The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [37]
The boy put his paper down quickly and faced Spade, staring at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. The boy’s small hands were spread flat over his belly. “Keep asking for it and you’re going to get it,” he said, “plenty.” His voice was low and flat and menacing. “I told you to shove off. Shove off.”
Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and a thin-legged blonde girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and said: “That would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But you’re not in Romeville now. You’re in my burg.” He inhaled cigarette-smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. “Well, where is he?”
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”
“People lose teeth talking like that.” Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. “If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.”
The boy repeated his two words.
Spade dropped his cigarette into a tall stone jar beside the divan and with a lifted hand caught the attention of a man who had been standing at an end of the cigar-stand for several minutes. The man nodded and came towards them. He was a middle-aged man of medium height, round and sallow of face, compactly built, tidily dressed in dark clothes.
“Hello, Sam,” he said as he came up.
“Hello, Luke.”
They shook hands and Luke said: “Say, that’s too bad about Miles.”
“Uh-huh, a bad break.” Spade jerked his head to indicate the boy on the divan beside him. “What do you let these cheap gunmen hang out in your lobby for, with their tools bulging their clothes?”
“Yes?” Luke examined the boy with crafty brown eyes set in a suddenly hard face. “What do you want here?” he asked.
The boy stood up. Spade stood up. The boy looked at the two men, at their neckties, from one to the other. Luke’s necktie was black. The boy looked like a schoolboy standing in front of them.
Luke said: “Well, if you don’t want anything, beat it, and don’t come back.”
The boy said, “I won’t forget you guys,” and went out.
They watched him go out. Spade took off his hat and wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief.
The hotel-detective asked: “What is it?”
“Damned if I know,” Spade replied. “I just happened to spot him. Know anything about Joel Cairo—six-thirty-five?”
“Oh, that one!” The hotel-detective leered.
“How long’s he been here?”
“Four days. This is the fifth.”
“What about him?”
“Search me, Sam. I got nothing against him but his looks.”
“Find out if he came in last night?”
“Try to,” the hotel-detective promised and went away. Spade sat on the divan until he returned. “No,” Luke reported, “he didn’t sleep in his room. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Come clean. You know I’ll keep my clam shut, but if there’s anything wrong we ought to know about it so’s we can collect our bill.”
“Nothing like that,” Spade assured him. “As a matter of fact, I’m doing a little work for him. I’d tell you if he was wrong.”
“You’d better. Want me to kind of keep an eye on him?”
“Thanks, Luke. It wouldn’t hurt. You can’t know too much about the men you’re working for these days.”
It was twenty-one minutes past eleven by the clock over the elevator-doors when Joel Cairo came in from the street. His forehead was bandaged. His clothes had the limp unfreshness of too many hours’ consecutive wear. His face was pasty, with sagging mouth and eyelids.
Spade met him in front of the desk. “Good morning,” Spade said easily.
Cairo drew his tired body up straight and the drooping lines of his face tightened. “Good morning,” he responded without enthusiasm.
There was a pause.
Spade said: “Let’s go some place where we can talk.”
Cairo raised his chin. “Please excuse me,” he said. “Our conversations in private have not been such that I am anxious to continue them. Pardon my speaking bluntly, but it is the truth.”
“You mean last night?” Spade made an impatient gesture with head and hands. “What in hell else could I do? I thought you’d see that. If you pick a fight with her, or let her pick one with you, I’ve got to throw in with her. I don’t know where that damned bird is. You don