The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [63]
Spade rose and went to the washbowl in the outer office.
Effie Perine, wan and trembling and holding herself upright by means of a hand on the corridor-door’s knob and her back against its glass, whispered: “Is—is he—?”
“Yes. Shot through the chest, maybe half a dozen times.” Spade began to wash his hands.
“Oughtn’t we—?” she began, but he cut her short: “It’s too late for a doctor now and I’ve got to think before we do anything.” He finished washing his hands and began to rinse the bowl. “He couldn’t have come far with those in him. If he— Why in hell couldn’t he had stood up long enough to say something?” He frowned at the girl, rinsed his hands again, and picked up a towel. “Pull yourself together. For Christ’s sake don’t get sick on me now!” He threw the towel down and ran fingers through his hair. “We’ll have a look at that bundle.”
He went into the inner office again, stepped over the dead man’s legs, and picked up the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. When he felt its weight his eyes glowed. He put it on his desk, turning it over so that the knotted part of the rope was uppermost. The knot was hard and tight. He took out his pocket-knife and cut the rope.
The girl had left the door and, edging around the dead man with her face turned away, had come to Spade’s side. As she stood there—hands on a corner of the desk—watching him pull the rope loose and push aside brown paper, excitement began to supplant nausea in her face. “Do you think it is?” she whispered.
“We’ll soon know,” Spade said, his big fingers busy with the inner husk of coarse grey paper, three sheets thick, that the brown paper’s removal had revealed. His face was hard and dull. His eyes were shining. When he had put the grey paper out of the way he had an egg-shaped mass of pale excelsior, wadded tight. His fingers tore the wad apart and then he had the foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal and shiny where its polish was not dulled by wood-dust and fragments of excelsior.
Spade laughed. He put a hand down on the bird. His widespread fingers had ownership in their curving. He put his other arm around Effie Perine and crushed her body against his. “We’ve got the damned thing, angel,” he said.
“Ouch!” she said, “you’re hurting me.”
He took his arm away from her, picked the black bird up in both hands, and shook it to dislodge clinging excelsior. Then he stepped back holding it up in front of him and blew dust off it, regarding it triumphantly.
Effie Perine made a horrified face and screamed, pointing at his feet.
He looked down at his feet. His last backward step had brought his left heel into contact with the dead man’s hand, pinching a quarter-inch of flesh at a side of the palm between heel and floor. Spade jerked his foot away from the hand.
The telephone-bell rang.
He nodded at the girl. She turned to the desk and put the receiver to her ear. She said: “Hello…. Yes…. Who? … Oh, yes!” Her eyes became large. “Yes…. Yes…. Hold the line....” Her mouth suddenly stretched wide and fearful. She cried: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” She rattled the prong up and down and cried, “Hello!” twice. Then she sobbed and spun around to face Spade, who was close beside her by now. “It was Miss O’Shaughnessy,” she said wildly. “She wants you. She’s at the Alexandria—in danger. Her voice was—oh, it was awful, Sam!—and something happened to her before she could finish. Go help her, Sam!”
Spade put the falcon down on the desk and scowled gloomily. “I’ve got to take care of this fellow first,” he said, pointing his thumb at the thin corpse on the floor.
She beat his chest with her fists, crying: “No, no—you’ve got to go to her. Don’t you see, Sam? He had the thing that was hers and he came to you with it. Don’t you see? He was helping her and they killed him and now she’s— Oh, you’ve got to go!”
“All right.” Spade pushed her away and bent over his desk, putting the black bird back into its nest of excelsior,