Ferris’s face reddened. “What?”
“Shakedown,” Spade repeated patiently; “money, blackmail.”
“Look here, Spade,” Ferris said earnestly; “you don’t really believe what yon said? What would he have to blackmail me on?”
“’To good old Buck,’” – Spade quoted the dead poet’s inscription – “’who knew his coloured lights, in memory of them there days.’” He looked sombrely at Ferris from beneath slightly raised brows. “What coloured lights? What’s the circus and carnival slang term for kicking a guy off a train while it’s going? Red-lighting. Sure, that’s it-red lights. Who’d you red-light, Ferris, that Haven knew about?”
Minera went over to a chair, sat down, put his elbows on his knees, his head between his hands, and stared blankly at the floor. Conrad was breathing as if he had been running.
Spade addressed Ferris, “Well?”
Ferris wiped his face with a handkerchief, put the handkerchief in his pocket, and said simply, “It was a shakedown.”
“And you killed him.”
Ferris’s blue eyes, looking into Spade’s yellow-gray ones, were clear and steady, as was his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I swear I did not. Let me tell you what happened. He sent me the book, as I told you, and I knew right away what that joke he wrote in the front meant. So the next day, when he phoned me and said he was coming over to talk over old times and to try to borrow some money for old times’ sake, I knew what he meant again, and I went down to the bank and drew out ten thousand dollars. You can check that up. It’s the Seaman’s National.”
“I will,” Spade said.
“As it turned out, I didn’t need that much. He wasn’t very big-time, and I talked him into taking five thousand. I put the other five back in the bank next day. You can check that up.”
“I will,” Spade said.
“I told him I wasn’t going to stand for any more taps, this five thousand was the first and the last. I made him sign a paper saying he’d helped in the – what I’d done – and he signed it. He left some time around midnight, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.”
Spade tapped the envelope that Ferris had given him. “And how about this note?”
“A messenger boy brought it at noon, and I came right over. Eli had assured me he hadn’t said anything to anybody, but I didn’t know. I had to face it, whatever it was.”
Spade turned to the others, his face wooden. “Well?”
Minera and Conrad looked at James, who made an impatient grimace and said, “Oh, sure, we sent him the letter. Why not? We was friends of Eli’s and we hadn’t been able to find him since he went to put the squeeze to this baby, and then he turns up dead, so we kind of like to have the gent come over and explain things.”
“You knew about the squeeze?”
“Sure. We was all together when he got the idea.”
“How’d he happen to get the idea?” Spade asked.
James spread the fingers of his left hand. “We’d been drinking and talking – you know the way a bunch of guys will, about all they’d seen and done – and he told a yarn about once seeing a guy boot another off a train into a canon, and he happens to mention the name of the guy that done the booting – Buck Ferris. And somebody says, ‘What’s this Ferris look like?’ Eli tells him what he looked like then, saying he ain’t seen him for fifteen years; and whoever it is whistles ‘and says, ‘I bet that’s the Ferris that owns about half the movie joints in the state. I bet you he’d give something to keep that back trail covered!’
“Well, the idea kind of hit Eli. You could see that. He thought a little while and then he got cagey. He asked what this movie Ferris’s first name is, and when the other guy tells him, ‘Roger,’ he makes out he’s disappointed and says, ‘No, it ain’t him. His first name was Martin.’ We all give him the ha-ha and he finally admits he’s thinking of seeing the gent, and when he called me up Thursday around noon and says he’s throwing a party at Pogey Hecker’s that night, it ain’t no trouble to figure out what’s what.”
“What was the name of the gentleman who was red-lighted?”
“He wouldn’t say. He shut up tight. You couldn’t blame him.”
“Then nothing. He never showed up at Fogey’s. We tried to get him on the phone around two o’clock in the morning, but his wife said he hadn’t been home, so we stuck around till four or five and then decided he had given us a run-around, and made Pogey charge the bill to him, and beat it. I ain’t seen him since – dead or alive.”
Spade said mildly. “Maybe. Sure you didn’t find Eli later that morning, taking him riding, swap him bullets for Ferris’s five thou, dump him in the -?”
A sharp double knock sounded on the door.
Spade’s face brightened. He went to the door and opened it.
A young man came in. He was very dapper, and very well proportioned. He wore a light topcoat and his hands were in its pockets. Just inside the door he stepped to the right, and stood with his back to the wall.
By that time another young man was coming in. He stepped to the left. Though they did not actually look alike, their common dapperness, the similar trimness of their bodies, and their almost identical positions – back to wall, hands in pockets, cold, bright eyes studying the occupants of the room – gave them the appearance of twins.
Then Gene Colyer came in. He nodded at Spade, but paid no attention t© the others in the room, though James said, “Hello, Gene.”
“Anything new?” Colyer asked Spade.
Spade nodded. “It seems this gentleman” – he jerked a thumb at Ferris -“ was -“
“Any place we can talk?”
“There’s a kitchen back here.”
Colyer snapped a “Smear anybody that pops” over his shoulder at the two dapper young men and followed Spade into the kitchen. He sat on the one kitchen chair and stared with unblinking green eyes at Spade while Spade told him what he had learned.
When the private detective had finished, the green-eyed man asked, “Well, what do you make of it?”
Spade looked thoughtfully at the other, “You’ve picked up something. I’d like to know what it is.”
Colyer said, “They found the gun in a stream a quarter of a mile from where they found him. It’s James’s – got the mark on it where it was shot out of his hand once in Vallejo.”
“That’s nice,” Spade said.
“Listen. A kid named Thurston says James comes to him last Wednesday and gets him to tail Haven. Thurston picks him up Thursday afternoon, puts him in at Ferris’s, and phones James. James tells him to take a plant on the place and let him know where Haven goes when he leaves, but some nervous woman in the neighbourhood puts in a ruble about the kid hanging around, and the cops chase him along about ten o’clock.”
Spade pursed his lips and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling.
Colyer’s eyes were expressionless, but sweat made his round face shiny, and his voice was hoarse. “Spade,” he said, “I’m going to turn him in.”
Spade switched his gaze from the ceiling to the protuberant green eyes.
“I’ve never turned in one of my people before,” Colyer said, “but this one goes. Julia’s got to believe I hadn’t anything to do with it if it’s one of my people and I turn him in, hasn’t she?”
Spade nodded slowly. “I think so.”
Colyer suddenly averted his eyes and cleared his throat. When he spoke again it was curtly. “Well, he goes.”
Minera, James, and Conrad were seated when Spade and Colyer came out of the kitchen. Ferris was walking the floor. The two dapper young men had not moved.
Colyer went over to James. “Where’s your gun, Louis?” he asked.
James moved his right hand a few inches toward his left breast, stopped it, and said, “Oh, I didn’t bring it.”