“What'd he want to see you about?” Dundy asked.
“I don't know. He didn't say. He said it was very important.”
“Didn't you get my message?” Spade asked.
Ira Binnett's eyes widened. “No. What was it? Has any-think happened? What is—“
Spade was moving toward the door. “Go ahead,” he said to Dundy. “I'll be right back.”
He shut the door carefully behind him and went up to the third floor.
The butler Jarboe was on his knees at Timothy Binnett's door with an eye to the keyhole. On the floor beside him was a tray holding an egg in an egg-cup, toast, a pot of coffee, china, silver, and a napkin.
Spade said: “Your toast's going to get cold.”
Jarboe, scrambling to his feet, almost upsetting the coffeepot in his haste, his face red and sheepish, stammered: “I—er—beg your pardon, sir. I wanted to make sure Mr. Timothy was awake before I took this in.” He picked up the tray. “I didn't want to disturb his rest if—“
Spade, who had reached the door, said, “Sure, sure,” and bent over to put his eye to the keyhole. When he straightened up he said in a mildly complaining tone: “You can't see the bed—only a chair and part of the window.”
The butler replied quickly: “Yes, sir, I found that out.”
Spade laughed.
The butler coughed, seemed about to say something, but did not. He hesitated, then knocked lightly on the door.
A tired voice said, “Come in.”
Spade asked quickly in a low voice: “Where's Miss Court?”
“In her room, I think, sir, the second door on the left,” the butler said.
The tired voice inside the room said petulantly: “Well, come on in.”
The butler opened the door and went in. Through the door, before the butler shut it, Spade caught a glimpse of Timothy Binnett propped up on pillows in his bed.
Spade went to the second door on the left and knocked. The door was opened almost immediately by Joyce Court. She stood in the doorway, not smiling, not speaking.
He said: “Miss Court, when you came into the room where I was with your brother-in-law you said, 'Wally, that old fool has—' Meaning Timothy?”
She stared at Spade for a moment. Then: “Yes.”
“Mind telling me what the rest of the sentence would have been?”
She said slowly: “I don't know who you really are or why you ask, but I don't mind telling you. It would have been 'sent for Ira.' Jarboe had just told me.”
“Thanks.”
She shut the door before he had turned away.
He returned to Timothy Binnett's door and knocked on it.
“Who is it now?” the old man's voice demanded.
Spade opened the door. The old man was sitting up in bed.
Spade said: “This Jarboe was peeping through your keyhole a few minutes ago,” and returned to the library.
Ira Binnett, seated in the chair Spade had occupied, was saying to Dundy and Polhaus: “And Wallace got caught in the crash, like most of us, but he seems to have juggled accounts trying to save himself. He was expelled from the Stock Exchange.”
Dundy waved a hand to indicate the room and its furnishings. “Pretty classy layout for a man that's busted.”
“His wife has some money,” Ira Binnett said, “and he always lived beyond his means.”
Dundy scowled at Binnett. “And you really think he and his missus weren't on good terms?”
“I don't think it,” Binnett replied evenly. “I know it.”
Dundy nodded. “And you know he's got a yen for the sister-in-law, this Court?”
“I don't know that. But I've heard plenty of gossip to the same effect.”
Dundy made a growling noise in his throat, then asked sharply: “How does the old man's will read?”
“I don't know. I don't know whether he's made one.” He addressed Spade, now earnestly: “I've told everything I know, every single thing.”
Dundy said, “It's not enough.” He jerked a thumb at the door. “Show him where to wait, Tom, and let's have the widower in again.”
Big Polhaus said, “Right,” went out with Ira Binnett, and returned with Wallace Binnett, whose face was hard and pale.
Dundy asked: “Has your uncle made a will?”
“I don't know,” Binnett replied.
Spade put the next question, softly: “Did your wife?”
Binnett's mouth tightened in a mirthless smile. He spoke deliberately: “I'm going to say some things I'd rather not have to say. My wife, properly, had no money. When I got into financial trouble some time ago I made some property over to her, to save it. She turned it into money without my knowing about it till afterwards. She paid our bills—our living expenses—out of it, but she refused to return it to me and she assured me that in no event—whether she lived or died or we stayed together or were divorced—would I ever be able to get hold of a penny of it. I believed her, and still do.”
“You wanted a divorce?” Dundy asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It wasn't a happy marriage.”
“Joyce Court?”
Binnett's face flushed. He said stiffly: “I admire Joyce Court tremendously, but I'd've wanted a divorce anyway.”
Spade said: “And you're sure —still absolutely sure—you don't know anybody who fits your uncle's description of the man who choked him?”
“Absolutely sure.”
The sound of the doorbell ringing came faintly into the room.
Dundy said sourly, “That'll do.”
Binnett went out.
Polhaus said: “That guy's as wrong as they make them. And—”
From below came the heavy report of a pistol fired indoors.
The lights went out.
In darkness the three detectives collided with one another going through the doorway into the dark hall. Spade reached the stairs first. There was a clatter of footsteps below him, but nothing could be seen until he reached a bend in the stairs. Then enough light came from the street through the open front door to show the dark figure of a man standing with his back to the open door.
A flashlight clicked in Dundy's hand—he was at Spade's heels—and threw a glaring white beam of light on the man's face. He was Ira Binnett. He blinked in the light and pointed at something on the floor in front of him.
Dundy turned the beam of his light down on the floor. Jarboe lay there on his face, bleeding from a bullet hole in the back of his head.
Spade grunted softly.
Tom Polhaus came blundering down the stairs, Wallace Binnett close behind him. Joyce Court's frightened voice came from farther up: “Oh, what's happened? Wally, what's happened?”
“Where's the light switch?” Dundy barked.
“Inside the cellar door, under these stairs,” Wallace Binnett said. “What is it?”
Polhaus pushed past Binnett towards the cellar door.
Spade made an inarticulate sound in his throat and, pushing Wallace Binnett aside, sprang up the stairs. He brushed past Joyce Court and went on, heedless of her startled scream. He was half way up the stairs to the third floor when the pistol went off up there.
He ran to Timothy Binnett's door. The door was open. He went in.
Something hard and angular struck him above his right ear, knocking him across the room, bringing him down on one knee. Something thumped and clattered on the floor just outside the door.
The lights came on.
On the floor, in the center of the room, Timothy Binnett lay on his back bleeding from a bullet wound in his left forearm. His pajama jacket was torn. His eyes were shut.
Spade stood up and put a hand to his head. He scowled at the old man on the floor, at the room, at the black automatic pistol lying on the hallway floor. He said: “Come on, you old cutthroat. Get up and sit on a chair and I'll see if I can stop that bleeding till the doctor gets here.”
The man on the floor did not move.
There were footsteps in the hallway and Dundy came in, followed by the two younger Binnetts. Dundy's face was dark and furious. “Kitchen door wide open,” he said in a choked voice. “They run in and out like—“
“Forget it,” Spade said. “Uncle Tim is our meat.” He paid no attention to Wallace Binnett's gasp, to the incredulous looks on Dundy's and Ira Binnett's faces. “Come on, get up,” he said to the old man on the floor, “and tell us what it was the butler saw when he peeped through the keyhole.”
The old man did not stir.
“He killed the butler because I told him the butler had peeped,” Spade explained to Dundy. “I peeped, too, but didn't see anything except that chair and the window, though we'd made enough racket by then to scare him back to bed. Suppose you take the chair apart while I go over the window.” He went to the window and began to examine it carefully. He shook his head, put a hand out behind him, and said: “Give me the flashlight.”
Dundy put the flashlight in his hand.
Spade raised the window and leaned out, turning the light on the outside of the building. Presently he grunted and put his other hand out, tugging at a brick a little below the sill. Presently the brick came loose. He put it on the window sill and stuck his hand into the hole its removal had made. Out of the opening, one at a time, he brought an empty black pistol holster, a partially filled box of cartridges, and an unsealed manila envelope.