The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Chapter X

The Belvedere Divan

Beginning day had reduced night to a thin smokiness when Spade sat up. Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s soft breathing had the regularity of utter sleep. Spade was quiet leaving bed and bedroom and shutting the bedroom door. He dressed in the bathroom. Then he examined the sleeping girl’s clothes, took a flat brass key from the pocket of her coat, and went out.

He went to the Coronet, letting himself into the building and into her apartment with the key. To the eye there was nothing furtive about his going in; he entered boldly and directly. To the ear his going in was almost unnoticeable: he made as little sound as might be.

In the girl’s apartment he switched on all the lights. He searched the place from wall to wall. His eyes and thick fingers moved without apparent haste and without ever lingering or fumbling or going back, from one inch of their fields to the next, probing, scrutinizing, testing with expert certainty. Every drawer, cupboard, cubbyhole, box, bag, trunk — locked or unlocked — was opened and its contents subjected to examination by eyes and fingers. Every piece of clothing was tested by hands that felt for telltale bulges and ears that listened for the crinkle of paper between pressing fingers. He stripped the bed of bedclothes. He looked under rugs and at the under side of each piece of furniture. He pulled down blinds to see that nothing had been rolled up in them for concealment. He leaned through windows to see that nothing hung below them on the outside. He poked with a fork into powder and cream jars on the dressing table. He held atomizers and bottles up against the light. He examined dishes and pans and food and food containers. He emptied the garbage can on spread sheets of newspaper. He opened the top of the flush box in the bathroom, drained the box, and peered down into it. He examined and tested the metal screens over bath-tub, wash-bowl, sink and laundry-tub drains.

Spade did not find a black bird. He found nothing that seemed to have any connection with a black bird: the only piece of writing he found was a week-old receipt for the month’s apartment rent Brigid O’Shaughnessy had paid. The only thing he found that interested him enough to delay his search for a few minutes while he looked at it was a double handful of rather fine jewelry in a polychrome box in a locked dressing table drawer.

When he had finished he made and drank a cup of coffee. Then he unlocked the kitchen window, scarred the edge of its lock a little with his pocketknife, opened the window — over a fire escape — got his hat and overcoat from the living room settee, and left the apartment as he had come.

On his way home he stopped at a store that was being opened by a puffy-eyed, shivering, plump grocer and bought oranges, eggs, rolls, butter, and cream.