The Maltese Falcon Read Free

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 farfrom 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 wasa 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