"I must've got that from the fire."
She scrubbed the smudge with the corner of a handkerchief.
"The Perine-Christy enthusiasm ignite Berkeley?" he asked.
She made a face at him while patting her nose with a powdered pink disc.
"There was a boat on fire when I came back.
They were towing it out from the pier and the smoke blew all over our ferry-boat."
Spade put his hands on the arms of his chair.
"Were you near enough to see the name of the boat?" he asked.
"Yes.
La Paloma.
Why?"
Spade smiled ruefully.
"I'm damned if I know why, sister," he said.
XV.Every Crackpot
Spade and Detective-sergeant Polhaus ate pickled pigs' feet at one of big John's tables at the States Hof Brau.
Polhaus, balancing pale bright jelly on a fork half-way between plate and mouth, said:
"Hey, listen, Sam!
Forget about the other night.
He was dead wrong, but you know anybody's liable to lose their head if you ride them thataway."
Spade looked thoughtfully at the police-detective.
"Was that what you wanted to see me about?" he asked.
Polhaus nodded, put the forkful of jelly into his mouth, swallowed it, and qualified his nod:
"Mostly."
"Dundy send you?"
Polhaus made a disgusted mouth.
"You know he didn't.
He's as bullheaded as you are."
Spade smiled and shook his head.
"No, he's not, Tom," he said.
"He just thinks he is."
Tom scowled and chopped at his pig's foot with a knife.
"Ain't you ever going to grow up?" he grumbled.
"What've you got to beef about?
He didn't hurt you.
You came out on top.
What's the sense of making a grudge of it?
You're just making a lot of grief for yourself."
Spade placed his knife and fork carefully together on his plate, and put his hands on the table beside his plate.
His smile was faint and devoid of warmth.
"With every bull in town working overtime trying to pile up grief for me a little more won't hurt. I won't even know it's there."
Polhaus's ruddiness deepened.
He said:
"That's a swell thing to say to me."
Spade picked up his knife and fork and began to eat.
Polhaus ate.
Presently Spade asked:
"See the boat on fire in the bay?"
"I saw the smoke.
Be reasonable. Sam.
Dundy was wrong and he knows it.