The young man screamed and flung himself at Dundy, clawing with both hands. Dundy grunted —”Uh!” —and struck him in the face with a heavy fist. The young man went backwards across the room until he collided with a chair. He and the chair went down on the floor together. Dundy said to the gray-faced man, “Take him down to the Hall — material witness.”
The gray-faced man said, “Oke,” picked up Smekalov’s hat, and went over to help pick him up.
Theodore Bliss, his wife, and the housekeeper had come to the door Miriam Bliss had left open. Miriam Bliss was crying, stamping her foot, threatening Dundy: “I’ll report you, you coward. You had no right to . . .” and so on. Nobody paid much attention to her; they watched the gray-faced man help Smekalov to his feet, take him away. Smekalov’s nose and mouth were red smears.
Then Dundy said, “Hush,” negligently to Miriam Bliss
and took a slip of paper from his pocket. “I got a list of the calls from here today. Sing out when you recognize
them.”
He read a telephone number.
Mrs. Hooper said, “That is the butcher. I phoned him before I left this morning.” She said the next number Dundy read was the grocer’s.
He read another.
“That’s the St. Mark,” Miriam Bliss said. “I called up Boris.” She identified two more numbers as those of friends
she had called.
The sixth number, Bliss said, was his brother’s office. “Probably my call to Elise to ask her to meet me.”
Spade said “Mine,” to the seventh number, and Dundy said, “That last one’s police emergency.” He put the slip
back in his pocket.
Spade said cheerfully, “And that gets us a lot of places.”
The doorbell rang.
Dundy went to the door. He and another man could be heard talking in voices too low for their words to be recognized in the living room.
The telephone rang. Spade answered it. “Hello. . . . No, this is Spade. Wait a min — All right.” He listened. “Right, I’ll tell him. … I don’t know. I’ll have him call you. . . .
Right.”
When he turned from the telephone Dundy was standing, hands behind him, in the vestibule doorway. Spade said, “O’Gar says your Russian went completely nuts on the way to the Hall. They had to shove him into a strait-jacket.”
“He ought to been there long ago,” Dundy growled. “Come here.”
Spade followed Dundy into the vestibule. A uniformed policeman stood in the outer doorway.
Dundy brought his hands from behind him. In one was a necktie with narrow diagonal stripes in varying shades of green, in the other was a platinum scarfpin in the shape of a crescent set with small diamonds.
Spade bent over to look at three small, irregular spots on the tie. “Blood?”
“Or dirt,” Dundy said. “He found them crumpled up in a newspaper in the rubbish can on the corner.”
“Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said proudly; “there I found them, all wadded up in — ” He stopped because nobody was paying any attention to him.
“Blood’s better,” Spade was saying. “It gives a reason for taking the tie away. Let’s go in and talk to people.”
Dundy stuffed the tie in one pocket, thrust his hand holding the pin into another. “Right —and we’ll call it blood.”
They went into the living-room. Dundy looked from Bliss to Bliss’s wife, to Bliss’s niece, to the housekeeper, as if he did not like any of them. He took his fist from his pocket, thrust it straight out in front of him, and opened it to show the crescent pin lying in his hand. “What’s that?” he demanded.
Miriam Bliss was the first to speak. “Why, it’s Father’s pin,” she said.
“So it is?” he said disagreeably. “And did he have it on today?”
“He always wore it.” She turned to the others for confirmation.
Mrs. Bliss said, “Yes,” while the others nodded.
“Where did you find it?” the girl asked.
Dundy was surveying them one by one again, as if he liked them less than ever. His face was red. “He always wore it,” he said angrily, “but there wasn’t one of you could say, ‘Father always wore a pin. Where is it?’ No, we got to wait till it turns up before we can get a word out of you about it.”