She said, ” ‘Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea.'” She spoke, not as if quoting, but as if saying something she believed.
Dundy barked a question at her: “What little one?” She turned her grave gray eyes on him, then looked past him at the bedroom door. “Her,” she said; “Miriam.” Dundy frowned at her, “His daughter?” The woman said, “Yes, his own adopted daughter.” Angry blood mottled Dundy’s square face. “What the heck is this?” he demanded. He shook his head as if to
free it from some clinging thing. “She’s not really his daughter?”
The woman’s serenity was in no way disturbed by his anger. “No. His wife was an invalid most of her life. They didn’t have any children.”
Dundy moved his jaws as if chewing for a moment and when he spoke again his voice was cooler. “What did he do to her?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I truly believe that when the truth’s found out you’ll see that the money her father — I mean her real father — left her has been — ”
Spade interrupted her, taking pains to speak very clearly, moving one hand in small circles with his words. “You mean you don’t actually know he’s been gypping her? You just suspect it?”
She put a hand over her heart. “I know it here,” she replied calmly.
Dundy looked at Spade, Spade at Dundy, and Spade’s eyes were shiny with not altogether pleasant merriment. Dundy cleared his throat and addressed the woman again. “And you think this” — he waved a hand at the floor where the dead man had lain—”was the judgment of God, huh?”
“I do.”
He kept all but the barest trace of craftiness out of his eyes. “Then whoever did it was just acting as the hand of
God?”
“It’s not for me to say,” she replied. Red began to mottle his face again. “That’ll be all right now,” he said in a choking voice,
but by the time she had reached the bedroom door his eyes became alert again and he called, “Wait a minute.” And when they were facing each other: “Listen, do you happen to be a Rosicrucian?”
“I wish to be nothing but a Christian.”
He growled, “All right, all right,” and turned his back on her. She went into the bedroom and shut the door. He wiped his forehead with the palm of his right hand and complained wearily, “Great Scott, what a family.”
Spade shrugged, “Try investigating your own some time.”
Dundy’s face whitened. His lips, almost colorless, came back tight over his teeth. He balled his fists and lunged towards Spade. “What do you — ?” The pleasantly surprised look on Spade’s face stopped him. He averted his eyes, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue, looked at Spade again and away, essayed an embarrassed smile, and mumbled, “You mean any family. Uh-huh, I guess so.” He turned hastily towards the corridor door as the doorbell rang.
The amusement twitching Spade’s face accentuated his likeness to a blond satan.
An amiable, drawling voice came in through the corridor, door: “I’m Jim Kittredge, Superior Court. I was told to come over here.”
Dundy’s voice: “Yes, come in.”
Kittredge was a roly-poly ruddy man in too-tight clothes with the shine of age on them. He nodded at Spade and said, “I remember you, Mr. Spade, from the Burke-Harris suit.”
Spade said, “Sure,” and stood up to shake hands with him.
Dundy had gone to the bedroom door to call Theodore Bliss and his wife. Kittredge looked at them, smiled at them amiably, said, “How do you do?” and turned to Dundy. “That’s them, all right.” He looked around as if for a place to spit, found none, and said, “It was just about ten minutes to four that the gentleman there came in the courtroom and asked me how long His Honor would be, and I told him about ten minutes, and they waited there; and right after court adjourned at four o’clock we married them.”