Spade casually picked up Treasure Island and walked out, pausing a dozen yards away from the cabin to put it under his arm and work on a cigarette. Tom Polhaus came up behind him.
“Ain’t that evidence, Sam?”
“Of what? I loved this story when I was a kid, thought I’d read it again.” He chuckled sardonically and held the book out to Polhaus. “But of course if it’s evidence...”
“Aw hell, Sam,” said Tom. An almost crafty light entered his eyes. “What were you over here to talk with Boothe about?”
“Nothing that was going to get him killed.” He clapped Polhaus on the shoulder. “I’ve got a business to run, Tom. Take me back to the city and I’ll buy you pickled pigs’ feet at Big John’s Hof Brau.”
42
Death by Fire
On Friday morning Spade looked up, stopped leafing through Treasure Island, and said offhandedly, “Hello, Miles. When did you get back?”
“Late last night.” Archer went to his desk, sat down, said, “I’ve gotta do my expense account on the trip.”
“Try to hold it down on the bribes, booze, and biddies.”
“You kidding?” Archer guffawed. “Over in those Valley towns you can’t sin if you want to. Anyway, Zhu turned up in Sacramento maybe three years ago with a diploma from an outfit advertising in the back of a magazine, saying he was a minister of God.”
“Aimee Semple McPherson, look out,” chuckled Spade.
“The Chinese Methodist church in Fresno took him on as assistant pastor. He stayed a year. He looks clean to me.”
“Good. He has a lot of influence on our client; I just wanted to make sure he’s a right ghee, that’s all.”
Spade got his hat, stopped at Effie Perine’s desk.
“Call Doc Naughton out at the U.C. Med School, sweetheart.”
She picked up the phone. “Do I tell him where it hurts?”
“Just tell him I’m curious.”
Spade walked up Parnassus to the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research. The sky was gray and the wind whipped the tails of his overcoat. He had to hold his hat on his head, had to chafe his hands together after entering the imposing granite building.
James Naughton met Spade in the doctors’ lounge and poured coffee. He was a big man with ice-chip blue eyes, a Guards mustache, and a marked British accent. He radiated authority and confidence.
“I suggested we meet here, Samuel, because I have surgery in a few minutes and Effie said you were suffering from nothing more dangerous than a terminal case of medical curiosity.”
Spade said, “I seem to remember, from that time I took that wart off your back, that cosmetic surgery is your field.”
“Took the wart off my back?” Naughton chuckled. “A good way to describe excising a blackmailer. So?”
“I seem to remember you telling me that the ancient Egyptians reconstructed lips, noses, and ears with skin grafts and that the ancient Greeks and Romans perfected the technique to include eyelids.”
“You’ve got a good memory, Samuel. A first-century Roman physician named Aulus Cornelius Celsus did indeed report making excisions in the skin of the eyelids to relax them. During the Middle Ages plastic surgery was banned as unethical and godless, but during the Renaissance many of those ancient surgical procedures and techiques were rediscovered.”
Naughton checked his watch.
“In eighteen eighteen a German doctor, Karl Ferdinand von Graefe, called operations to repair deformities caused by cancer in the eyelids blepharoplasty. He laid the foundations for the work done by surgeons like myself on men disfigured in the Big War.”
“You ever get asked to try and change a Chinese woman’s eyelids to make her look less Asian and more Western?”
Naughton leaned back, shook his head. “No. Chinese American women are generally too conservative to want something like that. But two years ago in Boston a Japanese man in love with a girl from Iowa wanted a doctor to Westernize his features so he’d be acceptable to the girl’s good God-fearing conservative Midwest folks. The doc cut the eye corners so the slant was gone and tightened the man’s pendulous lower lip.”
Spade started to dig out tobacco and papers, thought better of it, drank coffee instead. “How’d it work out for them?”
“The patient changed his name to William White and married his true love.”
“One more question, Doc. Could a white woman, say, have that surgery done in reverse? Get an operation to make her look like she was Chinese? Or half Chinese? From Hawaii maybe?”
“Intriguing. Just a matter of removing the superior palpe-bral fold of the Caucasian eyelid to give the eye the slanted look of the typical Chinese.” He checked his watch a final time, said “Damn,” then said, “I met a doctor from Sacramento at a medical convention three years ago who said he had a Caucasian patient wanted him to do something like that.”
“What was the doctor’s name?” asked Spade quickly.
“I don’t remember. He died in a fire a few months later.”
Spade climbed the sweeping marble staircase to the second floor of San Francisco’s Main Library, across the Civic Center Plaza from City Hall. In the newspapers and periodicals room he told a sweet-faced lady librarian whose name plate read THERESA MCGOVERN, “I’m interested in out-of-town newspapers.”
“Current newspapers are on the racks along the walls. If you need back issues I can bring them to you. Library patrons aren’t allowed in the periodicals stacks.”
“I’m looking for the death of a Sacramento-area doctor by fire during the last three months of nineteen twenty-five or maybe early nineteen twenty-six.”
She came back scant minutes later with a sheaf of folded newspapers. She shook her head sadly.
“The poor man. A wife and family and a good practice, then to die when some arsonist burned his office to the ground.”
Spade thanked her, then added, “You make it look so easy that maybe you can dig up some information on one other thing.”
“You just name it,” smiled Theresa.
“Red Rock Island.”
Effie Perine was bent over her desk, studying the horoscope in one of the afternoon newspapers.
“I see a handsome stranger in your life,” said Spade.
She tossed the paper aside with a rueful grin. “Don’t I wish.” She opened her pad. “Tom Polhaus left word that the autopsy on Charles Boothe showed his heart gave out when he was being tortured.” She shivered. “A nasty way to go, Sam.”
“Yeah. Call Mai-lin, darling, set up an appointment here for tomorrow morning. Tell her that dead men sometimes speak.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Charles Boothe left me a message.” As she reached for her phone, he added, “I have to go over to Marin. Cook up something for Miles to do so he won’t come barging into the office tomorrow morning.”
Afternoon fog flowed down over the brushy hills that ringed Sausalito to bring cold, wet air and cut off the weak winter sunshine. Benny Ruiz was at the Sausalito yacht harbor sitting on the hatch cover of his fishing boat, the Portagee, using a long curved needle to repair a fishnet. Half a dozen crab pots were stacked on the deck. The boat smelled of fish scales and tar and, very faintly, bootleg booze from Canada.
A smile lit up Benny’s round, slightly concave face. His heavy lips opened in a smile.
“Hey, Sam!” He was wearing his usual black sweater and black peacoat. A Greek fisherman’s cap was tipped back on his head. “You got any more English gold you want found?”
“Fresh out, Benny.” Spade put his backside against the gunwale, gestured at the net. “No more bootlegging?”