Kindle Notes & Highlights
He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?” She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face. She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: “There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.”
Spade rocked back in his chair and asked: “Now what can I do for you, Miss Wonderly?” She caught her breath and looked at him. She swallowed and said hurriedly: “Could you—? I thought—I—that is—” Then she tortured her lower lip with glistening teeth and said nothing. Only her dark eyes spoke now, pleading. Spade smiled and nodded as if he understood her, but pleasantly, as if nothing serious were involved. He said: “Suppose you tell me about it, from the beginning, and then we’ll know what needs doing. Better begin as far back as you can.”
Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy, and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at windows.
“Are you going to marry Iva?” she asked, looking down at his pale brown hair. “Don’t be silly,” he muttered. The unlighted cigarette bobbed up and down with the movement of his lips. “She doesn’t think it’s silly. Why should she—the way you’ve played around with her?” He sighed and said: “I wish to Christ I’d never seen her.” “Maybe you do now.” A trace of spitefulness came into the girl’s voice. “But there was a time.” “I never know what to do or say to women except that way,” he grumbled,
Cairo, speaking with difficulty because of the fingers on his throat, said: “This is the second time you’ve put your hands on me.” His eyes, though the throttling pressure on his throat made them bulge, were cold and menacing. “Yes,” Spade growled. “And when you’re slapped you’ll take it and like it.”
“Uh-huh. I could’ve butchered Miles to get his wife, and then Thursby so I could hang Miles’s killing on him. That’s a hell of a swell system, or will be when I can give somebody else the bump and hang Thursby’s on them. How long am I supposed to keep that up? Are you going to put your hand on my shoulder for all the killings in San Francisco from now on?”
He wiped his lips with his napkin, dropped it crumpled on the table, and spoke casually: “You are a liar.” She got up and stood at the end of the table, looking down at him with dark abashed eyes in a pinkening face. “I am a liar,” she said. “I have always been a liar.” “Don’t brag about it. It’s childish.”
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.
“That’s the third time she’s called up this morning,” she told Spade. He made an impatient growling noise.
“You’ll have to trot along, precious. I’m late for an appointment now. You do what you want, but if I were you I’d tell Sid the truth or nothing. I mean leave out the parts you don’t want to tell him, but don’t make up anything to take its place.”
Spade went in. A fat man came to meet him. The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.
“I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.”
The fat man leaned forward until his belly stopped him. His smile was ingratiating and so was his purring voice.
Spade didn’t speak until he had with great care rolled and lighted another cigarette. Then he said: “I think that’s an all right spread. It seems to click with most of the known facts. It ought to hold.” Wise’s fingers, running through his hair again, combed more dandruff down on his shoulders. He studied Spade’s face with curious eyes and asked: “But you don’t believe it?” Spade plucked his cigarette from between his lips. “I don’t believe it or disbelieve it, Sid. I don’t know a damned thing about it.”
They sat close together, her head against his left shoulder, his left arm around her shoulders. She had stopped trembling, had stopped panting. The appearance of Gutman and his companions seemed to have robbed her of that freedom of personal movement and emotion that is animal, leaving her alive, conscious, but quiescent as a plant.
Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness.
“That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.”
All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.” “You know,” she whispered, “whether you do or not.” “I don’t. It’s easy enough to be nuts about you.”
