It And Other Stories
“Hammett’s. He’s deductive, practical, and maybe a little unromantic. Probably that’s why he runs into such wild adventures and takes such horrible chances. In this story he walks into a whirlwind of death. Go to it.
The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.
The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it—until the third and last day.
Then things changed.
I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager on duty at the time, hunting for me.
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