Spade tapped the envelope Ferris had given him. “And how about this note?”
“A messenger boy brought it at noon, and I came right over. Eli had assured me he hadn’t said anything to anybody, but I didn’t know. I had to face it, whatever it was.”
Spade turned to the others, his face wooden. “Well?”
Minera and Conrad looked at James, who made an impatient grimace and said, “Oh, sure, we sent him the letter. Why not? We was friends of Eli’s, and we hadn’t been able to find him since he went to put the squeeze to this
baby, and then he turns up dead, so we kind of like to have the gent come over and explain things.”
“You knew about the squeeze?”
“Sure. We was all together when he got the idea.”
“How’d he happen to get the idea?” Spade asked.
James spread the fingers of his left hand. “We’d been drinking and talking — you know the way a bunch of guys will, about all they’d seen and done — and he told a yarn about once seeing a guy boot another off a train into a canon, and he happens to mention the name of the guy that done the booting — Buck Ferris. And somebody says, ‘What’s this Ferris look like?’ Eli tells him what he looked like then, saying he ain’t seen him for fifteen years; and whoever it is whistles and says, ‘I bet that’s the Ferris that owns about half the movie joints in the state. I bet you he’d give something to keep that back trail covered!’
“Well, the idea kind of hit Eh’. You could see that. He thought a little while and then he got cagey. He asked what this movie Ferris’s first name is, and when the other guy tells him, ‘Roger,’ he makes out he’s disappointed and says, ‘No, it ain’t him. His first name was Martin.’ We all give him the ha-ha and he finally admits he’s thinking of seeing the gent, and when he called me up Thursday around noon and says he’s throwing a party at Pogey Hecker’s that night, it ain’t no trouble to figure out what’s what.”
“What was the name of the gentleman who was red-lighted?”
“He wouldn’t say. He shut up tight. You couldn’t blame him.”
“Uh-huh,” Spade agreed.
“Then nothing. He never showed up at Fogey’s. We tried to get him on the phone around two o’clock in the morning, but his wife said he hadn’t been home, so we stuck around till four or five and then decided he had given us a run-around, and made Pogey charge the bill to him, and beat it. I ain’t seen him since — dead or alive.” Spade said mildly. “Maybe. Sure you didn’t find Eli later that morning, take him riding, swap him bullets for Ferris’s five thou, dump him in the—?”
A sharp double knock sounded on the door.
Spade’s face brightened. He went to the door and opened it.
A young man came in. He was very dapper, and very well proportioned. He wore a light topcoat and his hands were in its pockets. Just inside the door he stepped to the right, and stood with his back to the wall. By that time another young man was coming in. He stepped to the left. Though they did not actually look alike, their common dapperness, the similar trimness of their bodies, and their almost identical positions — backs to wall, hands in pockets, cold, bright eyes studying the occupants of the room — gave them, for an instant, the appearance of twins.
Then Gene Colyer came in. He nodded at Spade, but paid no attention to the others in the room, though James said, “Hello, Gene.”
“Anything new?” Colyer asked Spade.
Spade nodded. “It seems this gentleman” — he jerked a thumb at Ferris — “was —”
“Any place we can talk?”
“There’s a kitchen back here.”
Colyer snapped a “Smear anybody that pops” over his shoulder at the two dapper young men and followed Spade into the kitchen. He sat on the one kitchen chair and stared with unblinking green eyes at Spade while Spade told him what he had learned.