Joe Gores - Spade & Archer

Wise spoke tonelessly without turning. “The San An selmo. Still chasing ghosts, Sam?”

“St. Clair McPhee, Devlin St. James. Whatever name he uses he’s no ghost, Sid.”

“After all this time he might as well be.”

“We’ll see about that.” Then Spade drew a deep, dismissive breath, gestured at the office door through which Miles Archer had departed. “So what do you think of him, Sid?”

Only then did Wise swivel his chair around to face Spade.

“Same as you do, Sammy. He’s dumb as a post and greedy as a lawyer.”

“Here lies a lawyer, an honest man.”

“Why’d they bury them in the same grave? I’ve heard that one.” Wise retrieved his half-smoked cigar from the ashtray. He relit it, carefully turning it to get it burning evenly again. “I don’t trust him, Sam.”

“Nor do I, but he’s damned good at what he does. He turned up a lot of Commies for the Burns Agency in Seattle.”

“How many were Commies just because he said they were?”

Spade nodded to that thoughtfully. Wise blew out a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke.

“I hear he’s got a blond wife that’s a knockout.” He added deadpan, “Originally from Spokane.”

“Yeah, I knew her up there,” Spade said shortly.

“You don’t need him, Sam, but now you’re stuck with him for a year. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ve got an expensive suite of offices in the heart of the financial district, Sid. Half the politicians and the big rich in this town would like to see me in jail, but every once in a while they need me because I’m the only one they can trust to sweep up the breakage and keep my mouth shut.”

“If you’d had too much work for one man you could have just hired extra ops from Continental. You didn’t have to take in Archer as a partner. Three years ago when he hinted around at it you turned him down flat. Now...”

Spade leaned back in his chair, feathered smoke through his nostrils, said, “The Blue Book union. The boys who got control of the docks and crushed the trade unions after the war.”

“They hate your guts, you hate their guts. You’re trying to tell me that they want to hire you?”

“Not directly. But last week I was summoned by Ralph Toomey at Matson Shipping. He was speaking for the Industrial Association, the bankers and industrialists and oilcompany and shipping-company executives who really run this burg and who set up the Blue Book union in the first place.”

“Nobody’s going to be able to take them down, Sam. They belong to the exclusive clubs, they helped found the opera, the symphony, they fund the Community Chest and Stanford and the Boy Scouts and the Y.M.C.A. and the California Historical Society.”

“All noble causes.” Spade deepened his sardonic voice to proclaim in ringing orator’s tones, “ ‘We have succeeded in making San Francisco a free city where capital can safely invest.’ ” In his own voice he added, “Toomey said that right now there’s the most wide-scale pilfering and theft on the docks that the port’s ever seen. They want it kept quiet but they want it stopped.”

Wise was thoughtful. “Sounds like a perfectly legitimate investigation to me, Sam.”

“Maybe. But since I’m too well known on the waterfront to go undercover myself on the docks these days, Toomey ‘recommended’ I take on Miles Archer as a partner. Burns used Miles undercover in Seattle to ferret around, glad-hand people, get them talking, then turned them in as Commies. Toomey said he’s heard only good things about him.”

“As blatant as that?”

“As blatant as that. Between the lines no Archer, no job. So Miles is going down on the docks undercover tomorrow night for Spade and Archer.”

“And Iva Archer has nothing to do with this?”

“Nothing.”

“What if she thinks she does?”

“I can’t help what people think.”

Wise held up wide-open defensive hands. “I wouldn’t be doing my job as your lawyer if I didn’t ask these things.”

“Yeah.” Spade retrieved his hat, stood up. “Remember from high school, Sid? Shakespeare? ‘First.... let’s kill all the lawyers’?”

He chuckled at his joke. Sid Wise didn’t.

Effie Perine came around Spade’s desk to fish the tobacco sack and cigarette papers out of his vest pocket. She made a paper trough, sprinkled flakes into it, expertly pulled the drawstring at the top of the sack with her teeth. As she did she glanced at the bare-topped desk across the room.

“We haven’t seen much of the new partner around here since he started,” she said.

“He’s working down on the docks nights, sleeping days.”

“Leaving poor little Iva all alone in that big apartment.”

“Enough of that, snip. You sound like Sid Wise.” She licked the seam, smoothed the cigarette, twisted the ends, placed one of them between Spade’s lips, went back around the desk, and sat down in the oaken armchair.

“I don’t like that woman, Sam. She’s too blonde and too good-looking and she’s got too good a figure.” She added snidely, “For her age. I hear she’s been talking about divorce.”

“You women,” said Spade, shaking his head. He picked a flake of tobacco off his lower lip. “Leave me out of it.”

“Will she?”

Spade’s face got sullen. “She’ll have to.”

The door opened. Miles Archer came in. He was dressed for the docks: watch cap, heavy mackinaw, waterproof khaki pants over heavy work boots.

“Mr. Archer,” said Effie with a smile, then added cheerily, “I’ll get those papers typed up for you to sign, Mr. Spade.”

“Thanks, sweetheart.”

Archer turned to watch Effie go through the door. When he turned back to Spade his eyes gleamed wetly. But all he did was sit down in the client’s chair Effie Perine had vacated and say, “I’ve got my foot in the door, Sam.”

“In just four nights?” Spade spoke with what seemed like admiration. “Does that mean you know who’s doing it? Where they’re storing the stolen goods? Are they in it for the money? Or for something else?”

“Of course for the money. This ain’t nickel-and-dime stuff, Sam. This is big-time, organized thievery.”

Spade said thoughtfully, “Maybe someone in the labor movement wants to disrupt the status quo, like the Wobblies kept trying to do up in Seattle after the union movement got squashed by all those ex-servicemen coming home needing jobs.”

“The Wobblies were just a Commie front anyway,” said Archer darkly. “Things are different down here. But maybe you’ve got something at that, Sam. My first night, a Commie named Robbie Brix I got blackballed in Seattle shows up at the Blue Book shape-up.” The small brown eyes again became almost beady. He hitched his chair closer. “And he gets hired. Night work under the lights on a freighter with a tight turnaround schedule. A known Commie. When his shift ends he leaves real quick, like he has a date. A date at four in the morning? So the next night I follow him. Just a couple blocks.”

“He spot you?”

“You kidding?” Archer sat back in his chair, lit a cigarette, blew out smoke, preened. “I been doing this a long time. Next night I picked him up where I’d left him the first night, followed him another couple blocks, dropped him again. Last night I tracked him to a warehouse where Green dead-ends up against the side of Telegraph Hill.”

“Small two-story red brick, pre-quake, loading dock and a big overhead door? In the one-hundred-block stub just off Sansome?”

“You got it. There were lights on inside.”

“Right across the Embarcadero from the cotton warehouse on Piers fifteen and seventeen,” mused Spade. “That’s where a lot of the dry goods have been disappearing from.”