The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [30]
Joel Cairo said indignantly: “That isn’t so. She—”
Spade interrupted him in a quite loud, but still genial, voice: “I hired her just recently, yesterday. This is Mr. Joel Cairo, a friend—an acquaintance, at any rate—of Thursby’s. He came to me this afternoon and tried to hire me to find something Thursby was supposed to have on him when he was bumped off. It looked funny, the way he put it to me, so I wouldn’t touch it. Then he pulled a gun—well, never mind that unless it comes to a point of laying charges against each other. Anyway, after talking it over with Miss O’Shaughnessy, I thought maybe I could get something out of him about Miles’s and Thursby’s killings, so I asked him to come up here. Maybe we put the questions to him a little rough, but he wasn’t hurt any, not enough to have to cry for help. I’d already had to take his gun away from him again.”
As Spade talked anxiety came into Cairo’s reddened face. His eyes moved jerkily up and down, shifting their focus uneasily between the floor and Spade’s bland face.
Dundy confronted Cairo and bruskly demanded: “Well, what’ve you got to say to that?”
Cairo had nothing to say for nearly a minute while he stared at the Lieutenant’s chest. When he lifted his eyes they were shy and wary. “I don’t know what I should say,” he murmured. His embarrassment seemed genuine.
“Try telling the facts,” Dundy suggested.
“The facts?” Cairo’s eye fidgeted, though their gaze did not actually leave the Lieutenant’s. “What assurance have I that the facts will be believed?”
“Quit stalling. All you’ve got to do is swear to a complaint that they took a poke at you and the warrant-clerk will believe you enough to issue a warrant that’ll let us throw them in the can.”
Spade spoke in an amused tone: “Go ahead, Cairo. Make him happy. Tell him you’ll do it, and then we’ll swear to one against you, and he’ll have the lot of us.”
Cairo cleared his throat and looked nervously around the room, not into the eyes of anyone there.
Dundy blew breath through his nose in a puff that was not quite a snort and said: “Get your hats.”
Cairo’s eyes, holding worry and a question, met Spade’s mocking gaze. Spade winked at him and sat on the arm of the padded rocker. “Well, boys and girls,” he said, grinning at the Levantine and at the girl with nothing but delight in his voice and grin, “we put it over nicely.”
Dundy’s hard square face darkened the least of shades. He repeated peremptorily: “Get your hats.”
Spade turned his grin on the Lieutenant, squirmed into a more comfortable position on the chair-arm, and asked lazily: “Don’t you know when you’re being kidded?”
Tom Polhaus’s face became red and shiny.
Dundy’s face, still darkening, was immobile except for lips moving stiffly to say: “No, but we’ll let that wait till we get down to the Hall.”
Spade rose and put his hands in his trousers-pockets. He stood erect so he might look that much farther down at the Lieutenant. His grin was a taunt and self-certainty spoke in every line of his posture.
“I dare you to take us in, Dundy,” he said. “We’ll laugh at you in every newspaper in San Francisco. You don’t think any of us is going to swear to any complaints against the others, do you? Wake up. You’ve been kidded. When the bell rang I said to Miss O’Shaughnessy and Cairo: ‘It’s those damned bulls again. They’re getting to be nuisances. Let’s play a joke on them. When you hear them going one of you scream, and then we’ll see how far we can string them along before they tumble.’ And—”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy bent forward in her chair and began to laugh hysterically.
Cairo started and smiled. There was no vitality in his smile, but he held it fixed on his face.
Tom, glowering, grumbled: “Cut it out, Sam.”
Spade chuckled and said: “But that’s the way it was. We—”
“And the cut on his head and mouth?” Dundy asked scornfully. “Where’d they come from?”
“Ask him,” Spade suggested. “Maybe he cut himself shaving.”
Cairo spoke quickly, before he could