The Maltese Falcon (2 page)

“Can he cover up by marrying her?” Archer asked.

The girl blushed and replied in a confused voice: “He has a wife and three children in England. Corinne wrote me that, to explain why she had gone off with him.”

“They usually do,” Spade said, “though not always, in England.” He leaned forward to reach for pencil and pad of paper. “What does he look like?”

“Oh, he’s thirty-five years old, perhaps, and as tall as you, and either naturally dark or quite sunburned. His hair is dark too, and he has thick eyebrows. He talks in a rather loud, blustery way and has a nervous, irritable manner. He gives the impression of being—of violence.”

Spade, scribbling on the pad, asked without looking up: “What color eyes?”

“They’re blue-grey and watery, though not in a weak way. And—oh, yes—he has a marked cleft in his chin.”

“Thin, medium, or heavy build?”

“Quite athletic. He’s broad-shouldered and carries himself erect, has what could be called a decidedly military carriage. He was wearing a light grey suit and a grey hat when I saw him this morning.”

“What does he do for a living?” Spade asked as he laid down his pencil.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“What time is he coming to see you?”

“After eight o’clock.”

“All right, Miss Wonderly, we’ll have a man there. It’ll help if—”

“Mr. Spade, could either you or Mr. Archer?” She made an appealing gesture with both hands. “Could either of you look after it personally? I don’t mean that the man you’d send wouldn’t be capable, but—oh!—I’m so afraid of what might happen to Corinne. I’m afraid of him. Could you? I’d be—I’d expect to be charged more, of course.” She opened her handbag with nervous fingers and put two hundred-dollar bills on Spade’s desk. “Would that be enough?”

“Yeh,” Archer said, “and I’ll look after it myself.”

Miss Wonderly stood up, impulsively holding a hand out to him.

“Thank you! Thank you!” she exclaimed, and then gave Spade her hand, repeating: “Thank you!”

“Not at all,” Spade said over it. “Glad to. It’ll help some if you either meet Thursby downstairs or let yourself be seen in the lobby with him at some time.”

“I will,” she promised, and thanked the partners again.

“And don’t look for me,” Archer cautioned her. “I’ll see you all right.”

Spade went to the corridor-door with Miss Wonderly. When he returned to his desk Archer nodded at the hundred-dollar bills there, growled complacently, “They’re right enough,” picked one up, folded it, and tucked it into a vest-pocket. “And they had brothers in her bag.”

Spade pocketed the other bill before he sat down. Then he said: “Well, don’t dynamite her too much. What do you think of her?”

“Sweet! And you telling me not to dynamite her.” Archer guffawed suddenly without merriment. “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.” He put his hands in his trousers-pockets and teetered on his heels.

“You’ll play hell with her, you will.” Spade grinned wolfishly, showing the edges of teeth far back in his jaw. “You’ve got brains, yes you have.” He began to make a cigarette.

A telephone-bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bed-springs creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:

“Hello…. Yes, speaking…. Dead? … Yes…. Fifteen minutes. Thanks.”

A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center filled the room with light. Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed. He scowled at the telephone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.

Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorns dull moaning. A tinny alarmclock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s
Celebrated Criminal Cases of America
—face down on the table—held its hands at five minutes past two.

Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper,
spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.

He picked up the pigskin and nickel lighter that had fallen to the floor, manipulated it, and with the cigarette burning in a corner of his mouth stood up. He took off his pajamas. The smooth thickness of his arms, legs, and body, the sag of his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear’s. It was like a shaved bear’s: his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly soft and pink.

He scratched the back of his neck and began to dress. He put on a thin white union-suit, grey socks, black garters, and dark brown shoes. When he had fastened his shoes he picked up the telephone, called Graystone 4500, and ordered a taxicab. He put on a green-striped white shirt, a soft white collar, a green necktie, the grey suit he had worn that day, a loose tweed overcoat, and a dark grey hat. The street-doorbell rang as he stuffed tobacco, keys, and money into his pockets.

Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy, and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at windows.

Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs, went to the parapet, and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street.

An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if it had been blown out, and ran away. Not far
from the tunnel’s mouth a man was hunkered on his heels before a billboard that held advertisements of a moving picture and a gasoline across the front of a gap between two store-buildings. The hunkered mans head was bent almost to the sidewalk so he could look under the billboard. A hand flat on the paving, a hand clenched on the billboards green frame, held him in this grotesque position. Two other men stood awkwardly together at one end of the billboard, peeping through the few inches of space between it and the building at that end. The building at the other end had a blank grey sidewall that looked down on the lot behind the billboard. Lights flickered on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights.

Spade turned from the parapet and walked up Bush Street to the alley where men were grouped. A uniformed policeman chewing gum under an enameled sign that said
Burritt St.
in white against dark blue put out an arm and asked:

“What do you want here?”

“I’m Sam Spade. Tom Polhaus phoned me.”

“Sure you are.” The policeman’s arm went down. “I didn’t know you at first. Well, they’re back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bad business.”

“Bad enough,” Spade agreed, and went up the alley.

Half-way up it, not far from the entrance, a dark ambulance stood. Behind the ambulance, to the left, the alley was bounded by a waist-high fence, horizontal strips of rough boarding. From the fence dark ground fell away steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below.

A ten-foot length of the fence’s top rail had been torn from a post at one end and hung dangling from the other. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder stuck out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back. Two men stood over him. One of them held the beam of an electric torch on the dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope.

One of them hailed Spade, “Hello, Sam,” and clambered up to the alley, his shadow running up the slope before him. He was
a barrel-bellied tall man with shrewd small eyes, a thick mouth, and carelessly shaven dark jowls. His shoes, knees, hands, and chin were daubed with brown loam.

“I figured you’d want to see it before we took him away,” he said as he stepped over the broken fence.

“Thanks, Tom,” Spade said. “What happened?” He put an elbow on a fence-post and looked down at the men below, nodding to those who nodded to him.

Tom Polhaus poked his own left breast with a dirty finger. “Got him right through the pump—with this.” He took a fat revolver from his coat-pocket and held it out to Spade. Mud inlaid the depressions in the revolver’s surface. “A Webley. English, ain’t it?”

Spade took his elbow from the fence-post and leaned down to look at the weapon, but he did not touch it.

“Yes,” he said, “Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. That’s it. Thirty-eight, eight shot. They don’t make them any more. How many gone out of it?”

“One pill.” Tom poked his breast again. “He must’ve been dead when he cracked the fence.” He raised the muddy revolver. “Ever seen this before?”

Spade nodded. “I’ve seen Webley-Fosberys,” he said without interest, and then spoke rapidly: “He was shot up here, huh? Standing where you are, with his back to the fence. The man that shot him stands here.” He went around in front of Tom and raised a hand breast-high with leveled forefinger. “Lets him have it and Miles goes back, taking the top off the fence and going on through and down till the rock catches him. That it?”

“That’s it,” Tom replied slowly, working his brows together. “The blast burnt his coat.”

“Who found him?”

“The man on the beat, Shilling. He was coming down Bush, and just as he got here a machine turning threw headlights up here, and he saw the top off the fence. So he came up to look at it, and found him.”

“What about the machine that was turning around?”

“Not a damned thing about it, Sam. Shilling didn’t pay any attention to it, not knowing anything was wrong then. He says nobody didn’t come out of here while he was coming down from Powell or he’d’ve seen them. The only other way out would be under the billboard on Stockton. Nobody went that way. The fog’s got the ground soggy, and the only marks are where Miles slid down and where this here gun rolled.”

“Didn’t anybody hear the shot?”

“For the love of God, Sam, we only just got here. Somebody must’ve heard it, when we find them.” He turned and put a leg over the fence. “Coming down for a look at him before he’s moved?”

Spade said: “No.”

Tom halted astride the fence and looked back at Spade with surprised small eyes.

Spade said: “You’ve seen him. You’d see everything I could.”

Tom, still looking at Spade, nodded doubtfully and withdrew his leg over the fence.

“His gun was tucked away on his hip,” he said. “It hadn’t been fired. His overcoat was buttoned. There’s a hundred and sixty-some bucks in his clothes. Was he working, Sam?”

Spade, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded.

Tom asked: “Well?”

“He was supposed to be tailing a fellow named Floyd Thursby,” Spade said, and described Thursby as Miss Wonderly had described him.

“What for?”

Spade put his hands into his overcoat-pockets and blinked sleepy eyes at Tom.

Tom repeated impatiently: “What for?”

“He was an Englishman, maybe. I don’t know what his game was, exactly. We were trying to find out where he lived.” Spade grinned faintly and took a hand from his pocket to pat Tom’s shoulder. “Don’t crowd me.” He put the hand in his pocket again. “I’m going out to break the news to Miles’s wife.” He turned away.

Tom, scowling, opened his mouth, closed it without having said anything, cleared his throat, put the scowl off his face, and spoke with a husky sort of gentleness:

“It’s tough, him getting it like that. Miles had his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must’ve had some good points too.”