The Adventures Of Sam Spade - Hammett Dashiell. Страница 14

Dundy screwed up his eyes at Smekalov and made his voice judicial. “You've probably,” he said, “put yourself in a pretty tough spot.”

Smekalov seemed about to cry. “But only put yourself in my place,” he begged, “and you—“

“Wouldn't want to.” Dundy seemed, in his callous way, sorry for the young man. “Murder's nothing to play with in this country.”

“Murder! But I tell you, Lieutenant, I happen' to enter into this situation by the merest mischance only. I am not—”

“You mean you came in here with Miss Bliss by accident?”

The young man looked as if he would like to say “Yes.” He said, “No,” slowly, then went on with increasing rapidity: “But that was nothing, sir, nothing at all. We had been to lunch. I escorted her home and she said, 'Will you come in for a cocktail?' and I would. That is all, I give you my word.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Could it not have happened so to you?” He moved his hands in Spade's direction. “To you?”

Spade said, “A lot of things happen to me. Did Bliss know you were running around with his daughter?”

“He knew we were friends, yes.”

“Did he know you had a wife?”

Smekalov said cautiously, “I do not think so.”

Dundy said, “You know he didn't.”

Smekalov moistened his lips and did not contradict the lieutenant.

Dundy asked, “What do you think he'd've done if he found out?”

“I do not know, sir.”

Dundy stepped close to the young man and spoke through his teeth in a harsh, deliberate voice: “What did he do when he found out?”

The young man retreated a step, his face white and frightened.

The bedroom door opened and Miriam Bliss came into the room. “Why don't you leave him alone?” she asked indignantly. “I told you he had nothing to do with it. I told you he didn't know anything about it.” She was beside Smekalov now and had one of his hands in hers. “You're simply making trouble for him without doing a bit of good. I'm awfully sorry, Boris, I tried to keep them from bothering you.”

The young man mumbled unintelligibly.

“You tried, all right,” Dundy agreed. He addressed Spade: “Could it've been like this, Sam? Bliss found out about the wife, knew they had the lunch date, came home early to meet them when they came in, threatened to tell the wife, and was choked to stop him.” He looked sidewise at the girl. “Now, if you want to fake another faint, hop to it.”

The young man screamed and flung himself at Dundy, clawing with both hands. Dundy grunted —“Uh!” —and struck him in the face with a heavy fist. The young man went backwards across the room until he collided with a chair. He and the chair went down on the floor together. Dundy said to the gray-faced man, “Take him down to the Hall—material witness.”

The gray-faced man said, “Oke,” picked up Smekalov's hat, and went over to help pick him up.

Theodore Bliss, his wife, and the housekeeper had come to the door Miriam Bliss had left open. Miriam Bliss was crying, stamping her foot, threatening Dundy: “I'll report you, you coward. You had no right to . . .” and so on. Nobody paid much attention to her; they watched the gray-faced man help Smekalov to his feet, take him away. Smekalov's nose and mouth were red smears.

Then Dundy said, “Hush,” negligently to Miriam Bliss and took a slip of paper from his pocket. “I got a list of the calls from here today. Sing out when you recognize them.”

He read a telephone number.

Mrs. Hooper said, “That is the butcher. I phoned him before I left this morning.” She said the next number Dundy read was the grocer's.

He read another.

“That's the St. Mark,” Miriam Bliss said. “I called up Boris.” She identified two more numbers as those of friends she had called.

The sixth number, Bliss said, was his brother's office. “Probably my call to Elise to ask her to meet me.”

Spade said “Mine,” to the seventh number, and Dundy said, “That last one's police emergency.” He put the slip back in his pocket.

Spade said cheerfully, “And that gets us a lot of places.”

The doorbell rang.

Dundy went to the door. He and another man could be heard talking in voices too low for their words to be recognized in the living room.

The telephone rang. Spade answered it. “Hello. . . . No, this is Spade. Wait a min—All right.” He listened. “Right, I'll tell him. … I don't know. I'll have him call you. . . .

Right.”

When he turned from the telephone Dundy was standing, hands behind him, in the vestibule doorway. Spade said, “O'Gar says your Russian went completely nuts on the way to the Hall. They had to shove him into a strait-jacket.”

“He ought to been there long ago,” Dundy growled. “Come here.”

Spade followed Dundy into the vestibule. A uniformed policeman stood in the outer doorway.

Dundy brought his hands from behind him. In one was a necktie with narrow diagonal stripes in varying shades of green, in the other was a platinum scarfpin in the shape of a crescent set with small diamonds.

Spade bent over to look at three small, irregular spots on the tie. “Blood?”

“Or dirt,” Dundy said. “He found them crumpled up in a newspaper in the rubbish can on the corner.”

“Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said proudly; “there I found them, all wadded up in—” He stopped because nobody was paying any attention to him.

“Blood's better,” Spade was saying. “It gives a reason for taking the tie away. Let's go in and talk to people.”

Dundy stuffed the tie in one pocket, thrust his hand holding the pin into another. “Right —and we'll call it blood.”

They went into the living-room. Dundy looked from Bliss to Bliss's wife, to Bliss's niece, to the housekeeper, as if he did not like any of them. He took his fist from his pocket, thrust it straight out in front of him, and opened it to show the crescent pin lying in his hand. “What's that?” he demanded.

Miriam Bliss was the first to speak. “Why, it's Father's pin,” she said.

“So it is?” he said disagreeably. “And did he have it on today?”

“He always wore it.” She turned to the others for confirmation.

Mrs. Bliss said, “Yes,” while the others nodded.

“Where did you find it?” the girl asked.

Dundy was surveying them one by one again, as if he liked them less than ever. His face was red. “He always wore it,” he said angrily, “but there wasn't one of you could say, 'Father always wore a pin. Where is it?' No, we got to wait till it turns up before we can get a word out of you about it.”

Bliss said, “Be fair. How were we to know— ?”

“Never mind what you were to know,” Dundy said. “It's coming around to the point where I'm going to do some talking about what I know.” He took the green necktie from his pocket. “This is his tie?”

Mrs. Hooper said, “Yes, sir.”

Dundy said, “Well, it's got blood on it, and it's not his blood, because he didn't have a scratch on him that we could see.” He looked narrow-eyed from one to another of them. “Now, suppose you were trying to choke a man that wore a scarfpin and he was wrestling with you, and—”

He broke off to look at Spade.

Spade had crossed to where Mrs. Hooper was standing. Her big hands were clasped in front of her. He took her right hand, turned it over, took the wadded handkerchief from her palm, and there was a two-inch-long fresh scratch in the flesh.

She had passively allowed him to examine her hand. Her mien lost none of its tranquillity now. She said nothing.

“Well?” he asked.

“I scratched it on Miss Miriam's pin fixing her on the bed when she fainted,” the housekeeper said calmly.

Dundy's laugh was brief, bitter. “It'll hang you just the same,” he said.

There was no change in the woman's face. “The Lord's will be done,” she replied.:

Spade made a peculiar noise in his throat as he dropped her hand. “Well, let's see how we stand.” He grinned at Dundy. “You don't like that star-T, do you?”