The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [56]
“I saw the smoke. Be reasonable, Sam. Dundy was wrong and he knows it. Why don’t you let it go at that?”
“Think I ought to go around and tell him I hope my chin didn’t hurt his fist?”
Polhaus cut savagely into his pig’s foot.
Spade said: “Phil Archer been in with any more hot tips?”
“Aw, hell! Dundy didn’t think you shot Miles, but what else could he do except run the lead down? You’d’vd done the same thing in his place, and you know it.”
“Yes?” Malice glittered in Spade’s eyes. “What made him think I didn’t do it? What makes you think I didn’t? Or don’t you?”
Polhaus’s ruddy face flushed again. He said: “Thursby shot Miles.”
“You think he did.”
“He did. That Webley was his, and the slug in Miles came out of it.”
“Sure?” Spade demanded.
“Dead sure,” the police-detective replied. “We got hold of a kid—a bellhop at Thursby’s hotel—that had seen it in his room just that morning. He noticed it particular because he’d never saw one just like it before. I never saw one. You say they don’t make them any more. It ain’t likely there’d be another around and—anyway—if that wasn’t Thursby’s what happened to his? And that’s the gun the slug in Miles come out of.” He started to put a piece of bread into his mouth, withdrew it, and asked:
“You say you’ve seen them before: where was that at?” He put the bread into his mouth.
“In England before the war.”
“Sure, there you are.”
Spade nodded and said: “Then that leaves Thursby the only one I killed.”
Polhaus squirmed in his chair and his face was red and shiny. “Christ’s sake, ain’t you never going to forget that?” he complained earnestly. “That’s out. You know it as well as I do. You’d think you wasn’t a dick yourself the way you bellyache over things. I suppose you don’t never pull the same stuff on anybody that we pulled on you?”
“You mean that you tried to pull on me, Tom—just tried.”
Polhaus swore under his breath and attacked the remainder of his pig’s foot.
Spade said: “All right. You know it’s out and I know it’s out. What does Dundy know?”
“He knows it’s out.”
“What woke him up?”
“Aw, Sam, he never really thought you’d—” Spade’s smile checked Polhaus. He left the sentence incomplete and said: “We dug up a record on Thursby.”
“Yes? Who was he?”
Polhaus’s shrewd small brown eyes studied Spade’s face. Spade exclaimed irritably: “I wish to God I know half as much about this business as you smart guys think I do!”
“I wish we all did,” Polhaus grumbled. “Well, he was a St. Louis gunman the first we hear of him. He was picked up a lot of times back there for this and that, but he belonged to the Egan mob, so nothing much was ever done about any of it. I don’t know howcome he left that shelter, but they got him once in New York for knocking over a row of stuss-games—his twist turned him up—and he was in a year before Fallon got him sprung. A couple of years later he did a short hitch in Joliet for pistol-whipping another twist that had given him the needle, but after that he took up with Dixie Monahan and didn’t have any trouble getting out whenever he happened to get in. That was when Dixie was almost as big a shot as Nick the Greek in Chicago gambling. This Thursby was Dixie’s bodyguard and he took the run-out with him when Dixie got in wrong with the rest of the boys over some debts he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay off. That was a couple of years back—about the time the Newport Beach Boating Club was shut up. I don’t know if Dixie had any part in that. Anyways, this is the first time him or Thursby’s been seen since.”
“Dixie’s been seen?” Spade asked.
Polhaus shook his head. “No.” His small eyes became sharp, prying. “Not unless you’ve seen him or know somebody’s seen him.”
Spade lounged back in his chair and began to make a cigarette. “I haven’t,” he said mildly. “This is all new stuff to me.”
“I guess it is,” Polhaus snorted.
Spade grinned at him and asked: “Where’d you pick up all this news about Thursby?”
“Some of it’s on the records. The rest—well—we got it here and there.”
“From Cairo, for instance?” Now Spade’s eyes held the prying gleam.
Polhaus