Dundy’s lips tightened a little. “Were you and he on intimate terms?”
“Friendly, if that’s what you mean.”
“Are you sure?” Dundy asked. “Are you sure neither of you held any grudge against the other?”
Theodore Bliss took his arm free from around his niece. Increasing pallor made his sunburned face yellowish. He said, “Everybody here knows about my having been in
San Quentin. You can speak out, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“It is,” Dundy said, and then, after a pause, “Well?”
Bliss stood up. “Well, what?” he asked impatiently. “Did I hold a grudge against him for that? No. Why should I? We were both in it. He could get out; I couldn’t. I was sure of being convicted whether he was or not. Having him sent over with me wasn’t going to make it any better for me. We talked it over and decided I’d go it alone, leaving him outside to pull things together. And he did. If you look up his bank account you’ll see he gave me a check for twenty-five thousand dollars two days after I was discharged from San Quentin, and the registrar of the National Steel Corporation can tell you a thousand shares of stock have been transferred from his name to mine since then.”
He smiled apologetically and sat down on the bed again. “I’m sorry. I know you have to ask things.”
Dundy ignored the apology. “Do you know Daniel Tal-bot?” he asked.
Bliss said, “No.”
His wife said, “I do; that is, I’ve seen him. He was in the office yesterday.”
Dundy looked her up and down carefully before asking, “What office?”
“I am — I was Mr. Bliss’s secretary, and — ”
“Max Bliss’s?”
“Yes, and a Daniel Talbot came in to see him yesterday afternoon, if it’s the same one.”
“What happened?”
She looked at her husband, who said, “If you know anything, for heaven’s sake tell them.”
She said, “But nothing really happened. I thought they were angry with each other at first, but when they left together they were laughing and talking, and before they went Mr. Bliss rang for me and told me to have Trapper — he’s the bookkeeper — make out a check to Mr. Tal-bot’s order.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, yes. I took it in to him. It was for seventy-five hundred and some dollars.”
“What was it for?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“If you were Bliss’s secretary,” Dundy insisted, “you must have some idea of what his business with Talbot was.”
“But I haven’t,” she said. “I’d never even heard of him before.”
Dundy looked at Spade. Spade’s face was wooden. Dundy glowered at him, then put a question to the man on the bed: “What kind of necktie was your brother wearing when you saw him last?”
Bliss blinked, then stared distantly past Dundy, and finally shut his eyes. When he opened them he said, “It was green with — I’d know it if I saw it. Why?”
Mrs. Bliss said, “Narrow diagonal stripes of different shades of green. That’s the one he had on at the office this morning.”
“Where does he keep his neckties?” Dundy asked the housekeeper.
She rose, saying, “In a closet in his bedroom. I’ll show you.”
Dundy and the newly married Blisses followed her out.
Spade put his hat on the dressing table and asked Miriam Bliss, “What time did you go out?” He sat on the foot of her bed.
“Today? About one o’clock. I had a luncheon engagement for one and I was a little late, and then I went shopping, and then —” She broke off with a shudder.
“And then you came home at what time?” His voice was friendly, matter-of-fact.
“Some time after four, I guess.”
“And what happened?”
“I f-found Father lying there and I phoned — I don’t know whether I phoned downstairs or the police, and then I don’t know what I did. I fainted or had hysterics or something, and the first thing I remember is coming to and finding those men here and Mrs. Hooper.” She looked him full in the face now.
“You didn’t phone a doctor?”
She lowered her eyes again. “No, I don’t think so.”