Spade asked casually, “Where is he?” while shaking tobacco down into a brown paper curved to catch it.
The boy lowered Ins paper and looked around, moving with a purposeful sort of slowness, as of a more natural swiftness restrained. He looked with smnalh hazel eyes under somewhat long curling lashes at Spade’s chest. He said, in a voice as colorless and composed and cold as his young face: “What?”
“Where is he?” Spade was busy with his cigarette.
“Who?”
“The fairy.”
The hazel eyes’ gaze went up Spade’s chest to the knot of his maroon tie and rested there. “What do you thunk you’re doing, Jack?” the boy demanded. “Kidding me?”
“I’ll tell you when I am.” Spade licked his cigarette and smiled amiably at the boy. “New York, aren’t you?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie and did not speak. Spade nodded as if the boy had said yes and asked: “Baumes rush?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie for a moment longer, then raised his newspaper and returned Ins attention to it. “Shove off,” he said from the side of his mouth.
Spade lighted his cigarette, leaned back comfortably on the divan, and spoke with good-natured carelessness: “You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny–some of you will–and you can tell C. I said so.”
The boy put his paper down quickly and faced Spade, staring at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. The boy’s small hands were spread flat over his belly. “Keep asking for it and you’re going to get it,” he said, “plenty.” His voice was low and flat and menacing. “I told you to shove off. Shove off.”
Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and a thin-legged blonde girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and said: “That would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But you’re not in Romeville now. You’re in my burg.” He inhaled cigarette-smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. “Well, where is he?”
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”
“People hose teeth talking like that.” Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. “If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.”
The boy repeated his two words.
Spade dropped his cigarette into a tall stone jar beside the divan and with a lifted hand caught the attention of a man who had been standing at an end of the cigar-stand for several minutes. The man nodded and came towards them. He was a middle-aged man of medium height, round and sallow of face, compactly built, tidily dressed in dark clothes.
“Hello, Sam,” he said as he came up.
“Hello, Luke.”
They shook hands and Luke said: “Say, that’s too bad about Miles.”
“Uh-huh, a bad break.” Spade jerked his head to indicate the boy on the divan beside him. “What do you let these cheap gunmen hang out in your lobby for, with their tools bulging their clothes?”
“Yes?” Luke examined the boy with crafty brown eyes set in a suddenly hard face. “What do you want here?” he asked.
The boy stood up. Spade stood up. The boy looked at the two men, at their neckties, from one to the other. Luke’s necktie was black. The boy looked like a schoolboy standing in front of them.
Luke said: “Well, if you don’t want anything, beat it, and don’t come back.”
The boy said, “I won’t forget you guys,” and went out.
They watched him go out. Spade took off his hat and wiped his damp forehead with a handkercluef.
The hotel-detective asked: “What is it?”
“Damned if I know,” Spade replied. “I just happened to spot him. Know anything about Joel Cairo–six-thirty-five?”
“Oh, that one!” The hotel-detective leered.
“How hong’s he been here?”
“Four days. This is the fifth.”
“What about him?”
“Search me, Sam. I got nothing against him but his looks.”
“Find out if he came in last night?”
“Try to,” the hotel-detective promised and went away. Spade sat on the divan until he returned. “No,” Luke reported, “he didn’t sleep in his room. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Come clean. You know I’ll keep my clam shut, but if there’s anything wrong we ought to know about it so’s we can collect our bill.”