“Does he know I’m here?” she asked quickly.
“Couldn’t say.” He stood up, pretending he was not watching her closely. “Do you care?”
She pinched her lower lip between her teeth, said, “No,” hesitantly.
“Fine. I’ll have him in.”
She raised a hand as if in protest, then let it drop, and her white face was composed. “Whatever you want,” she said.
Spade opened the door, said, “Hello, Colyer. Come on in. We were just talking about you.”
Colyer nodded, and came into the office holding his Malacca stick in one hand, his hat in the other. “How are you this morning, Julia? You ought to’ve phoned me. I’d’ve driven you back to town.”
“I – I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Colyer looked at her for a moment longer, then shifted the focus of his expressionless green eyes to Spade’s face. “Well, have you been able to convince her I didn’t do it?”
“We hadn’t got around to that,” Spade said. “I was just trying to find out how much reason there was for suspecting you. Sit down.”
Colyer sat down somewhat carefully, asked, “And?”
“And then you arrived.”
Colyer nodded gravely. “All right, Spade,” he said; “you’re hired again to prove to Mrs. Haven that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Gene,” she exclaimed in a choked voice, and held her hands out toward him appealingly. “I don’t think yon did – I don’t want to think you did – but I’m so afraid.” She put her hands to her face and began to cry.
Colyer went over to the woman. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ll kick it out together.”
Spade went into the outer office, shutting the door behind him.
Effie Ferine stopped typing a letter.
He grinned at her, said, “Somebody ought to write a book about people some time – they’re peculiar,” and went over to the water cooler. “You’ve got Wally Kellogg’s number. Call him up and ask him where I can find Tom Minera.”
He returned to the inner office.
Mrs. Haven had stopped crying. She said, “I’m sorry.”
Spade said, “It’s all right.” He looked sidewise at Colyer. “I still got my job?”
“Yes.” Colyer cleared his throat. “But if there’s nothing special right now, I’d better take Mrs. Haven home.”
“Okay, but there’s one thing: according to the Chronicle you identified him. How come you were down there?”
“I went down when I heard they’d found a body,” Colyer replied deliberately. “I told you I had connections.”
Spade said, “All right; be seeing you,” and opened the door for them.
When the corridor door closed behind them, Effie Ferine said, “Minera’s at the Buxton on Army Street.”
Spade said, “Thanks.” He went into the inner office to get his hat. On his way out he said, “If I’m not back in a couple of months tell them to look for my body there.”
Spade walked down a shabby corridor to a battered green door marked 411. The murmur of voices came through the door, but no words could be distinguished. He stopped listening and knocked.
An obviously disguised male voice asked, “What is it?”
“I want to see Tom. This is Sam Spade.”
A pause, then: “Tom ain’t here.”
Spade put a hand on the knob and shook the frail door. “Come on, open Hip,” he growled.
Presently the door was opened by a thin, dark man of twenty-five or -six who tried to make his beady dark eyes guileless while saying, “I didn’t think it was your voice at first.” The slackness of his mouth made his chin seem even smaller than it was. His green-striped shirt, open at the neck, was not clean. His gray pants were carefully pressed.
“You’ve got to be careful these days,” Spade said solemnly, and went through the doorway into a room where two men were trying to seem uninterested in his arrival.
One of them leaned against the window-sill filing his fingernails. The other was tilted back in a chair with his feet on the edge of a table and a newspaper spread between his hands. They glanced at Spade in unison and went on with their occupations.
Spade said cheerfully, “Always glad to meet any friends of Tom Minera’s.”
Minera finished shutting the door and said awkwardly, “Uh – yes – Mr. Spade, meet Mr. Conrad and Mr. James.”
Conrad, the man at the window, made a vaguely polite gesture with the nail file in his hand. He was a few years older than Minera, of average height, sturdily built, with a thick-featured, dull-eyed face.
James lowered his paper for an instant to look coolly, appraisingly, at Spade and say, “How’r’ye, brother?” Then he returned to his reading. He was as sturdily built as Conrad, but taller, and his face had a shrewdness the other’s lacked.
“Ah,” Spade said, “and friends of the late Eli Haven.”
The man at the window jabbed a finger with his nail file, and cursed it bitterly. Minera moistened his lips, and then spoke rapidly, with a whining note in his voice. “But on the level, Spade, we hadn’t none of us seen him for a week.”
Spade seemed mildly amused by the dark man’s manner.
“What do you think he was killed for?”
“All I know is what the paper says: his pockets was all turned inside out and there wasn’t much as a match on him.” He drew down the ends of his mouth. “But far as I know he didn’t have no dough. He didn’t have none Tuesday night.”
Spade, speaking softly, said, “I hear he got some Thursday night.”
Minera, behind Spade, caught his breath audibly.
James said, “I guess you ought to know. I don’t.”
“He ever work with you boys?”
James slowly put aside his newspaper and took his feet off the table. His interest in Spade’s question seemed great enough, but almost impersonal. “Now, what do you mean by that?”
Spade pretended surprise, “But you boys must work at something?”
Minera came around to Spade’s side. “Aw, listen, Spade,” he said. “This guy Haven was just a guy we knew. We didn’t have nothing to do with rubbing him out; we don’t know nothing about it. You know we -“
Three deliberate knocks sounded at the door.
Minera and Conrad looked at James, who nodded, but by then Spade, moving swiftly, had reached the door and was opening it.
Roger Ferris was there.
Spade blinked at Ferris, Ferris at Spade. Then Ferris put out his hand and said, “I am glad to see you.”
“Come on in,” Spade said.
“Look at this, Mr. Spade.” Ferris’s hand trembled as he took a slightly soiled envelope from his pocket.
Ferris’s name and address were typewritten on the envelope. There was no postage stamp on it. Spade took out the enclosure, a narrow slip of cheap white paper, and unfolded it. On it was typewritten:
You had better come to Room 411 Buxton Hotel on Army St at 5 pm this afternoon on account of Thursday night.
There was no signature.
Spade said, “It’s a long time before five o’clock.”
“It is,” Ferris agreed with emphasis. “I came as soon as I got that. It was Thursday night Eli was at my house.”
Minera was jostling Spade, asking, “What is all this?”
Spade held the note up for the dark man to read. He read it and yelled, “”Honest, Spade, I don’t know nothing about that letter.”
“Does anybody?” Spade asked.
Conrad said, “No,” hastily.
James said, “What letter?”
Spade looked dreamily at Ferris for a moment, then said, as if speaking to himself, “Of course, Haven was trying to shake you down.”