Effie back on,” said Spade soothingly.
“I’m here,” said Effie Perine.
“How’s your mother with all these shenanigans?”
She got closer to the phone. “She’s worried, maybe a little scared, but she’s always been strong for Penny.”
“OK, make sure all the doors and windows are locked till I get there. Call the Monroe Hotel out on Sacramento Street and reserve a room for a Mary Kutina, that’s K-u-t-i-n-a. I don’t think he’d try to crush his way in there, but if you see anyone hanging around call the cops and report a Peeping Tom.”
Spade hung up, got central, gave the operator Davenport 1000. A man’s gruff voice answered. “Bluebird Cabs.”
“Eight nine one Post Street, ten minutes,” said Spade.
He started out of the apartment, grabbing his hat and the mackinaw. He stopped, wiggled his fingers through the entry and exit holes in his hat, tossed it aside, and got another. It was tan and did not go with the rest of his clothes.
26
Penny
The Monroe Hotel was between Van Ness and Franklin at the lower edge of Pacific Heights. Spade had money in hand for the cabdriver. He hurried into the hotel so fast, with Penny in tow, that she was on the sidewalk a bare five seconds.
The clerk was a slightly bug-eyed man with an old-fashioned monocle on a velvet cord that passed through the lapel buttonhole of his three-piece suit. He had a judging face, a tightly trimmed sandy mustache, slim fingers that drummed nervously on the desktop.
“May we help you, sir?” His voice was supercilious.
Spade spun the hotel register around, wrote “Mary Kutina, City,” in a bold slashing hand, saying without looking up, “My secretary phoned ahead for a reservation for Miss Kutina.”
The clerk’s eyes took in Spade’s disreputable appearance, Penny’s frightened eyes and cloche hanging precariously to the side of her head, the cheap frock under a calf-length coat that had seen better days. The eyes slid to the lobby clock.
“I think not, sir.” His voice just avoided having a sneer in it. “We are not that kind of hotel.”
“You are now,” said Spade. “Tell your house dick, Skip LeGrande, that Sam is stashing a witness for a day or two.” He tossed money on the counter, reached across to the keyboard and snagged a key, held it up, said, “Three three three.”
Spade put their hats on the shelf of the closet inside the door, hung up their coats. When he turned, Penny was standing in the middle of the room with a dazed look on her face, as if she couldn’t remember where she was or how she had gotten there.
“Sit down, precious,” Spade said.
She sat down obediently in the closest chair in that same all-at-once-boneless way with which she had sat when Spade had braced her the night before. Her face was pale, exhaustion rimmed her eyes with red and made their lids seem transparent.
Spade half-filled two glasses with water from the sink, set them down on the table beside Penny’s chair, poured generous doses of dark liquid into each glass from a curved, leather-covered metal flask off his hip. He kept one glass for himself, put the other into her hand. He clinked his glass to hers.
“Success to crime,” he said.
She shuddered. “Can’t we drink to something else?”
“To truth,” said Spade. This time she drank, greedily, as she had drunk the at-first-refused coffee at her apartment.
“I’m just so tired of running and hiding and lying all the time,” she said. “Of being so scared for so long I can’t remember what it’s like to not be scared.”
“The running and hiding and lying are all finished,” said Spade. “You’re going to tell me all about it — all about it — and then I’ll fix whatever is broken.”
“Is that a promise?” She had a sort of hope in her voice.
“Guaranteed.”
She took another slug of her drink. He darkened it with more bourbon. She started talking, her voice getting stronger.
“You had almost all of it right last night, Sam. I was working at Hartford and Cole as a secretary and they let me start handling little jobs a broker would usually do. Collin was one of their main clients. Almost immediately he started taking me out on the sly and wining and dining me. He was twenty years older than I, I knew he was married, but he didn’t seem to care about it so I didn’t either. Pretty soon he took me to bed.”
“And made sure you handled more of his business?”
“Yes. And set me up in an apartment at eleven fifty-five Leavenworth.”
“Hmm. Three-story brownstone at the corner of Sacramento?”
“Yes. I — it meant I could send more money to my mother. Last night you made it sound like it was cold and calculating and commercial. It wasn’t like that. Not for either one of us.”
“I said that to try and shake the truth out of you.”
“I guess you’ve succeeded,” she said with a wan smile. “Collin took me places on the weekends. Sonoma. Carmel. I was handling most of his gold-mining stocks by then. A few months ago he changed. He was wrestling with a decision. At first I didn’t know if it was about me or the bank, but then he started to talk about his worries and a man named Devlin St. James.”
Spade hiked his chair a little closer. His eyes had taken on a yellow glow. “When was the first time you saw St. James?”
“I never did. Not while Collin was alive. At the time Collin told me that St. James had come to him four years ago with a lot of illegal money. He needed someone to front it for him, turn it legitimate. Collin was desperate, he and the bank were floundering, that cash would save them.”
Spade made a cigarette, poured bourbon from his flask.
“Collin said yes to St. James. He even came up with a plan. He set up a gold-mining syndicate that existed only on paper so they could run the money through the syndicate’s accounts at the bank.”
“What did he mean by a lot of money?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
Spade’s eyes narrowed. “Where did the money come from?”
“A bootlegging syndicate in Half Moon Bay. There were no mines, there never had been any mines. Collin said the bootleggers brought the liquor down from Canada and offloaded it into small boats outside the eleven mile limit. Some got caught, but nobody could betray the syndicate because none of the men knew who they really were working for.”
“A sweet setup,” mused Spade. “You run illicit profits from bootlegging through a tame bank as if they are legitimate profits from a gold-mining enterprise. Nothing can go wrong — unless your tame banker gets cold feet.”
She made a small distressed sound in her throat.
“I hate to think of Collin that way but, yes, he was the tame banker, and I suppose you could say he got cold feet. He told me that St. James was also violent and unpredictable and liked to brag of killing people who got in his way.”