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.
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.”
“I guess so,” Spade agreed in a tone that was utterly meaningless, and
went out of the alley.
* * * * *
In an all-night drug-store on the corner of Bush and Taylor Streets,
Spade used a telephone.
“Precious,” he said into it a little while after he had given a number,
“Miles has been shot. . . . Yes, he’s dead. . . . Now don’t get
excited. . . . Yes. . . . You’ll have to break it to Iva. . . . No, I’m
damned if I will. You’ve got to do it. . . . That’s a good girl. . . .
And keep her away from the office. . . . Tell her I’ll see her—uh—some
time. . . . Yes, but don’t tie me up to anything. . . . That’s the
stuff. You’re an angel. ’Bye.”
* * * * *
Spade’s tinny alarm-clock said three-forty when he turned on the light
in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed
and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wine-glass
and a tall bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing.
He put bottle and glass on the table, sat on the side of the bed facing
them, and rolled a cigarette. He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi
and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street-door-bell rang. The
hands of the alarm-clock registered four-thirty.
Spade sighed, rose from the bed, and went to the telephone-box beside
his bathroom-door. He pressed the button that released the
street-door-lock. He muttered, “Damn her,” and stood scowling at the
black telephone-box, breathing irregularly while a dull flush grew in
his cheeks.
The grating and rattling of the elevator-door opening and closing came
from the corridor. Spade sighed again and moved towards the
corridor-door. Soft heavy footsteps sounded on the carpeted floor
outside, the footsteps of two men. Spade’s face brightened. His eyes
were no longer harassed. He opened the door quickly.
“Hello, Tom,” he said to the barrel-bellied tall detective with whom he
had talked in Burritt Street, and, “Hello, Lieutenant,” to the man
beside Tom. “Come in.”
They nodded together, neither saying anything, and came in. Spade shut
the door and ushered them into his bedroom. Tom sat on an end of the
sofa by the windows. The Lieutenant sat on a chair beside the table.
The Lieutenant was a compactly built man with a round head under
short-cut grizzled hair and a square face behind a short-cut grizzled
mustache. A five-dollar gold-piece was pinned to his necktie and there
was a small elaborate diamond-set secret-society-emblem on his lapel.
Spade brought two wine-glasses in from the kitchen, filled them and his
own with Bacardi, gave one to each of his visitors, and sat down with
his on the side of the bed. His face was placid and uncurious. He raised
his glass, and said, “Success to crime,” and drank it down.
Tom emptied his glass, set it on the floor beside his feet, and wiped
his mouth with a muddy forefinger. He stared at the foot of the bed as
if trying to remember something of which it vaguely reminded him.
The Lieutenant looked at his glass for a dozen seconds, took a very
small sip of its contents, and put the glass on the table at his elbow.
He examined the room with hard deliberate eyes, and then looked at Tom.
Tom moved uncomfortably on the sofa and, not looking up, asked: “Did you
break the news to Miles’s wife, Sam?”
Spade said: “Uh-huh.”
“How’d she take it?”
Spade shook his head. “I don’t know anything about women.”
Tom said softly: “The hell you don’t.”
The Lieutenant put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. His
greenish eyes were fixed on Spade in a peculiarly rigid stare, as if
their focus were a matter of mechanics, to be changed only by pulling a
lever or pressing a button.
“What kind of gun do you carry?” he asked.
“None. I don’t like them much. Of course there are some in the office.”
“I’d like to see one of them,” the Lieutenant said. “You don’t happen to
have one here?”
“No.”
“You sure of that?”
“Look around.” Spade smiled and waved his empty glass a little. “Turn
the dump upside-down if you want. I won’t squawk—if you’ve got a
search-warrant.”
Tom protested: “Oh, hell, Sam!”
Spade set his glass on the table and stood up facing the Lieutenant.
“What do you want, Dundy?” he asked in a voice hard and cold as his
eyes.
Lieutenant Dundy’s eyes had moved to maintain their focus on Spade’s.
Only his eyes had moved.
Tom shifted his weight on the sofa again, blew a deep breath out through
his nose, and growled plaintively: “We’re not wanting to make any
trouble, Sam.”
Spade, ignoring Tom, said to Dundy: “Well, what do you want? Talk
turkey. Who in hell do you think you are, coming in here trying to rope
me?”
“All right,” Dundy said in his chest, “sit down and listen.”
“I’ll sit or stand as I damned please,” said Spade, not moving.
“For Christ’s sake be reasonable,” Tom begged. “What’s the use of us
having a row? If you want to know why we didn’t talk turkey it’s because
when I asked you who this Thursby was you as good as told me it was none
of my business. You can’t treat us that way, Sam. It ain’t right and it
won’t get you anywheres. We got our work to do.”
Lieutenant Dundy jumped up, stood close to Spade, and thrust his square
face up at the taller man’s.
“I’ve warned you your foot was going to slip one of these days,” he
said.
Spade made a depreciative mouth, raising his eyebrows. “Everybody’s foot
slips sometime,” he replied with derisive mildness.
“And this is yours.”
Spade smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ll do nicely, thank you.” He
stopped smiling. His upper lip, on the left side, twitched over his
eyetooth. His eyes became narrow and sultry. His voice came out deep as
the Lieutenant’s. “I don’t like this. What are you sucking around for?
Tell me, or get out and let me go to bed.”
“Who’s Thursby?” Dundy demanded.
“I told Tom what I knew about him.”
“You told Tom damned little.”
“I knew damned little.”
“Why were you tailing him?”
“I wasn’t. Miles was—for the swell reason that we had a client who was
paying good United States money to have him tailed.”
“Who’s the client?”
Placidity came back to Spade’s face and voice. He said reprovingly: “You
know I can’t tell you that until I’ve talked it over with the client.”
“You’ll tell it to me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly.
“This is murder and don’t you forget it.”
“Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll
tell it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out
crying because policemen didn’t like me.”
Tom left the sofa and sat on the foot of the bed. His carelessly shaven
mud-smeared face was tired and lined.
“Be reasonable, Sam,” he pleaded. “Give us a chance. How can we turn up
anything on Miles’s killing if you won’t give us what you’ve got?”
“You needn’t get a headache over that,” Spade told him. “I’ll bury my
dead.”
Lieutenant Dundy sat down and put his hands on his knees again. His eyes
were warm green discs.
“I thought you would,” he said. He smiled with grim content. “That’s
just exactly why we came to see you. Isn’t it, Tom?”
Tom groaned, but said nothing articulate.
Spade watched Dundy warily.
“That’s just exactly what I said to Tom,” the Lieutenant went on. “I
said: ‘Tom, I’ve got a hunch that Sam Spade’s a man to keep the
family-troubles in the family.’ That’s just what I said to him.”
The wariness went out of Spade’s eyes. He made his eyes dull with
boredom. He turned his face around to Tom and asked with great
carelessness: “What’s itching your boy-friend now?”
Dundy jumped up and tapped Spade’s chest with the ends of two bent
fingers.
“Just this,” he said, taking pains to make each word distinct,
emphasizing them with his tapping finger-ends: “Thursby was shot down in
front of his hotel just thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt
Street.”
Spade spoke, taking equal pains with his words: “Keep your God-damned
paws off me.”
Dundy withdrew the tapping fingers, but there was no change in his
voice: “Tom says you were in too much of a hurry to even stop for a look
at your partner.”
Tom growled apologetically: “Well, damn it, Sam, you did run off like
that.”
“And you didn’t go to Archer’s house to tell his wife,” the Lieutenant
said. “We called up and that girl in your office was there, and she said
you sent her.”
Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its calmness.
Lieutenant Dundy raised his two bent fingers towards Spade’s chest,
quickly lowered them, and said: “I give you ten minutes to get to a
phone and do your talking to the girl. I give you ten minutes to get to
Thursby’s joint—Geary near Leavenworth—you could do it easy in that
time, or fifteen at the most. And that gives you ten or fifteen minutes
of waiting before he showed up.”
“I knew where he lived?” Spade asked. “And I knew he hadn’t gone
straight home from killing Miles?”
“You knew what you knew,” Dundy replied stubbornly. “What time did you
get home?”
“Twenty minutes to four. I walked around thinking things over.”
The Lieutenant wagged his round head up and down. “We knew you weren’t
home at three-thirty. We tried to get you on the phone. Where’d you do
your walking?”
“Out Bush Street a way and back.”
“Did you see anybody that—?”
“No, no witnesses,” Spade said and laughed pleasantly. “Sit down, Dundy.
You haven’t finished your drink. Get your glass, Tom.”
Tom said: “No, thanks, Sam.”
Dundy sat down, but paid no attention to his glass of rum.
Spade filled his own glass, drank, set the empty glass on the table, and
returned to his bedside-seat.
“I know where I stand now,” he said, looking with friendly eyes from one
of the police-detectives to the other. “I’m sorry I got up on my hind
legs, but you birds coming in and trying to put the work on me made me
nervous. Having Miles knocked off bothered me, and then you birds
cracking foxy. That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re
up to.”
Tom said: “Forget it.”
The Lieutenant said nothing.
Spade asked: “Thursby die?”
While the Lieutenant hesitated Tom said: “Yes.”
Then the Lieutenant said angrily: “And you might just as well know
it—if you don’t—that he died before he could tell anybody anything.”
Spade was rolling a cigarette. He asked, not looking up: “What do you
mean by that? You think I did know it?”
“I meant what I said,” Dundy replied bluntly.
Spade looked up at him and smiled, holding the finished cigarette in one
hand, his lighter in the other.
“You’re not ready to pinch me yet, are you, Dundy?” he asked.
Dundy looked with hard green eyes at Spade and did not answer him.
“Then,” said Spade, “there’s no particular reason why I should give a
damn what you think, is there, Dundy?”
Tom said: “Aw, be reasonable, Sam.”
Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set fire to it, and laughed smoke
out.
“I’ll be reasonable, Tom,” he promised. “How did I kill this Thursby?
I’ve forgotten.”
Tom grunted disgust. Lieutenant Dundy said: “He was shot four times in
the back, with a forty-four or forty-five, from across the street, when
he started to go in the hotel. Nobody saw it, but that’s the way it
figures.”
“And he was wearing a Luger in a shoulder-holster,” Tom added. “It
hadn’t been fired.”
“What do the hotel-people know about him?” Spade asked.
“Nothing except that he’d been there a week.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
“What did you find on him? or in his room?”
Dundy drew his lips in and asked: “What’d you think we’d find?”
Spade made a careless circle with his limp cigarette. “Something to tell
you who he was, what his story was. Did you?”
“We thought you could tell us that.”
Spade looked at the Lieutenant with yellow-grey eyes that held an almost
exaggerated amount of candor. “I’ve never seen Thursby, dead or alive.”
Lieutenant Dundy stood up looking dissatisfied. Tom rose yawning and
stretching.
“We’ve asked what we came to ask,” Dundy said, frowning over eyes hard
as green pebbles. He held his mustached upper lip tight to his teeth,
letting his lower lip push the words out. “We’ve told you more than
you’ve told us. That’s fair enough. You know me, Spade. If you did or
you didn’t you’ll get a square deal out of me, and most of the breaks. I
don’t know that I’d blame you a hell of a lot—but that wouldn’t keep me
from nailing you.”
“Fair enough,” Spade replied evenly. “But I’d feel better about it if
you’d drink your drink.”
Lieutenant Dundy turned to the table, picked up his glass, and slowly
emptied it. Then he said, “Good night,” and held out his hand. They
shook hands ceremoniously. Tom and Spade shook hands ceremoniously.
Spade let them out. Then he undressed, turned off the lights, and went
to bed.
3