_Burritt St._ in white against dark blue put out an arm and asked:

 

“What do you want here?”

 

“I’m Sam Spade. Tom Polhaus phoned me.”

 

“Sure you are.” The policeman’s arm went down. “I didn’t know you at first.

Well, they’re back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bad business.”

 

“Bad enough,” Spade agreed, and went up the alley.

 

Half-way up it, not far from the entrance, a dark ambulance stood.

 

Behind the ambulance, to the left, the alley was bounded by a waist-high fence,

horizontal strips of rough boarding. From the fence dark ground fell away

steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below.

 

A ten-foot length of the fence’s top rail had been torn from a post at one end

and hung dangling from the other. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder

stuck out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back.

Two men stood over him. One of them held the beam of an electric torch on the

dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope.

 

One of them hailed Spade, “Hello, Sam,” and clambered up to the alley, his

shadow running up the slope before him. He was a barrel-bellied tall man with