The Maltese Falcon Read Online Free Page A

asked. “And I knew he hadn’t gone straight home from killing Miles?”
    “You knew what you knew,” Dundy replied stubbornly. “What time did you get home?”
    “Twenty minutes to four. I walked around thinking things over.”
    The Lieutenant wagged his round head up and down. “We knew you weren’t home at three-thirty. We tried to get you on the phone. Where’d you do your walking?”
    “Out Bush Street a way and back.”
    “Did you see anybody that—?”
    “No, no witnesses,” Spade said and laughed pleasantly. “Sit down, Dundy. You haven’t finished your drink. Get your glass, Tom.”
    Tom said: “No, thanks, Sam.”
    Dundy sat down, but paid no attention to his glass of rum.
    Spade filled his own glass, drank, set the empty glass on the table, and returned to his bedside-seat.
    “I know where I stand now,” he said, looking with friendly eyes from one of the police-detectives to the other. “I’m sorry I got up on my hind legs, but you birds coming in and trying to put the work on me made me nervous. Having Miles knocked off bothered me, and then you birds cracking foxy. That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re up to.”
    Tom said: “Forget it.”
    The Lieutenant said nothing.
    Spade asked: “Thursby die?”
    While the Lieutenant hesitated Tom said: “Yes.”
    Then the Lieutenant said angrily: “And you might just as well know it—if you don’t—that he died before he could tell anybody anything.”
    Spade was rolling a cigarette. He asked, not looking up: “What do you mean by that? You think I did know it?”
    “I meant what I said,” Dundy replied bluntly.
    Spade looked up at him and smiled, holding the finished cigarette in one hand, his lighter in the other.
    “You’re not ready to pinch me yet, are you, Dundy?” he asked.
    Dundy looked with hard green eyes at Spade and did not answer him.
    “Then,” said Spade, “there’s no particular reason why I should give a damn what you think, is there, Dundy?”
    Tom said: “Aw, be reasonable, Sam.”
    Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set fire to it, and laughed smoke out.
    “I’ll be reasonable, Tom,” he promised. “How did I kill this Thursby? I’ve forgotten.”
    Tom grunted disgust. Lieutenant Dundy said: “He was shot four times in the back, with a forty-four or forty-five, from across the street, when he started to go in the hotel. Nobody saw it, but that’s the way it figures.”
    “And he was wearing a Luger in a shoulder-holster,” Tom added. “It hadn’t been fired.”
    “What do the hotel-people know about him?” Spade asked.
    “Nothing except that he’d been there a week.”
    “Alone?”
    “Alone.”
    “What did you find on him? or in his room?”
    Dundy drew his lips in and asked: “What’d you think we’d find?”
    Spade made a careless circle with his limp cigarette. “Something to tell you who he was, what his story was. Did you?”
    “We thought you could tell us that.”
    Spade looked at the Lieutenant with yellow-grey eyes that held an almost exaggerated amount of candor. “I’ve never seen Thursby, dead or alive.”
    Lieutenant Dundy stood up looking dissatisfied. Tom rose yawning and stretching.
    “We’ve asked what we came to ask,” Dundy said, frowning over eyes hard as green pebbles. He held his mustached upper lip tight to his teeth, letting his lower lip push the words out. “We’ve told you more than you’ve told us. That’s fair enough. You know me, Spade. If you did or you didn’t you’ll get a square deal out ofme, and most of the breaks. I don’t know that I’d blame you a hell of a lot—but that wouldn’t keep me from nailing you.”
    “Fair enough,” Spade replied evenly. “But I’d feel better about it if you’d drink your drink.”
    Lieutenant Dundy turned to the table, picked up his glass, and slowly emptied it. Then he said, “Good night,” and held out his hand. They shook hands ceremoniously. Tom and Spade shook hands