The Adventures Of Sam Spade - Hammett Dashiell. Страница 23

Hubert Landow, who had returned to his chair, now jerked in it so that its joints creaked strainingly. His face, crimson a second ago, drained paperwhite. Another sound than the chair's creaking was faint in the room: the least of muffled gasps. The blond young man did not seem to hear it, but Alec Rush's bloodshot eyes flicked sidewise for an instant to focus fleetingly on a closed door across the room.

Landow was out of his chair again, leaning down to the detective, his fingers digging into the ugly man's loose muscular shoulders.

“This is horrible!” he was crying. “We've got to—”

The door at which the detective had looked a moment ago opened. A beautiful tall girl came through—Sara Landow. Her hair rumpled, was an auburn cloud around her white face. Her eyes were dead things. She walked slowly toward the men, her body inclined a little forward, as if against a strong wind.

“It's no use, Hubert.” Her voice was dead as her eyes. “We may as well face it. It's Madeline Boudin. She has found out that I killed my uncle.”

“Hush, darling, hush!” Landow caught his wife in his arms and tried to soothe her with a caressing hand on her shoulder. “You don't know what you're saying.”

“Oh, but I do.” She shrugged herself listlessly out of his arms and sat in the chair Alec Rush had just vacated. “It's Madeline Boudin, you know it is. She knows I killed Uncle Jerome.”

Landow whirled to the detective, both hands going out to grip the ugly man's arm.

“You won't listen to what she's saying, Rush?” he pleaded. “She hasn't been well. She doesn't know what she's saying.”

Sara Landow laughed with weary bitterness.

“Haven't been well?” she said. “No, I haven't been well, not since I killed him. How could I be well after that? You are a detective.” Her eyes lifted their emptiness to Alec Rush. “Arrest me. I killed Jerome Falsoner.”

Alec Rush, standing arms akimbo, legs apart, scowled at her, saying nothing.

“You can't, Rush!” Landow was tugging at the detective's arm again. “You can't, man. It's ridiculous! You—”

“Where does this Madeline Boudin fit in?” Alec Rush's harsh voice demanded. “I know she was chummy with Jerome, but why should she want your wife killed?”

Landow hesitated, shifting his feet, and when he replied it was reluctantly.

“She was Jerome's mistress, had a child by him. My wife, when she learned of it, insisted on making her a settlement out of the estate. It was in connection with that that I went to see her yesterday.”

“Yeah. Now to get back to Jerome: you and your wife were supposed to be in her apartment at the time he was killed, if I remember right?”

Sara Landow sighed with spiritless impatience.

“Must there be all this discussion?” she asked in a small, tired voice. “I killed him. No one else killed him. No one else was there when I killed him. I stabbed him with the paper-knife when he attacked me, and he said, 'Don't! Don't!' and began to cry, down on his knees, and I ran out.”

Alec Rush looked from the girl to the man. Landow's face was wet with perspiration, his hands were white fists, and something quivered in his chest. When he spoke his voice was as hoarse as the detective's, if not so loud.

“Sara, will you wait here until I come back? I'm going out for a little while, possibly an hour. You'll wait here and not do anything until I return?”

“Yes,” the girl said, neither curiosity nor interest in her voice. “But it's no use, Hubert. I should have told you in the beginning. It's no use.”

“Just wait for me, Sara,” he pleaded, and then bent his head to the detective's deformed ear. “Stay with her, Rush, for God's sake!” he whispered, and went swiftly out of the room.

The front door banged shut. An automobile purred away from the house. Alec Rush spoke to the girl.

“Where's the phone?”

“In the next room,” she said, without looking up from the handkerchief her ringers were measuring.

The detective crossed to the door through which she had entered the room, found that it opened into a library, where a telephone stood in a corner. On the other side of the room a clock indicated three-thirty-five. The detective went to the telephone and called Ralph Millar's office, asked for Millar, and told him:

“This is Rush. I'm at the Landows'. Come up right away.”

“But I can't, Rush. Can't you understand my —”

“Can't hell!” croaked Alec Rush. “Get here quick!” The young woman with dead eyes, still playing with the hem of her handkerchief, did not look up when the ugly man returned to the room. Neither of them spoke. Alec Rush, standing with his back to a window, twice took out his watch to glare savagely at it.

The faint tingling of the doorbell came from below. The detective went across to the hall door and down the front stairs, moving with heavy swiftness. Ralph Millar, his face a field in which fear and embarrassment fought, stood in the vestibule, stammering something Unintelligible to the maid who had opened the door. Alec Rush put the girl brusquely aside, brought Millar in, guided him upstairs.

“She says she killed Jerome,” he muttered into his client's ear as they mounted.

Ralph Millar's face went dreadfully white, but there was no surprise in it.

“You knew she killed him?” Alec Rush growled. Millar tried twice to speak and made no sound. They were on the second-floor landing before the words came. “I saw her on the street that night, going toward his flat!”

Alec Rush snorted viciously and turned the younger man toward the room where Sara Landow sat.

“Landow's out,” he whispered hurriedly. “I'm going out. Stay with her. She's shot to hell—likely to do anything if she's left alone. If Landow gets back before I do, tell him to wait for me.”

Before Millar could voice the confusion in his face they were across the sill and into the room. Sara Landow raised her head. Her body was lifted from the chair as if by an invisible power. She came up tall and erect on her feet. Millar stood just inside the door. They looked eye into eye, posed each as if in the grip of a force pushing them together, another holding them apart.

Alec Rush hurried clumsily and silently down to the street.

In Mount Royal Avenue, Alec Rush saw the blue roadster at once. It was standing empty before the apartment building in which Madeline Boudin lived. The detective drove past it and turned his coupe in to the curb three blocks below. He had barely come to rest there when Landow ran out of the apartment building, jumped into his car, and drove off. He drove to a Charles Street hotel. Behind him went the detective.

In the hotel, Landow walked straight to the writing room. For half an hour he sat there, bending over a desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper with rapidly written words, while the detective sat behind a newspaper in a secluded angle of the lobby, watching the writing-room exit. Landow came out of the room stuffing a thick envelope in his pocket, left the hotel, got into his machine, and drove to the office of a messenger service company in St. Paul Street. . He remained in this office for five minutes. When he came out he ignored his roadster at the curb, walking instead to Calvert Street, where he boarded a northbound street-car. Alec Rush's coupe rolled along behind the car. At Union Station, Landow left the street-car and went to the ticket window. He had just asked for a one-way ticket to Philadelphia when Alec Rush tapped him on the shoulder.

Hubert Landow turned slowly, the money for his ticket still in his hand. Recognition brought no expression to his handsome face.

“Yes,” he said coolly, “what is it?”

Alec Rush nodded his ugly head at the ticket-window, at the money in Landow's hand.

“This is nothing for you to be doing,” he growled.

“Here you are,” the ticket-seller said through his grille. Neither of the men in front paid any attention to him. A large woman in pink, red and violet, jostling Landow, stepped on his foot and pushed past him to the window. Landow stepped back, the detective following.