him in this grotesque position. Two other men stood awkwardly together at one end of the billboard, peeping through the few inches of space between it and the building at that end. The building at the other end had a blank grey sidewall that looked down on the lot behind the billboard. Lights flickered on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights.
Spade turned from the parapet and walked up Bush Street to the alley where men were grouped. A uniformed policeman chewing gum under an enameled sign that said “Burritt St. ” in white against dark blue put out an arm and asked:
“What do you want here?”
“I’m Sam Spade. Tom Polhaus phoned me.”
“Sure you are.” The policeman’s arm went down. “I didn’t know you at first. Well, they’re back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bad business.”
“Bad enough,” Spade agreed, and went up the alley.
Halfway up it, not far from the entrance, a dark ambulance stood. Behind the ambulance, to the left, the alley was bounded by a waist-high fence, horizontal strips of rough boarding. From the fence dark ground fell away steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below.
A ten-foot length of the fence’s top rail had been torn from a post at one end and hung dangling from the other. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder stuck out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back. Two men stood over him. One of them held the beam of an electric torch on the dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope.
One of them hailed Spade, “Hello, Sam,” and clambered up to the alley, his shadow running up the slope before him. He was a barrel-bellied tall