Joe Gores - Spade & Archer

“Not involved. Defrauded. As Eberhard’s heir, she would step into his controlling interest in the bank and could demand to see the books. If they showed Eberhard was ruined, she would get the insurance money and nothing more. And be glad to get it. If he wasn’t ruined, then somebody’s been cooking the books.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“There’s something I can do about it,” said Spade.

When the key turned in the lock, Spade was sitting in Penny’s easy chair reading the clippings about Eberhard’s death. His empty coffee mug was perched on one frayed arm of the chair.

Penny came through the door, turned and closed and locked it before she registered that the lights were on. She whirled, her face going deathly pale and her mouth becoming a round O of terror when she saw someone sitting in the armchair.

“Don’t yell. You’ll wake little Jenny across the hall.”

She recognized him. Fire replaced fear in her eyes.

“I thought I could trust you! Instead you followed me here after you promised you wouldn’t. You lied to me.”

“As you lied to me.” Spade tossed the clippings back onto the magazine stand, stood up, and carried his empty mug around the linoleum-topped counter to the tiny kitchen. He refilled his mug from the pot on the stove, raised it. “Coffee?”

Penny shook her head. Her eyes were hostile. He poured a second mug anyway, set his on the counter, hers on the chair arm.

She burst out, “What do you mean I lied to you? I didn’t want you to know where I lived, but I told you where I worked.”

“You haven’t worked there for a month,” said Spade.

Her magnificent dark eyes dulled. Moving like a suddenly old woman, she groped her way to the armchair, sat, and then, despite her refusal, began greedily drinking thick, hot coffee.

“Let’s stop playing games,” said Spade in a softer voice. “Let’s stop accusing each other of things. Just tell me the truth, Penny, so I’ll know what I’m dealing with.”

“I have been telling you the truth!”

Spade snatched up the sheaf of clippings on the Eberhard death from the magazine table beside her chair. “These say you’re lying.” He slammed them down again. “To your mother. To Effie. To me. To everyone. Want me to list all the lies?”

“They weren’t lies. They were—”

“One” — Spade folded in his left thumb — “the Turk that’s supposed to be following you. There is no Turk.” He folded down his forefinger. “Two. The chest of Bergina. Maybe there is a chest. Maybe your father even wrote to you about it. But it has nothing to do with you either way.” He folded down his index finger. “Three. You told me you were a secretary at Hartford and Cole. You started out that way right enough, but by the time you quit you were a de facto broker.” He folded down the ring finger. “Four. You told Cole you had to care for your aged father. Your father is dead.” The little finger. “Five—”

“Stop it!” she cried.

“Five,” he repeated inexorably, his left hand now a closed fist. “You moved in here under a false name — Julia Drosos.”

He opened his left hand, then folded in his right thumb.

“Six. You told Beverly Donant across the hall that your mother had died down in Santa Barbara and you had come up here because being there made you sad.” Folded the right forefinger. “Seven. You told her you were looking for work as a nanny for little children like her Jenny.” Right index finger. “Eight.”

Her mouth twisted with some deep emotion, perhaps anger.

“What about your lies to Beverly? That you were looking for someone to take care of the small children of a wealthy family outside the city? I should have known better, but I so much wanted to get away from here and be safe and—”

She stopped, on the edge of tears. The harsh lines drawn in Spade’s face eased. His voice was once again soft.

“You’re right. Seven lies are plenty.” He took a turn around the room, stopped in front of her again. “But don’t you see? Now that we’ve cut through all the evasions, you have to tell me the truth.”

“I–I have nothing to tell you.”

Spade rolled and lit his first cigarette since she had entered the room. He looked at her through the drifting smoke.

“OK, I’ll tell you.”

He swept the clippings off the magazine stand and sat down on the edge of it so he could loom over her.

“Three years ago your father was killed in Anatolia — unless that’s a lie too. Anyway, the money stopped. Your mother had to take in boarders. You moved out, found a room somewhere, and became a secretary for Hartford and Cole, who specialized in timber and mineral stocks — copper, tin, silver, gold.”

Animation lit her face. “I told Effie I was working—”

“Yeah. But not where. And not where you were living. You had a head for the business, so pretty soon you were handling bits and pieces of some of Hartford and Cole’s accounts like a bona fide broker. ‘Near as damn to swearing’ is the way Cole put it to me. One of the accounts was Eberhard’s.”

“Even if that were so, it doesn’t mean that I—”

“Of course it does.” He dropped the butt of his cigarette hissing into her half-empty mug. “Eberhard started an affair with you, God knows it would be easy enough to want to, and then told them he wanted you handling more of his work.”

Penny put her hands over her ears, as if she didn’t want to hear him. Spade gave a jeering laugh and leaned closer still and put even more steel into his voice.

“He came to trust you. To tell you things he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell his wife. She knew he had a mistress. A few months ago she wanted to hire me to find out who you were, to save her marriage. Now she wants me to find you and throw you to the wolves. I think you knew that the money Devlin St. James was investing wasn’t coming from any gold mines. I think you know, or at least suspect, maybe from things Eberhard had told you, that Eberhard was murdered.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head.

“Hear no evil? See no evil? Speak no evil?” He gave his jeering laugh again. “Not this time, sister. You came to me in the first place because Effie had told you I was looking into the Eberhard death, and you either wanted to sidetrack me or use me as protection against whoever’s out there looking for you.”

She raised her eyes to his. “I don’t know anything.”

He stared at her for long moments, then frustration and anger faded to resignation. He put a thick, wedge-shaped hand under her chin and raised her face so she had to look up at him from clear dark eyes. He bent and gently kissed her on the lips.

“Good-bye, Penny,” he said.

When Effie Perine entered Sam Spade’s inner office the next morning at 8 o’clock, he was slouched behind his desk, dull eyed, smoking a cigarette. The bottle of Manhattan cocktail that was usually in the lower drawer stood empty on the desk. A dozen paper cups were crumpled in the wastebasket beside it. Butts overflowed the ashtray onto the blotter. The open window behind Spade’s head swirled and eddied ash like wind from the bay eddied the summer fog on Mission Street below the window.

Spade raised bloodshot eyes at her entrance. His face was lined. The hand holding his smoked-down cigarette shook slightly when he smeared it out among the other butts in the ashtray.

“ ‘Lo, snip,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice. “I got hootched up like a bat last night.”

“I never would have known.” Then her sprightly voice changed to gravity. “Any reason?”

He didn’t speak. She dropped the bottle into the half-full wastebasket, followed it with the butts from the ashtray. She took a cloth draped over the S-shaped pipe under the sink and wiped the ash off the desk. Spade’s bloodshot eyes followed her as she started for the door with the wastebasket.