“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.
2
DEATH IN THE FOG
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 foghorn’s dull moaning. A tinny
alarm-clock, 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-door-bell 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 man’s 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 billboard’s 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.
Reader notes
Loading reader notes…