Spade seemed mildly surprised. “Why?”
Binnett shrugged. “He’s peculiar sometimes. Understand, his mind seems perfectly all right, but he has the testiness and eccentricity of an old man in ill health and — well — at times he can be difficult.”
Spade asked slowly: “He’s already refused to see me?”
“Yes.”
Spade rose from his chair. His blond satan’s face was expressionless.
Binnett raised a hand quickly. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to make him change his mind. Perhaps if—” His dark eyes suddenly became wary. “You’re not simply trying to sell him something, are you?”
“No.”
The wary gleam went out of Binnett’s eyes. “Well, then, I think I can —”
A young woman came in crying angrily, “Wally, that old fool has —” She broke off with a hand to her breast when she saw Spade.
Spade and Binnett had risen together. Binnett said suavely: “Joyce, this is Mr. Ames. My sister-in-law, Joyce Court.”
Spade bowed.
Joyce Court uttered a short, embarrassed laugh and said: “Please excuse my whirlwind entrance.” She was a tall, blue-eyed, dark woman of twenty-four or -five with good shoulders and a strong, slim body. Her features made up in warmth what they lacked in regularity. She wore wide-legged blue satin pajamas.
Binnett smiled good-naturedly at her and asked: “Now what’s all the excitement?”
Anger darkened her eyes again and she started to speak. ; Then she looked at Spade and said: “But we shouldn’t bore Mr. Ames with our stupid domestic affairs. If—” She hesitated.
Spade bowed again. “Sure,” he said, “certainly.”
“I won’t be a minute,” Binnett promised, and left the room with her.
Spade went to the open doorway through which they had vanished and, standing just inside, listened. Their footsteps became inaudible. Nothing else could be heard. Spade was standing there — his yellow-gray eyes dreamy — when he heard the scream. It was a woman’s scream, high and shrill with terror. Spade was through the doorway when
he heard the shot. It was a pistol shot, magnified, reverberated by walls and ceilings.
Twenty feet from the doorway Spade found a staircase, and went up it1 three steps at a time. He turned to the left. Halfway down the hallway a woman lay on her back on the floor.
Wallace Binnett knelt beside her, fondling one of her hands desperately, crying in a low, beseeching voice: “Darling, Molly, darling!”
Joyce Court stood behind him and wrung her hands while tears streaked her cheeks.
The woman on the floor resembled Joyce Court but was older, and her face had a hardness the younger one’s had not.
“She’s dead, she’s been killed,” Wallace Binnett said incredulously, raising his white face towards Spade. When Binnett moved his head Spade could see the round hole in the woman’s tan dress over her heart and the dark stain which was rapidly spreading below it.
Spade touched Joyce Court’s arm. “Police, emergency hospital — phone,” he said. As she ran towards the stairs he addressed Wallace Binnett: “Who did —”
A voice groaned feebly behind Spade.
He turned swiftly. Through an open doorway he could see an old man in white pajamas lying sprawled across a rumpled bed. His head, a shoulder, an arm dangled over the edge of the bed. His other hand held his throat tightly. He groaned again and his eyelids twitched, but did not open.
Spade lifted the old man’s head and shoulders and put
them up on the pillows. The old man groaned again and took his hand from his throat. His throat was red with half a dozen bruises. He was a gaunt man with a seamed face that probably exaggerated his age.
A glass of water was on a table beside the bed. Spade put water on the old man’s face and, when the old man’s eyes twitched again, leaned down and growled softly: “Who did it?”
The twitching eyelids went up far enough to show a narrow strip of blood-shot gray eyes. The old man spoke painfully, putting a hand to his throat again: “A man — he —” He coughed.
Spade made an impatient grimace. His lips almost touched the old man’s ear. “Where’d he go?” His voice was urgent.