He pushed the telephone away, yawned, stretched, felt his bruised temple, looked at his watch, and rolled and lighted a cigarette. He smoked sleepily until Effie Perine came in.
Effie Perine came in smiling, bright-eyed and rosy-faced. “Ted says it could be,” she reported, “and he hopes it is. He says he’s not a specialist in that field, but the names and dates are all right, and at least none of your authorities or their works are out-and-out fakes. He’s all excited over it.”
“That’s swell, as long as he doesn’t get too enthusiastic to see through it if it’s phoney.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t–not Ted! He’s too good at his stuff for that.”
“Uh-huh, the whole damned Perine family’s wonderful,” Spade said, “including you and the smudge of soot on your nose.”
“He’s not a Perine, he’s a Christy.” She bent her head to look at her nose in her vanity-case-mirror. “I must’ve got that from the fire.” She scrubbed the smudge with the corner of a handkerchief.
“The Perine-Christy enthusiasm ignite Berkeley?” he asked.
She made a face at him while patting her nose with a powdered pink disc. “There was a boat on fire when I came back. They were towing it out from the pier and the smoke blew all over our ferry-boat.”
Spade put his hands on the arms of his chair. “Were you near enough to see the name of the boat?” he asked.
“Yes. La Paloma. Why?”
Spade smiled ruefully. “I’m damned if I know why, sister,” he said.
XV.
Every Crackpot
Spade and Detective-sergeant Polhaus ate pickled pigs’ feet at one of big John’s tables at the States Hof Brau.
Polhaus, balancing pale bright jelly on a fork half-way between plate and mouth, said: “Hey, listen, Sam! Forget about the other night. He was dead wrong, but you know anybody’s liable to lose their head if you ride them thataway.”
Spade looked thoughtfully at the police-detective. “Was that what you wanted to see me about?” he asked.
Polhaus nodded, put the forkful of jelly into his mouth, swallowed it, and qualified his nod: “Mostly.”
“Dundy send you?”
Polhaus made a disgusted mouth. “You know he didn’t. He’s as bullheaded as you are.”
Spade smiled and shook his head. “No, he’s not, Tom,” he said. “He just thinks he is.”
Tom scowled and chopped at his pig’s foot with a knife. “Ain’t you ever going to grow up?” he grumbled. “What’ve you got to beef about? He didn’t hurt you. You came out on top. What’s the sense of making a grudge of it? You’re just making a lot of grief for yourself.”
Spade placed his knife and fork carefully together on his plate, and put his hands on the table beside his plate. His smile was faint and devoid of warmth. “With every bull in town working overtime trying to pile up grief for me a little more won’t hurt. I won’t even know it’s there.”
Polhaus’s ruddiness deepened. He said: “That’s a swell thing to say to me.”
Spade picked up his knife and fork and began to eat. Polhaus ate.
Presently Spade asked: “See the boat on fire in the bay?”
“I saw the smoke. Be reasonable. Sam. Dundy was wrong and he knows it. Why don’t you let it go at that?”
“Think I ought to go around and tell him I hope my chin didn’t hurt his fist?”
Polhaus cut savagely into his pig’s foot.
Spade said: “Phil Archer been in with any more hot tips?”
“Aw, hell! Dundy didn’t think you shot Miles, but what else could he do except run the lead down? You’d’ve done the same thing in his place, and you know it.”
“Yes?” Malice glittered in Spade’s eyes. “What made him think I didn’t do it? What makes you think I didn’t? Or don’t you?”
Polhaus’s ruddy face flushed again. He said: “Thursby shot Miles.”
“You think he did.”
“He did. That Webley was his, and the slug in Miles came out of it.”
“Sure?” Spade demanded.
“Dead sure,” the police-detective replied. “We got hold of a kid–a bellhop at Thursby’s hotel–that had seen it in his room just that morning. He noticed it particular because he’d never saw one just like it before. I never saw one. You say they don’t make them any more. It ain’t likely there’d be another around and–anyway–if that wasn’t Thursby’s what happened to his? And that’s the gun the slug in Miles come out of.” He started to put a piece of bread into his mouth, withdrew it, and asked: “You say you’ve seen them before: where was that at?” He put the bread into his mouth.