Spade winked at his partner. Miles Archer came forward to stand at a corner of the desk. While the girl looked at her bag he looked at her. His little brown eyes ran their bold appraising gaze from her lowered face to her feet and up to her face again. Then he looked at Spade and made a silent whistling mouth of appreciation.
Spade lifted two fingers from the arm of his chair in a brief warning gesture and said: “We shouldn’t have any trouble with it. It’s simply a matter of having a man at the hotel this evening to shadow him away when he leaves, and shadow him until he leads us to your sister. If she comes with him, and you persuade her to return with you, so much the better. Otherwise–if she doesn’t want to leave him after we’ve found her–well, we’ll find a way of managing that.”
Archer said: “Yeh.” His voice was heavy, coarse.
Miss Wonderly looked up at Spade, quickly, puckering her forehead between her eyebrows. “Oh, but you must be careful!” Her voice shook a little, and her lips shaped the words with nervous jerkiness. “I’m deathly afraid of him, of what he might do. She’s so young and his bringing her here from New York is such a serious– Mightn’t he–mightn’t he do–something to her?”
Spade smiled and patted the arms of his chair. “Just leave that to us,” he said. “We’ll know how to handle him.”
“But mightn’t he?” she insisted.
“There’s always a chance.” Spade nodded judicially. “But you can trust us to take care of that.”
“I do trust you,” she said earnestly, “but I want you to know that he’s a dangerous man. I honestly don’t think he’d stop at anything. I don’t believe he’d hesitate to–to kill Corinne if he thought it would save him. Mightn’t he do that?”
“You didn’t threaten him, did you?”
“I told him that all I wanted was to get her home before Mama and Papa came so they’d never know what she had done. I promised him I’d never say a word to them about it if he helped me, but if he didn’t Papa would certainly see that he was punished. I–I don’t suppose he believed me, altogether.”
“Can he cover up by marrying her?” Archer asked.
The girl blushed and replied in a confused voice: “He has a wife and three children in England. Corinne wrote me that, to explain why she had gone off with him.”
“They usually do,” Spade said, “though not always in England.” He leaned forward to reach for pencil and pad of paper. “What does he look like?”
“Oh, he’s thirty-five years old, perhaps, and as tall as you, and either naturally dark or quite sunburned. His hair is dark too, and he has thick eyebrows. He talks in a rather loud, blustery way and has a nervous, irritable manner. He gives the impression of being–of violence.”
Spade, scribbling on the pad, asked without looking up: “What color eyes?”
“They’re blue-grey and watery, though not in a weak way. And–oh, yes–he has a marked cleft in his chin.”
“Thin, medium, or heavy build?”
“Quite athletic. He’s broad-shouldered and carries himself erect, has what could be called a decidedly military carriage. He was wearing a light grey suit and a grey hat when I saw him this morning.”
“What does he do for a living?” Spade asked as he laid down his pencil.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“What time is he coming to see you?”
“After eight o’clock.”
“All right, Miss ‘Wonderly, we’ll have a man there. It’ll help if–”
“Mr. Spade, could either you or Mr. Archer?” She made an appealing gesture with both hands. “Could either of you look after it personally? I don’t mean that the man you’d send wouldn’t be capable, but–oh!–I’m so afraid of what might happen to Corinne. I’m afraid of him. Could you? I’d be–I’d expect to be charged more, of course.” She opened her handbag with nervous fingers and put two hundred-dollar bills on Spade’s desk. “Would that be enough?”
“Yeh,” Archer said, “and I’ll look after it myself.”
Miss Wonderly stood up, impulsively holding a hand out to him. “Thank you! Thank you!” she exclaimed, and then gave Spade her hand, repeating: “Thank you!”