Spade & Archer

1 Spade’s Last Case

It was thirteen minutes short of midnight. Drizzle glinted through the wind-danced lights on the edge of the Tacoma Municipal Dock. A man a few years shy of thirty stood in a narrow aisle between two tall stacks of crated cargo, almost invisible in a black hooded rain slicker. He had a long bony jaw, a flexible mouth, a jutting chin. His nose was hooked. He was six feet tall, with broad, steeply sloping shoulders.

He stayed in the shadows while the scant dozen passengers disembarked from the wooden-hulled steam-powered passenger ferry Virginia V, just in from Seattle via the Colvos Passage. His cigarette was cupped in one palm as if to shield it from the rain, or perhaps to conceal its glowing ember from watching eyes.

The watcher stiffened when the last person off the Virginia V was a solid, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties, dressed in a brown woolen suit. His red heavy-jawed face was made for joviality, but his small brown eyes were wary, constantly moving.

The passenger went quickly along the dock toward a narrow passageway that led to the city street beyond. The watcher, well behind, ambled after him. The first man had started through the passageway when he was jumped by two bulky, shadowy figures. There were grunts of effort, curses, the sound of blows, the scrape of leather soles on wet cobbles as the men struggled.

The watcher announced his arrival by jamming his lighted cigarette into the eye of one attacker. The man screamed, stumbled unevenly away holding a hand over his eye. The second attacker broke free and fled.

“‘Lo, Miles.”

Miles Archer, holding a handkerchief to his bloodied nose, said thickly through the bunched-up cloth, “Uh... thanks, Sam.”

“Wobblies?” asked Sam Spade.

“Wobblies. Who else?”

They went down the passageway toward the street. Archer was limping. He had the thick neck and slightly soft middle of an athletic man going to seed.

“They finally made you as undercover for Burns?”

“Took ’em long enough,” Archer bragged. He looked over at Spade. “Back with Continental, huh? Uh... how’d you find me?”

“Wasn’t looking. Was staked out for a redheaded paper hanger out of Victoria.”

“I saw him miss the ferry in Seattle.”

Spade nodded, put a smile on his face that did not touch his eyes. “Belated congratulations on your marriage, Miles.”

“Yeah, uh, thanks, Sam.” Something sly and delighted seemed suddenly to dance in Archer’s heavy, coarse voice. “We’re living over in Spokane so’s she can keep working at Graham’s Bookstore, even though I’m down here most of the time. Tough on the little lady, but what can she do?”

Spade was at a table set for afternoon tea when the fortyish matron entered from Spokane’s Sprague Avenue. The Davenport Hotel’s vast Spanish-patio-style lobby was elegant, with a mezzanine above and, on the ground floor, an always-burning wood fireplace. When the woman paused in the doorway he stood. His powerful, conical, almost bearlike body kept his gray woolen suit coat from fitting well.

She crossed to him. She had wide-set judging eyes and a small, disapproving mouth.

“I am Mrs. Hazel Cahill. And you are...”

He gave a slight, almost elegant bow. “Samuel Spade.”

Mrs. Cahill set her Spanish-leather handbag on one of the chairs, stripped off her kidskin gloves, and slid them through the bag’s carrying straps. Her movements were measured. She turned slightly so Spade’s thick-fingered hands could remove her coat.

She sat. She did not thank him. She said, “Three o’clock last Monday afternoon he and two other men came from this hotel, laughing about their golf scores. My husband, Theodore, and I just moved here from Tacoma a month ago, and it’s been five years, but I know what I saw.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t.”

“Theodore does. Constantly.” Her head shake danced carefully marcelled curls under her narrow-brimmed hat. “You men always stick together.”

Spade nodded with seeming indifference.

“Theodore and he were great cronies — golf and tennis, drinks at the club. When he abandoned poor Eleanor five years ago and didn’t turn up dead Theodore called him the one who got away. Eleanor is my best friend. She never remarried.”

The skylight in the high vaulted ceiling laid a slanted bar of pale afternoon sunlight across one corner of their table. Spade’s raised brows, which peaked slightly above his yellow-gray eyes, encouraged confidences.

“Did Eleanor’s husband recognize you?”

“No. And only when they were past did I recognize him, from his voice — a distinctive tenor I’d always found irritating.” She pursed thin lips and something like malice gleamed in her eyes. “Of course I immediately called Eleanor in Tacoma to tell her I had seen her missing husband here in Spokane.”

“And she believed you. Even if your husband doesn’t.”

“My husband never believes me.”

“If the man’s here I’ll find him.”

After she had gone Spade remained, rolled and smoked three cigarettes in quick succession, muttered aloud, “What the hell?” and left the hotel.

John Graham’s Bookstore was on the corner of Sprague Avenue and West First Avenue, hard by the Davenport Hotel. Spade entered with long strides, slowed as if looking for a particular volume on the crowded shelves. There were a half dozen browsers and an almost pleasant smell of old books in the air.

Graham himself, a thin bespectacled man with a trim white mustache and wings of silver hair swept back from either side of his face, was ringing up a sale on the front register. A female clerk was selling a customer a book halfway down the store.

Spade went that way, his eyes hooded. The clerk was a blonde of about his age, pretty verging on beautiful, with an oval face, blue eyes, and a moist red mouth. Her silk-striped woolen rep dress, too fashionable for a shopgirl to wear to work, clung to an exquisite body.

The big round blue eyes lit up when she saw Spade. She hurried her sale to just short of rudeness, came up to Spade, raised her face for his kiss. Instead, he put an arm around her shoulders, turned her slightly, kissed her on the cheek.

“You didn’t tell me you were in town!” she exclaimed in a slightly hurt voice.

“Just for the day,” he lied easily. “On a case.”

“And you came into Graham’s for old time’s sake,” she said. “Because we met here.” In that light her eyes looked almost violet. “That first time, you came in to get a book and instead you got...” — she opened her arms wide — “me!”

Spade grunted. “Just as a rental.”

“That’s a nasty thing to say to a girl, Sam.”

“Not a girl anymore. Not Ida Nolan anymore.”

“What did you expect? You ran off to be a hero in France.”

His eyes hardened between down-drawn brows. He said in a sarcastic voice, “I love you, Sam. I’ll wait for you, Sam.”

“I got lonely.”

“And married Miles Archer three months after I left.”

“Miles was here. Miles was eager to marry me. Miles—”

“I saw Miles in Tacoma a couple of nights ago,” Spade said. “He thanked me.”

She said almost cautiously, “For what?”

“Going into the army. Leaving him an open field.”

“He isn’t due back from Tacoma until tomorrow...”

“I’m booked on the four oh five stage to Seattle.”

“To hell with you, Sam Spade,” Iva Archer said viciously.

The engines growled and shook; white water boiled up around the stern of the Eliza Anderson as she backed away from the ramshackle Victoria, British Columbia, slip. Fog, wet as rain, already had swept most of the passengers off the darkening deck into the cabin for their three-hour trip down Puget Sound to Seattle.

A dark-haired man just shy of forty turned from the coffee urn with a steaming mug in one hand. He had a trim mustache over a wide mouth, narrow, amused eyes under level brows, a strong jaw, a small faded scar on his left cheek. Before exiting he set down his coffee and cinched up the belt of his ulster.

Sam Spade, who had been leaning against the bulkhead midcabin, sauntered out after him. Moisture immediately beaded Spade’s woolen knit cap, the turned-up collar of his mackinaw.

The man was standing at the rail, mug in hand, staring down at the wind-tossed water. A glow came into Spade’s eyes. His upper lip twitched in what could have been a smile. He leaned on the railing beside the other man.

“Mr. Flitcraft, I presume?”

The man dropped his mug overboard.

Charles Pierce slid warily through the doorway like a cat entering a strange room. He relaxed fractionally when he saw a bottle of Johnnie Walker whiskey and two glasses on a tray on the table. Spade was at the sink running water into a pitcher. The room was simple, comfortable, homey, with a private bath.

“I want to get this over with,” said Pierce in a high, clear voice. “Not that I have anything to feel guilty about.”

They touched glasses. Spade said, “Success to crime.”

“There’s no crime involved here. Nothing like that.”

Without obvious irony Spade said, “Five years ago, in 1916, a man named Robert Flitcraft did a flit in Tacoma. Before leaving his real estate office to go to luncheon, he made an engagement for a round of golf at four o’clock that afternoon. He didn’t keep the engagement. Nobody ever saw him again.”

Pierce downed half his drink. Spade’s hands had been rolling a cigarette. He lit it, looked through the drifting smoke with candid eyes.

“The police got nowhere. Flitcraft’s wife came to our Seattle office. She said she and her husband were on good terms, said they had two boys, five and three, said he drove a new Packard, said he had a successful real estate business and a net worth of two hundred thousand dollars. I was assigned to the case. I could find no secret vices, no other woman, no hidden bank accounts, no sign Flitcraft had been putting his affairs in order. He vanished with no more than fifty bucks in his pocket. He was just gone, like your lap when you stand up.”

“What he did makes perfect sense! He—”

“When I went into the army in nineteen seventeen he was still missing. Last week his wife came in to tell us a friend of hers had seen him here in Spokane.”

Spade rubbed his jutting chin as if checking his shave.

“Now we have Charles Pierce living in a Spokane suburb with his wife of two years and an infant son. He sells new cars, nets twenty-five thousand a year, belongs to the country club, plays golf most afternoons at four o’clock during the season. His wife doesn’t look like Flitcraft’s wife, but they’re more alike than different. Afternoon bridge, salad recipes...”

Pierce was fidgeting. “What are you getting at?”

“I was sent here to find and identify the man our informant thought was Flitcraft. I’ve done that. Charles Pierce is Robert Flitcraft. No definite instructions beyond that, but there’s the bigamy question. Wife here, wife in Tacoma. Kids from both marriages...” For the first time Spade ad dressed Pierce directly as Flitcraft. “Of course since you left your first wife extremely well fixed you could claim you thought that after all this time she would have divorced you in absentia—”

“I was on my way to lunch.” He paused. “A steel beam fell from a new office building and hit the sidewalk right beside me.”

“A beam.” Spade’s voice was without inflection.

“A chip of concrete flew up...” His hand absently touched the faint scar on his left cheek. “I was more shocked than scared. I was a good husband, a good father, I was doing everything right, and none of it meant a damned thing if a beam could fall off a building and kill me.”

“As if someone had taken the lid off life and let you see how it really worked?” Spade pinched his lower lip, frowned, drew his brows together. “No logic, no fairness, only chance.” His frown disappeared. “Sure. By getting in step with what you thought was life you got out of step with real life.”

“You do get it! I decided that if my life was merely a collection of random incidents, I would live it randomly. That afternoon I went to Seattle, caught a boat to San Francisco. For the next few years I wandered around and finally ended up back in the Northwest. I got a chance to buy into an auto dealership here in Spokane, met my wife, got married, had a son...” He grinned almost sheepishly. “I like the climate.”

“Three things not in my report,” said Spade.

Ralph Dudley, resident supervisor of Continental’s Seattle office, was in his seventies, fifty years on the job, white of mustache, pink of face. His kindly eyes behind rimless spectacles were misleading; they never changed expression, not even when he sent his ops out to face danger, sometimes death.

“First item,” said Spade. “Nobody’s said so, but before Flitcraft disappeared Mrs. Cahill made a play for him. An affair wouldn’t have fit in with his view of what the good citizen-husband-father did so he turned her down. She didn’t like that. So when she spotted him in Spokane she couldn’t wait to try and make as much trouble for him as she could.”

Dudley said in mild-voiced skepticism, “I see.”

“Second item. Flitcraft was afraid his first wife wouldn’t get what he did. She didn’t. She just figures he played a dirty trick on her so she’s going to get a quiet divorce.” Merriment lit his face. “Flitcraft doesn’t get it either. He adjusted to falling beams. When no more beams fell he adjusted back again.”

“You mentioned three things, Spade.”

“Flitcraft is my last case.”

Dudley turned his swivel chair to stare out the window. Half a dozen mosquito-fleet ferries were churning their various ways across Elliott Bay between the Seattle waterfront and the distant irregular green rectangle of Blake Island.

Dudley told the window, “In nineteen seventeen you couldn’t wait for us to get into the war. Disregarding my direct order, you went over the border to enlist in the First Canadian Division.” He turned to look at Spade. “While training in England you took up competitive pistol shooting. You made some records.”

“The pistol made the records. All I did was point it and make it go bang,” said Spade. “Eight-shot thirty-eight Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. Only three hundred of them ever got made because they jammed in combat, but they were so accurate on the firing range they got banned from competition shooting.”

Dudley went on coldly as if Spade hadn’t spoken.

“You were assigned to the Seventh Battalion of the Second Infantry Brigade and saw action in the trenches of the Lens-Arras sector of France. You were wounded. You got a medal. Upon your return, against my better judgment, I took you back.” His voice took on a nasty edge. “A competitive pistol shot, a war hero, and suddenly you don’t like guns. Suddenly you’re quitting the detective trade. Do you mind telling me why? Or have you just lost your stomach for real man’s work?”

Spade stood. He did not offer his hand.

“I think if you need to use a gun you’re doing a lousy job as a detective. As for resigning, I don’t like the work here much since the war. Too much head knocking, not enough door knocking. And who says I’m quitting the detective trade?”

2 Samuel Spade, Esq.

San Francisco’s summer fog was in. Sam Spade’s Wilton was pulled low over his eyes, his hands were jammed deep in his topcoat pockets. He walked past the United States Mint on Fifth, turned right past the secondhand store on the corner. Remedial Loans, at 932 Mission Street, had venetian blinds on the ground floor, a high arched window above them, and an elaborate second-story facade with incised decorative heraldic designs.

The wind had crumpled the front section of that morning’s Call against the recessed street door of the shabby office building beyond Remedial. Spade’s left hand scooped up the newspaper while his right hand opened the door. He climbed a narrow flight of stairs, turned left, started down the second-floor hall. The boards creaked under his steps.

The door of the second office down popped open. A dark dapper thirtyish man in a brown suit that matched his eyes stuck out his head. He brought the smell of cigar smoke with him. His tired oval face, olive skinned, was dominated by a big nose. A gold watch chain glinted across his vest. Dandruff speckled his already thinning hair and the shoulders of his suit coat. His voice was high-pitched, almost shrill.

“I’m Sid Wise. You the new tenant?”

“Yep. Sam Spade. You got a wastebasket?” Spade thrust the crumpled-up Call into Wise’s hands. “Thanks.”

He went on to the next office. A man in a white smock was blocking out letters on the opaque glass of the propped-open door. The letters, when filled in, would spell out SAMUEL SPADE, ESQ.

“Two more hours, Mr. Spade.”

“That’s the stuff,” said Spade.

A shadow moved across the floor of his outer office. He stopped short, jerked his head slightly sideways.

“A girl,” said the sign painter. “I had the door open, she went right in. I thought she was your new secretary. When three more women showed up she told them the position was filled.”

Spade squeezed his shoulder, went by him. The office was a ten-by-twelve uncarpeted cube without a window. An open door in the far wall led to an inner office. On the plain golden-gloss oaken desk were a telephone, a steno pad, and a Remington Standard typewriter, nothing else. An office chair was behind the desk, another against the wall beside the door. Beside it was an end table with a single magazine on it. Nobody was in the room.

Spade hung his overcoat and hat over a double hook on the coatrack beside the door. He was wearing the same suit he had worn in Spokane. A girl came from the inner office with a water glass full of fresh daisies. She was so shocked at the sight of Spade she almost dropped the flowers.

“Oh! I — you startled...”

Spade beckoned, went by her through the connecting door to the inner office. The girl put the flowers on the desk and followed, hesitantly. The inner room was larger than the other; it had a window looking out over busy Mission Street, open far enough to stir the curtains. In one corner were a sink and a towel rack. The inside of the sink was wet.

Spade sat down in the swivel armchair behind the desk. It was a larger version of that in the outer office, with a deep drawer on the left side for the upright filing of long ledger books and letter files. It bore a blotter, a pen set, an ashtray. No framed photographs. No papers. No files.

The girl sat down hesitantly on the very front edge of the oaken armchair across from him. She was ten years younger than Spade, with an open, almost boyish face and direct brown eyes that didn’t meet his frankly appraising yellowish ones. She was wearing a woolen skirt and a tailored jacket and a spotless white blouse with frilled cuffs. A bejeweled locket on a thin gold chain glinted on her shirtfront. Her right hand played with it.

She said nervously, “Your ad in the Chronicle didn’t specify what sort of business you’re in, but it was for a part-time receptionist-typist to answer your phone and keep your files in order. My shorthand is still pretty slow, but filing and typing I can do. And I’m a quick learner.”

From his vest pocket Spade took a packet of brown papers and a thin white cloth sack of Bull Durham with a drawstring on top. He sifted tan flakes onto the paper, spread them evenly with a slight depression in the middle, rolled the paper’s inner edge down and then up under the outer edge, and licked the flap, using his right forefinger and thumb to smooth the damp seam, twisting that end and lifting the other end to his lips.

He lit the cigarette with a pigskin and nickel lighter, drew deeply, spoke to the girl through drifting smoke.

“Private investigations.”

Her face lit up. “Like in Black Mask?”

Spade said to the universe at large, “Sweet Jesus, she reads the pulps!”

He leaned forward to tap ash into a nickel-plated tray on the desk. Beside it was a glass cigarette holder with a brass top, empty, and an attached matchbox holder.

“No, not like Black Mask. Jewel thefts and bank robberies and handling security at racetracks are jobs for the big agencies. For the one-man shop it’s searching records, catching cashiers stealing from their employers, finding people who have disappeared, guarding the gifts at fancy weddings. Sitting around and waiting for a client and smoking too many cigarettes.” He put both hands flat on the blotter. “The sign painter said three other women showed up in answer to my ad.”

“They... left.” She raised her chin almost defiantly. “I told them the position had been filled.”

“Why the flowers?”

“I–I bought them for my mother. She loves daisies. But this place looked so drab I thought— Oh! I don’t mean...” She colored. “I can come in after school for the next month, until I graduate from the St. Francis Technical School for Girls. Then I can be full-time.”

He said in a sort of singsong, “Shorthand, typing, filing, and comportment for young ladies in an office environment. Right now I only need part-time. How old are you? Seventeen?”

She tried to prepare a lie, but her face couldn’t bring it off. In one breathless burst of words, again with that chin raised, she said, “Yes, seventeen, but I’m very mature for my age and I’m a quick learner and—”

“Ten dollars a week,” said Spade. “If you make it through the first month maybe you’ll get a pay raise. If you earn it.”

She said in an astounded voice, “You mean that I—”

“If you know how to roll a cigarette.”

“I’ll learn.”

Spade stood to come around the desk, saying, “I’ll just bet you will, sister,” and stuck out a thick-fingered hand. He said, almost formally, “Samuel Spade.”

She pushed her chair back and stood to take the proffered hand with a formality matching his own.

“Effie Perine. I think you should leave the ‘Esq.’ off your door. “Just Samuel Spade is more elegant.”

“Comportment for young detectives? OK, scoot out there and tell the sign painter to leave it off. He’s still blocking in the letters; it should be easy for him to do.”

She bobbed her head, turned to leave.

“Then bring in that steno pad from your desk. If I’m going to be paying you all that money, we’ve got to get out a stack of client solicitation letters.”

3 This and That

Effie Perine stood aside so the stocky, redheaded man with the squirrel-cheeked florid face could get by her, then went in to Spade’s inner office. Spade was behind his desk getting out his Bull Durham and his papers. She stopped in front of him, eyes bright.

“So, did he hire us?”

“I shooed him away. I forgot to tell you, sweetheart, your Sammy doesn’t do domestic. Find out before you send them in.” As she hooked a hip over the corner of his desk, took papers and tobacco from him, and began expertly rolling his cigarette, a sardonic light, quickly quelled, came and went in Spade’s eyes. “He’s on the road a lot, his wife gets lonely.”

Effie Perine held the rolled cigarette out to him, end up.

“And he thinks she’s cheating on him.”

“He’s right.”

“I graduate tomorrow, Sam. Will you come?”

“I’ll try to make it if you’ll keep your mother away from me.”

“Samuel Spade, I never once said Ma—” Seeing the smug look on his face, she stopped, almost giggled. “Greek women are great at business. Of course she wants to size you up.”

“I’ve got a maybe client named Ericksen coming in at noon. Get him to sign a standard contract. I’ll show up tomorrow, just to convince your mother that I don’t keep a tommy gun in my desk and that I can’t pay you more than ten bucks a week.”

She said in a soft voice, “Thanks, Sam.”

At 8 a.m. a week later Spade trotted up the stairs carrying that morning’s newspaper. The doors of both his and Sid Wise’s offices were standing open. Wise’s office was one room only, unoccupied. The desk had no typewriter on it. As Spade cat-footed past, his big shoulders hunched under his blue topcoat and a perhaps-delighted light came into his eyes.

He stopped short of his own office so his shadow would not be cast inside by the hallway light. Overriding Effie Perine’s expert typing was Sid Wise’s voice, less shrill than usual, more resonant than might have been expected from such a slight man.

“We hereby submit the moving papers, already examined by the respondent. The moving papers consist of the accusation, the statement to the respondent sent by certified mail, a signed copy of the notice of defense, a notice of hearing—”

Sam Spade spun around the doorframe and into the office. Sid Wise was in the middle of the room, a declaiming finger pointed at the ceiling.

“What a God-damned lawyer trick, using my secretary on the sly because you’re too tight to hire your own girl.”

Wise’s finger dropped very quickly to his side. “Don’t blame Effie. I talked her into it.”

“You’ve been out of the office all week on the Ericksen case, Sam.” Effie Perine’s voice was small. She was sitting up very straight, red with embarrassment. “You didn’t leave me any work to do and I wanted to practice my skills.”

“You defend him sneaking in here like some midnighter to steal the silverware?” Spade clapped his hands together, gave a sharp bark of laughter. “My work comes first and as of last Monday, Sid, you’re paying Effie five bucks a week.”

“You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” said a shamefaced Wise.

Spade was sitting behind his desk smoking a cigarette when Effie Perine came in with a pen and steno pad, all efficiency.

“Were — were you really mad, Sam?”

“Hell no, sweetheart. I’ve known you’ve been doing his work this past week; I just wanted to catch him at it. I’m going to start needing a good lawyer one of these days.” He pointed at a folder on his desk. “Close and bill on Ericksen.”

For the next twenty minutes Spade talked in even, well-formed sentences as Effie Perine’s pencil covered page after page of her shorthand pad with his closing report. He never stumbled, never went back to correct some fact.

Sven Ericksen and his partner, Paul Lembach, had the Ericksen-Lembach Complete Home Furnishers at Seventeenth and Mission.

“Strictly a working-class neighborhood,” said Spade. “Credit up to fifty dollars, nothing down, a dollar a week.”

Ericksen was a widower with two small children, so Lembach stayed late most nights to count the cash, make out a deposit slip, and put the money in the Bank of Italy’s all-night depository at Mission and Twenty-third.

“Sales are level, but their gross has been slipping for the past six months. Ericksen took Lembach on right out of business school, taught him the trade, made him a partner. He can’t admit to anyone, especially himself, that the man’s a thief.”

“So you concentrated on Lembach without telling him?”

“Mmm-hmm. About six months ago Lembach started betting heavily on the ponies, and losing even more heavily. For five nights, through a hole in the wall of the storeroom next to the office, I watched him count the cash. He coffee-canned ten, fifteen, twenty, and forty bucks and gimmicked the bank deposit slips to correspond to the cash he was depositing. The third day his horse came in, so he didn’t steal anything.”

Effie looked up from her pad, excitement in her face and voice. “Did you confront him with it?”

“He’d just deny it and our client would side with him. So last evening just after closing I secretly counted the cash. This morning I gave my total to Ericksen.”

“Which he’ll check against Lembach’s deposit slip total and find a” — Effie Perine looked down at her pad — “a forty-dollar discrepancy for last night.”

The corners of Spade’s mouth drew up in a grin. “You’ll make a detective yet, sweetheart. I’ll advise Ericksen to dissolve the partnership and demand restitution over a six-month period for Lembach’s defalcations. He won’t be sore at me and he’ll pay our invoice without a squawk.”

“Ericksen will need a lawyer for that, won’t he, Sam?”

“Yeah.” Spade grinned sardonically. “And yeah, I’ll recommend Sid Wise for the job. Then Sid’ll really owe us.”

4 Enchanted with These Islands

Golden Gate Trust was located between Bush and Pine in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. Three of its plate glass windows looked out on Seaman’s Bank across Montgomery; in the fourth was a massive vault with a gleaming brass locking mechanism as big as the steering wheel of a Duesenberg.

Sam Spade approached a bank official whose desk was angled so he could watch the tellers at work even while serving a customer. His desk plaque read TOBIAS KRIEGER.

“Samuel Spade to see Charles Barber.”

Krieger wore a high starched collar and gray spats over shiny black oxford dress shoes. He had the wispiest of pencil mustaches over a pink upper lip. He led Spade through a maze of hallways to a door of solid teak that bore the legend

Krieger knocked, opened the door, and stood aside while announcing, “Mr. Samuel Spade.”

The banker stood up behind a ten-foot-long teakwood desk that had stacks of files on each end and three telephones and an ashtray and a leather-edged blotter with a pen set. The two framed portraits on the desk faced Barber.

“That will be all, Krieger.”

Barber was a vigorous sixty, white-haired, with dark, piercing eyes. He was as tall as Spade, heavier, thicker in the middle, with the muttonchop sideburns and walrus mustache favored by those in the San Francisco power structure. He did not offer to shake hands. His voice was brusque.

“Sit down, Spade. Do you know why you’re here?”

“Sid Wise said, ‘a confidential matter.’ ”

“Can you keep it confidential?”

“Keep what confidential?”

Barber reared back in his swivel chair, eyes snapping, then gave a bark of laughter and came forward again.

“Hah. I think you’ll do. Wise and Merican is the law firm on retainer by the bank, but I can’t use them for this. Old man Wise wanted young Sid to join the firm, but Sid’s out to prove he can make it on his own. He’s hungry, he’s close-mouthed, and he’s a Jew. Jews are shrewd. I need a shrewd man on this.”

Barber turned one of the framed portraits on his desk to show Spade a striking blond woman of about forty with an oval face and warm eyes.

“My wife. My second wife. She has a position in the community so she abhors publicity.”

Spade was frowning. “Sid said this was not domestic.”

“It isn’t.” Barber turned the other portrait toward Spade. “Our son, Charles Hendrickson Barber III.”

It was a snapshot of a well-built boy of seventeen grinning at the camera in front of the exclusive Pacific Heights School in Jackson Street. He had a shock of black hair and dark eyes that looked soulful and dreamy.

“Popular with the girls,” Spade said with assurance.

“It’s not girl trouble. He’s an excellent student and reads a lot and is impossibly romantic. He gets that from his mother. He disappeared two nights ago.”

Spade leaned forward, focused. “Phone calls? Ransom message? The police?”

“None of those. He left a note.” Barber handed Spade a folded sheet of paper from his middle desk drawer.

“Henny?”

“Family name. Short for Hendrickson.”

Spade’s frown drew deep vertical lines between his brows. “This means something to you?”

“His mother and I made the mistake of taking him on a cruise to Hawaii as a high-school graduation present and he fell in love with the South Seas. He started reading Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson...” He looked almost suspiciously at Spade. “Have you heard of any of them?”

Spade had a momentary faraway look in his eyes. “Yeah. I read a book once. I know who they are.”

“My wife tells me that the quotation is from a character in a Joseph Conrad novel, a man named Axel Heyst.”

“So,” said Spade, “Hawaii. Or Tahiti. Or maybe American Samoa — Stevenson was called Tusitala, Teller of Tales. He’s buried on a mountain called Vaea on Apia.” He was on his feet. “Henny’d have the money just to book passage, but that won’t be romantic enough for him. If no ships have sailed for Australia via those ports of call since he disappeared, he’ll probably be hanging around the docks looking to stow away.”

Barber waved a well-manicured hand. “Find him. My wife is delicate, and she’s frantic.”

“I suggested to Barber that there’s nothing so wrong with the kid trying to stow away on a freighter, getting it out of his system, instead of going straight to college.”

“Not Barber. Strictly financial,” said Sid Wise. “He wants Henny to do just what he himself did when his father retired — step into his shoes at the bank at the proper moment.”

“The boy’s mother is calling the shots, and she’s afraid that Henny might actually stow away, or might run into some real trouble if he’s hanging around the docks. She’s probably right. I did when I was his age.”

“What did your folks do about it?” asked Effie Perine.

“My ma moaned a lot. My old man was a longshoreman, what could he say? He’d done the same in his day.”

Sid Wise checked his watch. “I’ve got a client coming.”

Effie Perine moved Wise’s chair back into the outer office. When she returned Spade said, “Get an afternoon Call, angel. Leave a rundown on my desk of all the freighters and liners expected in from Australia during the next few days that will be making stops in the islands on their way back.”

“Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti?”

“Yeah. Maybe Aitutaki in the Cooks, too.”

“Maybe I’ll stow away with him,” she said almost wistfully.

“You’d stow away alone. I’m going to nab our Henny before he can clear the Golden Gate.”

Spade walked the three long blocks to his one-room efficiency in Ellis Street, changed into a denim jacket and pants, gray chambray work shirt, and heavy work shoes with five-ply leather heels. None of the clothes were new.

Paddy Hurlihey’s was a waterfront bootleg joint at Pier 23 on the Embarcadero. It smelled of stale beer, was wreathed in cigarette smoke, was crowded with loudmouthed stevedores. Spade, dressed like any other longshoreman, bellied up at the bar beside a wiry lean-faced twenty-year-old.

“Let me buy you a drink, Harry.”

“I’ll be damned. Sam Spade.” Harry’s large direct eyes, under brows turned down at the outside edges like a bloodhound’s, were too old for his chronological age. His voice had an Aussie twang. “I heard you was with Continental up in Seattle.”

Spade caught the barkeep’s eye. “Got back a month ago to set up on my own here. I know this town.”

“Towns is all the same,” said Harry morosely. “I bet it’s as bad for the workingman up there as it is down here.”

“One of the reasons I left. Too much strikebreaking.”

“See? The same. Since the old Riggers’ and Stevedores’ Union went down after the strike of nineteen the shipping companies have set up something they call the Blue Book union. It’s supposed to be independent, but we don’t got no contract no more and it’s a closed shop for guys like me who was active in the strike. I get some work over in Richmond. Tramp steamers, the Alaska Packer Line, the Japs, the Aussies — they don’t gotta go along with the company union. Ship’s there a week, a man can make fifty, sixty bucks. But ships is few and far between.”

The burly Irish bartender came down the stick. Without asking, he poured two shots from a bottle with an Antiquary label, then clamped his hand on Spade’s forearm. Spade jerked free, his hand already closing into a fist. The bartender stepped back quickly with both hands raised, palms out.

“I just need your brass check before you gents can drink.”

Harry took a round brass disc from his pocket, tossed it on the bar. “The shape-up bosses pay in these instead of cash. The number on it shows that it’s legit. Only places you can cash ’em is gin mills like this here one, the bookie joints along the waterfront, and Sly-Pork’s pool hall up the street. You gotta buy two drinks at two bits each. Then you get one on the house.”

Spade put a dollar on the bar next to Harry’s brass check and held up four thick fingers. “And two on the house.”

The bartender hesitated, poured, departed. They fired down their shots.

“You still a betting man, Harry?”

Harry nodded. “Between ships I stay alive with the whores, the fours, and the one-eyed Jacks.”

“I’ve got ten bucks says you can’t get me a lead to a seventeen-year-old kid hanging around down here until he can find a freighter to the South Seas to stow away on.”

“Maybe I oughtta stow away with him — go back home to Australia where I belong. I ain’t doin’ so hot here.”

Spade described Henny Barber, gave Harry a ten-dollar bill.

“Hell’s sake, Sam, I ain’t found out nothing for you yet.”

“You will,” said Spade. His grin made him look pleasantly satanic. “I can always find you over in Richmond if you welsh. Kid might be staying with a friend somewhere nights and hanging around the docks days, and talking about stowing away. He’s called Henny. Anything you can find out about him will help.”

5 Missing Gold Sovereigns

Spade hooked a hip over one corner of Effie Perine’s desk while fishing papers and tobacco from his vest pocket. She looked up from the Chronicle’s shipping news.

“Harry called to say that the hen is sleeping in the henhouse but pecking around Pier 35. He’s betting ten bucks that what you want is the Oceanic Line’s San Anselmo, newly arrived from Sydney via Honolulu and due to go back to Australia after a two-day turnaround here.” She rattled her newspaper in frustration. “Who’s Harry? What’s he talking about?”

“Harry’s a longshoreman when he can get work. He helped lead the strike by the Riggers’ and Stevedores’ Union back in nineteen. Trouble was it broke the union instead of the shipping companies. He was only eighteen then, but they’ve got him down as a dangerous radical — maybe a Commie.”

Her eyes were bright. “So you gave him some work.”

“Ten bucks worth. It ain’t charity, sister. He’s found out that our boy Henny — the hen he mentioned — is bunking in safely with buddies but was hanging around Pier 35 waiting for the San Anselmo to dock. Any other messages?”

She took his cigarette makings from his fingers.

“Sid said that Charles Hendrickson Barber” — she drew out the word Hendrickson in a la-di-da voice — “wants you to call him at the bank when you get in.”

“String him along for me, darling.” He jabbed his lighted cigarette toward her. “Don’t tell him about the San Anselmo. I want to hold off grabbing Henny until just before he tries to stow away.” He winked at her. “Run up the charges.”

“Samuel Spade, never mind about your charges! What about that boy’s poor mother? She thinks he’s in mortal danger—”

“What would your ma do if it was you?”

Effie Perine giggled. “She’d be down on the docks herself raising blue blazes.”

“There’s your answer,” said Spade.

The San Anselmo was a rakish one-stack steamer that had come through the Golden Gate under pilot the night before, too late for quarantine anchorage. That morning early it had docked at its home pier, 35. Spade, carrying a clipboard, looking vaguely official in a watch jacket and a yachting cap with gold braid on the visor, went up the gangplank with authoritative strides. Aft, on the poop deck, stevedores were unloading brown-leafed hands of Hawaiian bananas from between latticed frames.

“Port Authority,” Spade told the seaman standing gangway watch, a blond, clever-looking man with vivid blue eyes.

“Quartermaster Kest, sir.”

“I have to examine your lifeboats for—”

“Christ, man, are we glad to see you!” Advancing on him with outstretched hand was a hard-bitten man with his share of gold braid on his uniform. “Tom Rafferty, first officer.”

“Daniel Gough, Port Authority.”

“How’d you get here so quick? We only just called the International Banking Corporation five minutes ago.”

Spade said blandly, “I was here on another matter.”

“Well, c’mon down to the strong room so you can see firsthand what they did to our specie tank. You’ll have to tell us proper procedure. We’ve never had anything like this before. The officials of the I.B.C. were already planning to come with armed guards and trucks to take the treasure to their vaults, so they shouldn’t be over half an hour getting here.”

Spade wore his poker face. “How much is missing?”

“Captain Ogilvie will want to show you for himself.”

Kest said, “Should I get another quartermaster up here to relieve me, Mr. Rafferty, in case Mr. Gough has any questions?”

“Do so,” said Rafferty. As they descended a series of ladders to the strong room he said over his shoulder, “When the passengers started disembarking, the captain said we’d better open the first two of the three strong room locks.”

“Standard procedure?”

“Not really. The three keys are held by Captain Ogilvie, Purser Abbott G. Battle, and myself. Usually we’d open all three, but because the San Anselmo was going to be carrying such a huge number of gold sovereigns, Captain Ogilvie had his lock replaced with a new one in Sydney.”

Rafferty led Spade through the door from the first-class staterooms to the baggage room. There was a loading port at each side. The room was virtually empty.

“The first-class passengers have gone and their luggage has been taken off. During the voyage they had access to this room for two hours each day. Under guard, of course.”

A door in the opposite wall led to what Rafferty called the extra-mail room. It was empty. Straight ahead was a bulkhead door, closed. To their right was a steel door, open.

“That’s the vault. The other door leads to the messroom. This is the most secure location on the ship.” Rafferty stepped to the strong room door and sang out, “Port Authority’s here.”

Two uniformed men came out. The one introduced as the purser, Abbott G. Battle, had a face shiny with perspiration. The other man was big and hard and fifty, reeking of authority, with a hand made hard by calluses and the deeply tanned face of one who has spent his life at sea.

“Captain Floyd Ogilvie,” he said.

“Daniel Gough,” said Samuel Spade.

The shrewd blue eyes took Spade in. “Where’s your usual man? Frank Petrie?”

“Off sick. What do we have here?”

“A hell of a mess. Three of us have to be here for the vault to be opened because we each hold one of the keys. This morning when we got to port I gave Tom here my key to open up the vault while I was overseeing the passengers’ leaving.”

“My lock and Abbott’s opened up, but the captain’s key wouldn’t fit,” said Rafferty. “I called him down immediately.”

“You keep the keys in your cabins?”

“We do. Abbott and I share quarters. Of course the captain has his own cabin.”

Purser Battle spoke for the first time. He had a husky voice edged with belligerence. “The thieves must have made impressions of our keys so they could get in here and remove the gold between Honolulu and Frisco.”

Ogilvie said, “I saw immediately that the lock’s shackle was brass. The one I had put on in Sydney was steel. We had to get the ship’s carpenter down here to saw it off. When I got the door opened and switched on the light this is what I found...”

Ogilvie led them into the strong room. Quartermaster Kest had shown up to crowd in behind them. Battle mopped his face with his handkerchief and stayed behind in the mail room.

The strong room was a compact armored chamber, cold and clammy. It held ten locked and steel-bound money chests.

“So what’s missing?”

“Five chests just like these. Each chest contains ten thousand sovereigns — five thousand pounds worth of British gold. Seventy-five thousand pounds in gold specie in the fifteen chests, consigned by the Commonwealth of Australia to the International Banking Corporation here in San Francisco.”

Spade gave a low whistle. “Three hundred and seventy-five thousand American, total. Twenty-five thousand bucks in each chest. No wonder you had your lock changed in Sydney.”

“For all the good it did me,” said Ogilvie sourly. “I can’t believe any of my men were involved in something like this. We have a veteran crew of loyal seamen. A union crew.”

“And the looters got what — a third of it? One hundred twenty-five thousand bucks. What do these chests weigh?”

“Including the boxes themselves, eighty pounds each.”

Spade looked at his watch. “Four hundred pounds in all, and clumsy to move. I make it a four-man job, three crewmen to do the work and a first-class passenger who planned it and set it up. Probably boarded the ship at Pago Pago or Honolulu.”

“The master criminal,” said Kest in an awed voice.

“Given the keys, the theft’s easy. Getting the loot off once the ship docked is what’s tough.” Spade paused. “You came in too late to go through quarantine and anchored off until morning?”

“That’s right,” said Ogilvie. “We usually do.”

“So, maybe a fifth man ashore. When the I.B.C. and the customs officers and the cops and the detectives get here, they should run down all of the passengers and their luggage and not let them leave the jurisdiction. Tell ’em to concentrate on anyone who came aboard at Honolulu. Search all crew members before they go ashore, then search the ship itself.”

“You think the gold is hidden aboard?”

Spade checked his watch again, shrugged. “Could be. Are the mail sacks unloaded by hand or handled by machine?”

“By machine,” said Rafferty.

“So you could take the gold from the boxes, wrap it in small packages, and hide it in mail sacks consigned to some direct-delivery address.” Spade nodded. “Yeah. If the mail hasn’t already been cleared at the customs shed you might want to open the sacks and check them — if you can do it legally.”

“You Port Authority people can,” said Ogilvie.

“I’ll go set that in motion right now,” said Spade quickly.

Topside, he took a quick five minutes to check the canvas-covered lifeboats hanging from their davits beyond the railings, left when he heard the approaching police sirens.

6 Continental

“It’s the purser,” said Sid Wise. Effie Perine had brought in an extra chair from Spade’s office, was working the steno pad balanced on her knee. “In his position he could move around the ship at all hours without anyone thinking anything about it.”

Spade shook his head. “Uh-uh. Our inside man on the heist is Quartermaster Walter Kest. I’d have liked twenty minutes alone with that bird. Tap him, he’ll crack like an egg. Trouble is I shot my mouth off, telling them the investigative steps to make, which they’ll pass on to the International Banking Corporation and the cops. I had to beat it before some smart flatfoot recognized me.”

“They should just be grateful for all the work you did.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn about the coppers, sweetheart. I saw a sergeant named Dundy going aboard. He’d love to get me between floors at the Hall of Justice with a couple of other cops and rolled-up newspapers for some kidney work. I stuck my finger in his eye once too often when I was with Continental.”

“Sometimes I think you just like to make people in authority mad at you.”

“It keeps things stirred up.” Spade stood. “The cops and Continental and Burns will be all over that boat for the next couple of days looking for the loot.”

“What about my client’s son?” demanded Wise. “How will you know he hasn’t stowed away if you can’t get back aboard?”

“I’ll get aboard all right. Meanwhile, no other vessel’s scheduled out of San Francisco for the South Seas this week.”

In the hallway Spade said to Effie Perine, “You’re having the time of your life, aren’t you, sweetheart? Be an angel, while I’m gone run down and get the newspapers to see how they’re handling the story.”

The round ornate pillar clock in front of Samuel’s Jewelers in Market Street showed just shy of 2 o’clock when Spade entered the triangular-shaped Flood Building. He took the stairs to the third floor, walked down a quiet linoleum-covered hallway. Light from a pebbled-glass fire escape window at the far end of the hall showed CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY on the door to suite 314. Spade entered without knocking.

In the reception room a secretary he didn’t know was banging on a typewriter as if it were a faithless lover. Spade pointed a forefinger at her with his hand closed behind it, worked his thumb like the hammer of a gun, said, “Samuel Spade to see Phil Geaque. I’ll be in the operatives’ room.”

She started to her feet, protesting, but by then Spade had slid through the door in the left-hand wall and closed it behind him. The big boxy tan three-windowed room held a couch, seven chairs, four desks, and a conference table. On the desks were messy stacks of paper, typewriters, unwashed coffee mugs. On one wall was a notice board plastered with WANTED posters from other Continental offices around the country.

Lounging on the couch under the windows was a hulking Irishman with an ingenuous face and big ears that stuck out a mile. Beside him was a tall lean man with lank brown hair and a big head thrust slightly forward on a surprisingly thin stalk of neck. Sitting in a turned-around straight-backed chair was a medium-size youngster with a narrow face and quick eyes. His chin rested on forearms crossed on the back of the chair.

The Irishman was saying, “I’d of had the chance of a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest if that boogie’d had a shiv on him,” when Spade interrupted with, “Hi, Mickey.”

Mickey Linehan sprang to his feet, grinning, exclaiming in a bogus Irish brogue, “Faith an’ be-Jaysus an’ they let you out early. For good behavior, is it?” He said to the other two men, “Samuel Spade here was the best shadow man Continental ever had.”

The tall lean man switched his store-bought cigarette to his left hand and stuck out his right. “Woody Robinson. Pleased t’meetcha, mate.” He had bad teeth and a marked Australian accent. “This bird here is Phil Haultain, with us a week today.”

“Woody and the kid just got back from a shadow job down in Calistoga,” said Linehan.

Haultain said, “The Frisco D.A.’s office was hiding two witnesses down there until they could get on the stand. They were at the party the night that Virginia Rappe got dead.”

Spade hitched his hip over the edge of a desk, began rolling a cigarette. “Hell of a town to do a tail job in, Calistoga. Everybody knows everybody.”

“We found that out,” said Robinson. “Fatty Arbuckle’s lawyers wanted us to get a line on the witnesses — a couple of good-time girls named Bambina Delmont and Alice Blake — though they’re calling themselves models and actresses now. Their chaperone, a woman from the D.A.’s office, made us dead quick.”

“The jury’ll set Arbuckle free,” said Spade around his cigarette. “She didn’t die until four days after he took her into that hotel room at the St. Francis. The D.A.’d as lief charge the two ladies with manslaughter as Arbuckle.”

“Their sticking her in that cold bath because they thought she’d had too much to drink probably ruptured her bladder and killed her right enough,” nodded Mickey sagely.

Spade shook his head. “I figure her torn bladder grew out of some chronic condition aggravated by bootleg hootch. But I hear this assistant district attorney Bryan likes to win cases so much that he pretends the law is what he says it is.”

“You mean it ain’t?” said Robinson.

The receptionist stuck her head in. “Mr. Geaque can see you now, Mr. Spade.”

The superintendent’s triangular corner office had windows overlooking Powell and Market Streets. Phil Geaque, standing up behind his littered desk, burst out laughing. He was bald headed and sharp-eyed and came just to Spade’s shoulder.

“Daniel Gough indeed! As soon as Pearl told me you were here I remembered you always liked to use street names for aliases, so I knew it had to be you who’d been nosing around the San Anselmo this morning.”

They shook hands as if they liked each other, sat down on opposite sides of the desk.

“I figured you’d already be on it, Phil, so I came by to pick your brains.”

“Slim pickings so far. It’s a good heist, Sam. But how’d you get on it so soon? Looking to collect the reward they’ll be offering?”

“Why not? You boys can’t touch it. Actually, I was down there on something else and just ran across it.”

“And told them how to conduct their investigation. Not that you weren’t right. If they weren’t looking to arrest you they’d be looking to hire you. I can give you some cover by taking you on at the usual pay, backdate the start of employment, and say you were there on a case.”

“Six bucks a day, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year?” Spade chuckled and shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ve had my fill of that. They know who I am?”

“No, but Sergeant Dundy thinks Daniel Gough might have been involved in the heist and was making a ‘daring foray’ to see what the authorities had discovered. He says he thinks he recognizes Gough’s description. Now run it down for me, Samuel.”

Spade did, finishing with, “I like the quartermaster, Kest, for the inside man, with a couple of crewmen from the graveyard shift at sea. But whoever planned it is the key.”

“You’re giving away a lot of weight here, Sam.” Geaque had a twinkle in his eye. “We’re going to beat you to the gold and the glory if you’re not careful.”

“You’ll be out in front of the coppers and Burns, Phil. I figure I can stay out in front of you without much trouble.” Spade mashed out his cigarette. “Somebody’ll spot me if I hang around down there, so I need tin mittens to get me my information. Way I see it, now you owe me so you’ll feel guilty if you don’t keep me up-to-date on the official investigation.”

Effie Perine looked up from the messy stack of newspapers she was rifling when Spade came through the door. She grabbed up her shorthand pad from the desk blotter.

“A police sergeant named Dundy was by. He told me I’d better let him know whenever you show up or it’ll go hard on me.”

Spade smiled without showing any teeth. “That’s our Dundy, all right.”

“He had a patrolman named Polhaus with him.”

“Tom Polhaus?” Spade’s eyes had brightened. “That’s a break. If Dundy gets too snotty go to Tom. Anything from Sid on how our client is behaving? Sid’s office is locked up.”

“Nothing. No other calls.”

“Just make sure he pays you for any work he dumps on you.”

“Of course I’ll get paid!” She sounded shocked. “Sid is your friend and the man who brought you the job you’re—”

“And he’s a lawyer.” He lit a cigarette. “The papers have anything we don’t know, snip?”

Effie Perine began sorting through the stack of news papers with slim, efficient fingers, pausing at this or that article.

“The Chronicle says, ‘When the theft was discovered, guards were immediately placed on the pier and aboard the liner. Search of the large vessel was immediately begun by a special detail of customs officials, accompanied by police and detectives from the Continental and Burns agencies. All members of the crew were searched before they were allowed ashore.’ ”

“They had to go through the motions even though it was way too late to do any good.”

She blurted, “They’re doing all the things you told them to do, Sam!”

He didn’t react, so she returned to her papers. “The Call says, ‘After an all-day search by police and private detectives, the disappearing gold remains an inscrutable mystery. An inside job involving several members of the San Anselmo’s crew is suspected...’ ”

Spade gave a derisive snort as she selected another paper.

“The Examiner says, ‘An international ring of specie robbers, including either members of the crew or persons who frequently travel on the liners across the Pacific, is thought responsible for the crime.’ ”

“Next they’ll be saying it was the Commies looking to finance another revolution.”

“The News says, ‘The baggage still on the pier and the mail that had been stowed adjacent to the strong room were searched without result.’ Gardner Matheson, Oceanic’s general manager, is quoted as saying, ‘The gold unquestionably was removed in Pago Pago or Honolulu before the San Anselmo sailed on to San Francisco. All passengers have been queried—’ ”

“All passengers?”

“ ‘Except those of unquestionable reputation.’ ” She frowned, scanning further. “There’s something... Here it is. The Daily Herald says, ‘Two passengers were not immediately contacted. One disembarked and disappeared with only a single suitcase. The other had made several voyages on the San Anselmo and had been seen in close communication with several members of the crew. He left the vessel with two trunks each weighing one hundred eighty pounds and checked into the Palace Hotel but never occupied his room. The police are still seeking him.’ ”

She looked up at Spade, eyes shining, voice excited. “What sort of luggage weighs three hundred and sixty pounds, Sam? He hid most of the gold in his trunks in the baggage room and was among the first passengers off so he could get away before the theft was discovered.”

“How did he get into the strong room? How did he get the gold into the trunks when he only had two hours in the baggage room, and that with guards watching his every move?”

“You said yourself that crewmen were involved.”

“Yeah. Look, I don’t know if the police are looking for him, but try to find out everything you can about the man with the single suitcase. If he came aboard at Honolulu he’s our meat. Also, get everything you can on the quartermaster, Kest.”

Effie Perine was making shorthand notes on her pad.

“You’re going to have to keep the office running and keep Dundy off my back,” he told her. “Tell Sid I’m working full-time on our stowaway. Tell everybody else you don’t know where I am.”

“Oh, Sam, all that gold!”

“We’ll see. I have an idea of how they might have gotten at least some of the gold off, and I need to check places aboard where they might have hidden the rest of it.”

“The police and the detectives—”

“Are thinking big and complicated. I’m thinking small and simple.” He touched a finger to the tip of her nose. “Simple is always best, sweetheart.”

7 The Plot Thickens

Sam Spade, in his longshoreman’s getup, was in the morning Blue Book shape-up for a job unloading the rest of the San Anselmo’s cargo. As expected, he was passed over.

“How d’ya get a job in this burg?” he complained.

The burly stevedore next to him in the shape-up, who said his name was Tingly, looked Spade over carefully. He had a two-day growth of beard, hard eyes, and a weary air.

“You don’t, less’n you offer a kickback on your wages.”

“Hell with that stuff. That’s why I left Seattle.”

They strolled, stopped to roll cigarettes. Tingly stood on one foot with the other leg bent, his shoe flat against the wall of Pier 35. He gestured with his cigarette and laughed bitterly.

“Looks like the flatties got somethin’ on what they call their minds.”

Dundy and Polhaus and two other uniformed policemen were striding purposefully up the ramp to the San Anselmo, where Quartermaster Kest awaited them at the head of the gangway.

“Maybe they’re gonna arrest somebody,” said Spade, drifting that way. Tingly drifted with him.

“Or bust some heads. That one in the front, Dundy, busted mine during the strike in nineteen.”

They were standing near the foot of the gangplank when the policemen descended with four manacled seamen between them. Both men turned away to draw on their cigarettes as the officers and their prisoners passed. When Spade and Tingly turned back, the first officer, Rafferty, and Quartermaster Kest were at the head of the gangplank to watch the procession to the squad cars. Their voices carried.

“I bet those four let that passenger put all the stolen gold in his steamer trunks in the baggage room,” said Kest.

Rafferty shook his head almost belligerently.

“Don’t you believe it. They’re all good union men and they’ve been with us for six voyages now. They’ll be back. Then whatever s.o.b. pulled this job, he’d better haul ass. The cops will be out for blood for sure.”

“I s’pose you’re right.” Kest added casually, “Can you get Phillips to relieve me here while I get some chow?”

Rafferty went in search of Kest’s replacement. Spade said, “Let’s play some pool. Penny a ball?”

“Why the hell not?” said Tingly. “There sure ain’t gonna be no work today for the likes of us.”

As they strolled down the Embarcadero, Kest roared by them on a green motorcycle with a sidecar.

It was 11 p.m. The two seamen pulling graveyard watch, Hans Grost and Shelly Grafton, were on the boat deck checking the gas-vent pipes from the fuel tanks. Grost was thick and slow with pig eyes, Grafton lean and lithe, knife eyed. Their movements were surreptitious. They descended quickly and silently to the promenade deck, which had been roped off so it could be re-covered with gray rub berized paint before the vessel departed San Francisco. After quickly checking the bottoms of the scuppers — drainpipes — from the boat deck, they set off toward the smell of fresh coffee wafting from the galley.

Sam Spade, still in his longshoreman’s denim jacket and pants, a blue knit navy watch cap pulled down hard on his head, emerged from an alcove beside the doorway to the passengers’ cabins. He crossed quickly to the drainpipes. The bottoms of all of them were plugged pending the paint job. Spade lightly tapped each in turn with the rounded steel end of his Flylock pocketknife. The first three gave off a hollow metallic clang. The fourth emitted a dull thunk.

Spade followed that scupper up to the boat deck. Its top was blocked. The others were not. He stared thoughtfully at it for a full two minutes, then went around tapping the vent pipes from the fuel tanks that Grost and Grafton also had been checking. Again, one of them emitted a thunk instead of a clang.

After looking into the lifeboats hanging from their boat deck davits, Spade departed the vessel. It was just midnight.

Fog was drifting in through the Golden Gate and the horns were busy, as well as the bells and whistles of the ferries crossing to and from Oakland and Sausalito, up in Marin County.

Spade strolled from Pier 35 down toward the Ferry Building. As he passed the intersection where Front and Union touch the Embarcadero, three bulky shapes emerged from the shadows. Their features were obscured by the heavy hoods of their jackets. The man in front had a baseball bat, brass knuckles glinted on the second man’s fist, a knife gleamed in the hand of the third.

Spade backed up against the front of the Pier 19 warehouse. His body seemed to shrink, to draw in on itself as if to make him a smaller target. Terror was in his eyes, his head swiveled from side to side to keep all three men in view. His hands were out as if to ward off attack. The fear in his eyes was echoed in his voice; he seemed to have trouble getting words past a closed-down larynx.

“Chrissake, guys, don’t — don’t hurt me. I’ll give you everything I’ve got. You don’t have to hurt me.”

The lead man gave a heavy laugh of triumph.

“A snoop, and a yellow-livered snoop besides. You’ve been sticking your nose into the wrong guy’s business.”

He swung the baseball bat at the cringing figure’s head. But Spade had already charged inside the bat’s arc. His right elbow jammed up into the attacker’s exposed throat.

His charge was so sudden that the second man’s brass knucks only grazed the side of his face, dropping him to one knee. But even as Spade went down, he was driving forward off his other foot.

The top of Spade’s head crunched into Brass Knucks’s chin. The man went backward with blood spouting from his ruined mouth as the first attacker, gasping and choking, hit the pavement with the back of his head. He was motionless.

Grunting like a wild boar, Spade whirled to drive his cupped hands simultaneously against both of the knifeman’s ears. Howling with the pain of shattered eardrums, the man landed on his knees, tipped over sideways, and lay still, clutching both sides of his head, yowling.

Forty-five seconds had passed.

Spade looked quickly around, panting, holding his handkerchief to his scraped cheek. No pedestrians were in sight. No traffic passed on the Embarcadero. He bent over each man in turn, pulling back their hoods so he could see their faces. It was obvious from his expression that he didn’t know any of them. He checked their pockets. No money, no I.D. He walked away.

At the turnaround in front of the Ferry Building, Spade jumped aboard an almost-empty Market Street Owl just pulling away. He took a seat close to the back door and kept his head down and the handkerchief to his face to mask the bleeding.

He left the car at Ellis Street, walked the block and a half to his apartment at 120 Ellis. His hands were shaking. The blood on his cheek was clotting. He took off his heavy woolen cap. There was a bloody tooth embedded in the fabric. He threw the tooth into the gutter, let himself in, trudged up the stairs, let himself into his room.

Spade pulled the chain of the bare overhead sixty-watt bulb, tossed his cap and coat on the davenport bed, and went around a counter with a tall stool in front of it. In the tiny cubicle behind it were a sink and a table with an Energex single-burner hot plate on top, two plates, and cutlery on the shelf below.

He washed his hands and face, wincing when the hot water hit his lacerated cheek, dried gingerly using the towel that hung on a rack behind the counter. From a narrow cupboard above the sink, he took a Johnson & Johnson first aid medical kit and liberally applied iodine to his cheek, again wincing, added a gauze pad and sticking plaster.

From the shelf below the bedside stand he got a wine glass and a half-full bottle of rum, opened the window to let in the cold wet night air and the smells and incessant night sounds of Market Street. He sat down in the room’s only chair and drank rum and rolled and smoked cigarettes.

“The plot thickens,” he finally muttered aloud.

He washed and dried his glass, put it and the Bacardi back in the nightstand. He undressed and put on the green-and-white checked pajamas he took from under the pillow, pulled the chain on the overhead bulb, and got into bed.

He slept.

8 Take It to the Bank

“Sam, what happened to your face?”

Spade wore a white shirt with narrow green stripes; his suit coat was over the back of his swivel chair. He stubbed out his cigarette, said, “Three muggers. We’re making progress.”

“Getting beat up is making progress?”

“You oughtta see the other guys.”

“There was nothing in the papers—”

“I can’t figure if they were warning me off or trying to kill me.”

“Kill you?” Effie Perine’s face was suddenly pale.

“Brass knucks, a shiv, a baseball bat. Easy to go too far. Someone’s getting worried.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I was on the San Anselmo last night and watched two seamen on graveyard watch checking out the drainpipes.”

“You mean they saw you and—”

“You think I’m a baby in diapers?” he snarled. “If I don’t want to get seen I don’t get seen.” Then he chuckled and patted her arm. “Don’t mind me, sweetheart, my face hurts.”

The door to the outer office was thrust open with such force it banged against the wall. Two men burst in. Effie Perine started to her feet. The shorter man, in front, wore a black bowler hat. He pointed at Spade in triumph.

“The man on the beat told me he saw you coming in!”

“Hello, Sergeant,” said Spade cheerily. His only move had been to lean back in his chair. He gestured. “I believe you’ve met my secretary, Effie Perine.”

Dundy was a head shorter than Spade, compact but strongly built, with a bullet head and a square face and green eyes. His short-cut brown hair and tightly trimmed mustache were starting to show glints of gray. He lowered his pointing finger.

“I’ve met her,” he said harshly.

Spade lit the cigarette he had been rolling when Effie Perine came in, gestured lazily with it.

“ ‘Lo, Tom.”

The big man behind Dundy jerked a nod. “Sam.”

He was Spade’s size but carried more weight, most of it in a hard-looking belly that stretched at the shirt buttons above his belt. His mouth was thick, hard-edged; he looked like he would always need a shave. His eyes were small and blue and shrewd, constantly shifting.

Spade clasped his hands behind his neck.

“So what are you two birds up to this morning?”

“Up to our necks in the manure you’ve been spreading around town,” snapped Dundy, crowding the desk. “Wasting our days running around in circles trying to catch up with you.”

“Well, I’m here now.” He said to Tom Polhaus, “I hear you took the four luggage-room guards down to the hall and were grilling them until all hours.”

“How did you know—”

“It’s all over the docks, Dundy,” Spade said mockingly.

“Had to let them go,” said Polhaus in an almost apologetic voice. “Nothing to show they were in on the heist.”

“I could have told you that” — said Spade. He unclasped his hands and lowered his arms and leaned his elbows on the desk. He grinned — “if you boys could have got hold of me.”

“We’ve got you now,” said Dundy with triumph in his voice. “Got you for impersonating an officer—”

“Prove it.”

“I knew you’d say that, Spade. I’m going to take you down to the San Anselmo and show you to First Officer Raf-ferty and Quartermaster Kest so they can identify you as the man who went aboard just after the robbery claiming to be—”

Spade was on his feet, his movement so abrupt that his swivel chair crashed back against the wall under the window.

“You got a warrant for my arrest?” he demanded.

The veins were swelling at the sides of his thick neck. Dundy took an involuntary step back and Tom Polhaus started forward, alarm on his face.

“Take it easy, Sam, we’re just—”

“Just busting in, making accusations without a warrant.”

He put his left hand flat on his desk and leaned forward on that arm while pointing his right forefinger at Dundy’s chest as Dundy had pointed a finger at him.

“If I impersonated anyone, it would have been a minor Port Authority official, not a cop. If you want to arrest someone, clap the nippers on Quartermaster Kest. If you can find him.”

“Straight goods, Sam?” asked Polhaus.

“Take it to the bank.” He jerked a thumb at Dundy. “And take your pal here with you when you go.”

“How do you know Kest is involved if you weren’t in on it yourself?” demanded Dundy doggedly.

“It’s called investigating, Dundy. If you think you can prove anything on me, go ahead, take me in.” He turned to Effie Perine, who was still standing back from the desk, white-faced and astounded. “Run next door, sweetheart, ask Sid Wise to come in—”

“We’re going, Spade.” Dundy’s mouth worked beneath his mustache as he turned away. “But we’ll be back.”

Polhaus paused long enough to nod to Effie Perine and shake his head at Spade in exasperation. Then he went out behind Dundy. Only after the outer door had closed behind them did Spade drag his chair up to the desk again and sit back down in it. Effie Perine, still shaken, sank into the other chair.

“Sam! A police sergeant! He’s going to—”

“He’s going to try,” said Spade. “What have you got to tell me about our missing passenger without any luggage?”

Her face fell. “Nothing. He boarded at Honolulu as you thought, slight and bearded, under the name St. Clair McPhee. Paid cash. Left the ship and just disappeared.”

“Good!” Spade’s face had brightened. “Then we can give odds forever that he’s the one behind the whole scheme.”

“But if he’s gone and the gold’s gone—”

“Some of it’s still aboard the San Anselmo. Give Tom Pol-haus time to get back to the hall, call him, ask him to meet me at the Waldorf at noon. Those three mug artists who jumped me last night knew who I was. If Tom can bird-dog them for me through police records I’ll tail ’em until they lead me to this St. Clair McPhee.”

She started to speak, but he interrupted.

“They weren’t hired by Kest. He went on the lam yesterday. They weren’t hired by my graveyard-watch seamen because they didn’t see me. So it has to be our missing passenger.”

He shrugged into his suit coat and started for the door.

“And tell Sid Wise I’ve got the kid nailed down. I don’t know where he is minute to minute, but he’s OK.”

Spade was at a corner table in the Waldorf Café in Market Street, drinking a seidel of beer and eating a ham sandwich. Tom Polhaus sat down, tipped his hat back, and sighed.

“That beer looks good. I ain’t been in here before.”

Spade swept a thick, hostlike arm around the small, dim saloon. “Buy one and the sandwiches are free.”

Polhaus lumbered to his feet, went up to the bar, returned with his own stein of dark beer and a big plateful of ham sandwiches on small hot biscuits. He started wolfing them down.

“Did Dundy really think those four seamen were in on the heist, or was he just trolling for headlines?”

Polhaus shrugged. “He tried hard enough to break ’em, that’s the truth. Took ’em downstairs for a little session.”

“Waltzing around a quartet of tough seamen who don’t know anything in the first place does a lot of good.” Spade blew out smoke. “What about the quartermaster? Kest?”

Polhaus drank beer, looked quizzically at Spade. “That on the up-and-up, Sam? You really think he’s the one planned it?”

“Planned it? No. In on it? Yes.” Malice glinted for a moment in his eyes. “Not that you’re likely to find him even if you do look. Not him or his green motorcycle with the sidecar.”

“Motorcycle with a sidecar?”

“Yeah, but here’s another one for you. What’s the story on those three guys got beat up on the Embarcadero last night?”

Polhaus stared at him with small, bright, suddenly suspicious eyes. “What happened to your face, Sam?”

“Cut myself shaving. Who are they? What’s their grift? What tale did they spin for you?”

Polhaus drank beer and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, his knuckles rasping the bristles on his chin. When he spoke it was slowly, thoughtfully, as if feeling his way.

“They were the ones got beat up, not the other way around.”

Spade chuckled. “By a dozen Chinese highbinders with lathers’ hatchets? Anybody want ’em for anything?”

“You sure you cut yourself shaving?”

“Out-of-towners? Local? Where are they staying?”

“No wants, Sam. They got patched up and walked away.”

“I’d get more from the newspapers,” said Spade irritably.

“Let’s talk about all the help you’re giving us.”

“I gave you Kest. What more do you want?”

“I want you to level with me about those three guys.”

Polhaus finished his sandwich, scraped his chin again, sighed. “Well, might could it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at Kest. That sidecar big enough to carry some of that missing gold?”

“Yeah, but it didn’t.”

“I wish I knew what you aren’t telling me, Sam.”

Spade put money down. “I might have something for you in a day or two. For you, Tom. Got it?”

“I got it,” said Polhaus almost glumly. Then he added unwillingly, “Those three guys, they’re Portagee fishermen out of Sausalito, maybe turned leggers. I ain’t got their names on me but we couldn’t hold ’em anyway. No wants or warrants on ’em.”

9 The Portagee

The Eureka, one of several side-wheelers that made the thirty-two-minute run to Marin County half a dozen times a day, slowed to a crawl to slide between the massive wooden pilings of the middle of Sausalito’s three ferry slips. The mooring lines were tossed out, and the gangplank was slid out and down. Spade followed the other passengers off, walked a hundred yards to a three-story pseudo-Mission-style hotel overlooking the meager downtown.

For now the hotel lobby was deserted. Dust motes danced in the air. The check-in counter was unmanned. From the room behind it came muted voices and the clink of chips.

Spade slapped the round metal bell on the counter several impatient times. A stooped man wearing a green eye-shade stuck his head through the doorway with a surprised look on his face.

“Yes, sir,” he piped. “Can I help you?”

“Benny Ruiz back there?”

“Benny.” He trailed off as if unsure of the name.

“Ruiz. Quit the clown act. Is the Portagee in the game?”

The face disappeared. Another took its place, square and meaty, wearing whiskers and a cigar. “Who’s askin’?”

“Spade.”

“Course it is. Long time no. Try the Lighthouse.”

Spade nodded. “You up or down, Duke?”

“Down twenty berries.”

“When you gonna learn not to draw to an inside straight?”

The head made a rude noise and disappeared. Spade went out into the street to walk north along the waterfront.

The Lighthouse looked like its name, a small white café with a fake octagonal wooden lighthouse on top. The windows were steamy. The clatter of cutlery, the jumble of voices, the smell of frying peppers and spicy Portuguese chorizo came out when Spade pulled the door open. A counter ran down the center of the room with stools in front and the grill behind. There were booths along the front and side walls. In four of them were lean, narrow men in rain slickers, some with missing fingers.

Three of the seven stools along the counter were taken, one by the Lighthouse’s lone woman. When Spade entered all conversation in American ceased. The sweating cook abandoned the hash browns and sausage and eggs he had sizzling on the flat steel grease-stained grill to look at Spade. His shirt was open to show the top of a red union suit.

“Yeah?”

Spade walked through the silence toward the only man at the counter who had not turned to look at him, a wide and thick man with meaty arms and shoulders under a black sweater. His round face was slightly concave, with receding black hair and round brown eyes under thick brows. His nose was broad, open pored, his lips thick. A black peacoat draped the stool beyond him.

Spade took the nearer red vinyl stool. The man turned to look at him. “Hell’s sake, Sam. What’s it been?”

“All of five years,” said Spade.

Conversation resumed. The cook slopped a mug of steaming coffee down in front of Spade. The Portagee had his elbows on the counter, was sucking heavily on a Fatima cigarette.

“New cook, new clientele. Place has changed, Benny.”

Benny Ruiz nodded. “Lots of us Portagees is leggers these days. We get nervous-like when strangers show up.”

“How about you, Benny? Dealing crab or liquor?”

“Both since Prohibition. Hell, Sam, bringing in booze beats working.”

Spade blew on his coffee, sipped it, made a face.

“Dregs of the pot,” said the cook without turning around.

Ruiz stubbed his cigarette out in the remains of his meal, picked up his peacoat, and dropped a quarter beside his plate.

“See you around,” he said.

Spade made and smoked a cigarette, sipped at the vile coffee. After all of ten minutes he tossed a dime on the counter and went outside. Ruiz fell into step beside him.

“Didn’t want to blow the gaff on you, Sam, if you was working a game on somebody for Continental.”

“I’m out on my own now, Benny. Three leggers, Portagees, jumped me in the city last night. They work out of Sausalito. I don’t have names. Maybe you could ask around, find out who’s carrying scars. Find out if one of them took a boat out — his own or somebody else’s — after midnight three nights ago and came back before first light with a load that wasn’t hooch.”

“I’ll be damned. The San Anselmo gold heist?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But there’s reward money out. Find out if he maybe met up with a man named St. Clair McPhee.”

Effie Perine was on her way down the stairs when Spade came in the street door. She stopped, said eagerly, “I can come back up if you need me.”

“Go on home, angel. I’ve been over in Sausalito.”

“Why Sausalito?” She sounded surprised.

“Because that’s where our three mug artists are from. And that’s where the bootleggers keep their boats.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Neither do I, sweetheart. See you tomorrow.”

“Sam, wait! A Phil Geaque — I think that’s how you pronounced it — called. I left his message on your desk.”

“You got it right. Gee-ack.”

“And Sid says his client is getting up on his hind legs. Three ships are slated to sail for Australia with ports of call in the South Seas during the next week and Henny could try to stow away on any of them. Does that still hold what you told me this morning, Sam? That you have Henny nailed down?”

“I’ll know where to find him when the time comes, if that’s what you mean.”

Effie Perine went down and out. Spade went up and in. By the illumination coming through the thin net window curtains he rolled a cigarette, picked up the phone, gave central Kearny 5330-1. He heard Geaque’s voice in his ear.

“Still there, Phil? Scraping the bottom of the barrel?”

“You know us, Sam. We never sleep. Bottom of the barrel is right. The police had to let those four seamen go.”

“There was never anything in that anyway.”

“We wired our Honolulu office to check whether the replacement lock and hasp for Captain Ogilvie were obtained there by the thieves. We haven’t gotten any word yet.”

“And won’t. The locks were changed in Sydney.”

“Locks? Only the captain’s was changed.”

Spade shook his head impatiently even though Geaque could not see him. “All of the locks. The San Anselmo was there eight days with the strong room open and empty and the locks hanging on their chains and their keys hanging on hooks in the ship’s officers’ quarters. Everybody ashore except a seaman or two on watch? Go on with you. New locks, new keys, to replace the old.”

After a long silence Geaque said slowly, “But then the captain replaced his lock with another one of his own, so they had to put on another lock that they’d have a key for.”

“The quartermaster, Kest, is the bird who switched ’em.”

Geaque’s sigh came over the wire. “Kest failed to report for last night’s midnight watch, and today the police found two gold sovereigns in a pawn shop. The man who ex changed them for American money fit Kest’s description. But I find it hard to believe he had the brains to set this whole thing up.”

“Nor did he. It was a passenger got on at Honolulu.”

Geaque’s voice was sharp. “Who is he? What’s his name? Where is he right now?”

“Don’t know, don’t know, and don’t know. He gave the name of St. Clair McPhee — surely false — to the shipping line, paid cash, was first off the boat, and disappeared.”

“That’s him for sure?”

“Sure as death and taxes.”

“The authorities now hold the theory, and I concur, that the gold was stolen before the ship ever arrived in Honolulu, and was off-loaded and hidden there. The thieves’ll be planning to pick it up when the San Anselmo passes through on its way back to Australia. I’ll plant an undercover man aboard in hopes that he can identify them before Honolulu.”

“Waste of time, Phil. The gold was stolen here.”

“You’re wrong, Sam. We’ve confirmed it’s not hidden aboard and there’s been no opportunity to smuggle it off the ship since it docked. It has to be in Honolulu.” Another sigh. “Anyway, the point is moot. We’re out of time here. The authorities can’t hold the San Anselmo much longer.”

Spade’s voice betrayed urgency. “When will it sail?”

“They’ll start loading cargo tomorrow, let the passengers aboard the next day, and sail that afternoon.”

“Thanks,” said Spade and hung up abruptly.

He locked the office and left, but did not go back to his apartment in Ellis Street. He caught a down car to the Ferry Building, walked out to Pier 35. When the loading started in the morning there would be lots of activity, but at midnight the San Anselmo was deserted. As it had been the night he’d gone aboard to watch Grost and Grafton, the gangplank was unguarded.

Spade easily vaulted over the gate across the head of the gangway, landed on the deck on almost silent feet, and cat-footed it across the boat deck to the lifeboats.

In the third one he checked he obviously found what he was looking for. He left the ship wearing a satisfied expression.

“Tomorrow night,” he muttered to himself.

10 You’re Worth Money to Me

At 6 o’clock the next evening Sam Spade strolled through the cigar store that fronted Sly-Pork Cunningham’s pool hall across from Pier 27. He looked successful, dapper, almost dandyish in a blue woolen double-breasted suit, a hand-tailored blue patterned tie, and shiny black oxfords. He was smoking a cigar.

Able-bodied seamen Grost and Grafton were playing rotation at one of the six green felt tables. The pool hall was high ceilinged, noisy with the clack of balls and the voices of the kibitzers lining the walls in straight-backed wooden chairs. The overhead lights were filtered through cigar and cigarette smoke.

Grafton ran the three through nine before miscuing on the ten. Spade spoke in a flat, almost menacing voice.

“I play the winner. Dime a ball.”

Grost took him in, almost sneered. “Private game, Mac.”

“I play the winner, dime a ball,” said Spade in that tone.

Grost was the heavy-bodied one, thick and slow in a faded tight-fitting middy and blue jeans that bagged on heavy flanks. His body looked poised for violence, but his chin was just going south and his piglike eyes could not hold Spade’s stony stare.

“Ah, OK, sure. Ah, anything you want.”

Rattled, he shot and missed. They played out their game hurriedly. Grafton won. Spade put aside his cigar and selected one of the cues held upright in the rack midway down the room, laid it on the table, and rolled it back and forth. It was bowed, rolled unevenly. The next one he selected rolled flawlessly.

As he chalked up he said, “Lag for break.”

Grafton won the break. Spade set them up, tightly so they would break wide, hung the wooden triangle back up on the wall.

Grafton put so much force into his break that the twelve ball jumped off the table. Spade fielded it left-handed like a good shortstop, set it back on the green felt.

Grafton made the one and two balls, had to try a bank shot for the three, missed. Spade ran the rest of the table in order. He put his cue back in the rack, picked up his still-smoldering cigar. With ill grace, Grafton gave him a dollar.

“Close enough,” said Spade. “Let’s barber. Outside.”

Grafton stepped up close, almost chest to chest. In sharp contrast to his fellow seaman he was lithe and lean, his work clothes almost tailored, his face bland but his eyes dark and blade sharp. Emboldened by him, Grost stepped closer too.

“Who the hell you think you’re kidding, Mac?”

Spade touched his ear. “Too many lugs hanging out in here.” He leaned close, murmured without any apparent movement of his lips, “The sovereigns,” then walked out.

He had thrown his stogie into the gutter and had started rolling a cigarette when the two seamen came up to him.

“This had better be good,” said Grafton in an icy tone.

Spade hunched against the fog-laden evening wind to fire up his cigarette with his lighter.

“The San Anselmo boards passengers tomorrow morning and sails for Australia in the afternoon. You two only have tonight to get the rest of the gold off.”

“We don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” mumbled Grafton.

Spade dragged in smoke and looked around in exaggerated confusion. “Am I talking to the wrong people here? Kest must have told you to be on the lookout for me before he lost his guts and ran away and hid.”

They seemed to struggle for what to say. Spade shrugged as if in disgust, started up Sansome Street. The two men hesitated, then hurried to fall into step with him.

“We knew there was someone, but Kest — he didn’t say nothing,” said Grost. “We been waitin’ for him to—”

“Shut up, you damn fool!” snarled Grafton.

Spade chuckled. “What a smart pair you are! He’ll rat you out to the cops to save his own hide. I got most of the gold off the night the San Anselmo arrived, but I told Kest a couple of hiding places aboard ship just in case. I figured it was safer for all of us if you two never met me face-to-face. But with the ship leaving tomorrow I have to chance it.”

“We was promised a third of what we hid aboard, but now we want half.”

Spade looked angry, then tossed away his butt, shrugged.

“OK, half it is, seeing as how we’ll be splitting Kest’s share. I’ve got a Chink merchant lined up in Chinatown’ll give me seventy-five cents for every dollar of gold I bring him. But you boys don’t see a dime unless you recover the rest of it tonight.”

Grafton got a crafty look. “Look here, mister, how do we know you ain’t just some grifter tryna cut yourself in?”

“You birds figure you can smuggle off the gold still aboard when you get to Honolulu.” Spade shook his head. “You’ll land in the brig for sure. I’ll see to that. But if you move it here tonight you’ll get your share. Tomorrow’s too late.”

Spade started walking again. Grafton hurried to catch up. “Maybe you don’t have no idea if there’s gold hidden aboard. Maybe you’re just tryna con us into telling you things.”

“Half’s in a vent pipe from the fuel tanks, the other half’s in a scupper from the boat deck to the promenade deck.”

They stared at him in silence. Grafton got sly again. “Where are you gonna be while we’re takin’ all the risks?”

“Waiting for you on the dock with a car,” said Spade.

Grafton shook his head. “Uh-uh. You’re gonna be right there with us so you’ll be in the can with us if anything goes wrong.”

Spade sighed, shrugged. “You birds are too smart for me.”

From the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Office in Powell Street, Spade called Tom Polhaus in the Detective Squad Room at the Hall of Justice. “Dundy around, Tom?”

“Gone home.” Polhaus chuckled. “So we can talk, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“That’s what I’m driving at.”

“I can’t be goin’ around behind my partner’s back, Sam.”

“He would behind yours. Bring him in after if that’s what you want, but if he knows about the play beforehand he’ll hex it for sure. And he’ll hog the glory and the promotions. Do you want in on the San Anselmo gold-theft collars or not?”

“Damn, I just knew you had a line to that gold,” said Tom.

Spade talked, hung up, called a Hertz Drive-Ur-Self station and said he would be by to pick up a car within the hour. At Bernstein’s in Powell Street he had a plate of steamed clams, then walked to his apartment to change clothes.

An hour after midnight a 1920 Model T Ford went out along Pier 35 to stop at the wooden fence. Its streamlined hood and big radiator with nickel trimmings gleamed under wet-haloed dock lights. Beyond the fence the black curved side of the San Anselmo stretched up into darkness. In the bay Alcatraz was baying like an old hound, Land’s End lighthouse was yapping back from beyond the Gate.

The car ka-chunked to a stop. The driver’s door creaked open. Sam Spade stepped out. The salt tang of the bay filled his nostrils. He stood for long moments, his head swiveling like the head of a wary bear.

Satisfied, he put one hand on top of the wooden fence and vaulted over. Stood again, listening, watching. At the top of the unguarded gangway two shadowy figures materialized, one heavy, wide, slouchy, the other tall, narrow, quick.

“Where’s the gangplank guard?” asked Spade in an undertone.

“Down in the galley.” Grost used the same low tone. “We put them drops in the coffee urn like you told us; he’s sleeping like a baby. Last night in port, no one else is aboard.”

“The chest’s in the car. Let’s go get it,” said Spade.

The three stealthy figures hauled the obviously empty iron-bound chest up the gangplank, carried it awkwardly down to the promenade deck, opened it, set it under the bottom of the scupper that had clunked dully under Spade’s earlier tapping.

Grafton’s sheath knife dug out the plug. Down poured a shower of gold sovereigns. Spade grabbed the rope handle at one end of the chest, began backing toward the stairs, dragging it with him. The two seamen pushed from behind, then lifted it up step-by-step. On the boat deck above, Grafton unblocked the vent pipe. They hand-over-handed up a twenty-foot length of fire hose, its nozzle down. Spade tipped the open end of the hose over the chest. Another flood of gold coins poured down.

“Fifty thousand dollars in all,” panted Grafton in triumph.

They dragged the chest over to the gangplank, Spade carrying one end by its rope handle, the two seamen carrying the other. Spade seemed to catch his heel on something, lost his balance. He dropped his end of the chest on Grost’s foot; his flailing elbow caught Grafton on the side of his jaw. The chest broke open, gold coins spilled out.

There were sudden shouting voices, pounding feet, light from wildly waving electric torches. Uniformed bulls surged up the gangplank and came from the shadows on the deck. Tom Polhaus was in the forefront, directing them, his small shrewd eyes alight.

“We’ll have the devil’s own time to gather up all them coins, Samuel,” he said.

Spade growled, “What do you want, Tom? Pretty ribbon wrapped around ’em? Here’s something else: if I were you, I’d put divers off the stern of this ship tomorrow morning early.”

“Divers? What for?”

“To recover the two empty chests those birds dumped overboard after they hid the gold you just recovered by inspired police work.” He gave a sardonic laugh. “Unless Dundy is back at the hall working out ways to grab the glory.”

“Aw, c’mon, Sam,” said Polhaus almost sheepishly. “You know the sergeant’s a fair man in his own way.”

Spade said, “I’ll be in tomorrow to give my statement.”

Polhaus led his shackled prisoners down the gangplank as police officers on hands and knees gathered up the scattered coins. Spade melted into the shadow of the cabin, unseen, until the police and dockside onlookers below had dispersed.

Only then did he jerk aside the already-loosened canvas cover on one of the lifeboats slung on davits above the rail. He reached in and, one-handed, bodily hauled a squirming teenager out by his coat collar.

“Sorry to forestall your South Seas dream, son,” he said to “Henny” Hendrickson Barber, “but you’re worth money to me.”

11 At the Blue Rock Inn

Sam Spade’s left hand was about to replace the receiver when he heard Sid Wise’s sleep-thick voice in his ear.

“If the city isn’t on fire, I’m going to—”

“My office. Pronto.” Spade hung up.

He looked at the disconsolate teenager slumped across the desk from him, arms hanging limply outside the chair arms toward the floor. It was cold in the office.

“How much trouble am I in?” asked the boy finally.

Spade licked the paper of one of his hand-rolled, twisted the ends, put one end in his mouth, lit it. “With the cops, none at all.” He put a shrug in his voice. “With your folks—”

“How’d you find me?”

“I saw your clothes and food and books in a lifeboat.”

The boy fell silent. Spade smoked placidly. Henny finally said, “You sound like you tried it once.”

Spade chuckled. “I didn’t get any farther than you did. My old man whaled the tar out of me.”

“That’d be beneath Pater’s dignity. My ma will yell at me and then start hugging me. She never lets me do anything.”

Hurried steps pattered up the hall, came through Spade’s outer door without slowing down. Sid Wise burst in.

“Sam, what the devil are you...” He ran down, seeing the boy for the first time. He exclaimed, “Henny!”

“ ‘Lo, Mr. Wise,” said Henny despondently to the floor.

“Where’d you find him?”

“San Anselmo.” Spade grinned wolfishly. “Got the gold, too, fifty thousand worth. Seventy-five is still missing. So is McPhee, so the case isn’t closed yet in my book.”

Wise gestured Henny out of the chair, fell into it himself. “You’d better tell me all about it. From the beginning.”

Spade pointed at the telephone.

“Call the Barbers. I’ll fill you in while you’re driving the three of us out to their estate to bring this desperado here home to his folks.”

Henny couldn’t hide his sudden grin at the description.

“You’ll be fighting off the girls with a stick at U.C. Berkeley, son.” To Wise he said, “I gave it to Tom Polhaus. The find, the takedown. By the time Dundy gets through shoving him aside, neither his nor my name will appear in the papers.”

Sid Wise reached across the desk for the telephone, chuckling to Spade. “Even so, we’re golden on this one, Sammy.”

“Sure.” Spade was on his feet. “I’ll get paid, Geaque will know who found the gold, and he’ll get the word out. It’ll do me good in the long run with the movers and shakers.”

. . .

When Spade entered the office at 7:30 the next morning, Effie Perine was already at her desk, the little jeweled gold locket she had been wearing on the day he hired her open before her. She had a wistful expression on her face.

Spade looked over her shoulder. Unfolded, the locket showed miniature photographs in a four-leaf-clover shape, each picture under a thin glass plate.

“Trouble?” asked Spade.

Effie Perine jumped, startled. “I–I didn’t hear you come in, Sam. No. No trouble. Just... memories...”

On the left was the cracked, faded portrait of a handsome Greek man with piercing, soulful eyes. He was dressed in the high starch collar and cravat of the previous century.

Spade said, “Your father?”

“Yes. Tassos Perinos. He died in the nineteen eighteen flu epidemic.”

The photograph across from her father’s was of a young woman, older now, whose face Spade knew well. “And your ma.” He looked at the lower one. “And their wedding picture.”

The top photograph was a tiny portrait of a Greek woman of twenty-two or twenty-three. It too had been amateurishly cut with nail scissors to fit the oval frame. It was too small to show much detail.

Effie Perine said, “Penelope Chiotras. Penny. She’s six years older than I am. Our parents came here together from Greece in nineteen hundred. Penny’s always been like a big sister to me. She took care of me for a year when my mother sort of fell to pieces after Dad died. I haven’t seen her for a year. I know she’s all right; she makes regular deposits in her mother’s account. But... nobody knows where she lives or works. I miss her.”

“I’d miss her too,” said Spade.

Decisively, she closed the locket and hung it back around her neck on its thin gold chain. Her mood had lightened.

“Did you find Henny? Is he all right?”

“Yeah,” said Spade.

Effie Perine said, perhaps snidely, “You could at least have rubbed the lipstick off your cheek.”

“The boy’s mother was grateful to get her son back all in one piece, that’s all. C’mon — you’ll hear all about it.”

An hour later they were eating ham, eggs, toast, and marmalade and drinking coffee with Sid Wise in the Palace Hotel on New Montgomery just south of Market. Where horse-drawn carriages had once stopped to drop off wealthy top-hatted and bejeweled patrons there was now an ornate roofed lobby with a fancy dining room.

Sid Wise had one of the morning papers braced against the silver coffeepot, folded open to the story of the midnight gold recovery aboard the San Anselmo.

“According to the newshawks, Sergeant Dundy has had his eyes on Grost and Grafton since the day the theft was discovered. Of course he figured they’d have to make their move on the night before the ship sailed, so he directed patrolman Tom Polhaus to have men concealed on the dock and aboard the ship. The thieves appeared with the gold in an iron-bound chest—”

“Sam isn’t even mentioned?” demanded Effie Perine.

“I’m surprised Tom got mentioned,” said Spade. “As for me, it isn’t just Henny’s ma who’s grateful. His old man is happy his kid’s escapade won’t be making the newspapers, so he’ll pay without a squawk. And plenty, too.” Spade grinned. “The kid’s taking no harm. Just getting caught was an adventure.”

“How did you know where to look?” asked Effie Perine.

“One of the lifeboats had food and clothing and novels about the South Seas in it.”

“But how’d you know last night?”

“The ship is sailing this afternoon.”

“Then there’s the reward money,” said Effie Perine.

“The International Banking Corporation will make the point that total recovery wasn’t made — seventy-five thousand worth of stolen gold is still missing,” said Wise. “They’ll say their policy is that the reward gets paid only on full recovery.”

“It isn’t fair!” exclaimed Effie Perine.

Wise popped the last piece of toast into his mouth, chewed, nodded. “But that’s the way they’ll play it.”

“But all along Sam’s been focused on the reward money!”

“So everybody else would focus on it, Effie. The two real questions have always been, who is St. Clair McPhee really, and how did he get the rest of the loot off the San Anselmo?”

“Is that why you went to Sausalito?”

Spade turned to Wise, who had tented his hands under his chin and was staring judiciously at the ornate chandelier overhead.

“Hear that, Sid? I told you she was a smart Greek.”

“Never knew one who wasn’t. And that’s a Jew who says it.”

Spade said to Effie Perine, “Now the point is to find McPhee, and pronto. He has his gold, but he isn’t through yet.”

Effie Perine asked, “Is he the one who hired those men?”

“Yeah.” Spade’s face darkened. “He won’t want anyone around who can identify him.”

“You mean he might—”

“Kill people? Sure. Anyone who helped get him the seventy-five thousand dollars that he got away with, and me, who kept him from getting the other fifty thousand dollars. I have to take him down, and quick.”

“But the papers are saying it was Dundy who found it.”

“McPhee, whoever he is, will know better than that.”

When they walked into Spade’s office, leaving Wise behind, the phone was ringing. Spade hung his hat on the rack by the door; Effie Perine picked up. “Samuel Spade Investigations.”

As he was crossing toward his private office she waved him to wait with the hand not over the receiver.

“A man calling himself the Portagee wants you to meet him at the Blue Rock Inn in Larkspur,” she said. “He sounds tough.”

“He is tough. Tell him I’m on my way.” There was satisfaction in Spade’s voice. “I’ve been waiting for his call.”

Though it was noon there was no sun in Sausalito. The train to San Rafael would go through Larkspur, but not soon enough. After leaving the ferry, Spade hunted up the “Hamburger Line” taxi — “two Greeks and six cabs” — that had recently expanded from San Francisco into Marin, and climbed into the front seat beside the cabdriver of the line’s lone Studebaker sedan. He pulled his topcoat tighter around him.

“Larkspur. The Blue Rock Inn.”

The gap-toothed skinny driver had rheumy eyes and a tweed cap pulled down over his ears and fur-lined gloves on his hands. He looked over at Spade disconsolately.

“Cold old ride up over the mountain. Train’ll be going in an hour,” he said, as if reluctant to venture out of the relative shelter of town into the windswept lower reaches of Tamalpais.

“I don’t have an hour,” said Spade.

The driver nodded sadly and slammed the car into gear, and they took off with a jerk. The two-lane road ran from Richardson Bay to Larkspur, first out across the lowland tidal flats, then up and over the hill beyond Mill Valley. It was a corkscrewing, up-and-down nine-mile ride on gravel.

Air rushing around the edges of the windscreen made talk impossible, so Spade rolled and smoked cigarettes and stared out at the pines and redwoods and, on the steeper slopes, manzanita and Scotch broom. Black-crested Steller’s jays flitted through the foliage. Once Spade looked back and could see the city gleaming white across the bay.

The taxi went down a winding decline through a final set of racetrack curves, past a farmhouse and a red barn with horses in the hillside pasture. Then they were back on level ground and chugging along Magnolia Avenue. Beyond more groves of towering redwoods the tiny town of Larkspur appeared. The driver pulled off the road opposite the newly refurbished Blue Rock Inn.

“Guess I better wait for you?” he asked in glum hope. A return fare other than Spade would be rare indeed.

“Yeah. And get yourself a drink. On me.”

“Hey, you’re all right, cap.”

They crossed the street together and went into the restaurant. There was no traffic, few pedestrians. The bar, against the right-hand wall, made no pretense of abiding by the strictures of Prohibition. A sign in the dining room read:

Under it was another notice, for the hotel on the top floors:

The cabbie took a stool while Spade walked back through the empty dining room looking for Benny Ruiz. He found the Portagee at the farthest table in the rear, under a window looking out onto unpaved Ward Street. There was a bottle of cheap red wine and two filled glasses in front of him. He was sucking on a Fatima. He raised his glass in greeting. There was a dirty bandage around his left forearm.

“You made quick time, Sam.”

“Hired a cab.” Spade sat, picked up the second glass, drank. He didn’t seem to see the bandage. “What are you doing out here in Larkspur?”

Ruiz shrugged heavy shoulders. “I asked around like you said, about someone going out the night before the San Anselmo gold heist was discovered.”

“And?”

“Legger name of Fundão ‘Fingers’ Lisboa spread it around he had a load of hooch coming in that night. But when he went out at one a.m. it was in his dinghy. His motor launch is the fastest on the bay, even carrying thirty cases of Canadian, and he leaves it behind. Foggy night, nobody seen where he went.”

“What time’d he come back?”

“Three thirty, four.”

“Hmmm. Not long enough to go out through the Gate and back. Where does he hide the booze until it gets picked up?”

“Sometimes Angel Island. Sometimes below Yellow Bluff. Here in town is a couple places built on stilts so the water washes in underneath them, deep enough to bring a boat in. The booze can sit there above high tide until they can truck it out.”

“He go out alone? Come back alone?”

“Out alone. Back with someone. Nobody saw ’em clear.” Benny Ruiz flicked ash from his Fatima onto the floor and screwed up his heavy face in a worried look. “You think maybe he was this St. Clair McPhee guy you’re looking for?”

“Seems likely,” said Spade. He drew on his cigarette, emptied his wine glass. Benny refilled it. “You talk to Fingers yourself after he got back?”

“Sure. He was half lit, talkin’ ‘bout a big bootleggin’ syndicate they was gonna set up, playin’ as if he’d actually been out on a liquor run. Then he shut up quick, like he’d said too much. He didn’t say no more.”

“Anything on the other two guys?”

“Second was Fingers’s cousin Figueiro Mondego. The third was a tough bird named Villalba Berlingas. Fingers couldn’t hardly talk. Big black-and-blue marks on his neck.”

Spade nodded. “The ringleader. He had a baseball bat.”

“Figueiro had a almost-busted jaw and missin’ teeth.”

“Brass knucks,” said Spade.

“An’ Villalba had busted eardrums. Still had dried blood down the side of his neck when I saw him.”

“The shiv,” said Spade.

Benny looked around, hunched toward Spade across the table.

“Thing is, last night I sat in at the game in the hotel, made a fin. After midnight I was climbin’ up the hill to my rooming house when somebody jumped me. I figured it was ‘cause I’d won at the game. But he tried to knife me.” He held up his left arm. “Just a scratch, but if I hadn’t of blocked it...”

“So you cleared out,” said Spade.

“Well, I didn’t see the guy cut me, but Villalba’s good with a shiv. So this morning early I jumped the San Rafael train, hung on the outside of the caboose. Jesus, was it cold! Dropped off below the station here in Larkspur. Didn’t nobody see me get on or off. Got a room. Called you.”

“Smart man,” said Spade. He finished his wine, got to his feet. He dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “You hear anything, let me know. I hear anything, I’ll let you know. You can use your time trying to figure out where the San Anselmo loot might be hidden. Find that, you’ll get some reward money.”

He left Benny Ruiz looking thoughtful.

12 Dead Men Tell No Tales

When Spade boarded the ferry in Sausalito for the return trip to the city, it was full dark and the fog was in, heavy and wet. The half a hundred passengers were all inside, crowding the seats near the engine-room wall, where the warmth seeped out.

He went to the stand-up counter next to the cigar-and newsstand. A dark-eyed girl with short frizzy red hair and a waitress uniform poured him black coffee without asking.

“Thanks,” said Spade. He laid down his nickel. “Say, how about a roast-beef sandwich to go with it?”

She brought him the sandwich on a plate with mashed potatoes and brown gravy. Spade paid his forty-five cents, ate it standing. Then he pulled his hat low on his head, wrapped his topcoat tightly around himself, and started toward the door.

“You aren’t going out into that weather!” exclaimed the waitress in a concerned voice.

“Cold air helps me think,” said Spade, grinning.

The squat ferryboat was plowing through the waves with a lurching up-and-down motion. The engines seemed to be straining, off-key. From every direction came blaring horns and moaning whistles, the jangling of bells. Despite the lights above the deck, Spade couldn’t see even the bow of the vessel.

Brief light was laid across the deck as another hearty soul emerged from the cabin. The door shut; again it was dark.

“Filthy night,” said a man’s voice full of tension.

As Spade started to turn toward the tension, he was struck on the side of his head with something blunt and hard. His hat partially absorbed the force of the blow, but it was what prizefighters call a quitter. He was still awake, trying to see the face of the man who had struck him, but when a foot swept his feet out from under him he went down hard on his side.

Quick hands tried to roll him off the deck between the railing stanchions. He caught one of the supports, wouldn’t let go. A heavy boot drove into his side once, again. He felt a rib give. His feet were shoved over the side, his torso followed. No splash would be heard in the moan of wind and din of waves. Only his clinging hand kept him from dropping into the water.

Fingers tore at his fingers. Ripped them free. He was falling. He got the other hand hooked over the edge of the deck, hung on, invisible. The door swung open again, laying down light, emitting unconcerned voices. The door shut. He was alone.

Spade’s volition was returning. He got the fingers of his other hand, strong as steel hooks, curved over the edge of the deck. Flexed his arms as if doing a pull-up on a gym bar. Shot his right arm out, gripped the base of the stanchion again. When he did the same with his left hand, pain shot through his torso from the cracked rib. He did not let go.

Spade began swinging himself from side to side. On the fourth try he hooked a shoe around another stanchion. Twisted his body, stifling a cry at the pain from his rib cage. But he had rolled himself up onto the deck once more.

He lay there for minutes, hatless, breathing harshly. He finally dragged himself to his feet by clinging to the railing. He shambled to the very bow of the craft, stayed there hunched in the shadows, where he could remain unseen until the boat had slid into its berth at the Ferry Building.

Spade, last off, found a corner in the echoing terminal. After twenty minutes without spotting any watchers, he went gingerly out to the streetcar circle and caught a car to the Sutter Hospital to get his ribs taped. From there he went to his apartment and drank enough Bacardi to put himself to sleep.

At 8 a.m. he sat up groaning, called the office, told Effie Perine he would not be in that day, and hung up without telling her why, or where he was.

He got central again, asked for the Blue Rock Inn across the bay in Larkspur. The connection took five minutes, which he spent hunched on the side of the bed, shivering, rolling and smoking a cigarette. Finally he got through, asked for Benny Ruiz by description instead of the phony name he was using.

Another two minutes, he had Benny’s voice in his ear. He said, “Those three birds won’t be bothering you anymore.” A pause. “Gotcha. I’ll go back to town this morning.” Spade stubbed out his cigarette, lay back down groaning.

When Spade, pale but clean shaven, clear-eyed, and moving well, walked into his office at 11 a.m. on Friday morning a uniformed bull was standing outside the hallway door. Inside, Polhaus bulked large next to the door, arms crossed, dissociating himself from Dundy, who was leaning over a cowering, white-faced Effie Perine, jabbing a finger at her face.

“Quit stalling, sister. I want to know where your boss—”

Spade caught Dundy by the back of his suit-coat collar, winced slightly as he spun the sergeant around before Tom Polhaus could even get his arms uncrossed. The uniformed man was frozen in place outside.

Blood suffused Dundy’s face and his fists clenched. His right arm started to move, but by then Polhaus had interposed his bulk between the two angry men.

“Get him out of here.” Spade’s neck was bulging; the whites of his eyes were limned in red.

“That’s no way to act, Sam. He was just—”

“Get him out.” Spade leaned over Effie Perine’s desk to ask in a soft, very different voice, “You all right, angel?”

She gave Spade a wan smile. The color was coming back to her face. She nodded.

The tension was leaving Dundy’s body. He stepped back a pace. “We’re going, Spade. But you’re coming with us.”

Ignoring him, Spade said to Polhaus, “This a pinch, Tom?”

“Nothing like that, Sam. They just want to ask you some questions like, over in Sausalito.”

“Sausalito? All you had to do was call. I’d of come running. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

“Sausalito! You admit you’re involved!” trumpeted Dundy.

“Of course I’m involved. I’ve been pointing my finger at Sausalito for you birds all along.”

“Now you can point it from the other side of the bay.” Dundy raised a hand as if to grab Spade’s arm, thought better of it, dropped his hand.

Still ignoring him, Spade asked Effie Perine, “Any calls?”

“One.” She cast a look at Dundy, then spoke in a malice-laden voice as she consulted her notebook, though it was obvious she didn’t need to. “Sid said he went to see Mr. — see our client about that problem he’d been having, that the client finds the result satisfactory, and that he’s holding a check for you.”

“That’s my girl.” To Polhaus, he said, “Let’s go get that police launch to Sausalito, Tom. Bring your boyfriend with you. And tell him he never, not ever, threatens my secretary again. Not about anything. Ever. He got that?”

Sergeant Dundy was silent, pinch faced, simmering.

Tom Polhaus mumbled, “Yeah, he’s got it, Sam.”

The police launch was a white quick narrow cutter that sliced through the bay’s Friday clutter of pleasure boats like a surgeon’s scalpel through flesh. It threw spume out on either side of its bow and left a spreading wake.

Sam Spade, standing in the narrow prow, gazed out through the Golden Gate at a cargo ship waddling its way out, hull down on the horizon. Another was lumbering in from the open Pacific between Land’s End and the Marin headlands. Also on the horizon were the low, irregular shapes of the Farallons, visited by nesting seabirds and little else except, in season, pods of whales migrating south toward the warm Mexican waters. Of course any night of the year bootleggers might be found out there, transferring Canadian whiskey from ships to fishing boats.

The wind whipping Spade’s coat about him made smoking impossible. The roar of the engines made conversation almost as difficult, but Tom Polhaus tried, coming up to stand beside Spade and grip the rail with both white-knuckled hands.

“The Marin County sheriff is holding a friend of yours, Sam!” he yelled in Spade’s ear. “He said he was doing some work for you! That’s why we came to get you!”

Seeing Polhaus there, Dundy came bustling importantly up on Spade’s other side. He looked pleased.

“Legger named Benny Ruiz!” he shouted. “Got him dead to rights! And for a lot more than bringing in Canadian booze!”

“Fisherman, not a legger!” yelled Spade automatically.

“Wait till you see what they caught him with!”

Dundy made a futile grab for his black derby hat as the wind snatched it from his head and twirled it around twice before dropping it in the wake far behind the boat. Dundy cursed impotently. Spade, plaid cap pulled down hard over his eyes, laughed aloud.

The Marin County sheriffs deputy who met them at the dock was long and lank with an unexpected watermelon potbelly under a gaudy yellow-and-green checked woolen shirt. He wore a black wide-brimmed fedora and a heavy tan corduroy jacket and black denim jeans over muddy boots, one of which was partially unlaced.

“Glad to see you fellers,” he said, shaking hands all around. He had a two-day stubble and his left eye was slightly cocked. “The boss’s at the site of the crime, waitin’ for us.” His voice got excited. “Caught Benny Ruiz right there, didn’t we? Still had the shovel in his hand, didn’t he? We’ve had our eye on him for months, haven’t we? A criminal type for sure.”

He led them to a long black touring car with the sheriffs decal on the door and a red light mounted on top.

Spade asked indifferently, “What does Benny say?”

“Officially, he ain’t talkin’. But hell, everybody in town knows he was lookin’ fer Fingers Lisboa.”

“And found him,” said Dundy with great delight.

They drove south along the waterfront until the road made an abrupt ninety-degree turn to the right, where Richardson Street slanted up the hillside behind the bay. The deputy pulled off on the sandy shoulder beside another sheriffs car and killed the engine.

The four men got out, the slam of the doors loud above the slosh of waves. They were beside a large pale-lemon frame house set on the high ground back from the shore, its front room extending out from the land on creosoted posts sunk into concrete bases. Its windows faced Richardson Bay above a strip of sandy beach, with the water washing in beneath it.

When Spade saw where they had stopped, he shook his head and gave an ironic chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Dundy suspiciously.

“The Stevenson house,” said Spade.

As he spoke a substantial man, who, unlike his deputy, was in uniform, got out of the other car. He had a meaty face with a heavy sandy mustache and bristling brows above muddy eyes. His hat was like those worn by Canadian Mounties in dress uniform. He nodded ponderously to each of them in turn, but thrust his hand out to shake only with Spade.

“Sorry to drag you over here, Sam, but we have questions that need answers.”

“Sure you do.”

The sheriff led them, slipping and sliding, down over the rocks to the sandy beach. Spade went slowly, favoring his cracked ribs while trying not to show it. He drew a breath between clenched teeth when he jumped down to the beach. The floor of the Stevenson house was fifteen feet above their heads.

“Seems mighty strange the bootleggers know it’s safe to land their booze right here in town,” said Dundy accusingly.

“Just some of ’em some of the time,” said the sheriff. “I ain’t got but two deputies and me to cover the whole damn county, and the feds ain’t much help. Sometimes things slip through.”

Spade walked in and up under the house to a large rectangle of dug-up sand. Beside it four loglike objects had been laid out in a neat row under heavy tarpaulins.

“Dead men tell no tales,” said Spade.

The sheriff had come up beside him. “These sure ain’t talkin’. We’re relyin’ on you to shed some light on events.”

“This is where you grabbed Benny Ruiz?”

“We got a tip and snuck down here, an’ didn’t we find him right here with a shovel in his hand?” said the deputy eagerly.

“Benny was digging them up,” said Spade, “not burying them. I asked him to look for Fingers Lisboa and asked him to think about where the San Anselmo’s missing gold might be. He must have seen this dug-up sand and thought he’d found it.”

“What’d you want with Lisboa?” demanded Dundy.

Spade said to the sheriff, “How long have they been dead?”

“Coroner says different times most like. I wanted you to see ’em here in situ, like the feller says, fore he moved ’em.”

Spade went down the row of corpses, stooping to flip the tarps down to expose each of the faces. He showed no reaction. Then he came back, indicating each man in turn.

“This one is Quartermaster Kest from the San Anselmo, as Dundy knows full well. This one is Fingers Lisboa. The next one is his cousin Figueiro Mondego. This fourth one is a shiv artist name of Villalba Berlingas.”

“We know who they are,” barked Dundy. “How come you do?”

Spade looked across the bodies to address Tom Polhaus. “Lisboa, Mondego, and Berlingas are the three thugs I asked you about, Tom, the ones who tried to mug me on the Embarcadero.”

Dundy had been standing stiffly, bent at the waist, tensely expectant. Now he almost sprang forward, exclaiming, “Samuel Spade, I arrest you for the murders of—”

“Better ask the sheriff about that,” said Spade, stepping neatly out of his grasp. “On this side of the bay you don’t have the authority to arrest a dog for lifting its leg.”

“That’s right, Sergeant,” said the sheriff quickly. “In fifteen, when Sam was with Continental, he done a couple of nifty jobs he wouldn’t take no credit for. Didn’t hurt me none with the voters come election time. So we’re gonna let the coroner get at these bodies an’ all of us is gonna go up to my office at the San Rafael Courthouse an’ we’re gonna put our bottoms on our chairs and put our heads together and figger out where we stand ‘fore anybody starts arrestin’ anybody.”

13 Roll Your Dice

“And that was that,” said Sam Spade. “I told them what had happened the night the gold was stolen, and who killed those four men, and why, so now Benny Ruiz is out of jail and Dundy’ll have to wait for another day to put the cuffs on me.”

“That’s an explanation that doesn’t explain anything.”

“Explanations usually don’t, Sid.”

They were eating lamb chops and roasted potatoes and lettuce and tomatoes in one of the dark-wood back booths at John’s Grill on Ellis Street, just a block from Spade’s room.

“Who did kill them?” asked Effie Perine.

Spade pointed a carrot stick at her. “I told you all along that your missing passenger who didn’t have any luggage — St. Clair McPhee — was the mastermind behind all this.”

“Will they get him?”

“He’s too slick. But I’m not going to forget him, and someday...” He began counting off on his fingers. “Fingers Lisboa dead with the back of his head stove in with a shovel. Kest dead with his throat—”

Wise said in a warning tone, “Sam.”

Effie Perine’s hand had gone to her throat and her face had turned pale at his offhand descriptions.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” said Spade.

“That — that’s all right. I need to hear it.”

Spade returned to his count. “Kest with his throat cut from ear to ear. The coroner couldn’t find a mark on either of the other two thuggers, Mondego and Berlingas, but I’m betting on poison in their whiskey. They knew his face and hadn’t enough brains to stay out of trouble. That’d be enough for McPhee.”

“How do you connect all four dead men to him?” asked Wise.

Spade leaned back to roll a cigarette, wincing slightly.

“Start at Sydney. That’s where the heist was put into play. Previously McPhee had told Kest to switch the strong room locks. McPhee would come aboard at Honolulu. Geaque found that the record shows he’d made that round-trip twice before and could have known that fresh green bananas were stowed on wooden latticework racks on the poop deck with enough room left to work the mooring lines. Until the ship docked at San Francisco, a perfect place for Kest and the two graveyard-watch hands, Grost and Grafton, to hide the five chests of gold they’d stolen.”

Wise put a forkful of pink lamb in his mouth and chewed. “Where was McPhee while they looted the strong room?”

“In his stateroom. He didn’t want anyone except Kest to know who he was. I think even then he planned to kill Kest.”

Effie Perine said, “I can’t believe that none of the pursers or cabin boys or crewmen could describe him.”

Spade shook his head in disgust. “Oh, they described him. Late twenties, heavy beard, dark-haired, sort of a dandy. But when he boarded at Honolulu he was bundled up despite the climate. Looked frail, claimed to be recuperating from a long illness, so he took his meals in his cabin and never ventured out on deck. Not when anyone could get a look at him, anyway.”

“So the chests were hidden on deck under the bananas.”

“Sure. McPhee was counting on the ship to arrive here too late for quarantine. It almost always did.”

The waiter brought coffee and honey-soaked Greek baklava. Spade ground out his cigarette and was silent until after Effie Perine had poured coffee and passed the sweets.

“That meant the San Anselmo would have had to anchor off until dawn. By ten thirty the ship was a seagoing morgue. At, say, one a.m. McPhee got busy. A one-man job aboard, another man with a small boat waiting in under the stern of the ship.”

“Fingers Lisboa from Sausalito?” asked Effie Perine.

Spade nodded appreciatively. “You’ve got it, Effie. McPhee started lowering the chests down to him, one at a time. But the tug showed up early. He only got three chests off-loaded before Lisboa had to leave so he wouldn’t get spotted. Predawn, McPhee told Kest to have Grost and Grafton hustle around hiding the rest of the gold aboard ship and dumping the empty chests off the stern, open, so they would sink.”

“Tom Polhaus sent divers down to find them like you told him, and found them,” said Effie Perine. “It was in the papers.”

Sid Wise said, “How do you know all this, Sam?”

“Because it’s the only way the facts we have can be fit together to make sense.”

“Dundy would think prior knowledge.”

“Dundy never thinks. Anyway, our boy disembarked with the rest of the passengers, that night caught the car ferry at the Hyde Street pier to pick up Lisboa in Sausalito. Together they buried the gold under the house in Sausalito.” He shook his head. “It’s ironic in a way.”

“What is, Sam?”

“That’s the house where Robert Louis Stevenson lived before he sailed for the South Seas. One of the main reasons Henny Barber wanted to stow away was to see Stevenson’s grave up on Mount Vaea in Western Samoa. His romantic dream brought us into the case to mess up McPhee’s plans. Once I was in, I wanted to break the robbery and get the guy behind it. From the start something about him—”

“How about Kest?” asked Effie Perine.

“He was always a dead man, he just didn’t know it. Getting in a panic and demanding his cut right away got his throat cut sooner. They found his motorcycle below Yellow Bluff.”

Wise finished his baklava. “And the three Portagees?”

“I’m just guessing here, but I think that on the day I went to see Benny Ruiz in Larkspur, McPhee was a busy little man. He separated Lisboa from the other two, took him to the Stevenson house. Lisboa would be thinking they were going to dig up the gold where they had buried it. Instead, they dug up the gold and he got his head bashed in. McPhee then lured Mondego and Berlingas to the Stevenson house, fed them whiskey with poison in it to celebrate their success. He was always too smart for the cops.” Anger darkened Spade’s eyes. “Too smart for me, too. He almost got me on the ferry back from Marin. And still nobody living knows what he really looks like.”

“Why exactly did McPhee set those men on you and then try to kill you?” asked Effie Perine.

“At first he was worried I might grab Kest, who’d dealt with him face-to-face and could finger him. Then I recovered fifty thousand dollars in specie before he could get it. That frustrated him and he doesn’t take frustration easily. And, he likes to kill.”

“You’re drawing quite a profile of a man you’ve never met.”

The muscles bulged along Spade’s jaws. “But I know him just the same, Sid. And one of these days I’ll find him.”

“Meanwhile, you’re looking at trouble from the authorities. Dundy wants the D.A.’s office to go after your license.”

“Yeah. I’ve been summoned to appear in” — Spade checked his watch — “thirty-five minutes.”

The interrogation room in the Hall of Justice had a single window so dirty the sunshine-flooded rise of Washington Square below Chinatown was just discernible through it.

Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bryan stood when Sam Spade entered. With Bryan were two men. One had a jovial red Irish drinker’s face and red hair. His pulled-down tie had cigarette ash on it. The other man was thin, colorless, with round eyeglasses and a bland face and a mole on his upper lip. He remained seated with a steno pad resting on one knee.

“Samuel Spade?” asked Bryan in a formal, resonant voice.

“Guilty,” admitted Spade.

“No attorney with you?”

“I won’t need one.”

Only then did Bryan, with a gleam of satisfaction in his eye, shake Spade’s hand and sit down again. He was just past forty, of medium stature, with a tennis player’s fitness. His eyes were blue and aggressive; his black-ribboned nose glasses were for the moment hanging below a wide determined cleft chin. His almost-patrician face had a too-mobile orator’s mouth.

“We are here today for a formal exploration of certain charges that have been leveled against you by the San Francisco Police Department, Mr. Spade. Mr. Riley will observe, Mr. Levinger will take shorthand notes. I was not with the district attorney’s office when you were a Continental agent in this city, but I have heard that you often acted with little regard for the dignity and solemnity of the law.”

“You shouldn’t listen to Dundy,” said Spade.

“This is not an adversarial procedure, Mr. Spade. We are only interested in the truth here today.”

Spade dug in his vest pocket for papers and tobacco. “My truth or your truth?”

“There is only one truth.” Bryan raised his glasses and hooked them over his nose, tried to drill Spade with aggressive eyes. “The truth is that you have been operating in a very high-handed manner for the past week.”

“And have recovered fifty thousand bucks worth of stolen gold for the International Banking Corporation.”

“And let seventy-five thousand slip through your fingers.”

“Without me there would have been no recovery at all. I was working a case and ran across the theft by accident.”

“Aha! What case? For whom?”

Spade shook his head almost sorrowfully as he rolled and licked his cigarette, lit it. “Sorry, I can’t tell you that. A grand jury can maybe make me cough up his name or spend some time in the can, but you—”

The phone on the table rang. The redheaded assistant D.A. stubbed out his own cigarette and picked it up. He listened, hung up, walked quickly out, leaving behind only the whisper of the stenographer’s pencil recording his departure. Bryan frowned. The pencil stopped moving. Bryan cleared his throat.

“According to our information, Spade, you knew a great deal about those dead men over in Sausalito.”

“One slipped through the cops’ fingers after I told them repeatedly to grab him. The other three attacked me a few nights ago on the Embarcadero at midnight.”

“You do not strike me as the sort of man to take such assault without seeking redress.”

“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not, but I would have to know where they were before I could act, right? I didn’t see them again until I was shown their bodies over in Sausalito. And how did they die? One had his throat slit. According to the Marin County coroner, the other two were poisoned. A knife? Poison? Me?” Spade smiled sardonically. “Your truth or mine, Bryan?”

Bryan cleared his throat, perhaps angrily. “Then there’s the matter of your impersonating an officer.”

“If I did, a minor port official.” Spade blew smoke from one corner of his mouth. “Nobody who was there has pointed a finger at me.”

Bryan began slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other in time with his words.

“You do not have the power of the Continental Detective Agency behind you now, Spade. You are a lone-wolf operator on the fringes of the law. Your answers to my next two questions will determine whether you retain your license or not.”

“Fire away.”

“Who was the client you were working for when you ran across the gold theft? And what did your investigation entail?”

“It was a domestic inquiry for a private individual.”

“I demand to know his name and the nature of the case!”

“I’ve said it before, you birds on the city payroll all think the law ought to be what you say it is.”

The blood rushed to Bryan’s face. “The law is the same for every man or woman, rich or poor, educated or—”

“The law is what I can get away with and stay out of jail.”

Bryan pointed an accusing finger across the table. His voice filled the room.

“You’ve had your chance, Spade! I will move against you with the full power and majesty of this office. You will receive your summons to appear before the grand jury tomorrow.” His blue eyes gleamed triumphantly. “I will have your license in my hand by the end of the week.”

The door opened and the redheaded Irishman hurried in. He stopped close to Bryan and talked urgently, glancing obliquely at Spade, gesturing with a raised shoulder and movements of his hands and head to indicate something or someone outside the room.

“I see,” Bryan said finally in a strangled voice.

Spade stubbed out his cigarette, stood without haste, pulled the points of his vest down, and pointed a finger at Bryan as Bryan had pointed a finger at him.

“You’ll be having ambitions to be district attorney — all assistant D.A.’s do. So roll your dice, Bryan. And that’s all right, I can find my own way out.”

“Something took the wind out of his sails, Sid.”

Spade was sitting across from the diminutive attorney, his hat balanced on the near corner of Wise’s desk.

“Charles Hendrickson Barber,” said Wise.

Spade got a startled look on his face. “I just got raked over the coals for refusing to divulge his name to Bryan.”

“Oh, Barber wouldn’t do anything as compromising as appear in this thing personally.” Wise began playing with the pencil on his desk. “But apart from being president of Golden Gate Trust, he’s also president of Golden Gate Saving Trust. He has a hand in the commission house of Kittle and Company. He’s a director of the Shipowners’ and Merchants’ Tugboat Company and was vice president of the nineteen fifteen Panama Pacific International Exposition. He’s a real power in this city, Sam, and—”

“And that’s why he came to you to hire someone to find his son when the kid ran off. He didn’t want his power-structure cronies to know there was trouble in the Barber family.”

“That’s also why I called him and told him Bryan was going to try and get his name out of you. I said he had nothing to worry about, you were a boulder without a fissure, but...”

Spade pulled his brows down in a black frown. “I can rake my own chestnuts out of the fire, Sid.” His face brightened, he stood, picked up his hat. “Still, it’s not so bad to declare our weight and come out punching. Because Barber made a phone call and someone dropped by the hall, I won’t have to be dodging a summons and complaint from Bryan any time soon.”

“I’m glad you’re pleased,” said Wise drily.

“When I’m not, Sid, you’ll be the first to know.”

He found Effie Perine making diagonal cuts across the long stems of a dozen red roses.

“Secret admirer?” he asked.

“Of you,” she said ruefully. “Mrs. Barber sent them.”

His eyes gleamed theatrically. “Mrs. Barber, huh? Any calls? Any clients waiting in my office?”

“Nothing. I think the whole town knows that the district attorney’s office had you on the carpet all morning.” Her face turned serious. “How do we stand, Sam?”

“On our own two feet.” He sat down across from her. “Here’s how it works, sweetheart. The cops don’t like us. The D.A. doesn’t like us. City Hall doesn’t like us. But even though they’re going to welsh on the reward money, the International Banking Corporation does like us. Because Charles Barber’s son is back in the fold unharmed, Barber likes us.”

“What good does all of that do us, Sam?”

“Just this: this city’s big-money circles will know that and take it into account when they need an investigator who isn’t with one of the big agencies and can keep his trap shut.” He took the cigarette she had rolled him, lit it, blew smoke luxuriously at the ceiling. “Which will translate into a better class of client who will pay bigger fees for our services.”

“Does it translate into a better office in a better part of town?” she asked.

“Not yet. I need a lot of people to talk to me because they feel they can trust me. Too much flash makes ’em nervous.” He ground his fag out in her ashtray, stood. “But as of now you’re on the payroll full-time at twenty-five bucks a week. Tell that to your mother.”

She was on her feet also, eyes alight. But all she said was “She likes you, you know. She trusts you won’t get her little girl into any trouble you can’t get her out of.”

“Does that mean I can use your mother as an informant in the Greek community?”

“You’re an impossible man, Samuel Spade!” she ex claimed.

He started toward his private office, then paused and turned back. “When you finish with those roses, you’d better make a file headed ‘St. Clair McPhee.’ We don’t have anything to put in it — yet. But I’m betting we will.”

He went on and shut the door. Effie Perine began arranging the roses in a vase. She began softly singing the refrain from “Ain’t We Got Fun?” to herself as she worked.

The phone rang. She stopped singing to pick up.

“Samuel Spade Investigations.”

She grabbed her steno pad and started making notes.