Spade walked down to the corner and stood by the curb until the red-faced blond chauffeur had parked his cab and got out. Then Spade went up to him and said: “I got into your cab with a lady at noontime. We went out Stockton Street and up Sacramento to Jones, where I got out.”
“Sure,” the red-faced man said, “I remember that.”
“I told you to take her to a Ninth-Avenue-number. You didn’t take her there. Where did you take her?”
The chauffeur rubbed his cheek with a grimy hand and looked doubtfully at Spade. “I don’t know about this.”
“It’s all right,” Spade assured him, giving him one of his cards. “If you want to play safe, though, we can ride up to your office and get your superintendent’s OK.”
“I guess it’s all right. I took her to the Ferry Building.”
“By herself?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Didn’t take her anywhere else first?”
“No. It was like this: after we dropped you I went on out Sacramento, and when we got to Polk she rapped on the glass and said she wanted to get a newspaper, so I stopped at the corner and whistled for a kid, and she got her paper.”
“Which paper?”
“The Call. Then I went on out Sacramento some more, and just after we’d crossed Van Ness she knocked on the glass again and said take her to the Ferry Building.”
“Was she excited or anything?”
“Not so’s I noticed.”
“And when you got to the Ferry Building?”
“She paid me off, and that was all.”
“Anybody waiting for her there?”
“I didn’t see them if they was.”
“Which way did she go?”
“At the Ferry? I don’t know. Maybe upstairs, or towards the stairs.”
“Take the newspaper with her?”
“Yeah, she had it tucked under her arm when she paid me.”
“With the pink sheet outside, or one of the white?”
“Hell, Cap, I don’t remember that.”
Spade thanked the chauffeur, said, “Get yourself a smoke,” and gave him a silver dollar.
Spade bought a copy of the Call and carried it into an office-buildingvestibule to examine it out of the wind.
His eyes ran swiftly over the front-page-headlines and over those on the second and third pages. They paused for a moment under SUSPECT ARRESTEn A5 COUNTERFEITER on the fourth page, and again on page five under BAY YOUTH SEEKS DEATH WITH BULLET. Pages six and seven held nothing to interest him. On eight 3 Boys ARRESTEn AS S. F. BURGLARS AFTER SHOOTING held his attention for a moment, and after that nothing until he reached the thirty-fifth page, which held new-s of the weather, shipping, produce, finance, divorce, births, marriages, and deaths. He read the list of dead, passed over pages thirty-six and thirty-seven–financial news–found nothing to stop his eyes on the thirty-eighth and last page, sighed, folded the newspaper, put it in his coat-pocket, and rolled a cigarette.
For five minutes he stood there in the office-building-vestibule smoking and staring sulkily at nothing. Then he walked up to Stockton Street, hailed a taxicab, and had himself driven to the Coronet.
He let himself into the building and into Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s apartment with the key she had given him. The blue gown she had worn the previous night was hanging across the foot of her bed. FIer blue stockings and slippers w-ere on the bedroom floor. The polvehrome box that had held jewelry in her dressing-table-draw-er now stood empty on the dressingtable-top. Spade frowned at it, ran his tongue across his lips, strolled through the rooms, looking around but not touching anything, then left the Coronet and went downtown again.
In the doorway of Spade’s office-building he came face to face with the boy he had left at Gutman’s. The boy put himself in Spade’s path, blocking the entrance, and said: “Come on. He wants to see you.”
The boy’s hands were in his overcoat-pockets. His pockets bulged more than his hands need have made them bulge.
Spade grinned and said mockingly: “I didn’t expect you till fivetwenty-five. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in the strained voice of one in physical pain: “Keep on riding me and you’re going to be picking iron out of your navel.”