XVIII.
The Fall-Guy
Spade, with his arms around Brigid O’Shaughnessy, smiled meagerly over her head and said: “Sure, we’ll talk.”
Gutman’s bulbs jounced as he took three waddling backward steps away from the door.
Spade and the girl went in together. The boy and Cairo followed them in. Cairo stopped in the doorway. The boy put away one of his pistols and came up close behind Spade.
Spade turned his head far around to look down over his shoulder at the boy and said: “Get away. You’re not going to frisk me.”
The boy said: “Stand still. Shut up.”
Spade’s nostrils went in and out with his breathing. His voice was level. “Get away. Put your paw on me and I’m going to make you use the gun. Ask your boss if he wants me shot up before we talk.”
“Never mind, Wilmer,” the fat man said. He frowned indulgently at Spade. “You are certainly a most headstrong individual. Well, let’s be seated.”
Spade said, “I told you I didn’t like that punk,” and took Brigid O’Shaughnessy to the sofa by the windows. They sat close together, her head against his left shoulder, his left arm around her shoulders. She had stopped trembling, had stopped panting. The appearance of Gutman and his companions seemed to have robbed her of that freedom of personal movement and emotion that is animal, leaving her alive, conscious, but quiescent as a plant.
Gutman lowered himself into the padded rocking chair. Cairo chose the armchair by the table. The boy Wilmer did not sit down. He stood in the doorway where Cairo had stood, letting his one visible pistol hang down at his side, looking under curling lashes at Spade’s body. Cairo put his pistol on the table beside him.
Spade took off his hat and tossed it to the other end of the sofa. He grinned at Gutman. The looseness of his lower lip and the droop of his upper eyelids combined with the v’s in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr’s. “That daughter of yours has a nice belly,” he said, “too nice to be scratched up with pins.”
Gutman’s smile was affable if a bit oily.
The boy in the doorway took a short step forward, raising his pistol as far as his hip. Everybody in the room looked at him. In the dissimilar eyes with which Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo looked at him there was, oddly, something identically reproving. The boy blushed, drew back his advanced foot, straightened his legs, lowered the pistol and stood as he had stood before, looking under lashes that hid his eyes at Spade’s chest. The blush was pale enough and lasted for only an instant, but it was startling on his face that habitually was so cold and composed.
Gutman turned his sleek-eyed fat smile on Spade again. His voice was a suave purring. “Yes, sir, that was a shame, but you must admit that it served its purpose.”
Spade’s brows twitched together. “Anything would’ve,” he said. “Naturally I wanted to see you as soon as I had the falcon. Cash customers–why not? I went to Burlingame expecting to run into this sort of a meeting. I didn’t know you were blundering around, half an hour late, trying to get me out of the way so you could find Jacobi again before he found me.”
Gutman chuckled. His chuckle seemed to hold nothing but satisfaction. “Well, sir,” he said, “in any case, here we are having our little meeting, if that’s what you wanted.”
“That’s what I wanted. How soon are you ready to make the first payment and take the falcon off my hands?”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy sat up straight and looked at Spade with surprised blue eyes. He patted her shoulder inattentively. His eyes were steady on Gutman’s. Gutman’s twinkled merrily between sheltering fatpuffs. He said: “Well, sir, as to that,” and put a hand inside the breast of his coat.
Cairo, hands on thighs, leaned forward in his chair, breathing between parted soft lips. His dark eyes had the surface-shine of lacquer. They shifted their focus warily from Spade’s face to Gutman’s, from Gutman’s to Spade’s.
Gutman repeated, “Well, sir, as to that,” and took a white envelope from his pocket. Ten eyes–the boy’s now only half obscured by his lashes–looked at the envelope. Turning the envelope over in his swollen hands, Gutman studied for a moment its blank white front and then its back, unsealed, with the flap tucked in. He raised his head, smiled amiably, and scaled the envelope at Spade’s lap.