Sam Spade

And he wanted the 50,000.

Right.

I mean, check.

Oh, fair enough.

Well, that's what you advertise, isn't it?

Not to people who hang up when you get curious.

If it was Biddle, I've got to record his story.

I want him here by 8 tomorrow night, check?

Well, since you keep bringing it up, check.

Yes.

You can make it out for 100 bucks.

At Homicide, I cased the files on the Stevens thing.

San Francisco's answer to the Black Dead.

A cheap killing of a cheap dame in a cheap apartment that used a lot of expensive newsprint.

She'd taken her last turn under the blue spot around 10.30, left the theater and hustled straight home because at 11 sharp, according to the neighbor across the hall, someone had tried the Abraham Lincoln bookend on Carol Versailles.

She hit the floor just as the 11 o'clock news came on.

Biddle's alibi had to be good, and it was.

It came, as a matter of fact, from the greatest little alibi factory in town.

Biddle was drinking old fashions with Joseph P. Norgard, the well-known criminal lawyer at the time of the killing.

So I trotted over to Norgard's office on Market Street, found him tied up, and settled down in the waiting room next to a gimlet-eyed youth in a neon striped suit who looked like he made a living sticking up crap games.