Spade cursed his luck.
“Checked out–gone bag and baggage,” Luke said. He took a battered memorandum-book from a vest-pocket, licked his thumb, thumbed pages, and held the book out open to Spade. “There’s the number of the taxi that hauled him. I got that much for you.”
“Thanks.” Spade copied the number on the back of an envelope. “Any forwarding address?”
“No. He just come in carrying a big suitcase and went upstairs and packed and come down with his stuff and paid his bill and got a taxi and went without anybody being able to hear what he told the driver.”
“How about his trunk?”
Luke’s lower lip sagged. “By God,” he said, “I forgot that! Come on.”
They went up to Cairo’s room. The trunk was there. It was closed, but not locked. They raised the lid. The trunk was empty. Luke said: “What do you know about that!”
Spade did not say anything.
Spade went back to his office. Effie Perine looked up at him, inquisitively.
“Missed him,” Spade grumbled and passed into his private room.
She followed him in. He sat in his chair and began to roll a cigarette. She sat on the desk in front of him and put her toes on a corner of his chair-seat.
“What about Miss O’Shaughnessy?” she demanded.
“I missed her too,” he replied, “but she had been there.”
“On the La Paloma?”
“The La is a lousy combination,” he said.
“Stop it. Be nice, Sam. Tell me.”
He set fire to his cigarette, pocketed his lighter, patted her shins, and said: “Yes, La Paloma. She got down there at a little after noon yesterday.” He pulled his brows down. “That means she went straight there after leaving the cab at the Ferry Building. It’s only a few piers away. The Captain wasn’t aboard. His name’s Jacobi and she asked for him by name. He was uptown on business. That would mean he didn’t expect her, or not at that time anyway. She waited there till he came back at four o’clock. They spent the time from then till meal-time in his cabin and she ate with him.”
He inhaled and exhaled smoke, turned his head aside to spit a yellow tobacco-flake off his lip, and went on: “After the meal Captain Jacobi had three more visitors. One of them was Gutman and one was Cairo and one was the kid who delivered Gutman’s message to you yesterday. Those three came together while Brigid was there and the five of them did a lot of talking in the Captain’s cabin. It’s hard to get anything out of the crew, but they had a row and somewhere around eleven o’clock that night a gun went off there, in the Captain’s cabin. The watchman beat it down there, but the Captain met him outside and told him everything was all right. There’s a fresh bullet-hole in one corner of the cabin, up high enough to make it likely that the bullet didn’t go through anybody to get there. As far as I could learn there was only the one shot. But as far as I couki learn wasn’t very far.”
He scowled and inhaled smoke again. “Well, they left around midnight–the Captain and his four visitors all together–and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from the watchman. I haven’t been able to get hold of the Custom-House-men who were on duty there then. That’s all of it. The Captain hasn’t been back since. He didn’t keep a date he had this noon with some shipping-agents, and they haven’t found him to tell him about the fire.”
“And the fire?” she asked.
Spade shrugged. “I don’t know. It was discovered in the hold, aft–in the rear basement–late this morning. The chances are it got started some time yesterday. They got it out all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody liked to talk about it much while the Captain’s away. It’s the–”
The corridor-door opened. Spade shut his mouth. Effie Perine jumped down from the desk, but a man opened the connecting door before she could reach it.
“Where’s Spade?” the man asked.
His voice brought Spade up erect and alert in his chair. It was a voice harsh and rasping with agony and with the strain of keeping two words from being smothered by the liquid bubbling that ran under and behind them.