XVI

The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade. He said, “You know⁠—” and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said. He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself stiffly straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls.

Spade, wooden-faced and nimble, sprang from his chair and caught the falling man. When Spade caught him the man’s mouth opened and a little blood spurted out, and the brown-wrapped parcel dropped from the man’s hands and rolled across the floor until a foot of the desk stopped it. Then the man’s knees bent and he bent at the waist and his thin body became limber inside the sheathlike overcoat, sagging in Spade’s arms so that Spade could not hold it up from the floor.

Spade lowered the man carefully until he lay on the floor on his left side. The man’s eyes⁠—dark and bloodshot, but not now mad⁠—were wide open and still. His mouth was open as when blood had spurted from it, but no more blood came from it, and all his long body was as still as the floor it lay on.

Spade said: “Lock the door.”

While Effie Perine, her teeth chattering, fumbled with the corridor door’s lock Spade knelt beside the thin man, turned him over on his back, and ran a hand down inside his overcoat. When he withdrew the hand presently it came out smeared with blood. The sight of his bloody hand brought not the least nor briefest of changes to Spade’s face. Holding that hand up where it would touch nothing, he took his lighter out of his pocket with his other hand. He snapped on the flame and held the flame close to first one and then the other of the thin man’s eyes. The eyes⁠—lids, balls, irises, and pupils⁠—remained frozen, immobile.

Spade extinguished the flame and returned the lighter to his pocket. He moved on his knees around to the dead man’s side and, using his one