He turned away from the telephone. About half an hour before Bliss phoned, a man called my office and asked for Mr. Kruger.
Dundy frowned. So what?
Kruger wasn't there.
Dundy's frown deepened. Who's Kruger?
I don't know, Spade said blandly. I never heard of him. He took tobacco and cigarette papers from his pockets. All right, Bliss, where's your scratch?
Theodore Bliss said, What? while the others stared blankly at Spade.
Your scratch, Spade repeated in a consciously patient tone. His attention was on the cigarette he was making. The place where your brother's pin gouged you when you were choking him.
Are you crazy? Bliss demanded. I was
Uh-huh, you were being married when he was killed. You were not. Spade moistened the edge of his cigarette paper and smoothed it with his forefingers.
Mrs. Bliss spoke now, stammering a little: But hebut Max Bliss called
Who says Max Bliss called me? Spade asked. I don't know that. I wouldn't know his voice. All I know is a man called me and said he was Max Bliss. Anybody could say that.
But the telephone records here show the call came from here, she protested.
He shook his head and smiled. They show I had a call from here, and I did, but not that one. I told you somebody called up half an hour or so before the supposed Max Bliss call and asked for Mr. Kruger. He nodded at Theodore Bliss. He was smart enough to get a call from this apartment to my office on the record before he left to meet you.
She stared from Spade to her husband with dumfounded blue eyes.
Her husband said lightly, It's nonsense, my dear. You know
Spade did not let him finish that sentence. You know he went out to smoke a cigarette in the corridor while waiting for the judge, and he knew there were telephone booths in the corridor. A minute would be all he needed. He lit his cigarette and returned his lighter to his pocket.
Bliss said, Nonsense! more sharply. Why should I want to kill Max? He smiled reassuringly into his wife's horrified eyes. Don't let this disturb you, dear. Police methods are sometimes
All right, Spade said, let's look you over for scratches.
Bliss wheeled to face him more directly. Damned if you will! He put a hand behind him.
Spade, wooden-faced and dreamy-eyed, came forward.
Spade and Effie Ferine sat at a small table in Julius's Castle on Telegraph Hill. Through the window beside them ferryboats could be seen carrying lights to and from the cities' lights on the other side of the bay.
... hadn't gone there to kill him, chances are, Spade was saying; just to shake him down for some more money; but when the fight started, once he got his hands on his throat, I guess, his grudge was too hot in him for him to let go till Max was dead. Understand, I'm just putting together what the evidence says, and what we got out of his wife, and the not much that we got out of him.
Effie nodded. She's a nice, loyal wife.
Spade drank coffee, shrugged. What for? She knows now that he made his play for her only because she was Max's secretary. She knows that when he took out the marriage license a couple of weeks ago it was only to string her along so she'd get him the photostatic copies of the records that tied Max up with the Graystone Loan swindle. She knowsWell, she knows she wasn't just helping an injured innocent to clear his good name.
He took another sip of coffee. So he calls on his brother this afternoon to hold San Quentin over his head for a price again, and there's a fight, and he kills him, and gets his wrist scratched by the pin while he's choking him. Blood on the tie, a scratch on his wristthat won't do. He takes the tie off the corpse and hunts up another, because the absence of a tie will set the police to thinking. He gets a bad break there: Max's new ties are on the front of the rack, and he grabs the first one he comes to. All right. Now he's got to put it around the dead man's neckor waithe gets a better idea. Pull off some more clothes and puzzle the police. The tie'll be just as inconspicuous off as on, if the shirt's off too. Undressing him, he gets another idea. He'll give the police something else to worry about, so he draws a mystic sign he has seen somewhere on the dead man's chest.
Spade emptied his cup, set it down, and went on: By now he's getting to be a regular master-mind at bewildering the police. A threatening letter signed with the thing on Max's chest. The afternoon mail is on the desk. One envelope's as good as another so long as it's typewritten and has no return address, but the one from France adds a touch of the foreign, so out comes the original letter and in goes the threat. He's overdoing it now; see? He's giving us so much that's wrong that we can't help suspecting things that seem all rightthe phone call, for instance.
Well, he's ready for the phone calls nowhis alibi. He picks my name out of the private detectives in the phone book and does the Mr. Kruger trick; but that's after he calls the blonde Elise and tells her that not only have the obstacles to their marriage been removed, but he's had an offer to go in business in New York and has to leave right away, and will she meet him in fifteen minutes and get married? There's more than just an alibi to that. He wants to make sure she is dead sure he didn't kill Max, because she knows he doesn't like Max, and he doesn't want her to think he was just stringing her along to get the dope on Max, because she might be able to put two and two together and get something like the right answer.
With that taken care of, he's ready to leave. He goes out quite openly, with only one thing to worry about nowthe tie and pin in his pocket. He takes the pin along because he's not sure the police mightn't find traces of blood around the setting of the stones, no matter how carefully he wipes it. On his way out he picks up a newspaperbuys one from the newsboy he meets at the street doorwads tie and pin up in a piece of it, and drops it in the rubbish can at the corner. That seems all right. No reason for the police to look for the tie. No reason for the street cleaner who empties the can to investigate a crumpled piece of newspaper, and if something does go wrongwhat the deuce!the murderer dropped it there, but he,
Theodore, can't be the murderer, because he's going to have an alibi.
Then he jumps in his car and drives to the Municipal Building. He knows there are plenty of phones there and he can always say he's got to wash his hands, but it turns out he doesn't have to. While they're waiting for the judge to get through with a case he goes out to smoke a cigarette, and there you are'Mr. Spade, this is Max Bliss and I've been threatened.'
Effie Ferine nodded, then asked, Why do you suppose he picked on a private detective instead of the police?
Playing safe. If the body had been found, meanwhile, the police might've heard of it and trace the call. A private detective wouldn't be likely to hear about it till he read it in the papers.
She laughed, then said, And that was your luck.
Luck? I don't know. He looked gloomily at the back of his left hand. I hurt a knuckle stopping him and the job only lasted an afternoon. Chances are whoever's handling the estate'll raise hob if I send them a bill for any decent amount of money. He raised a hand to attract the waiter's attention. Oh, well, better luck next time. Want to catch a movie or have you got something else to do?
THE ASSISTANT MURDERER
GOLD ON THE DOOR, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.
The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk's scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor's feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold. An ugly officethe proprietor was uglier. His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat. These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features. One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked. Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color. Veins had been broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes small, deep-set and pale blue of iriswere bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.